a_cubed | You've got to start somewhere

Andrew Patterson suggested I start an LJ account. I expressed a desire to him to keep in better touch with my friends from Scotland. I haven't been keeping up with people up there since moving down to Reading. That's to be expected to a certain extent, but I ended up in therapy in January, and one of the issues that needed dealing with is that I haven't been making new friends since moving down here in 2000, so I'd basically dropped out of my support network.
It might seem odd starting off a completely open and public journal with an admission of mental health difficulties but I believe it shouldn't be seen as a stigma. Lots of people have problems and getting help to deal with them is a positive thing, not a negative thing. Admitting that you are in need of help is a hard thing to do. Having admitted it to yourself and a therapist, it sholdn't be something you need to keep secret from everyone else.

So, here I am. I'm not sure how good I'm going to be at writing things in here. One of my biggest problems is overwork and exhaustion, so I'm not going to promise to write much here.

I had dinner with some new friends last night. One of the recently appointed lecturers in my department at the University and his wife (Corin and Nicki). Unfortunately I'd forgotten to give them a list of my food dislikes, so there was some awkwardness abotu that, but we were lucky because the pasta sauce they'd used didn't contain garlic. Everything else I could "eat around" but garlic would have killed the main course. Still, Nicki is about as picky about food as I am, although with mostly different things - awkward in some ways for joint meals - but we ended up swapping her mushrooms for my aubergine so that worked out OK.