35Up

The other night I caught a repeat of the documentary 42Up on tv, the sixth instalment of the series that revisited a group of children every 7 years to document their lives. Maybe it's because I'm 42, but it got me thinking about my own 42Up. I've probably documented my own version of being 42 here (or big chunks of it at least), but it got me thinking about where I was 7 years ago, who I was 7 years ago, and what I was doing. Here's the potted version:

35Up. 1999 - 2000

• Having moved back there for love, I was living back in my old home town of Adelaide.
  
• I was no longer in love with that man, in fact that relationship had turned out to be quite toxic, with big spoonfulls of the crazy thrown in. We broke up about 6 months after I moved back, about 18 months previously.
  
• I had started the year feeling depressed and lonely, living on my own and finding Adelaide not as the lively and fun place full of good friends that it had been in my youth.
  
• The later parts of the previous year and very early parts of this year saw me channeling some of that loneliness into sex, into a string of anonymous encounters and a few guys I saw casually every now and then.
  
• I had a nice, neat, cheap little 2 bedroom flat to myself but it turned out to be hard to get to by public transport (a regular Adelaide problem) and my upstairs neighbours were noisy and inconsiderate.
  
• I was working as a registry officer in a Familial Cancer Registry, collecting family medical history information to build genetic family trees of clients with certain types of cancer. It was a job that turned out to be emotionally stressful for me (with my family history of cancer) and a lack of training and management support for what was a new service meant that my two workmates and I were floundering somewhat.
  
• The whole time I was scraping by financially, trying to save enough money to make my return to Sydney.
  
• Things started to look up when on a business trip to Sydney for a cancer conference I visited friends who lived with a recently un-closeted Mikey. They didn't know many other gay people and suggested I come over and meet Mikey, and maybe give him another 'mo to talk to. I stayed for dinner and Mikey and I talked until the small hours of the morning.
  
• Returning to Adelaide (boo!) Mikey and I corresponded by email and telephone, gradually moving past being flirty to being more romantic, until towards the end of the year when I fled Adelaide back to Sydney and Mikey and I started up our relationship. A long distance courtship you could say, one that consisted of hundreds of pages of emails.

Most of it was pretty bleak I have to say, until the promise of a return to Sydney and a new relationship. New beginnings.

I'm not sure how different I was back then. I do remember how incredibly neat and tidy my flat was, partly on account of having so much more space, but I think I also channeled lots of my energy into making a little sanctuary for myself. I also remember affectionately David the recently un-closeted and divorced young dad I was shagging at the start of the year, who was light years away from wanting to start a relationship with me, but was fun to spend time with every now and then. Except when he would be drunk and horny and ring me in the small hours of the morning.

So, an interesting year.