T -1

Days until snow: 3

I can’t believe I’ve made it. I’m making it back to go skiing again. I’m getting on a plane tomorrow to go back to Canada. Truth be told I’m bricking it, but I’m always bricking it, every year. I think I’ll get on the plane. I might not, who knows, see what tomorrow brings.

But, as always, my brain needs something to freak out about. I’m worried about what people will think of me. A lot my friends from last year knew me as someone who was very ill. I did weird things. I’m so worried about what someone I was seeing last year will think of me. We where a good partnership, there was no expectations but I was horrible to him towards the end of the season. He coped amazing. He was so nice to me and looked after me.

We vaguely kept in touch over the summer, face timing while I was in Edinburgh, there was even talk of him coming to pick me up at the airport. We’re on good terms, weather it goes back to how it was or we’re just civil I don’t think I’m that bothered. I just don’t want him to think I am the person that I was at the end of last season. I wasn’t well, I really really wasn’t well. I probably wouldn’t have made it to this season if I hadn’t got help and there wasn’t someone to distract me with movies on my days off, like he did for me.

I owe a lot to a lot of people, who where totally passive in my life over the season but fundamentally kept me alive. My roommate was invaluable. For the first two weeks I lived alone, I got moved into a bigger room with a ticket scanner after asking the accommodations officer for a roommate. She was 19 and a bit of a mess. I don’t think she ate a fresh vegetable all season would consume huge amounts of peanut butter with a spoon when she’d come in high. But the mere presence of her being there stopped me from doing anything stupid. I never spoke about my mental health with her. Our relationship was pretty superficial, bonding over gossip and setting each other up with different boys on the hill. But it kept me alive. It stopped me crying myself to sleep. It reduced the urge to hang myself on the shower curtain rail.

Then there was there where the boys, I don’t know how I met them, probably just through word and mouth, but they where always there to eat a meal with me. I hated eating by myself (it’s something I’ve learn’t to love since the loony bin) and they where always there to sit and eat with me. Appeasing me with gossip and swapping songs and critiquing each others music taste. It just stopped the thoughts in my head for an hour or two. Although some of those relationships have turned a bit sour (mainly due to sex) they kept giving me reasons to live.

So I suppose its not the large gestures that save people, it’s the tiniest of things. It’s the normal things. It’s difficult to speak frankly and honestly about mental health and its difficult to hear. At least for me, the things that kept me going where the mundane. Even if it was just nipping up to use the microwave for 2 minutes or coming round after a night out to laugh about the antics the night before.

This year won’t be like last, I know that, I don’t expect to be. I just want there to be the mundane, even though I’ve been a lot more explicit about my mental health, it isn’t me. It’s just a side of me.