Origins

On Christmas Eve, the 24th December 2021 I made a note simply saying ‘ProjectME’. From this spark of an idea I started to make a list of some of the new things I wanted to try to do within 2022. Little did I know that at the time it was that spark that would flourish into the website that you find yourself on here today. x40.co.uk was born out of a wish to have a place to record my thoughts and feelings as I try to navigate through a life while living with grief, anxiety and depression. Rather than to have those three mental emotions define me as a person, or be any kind of disability to me, I wanted to find a way to move forward throughout them, exploring as I go, and seeing if there can be a life worth living on the other side of them.

Following on from the first spark of an idea, I started my 40th time around by being invited to spend New Years with an old friend and his family. Over the course of the few days spent away, seeing in the new year, I was able to free my mind enough to start to flesh out some of my sparks of ideas for x40.co.uk. I am eternally grateful for that time and space away, where I could be completely understood and I could step away from the sometimes overpowering ideologies of my home.

I do not believe that you ‘recover’ from depression, I believe that it is possible to find a way to live alongside it, fighting my way through the anxiety that has come from such an extended time of being inside. Fighting through the loneliness of lockdown and to a point my own personal lockdown via hibernation before. As for the grief I feel… There is no getting away from that at this current moment, but I cannot allow it to define who I am as a person. I don’t believe it is something I will ever get over, or get used to, but I do believe that I will someday be able to heal around it so that the rawness of right now will be somewhat shielded at some undefined future point in time.

After a period of extended hibernation away from the outside world, through grief, anxiety, depression and CoVID-19 lockdowns, I had a realisation that it might just be; time to start living again. Time to rediscover who I am and what it is I like and dislike. Therefore, throughout this my 40th orbit of the Sun I will challenge myself to experience new experiences, to make new memories and to record these through journaling, photography and videos.

I believe it is time to start living again instead of simply existing.

So here at x40.co.uk you will find first and foremost my journaling of my experiences, thoughts and feelings as I navigate through this 40th orbit around the sun, as I approach my 40th year and as I experience the first six months of it. I will write here as I feel fit to about upcoming events and trips that give me future excitement, as my plan’s grow and I start to feel more emotions leading up to and during events and trips, and of course afterwards providing some kind of personal review, not so much of the event or trip, but of how I felt moving through them.

It is my objective to plan new experiences through traveling, attending events and generally creativing new and exciting memories through being active and actively seeking out life. I am aiming to have a new experience at least once every two months over the course of a twelve month period from January 2022.

I will try to photograph whatever feels like a natural, unforced amount and I am even open to trying to capture some of my experiences in video. Everything will be collected and kept here for as long as I find it is useful to me. So I welcome all reading this to join me on this personal journey, instead of past – through my mental health and physical challenges on my 40th time around.