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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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It's been about five months since I last had time to sit and write. Since then I fled the country successfully.
If I remember rightly I began to seriously put an escape plan into place back in January 2022 and crossed the border for the last time before the end of that October.
So now in January, I sit here looking back on another impossible year not quite sure what to say about it.
Honestly I think that I should probably write about the move in more detail at a later date, it's own big letter. I tried writing about it a couple of weeks ago and got myself tied in knots.
It was an uneventful search right up until it wasn't, nothing worth reporting happened at all between May and October. But then I went from unexpectedly being offered a flat to across the border in exactly two weeks. Two weeks more and I had completely decorated and furnished a flat for the first time, I saw it as making a statement of intent, showing I was determined that this be a home, not another hiding place or cell.
It's going to take time to accept everything that has happened and for me to be able to properly put into words what 2022 has meant for me. In my mind this kind of change just isn't achievable for someone in my position, it shouldn't be possible for me to be here typing this. More difficult is to accept that if I look it all from the outside, it's realistic for me to say that this was all done by my own will. Like, nobody gave me an easy time or a hand out or help that wasn't earned. If I was on a waiting list it's because I was eligible, if I had a van driver or a carpet fitter, I paid them with money I acquired and saved legitimately.
I achieved this result. Such a difficult concept to accept.
Accepting reality always takes time for me, so when I've been able to put that problem aside I've had to start wondering - what now?
I moved as much for my health as I did my safety. In my mind any attempt to manage my health was going to be so much more difficult in an unsafe environment. So of cause the obvious answer to "what now?" is "get healthy" but what on earth does that mean when your health condition is managed, not cured?
At the moment I am in a bit of a medical limbo, waiting to find out what healthcare is available to me here and how long I should expect to wait for it. And while waiting, I am in the familiar position of having to find my own direction. I feel that the best I can aim for is to continue making positive changes to my self, but I think I've only ever been good at big problems, homelessness, fleeing countries, sure. Self-reflection and improvement, not so much.
So I feel more lost than average, because in my mind I already achieved the stretch goal beyond the original target. I didn't and don't have another target to set my sights on. Which is bad, as it leaves me sitting mistakenly believing that I should be healthy now since I did everything on my to-do list. Really all I've done is remove a major barrier preventing improvement, I'm just as sick now as I was two months ago.
Maybe accepting that truth should be just as much a part of the reality I'm trying coming to terms with as the move itself.