When I was a child I felt so embarrassed by pictures of me that I’d carry out clandestine operations to angle photos and push aside picture frames. I never had friends over because pictures embarrassed me more than the stuffy places we lived in.

To slip by unacknowledged was a skill, it’s own reward. It felt only natural for me to be drafted by shadows and sneak away from any recognition. Why? Well I won’t go into the Freudian bits but being unformed, untouched by an passing childhood crisis was a kind of liberation. I could be anyone I wanted to be, be on both sides, the wronged and the victorious. I was a diplomat with no crisis to attend to.

Having nothing to trouble you makes you a bit of a day dreamer, why wouldn’t you be if you were uninvested in what happened around you? It also makes for a polite kind of self involvement, a enjoyable one but there’s only so much of it I could stomach. Cynicism, I think, makes for good reading in your adolescence, afterwards it has nowhere to go but to a capacity for destruction.

I read some Jung this year, I read him every year but I only made something of his suggestions this year. You’ve got to be willing to unleash a little naiveté, a willingness to hope that’s a little bit more around the corner to really enjoy him. It’s funny that he’s the one with the reputation of being unscientific because he’s the one’s who’s constantly trying to structure things. There’s a certainty that comes with pulling back the curtains, leaning into a day dream or just a regular dream. It’s also funny given how much they reveal when you consider how vapour like they are.

I’ve been journalling my dreams regularly, they’re pretty strange but honest in the most absurd way. Meeting and being terrified by a goat faced God is a strange path to self discovery but I’ll take whatever works. The one thing that amazes me about dream journalling is how it let’s you recall dreams more regularly as you go along.

There’s a certain kind of honesty and strength that comes with writing down what’s bubbling in your mind, or even committing to creating something. So next year I’m going to go back to something I’ve always been avoiding, writing long bits of fiction. I’ve always had the lurking recognition that doing so really stretches how well you write and reveals your hand. I’m also going to get back to drawing regularly, I’ve been meaning to practice my basics instead of trying to skip ahead to the fancy parts I can show off. I’ve done an okay job of it so far but I’ve still got a long way to go on getting the perspective right.