Better in All Good Things

I hate being so negative. Let’s look at some things I’m really happy about.

No. 1. Right now the thing that makes me happiest is that in January I got to see Jamie and Tyler and Patrick and Jonny and Dylan and Adam play hockey. Watching ice hockey is like watching dancing for me. It’s beautiful and highly skilled and and it’s all men (I like watching male dancing, and there’s very little of it around). Nine months ago I knew nothing about ice hockey other than it existed. Funny how fast life can change and that it can mean so much to me that I saw my favourite players live when six months earlier I’d never heard of them. But it does. I might never get that opportunity again.

No. 2. My mother (who lives with me) and I have been watching Gilmore Girls every night during the lockdown. It started early on, when everything was so scary and overwhelming, and we decided we needed something to laugh at. We watched it years ago but never again and I still have the dvds, so every night while we eat dinner we watch two or three episodes. It’s a great tradition. The show is hilarious (if so dated now that I don’t remember half the references), and laughter is truly beneficial.

What I’m happy about isn’t so much the fact we’re watching it (although I’m happy about that too), but the fact that every time I see Rory’s boyfriend Dean I’m reminded of the fact that I’ve actually met Jared Padalecki several times in the last couple of years. I’ve talked to him, been wrapped up in his magnificent hugs (never turn down a hug from him if you ever get the opportunity for one, trust me), shared jokes and laughter with him, and learned so much from him. I actually love him because of Supernatural, not Gilmore Girls (although he’s adorable as the “original Dean”), and I’ve got to meet Jensen Ackles too, and I’m so, so happy about that. I was going to see both of them again next month, but clearly that’s not going to happen. I don’t mind losing out on that so much, because I’ve shared truly epic experiences with them already (especially one, which I won’t go into the details of, in Rome last year).

No. 3. This is sort of linked to number 2. Remember how much I loved Sebastian Stan when I randomly encountered him and Chris Evans in Singapore in 2016 just before Captain America: Civil War opened? After what happened in that movie, it became my greatest ambition to see Sebastian again, to meet him face to face. I wanted to thank him for Bucky. His Bucky got me through the last few years, literally. I’ve never identified so strongly with another fictional character as I do with Bucky, Sebastian’s Bucky. He’s the main reason I’ve recovered as well as I have.

Last May I was fortunate enough to meet Sebastian. I’ve seen every movie and tv show he’s been in, and I was astounded to discover that out of all the characters he’s played, Bucky is the one who’s the most like actual Sebastian. I honestly felt like I was looking at Bucky. I feel like I gazed into Bucky’s eyes, and I hugged Bucky. Sebastian is precious and adorable and the sweetest man I’ve ever encountered, and I got to thank him for what he did with Bucky and it meant the world to me. I even have a picture of us together and I often look at it in amazement. It actually happened. I finally, finally, finally got to meet him.

No. 4. I got to see New York. I’d given up on ever seeing New York. For complicated reasons, I had to get a visa to be able to visit the US and it was really difficult since I was self-employed and had so many bad experiences getting my British citizenship seven years ago that I couldn’t bear to engage with another government. America had been off-limits to me for so long that I no longer even contemplated going there.

Then last August I went to see Andy in a show at Sadler’s Wells. Remember dancer Andy? I used to call him my guardian angel. He was going to be in Swan Lake again, as the Prince again. He was the understudy last time and he was my favourite Prince. He was only going to be in it for the US segment of the international tour, and he wanted me to see him in it, to see how different his interpretation was five years later. I’ve hardly seen him for years since I so rarely go to that ballet world that used to make me so happy (Annette and her sister are STILL there, dominating it all and viciously hating me), and it meant a lot to me that he so badly wanted me to see him as the Prince, so I said I’d come to New York.

That meant facing up to my fear of applying for a visa. Funnily enough, it was the easiest visa I’ve ever got.

Swan Lake was showing in New York for two weeks, but I couldn’t go for that long so I randomly picked the first week, bought the tickets, booked a hotel on the same block as the City Center theatre and purchased a cheap, non-refundable airline ticket. At the time I had the conversation with Andy, I still knew nothing about ice hockey. That was literally right before it happened. You can imagine my astonishment when I discovered, much later, that the week I’d booked to go to New York coincided exactly with the week that one of the two teams I fell in love with, the Dallas Stars, were playing all three teams in the New York area.

So it’s all thanks to Andy that I got to see the Stars and the Blackhawks that week in January, and ironically he got injured two weeks before so he wasn’t even in New York in the end! It didn’t matter, since I was really going to see hockey at that point, and New York itself. One of my ballet friends from London decided at the last minute to go to New York for Swan Lake, I only found out she was going the day before I left, so I was able to give her all the Swan Lake tickets I’d bought so she had front row tickets instead of really cheap last-minute tickets at the very back, so it worked out wonderfully.

And I finally got to see New York! A city I’ve longed to know for most of my life! That week in New York and Chicago was honestly one of the very best weeks of my entire life. Thank you, Andy.

No. 5. I also got to go to Vancouver. It’s another place I’ve always longed to visit. I was meant to go in the summer of 2017, had tickets and everything, but it was one of the many casualties in 2016 and 2017 of my inability to go places and do things. I had too much anxiety about going to a new country, and when my father said he was selling his farm in northern New Zealand to retire and move to the coast near Wellington and asked if I’d come help him move, it was easier to give up Canada and flee to one of the countries that I regard as home.

But last summer I finally went! I didn’t really want to go. A friend of mine was going there for a specific event and another friend of hers was meant to go with her but lost her job so didn’t think she could afford it. I casually said to my friend that if her friend couldn’t go with her, then I would, not really expecting it to happen, but suddenly it did and everything was booked and now I was committed. I couldn’t back out because other people were counting on me (I’d enlisted a third friend to come with us as well).

I fell in love.

For all my travel around the world, I’ve never gone anywhere that FELT like home. England’s the closest and that’s why I live here, but something’s always felt wrong here. The trees are not quite right. Nor are the mountains. Nor is the air. And then I went to Vancouver and there were the right trees, the mountains were the mountains I’ve been missing all my life, the air was perfection.

I literally cried when we took off from Vancouver airport because it hurt so much to leave. I had my return trip all planned before I even landed at Heathrow.

That return trip isn’t happening now. I have no idea if I’ll ever get to go to Canada again. But I got to go that once. I got to feel like I was finally home. I found my place. And I’m really fucking happy about that.

So that’s five things that I’m really happy about from the last two years. I could go on for a really long time with this list. I’ve had so many wonderful experiences. There was a time for about two years after Jon died in mid-2015 that I felt like I would never be happy again. I’d lost so much, been so tremendously traumatised. I could tick off more than half of the top ten most stressful life events that had all happened for me within a six-month period, and it was a lot of hard work to recover from all of that.

But I did recover. And even if everything feels gone and lost again now, at least I was happy again and strong and largely anxiety-free. I was loving my job, enjoying travel again, meeting amazing people, and I’m really happy about all of that.

And very grateful.