So today will be noted in my calendar as the day I managed to tick off a tick bold check box on my bucket list. This is to get a job at a video game store at least once in my life! Its been years of trying and failing on a constant basis but I got there today! Which to me means more than what anyone could imagine.

You see the last 2 1/2 years of my life have been a slow road back into getting a career after having my mind messed with by my ex wife.She made me travel 40 miles away from home, lose contact with all my child hood friends and close family and finally mentally abused me for over a year. We split up in the end Giving up my job, the new friends I made and everything in between. When I came back down here I started to look for work but then my ex wife threw me the epic curve ball of "You need to care for our offspring, I cant deal with this being a parent thing any more." This destroyed my will to the core at first. Not only was I not going to be able to provide for my children. Something I had been doing since my eldest son was born. But I had to learn how to become a full time parent. Which is daunting especially when you get to know that I had 2 kids at this point. One was 21 months old and the other was 6 months old I blamed myself for everything at this point. I felt guilty as hell that my youngest. Who hadn't even grasped the concept of crawling at the time had been forgotten by his own mother. I felt ashamed that I wasn't going to be able to provide for them until school age due to having to raise a baby, then later finding out the eldest had autism which left me as his primary carer. And I felt tormented by my demons at the time which sent me into a hysteria of fitness and health conscience bullshit to the point I went from 17 stone to 12 in a matter of 3/4 weeks which as many people know is an unfit weight loss. My hometown friends did all they could to help. But there's only so much a person can do from the outside during an internal conflict.

But then something amazing happened. I met someone new. Someone inspiring and someone who felt for me and cared about my well being after such a turbulent time. That person was called Jess. Jess and I met randomly on halloween and the rest you can say is history. She was a manager in a local fabric chain. We were madly in love and got on like a house on fire. She eventually even came in to my kids lives and became the motherly role that my youngest child had been missing from his life since he was tiny. Things progressed rapidly between us and before you know it we found out we were expecting a child of our own. (at this point in time my mother who I was living with at the time was getting her house fitted with wooden flooring. and we were living in a tent outside and had been for weeks.) When I first found out I freaked out. I wanted the baby. I knew it had came for a reason. But living in the tent made me have a perception I would always be in the tent and I had images of a Nativity like scenario just.... y'know in a tent. But she pulled through and managed to find a house for us to move into a year ago this month. We settled in and started our life as a happy family and then in April of this year we had a child of our own who at the time of writing this is 6 months old.

Our new arrival inspired me and got me working on myself to get out of the mental train wreck of a state I was in and back in tip top fighting shape to get back into work before the end of the year. There were some hiccups, trials and tribulations along the way but in all fairness she has believed in me and has encouraged my good health to come back bounding and strong. I am now feeling better than ever. Confident with myself and happy with my life. Something I haven't been since my late teens. And getting this job today has proved to me that things can be fixed if you have the right positive attitude. So I publicly want to say thank you to my partner for helping me become a man, and thank you to my employer for giving me a chance.