Post-accident recovery update

I'm not going to lie to you, it has been a tough month since my last update. For the first couple of weeks after my accident I was relentlessly upbeat. “Heal, keep going, heal, keep going, get back to normal as soon as possible” was very much my mantra. I'm now realising that I was hiding from myself just how serious the accident was.

My brain is slowly letting me accept that I won't be “back to normal” any time soon - and I may be dealing with some permanent changes to my body. One colleague has suggested that I might look into counselling to help with the trauma and depression that I've been suffering on and off, but we'll see. I suspect it's just part of the natural healing process, both physically and psychologically.

Health Update

What I now know:

• It will be months before my left eye returns to normal, as the fracture heals and the eye settles back into place.
• I may always be dealing with floaters in my vision from some damage to the back of the eye, although my brain will “edit” them out over time.
• I will need a small amount of surgery on my eye in the coming months.

• My forehead is healing well, but it may be years before I regain full sensation there – if I ever do.
• I'm still largely wearing my glasses - contacts are still uncomfortable in my left eye. This is certainly the most I've worn my glasses since I was 18. But they do end up serving as a visual reminder that things aren't “normal”.

Talking of which…

Work

This has been one of the toughness starts to the working year I can remember, and not just because of the accident.

Luckily, my colleagues at City St George's have been both understanding and helpful, and are supporting me on staying on top of that part of my work as we move into marking and final project season. I'm profoundly glad that this didn't happen during lecturing season, as that would have been much harder to manage.

As for the rest of my work, well that's more challenging. Illness and accidents are the bane of the freelancer – and that's what I'm dealing with now. I have workshops and training courses with existing clients coming up over the next couple of months, which I'm more than well enough to deliver, which is a relief and takes some of the financial pressure off.

However, as some of you are aware, my working relationship with my long term business partner on training, which had been strained for a while, collapsed completely at the beginning of the year, and in spectacularly unpleasant fashion. It's still astonishing to me that my second-longest working relationship in my time self-employed (only beaten by NEXT Conference) ended in such a toxic way.

But it has, and that's the new reality I'm dealing with.

New beginnings for my training business

Endings are the chance for fresh starts. The upside of that was the opportunity to rebuild my training work on my own terms, and under my own control. Sadly, thanks to the accident, those plans have had to, inevitably, slow down.

There's some positives to that. We're starting a small house refurbishment next week, which will create a brand new home office for me, which I'll be better able to set up for online training.

I have the money in hand for new equipment, and the new setup will allow a direct wired link from the training computer to the fibre modem, which should give me a fast and stable connection. I was having some very interesting conversations about pricing models and approaches with some trusted friends and mentors before the accident, and I'm really looking forwards to unveiling what I'm planning in the coming months.

I intend to start putting time into developing the website to support that, which is already online in rudimentary form, in the coming months. But that will have to wait until the marking hump is out of the way. And, I've suddenly realised, I'll need a new profile photo with the scars on my forehead in place.

If you want to keep updated on that side of my work, then you can sign up for emails.

And how about this site?

This blog has really been neglected, hasn't it? I really want to get going on it again. It's been part of who I am for 23(!) years. But the accident isn't the only reason it's been quiet. I've been thinking about what I want to do with it.

When it started, I was very much a contrarian voice talking from the outside of the mainstream journalism world, I drifted more into the mainstream through the 2010s, but now I feel like I'm being pushed back out of the mainstream debate. The space I once had largely to myself has become noisy, with more and more people clamouring to make their voices heard in the future of journalism discussion.

But that's OK. Too much of the mainstream debate is just plain wrong. Some of it is deeply ill-informed. Some of it is too rooted in the past. The vast majority is too inwards looking, and focusing on the wrong threats (and opportunities) from outside journalism.

I'm actually looking forwards to being a contrarian voice again. As I've just been brutally reminded by a lamppost, life is short and unpredictable. And it's just too damn short for me to carry on holding my tongue just to be “accepted”. The audience might not be vast. But they're open-minded, welcoming of new ideas and just good people. And so, I'll write for them, and for myself.

I have Things To Say. And I will say them.

Onwards!