Reviews are subtle but powerful things: moments when we are asked to account for ourselves, to say how life has been for us since last meeting someone, at a wedding or somesuch; on those calendar events like Christmas and New Year, or on those gruesomely symbolic events like turning 40.

In my work as a therapist the first session with a client is really about listening to someone review their life to date. Some people have never done this before, and may even not be able to, other than to list dates and jobs and partners, like a CV – others have over-examined their lives to a crippling degree. In many ways, the work of therapy is a function of narration – if we can tell our story in such a way that we own our own part in its unfoldment, and not blame others for our misery, or endow others with sole responsibility for our happiness, then we're almost there. In some ways, therapy is a process of eliminating resentment – especially among those who drink too much, their addiction fuelled by the smouldering self-pity that their life is not as it "should have" been. But the only way to detect resentment is to listen for the whiff of victimhood when people tell their stories, review their lives.
But: physician heal thyself. I can't bear writing about how this year has been for me, so I retreat to professional musings. It's safer that way, less risky. I buggered up on getting my MA this year, and have had to face profound feelings of stupidity in the face of stinging criticism, while reworking my referred final submissions. Whether or not I get through and submit good enough work by January 5, demonstrating that I can write academically according to the established standards, is unknown to me right now. I've got a stinking sneezy cold and it feels like I'm all emotion, with not a brain cell to call my own. Could someone rescue me, please? Oh, no. Life's not like that.
I turned 40 this year. Still finding that a hollow joke. It makes no sense to me whatsoever, as I remain the person I was when I was in my early twenties, inside the baggy eyes and the lined forehead and the greying thinning hair. It is amazing how invisible I feel now when I go on the gay scene – it almost makes me consider a life of crime, as the scanning cruisy eyes that used to ping me when I had the "look" now don't even flicker as they pass right through me. I could get away with murder and there would not be witnesses.
A club I've been going to for the past couple of months every Sunday has a doorman who, despite chatting to me regularly, asks me each time if I've been there before. I don't mind it anymore. I don't function on a visual level, that's my understanding of it now. That this should matter at all is a symptom of remaining single, for which I have no remedy except to persevere and carry on carrying on. That is beyond my control.
The only thing that has improved in my life is something that I don't underestimate, which is I'm finally earning enough money to pay off my (student) debts and to begin to be able to save and plan long-term treats like holidays and wheels. Not having enough money to live on is a debilitating, corrosive experience, and eats to the heart of self-esteem and stability – so my hope is that this doesn't ever fade away on me again. I think part of what kept me from taking on too much work, unconsciously, was my fear of getting stressed and returning to my depression of three years ago. Fear is a bugger. In some spiritual schools of thought, fear, not hate, is the opposite of love. I can understand that.
This year has been one in which a very personal struggle from my adolescence reached world headlines – the split in the Anglican church around the appointment of an (openly) gay bishop. This cuts to the heart of the chasm in Christian teaching between sexuality and spirituality, and as it is debated and taken seriously, I feel my own split lessen in hurt. I wasn't such a freak, then – it may have taken it 25 years to get out in the open, but finally hypocrisy on matters sexual is being addressed for the deeply moral question that it is. The fact that the dying Pope still found it necessary to blast homosexuality this year, at the same time as his clergy were lobbying against gay marriage and spreading rumours about porous condoms, just confirms for me that no self-respecting gay or lesbian person could be a Catholic. Actually, scrub that – no self-respecting thinking person should be a Catholic.
But there's hope yet for some Christians, and the New Hampshire Anglicans are leading the way. I'm not saying that the answer to the queer sexual dilemma is domestication and Church-blessed monogamy, but I do know that having it as a serious option is a freeing and life-affirming spiritual advance. Without it, sexual anarchy can seem to be the only self-respecting choice.
A special mention for the end of the much-loathed Section 28 in the UK – the reprehensible Thatcherite injunction against local authority schools "promoting" homosexuality, thereby perpetuating the myth that homosexuality is learned or "caught", and keeping young gay and lesbian kids in ignorance and fear.
I am of the firm belief that so much suffering in queer lives is caused by the trauma in adolescence of keeping one's lovelife a dirty secret, instead of something gleefully gossipped about and shared with friends. I am certainly not saying it's easy for anyone in adolescence, I know it's not. A survey this year showed that the same percentage of gay/lesbian people were bullied at school as were the others – the only difference was that the cause was more obvious for the queers.
The more I learn about life, especially through my clients, the more I learn that queer problems are everyone's problems; we just seem to have been sensitised to them earlier, and have a vocabulary to express them. I listen to more and more heterosexual men in my work and the challenge of how to tame the beast of sexual desire is the same. Different opportunities and lifestyles, perhaps, but the same core issues of pride and shame, lust and love, hate and fear. Everyone imagines that there are people out there who have sorted out their sexuality, eradicated confusion – but I know no one for whom this is true.
In telling our stories, it is, perhaps, how much we can tolerate the disappointment that our life isn't how we wanted it to be that shows us how mature we're getting.
Bah. Humbug. I'm still throwing out the toys from the pram, here.