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The year began when I had a nervous breakdown.

Therapy, drugs, an understanding boss and the world's most patient, supportive, loving boyfriend saw me through to the other side. It started in a heatwave last summer when I couldn't get any sleep. In the house the temperature was 45 degrees, at night. After three days and nights of staying awake, I cracked. They call it sleep-deprivation psychosis. I was lucky it only took about four months for my circadian rhythm to get back to normal. For some people a severe knock to their body clock like that can leave them out of whack for seven years.

In lots of ways I was lucky.

Work finished on the show after two years and three seasons and it felt like we'd done some pretty good work by the end. It was more about the people I met there, they were the lasting impression, they were to borrow a phrase, "the take away" from the experiment. For me. Some of them headed off to incredible positions overseas. I turned 30 and packed up everything I knew and we moved to the country.

In Thailand I married my very oldest friends at an incandescent ceremony even though I'm not really a minister but the Church of the Subgenius said it was totally within my powers, so it was fine. It was incredible. It was so beautiful but I went there alone because we were always broke. I was a contractor and Andy hated his job and it was not really adding up to much so we decided it was time to leave Sydney.

In New York I held my friend's new baby when he wasn't even twelve hours old. I lay in Central Park one afternoon in the sun and tapped out a letter to someone I haven't seen in ages. I went down to Zuccotti Park, an editor sent me there "It could be Tahir Square, please send me something," so I did. I went to Miami where I was a little afraid for my life at one point, wandering South Beach at night looking for dinner and bolting back to my hotel after refusing an offer of crack cocaine.

In Los Angeles streets sprawled away forever and a friend from high school who lives there now, is married, took me everywhere. One night at the Chateau Marmont we looked at each other like, "This is so weird," and it was because the last time we spoke was sometime in the 90s. She took me to a tattoo parlour where I got an 'A' for you like you wanted on my wrist. We rode roller coasters and ate salt water taffy and at Knott's Berry Farm I was nearly scared to death.

I wrote some things that were okay, some things that were not. I produced some good pieces, I read my work at readings and on the radio. Some things I wrote made people laugh and they enjoyed them and another thing made people very sad and they emailed about it and that was when it felt like it was maybe working, maybe.

I don't know sometimes, if it will or not. Perhaps.

An important photo of me outside a record store, and cat inside ignoring me.

Photo by Daniel Boud.

Last day in the city.

30 Rock, looking north.