My poor brain in a tizzie. I had a plan for my return to work, move closer to work thereby cutting down on my travel time and have access to more interesting things as I would be living in a city. Then I was sitting on the beach wrapped in a blanket reading while my daughter swam and bodyboarding. A man stopped to remark on the weather and we got chatting. (I have a thing for the weather, comparing it to previous years, looking at predictions to see if they are even vaguely accurate.) He shared his favourite weather prediction website with me and I invited him to sit and chat. It was one of those chilly summer evenings, warm enough if you were in the water but breezy on the sand. The sun was going down. I recently started to listen to the advice and life stories of others, since I found out I did not have all the answers. He had recently moved to the town, after making a decision to significantly change his life. I was surprised and a little shocked as he told me his story, he seemed to be of an age where it was time for the pipe and slippers and grandchildren. I had been telling him of my day looking at houses and planning my move and how nice it was to take time out. It was his turn to be shocked, he wondered how I could leave such a beautiful place. He only spoke aloud what I had been thinking. I loved the area, the flowers, the beach , the sea, the cafes, but I had not seen that for years while I had been descending to the abyss of despair. I am so scared of the future as I have not planned it. For my whole life I planned my future, what I would be doing, how things would turn out, I set career goals and worked thought them. Then life had the cheek to thwart my goals and plans. I had not planned my first child, she was a gift from god, a happy accident who has brought me much joy and the inevitable pain, I planned my second child but I did not plan for her illness, I worked hard to help her get over it but I did not plan for it to come back, I worked hard to get promoted but I did not plan to be assigned to a job 30 miles away. I made plans and life decided to keep interfering.
Now I am making plans again. I am scared, in fact I am petrified. I thought about this and wondered how I have lived my whole life being so scared and anxious and yet pushed myself to keep going. I remembered chatting to a chap I ended up working for about that. About 5 years previously he interviewed me for my first job in Ireland, I came first out of 80 others and always wondered why, I was so surprised as my work experience was so different to the job I was interviewed for. I ended up taking a job closer to home. Anyway to the point of all this. On my first day at that new job he shot into my office and introduced himself. He said "I was wondering if you really were the girl in the skip", I was taken aback , Himself and the other guy used to occasionally chat about the week they spent interviewing us all; all shiny and hopeful, they had been very impressed by me, not because of my work experience but because of my ability to work through my fear. At interviews they always asked about your previous jobs and I had worked on piling. Part of my job was to get into a skip/tube, and descend 35 meters into the soil of London to check the bearing capacity of the base of the pile under-ream. It was quite a hazardous thing to do and there were many safety precautions. I am also claustrophobic, which complicated things.
They listened to the description, the safety precautions, the properties of London clay, the use of the hand penetromoter, and then he asked me was I sacred. I had forgotten my answer , he reminded me :Scared, I said, I WAS PETRIFIED, they were so amused by me and my ability to just get on with it I was hired. Single minded determination is what they looked for in the northwest, not a place for the faint hearted. Knowledge could be thought but that level of determination is born and bred into you. The ability to just do it is what kept me going for so long. Driving 90 mile per hour in first gear just because I thought I had to. He was the best boss I ever had as he knew I was pretty much permanently petrified but willing to work through it. He knew how to handle with care. I was spoiled rotten by him and hopelessly indulged, my ideas were listened to and I felt that I contributed. I suppose the main reason I found this current job so difficult as I had nobody there who knew that I was pretty much permanently petrified and when I told them how overwhelming the difficult things were and how i needed a little help they just thought I was shirking. Previously if I wanted to built a castle in the air they would have helped me design the correct foundations and found an expert on air castles , we would have found the money and built the best castle in the air ever, and then gone on lecture tours on how to do it. :-) I might be projecting but somehow I think not. So now I am thinking about going back. I have worked through the other 3.5 things that caused me the crippling stress that led to my collapse. I have put measures in place to reduce those stresses and now I need to work on that which makes me permanently petrified. The awful anxiety that crawls into my soul, sucks the life out of me and paralysis me. I am scared I wonder if second time around it will all be the same. I contemplated the second time around of many things. Going out with my xhusband the second time around (ended in divorce) not a good ideas, going back to the same place twice on holidays, not as good as the first time, numerous second dates, some were good some bad, the second helping of cake, yes that is sometimes as good as the first but mostly even better, my second child, again good. My daughters second time around with her illness. That was a second time around that I thought I could not cope with at all, but in the end it was no where near as bad as I thought it would be. That second time and what it might hold buzzed around in my brain like a whirling dervish on speed, dancing with the other thought; another whirling dervish on E , the thought of how would I be able to do all the travel and get the time off my present job as they did not want to make the concessions I thought would be so necessary. In the end my brain gave up, my daughter was ok , trips to be every three months not every two weeks, but I was not ok. I worried myself into collapse.
So what will this bring, second time around. I have grown so much over the last 6 months I am so scared that I will slip back into the despair and try to drive 90 miles per hour in first gear again. So today I was given the day off. One daughter is staying with her friend. The younger got up herself for the first time ever and took herself off to school. She planned it so that I could have a rest. I have been on the go for weeks now sorting stuff for the girls and dealing with the outfall from the assault on the eldest. I needed a rest and told everyone that I did. They listened and so here I am today listening to lyric fm and turning down offers of visits from my most recent x. Pat on the back to me. I am still a scardey cat but I am surrounded by other scardey cats too I think. I used to pretend that I was a tiger and many people believed that, lol, now I have taken off the tiger suit and shown myself for the scared kitten I really am.
I dont want to live in fear anymore, and mostly I dont. I need to go back to the basics that got me to let go of the fear of some any other things and get over the fear that going back to work will be too overwhelming for me. My mind is better, I can think again. My memory is good but not excellent, my nerves are good, but what more do I need to be ok with the return. I suppose I need to let go of a few things, and consider it was not my abilities that my favourite bosses liked but perhaps my exuberance, positivity and energy. Perhaps it was the loss of that which caused the work collapse. The prospect of being stuck listening to people complain about potholes forever. I suppose I did not see all the other wonderful things I was doing, and all the things I could do in the future.
As my optimism returns and my exuberance does too I am reminded that some people stay young at heart forever. My midlife crisis is finally coming to an end. So no more toyboys and dreams of yellow sports cars. I have reconnected with the things that lead me to this career in the first place. The desire to make things, the desire to have an impact on the environment. My love of land art has rekindled my desire to do large scale land art projects. A bit mad perhaps but we all need mad dreams to keep us sane. I started by drawing labyrinths on the beach, a project foiled by my daughters youthful exhuberance and desire to wipe out the paths as I was digging them , evil thing that she is. I am the quintessential, look at the stars and say why not kind of person. If someone said how will we get to the moon I would set about trying to find/build a rocket. I discovered my family motto the other day To rise again, optimism was bred into me as a child. I would always wonder why people did not help themselves more in life. If you just applied yourself you could solve it, if you failed you could try a new way. I suppose in essence you could rise again. High notions like the goats in Kerry, as Grandma said.
When I start out each post I wonder where it will lead me. I had a thought which I want to develop and I find writing helps me. A technique called think in ink. I am told. I have always kept some sort of a journal and written stuff down, my parents kept daily diaries. Short and hilarious entries like, Mary had a girl, weather fine, ( the day I was born) , hilarious to me only perhaps. On returning to the beginning of the post: that man had walked down the whole beach and probably seen me all serene and cosy reading and waving to my daughter(projecting on both our parts). He is still on the high of moving to such a beautiful environment, where you can walk to a blue flag beach from a town with some of the best resaturates in Ireland, where our native language is still spoken and where the weather is some of the best in the country. He was not with me when I brought my 14 year old daughter to A&E when she was beaten up by my neighbour's grandchild who was off her head on drugs and drink. He does not see the turmoil of my life, the commute, the stress of juggling the kids, work, relationships. He saw me in the distance, seemly happy content and at peace, in my tiger suit. I was all those things because I had made my mind up to make positive changes in my life. It was his fear that I was feeling. It is the fear of the unknown that I am feeling now not any regrets of leaving such a beautiful place. It is only a half hour from the city, I love the beach more than anything else here and I can always buy a mobile home in the local caravan park or even get a tent and camp there at weekends. It is not such a huge step. I need to move on. So I am off to ring the woodworm man and get a quote on how much it would cost to treat the house. So someone else is interested in buying it, when did I ever let others influence me. Hmmm yeah for about four years now, lol. When I was well I had self belief. I really really believed in myself. It was shaken all this years ago and never recovered. It is time to let go of that. My self belief is back but this time it is real. I believe in myself and not just because of what can I achieve but because I am. I will be careful in making my decision. I will not leap into any major change without careful consideration. I am trained in cost benifit analysis from a road design point of view. Can I apply the internal rate of return to my life? I think I can. I just need to develop the correct values to plug into the formulas. So I am off to tidy the house and continue with the packing and sorting. I have been cleaning out all the crap from my life and my house for a while now. I blamed the assault for my recent setback but it could have been anything, the wrong pants, a bad date, the local shop running out of lucosade, (my current addiction). It was just the thing that was there at the time to facilitate a test of my new found resilience
I am a closet Daniel fan , he is such a truly lovely person, not contrived just lovely . So this is for all of us who need to take it one day at a time.
I have finally worked out how to make my decision. I will take it one day at a time and work to making life easier for us all. I will take it one day at a time. I will trust my own intuition and now it is telling me be patient, let go of the feelings that came up last week and give yourself time to decide for yourself. I have a very developed sixth sense and right now it is saying be cautious and be aware of any changes you make, wait until you are at equilibrium and then decide.
I am off to balance my chackras, in peace and quite without the kids going oh god Mammy shut up about your chakras.
so balance your chakras, find your equilibrium and if you feel the need to whirl do so like those happy dervishes but remember they are trained how to do that are you?
Happy Wednesday
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