Life Changing Times

I’m apparently also at the age where memes and stuff like this seems to consume large parts of my waking hours.

This absolutely sums up exactly what I’ve been thinking and feeling for the past weeks. Especially since I’ve been writing my book.

I’m nearly done with the first (really) rough draft, and going through my entire life this way is one hell of a rollercoaster. Not as much as living it has been…but still

While my tolerance for bullshit has never been high, I really have reached zero for tolerance around lack of self awareness. It’s a huge part of my book, stemming from my early life, about how much I both prioritise self awareness myself and how much I value it in others

Yes, I make mistakes, we all do. But I’m just not interested anymore when people are continually making choices that are bad for them. Or those around them. Because there comes a time when you just have to get over that shit, where excuses don’t work anymore

Weirdly, I have always been over indulgent of this in others in some ways, most likely because of my own set of decades long destructive behaviours. Except I missed crediting myself with how many huge and painful changes I made to stop them.

And in writing the book I can see them a lot more clearly now. I think I have just got on with them, moved on to the next challenge and kept on going.

Take relationships, husbands…and all that. For a whole host of reasons (which the book goes into far more detail about) I have not made good choices when it’s come to life partners. Not a strength of mine. So 15 years ago I stopped trying – consciously and deliberately, knowing that while I had done enormous amounts of work on myself, this one was likely to remain a black hole and that was OK.

The exception was the relationship I had with a lunatic when I had cancer 8 years ago. He was also an intensive care nurse. Things don’t get much more traumatic than cancer, so I reverted back to old habits – except, the nursing/nurturing part really did make a big difference. When he was able to hold it.

My point is that I have stopped that behaviour, for a very long time. Because there’s little worse that a woman in her 40’s or 50’s pining over yet another emotionally fucked up man.

You hit a point where all that shit, whether it’s men, toxic behaviours or work environments, self flagellation etc just has to stop. Where if you are caught in any of it, you realise it’s utter bullshit and you have to move on, deal with it.

It doesn’t mean your life is living on a cloud and perfect – it means you’re aware of what is going on and you make choices to change. It means you are not pretending or hiding, acting like it’s not happening. You own it, and change it when you can.

I only recently left a deeply toxic job, yet another one, but used it to work out why I kept repeating these patterns and also, quite frankly, stayed with it to get my children the schooling they desperately needed. But there was no way I was going to stay for life – I was fully aware of the toxicity, had an amazing team I worked with, and used it as long as I needed to be able to find other, healthier solutions.

Which means I’m now unemployed 😂. And writing a book. And fucking loving it. Actually, I’m exaggerating for effect – I am freelancing with work and realising how much value I can offer this way. The years of experience can be used positively, I don’t have to work around the clock anymore to prove my value, I can do it in healthier and more productive ways

I’ve sacrificed job/financial security, home ownership and knowing what next (as much as any of us can) to do this, there is always a trade off. But I’ve done it consciously and I’ve empowered myself.

So yes, I don’t have time or energy for those who turn away, who live in the madness or toxicity and pretend it’s not happening or don’t hold themselves accountable. Because that’s not what I choose for myself.

Are my current friend group.

I’m half way through the first rough draft of my book, a turning point I celebrated yesterday as it finally felt like it was taking shape.

I seem to have adopted the slightly tortured writer lifestyle – minus the copious amounts of alcohol. I wake anywhere from 4am onwards and start writing around 6am, going to bed at 9pm. Perhaps if I was doing the drinking part I may be going to bed at 4am – it does sound a bit more glamorous than the reverse.

Which means by lunchtime I’m done. I can’t write all day and some days it’s only 2-3 hours because there’s a lot of emotional content in what I’m writing. And I just hit a wall depending on the day, the topic, how much or how little I slept. Today I doubt it will be a lot since it was just before 4am when I woke up.

Which brings me to Grey’s Anatomy. I started watching it from the start, and I’m on Season 14 now – not sure I should be admitting that. And I realised last night that they have become my (very thin. They are all very thin) friends.

I’m not going out much or socialising or doing much else than parenting or writing, which works for me right now as I seem to be on a roll. And I have become overly invested in the lives and deaths of fictional characters – looking forward to the next episode to see how Meredith or Christina (sadly, she’s left the show at this point) are getting on. Excited to learn how Alex and so many other characters are taking their next steps, sobbing at the deaths of patients and characters. Wondering how I survived all my relatively recent surgeries as lots of people seem to die of less on the show – the last two words being the giveaway as to how.

Really, I do become totally absorbed in it all. It’s just about the level of social interaction I can seem to handle currently. It’s also a departure from serial killers which is my usual genre of switch off series watching. I tend not to get excited for the next episode of ‘who has been slaughtered yet’.

My book writing has been churning up a lot of memories, nothing I haven’t processed a million times before, but deep enough to remain disturbing despite that. Let’s just say that when I moved to writing about a war zone, it was a relief. A real life friend, not a fictional doctor, remarked that perhaps when I moved on in the book I may get out of newborn sleeping patterns. FFS.

However, with my new cast of friends and my ploughing through the writing, I am loving it. I can see how it was impossible to have done this before now, because I never had the time, headspace, perspective or luxury of being able to dedicate weeks and weeks to it.

I had a summer filled with children, selling a house and moving, recovering from (another) toxic job, settling the kids back into school and then could start writing. I’ve had a month of space, being alone a lot of the time, in a flat and area that I absolutely love, with Grey’s Anatomy and my dog for company. Allowing me the freedom to not just write, but process a lot of what I am writing – it wouldn’t, couldn’t, happen without that.

And for that, I am immensely grateful. Because, fuck it, I’m finally doing something I’ve talked about for 30 years. Of course I want it to be successful, but I’m also totally fine if not. I will give this my best shot, the planets have aligned to make it all happen – from the book, to the screenplay to the TV thing.

It’s nearly 5am, must be time for my second coffee.

Sucks. I am watching lots of nonsense, as I tend to do, and I keep seeing people who just let multiple sorts of rejections bounce off them. To be clear, I am talking fictional TV characters.

It doesn’t bounce off me. It lands, splats, flattens out, becomes absorbent, seeps to weird and wonderful places in my mind and heart and then takes up residence. I have to spend lots of time and energy to locate all the places it’s gone to, dislodge it, clear it away and take out a restraining order so that it doesn’t return.

And sadly, as with many restraining orders, the perpetrator finds a way around it. So we rinse and repeat over the years.

And really what the fuck? I’m 56 and in minutes I can be reduced to the insecure 12 year old that I once was. Full of fear, shame and smallness, for lack of a better term – I feel like I shrink and become invisible and insignificant.

In the last 10 hours I’ve been rejected twice – once by a friend for a party we were meant to go to and the second time for an overseas work stint. The latter didn’t really work for me at all timing wise, but that logic is irrelevant right now. Because 12 year olds don’t have the breadth of experience to apply logic.

Then comes the ‘fuck it, fuck them, fuck it all’ mentality. I become huge, so to speak – muster up my considerable mental and emotional energy to overcome it. To protect the 12 year old part, to be bigger and better than the the source of the rejection, to blast out all the remnants of it inside.

A little fucking extreme. And a lot exhausting. Shocking that I may be extreme, I know. Why can’t I be one of those people who just shrugs and carries right on? Who barely even notices and doesn’t get derailed, having to go through all of the above all the time? Well OK, I know the answer – where I come from, I may not be broken but there are the still the pretty deep cracks there. Easy to fall down one of them. And before they weren’t cracks, they were holes with bottomless pits and if I hadn’t used all my force of will and energy, I may never have come out of them.