Your Tip

 And here is your tip - whoever you may be. Being scared, - really scared - does make you grow. What doesn't kill you - truly, I believe - makes you stronger.

I spent the year assessing everything. My partner - did I really love him? My children - should I really be their mother? Why do we bother with a mortgage? Why are we teaching our kids to love us so much - just so they feel the loss hard too?

And like what felt like to me - a clumsy child demonstrating massively unwanted and unexpected behaviours. Greif - loss - Fear - all of these things do this.

When shit gets real - it reshapes the edges of your core self. You may still be witty but - you also have a sense of sorrow inside. YOu may still laugh madly - but its not as often and care free. You learn to bury the bruises and sorrow because you have children you know need to know life goes on - but it takes all you have.

And when you are a shell - I have learned - you can re-shape. Its harder at 40 - because your path is no longer yours alone. You have to reshape with those you love, with those things you have built, with those spaces you can fill and keep those parts that you remember, actually give you reason to live.

I am in the process of reshaping. I don't want to do what I am doing now for the next 30 years. I want to do something else. I want to do what I should have had the confidence to do when I was 18 - what I find myself doing in my job roles, volunteering and spare time. I am staring a psychodynamic counselling course so I can have the tools to manage when I stumble again - and so I can share these tools widely - freely - for those who stumble too.

I don't want it to be paid for - money making - a quid for a tip. When you think about it - how can it be? Surely when we learn something - we should share it with those who need or want it? 

I have not - as I dawn on 41 - finished this assessment. My heart wants to leave this town and see the world. My brain says I cannot, my world and family don't want that - and I once felt trapped with this decision but now know I have to find those pockets to have all i built here - and see the world I want to see. I need to find a place to reshape and not let the fear of middle age hold me back.

This life is so pointlessly fleeting when you go - I now know what I am now is not a stable all I could be. For the next decade or 3 I can do something else. I have too. Because I truly don't believe life is settling for less than you yearn for. Its shaping the world you build around you as you evolve.

My father asked me, before he died, if I still wrote stories like when I was a child. I told him I had no time these days. He said to me, earnestly - 'keep writing. Write it all down - just do it'. And when you find those pockets of space and time, and fill them with what you like to do - by god - it makes the traumatic hollow horrid parts slightly less consuming. It makes you realise the pockets are worth reshaping for.

I don't find time. I write when I find space in insomnia. I don't review it and I don't tend to expect anything will ever be read. 

I digress - lets get more funny.....