Having left it 4 months before adding to my rambling blog, I settled down for a bit of thinking and opening of my heart and mind this afternoon, wrote a few sentences, and promptly fell asleep… So, although I think more than one post a day is excessive, I’m going to continue now…
The afternoon sleep because of the exhaustion which comes with finally starting to feel life is “right” again… I’m still not quite comfortable with, not quite used to the new me, the bereaved me, the free me, but I’m feeling more settled, feeling more often that… yes, actually, I do want to carry on living. In fact, I’m worried now that there’s too much I want to do before I die, too many things to fit in, that I find it hard to rest…and when I do, I fall asleep! How different from last year, from even a few months ago, when I just didn’t see the point in ANY of it anymore. When although I worked with a vengeance, trying to set up two new businesses, in a foreign country and with no support network, I was just doing it because it had o be done – I wasn’t doing it with a passion…
I look at what’s happened in the last 3 years and I see why I’m exhausted… because in those 3 years I’ve barely stopped. I was taken ill while holiday. Not gravely ill, but enough to worry me, to embarrass me, to make the summer difficult. I was worrying about my father who was losing weight and no-one knew why. I was worrying about my mother, who had a non-cancerous tumour in her throat and who had been coughing, continuously, for years. I was worried because my live-in boyfriend hadn’t proposed and I was unsure of the future. I was worried about how I could continue to do a job which was sucking the life out of me, making me physically and mentally ill… I loved teaching, but found the job increasingly stressful, unfulfilling, suffocating…
Three years later – both parents are dead, I’m no longer a teacher (well, I am, I suppose, but in an entirely different way), I’m married and living in France instead of England, I’m running two businesses and have a third underway… Small businesses, I hasten to add! But I’m me again. That’s the important detail. I am me again. I am more me than I’ve been for decades…
Last year, I thought it was the sudden death of both parents that had knocked me sideways; that their deaths made me feel the way I felt. Gradually, I’ve realised that it’s the decade of a job and a lifestyle that has been gradually chipping away at me which created the person I had become. I now have the passion, the ideas, the excitement I had in my 20s, but with the confidence and experience that comes with being in my 50s…. So many creative ideas buzzing in my head that it’s hard to rest… The only real downside is that I AM in my 50s, and my body is ageing faster than my mind and despite trying to get fit by taking up running, I have to accept that I am not as young as I feel inside…. I have to accept that many of the things I want to do may well not get done, because i will run out of time to do everything. Still, at least I FEEL young inside and I’m no longer counting the days until I die, like I was this time last year.
“You are never too old to be what you might have been”. George Eliot