O.K. to not be O.K.

In the last few months I have been ranging from feeling terribly low to high as a kite. I have tried however, to act through all of this like everything is ok. What I have realised now is that it's well and truly not ok. I have been on what can only be described as a self-destruct mission since ending my seven year relationship, doing so many things that are entirely unlike me. All in all, while I am happy when I have company and people around me, the minute I am on my own I am very unhappy and questioning all the decisions I have made in my life.

Whilst I was in a relationship I knew there was always someone there; someone who liked and wanted to be around me. Since I split up with my ex I sometimes feel like there is actually no one in the world who likes me. I have always been a bit paranoid about what people think of me, and finding out how few of mine and my ex's mutual friends were actually my friends has had an impact on making this worse. I am now dependent of my friends for company, and for people to be there for me in a crisis and the thought that there might be no one is terrifying. It's easy to feel like people don't know who I really am, or will judge me for the stupid mistakes I can regularly make.

Too many mistakes I have made in the last few months have been because I have simply been desperate to make everything better, to fix things too quick. Perhaps though what I need to realise is that it is ok to not be ok. I am recently out of a hugely serious relationship, my life has changed dramatically and I have made mistakes that are not going to be fixed overnight. Expecting that I will be perfectly happy, mentally sane and loving everything about my life is unrealistic. It is going to take time and effort to get my life the way I want it and I have to accept that. For now I have to put aside my perfectionism and accept that it is ok for things to be less than perfect, allow myself time to heal and forgive my numerous mistakes.

The Dating Game

Being a recently single twenty-something and with my last experience of being single in my teens I have managed, in the last four months, to get myself into a full variety of unfortunate situations for all kinds of reasons.  What has struck me in particular are peoples motives for their actions. It seems that it is no longer as simple as boy-meets-girl.

I have always following the very simple principle of ‘he’s-just-not-that-into-you’ and I have to admit that this has worked pretty well for me and I am still somewhat of a believer in this.  Certainly from my point of view people are all too quick to introduce complicated reasons and suggestions to my behaviour towards them that are in reality completely wrong.  Last weekend I was told I was ‘emotionally unavailable’.  Very true.  Of course the reason I was emotionally unavailable was because I already knew that I didn’t want to be with that person. In the circumstances it seemed easier to just agree than to explain that I just didn’t find the person that attractive.

The reality is that although I have perhaps rather justly earned myself a reputation as a bit of a player, even perhaps a man-eater (ouch!) the truth is that I have a short attention span and I am just not into any of those men. All (well most) are perfectly nice guys and begin as possibilities but it fairly quickly becomes clear that given a choice between the pub with my friends and them I would always choose the pub, so there is no point continuing things any further.

I know so many people who feel the need to always be with someone, and who will throw themselves entirely into something they already feel isn’t completely right. I have never been one of those people and when I was younger always expected that I would be single and actually rather enjoyed it. Now I finally understand what those people felt; I have to admit that it’s a rather lonely Saturday night when all your friends are with their respective partners and you’re contemplating a M&S dine-in for two (to be eaten by one!). So it is easy to settle for less and to date someone for a prolonged period whom you know is completely unsuitable.

What I have learnt however is that when you play the dating game, you should always consider the other side of the story. Someday you might be the person waking up and wishing that date from last night would call, waiting for the phone-call or text that, after a sufficient amount of time spent obsessively checking your phone, you realise will never come. Not only that but, although my rule holds true 95% of the time, there are genuine situations where things are more complicated. Or, more accurately there is a specific reason (like a messy break-up from a seven year relationship or liking someone else) why the rule holds true and it is not specifically about the other person. All this leads to hundred, thousands, potentially millions of reasons why you can reject someone.

The dating game looks fun from the outside; in reality it is messy, time-consuming and more trouble than it’s worth nine times out of ten. Not only that but in my opinion nothing, not a hundred great dates, not the most charming guy in the world, can replace that one in a million feeling where you just Know. What do you Know; well I don’t believe in ‘the one’, but perhaps that there is some basic chemical connection with that person that makes them different. So I will play the dating game for a while, but nothing short of finding that will tempt me into anything past a third date.  I want to wake up in the morning with someone I don’t want to leave. Otherwise it’s always much better to wake up alone. 

The 'line'

As I try to redefine relationships in my life, in the words of a great song, 'flames to dust, lovers to friends' I have got to wondering about the lines between friendship, lovers, partners and everything in between. When I was younger it seemed easy to slot people into these categories however these days I am finding it increasingly difficult, not just from my own perspective, but in judging other peoples motives and actions.

Having perhaps blurred one too many lines recently, I am now finding it hard to put things back on the 'right' side of the line. Maybe this is because modern day relationships have simply become 'blurry', or maybe this is simply because once you have crossed the 'line' it is simply not possible to ever completely reverse this. If the latter is true, I wonder what you are left with and if any friendship can really survive, or if so what it will become.

Turning a relationship into a friendship has to be the most difficult transition possible, and whilst attempting this I have come to realise that, in the beginning at least, it is almost impossible. I think in reality the solution is not to attempt to turn a relationship into a friendship, but to finish a relationship and then, after an appropriate amount of time, begin a friendship. Any other scenario simply becomes too complicated and damaging for at least one party.

An interesting side effect of being single is that I have found I am no longer sure when relationships with guys (or girls) are in danger of crossing the line between friendship and something else potentially unwanted. Whilst I was with my ex, I would have thought nothing of suggesting dinner or a drink with a male friend, in fact there were many occasions on which I did just that. Now however, I feel I have to be a little careful in case it is taken the wrong way. It would seem ridiculous to preface any such suggestion with 'obviously just as friends' and so I just refrain from such suggestions altogether. Contrastingly however, I would never take such a request from a guy as anything other than friendly unless given specific reason to, although further questions open up here as to what is a 'specific reason'; there are so many remarks that can be taken either as friendly or something more that it is difficult to tell anyones intentions unless they are explicit as to what they intend. Perhaps I am a little naive in always presuming the best in people here - this has unfortunately got me into trouble more than once in the past and I really should learn that just because I would never consider trying anything with anyone who had a girlfriend/boyfriend does not mean that the same is true of everyone else.

Whatever the answer is to any of the above, I should perhaps learn not to blur lines unless I am willing to deal with the consequences, and perhaps also that it is not always easy to draw those lines as relationships are not always easy to put into 'boxes'.

Looking in the Mirror

I find it fascinating to know what people see when they look at me and how they view my personality. At best it is great to know people look at you positively, and at worst you at least become aware of how aspects of yourself can be viewed negatively and work on fixing these.

People seem to have vastly different opinions on me that really become quite confusing, I have been told both that I come across as arrogant and that I don't seem to have much confidence, that I am very talkative and that I am too quiet, that I come across as, quote "a bit of a dumb blonde" and that I use language that is too complicated and intimidates people. Perhaps these opinions reflect the vast extremes of my personality - whilst I have a lot of confidence in some areas, in others I completely lack it, and with this confidence comes my ability to talk the hind legs off a donkey, whilst when I feel insecure and that I have nothing valuable to say I will simply stay quiet. However people perceive me though, I am aware of my real personality and am able to brush off negative comments which I do not feel are accurate, or take on board criticism and try to act better in the future.

Comments about my looks however, have always been much harder for me to take. Perhaps this is because I am aware of how my own perception can be warped and therefore that I cannot really trust what I see when I look in the mirror. At 18, a size 8, and spending around 15 hour a week in the gym, I still remember refusing to go out one evening because everything I owned made me look fat. These days, I look back at the few photos I allowed to be taken of me at that time and wonder what had possessed me. Whilst those were very extreme times, an obsession with the way I look will always remain hidden under the surface; I feel an obsessive need to be perfect in everything I do and when this is focused on my body, diet and exercise get dangerously out of hand. I can therefore never rely on what I see to tell me how I really look.

Recently I have had two very nice compliments, one person telling me I was 'above average' looking, and another person telling me that someone who wasn't interested me needed their head examining. It struck me how hard I found it to have any faith or belief in either of these comments. Passing comments from my ex-mother-in-law-to-be that I should go on a diet, however, I could take weeks to get over, hating my reflection every time I caught it in passing.  Compliments however, leave me looking in the mirror wondering what on earth that person could be seeing in me that I simply cannot see. I suppose perception is individual to each person and the laws of attraction will mean that some people will see things that other people won't.

As I have got older, it has become easier to accept what I see in the mirror, even grow to see parts of my reflection that I vaguely like from certain angles, to try not to focus on the parts I want to change. However I doubt I will ever have an accurate view of myself because I cannot view myself from outside my own issues with my body and personality. I have come a long way to be comfortable with what I see in the mirror, perhaps then in reality it is better that I will never really know how I appear to anyone else.

Where to go next?

I have never had much time for the question of where to go next, partly I suppose because it has always been set out - for the last seven years I have been in a relationship with someone I always took for granted was 'the one' (despite not believing in 'the one' as such) and where to go next in life and work was planned out - a series of goals I was working towards one stage at a time. Now that I have no relationship and work has no immediate goal I must admit to being at a loss as to where I go from here.

Many of my friends have suggested that I should be thinking about the person I want to be with next - making a 'list' of things, a mental checklist for any potential date. One friend even went as far as to suggest that I should then highlight the absolutely essential qualities in any man. After I had finished choking on my drink I ventured the opinion that making a list was the stupidest thing I had ever heard in my life, only to find several open mouthed people looking at me - apparently creating this 'list' is something every girl does - I must be missing that gene along with the one that makes girls dream about weddings and white dresses.

The thing is that while I have a vague plan for work and life in general I have never had a plan for relationships. I follow my heart not my head in general and go wherever it leads me. My heart right now is telling me that it has moved on and is ready to have someone new around. As for that someone new, well I suppose in reality I am not too short of options - just options that I would actually want to take up. As usual I suppose,  I want what I cannot have - or who I cannot have.  So the only tentative plan I have in that respect for now is not to get too wrapped up in someone who I cannot have, not to jump into anything too quickly, not to commit too much, and just to see how things go.

In the meantime where to go next in work has been decided for me and time is slowly ticking down until I will be moving on. This I find very unsettling, I enjoy where I am and have no particular desire to move on, in fact I would probably say the exact opposite.

In general then I guess the question of where to go next is answered for me - I have little to no control over where my heart leads me and little to no control over where work sends me. Planning for any of this would perhaps involve so many lists of potential wants and needs that I would bury myself in a pile of A3 sheets.

No, definitely best to live life day by day and see where it takes me....for now at least.

Freedom and Commitment

Lately my life has changed quite dramatically. I have ended a seven year relationship, engagement and several friendships as a result of my actions. How I feel about all this I am still reserving judgement on; the reasons I chose to make these decisions are perhaps as much of a mystery to me as the people involved.

One thing I do know is that over the last year I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the choices I have made. These choices, to me, had begun to take away my freedom and I began to feel something I had never felt in the previous six years of my relationship - tied down. Suddenly I was being asked to make choices that were irreversable - to make a decision about how I would feel about someone in 20, 30 or 40 years. For someone who finds it difficult to commit to a lunch choice, let alone a relationship, this was simply terrifying.

In the end the feeling of being tied became so constricting that I could no longer ignore it; I literally woke up one morning and knew I had to be free. At first I thought a decision not to get married would be enough to rescue the situation but it soon became clear that things had gone too far; I had been in a dark tunnel for too long and now I needed not only to breathe fresh air but to run up the nearest moutain and be surrounded by nothing else. I had no choice but to walk away from the relationship that has made me who I am - that despite its flaws was a loving and happy relationship.

The feeling of freedom at first was like an adrenalin rush. I felt light as air, like I could do anything, be anyone, that I suddenly had back the control over my life that I felt I had lost. Of course I knew this would ultimately not last and with one too many foolish decisions and choices made on the principle that I was now free to do as I wanted the inevitable happened and the crushing low of loneliness and the feeling of being totally alone in the world followed.

Now all that new and unsettling emotion has been replaced by something else - a sense of relief at the burden lifted perhaps, certainly excitement about what the future will hold, but also fear and sadness for the comfort and love I have left behind. Perhaps also a little fear about my own unpredictable emotions and behaviour. I have never been a particularly level person, preferring instead to go with however I feel at a particular moment and this can lead to some fairly disasterous results. Without a steadying influence I have no idea how things will go, although perhaps this is for the best and part of what makes life such a joy to live.

I know now that my big mistake was to commit before I was ready. Before all the wedding and marriage talk I was happy; and I slowly eroded my relationship away  because I couldn't commit to forever. Maybe I wasn't ready, maybe the relationship wasn't right, maybe i'll never know. I cannot now turn the clock back and change the past and make things clearer. In the end the only thing I could commit to right now was being free.

Change

Continuing my theme of using song lyrics, these words seem apt:

If I could hold you close,

Like you were never gone,

If I could hear your voice,

You’d tell me to be strong,

But sometimes I just can’t,

I just don’t understand,

Why you had to go,

I guess I’ll never know,

Ain’t it funny how you think you’re gonna be ok,

Till you remember things are never gonna be the same again,

Ain’t it crazy how you think you’ve got your whole life planned,

Just to find out things were never ever in your hands,

Change.

Two years ago tomorrow my life changed forever, completely beyond my control or anyones elses.  Perhaps death is one thing we can never have any real control of – putting aside suicide clinics, none of us can ever choose when, where or how for ourselves, or our loved ones.

With the loss of someone you love, you also seem to lose control over your thoughts, feelings, physical abilities, in fact most of the things we normally take credit for being able to control. Perhaps we never really have control over these things, but can only realise this when they become so extreme we can no longer ignore our lack of control.

In the last two years, I have suffered a prolonged period of dark numbness, following the immediate unbearable grief of losing my dad. Going travelling somehow seemed to help this although perhaps it was the intensity of the experiences and the loss I felt that provided a combination that meant my body could no longer block out what I was feeling.

I think my lowest point came in the centre of Australia.  Bags of time on buses meant hours and hours of time to think, and watch the scenery. My Mum and Dad had planned to make this trip, they had never been to the centre of Australia and it felt so unfair that this had been taken away from them. So unfair for my dad, and so unfair for my mum as well. His dying in some ways took away two futures, not just one.  Every time I spoke to my mum I was reminded of the fact that I had left her, all on her own, half way round the world, and I was desperately paranoid that something would happen to her while I was gone. Somehow it also became harder to know that my Dad would never pick up the phone to hear how the travels were going. I didn’t do a lot of things my dad wanted me to, always preferring to assert my teenage authority by doing the exact opposite, but he had always wanted me to go travelling. I missed the stories he could have told me about the places he had been so much. Those few days in the centre of Australia were probably the lowest I have had outside the month after my dad died. 

Following the receding of the numbness, and the crippling low that followed it, things did get better. I found it easier to be away from everyone, with people I had only just met and who were bright and lively and fun, and most of all who didn’t know. Not because I find it hard when people know, but because when people didn’t know I couldn’t feel a burning resentment that they no longer seemed to care, or remember, that I was suffering below the surface. When you have known people for years you expect them to recognise that you are in pain, and when they don’t, or fail to acknowledge it, it is impossible to help feeling abandoned and alone.

Being back in England has been better, than it was before, certainly. I finally feel that I have regained some semblance of who I am (I no longer hate Disney!).  I can remember the good things and smile. It makes birthdays and Christmas better to remember all the good time. At this time of year though, it seems to become harder, perhaps because as opposed to bringing back the memories of my dad it brings back the memories of his death, and I cant help but rehash the same thoughts of him lying there in the road, dying, all alone, and wish it could have somehow been different.

This spring, and the spring after that, the pain that goes with it, is something I think I will have to endure every year from now on.  At least if the rest of the year improves it will perhaps become bearable.

In the past year, I have come a long way. I hope my dad would be proud of me, would know that I haven’t forgotten him just because life does eventually have to move on, and time will not stop ticking, no matter how much you sometimes wish it would. 

Ego

‘The Saturdays’ new song “Ego’ is one of my favorite dancing tunes lately, mainly because I find the tune catchy and upbeat but also because after liking the tune I started listening to the words and found they contained a message that I have thought very hard about (probably too hard given that it is a pop song and not intended to give people revelations!!!)

“Now you wanna pretend that you’re a superstar.

And now you want us to end whats taken you this for.

Don’t tell me that you’re done as far as we go,

you need to have a sit down with your ego .

When everyones gone and you are by yourself,

 you know that you’re gonna come to me from help.

Don’t tell me that its time for going solo,

you need to knock some sense into your ego. “

My fiancée tends to get a pretty hard time in our relationship………partly from me (of course) but he also gets a lot of stick from our friends about his ‘less appealing’ personality traits – in main his ability to forget absolutely anything important you tell him within 30 seconds along with all the other unimportant stuff you tell him – in fact absolutely everything he doesn’t write down excluding completely useless car facts he picks up off Top Gear and that no one EVER needs to know!

Add to this forgetfulness a complete inability to organise himself let alone anyone else and it is easy to see where the room for jokes lies……we are inevitably late for/completely absent for any event he is left to organise because he has forgotten about it/arranged something directly before it such a distance away it is impossible to be on time for both.

On top of this he gets endless stick for the fact that his deepest thought on any given day is probably ‘do I need new hub caps?’ which he could probably spend an easy 30 minutes contemplating, He is definitely not a thinker or an academic and would rarely contemplate picking up a newspaper let alone a book.

I on the other hand, am probably the polar opposite. It is incredibly rare for me to forget anything I actually want to remember, I am organised to within an inch of my life and much more academically orientated. I would mostly enjoy a good book as much if not more than TV.

It is very easy for me to consider that I have the upper hand in the relationship, that I am putting in the most valuable effort – in other words to let my ‘ego’ get in the way of the truth.

Because the truth is that I cannot judge someone against the things I value in myself because that is an unfair comparison. What I would be asking for then would be for someone more like me, and I would be forgetting all my ‘less appealing’ (lets face it downright unattractive!) personality traits.

I am obsessive to the point of insanity over tidiness for no reason I have ever been able to understand let alone explain to anyone else (although of course I would expect them to meet my exacting standards).

I am basically pretty selfish, stubborn and can be downright mean when I want to be. After years of bitching about my fiancée for putting work above me, I now do exactly the same and have realised that work will always come first over social events, birthdays and most other things as well. I have a very short temper and tend to get exasperated and crotchety very quickly.

I also make some very questionable decisions and there is no denying that I will never be a easy and predictable person as sometimes even I can’t predict what I will do next.

(Despite all of the above (and countless other failings) I should probably note that I am not actually all bad. )

Going back to the song, what it made me realise is that it is all too easy to shout at someone, chuck a relationship away because you want someone ‘better’ – someone who thinks more, tidies more, remembers more; all without remembering what is important.

In my fiancé I have found someone who never treats me badly, never shouts, makes me tea, breakfast, lunch, dinner and cleans the cat litter out at night. He is truly brilliant at sports while I will never exceed terrible at anything which involves even a modicum of hand-eye co-ordination. Anything mechanical starts working effortlessly the moment he touches it (we will exclude the time when he forgot to check which way the jump leads were on my car and nearly melted the entire electrical system!). His spatial awareness is truly legendary and he can explain anything he understands himself whilst I couldn’t explain ice to an Eskimo. He is loving, kind sweet, trustworthy (as much as a human being ever can be) and I know he will always look out for me, take care of me if I am ill. I can talk to him about anything and he will try and act interested even when he isn’t (whilst I would just tell him I didn’t care and to stop talking!)

In short he may not be all of the things I would normally judge people by, that I value as my own best features, but he is probably twice the person I will ever be and I expect that if I spend the rest of my life trying to make up for all the things I have ever done wrong and he spent the rest of his life making up for all of the things he had ever done wrong he would be finished significantly earlier than me – and that is not even counting the mistakes I have yet to make.

He may not be as academic as me, as organised, as tidy, or as thoughtful, but I do know one thing for sure – there is no way I deserve such an amazing fiancé, I will never know how I convinced him to fall in love with me, to ask me to marry him.

There are thousands of people out there who would connect jump leads the right way round in the first place. But there probably aren’t that many who would spend Sunday afternoon as Halfords in -2 degrees checking each and every electrical fuse a car has to find out which ones have melted. What more could anyone ask for?

Moving On

How do you move on from something you don’t want to leave behind? Or perhaps the harder question is how do you move on from something you do want to leave behind.

Approaching my mid-twenties I find there are more and more things I have to, or want, to move on from. The student lifestyle is certainly one that I have to move on from, but also that I want to move on from, along with it encompassing all my ‘teenage’ attitude and crazy decision making.

In one sense this is very easy to accomplish. I have moved on – my life has moved on and I am no longer the same person. In another sense this is a lot harder, because moving on involves moving your image on, which while you are entangled with people who are incapable, or reluctant to move on from their image of you, is practically impossible and becomes almost poisonous.

Relationships with people who take this attitude become strained, and eventually downright impossible. You are stuck with a person who constantly sees you as someone else, and this is destructive to who you are trying to become.  Your only real choice in this situation is to walk away and find people who accept you for who you are now, and who don’t judge you for who you used to be.

Just as hard, perhaps harder, is moving on from something you don’t want to leave behind. Periods of our lives are comfortable, happy and safe, and we never want to leave those behind even though we might know that we have no choice. 

This is something we all have to deal with in life, and perhaps it is the only way we can grow and learn.  What is heartbreaking is to have to move on from something in order to learn that what you have moved on from was what you wanted all along. This seems to happen particularly frequently in the case of relationships and it is painful to watch people suffer because they had to leave behind someone they really loved to move on with life, only to find it is too late to go back.

In that situation, all you can do is help someone accept that they have to move on and they have to do the rest of the work themselves. Some people will get a second chance. My fiancée and I were perhaps a exceptional example of right person, wrong time and in our first attempt at a relationship we managed to cause chaos and catastrophe in just about every direction possible. Nine months later, when neither of use were able to move on we tried again, despite the discouragement of just about everyone we knew who thought we had already made quite big enough of a mess without.

Nearly six years later I am more convinced than ever that they were all wrong. The difference was that while people around us weren’t able to move on from the destruction of our first relationship, we both were. We had both changed and the second attempt has done considerably better than the first! We never talk about our respective wrongs and rights of that first relationship, as it is unimportant to us both. What matters is not who we were then, but who we are now. Our relationship today constantly moves on from our respective rights and wrongs.  It is always evolving and seems to have found a way to move on with both our lives, an invisible ever-changing entity that binds us together.  We are both always able to forget each other’s past-selves and see each other for who we are now.

One of my favourite song quotes:

“Cause I don’t know, who I am, who I am without you, all I know is that I should. I don’t know if I can stand another hand upon you, all I know is that I should.”

You have to know yourself before you can know if you want to spend the rest of your life with someone else. Sometimes that means moving on from a relationship that you don't want to leave behind. Sometimes you get a second chance.