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I hear the alarm and reach for my phone to click the snooze button. I try to convince myself that if I only had my eyes open for two seconds, I could just go back to sleep right away and finish the dream I was having. It took me ages to fall asleep the night before, and I tossed and turned, and now, I can feel every second I have lost. I can feel my back aching, my head feels heavy, and I feel exhausted in my soul. If I can just fall asleep for 5 minutes, maybe all of this will go away. Here is another alarm. I should have slept those five minutes, and instead, I calculated how much sleep I could get if I fell asleep immediately and then worried that I wouldn’t hear the next alarm. I now need to go to the bathroom, but I don’t want to leave the warmth and safety of my bed. How many snoozes can I afford before I reach the point of no return? Oh, I don’t want to go, I really don’t want to go. I just want to fall back to sleep and forget that today even happened. I wish I could just stop time for a while and live in a bubble for a week or two, and then maybe, just maybe, I can get some rest, but for now, I just want to call in sick. I can’t do that, though. What would I even say? I can’t do that. My grandmother always said that you should never lie about being sick because you invite it in, so I don’t feel comfortable telling them I am not well, and I don’t like lying to begin with, so I just have to go in. You have to go since those bills will not pay themselves, and you do seem to enjoy nice things like a roof over your head and food. My bladder is yelling at me now. This is it, we are awake. My feet hit the floor, and the feel of the carpet and the cold in the room let me know that I had started the day. No turning back now. Up I go, and my bones protest as my joints crack and pop. I go to the bathroom and finish my routine, delaying in the shower and considering if I really couldn’t just call in sick, and then thinking that tomorrow I will properly feel the same and have the guilt of lying, I get dressed and look out the window. Oh, magic! It is raining, and the wind is blowing hard. I have never wished harder that I knew how to drive. I now have to go in the rain in my work trousers, and the wind will drive that chill in my bones, and then I will get to the office, where the aircon will not allow them to dry for hours. I look at my watch and realise that I need to go, but of course, I can’t find my keys on the first try. After going around the house in an absolute panic, I have to try to walk faster to make up the time. If I lose the train, I will be at least 15 minutes late, and they are keeping track. They have this idea that if you are on time, you are already late, and they joke about how you are doing a half shift when you are leaving on time, but if you are late, even a few minutes, it becomes an issue. I made it to the train, but I had to run, and I was already wet and uncomfortable. I can hear people coughing; I know that soon enough, I will get a cold. I get there, and I see him standing on the balcony like a gargoyle, clock in his clutches. He stares at it whenever he sees a new person climbing the stairs or going to their workstation. Wings outspread since a sprawled position is meant to project power. I do love a bit of micromanagement in the morning. I enter the room, and everybody stares at the door. It has become a reflex now; everybody does it. Everybody watches everybody constantly. If you have a breakdown in that place, there is nowhere to cry because there is no privacy anywhere, no place to sit with your thoughts and reset. Even if there was, every time people get past you, they check their watch to see if you are still on break. You have been there for an eternity, but when you look at the clock, it is only 10 o’clock, and you have sooo many more hours to go. Not that you would know the difference because you are essentially in a warehouse with blinds covering the windows and neon lights above, so you don’t know what time of the day it is, and you are just as productive as an egg-laying hen. The day goes by, and it is time to go back home. Must hurry cause if you miss the bus, it will be double the time to get home, and in winter, in the dark, it is quite soul-crushing. Once home, I feel exhausted, and no wonder, since I started the day the same way. I sit on the couch and turn on the TV. The day is done, but I still need to cook, do the dishes, tidy the house, and do laundry. I would like to talk to my friends or go out, but I have no energy to do so, and I think that I will give them a shout tomorrow, and before I even know it, a month of tomorrow has passed, and I still miss them, but I am exhausted, and I feel so behind on everything.  I checked the time, and I just lost an hour frozen, considering what I still needed to do tonight, trying to convince myself to get up from the couch and start on my tasks. Blink again, and another two hours have passed. I finished some of my chores, not all, and as I looked at what was left, I had no energy or drive, so I sat down and watched TV again, just for a little bit. Episode after episode and before I know it, it’s one o'clock and it is time for bed but my brain is more fired up than ever because now I am considering what tasks I finished today and I am already completing the to-do list for tomorrow, I am already worrying about when will I have time to finish my housework and I need to make that call. It’s somebody’s birthday, and I didn’t realize so I need to watch that I remember and make the call at a reasonable time. I wonder how time crawled at work and how it flew when I was in the house. Another day gone, and it is one in a long row, and I feel that I live out of habit. Just one foot in front of the other, one breath after the other. What do we usually say to people when they ask us to speak about ourselves? We give them our name and our age if we feel so inclined, and we tell them what our job title is. We identify with what we do so much, and it is understandable up to a point, because if you consider it, we spend less time with our family and loved ones than we spend with our colleagues. Some people like to give out their titles and wait for people to be surprised, impressed, and fawn over them. This is where they get their validation, this is where they draw their sense of pride within themselves. Now, I am not saying that one should not be proud of their work or accomplishments, but I wonder what happens to the person when they can no longer do that job. The job is what you do, not who you are, but still, we are more comfortable talking about our work rather than telling people who we are. I have also noticed this fascination with being busy. Every conversation revolves around how many projects one can fit in a day, and we seem to have this idea that if we are busy, then we must mean we are productive and useful, and if we are useful, then we have value. I feel like every time, it is one of those going back-to-school essays where you have to write something about your summer holiday. One year, things were uneventful, not boring, but things were peaceful, and nothing was standing out, so I asked my mates who were around me if they had a topic for their essay, and then we decided to make up a trip to an amusement park. Four of us would be involved; we decided on a narrative so we could keep it consistent, and then we each used our writing skills to tell the story. It is the same with the conversations about what we did at the weekend. We feel bad or less than when we answer with nothing much, and then the other person lists what they have done, and then there is a sense that they have lived a life while I am wasting mine. My therapist asked me why I feel the need to achieve all the time when I should be able to relax and enjoy the times of stillness and rest. The answer, I suppose, is because my parents didn’t pay much attention to stillness but were very happy when I achieved things, and I got attention and praise for being productive. I was taught that I am only likeable when I am useful, my people-pleasing nature tells me that I need to keep going regardless of the cost. Never mind that I forget to eat, never mind that I forget to drink, never mind that I don’t sleep well, never mind that I feel ill, and I use coffee and sugar to keep me awake and alert, never mind that I feel empty and dead inside, but once I achieve something, I will be liked.  When I stopped and took a good, hard look at my life, I could see how I used work to run away from myself. I used “busy” to become numb when other pain and disappointment were trying to take hold or be processed. I saw how many times I have put work first and allowed it to affect my relationship and saw my partner at the door asking me to stop for the day and spend time with them and me just choosing to answer one more email and resenting them for not understanding the pressure that I am under and the fact that if I don’t do this today, I will be overwhelmed even further tomorrow. Work affects life, and life affects work, but when it comes to it, we try to keep it together and put our best foot forward at work. We hold our pain in, and we put on the best smile as we network and schmooze, and then we go home as an empty shell of a being, and we now have to be there for a family. The reality is that work gets the best of me, and they get what’s left of me. At work, I have to keep a straight head no matter what happens, be resilient, and be a good negotiator, no matter what comes my way, I am meant to face it with tact and gravitas. What happens next is that we go home, and we explode at the slightest provocation or inconvenience. We go to the events, but we are rolling our eyes at all times, and we are watching our watches to see when we can go home. Or we can be found somewhere in the corner, eyes glazed, in a trance because we are not at the park throwing a ball, we are in front of an audience presenting a case study. To what end? You kill yourself and make yourself jump through all of these hoops, but when you leave, there will not be legends told in whispers about you around the campfire. A great warrior who fought for their tribe and brought great victories. You probably won’t even remember most of these things when you are meant to go for job interviews as a success story. Do you know who will tell stories of you, stories that you will remember? The loved ones who appreciate you and your time and your attention see your efforts and support you when you are low. They accept you as you are and honestly work through issues when something happens. Most of us were on the hamster wheel, chasing that next promotion, chasing that next raise, so we could afford better clothes, better cars, go on better holidays, and then the pandemic came, and everything ground to a halt. All of a sudden, we did not have the option to be busy because we could not go out and meet people, we couldn’t go on holidays, and we couldn’t go and enjoy our hobbies. All we could do was stay in the house, face ourselves and sit with the idea that we could die, or our loved ones could die. All of a sudden, going to Turks and Caicos was not as important as wanting to go to Gran’s backyard and have a cup of tea with her. Nothing like a world crisis to put things in perspective and make people analyse their priorities. People hated their ride to work, all that time lost going back and forth, and realised how much time they were getting back in their lives from not commuting. There was this idea that if we worked from home, we would not be efficient, or people would not be working, but it turned out that people were responsible and accountable, and they still kept to their deadlines, did quality work, asked for help whenever needed, and collaborated. There was a sense of community that had been created in the thought that we were all together in this, and people banded together to accomplish everything that needed to be done. Not everybody thrived, and some started to feel disconnected and adrift without having the structure of going to work and being around other people. Some people felt that they needed others to regulate their emotions, and if they don’t have that, they spiral. Some felt that the environment affected them immensely, and they thrived and were more efficient when they were themselves and didn’t have the disruption of other people’s conversations in the background, or they could control interactions and responding their messages when ready rather than having someone at their desks asking for things. The new normal has become figuring out what brings us joy and fulfilment and pursuing it. Not having to commute has added an hour and a half of sleep to my day, which made it easier to cope with the bouts of insomnia. Instead of drinking my coffee while reading my emails, I have started to take it to the backyard and listen to the birds sing and the wind in the leaves, smell the flowers, and then go to work with a smile. I would make an active effort to check in with people and ask them how they were. Rather than at work, I would have my headphones in, and I would just jump from email to email. Furthermore, while I was progressing with the therapy, there was a lot of anger coming to the surface as the grieving process was unfolding. If I had been in the office, I would have probably taken my anger out on other people, as it was an energy that was amassing and had nowhere to go. By being contained in my house, I could work through the steps that I needed to release that anger and appropriately engage with people at work. I know what the energy I brought to the table was, and it would not have been fair to influence people and force them to be in that energy. My breaks would be working breaks so I could do my dishes or do my laundry while resting my eyes from staring at my computer and then when it was time to clock off, everything would be done so not only I would have to give my full attention at work but I would be able to finish some of my housework as well and feel that I have made the most of my day. I would then have my entire evening to devote to my interests. I realised that while I got pride and validation from my work, it wasn’t really aligning with what I wanted to do next. I took a step back, and instead of raising my hand for every single extra project that was being offered, I stopped and considered how much free time I have. Do you know what happened? The work still got done, and I didn’t burn out. My performance improved because I was giving the appropriate attention to tasks, and I allocated time for checks. When I started to set better boundaries and be selective with what I put my efforts towards, I chose projects that aligned more with my long-term goals, and I got more satisfaction than completing a hundred menial tasks that could be easily divided into the team and completed just as efficiently. I started to put myself first and advocate for myself. There was a situation where I was due to go on a paid training session, and my team lead suggested that, since it was a busy time, I should not attend. I have let them know that I had advised everyone ahead of time, found cover for my activities, and since the company has already paid for this training, my attendance was mandatory and monitored. I am worth two hours for myself to do a training, and the problem is that if I had been encouraged to pursue my interests, I would have been even more energised to go back to work, pull up my sleeves, and dig into the work. Think back on all the jobs that you went over and beyond for, and you broke your back to complete tasks because you were the only one who could do it. Then think about what happened when you left. Did the company collapse? No, they just found somebody else to do it and adjusted. I am not going to tell you how work-life balance should look for you, and I am not going to give you tips because you can just Google plenty of ideas. What I want to do, though, is to consider what you are doing everything for and when you commit to it, if it is worth the price. I am not telling you that you should stop giving your best, renouncing your work ethic, and doing the bare minimum, but I am telling you that if your job robs you of your joy, affects your relationship with your family, and breaks you, then you might want to consider alternatives. Try asking for help, try asking for your workload to be adjusted, and if nothing changes, then it is time to consider changing teams or the company. You make your destiny, and you decide how easy or hard you are going to make this journey for yourself. I just hope that you see that no matter what, you still have the freedom to choose.

When I started my first job, it meant I would have my own money and my own freedom. I had always been used to working hard and had this idea that if you work hard, the things that you want will come to you. I went into a new environment, learned what I had to do, and I have to say that some of the values instilled in me carried throughout my career. I have been told that I am in control of how much I can develop and learn, that I have to lead my growth and that I would find support if I asked for it. I was rated on being responsible and accountable, and they would say that it is alright to make a mistake as long as you admit it and learn from it. Those were the good parts. I also remember that I went for my first evaluation during a salary freeze. I was told that I was getting nothing extra for my efforts, but they expected me to outdo my performance next year. The next year, I got the same rating, and I was told that while I had performed very well, any increase or bonus that I might receive is based on how well my peers have done. I did get a bonus, and I also got to change contracts from the outsourcing company to the main company, which was somewhat of a promotion. I stayed in the team, but as management changed and the team structure changed, I found that I didn’t quite align anymore. I had grown so angry that I would finish 75 requests in a day against a target of 25 because I would channel all my rage into it and try to keep everybody out. I applied for the team lead position, and there have been no interviews. Somebody just got appointed, and an announcement was made in front of the team. Funny still, when the supervisor and the team lead are out of the office, you are doing backup, and the department manager comes in and tells you that you are the supervisor’s right hand and then realises that you are not the team lead and says you are the second right hand.  Am I now? I wasn’t aware that I was working with Kali. This event, on top of everything, just showed me that it was time for me to change teams, and I started to look within the company. Part of the process is to let your manager know that you are planning a move. Lo and behold, I found that since I was overachieving, I had been marked as an essential contributor, and my file was marked in HR so they wouldn’t let me move to other roles. I was only lucky that management changed again, and the new one understood that if they didn’t allow me to progress in the company, I would look for a role elsewhere. Lesson number one: not all people who appreciate you and see your merits will want the best for you, so you need to fight for yourself. In my next role, I was part of a team of 40 people. Being close to the same age and not having children yet, we would be more inclined to also socialise outside of work and build friendships, so whenever we would have to do backup for each other or holiday cover, we would organically come together and make sure that everything is done quickly and up to standard, so that we succeed together. Whenever there was a problem, there would be plenty of ears to listen to and people to support and guide you because they were facing the same issues. In this position, not only was I encouraged to participate in all the projects I wanted to pursue, but I also received the training I needed to develop my skills and feel that the company expected the best from me. I was a top performer, and I was given bonuses and salary increases. I got recognition, usually as the silent performer, and I was on my way to joining an employee accelerated program that would ensure my success within the company, when I fell in love. Before, when I was single, I would fill my nights by doing extra work and taking on more projects to distract myself from the fact that I felt so lonely. Running away from my depression by answering just another email. There would be times when I would be so busy and so focused on achieving and completing tasks for other people that I would not move from my desk for hours, I would forget to drink or eat, and when I did, I would have a can of Coke and some crisps. Expectations were still high, and the workload was still high, but I felt respected, seen, and I was being rewarded with money that allowed me to do up my flat, go out, buy the clothes that I wanted, go on holidays, and I had access to training opportunities and improvement programs that would allow me to grow my career. I fell in love, though, and because of that, I moved to Scotland. I left all of those career opportunities just as a footnote on my resume and skills acquired, and moved. In my first job, I landed in a team where people placed bets on how old I was, but no one would speak to me. I tried to take the opportunity to ask about them and try to build connections, as I was new to the country and I didn’t have friends there. My manager was micromanaging me, and every time I spoke to her, I felt disgust in her voice. I felt defeated in that job. Not the activities themselves, because I had learned as fast as I could, and I would ask for work all the time to make the day go faster. In this job, you were expected to be at your desk at all times. You would do your work, and if there was nothing to do, even if you asked other people for tasks, you didn’t have any training that you could do, you couldn’t read a newspaper, and I was being excluded from conversations with my coworkers. I was alone on an island in a sea of people, slowly dying on the inside. Before you judge me and tell me that a company is meant to get its money’s worth, so of course I could not read a newspaper, I would challenge you to go and sit at your desk for an hour, with nothing to do, just looking at a screen that doesn’t change, not talking to anybody. Even more so, I went on a night out later on after I managed to get a bit friendlier with the team, and towards the end of the night, my ex joined while I was talking to him, and he was kissing me, when someone threw a shot glass at us. Someone was so annoyed by this moment of joy that had nothing to do with them that they felt the need to chuck something at us. In this job, I would sit at my desk and count the seconds as they turned into minutes, the minutes turning into hours until it was time to go home. I was deeply suicidal, a shadow of the person I had been, and was staying for the money, little as they were, so I wouldn’t be a burden for my partner. When I changed jobs again, I never really negotiated a salary. I just wanted to get out of that place, and it was becoming a matter of survival. In the new place, I felt a sense of camaraderie again, and people took an interest in who I was as a person. I was being included in projects, and my opinions were being considered, so I felt that I mattered again. The problem was that after a time, people stopped seeing the things that I was doing right and my high performance, and they were only complaining about what was still to do and what I had missed. There were high times when I would wake up at 5 and work until 22.00 or midnight just to keep up with the workload, while my boyfriend kept on coming and asking me to spend time together, and me asking for more and more time. When a customer complained about a delay, my teammate washed her hands of it because she had been on holiday the previous week. I told my manager that I did my best, but I couldn’t progress it. I had asked him what his expectations were, considering that I had told him that my workload was too high and nothing had improved. He replied that he forgot, and I should have followed up. I knew it was no longer my place, and it was time to leave. I was always so stressed and angry, and I was trying hard not to shout at everybody. When I left, my manager told me that he was sorry to see me go, but he won’t thank me because I am leaving before Q4 started. My teammate had told me that I should have found her a job for loads of money at the company I was going to, as well. Everybody was somehow expecting me to put their interest and well-being before mine. When I switched work again, I was full of joy and excitement. I went for the interview, and I enjoyed myself while talking to the interviewer. When I met my manager, I asked if they had any cookbooks that would allow me to learn the processes more quickly, and I got the strangest look ever. This was a new beginning, and I thought that it would be an opportunity for everything to be different and for me to finally settle in a place. A huge burden had been lifted off my shoulders, and I could let go of all the stress and pressure and look forward to starting something new. What a funny little thing a job is. Your family is given, your friends you pick, but in your job, just like in school, you don’t have a choice of who will surround you. You go full of hope, and this stranger only has a few hours to decide if you have the skills to do the job and the personality to fit into the group that already exists. One is trying to put their best foot forward and hopes of being selected for the role. Everything looked so good on paper, and it really seemed to hit all the right marks. You wait, and then the answer comes, and wouldn’t you know it,  you are in.  We are so happy to have you in the family. Except, you can opt out of seeing your actual family at gatherings, but you will have to see these people five days a week for 9 hours. You will travel through snow, sleet, rain or shine to go be with these people. As you can understand, like any family, this one has its problems too. One is the brown-noser that gathers all the information and stabs everybody in the back to management, one is the workshy bastard that is even proud that they do the bare minimum while they watch other people struggle with the workload, and one is insecure and feels threatened every time somebody else is doing better. You see the cowards that can’t stand up for themselves but speak with others around the watercooler so they can enlist them in their petty battles. You also have the creep who is stalking people around the office and makes inappropriate jokes. You know them, the one who says you can’t take a joke whenever you call them out on their bullshit. So many characters together, all sent to test you, all people that you would never choose as friends. If you have a look back through my stories, you will notice that I never actually complained about the work itself. Some of it was stressful because of the deadlines, some of it was frustrating because the tools were slow or would fail exactly when I needed them most, but I have always found purpose in my work. I took pride in the achievements and in the skills that I have learned. The problem seems to have always been the people with whom I was not compatible, but from this crowd of strangers that I have been brought together by faith, always a hero emerged. THE WORK BESTIE! The only people who make any workplace bearable. The only beacons of joy in these places of desolation. Brought together by circumstance, you have that you have things in common that you can talk about, and then you feed each other crumbs of information to test if they do the rounds of the office or if the information stops with them. You bond over the certainty that these people are not alright, and you will need long years of therapy because these people won’t go. You will have a shorthand and know each other's minds. You will share looks of disbelief when, in a meeting, you will see one of your coworkers say so many stupid things in a row with such confidence, and you will know without a shadow of a doubt that you will laugh at this the rest of the week. No relationship is perfect, and from time to time, you will hurt each other by going on holiday and abandoning each other. The only thing that keeps one from breaking is that one can still vent over text. These are the real heroes who help you stay in a job a little longer,  who support you on the worst days, and give you a sense of community and belonging. Someone who understands your situation because they are going through it as well. Someone who shares your trauma and can make fun of the drama. They make the day go faster. They bring comfort to any situation. They bring safety in a place of uncertainty.  They have your back, and they support you. They want the best for you, and they celebrate you in the most wonderful ways. They are your biggest cheerleader, and you are the same for them. You come together, and then, when the rest gets too much, it is time to find another opportunity, and you need to say goodbye. Some friendships end there. When people don’t see each other every day, they sometimes find they cannot sustain a connection. They grow and grow apart. They find other besties who will offer their time and support. Some people are there for chapters, and some people are there for seasons. They fulfilled their role, and now it is time to be replaced by another. It’s always sad when this happens. I am always left wondering if the connection was as real to them as it was for me. I have been in some really poor work environments, but I have been blessed with the fact that I have quite a few people that I met in my first job who are still my friends to this day. I have witnessed them meeting their partners, getting married, and having children. We have grown together, and despite being in different time zones, our conversations feel as natural and easy as they ever been. These women have supported me in my worst times, through all the changes. They have been my rocks, they have been my emergency contacts. They have provided counsel and a shoulder to cry on. They grew from strangers to being the family I chose. Life gets a bit easier when you can share with them everything that happens from 9 to 5.

I was never good at colouring inside the lines. It would always be that the colour would run over or that I would not fill it in enough. I remember trying to do it slowly and meticulously so I could get it perfect, and I would feel this immense pressure in my mind to get it right. Sometimes, my intrusive thoughts would tell me to just go over the line and get it over with. Once that happened, then the pressure of achieving perfection would be gone. There was no longer potential for it, so now I could just do my best, and that would be that. I would try to push away those thoughts and continue with the task at hand, painstakingly colouring. Somehow, I always ended up outside the lines, though, and I would feel so disappointed looking at it. No matter how much I tried to fix it with the eraser, you could always tell there was an issue. I mean with an ’80s eraser; you could break the page or leave grey marks even though nothing grey has come in contact with it. That led to me seeing a commercial on TV with the slogan “The rubber that erases everything” and begging my mom for one. Turns out it was a commercial for condoms, and it would not be fit for my needs. There is no perfect audience, eh? In nature, I always seem to find appealing the bizarre, the uneven, the trees, flowers, or rocks that look like things that they should not be, deformed as they are, they are interesting, and they have an amazing story to tell but when it comes to people, we are attracted to symmetry. The more symmetrical, the more it shows that the genes are strong and healthy, and good offspring can be produced as a result. For me, the image of elegance was a woman in a smart dress with heels, long hair in a bun with a hat on her head, simple makeup with a black winged eye and perfect red lips, well-manicured red nails just gliding gracefully from place to place. I never felt that I could be that. I tried to be well-groomed and clean, but my clothes always were a bit too tight or too loose, a bit scratchy, with one strap that refused to stay in place. My hair was too thin, lacking volume, and seemed to faint at every attempt to be kept up in a bun unless there were some serious bondage attempts involved and if my scalp was not screaming in agony. I cannot find the symmetry of the black liner. Red lipstick travels, and if I am not careful, it is either on my teeth or around my mouth, portraying the clown that I am. My walk is anything but gliding. I am very feminine in the right outfit, but a breeze I am not. While I enjoy walking in heels and they make me feel so grown up and sexy, it also bores me to tears because I cannot walk as fast as I want to, and I have a bad back, so I cannot stand for extended periods in them. I suppose this is why I enjoyed Miss Congeniality so much. With the right team of trained professionals, I could become the elegant lady that I admire and would like to be, but I would probably fall flat on my face at the first opportunity. Growing up, I read books where the main character was usually a slender woman with long, flowy hair, perfect skin. The embodiment of perfection. Kind, helpful, and compassionate, so that her character matches her looks. Sure, she is overprotected, naïve, and helpless, but because she was so kind, everybody will jump to her aid. I played with dolls, and they too were meant to have perfect bodies, measurements of 36-24-36 to scale, with long hair, perfect makeup, walking on high heels for no reason, most of them blonde and blue or green-eyed. Then, you grow up and look at fashion magazines that play on the same idea of perfect skin, perfect symmetrical faces, like live Barbies, and clothes falling perfectly on the body. The same magazines talk about how one should look better, and most of them have at least one diet and one exercise regimen. We sure do like to keep our women busy on how their bodies are not enough. Can one imagine what we can do with the time not being spent telling ourselves we are not enough? I would look at those images of perfect skin with not even an ounce of fat, and no cellulite in sight, and take that to the mirror to see that I am not anywhere near that. I was thin at 54 Kg and 1.70m in height, but I have always had cellulite, and due to a growth spurt in adolescence, I have always had stretch marks. The trend when I was a teenager was a liking for big breasts, Pamela Anderson's build, which I did not match since mine were modest at best. Then it moved to the silhouette of a two-by-four, which I did not match again because I was born with those child-baring hips. Now, it moved to having big thighs and big butts which I again do not match somehow. Not a perfect body, not a perfect face, not matching what society deems as classical beauty. I felt so small and insignificant for so long. I felt like other women were so much better than I, and I am nothing special to look at. I will never make men gasp when I walk into a room, stunned by my beauty but, what I realized one day, while I sat in the park people watching is that I do not have to, that love comes in different shapes and sizes and beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. When I looked in the mirror, I felt disgusted by what I saw, and I only saw the need to improve everything that men were not looking at, or they looked at it and felt that it was amazing. There was an instance where a man looked at my stretch marks while I wished for death, feeling like he would find them disgusting, and he instead just bent down, kissed them, and moved on with his day. It was such a simple gesture that meant nothing to him, most likely, but it made me feel utterly accepted, lit me up inside, and made me feel sexy. I hold on to these types of moments now, and I think to myself, no matter what shape you take, there will always be someone out there ready to love you for who you are. I was reading Reshma Saujani’s book, “Brave Not Perfect”, and she was saying that girls and boys are raised very differently. Girls are taught from a young age to play it safe, while boys are encouraged to explore, fall, get back up, fail, and try again. As a result, men will be more willing to take risks and will be praised for it, while women will be more inclined to stick with what they know. Thinking about it, girls usually receive dolls as presents, and they are told that those are their babies and that they need to take care of them. Their games are to cook, clean, and be a wife and mother. We are told that we can play, but we must not be loud because that is inappropriate for a young lady. We get told that we must play carefully and stay away from dangerous things because a lady should not have scraped knees. The expectation is that our clothes stay clean and tidy after we play outside. Also, a good girl does not argue; a good girl does as she is told. Girls in my class, myself included, were expected to be quiet, obedient, pay attention, and get good grades. Under the premise that girls matured faster than boys and boys were more inclined to play and not pay attention, it was perfectly acceptable for boys to get a 7 or 8 out of 10, while I would get grilled by my parents as to why I did not get a perfect 10. Then compared with my peers and reminded them how they do so much better than me. Not only do I have to play by taking care of a family of 4 but I also need to learn how to do things with the women in my family that are meant to be traditions that I will pass on to my family because you can do whatever you want as long as you finish the school we think is worthwhile, get a degree in something respectable, find a husband, buy a house, have a child, then have another because you don’t want them to grow alone. I am not even nine, and I have responsibilities, and I am a carrier of tradition. They tell us that we are delicate and that we must be protected. They tell us that we should stay in our lane and be grateful for what we get. My mother actively told me to accept any job that was offered to me just to have a paycheck, even if it was a minimum wage income, even though I had a university degree and I knew two foreign languages, which would have put me in a position to get quite a good wage. My act of rebellion was to stick it out and not give in to pressure and hold off on a job that paid what I wanted. Another risk was to switch jobs when I was no longer happy with the conditions offered. I also had to prepare myself and go and ask one of my managers for a raise, which my mom had never done. Growing up, I had been criticised and I had been shamed for making mistakes, so when something happened, I knew exactly what would happen to me. There would be no sparing my feelings, and there would be no appreciation for effort and promises that I should do better next time. I was expected to do well every time. Every mistake would do the rounds in the family, and then my mom and dad would be shamed by their parents for their parenting style and failure, so my parents added shame to their disappointment and added pressure to me. Support and gentle parenting were not a thing, but you would get something bordering on bullying. Here is an example: in an attempt to please my parents, I tried to clean everybody’s shoes and polish them. When they came back home, I showed them what I had done, and I put my best effort into it. My dad seemed angry, and my mom sighed and rolled her eyes, and told me I did not need to do it. Somehow in our house appeared a book about a couple of baby bears that tried to clean their shoes and made a complete mess and then got completely distracted. As they were telling their grandmother what happened, there was this line that stuck with me:” ‘We only wanted to do a good deed, ’ they said while sobbing.” My parents dropped a hint… when I tried to help my mother and do the dishes for her, she got angry and told me that I did not need to do that as it was her task. Not even my dad can do it to her standards, so I should not try, and then she washed them again herself immediately. Your help is not wanted, nor needed, was a well-rehearsed chorus in my house. All of this made me push myself and try to get the best results in everything that I do, and work as hard as I need to get the job done, no matter if the extra effort will break me. I started working in the corporate environment, and we were told that covering your job requirements did not get you a raise. One would have to do stretch activities on top of an excellent day-to-day performance. I did find that my not-good-enough wound worked perfectly in achieving performance because I felt the need to do more and try to be perfect at it to prove myself. One is told that we need to be better and do more than last year, but that we will also be compared against each other, and even though I might have improved, it might still not be good enough for a high raise. There are my corporate parents, comparing me again with my corporate family. Getting things wrong and having to go and admit it was soul-crushing because this would become palpable proof that I am indeed not good enough. The shame would start recruiting more of my thoughts and activate that imposter syndrome, and it comes into the room ready to hurt me more than anybody else ever could. It mockingly looks at me and says, “Look at you. You thought you were the shit and turns out you are not even a fart. Did you think that you had what it took? You do not. You never did. You will never be anything. You will never amount to anything. Now go and tell them what you did and how you are going to fix it, and hope they do not fire you.” That teaches me not only to second-guess everything that I am doing and triple-check before sending files, but it also teaches me that I should not take on new things, minimising the chances of this happening again. I have never made a mistake that could not be fixed in a day or so, but still, the spiral continues. Albert Einstein said, “A person who has never made a mistake has never tried everything known.” I catch myself trying to be perfect when it comes to my house. As soon as people are meant to come to visit, I try to clean this house from top to bottom, and I also get cupboards that I have not opened in ages and organise them. Who are these people who are coming to look through all my stuff? It is yet unclear, but I need to clean every surface just in case people check that one corner that I forgot. I am meant to be the perfect host. I am meant to have everything that my guests ever wanted. My house is meant to be spotless. I am meant to be the perfect cook as well, if anybody eats with me. I never say that I am a good cook because I feel that if I mess up, I will be mocked, so I just say that I can feed people and leave them to decide based on the results of the day. There were so many things that I had to learn to do on my own. So many things that I had never tried before and just had to be done. To some, they are trivial things like finding a new flat to live in but I didn’t know the process so that seemed like such a daunting thing and most of all I was scared that if I made the wrong decision, I would get stuck and I wouldn’t be able to solve the problem. That made me so afraid of even starting to look for something, but there was no doubt about it; it had to be done. So, I tried to learn as much as I could about the process, ask for advice, and get on with it. Did I enjoy it? NO! Did it go smoothly? Also, NO! It got done, though. The first time was an absolute dumpster fire, but I got to go through the entire process myself, and I knew what to expect, and I knew what changes I needed to make to improve the process. At the end of the day, no one would come to my rescue, so I had to be catapulted out of my comfort zone. I just had to get used to the fact that it is not perfect, but it is done, and it is still a functional result. That it is okay to make mistakes, that it is okay to pivot, and that it is okay to change the plan if it is not working with the current conditions. It was not easy to push down the fear and the shame, but I can accept that I will feel horrible at times, and I will break down and cry, get up, and continue with the task at hand. I had to do it on my own, and I had to learn to be brave. I wish I could be the girl who has time to work out and have a perfect figure, which is always perfectly put together from the top of my head to my baby toe. I have perfect style, and everything fits me amazingly. I wish I had perfect skin, and I did have a skincare routine, but I do not. I wish that I could clean this house and not miss any spots every time. I wish I had the perfect job where I would be brilliant and that I would have a clear career plan that just falls in place perfectly. I wish that I would be able to find a great man with whom I can have a wonderful marriage and I would be an amazing and understanding wife at all times I can be open and empathic while being able to give wise advice while cooking meals from scratch every day and then be a porn star at night. Be able to have children whom I parent gently, and they will grow up to be perfectly adjusted cherubs who can achieve their full potential. I wish all of that could be possible. Most of all, I wish there were a recipe to start wishing for perfection. All I know so far is that all you can do is your best, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it just fails monumentally. The best stories are about things that you tried or realisations that some things may not be for you and need to be let go. Kindness to myself that matches the same grace that I have for others is the goal. A little bit of bravery, starting small and then just pushing the boat out a bit further every day, I find, is the way to go. Also, trying not to be fully invested in the result but having curiosity about the process and being fully present is a challenge. The reality is that I will never be perfect, but being absolutely and unapologetically me and trying my best every single time is indeed my idea of perfection.

I have always loved “The Lady in the Van.” That Maggie Smith starred in it might have played a big part, but I loved how the story was told. The first time I saw the movie, I caught it on TV, and it was already halfway through, but it immediately grabbed my attention. The story revolves around Alan Bennett, a writer who moved to Camden, and Mary Shepherd, a peculiar homeless woman living in a van. Alan has philosophical discussions with what seemed to me, at first glance, to be his twin, one musing on the current situation, the other playing the devil's advocate. I have watched the movie several times since, and I know that it is all in his head; what seems like the twins disagreeing is him being in two minds about the situation at hand. I will not ruin it for you if you haven’t watched it, but I hope you get my point. I suppose another way is often portrayed is by showing the good angel and the devil on a person’s shoulders whispering into the ear while they decide. The same idea as having two wolves inside a metaphor, and one needing to decide which one to feed. Usually, I find that my biggest battles are between what I should do and what I want to do. These are the situations where people ask me if I didn’t see the red flags, and to be honest, I had seen them, but sometimes I feel like choosing the wrong thing because it is what I want to do. Should I see that man again? He is not what I want or need, and he may be holding me back from finding the right person for me. I know that what I should be doing is saying no, but I just want to say yes. That is when the “oh, well. We can live a little” comes to mind, and fully knowing that the thrill is temporary, I decide to just go with it. I should say no because he lies unnecessarily, often, and poorly, leaving no doubt in my head that there is no future in any of this. But I want to say yes because I feel lonely sometimes, and I want someone to hold me and tell me that they missed me and tell me that I am beautiful and smart, and they can’t help themselves around me. The situation is not what I want because it lacks permanence, but the reason I continue with it is that it does give me some of the things that I need. I go and I do feel great in the moment. The next day comes, and my inner critic comes out and punishes me for being weak and allowing myself to be swayed, but while the voice of reason tells me I should not go again, I know full well that I do want to, and I will most likely see him again. Sometimes, I can see how a person is treating me, and at first, I get upset. Then I start to wonder if maybe I might have misinterpreted the situation, maybe I have been too sensitive, and I should give that person a bit of credit because maybe they didn’t mean it that way. I do like to see the good in people and believe that they wouldn’t hurt me on purpose. In most cases, I am right, but there are also those situations where people showed me exactly who they were from the start, and I chose to idealise them or give them too much credit. These situations tend to have the same pattern. I see what is happening, but I assume that I am wrong. The situation repeats itself until I accept that it is not I exaggerating, and I try to address it and get some explanation, but the behaviour persists. I then go to phase three, and I treat them the same way that they treat me. I figure that treating you like I want to be treated has led to disappointment on my part. I assume that you must have been doing the same, so if I treat you like you treat me, then we will have a better interaction. Imagine my surprise when people start to feel insulted and upset by being treated in this new fashion. Interesting because it was perfectly alright when it was being done to me. I would never hurt anyone, but I do indulge my petty side, and I feel that some people can’t empathise until it happens to them. Even then, I start to feel bad because I have been petty, and it is not the person that I want to be. I also feel stupid because I allowed things to get this way. The worst part, though, is when people start to weigh in and suggest that I should try to contact the person and try to explain what happened and how I felt and attempt to repair the situation, that maybe the other person was not aware of their effect on me. This upsets me because I don’t think they realise how long I go back and forth and analyse what is intuition, what is a logical deduction, and what is just me being paranoid and jumping to conclusions. If I decide to cut somebody off, I set a clear boundary because I have concluded that they knew exactly what they were doing, while they were doing it, and they chose to act as they did. I spend so much time overthinking and weighing everything, trying to make the best decision and find the best way to be. In this journey, I have had to change my patterns and behaviours many times, but sometimes it feels like running blind in traffic. I realise what I do wrong, and then sometimes I overcorrect, and I realise I have gone the complete opposite, but I don’t feel like it is serving me or when I hear myself saying it aloud, it just rings false and doesn’t quite sit right with me. I spend a lot of time walking and talking to myself. I have full conversations thinking of a topic and then telling myself that I am being stupid, and I always get it wrong. I then tell myself that I should be kinder to myself and dive back into overthinking. I have some favourite topics that I go back to so realistically, no matter where I am, I am never bored. One of those topics is “How do you give without expectation but still ask what you want?” I have turned this over in my head for ages, and it seems quite a contradiction at first. If I offer advice or give you my time, there is some expectation that you will be available to listen to my problems or you will be available for me when I need to, and that to me is an equal relationship as it is based on reciprocity. If you only listen to my problems all the time but do not share yours, it means that somewhere down the line, I have given you a reason not to trust me. I kept thinking about it for two months and trying to find the middle ground in this situation I came to the realisation that whenever I sent a text to someone to meet up, I would start to already think about what the other person is going to say, their enthusiasm about making it happen, how great it would be whenever we are out and how much fun we are going to have. In my head, I already lived the experience, and if reality does not match my expectations, I feel very disappointed and hurt. I never expect people to drop everything just because I want to talk, or I want to go out, but because I built it up in my head so much, I essentially hurt my own feelings. The first part is trying to stay in the moment and not anticipate anything, to just think that it would be nice if we went somewhere, but if the other person can’t make it, then it is alright. The second part of it is making sure that I set better boundaries and get the respect that is required to make it a healthy relationship. If the other person doesn’t make any effort or insists on mistreating me, it is alright for me to give up on people and choose people who choose me. We find things on social media sometimes and some of them seem insightful and they create these a-ha moments that help me progress but there was this one time when I saw this video that said about healing on your own, without needing the person that hurt you to acknowledge your feelings and that karma will take care of things and the universe will right itself and nothing would go unpunished. Two more scrolls, and here is a person saying how people relying on karma are just weak and that thinking that the universe would solve everything is just them not admitting that they are unable to get back at the person who wronged them. I then read Jay Shetty’s 8 Rules of Love, and he says that Karma is more about the mindset we are in when we decide on an action. If we make a choice, then karma is a reaction to that choice, and it is a tool that teaches you to make better decisions in the future, rather than a simple if I do bad, bad will come to me or if I do good, good will come to me. Same concept, but there are three different interpretations of it, just from what I can remember off the top of my head. More confusing still, when people talk about manifesting things and wanting things. They say you should set your intentions, and you should have it clear in your head what you want to achieve. Act as if the things you want are already a part of your reality, but you should also be detached from the result and not try to force it into existence, because you might get the opposite of what you want. If it doesn’t happen, there are instances when people say that you must not have wanted it hard enough, and that is why it didn’t come to you. To me, all of those seem to be quite conflictual statements. I concluded that if I want something, I should take steps towards it, which is the set intentions part and act. The act like it already exists is more the idea that you can bring it into existence if you believe that it is possible, and while it has a place in your mind and it already lives there, it is easier to bring it into this world as a fully developed concept. The nonattachment part to me became the idea that sometimes, no matter how much you try, some things are not meant for you, and it is alright to let them go when they don’t serve you anymore. I have always liked to ask opinions from my friends whenever I am thinking of something. On the one hand, if I say it to them, it helps map an issue in my head so it is very clear what data points I am working with in deciding on the other, it may be that my friends have similar situations that they have been through then they can give me some insight so I can speed up the process.  The problems start when people at the same table start contradicting each other in the advice they give me, so instead of clarity, I now have more things to overthink. Even worse is when people start judging and they offer advice, quite aggressively sometimes and tell me what I should do when I know full well that they don’t live by the words that they are preaching. In the beginning, this made life very hard for me because I spent hours agonising and considering if each person was right, but what I found is that it is best to be more exclusive with the circle of people that I share my worries with. I have advisors in people that take the time to fully understand what I am going through and want to understand my thought process and limitations. No advice can be universally applied, I feel. I can get a piece of advice that sounds good, but I may lack the skills that the person giving it had when completing the assignment. There will be people who, when I try to explain why something is not practical for me then they start to roll their eyes at me and consider me difficult. I am not trying to be difficult; I am trying to be realistic. When it comes to personal growth, change is hard. I am trying to shift patterns and ideas that have been with me for years. There are defence mechanisms that my subconscious had in place, and for good reason, despite them not being healthy ones, they have served a purpose. Now, I am trying to fight everything I know and make healthier choices, but sometimes they feel more uncomfortable at the start than making the wrong choice. Doing the right thing all the time can be mentally exhausting, and it requires me to keep my emotional balance at all times, so there will be situations where I slip back into my old ways. I have had people dismiss me to my face in such a situation, and all that it accomplished was that it made me feel bad about myself. It is a matter of accepting that there is no silver bullet in these situations and that I have to take things slowly. Maybe there will be slip-ups ups but at the end of the day, I am human, and it is alright for me to make mistakes and have moments of weakness. What should never happen is for me to fully revert to my bad habits that got me to being utterly depressed. How am I to decide who I am and what I am to become if I don’t test things out? How will I ever know what feeling fine feels like in the body if I never felt it before? How am I ever to make any progress if the fear of making a mistake and the shame of being judged keep me in a place where I just overthink things to death without making a move? My subconscious takes in data all the time, and my thoughts are reports being generated and submitted for analysis. My analytical mind then takes over and starts considering scenarios and putting together an action plan. Sometimes what my heart wants goes against what my heart wants to do, and that is where the being in two minds starts. Going through the process, though, I did find that things are easing up with all the little tweaks and course corrections that I have been making. I am starting to align more with the person that I want to be and the life that I want to live. The way forward is for me to accept my thoughts and select the same way that I choose the perfect outfit to wear, or that perfect piece of furniture that will just bring the room together and make it the centrepiece of my mindset. With the right people around me to help me when I am struggling with my inner conflict, with compassion and kindness, with the acceptance that I don’t know everything and no matter how much I try, I can’t control the outcome, I can go past any indecision and achieve everything that I set out to achieve.

There are so many traditions around the holiday season. As soon as December hits, all the Christmas carols start to be broadcast everywhere. The decorations and the lights start going up. Everybody starts looking at the weather forecast, and they start wishing for a white Christmas. Start planning menus, start planning parties. They get family heirlooms out that are connected with the season and display them. Everybody is suddenly expected to be a better person and be kinder regardless of how they have treated everybody over the year because nothing says giving and sharing like Santa Claus. For us, as Romanians, it starts on the 30th of November when we plant wheat in a pot and see how big it grows until the New Year as an indication of how good the next year will be. Then, on the 6th of December, we will get our boots all cleaned up in preparation for Saint Nicholas bringing us presents. This will be a dressed rehearsal for Christmas because, if you are not good, he will leave a stick in your shoes and if you have been good, there will be fruit and candy. We will slaughter a pig, make sausages, and cured meats, and get our appetites ready while we fast. Christmas is next with the bigger presents and the family dinners, school shows, church concerts, carolling from strangers, peace on Earth and all that. Every single year there will be reports of people ending up in the emergency room after stuffing their faces and becoming ill on the day. All culminates with New Year with the standard, fireworks, bubbly and a meal towards midnight, sparklers cause nothing says the night between years like letting children run around with a fire hazard and talks of New Year resolutions. We also had the cheese pie, close to a cheesecake but not really, in which we put a coin to be found by the luckiest of the group and my family also smashed a bottle to break the bad luck from last year. On the 1st of January, we would go around with a custom called “Sorcova”. That is a stick with coloured paper flowers attached to it and you kind of use it like a magic wand and you wish all the best to your relatives, and you get paid for carolling. One would expect all of this to be a season of joy but in my family, it has always been a tense affair. Something about the entire family coming together just brings all of this tension. When we were young, we always got dressed nicely for Christmas and New Year and we did the meals and the visits. We have told poems to show how smart we are. We have shown our report cards so our parents can get their validations from our grandparents. We would then eat the family dinner with mom and dad and while we would be watching movies about families coming together and celebrating in peace and harmony, my family had a tradition of fighting on every holiday, birthday, or special occasion. It would always be something before, during or after the meal. My dad would be set off in a way, he would abandon the meal saying that he doesn’t need food and go to his room. It was always a matter of when it will happen, not if it will happen. So, holiday celebrations had always had a tinge of sorrow, always knowing that they would be ruined one way or another. My tradition is to watch “A Christmas Carol.” I have watched all versions and regardless of how cheesy they might be, I have enjoyed every single one of them. From all the Christmas movies, I choose the one where if somebody admits their mistakes and takes responsibility, they can turn their life around and be a better person. After a string of bad relationships, forever hopeful, Miss Christmas Carol met Mr It’s a Wonderful Life, another Christmas classic about a man on the brink of suicide that is shown that his life has indeed meaning, and he has improved people’s lives by being in them. The first Christmas we spent together was in Bucharest. I bought a Christmas tree, decorated the house, and bought everything traditional for him to try, and we spent the day together. It was peaceful and relaxed, and we didn’t have one single fight. We drank hot chocolate, watched movies, and exchanged gifts and it was the best Christmas that I have ever had. Funny how little I needed to be happy. The next ones were spent in Scotland. We would go and see all his relatives, share gifts with everyone, catch up, and enjoy wine and food. It was so weird to see so many people just getting along, not a single fight in sight, everybody smiling and having a good time. It felt so unnatural, but it became one of my favourite holidays. I properly got involved. I might have made him write all the cards that he didn’t necessarily care to write but I knew that we would get one and it would be nice to have written one as well. I have chased and pushed and prodded and found options and made sure that we got gifts for everybody and tried to bring them as close to what people would like as possible. Every year, he would fight me every single step of the way but on the day, we would go and hand the gift over and the person would be happy and grateful, and his face would light up to see them happy. I would be happy knowing that all of it was worth it for those moments. He would be grateful in the morning, but he would still fight me on it the next year. The first December after we broke up, we were in pandemic times. There were still quite a lot of restrictions around travelling and Romania was not doing very well with the vaccination so, there was always a risk that the borders would be closed, and I would be stuck in Romania, with my family. I stayed in Glasgow, and I had taken almost three weeks off since I had so much holiday time left over. I was so exhausted after this first year that I just lay on the couch watched TV and slept, barely eating and drinking. I was completely checked out as I had processed my emotions for so long that now I was exhausted and giving myself a chance to dissociate. I would just watch the same series that I had already liked and enjoyed in the past. At least that way, I could be sure that I would enjoy it. I had Bruno with me for New Year, and I bought him and myself presents, and we opened them together. He was just as excited about opening mine as he was about getting his. We had dinner and Bruno was the only spark of joy I had. It has been a tough year and while I was an empty shell, I was still there, still alive. The next year, dissociating was no longer a luxury I could allow myself. I took the same three weeks off at the end of the year and I considered what my life was and how much I had achieved in the year, how many of my objectives I had achieved. The next year, I spent with my blinds drawn feeling exposed and fragile. I brought my beanbag chair to the living room; I got the footstool and a blanket, and I just watched Netflix while eating crisps and chocolate. My main hobby was crying, and I was so depressed. I had Bruno for Christmas week this time and he went for New Year with my ex. He has been such a supportive boy. He would try to get me to go out for walks and I would be in the middle of crying my eyes out so, he would lick my tears away and then he would get up on the beanbag chair and just cuddle with me and comfort me. I would pet him and rock him until I would calm down and then we would go to the park and walk around just in time for coming back home and having another breakdown. Since I had the time, I was a bit more active, and I also had time to tend to my hobbies. I quite enjoy puzzles, and I started to buy 5D diamond art kits. I would light some candles, get a nice glass of red wine and work on adding hundreds of rhinestones to these pictures. The activity allowed me to concentrate on some of the areas of my brain and kept me exhausting myself and avoiding being hyper-stimulated, while still allowing me to be able to weep uncontrollably, think about everything that is happening in my life and work through my feelings. The problem became that I was toxically goal-oriented and I kept on pushing myself to complete the image as quickly as possible even though my body was in agony, and I would have spent the entire night working on it. My brain would be fully engaged so, I wouldn’t have time to realize that I was actively hurting myself while still thinking that I was not achieving my goal fast enough. I have also managed to be more social, and I have seen my friends for Christmas and New Year. I was completely anxiety-riddled the entire time, I was shivering because of it but I just got nicely dressed, put makeup on to give myself confidence and went out to see them. The next year, things have taken quite a wild change. I was no longer crying my eyes out, but I was instead enjoying my free time. I have spent my time reading, writing, and watching TV, I have eaten good food and drank wine and this time, I have allowed my body to take over and just act as it needed. That unfortunately meant that I would stay up the entire night, go to bed at 7 and then wake up in the evening but I felt balanced and at ease. I was so relaxed that I could rest, dream, and remember my dreams. I still like doing the 5D art kits but this time around, I enjoyed the activity, I have slowed down and I have allowed myself to stop when I felt that my body was getting tired, and I needed a break. I also saw my friends for Christmas and on New Year when I wasn’t feeling well, I allowed myself to just stay home and not feel the pressure to have an activity. I would have gotten everyone sick since I had the cold. I cleaned the house, took a bath, cooked, put a mask on and cuddled with Bruno while watching TV. It might sound boring but, it was exactly what I needed, and I realised that I am finally enjoying solitude rather than fearing being lonely. That was the biggest win that I could have for the year. I can’t say that will happen next year, but I enjoy these periods where I can leave the usual stream of life, get off the hamster wheel and just allow myself to exist naturally. It allows me to realise where I am, and how far I've come, and have a think as to what I want to do. I enjoy treating myself, buying myself gifts, and I am so generous with myself. I have had to provide a list of options in the past from which my presents would have been picked, when all I wanted was someone to put the time and effort to surprise me, to show me that they know me and that they see me. Every year, I realise how magical my life is becoming each year. The spirits might not be able to do it all in one night, but nowadays, I spend a lot fewer days being hunted by the past, my present is filled with self-compassion, and I no longer spend my time scared of the future.

On a lazy morning when I was feeling down, I kept questioning when it would be my turn to be happy and when I would get everything that I wanted. The more I complained about everything and felt sorry for myself, this idea kept on taking shape: Who said that everybody has to be happy? Who says that everybody has to have a happy ever after? Every single self-help book sells the idea of happiness. Do this and in 21 simple steps, you will be happier. “The Secret” goes even further and says how you need to put your intentions out there and that the universe will realign itself to make every wish come true and if it hasn’t, it just means that you didn’t want it hard enough. People are buying crystals and trying to manifest the life they want and even more, the life they think they are owed. Just one more thing and I will be happy. If I get this one thing then it will be enough. Sometimes you get it, and you are so happy and then you post it on Instagram, Facebook, whatever, but you don’t get the likes you want, so you get a bit sad because you thought you were happy, and you wanted people to be happy for you or to be just a little tiny bit jealous, cause is it not enough if other people don’t watch you, is it? It seems that the concept has stayed the same, but the unit of measurement keeps changing. What was enough yesterday just lost its lustre a little bit today. Derren Brown said in his book, “Happy”, that if you buy a house, it will bring you immense joy but, in six months, your brain will more or less get used to the change and it no longer registers as such. If you come to think about it, happiness makes one content. If one is content, one does not have a strong drive to progress, and it makes you less aware of dangers. Thinking about it from an evolutionary point of view, we needed to be always on guard for survival so, I assume that if we relaxed completely, a wild animal would have eaten us. Does that make any sense? I am making this up as I am going along. Wolves do not chase us anymore but we are haunted by the fear that we might lose it all. Before I used to say that all I wanted was to be happy but now when I stop to think about it, I am not entirely sure what happiness looks like for me. I suppose you can’t reach a goal if you don’t know what the goal is. On a simple level, happiness is the absence of pain, fear, or any other negative emotion for that matter. Our brain is certainly geared up to keep us safe and away from anything that is perceived to be negative but how realistic is that goal? Good and bad experiences come and go. Something always happens and things will not happen exactly how we want them to so, how would we ever just have good experiences? I find that if you try to keep all bad experiences away and take only the safe decisions, the ones that always give you the results you want, you will also keep good experiences away. I know these people that have a plan for what they want. They have a clear idea of everything that they want to achieve in this lifetime and how they are going to get there. They have clear goals, and they are going after them. Always taking steps to promote that end goal. You see it with some celebrities as well. They just had this one thing that they were always good at, and they believed that they had this light in them, so they persevered no matter the setbacks. I always looked at those people with envy. I never had that clear line of what I want to be, I never had a clear life goal and how everything will happen for me. I have done this questionnaire that was meant to help me with my personal brand and one of the things that they were asking was what was unique about me, and what would have not happened the same if I had not been there. I kept thinking about it, and I couldn’t say what was special about me. I think that people would have achieved things and while I love to get involved and contribute, I wouldn’t know what makes me unique. I hate this question as much as I hate the one about interesting things people should know about me. If I look back, one of the wishes I had growing up, was to meet my prince charming, get married, and have a family of my own. I suppose that is the propaganda Disney was pushing since every princess was meeting their amazing man and getting married and then they lived happily ever after. I had this image of living in marital bliss. We would do things together and we would not fight but, we would have discussions instead. We would support each other and grow together so both can achieve our goals. He would never hold me too tight because he would know that he was the first one I wanted to share my achievements and sorrows. Later on, I have added the idea of children. A boy and a girl. I thought about it so much that I considered names, and they took shape in my head. I could hear their laughter, and I could picture them in my head running towards me. They would love me, and I would love them. Armed with the fantasy of my future family, I entered the dating world and met people who were not Prince Charming. I figured that one has to kiss quite a few frogs before one gets her prince and I had read that story too so, I was playing the long game. The years passed though, everybody else got married, and everybody else had children, and I am still searching. While I tried to keep my spirits up, at some point the doubt crept in that maybe, just maybe, marital bliss might not be in the cards for me, nor might motherhood. The years are passing, and the clock is running down, I might be able to influence quite a few things, but I cannot fight the passage of time. This image being so far from my grasp is causing me a lot of pain and the only way I can be happy is to let it go, to accept this idea of destiny and things happening for a reason, to accept that if it meant to be it will happen and no matter how much I push, or try to force it, it might never happen. The next big one was having a job. I somehow felt that because I was small and didn’t have any money, I also had little choice in what I did and how I lived but, if I had money, I could live how I wanted to live. My dad was a very big fan of telling me that while I lived under his roof, I would do as he said, I always had that sense of wanting my own home. As a child, I thought I could be anything that I wanted so, I would watch TV and dream the dreams of possibility. I wanted to be a ballet dancer at first since being a princess seemed a bit out of reach. I would see them glide with such grace and I wanted that to be me. When I mentioned to my mom, I got to hear how expensive everything was in terms of training and hard work so, it seems less and less possible that I would be a ballet dancer. I also wanted to be a PE teacher or a couch and that one fell away on his own. Life proved that I was better at intellectual endeavours than physical things so, what can one do? I also thought of being a lawyer after watching Law and Order and Ally McBeal. To be strong, confident, and come up with just the right answer at the right time and win everybody over. I figured that there would be a lot to remember and I am terrible at memorizing things if I don’t have a direct interest in them plus, the laws change so, it would be a lifetime endeavour to keep up with them and I was also terribly shy so since I couldn’t speak in a group, grandstanding in a courtroom didn’t quite seem like a thing I could do. When I went to university, my dream was to be an interpreter. I had hoped that I would go around the world and translate at conferences or books which was right up the alley of my liking to read. In my last year, a teacher asked me what I wanted to be and when I told her, she told me I was in the wrong course and that they make teachers there, not interpreters. I am so glad that they took my money for four years and never asked the question. I had been offered a job when I was in my third year which I would have been happy to take but, I didn’t have the same teacher in my last year and her offer never got renewed. I tried to find a job on my own when I finished my degree, and everybody was asking for at least 6 months on the job or I didn’t do as well as I expected when it came to the tests they sent me. I kept on going and I found a corporate job. They were impressed with my language skills, so I started to work for the UK&I. Having an ear for accents helped me in the beginning since I sounded English and then helped me when I moved to Scotland because I started to sound reasonably Scottish. This might not have been the dream but, I finally had a way to make money. I know what everybody is going to say. Money doesn’t bring happiness. That is correct. Money itself doesn’t bring happiness, but it surely does bring peace of mind. Health is one of the most important things so think about getting ill and not having enough money to buy medicine or get an operation that can improve the quality of your life. Having that money would bring happiness. Putting food on the table is also important so, while some people talk about going to Michelin-star restaurants to have the most expensive mouth bites for the experience, some people dream of just having the essentials every day without having to struggle. Back to my dreams though. I had wanted to travel and see the world but while I was making money, I wasn’t making enough money to just through a dart at the map and go anywhere it may take me which has always been my dream also, I found that the idea to travel alone terrified me and I wished that I had a buddy that I could travel the world with. I was terrified that I might get there, my wallet was going to be stolen and I would have no way to return home, and I would be stuck, and that fear paralyzed me. I also dreamed of having my own house. It doesn’t have to be huge because I consider the time to clean it, but my own house would give me so much freedom. Not having to ask permission from everyone whenever I have to do or change something. It will always reflect my desire and here comes money again because it seems like it is a far dream to have a house on my own in today’s economy. I might have enough money to buy it but what if anything breaks and my insurance won’t cover the repairs? Problems are so much easier to deal with if you have money to throw at them. I am not saying that money is the answer to everything, of course, it isn’t. When I am at my lowest, I don’t want any food, I don’t want any water, I don’t want to get off the floor let alone travel the world. In those moments, I only want one thing and that is peace. I wish I had a way to quiet my thoughts, I wish for a way to find rest and stop my thoughts from overwhelming me. I wish I had a way to live without fear every single moment of my life. When something happens, I feel weaves of panic and sorrow reverberating all over my body and I am crumbling on the inside. I feel the need to lie on the floor because emotionally, there is no way I can get any lower. I feel so much pain and shame in my chest that I feel it might get crushed sometimes. My dreams are of me waking up, resting, stretching, and enjoying the morning sunshine on my face. My body is free of tension and my mind is not racing, I am just in the moment, and I am just observing my life as it unfolds. I would make a cup of tea and maybe some breakfast while I watch the birds in the trees, the cats running around from yard to yard, and people just going about their busy lives. I have things to do but there is plenty of time to do everything that’s scheduled. My mind is so peaceful, no torture from the past I can’t change, no fear from the future I can’t control, just contentment that I can face everything that the present moment brings to me. In this dream, I wouldn’t feel like I am failing all the time, I wouldn’t feel like a fraud, I wouldn’t feel like everything is happening to me because I am a bad person. I wouldn’t worry that everybody leaves me or just never quite gets who I am because I am happy within myself. In this dream, I can wake up, brush my teeth, feed myself three meals a day, listen to my body, and take care of myself without a problem. While I have people around me, I don’t feel like they are more important in my life than I am, that they know better what I need than I do. In this dream, I love myself so much that I build the life that I want no matter the risks. I understand that nobody feels like this all the time, but I wish I could have that at least sometimes because I find myself walking for hours and I feel like there is nowhere to rest because I am not safe anywhere and no matter where I try to sit, I will not be safe. I walk because I don’t know what else to do but I still can’t calm the struggle that is inside me. I wish I could just find the perfect solution, the perfect switch, and then, boom, I am just everything that I ever wanted to be. I wish I understood how other people experience life because it feels lonely to feel like I am struggling while other people just know what to do. I wish that I could feel and experience the world as someone else, like a mind meld from Star Trek, so I can understand what they felt and what their emotional world was like and understand if their struggles resemble mine and then I wouldn’t feel so alien. I would be able to find a middle ground where I would accept my feelings for what they are and deal with them better. I don’t know if I will ever achieve happiness the way I want it and if it comes if I can hold onto it for long. One thing I understand is that what happiness looks like is different for each individual and that it changes throughout our lives based on our priorities at the time. At the moment, I am happy that I have someone to whom I can tell my worries, with whom I can be fully honest about my fears, and they tell me that I will be fine, and because they believe it, I believe it too and I can keep going on.

I was born at night. At 1.20 am, I decided that it was my time to shine, and I came out umbilical cord wrapped around my neck like a scarf because I wanted to make a stylish entrance and there was not a lot to work with. Well, entrance or exit, depending on the point of view. I used to get told all the time that my time of birth must be the reason why I am a night owl. My sister is a morning lark, just like my parents. They like going to bed early and waking up early, for no reason, even on the weekend. I used to wake up later and by the time, I was up, she had had time to do her morning routine, eat, and think of a million things to say. By the time, I woke up, there would be just a period of talking at me, on sight. This feels so intrusive, first thing in the morning. Nothing angers me more than being talked to before my brain has had a chance to properly get going. The nights were always different. I have been afraid of the dark since I watched Chucky by myself, as an impressionable youth. I can rationalize that the darkness itself is not dangerous, but I feel that it has something hidden in it and that something is looming, waiting for the perfect time to get me. By the power of imagination, a hoodie on a hanger becomes a murderer in wait. A good example, I feel, of my mind filling in the gaps when it doesn’t have enough information. While I am afraid of it though, I also think it has a lot of magic in it. I love the stars and how they twinkle. I love the crisp air on my skin. I love the calm of the night and how there is no expectation to achieve anything or be anywhere in particular. During the day, the world rushes about in its race to achieve things, with no time to lose but, nights have a completely different rhythm. My house was full of rules, of expectations, full of looks of disapproval, full of other people’s feelings and ideas of what I should be, hints of how I am letting people down, and a state of conflict, so I felt that I had to have my guard up the entire time. At night though, things were different. All the energies would go to sleep and the air would be cleared. You could hear the house settle and breathe a sigh of relief and I felt free. When I was young, I slept in the same bed as my sister so, once we were sent to bed, I was meant to fall asleep right away so she could get some rest. There were nights when she would tell me bedtime stories but, as we grew, I was just expected to do without. Sometimes, I would get restless and tossed and turned and I would get shouted at because I was l keeping my sister up too. There were times when I would tip-toe and step on the right boards so I was not heard and sit hidden in the hallway and watch TV as my mom would be awake. I would then have to go and lie down and try to fall asleep. For the longest time, I would just listen to the clock. The monotony of the tic-tac lulled me to sleep. Once my sister married and I had the room to myself, I could watch TV on my own, with the volume low. When my parents would come to check on me, my door handle would stick so, I would have a few seconds to turn and pretend I was sleeping. As I was maturing, I had nights when I had to stay up and work on my studies so, my parents would have nothing to object to as I had too much work to do and too few hours in the day. The worst was when I had back pain in my last year of university, and I couldn’t sleep because of the pain that would go from my lower back down my right hip towards my knee. No matter how I would try to lie, I would still be in pain so, I have used the time to work on my dissertation for my BA. I would read and research and then exhausted, I would be able to fall asleep at 6 or 7 in the morning. Once I did physio and sorted the back pain, I was able to go back to sleeping normally. Finishing my paper has also helped alleviate my stress and allow me to fall asleep more easily. When I moved on my own, it became somewhat easier to regulate as I was not affecting anyone else. I would have times of high stress when I couldn’t sleep, and it got worse when my dad got cancer, and I didn’t know if things would work out. I would be anxious and depressed, and I would watch TV and then fall asleep at 4 or 5 in the morning, get up and go to work and try to function. Sleep enriches the ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions and choices so the lack of it leads to inattention, disorientation, memory problems, fatigue, drowsiness, tiredness, and moodiness. Essentially, I am slowing down mentally. It is harder to concentrate on what people are saying and remembering instructions. It takes longer to formulate answers, and my mind forgets words to use and forgets what I was doing mid-task. At the height of it, I was staying awake all night so I could sleep the next night. As I was working in Romania, every year, we would have a medical check and they would do blood tests, check our ears, and our eyes and then we would talk to a GP about our overall state of mind and health. When he heard about my lack of sleep, he prescribed me sleeping pills, but he warned me that they are highly addictive and that I should only take them whenever I was struggling. He has given me the lowest dosage and said I should half that again. Believe me, sometimes it felt like it did nothing and other times, they did take me out and if I woke up, my pupils would be the size of dinner plates. This too passed though. When I moved over to the UK and I moved in with my boyfriend, we got into the habit of staying up late, so my circadian rhythm changed. The way it works is that melatonin begins to rise in the body soon after dusk and it signals to the body that it is dark. It slowly decreases during the night. Sunlight entering the brain through the eyes shuts down the release of melatonin. Cortisol spikes up temporarily when waking up and helps one feel refreshed. Then the production reduces as melatonin production ramps up. The cycle works on routines so if you keep staying up, the body will adjust. While my sleeping time was moving to the early hours of the morning, having to get to work meant that I had a very strict waking time. Some days I would be so tired that I would fall asleep before my head even hit the pillow. Other times, I would stay there and worry about all the things that I would have to do the next day, thinking about things I had to solve or even better, after trying not to think about anything during the day and keep focused on my work, my mind would finally see a break in the schedule and would start to analyse everything that happened that day and start making to-do lists. It usually starts with trying to magic myself to sleep, trying to stop the thoughts, looking at the watch, calculating how much time I would be able to sleep if I slept right then, and thinking about how bad I would feel the next day for not having slept well or at all. Regardless, I got used to having a sleep debt. That means that for all the tiredness accumulated during the week, I would try to compensate by sleeping loads at the weekend. That is when we wouldn’t play video games all night while stuffing our faces until the sun would come out and the birds would begin to sing. Sometimes he would snore, and I could just fall asleep before him most of the time and be fine but when I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t fall asleep due to the noise. I would be so tired sometimes that I would lie there planning his demise or wishing for the Lord to take me right then so I could maybe get some rest in the great beyond. One night I was considering if putting some Wicks under his nose in the middle of the night would be rude. I then thought that maybe I could just hold the jar to his face and that would be enough for his sinuses to cooperate and just give me five minutes. I decided that it was rude, and I just nudged him gently and asked him to turn on his side to stop him from snoring. That didn’t last long so, after quite a few failed attempts, I just went to the other room. The next morning, he came over to ask me if I was upset since I went to sleep in the other room but, I wasn’t looking for a fight, I was just looking for some rest and negotiated that as one of my tactics for being able to sleep when his snoring is too bad. The period during the pandemic shot my anxiety through the roof. I would have problems falling asleep, I would have problems staying asleep, I would have nights when I realized that while I was sleeping, my sleep was light and I was making lists in my mind, I had nights when I realized that I would be fully aware of every single time I would turn during my sleep. On my left side, on my back, on my right side, back to start on my left side. I tried to walk my anxiety off and use that time to think about my issues. I would use these walks as a way to wear myself out. I have tried warm showers, aromatherapy with essential oils, and lavender lotion. I have drank calming tea before bed. I have tried to not watch TV before sleep and trying to just sit there and think nice, calming, positive thoughts. I tried reading before bed. I once again ended up at the GP since my anxiety and depression had conspired and created some nice suicidal thoughts but this time the GP recommended I take antihistamines. Since sleeping pills were so problematic and I was also meant to take antidepressants, using the drowsy formula antihistamine would be using a side effect to treat a condition. I take the pill, the pill makes me sleepy and then I can get to sleep. I have had times when while I could fall asleep, I woke up in the middle of the night due to my anxiety, convinced that I needed to take action and do something only to collapse by the door when my brain convinced my legs that we should be asleep or I just get to my door and I realise that it is the middle of the night and the only place I should be going is back to bed.  I still have times when my body feels broken and exhausted by all the walks that I have been doing but my mind is still wide awake and has no intention of winding down anytime soon. My relationship with the Sandman has remained as difficult as ever. While I love sleep, that does not mean that it is going to happen for me. It is just like love, if you try too hard to make it happen, sometimes you just push it even further. Nowadays, I try to journal when I am anxious and caught in a circle of ruminating and overthinking. I put all my thoughts on paper, and I try to give them a way of expression. I try to sit with my emotions and figure out what problem my mind is trying to solve and what triggered it, in the hope that once I acknowledge what my subconscious wants me to deal with I will add it to my to-do list scheduled after I get some sleep. Sometimes nothing works so I just accept that is the case and I go do something else with my time. I reorganize a drawer, I will read a book, whatever I can do that does not involve waking up the neighbours. Sometimes, I just feel like I can fall asleep easier on the couch, and I need the TV running to sleep so I do that. Sometimes, I need total darkness and complete silence, so I lay in my bed and put the covers over my head. Sometimes, I feel like sleeping in my spare bedroom. I just listen to whatever my body wants to do and hope that it gets results. I used to think that my lack of sleep was a punishment but now I take it as a gauge. If my sleep is poor, then I need to work on my self-care, and self-compassion and work on getting myself to a calm state again. I accept that from time to time, I will not be able to sleep, and that I will have to rely on coffee and the help of 4 alarms to make my commitments. I accept that if I don’t sleep well, I will not have the energy to socialise so before accepting invitations, I make sure I have the energy to enjoy them and I opt out if I don’t. I will try to go to bed early tonight and if I am too tired tomorrow, I might take a nap to help me make it to my bedtime. Have a good sleep! 😊

It is endlessly funny how when we are in a relationship, we expect the other person to know us fully. We expect them to anticipate our thoughts, our reactions, our wishes, our needs. We expect them to know when we would have wanted them to come home and when we were genuinely happy for them to go out so we can have time to ourselves. We expect them to know what to get for our birthday or Christmas since we had it in our cart or wish list for ages, even though our wishes and aspirations changed five hundred times that year. He should know me because we live together and we spend time together when in fact, we spend more time at work with wee Janet who thinks that if she leaves, a multibillion corporation will collapse. Ludicrous idea considering that parents made us, raised us, taught us to do most things and still don’t have a clue who we are but Barry whom we met in a bar, half cut and ready to sell his granny to touch a boob, is meant to be this great mind reader that just does everything right. If we go a level deeper, why should Barry be “the one that knows me best”? How many times have people asked why we do certain things, and we just said that we had always been that way, or this is something that we just enjoyed? There is no “JUST” about it, by the way. There is a deliberate reason for everything that appeals in the way that it does. It turns out that my reaction to things and the way I experience the world is not because I am a Scorpio with the Sun in Scorpio and the Moon in Pisces and water signs are hella emotional, it is because I never felt safe, I have all of these warning bells to protect me, it is because I measure 10 times before I cut once and while others deserve love, empathy and compassion if they make a mistake, none for me, sister. The idea of somebody else knowing you so intimately becomes even more ludicrous still when we walk in this fog of not knowing what is wrong with us and why things don’t work out when everybody else could have a pretty accurate guess at what the problem is by what they saw and experience around you. A quick Google search will tell you that self-awareness is your ability to perceive and understand the things that make you who you are as an individual, including your personality, actions, values, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts. If you watch any movie, you will learn this idea that you just need to have 2 cries, eat a bit of junk food, get drunk and face plant because you are so quirky, take a bubble bath or two, medicate under a tree, light two scented candles, maybe paint something or have a makeover and ta-da you have turned your life around. Good job, you! Now, that this is done, here is your perfect job, here is the man of your dreams and your perfect friends. Essentially, everything you have ever wanted and all you had to do was be embarrassed a few times. If art imitates life and this is the process of achieving self-awareness, it is so amazing that more people are not out there surrounded by everything they ever wanted. My journey to a better sense of self-awareness began with admitting there was a problem. I have done things in the same manner for so long and nothing was changing, I wasn’t getting any closer to what I wanted in this life. I was so good at not feeling anything and pretending nothing bothered me that I didn’t even know I was doing it. I would just feel like I am gracefully getting over life’s hardships, and I am being resilient in the face of adversity. Smile even though your heart is breaking. Be gracious and forgiving with everybody who wronged you because nobody likes it when you are angry about it, you sound bitter. Talk about it but not too much, darling, you are bumming everybody out. I was told that I had to feel my feelings but, I didn’t have a clue how to do that. The brain is all about getting pleasure and avoiding pain. The whole thing about numbing is that the mind can’t cope with the emotion so, to protect itself, it buries it. Once the brain has done that, it is not very keen to try and dig up old emotions and feel them. It is like when you make a comment to somebody and all of a sudden, they start to either attack you or put together a vague answer and then change the subject. The comment touched a vulnerable area, and they are trying to protect themselves from going there thus they would lead you down the path and change topics so many times, so you forget what was being discussed. Once you stumble upon something like this, internally, the brain sounds the alarm that opening this door will be painful and sounds all of the alarms to keep one away from pain and discomfort. The path to awareness for me is paved with the knowledge that pain and discomfort will come, that they indicate where the problems are and the only way to be freed from them and do better for myself in future is to go through it rather than try to run away from it or go around it. Once something arises, the first phase of it is shock and denial. How can this have been there, and I didn’t see it? Surely, this isn’t really happening, I am just misunderstanding it because if the situation is not real then these feelings are not real, and I can just be fine. Everything tells me that I took a peek behind the door and now it is time to let it go. We tried. Stop. Walk away from it. It was real, though. How can it not be when I have details of it, clear memories that frame it? Anger rises, mostly towards me for ignoring red flags, also anger for the event itself and any person that might have been involved. Anger steals clarity but it also propels me forward. Anger wants to know why me. Why always me? Anger gives answers and they are not always the kindest so, there is a sifting of what is self-hate and what is fact. Anger hides the fear that things will never be the same. Anger hides the fear that I might not be able to find a solution. Anger hides the fear that I might not be able to cope with what is happening. Anger hides the dear that if I was wrong about his, I might be wrong about so many other things that I have built my beliefs on. Still, I stay in that space and my brain becomes obsessed with it. Always in the back of the mind, always a sense of discomfort, always trying to make a story that ties things together. Surely, I am missing something, and I am misconstruing. What happened? What did I do to make this happen? How did I react? What could I have done differently? What did I feel at the time? This is the bargaining. Maybe if I do this one thing, this could be resolved. Maybe if I had done these three magical steps and said this sequence of words, this would stop and still go in my favour. Again and again, thinking about how this was not what I thought it was and if the next day I wake up, I will discover that this was just a big misunderstanding. Hoping for a miracle. Hoping, wishing, praying but nothing changes. The next stage for me is acceptance. Admitting that this is happening, admitting that I had a hand in the way things progressed and turned out, admitting that I will have to let go of familiar things despite wanting to hang on to them, admitting that I am hurt, admitting that I am scared, admitting that I am overwhelmed, admitting that this can’t be ignored any longer. Once this happens though, the last stage kicks in and that is depression. After all of the pain and anger has kept me tense and awake, the body now needs to release it all and my mind needs to rest. I cry to let it all out. Sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, sometimes again and again for days and weeks. I might stop eating, drinking, sleeping. I forget that I am a human being and not just the vessel for this pain. Through depression, I keep working with acceptance to adjust the reality to what it is rather than a delusional version of it and I allow myself to grieve for what was and what could have been. It seems endless but all of a sudden, it starts to ease. It stops being all-encompassing and the body starts to remember its needs. I get hungry again, I get thirsty again. I start to feel more comfortable being me overall. From this process, a revelation is born. It is an understanding of what happened, what got me there and what I should do in the future to not end up in the same place. It has been a tough process, it feels like a victory, and it feels like this has been resolved, I figure that this door has been closed. It has not been meditating under a tree, it was ugly crying with snot while curled up on the couch, or walking aimlessly and feeling there is no place to rest because it is the reality in your mind that no longer feels like home. I go on for a while, and then the same thing turns up again in a different form. I look at it in shock again and I think to myself that this can’t be because I already resolved it but, it is happening, and the process starts again. All the steps and then I uncover more and more, get more pieces of the puzzle and I figure out that I never had the full picture. I realize that this comes in layers and as I level up in terms of acceptance and more importantly the curiosity that I approach the entire process with. I have accepted that I do not know much and that I should strive to understand who I am and how I got here. I made it my goal to know myself fully. Once you look and want to see, it becomes easier for my therapist to gently push me in the right direction. Just a crumb, just a hint can push me on the right path. I become a sleuth on my own figuring out who has done it and every time the answer is me. That can be so incredibly hurtful that one wants to stop looking. It was so much easier to lay the blame on everybody else and have it stay outside of me. It feels disheartening but also it gives hope. If you got yourself into this, you could get yourself out of this. You have no power in this world greater than the power to control your reactions, your perspective, your timing. This inkling of awareness starts to make you mindful of your potential. Change has started to grow within you. Another thing that people might not realise is that challenges might not come in a sequence, there might be two or three issues you are trying to release at the same time, each with their own intensity. It feels that once the lid has been taken off, it cannot be put back on the box. Again, and again attacked by emotions and things that have laid dormant for tens of years and now they all feel it is their time to come to light. You go for so long that you start to wonder why everybody has it together and why you keep getting lessons. It feels like you are getting your head just above the water and as soon as you take a breath, something else pulls you back under. All of this is on top of going to work, doing your job, paying your bills, keeping good relationships with people, keeping active, doing your housework, and trying not to let things slip behind. It feels like hell on earth but what is happening is that you are feeling all of your feelings. No longer numbing, no longer disassociating, no longer denying. You are slowly seeing your patterns and you are unlearning everything that does not serve, and you are slowly shedding the person that you used to be. I start to know who I am; I start to understand what I want; I start to understand how I react, and I start to see the change. My internal monologue changes from “This is happening, and I can’t handle it” to “This is happening, you are now triggered, look at the situation and understand what the trigger is and what wound has been activated. Listen to your body and see where the sensation resides.” Small steps, most hopefully, in the right direction. Knowing who you are also comes with the awareness of the effect you have on others. For example, if I feel lonely and a man comes along and talks to me and gives me attention, validates me and I reply, I have to think am I talking to this person because I am bored or am I truly interested? I am a strong believer that one should treat people the way that they want to be treated. It is better to let someone know that I have no interest in them, with the risk of hurting their feelings in the short run, rather than using them to meet my needs and hurting them worse in the long run. I know we all had that conversation about how we don’t like a person, and we are just having a bit of fun but, it is not taken as lightly when it happens to us. We tell ourselves that they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway, but we knew what we were doing, and we did it anyway. With awareness of self and the effect on others, also comes empathy. The peace in your mind on some situations and things being released completely makes one not react to situations at an impulse but decide what path to take in each case. I can think if their words or actions are about me, I can consider their purpose, I can allow for space to develop and I can ask questions to clarify rather than react, stop things in their track and then try to fill in the blanks myself. I can make better decisions if they are worth keeping in my life or if they should be cut. Peace over popularity all day every day. I have been told in a conversation that I seem so self-aware that the person didn’t think they could tell me anything new about myself. It sounded nice, and I wish it were true, but I know that I still have blind spots, I still have things I am ignoring and that there are high chances I still have issues that I have not even touched and that are going to come up during the course of my life. I figure that since I spent so much of my life people-pleasing and trying to make other people happy, it is a worthwhile endeavour to make myself happy and put in the effort to get to know myself. It’s not always easy, it’s not always fun but what an adventure to share with the only person that I will have for life. Myself 😊

Competition - the act or process of trying to get or win something (such as a prize or a higher level of success) that someone else is also trying to get or win (Britannica Dictionary) Ever since the first organism crawled out of the primordial ooze, the principle that has driven evolution has been the survival of the fittest. The predator that is the smartest and the strongest will eat, while the weak one will perish. Even in a pack, the strongest eat first, while the weak are allowed to feed on the leftovers. For the prey as well, the strong specimen will survive as they are the most resourceful; they will be able to get out of harm's way without an issue. That also extends to romance, if we can call it that. The best specimen will have no problems finding a mate and creating offsprings. There is a documentary I saw about a peacock’s mating ritual. He was trying to show his beautiful plumage and impress her, but while he was doing his dance, he kicked a rock, and she had the attention span of a fruit fly, so all his hard work went to waste because she just walked away. Oh, well. Can’t get them all. Then there is us. Everything is faster, bigger, and stronger than us and yet, we have managed to take over the entire planet and thrive and all of that with the power of our mind. Ingenuity was one of our strongest weapons. It allowed us to adapt and overcome, to create weapons to allow us to overcome our shortcomings. The human mind continues to find new ways of improving the way we live, and we can dream our dreams and then find ways to make them real. What is considered the best in people is also very nuanced, though. Is it looks, is it wealth, is it size, charisma, or knowledge? The possibilities are endless. It starts young. When children first come into the world, they have infinite potential and no self-awareness, so if they are asked who is the strongest and who is the fastest, they will all raise their hands. As they develop, if they are asked, they will provide a name. They now have measurable standards, and they know exactly where they are in the hierarchy. Then here come the grades. They are an indication of one adult's opinion of how well you did on a certain day. All of them together decide a person’s academic future, and all those grades decide what school you can go to. Then one finishes university and here we are in the workforce, competing for jobs, promotions, bonuses, training, and projects, and since everything happens behind the screen of confidentiality, one does not know how hard they have to work because they do not indicate where the competition is. You are swimming in your lane but instead of goggles, you have blinkers, and you know what you got as a result of your work but if it is not a clear promotion or a new job, you just don’t know. Treat them mean, keep them keen seems to apply here. Now, let’s turn the TV on together and what do we see? A cooking competition, a dancing competition, a singing competition, a quiz show, and then the big world of sports. When we do not compete ourselves, we relax with other people competing and we sit and comment on how they could have done better. I love watching the documentaries showing athletes’ careers. They have always focused on themselves, worked hard, adjusted, and then went to competitions and saw where they were in terms of comparing with other people. They watch films and they see how others achieve their results, and they learn from other people’s performance just as much as they learn from their results. I love seeing them interacting with other athletes and while they will give it their all, they are still friends outside the court, field, whatever. I give you this story in contrast. In one of my jobs, I have put together a project for improving team collaboration. As part of that project, I had to come up with a recognition method that didn’t need any funding so, I came up with a star that is given to the person that does the most requests, and they can choose where the team goes on the night out as a reward. No money since we were paying for our drinks. I then left the team not thinking much of it. The project has been put into practice and the starts have started to be awarded. Months later, I found out that people were fighting, and hard words were thrown because the same person kept on getting the star. Oh, how I love the human psyche and behaviour! Athletes fighting for world recognition and million-dollar contracts can be friends, but a cardboard star can break an entire team of corporate people. Have you ever had someone compare themselves to you right in your face? Making the calculations of what he has going for them, finding themselves better, and heaving a sigh of relief? I have. I looked at the person in front of me and asked myself if they realized they said it aloud cause surely that was an inner monologue thing. I then asked myself how many times they had done that before. How many times have I been punished when they found themselves lacking I could remember looks of disgust, statements full of disdain, and nostrils flaring with a downcast look while I spoke about my successes. Nothing hurts more than trying to share your triumphs with someone you care about and seeing how your success hurts them. I am not one to gloat because I never really expect success as a given so when it happens I think it is more gratitude and surprise if anything. Some people are obsessed with competition. They need it to keep them motivated and they somehow feel that if they don’t come up on top, they are nothing so, they will stop at nothing to ensure they are the winner. Have you ever competed with someone and not even realized it until you have seen them celebrate how they were better than you at something you care nothing about? You are not competing with them but in their mind, they are competing with you. You see that they compare clothes, makeup, tidiness, work achievements, and progression in life. I have had someone tell me how great I looked and how they wished they had my body, then go on a diet and try to exercise more than I do. I was then comparing my body to how I was before, and I mentioned how I wanted to get back to that shape and they said that I shouldn’t want anybody’s body. Well, hold on. I challenged and reminded them of their statement only to be told that they were just saying that to encourage me. Oh, is that right so, what you are telling me is that you are a liar, and I can’t trust anything you say because I have never asked for compliments.  I have had Bruno being compared which is insane because Bruno is magical, and nobody can ever match him. He is perfect from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail, and I don’t care if other dogs are astronauts and can fly to the moon, I will never think that any dog is better. I was returning from a hike, and we stopped at a fast-food restaurant. The guy in the window clocked Bruno and the man got excited to the point that he started calling every person in the shop to come and see him. The person I was in the car with just snapped back that they also had a dog in the front, but the guy didn’t care, he was enamoured with Bruno. I smiled cause I go daft for his cute face all the time and when the guy said that we come back any time and bring the dog too, they got a snappy reply. Different people love different types of dogs, it’s not that deep. There were plenty of people that were super impressed with their dog and how cute she was so, I couldn’t understand the drama. I had somebody that I was on the dating apps at the same time with and we would exchange opinions and talk about matches and stuff. At some point, she was asking how guys talked to me, and they didn’t quite talk to her. I didn’t have the answer to that. I was just myself and men seemed to respond to that for whatever reason. She understood that we were not comparing the same people so, like the little data scientist that she was, she decided to start hitting on the same men I was talking to. Even more so, using our friendship to get information about them to try and start conversations with them and make it seem like they have things in common based on what I told her. She did that on four different occasions. Whenever those men would not respond to her like she was expecting, all of a sudden they were horrible people that didn’t deserve me, and it would have been best for me to break contact with them and seek people that were better for me. I couldn’t wrap my head around this. We are meant to be friends, you know what I am going through, and you decide that you are going to go on an ego trip. Needless to say, we are not friends anymore. I would watch those movies where the girl is so mad that everybody else has things that she wants, and she feels that they are living her life. I could never understand that mindset. I can see that other people have things that I want, and I do get sad for myself that I am unable to get them, but I can also be genuinely happy for the people that have made it. We are different people, I can’t take their shine, and they can’t take mine away. It is not like there is a finite quantity of opportunity and happiness in the world and if this person gets some, she takes some from me. We can all succeed, and we can all achieve. I have had times where I was happy to compete with my ex and if I beat him in like cars, a board game, or a videogame, I would be so happy because I thought that he was good at them and if I beat him, it meant that I was doing well for myself. I suppose that my personality is more focused on connection rather than individual achievement. Of course, I want things for myself, and I have goals for myself but, I don’t have that cutthroat, step-over-bodies-to-success mentality. I am more of a we can shine together kind of person. I adore people who are highly achieving, and they mentor people and give their time to help them achieve their goals. There are some examples that I met over time that are the embodiment of Women supporting Women. Whenever you feel down, they don’t look down on you, but they offer encouragement, they make space for you, and they offer support to help you get to that new stage. I can only hope to make them proud of all the help that they have offered me. The only real competition that I subscribe to is the one with myself. How was I doing yesterday and how do I compare today? Have I grown? Am I learning? My highest goal is to be the most genuine version of myself so, how can I compete with anybody at being me? We are all born with different attributes and while we can learn skills throughout our lives, we can make them shine differently. I am going to help as many people as I can at every opportunity that I get. I will ask people to share their secrets with me and I want to make the world my teacher. Everybody has a story to tell and there is something to learn from every person. Some tell you about their mistakes, and some tell you about their successes. Some tell you about their struggles and how they overcame them. Everything can make me think and give me a clue about myself, an idea of how I can become better, or expose a flaw that I need to work on. In the words of Dr Seuss: “Today  you  are  You , that is truer than true.  There  is  no one  alive who is Youer than  You .”

I was always interested in the way my mind worked, and I was always introspective, mostly because I didn’t have a choice and nobody was interested but, all in all, it is a particularly good skill to have. The same pursuit got me interested in doing all sorts of tests and at some point, I found this website that allowed me to do endless psychological tests on multiple topics. One essentially said that I had sorted all of my issues up to the age of sixteen… not sure about that one. Another one said that I chose partners that I could help and that I saw them as a project on which I could work. Working on them and helping them with their issues gives me purpose. I have always wanted to help everybody I could in every way that I could. I never really had that idea of competition where you have to measure yourself up to everybody. My happiness has always come from being useful. I loved training people, I loved to see their confidence grow, and I loved to see them achieve and get recognized for their talents. They get themselves there, of course, but I always feel proud that I could be part of their journey and that they were able to become all that they can be. When I did my therapy, I would talk about how I tried to help this person and how I felt concerned about this other and I would get the comment:” Of course, you are. You are a saviour.” This was not sinking in quite right so it had to be repeated a few times before I could take a hint. First of all, I thought it was a compliment. I genuinely thought that the spandex suit with heels would look amazing on me, and the cape would be useful when I was cold and also on my bloated days. After having heard it a few times, I was ready to admit that it might be a hint, I took to the internet to see what it was all about. Being a saviour or white knighting involves trying to save people from distress and I might be drawn to people that have had a tough life. I then found an article that said that the only person that the saviour needs to help is themselves and that brought it home. I could see how every time someone would talk to me about a problem, I would automatically start to think of ways to troubleshoot., ways to improve and things I could do to support them in that. It is fine to want to help but it is not a good thing when you try to run away from your problems because you busy yourself with solving everyone else’s. When you offer to help but grudge them for needing help in the first place. When you use help as a way of getting people to like you by making yourself useful and getting them reliant on you. I have taken a personality test on 16personalities.com and it turns out that I am an INFJ, the Advocate, and one of the statements on the website was “Nothing lights up Advocates like changing someone’s life for the better.” It’s part of my personality so, how can I change that or why would I even want to change it? The goal would be to have it not be toxic. I gathered all the information, and I sat with that idea. The conclusion was that I need to focus on my issues, that it is not my responsibility to help everybody, and it is fine to say to people that I am not able to help them at a particular time. The fact that I started to learn how to build stronger boundaries helped in that because some individuals were using that to manipulate me. As I was oh so ready to be the knight in shining armour, there have been situations where people were more than ready to turn themselves into damsels in distress to get me to do things for them, things that they didn’t want to do or things that they felt entitled to have other people sort for them. When I was processing all this, I saw the title of Amy Tan’s book “Saving Fish from Drowning” and while I haven’t had time to read it yet, the title stuck in my head as the perfect way to describe this situation that I keep finding myself in. Putting time, effort, and resources towards saving people who have not asked to be saved or people who would pull me close when they needed my help and would drop me as soon as they were in a better position. My therapist went even further and suggested I read up on what the drama triangle was. This is a concept that was introduced by Stephen Karpman, and it looks at roles taken during stressful, emotional or conflict situations. The triangle has the “Victim” as the main role. That is the person who feels powerless over what is happening, and they are either complaining and going into a “poor me” state of being or completely falling to pieces. This role and perspective are activated by the “Persecutor.” This second role can be either a person, an event or a condition that is perceived to be the source of all the problems for the Victim. The third role is that of the Rescuer and it steps in to save the Victim. Now, the fun part is that the roles are not fixed, and a rescuer can become a persecutor. How could that be? Well, imagine you are with a couple, and you see that the man is not treating the lady right so, you decide to step in and advocate for her. That seems to make her feel a bit more empowered, you feel good about herself, everything seems to be going well but, he is not getting what he wants so, he starts pouting. She sees that he is upset and feels responsible for his well-being. From being the persecutor in the situation, he is now the victim, she used to be the victim, but she is now his saviour, and you used to be the saviour, but you are now the persecutor. What an opportunity lost to drink water and mind my business. I started reading “The Power of Ted” by David Emerald. This book gives an easy explanation of the concept itself and also the strategy to get out of this mindset. It described the victim’s perspective as an automatic reaction to just escape the current situation one is in. It sees it as a way to keep one feeling powerless and helpless, avoiding responsibility, and giving away control. I sat in this knowledge, and I looked at my life and what I saw broke my heart. I had always lived this way. In the beginning, as a child, I had no real power and no agency, no authority to make decisions for myself. My dad and my mom have moved between the persecutor role, dominating through blame, criticism and imposing their authority, and the rescuer, where they would step in to fix an issue. They have gone in even further and made sure that we were ashamed for needing their help and created the idea we couldn’t do anything right unless they helped us. It is something that they still try to do today. They still have a lot of ideas of what I should do, and they seem to ignore the fact that I am perfectly capable of solving my problems and I have done so, for quite some time now. I was pushed into the rescuer role and told that it was our duty as a child to pay back what we were given. That showing love meant putting the other person first and giving up my desires and priorities. My dad demanded it, my mom demonstrated it as she does this all the time. Moving forward on the timeline, I looked at all my romantic relationships and I saw them through the filter of the triangle and that put things in a different light. How I would ignore the red flags, and I would put myself as a saviour and then when they felt better and they had taken what they needed, they would leave, and I would be left behind. I always thought they were horrible people, and this happened to me every single time because that was all that I deserved. Allowed me to do things for them, and surrender leadership despite me saying that I would become a dictator if they didn’t do their part and keep things equal and then I got accused I held them back and I mothered them. When I started to take responsibility for my actions, I could see that they were treating me the way that I was allowing them to treat me. More so, it does take two to tango and I was part of that relationship, and I made my decisions. Did I not start this by saying that I ignored red flags? I ignored things, I lashed out, I was petty instead of discussing things, I manipulated, and I stayed quiet when I should have talked. I didn’t ask for what I needed and then I pretended they should have guessed all of my desires. It is an absolute stab in the heart when you find out that the reason for your happiness is you. The truth is though that it also brings a lot of hope. You can’t change people that don’t see a problem with the way they are but, you can change yourself. You can’t control everything, but you can control yourself, how you react to things, how you adjust your standards to achieve the result you want, what you accept and what you opt out of. The Empowerment Dynamic that David Emerald sees the opposite of the Victim's perspective as the Creator's perspective. You don’t react to just stop a bad situation, but you choose the life that you want, and you go towards it with intention. Accept that you may have a timeline in your mind but even if you can only take baby steps, progress is progress. You have to be flexible and accept that sometimes you will have setbacks. That it is fine for the plan to change, and it is ok for the goals to change if it doesn’t align anymore. It is all about consciously making decisions and taking responsibility for all of them. The way that I look at failure changed, as well. Things might go wrong but even if I don’t make it happen on the first try, at least I have tried my best. Every failure is a run-through, a dress rehearsal for trying again. A chance to introspect and check my processes, patterns, and reactions. The Persecutor has now become a Challenger and it’s not here to punish and oppress me but to motivate me to grow and learn new skills, an invitation to advocate for myself and show up in ways that I have never done before, that I expected other people to. The role of the Rescuer is then taken over by the role of the Coach. In this role, one just supports people in fixing their issues. It is intrusive to help someone who has not asked for help or advice, to just tell them to stand aside and do everything for them. Offering opinions and advice that nobody asked for does the same thing. Helping people in a way that makes you feel better is not helpful if it doesn’t match what the person thought they were lacking. I will allow space for people to speak about their issues, and while I will offer my help to the extent that I can offer it, it will be up to the other person to decide if they want to take it or not. I will not take it personally if they find more comfortable accepting help from somebody else or if they want to do it by themselves. I do not owe anybody happiness, but I am happy to offer support and encouragement. Now, I can look at situations and see how people are trying to position me in a rescuer position, and I can tell myself “It is not my responsibility to save them.” More so, when I get into a relationship, I know for a fact that I don’t want to save anybody, I want people who have already done the work on themselves and take responsibility for their actions. I refuse to fix men; I refuse to mother them. I refuse to put my wishes aside for anybody else. I won’t let people push me into taking options that are not working for me and my timeline. I see that I thought that by fixing other people I might find a way to fix myself. I am not saying that this is a perfect system, and I get it right every single time or that I don’t get caught up in my old ways without realizing it. I just don’t commit to it the way that I did before. I become aware that I am doing it, and I refocus my intentions and my attention to where I want to go. I am the maker of my reality; I am responsible for my perception I have the power to make all my dreams come true.

What a strange thing trust is. Strong enough to move mountains when it’s there, powerful enough to crumble them when it’s gone. Gain with so much effort and slowly over time but lost in a second and so hard to win back since now doubt lurks around every corner dripping “what if” in the mind and poisoning it. I went from one extreme to another with it. From trusting blindly in everyone that I met to looking at everybody with suspicion. Both of those are problematic in themselves but I keep on turning the issue in my head and I can’t seem to decide about where the happy medium is. What is the appropriate stance to take on the issue? I read the Attributes by Rich Diviney, and after a bit more research I ended up on his website which listed four elements to trust. Competency, consistency, integrity, and compassion. These apply to my issue as I need to see that you have what it takes to get the job done and that you will match what you say you are going to do with your actions if anything changes and you are unable to, I want to see that you are going, to be honest, and open about it. I also must see that you have a good moral compass and backbone so that you will do the right thing because it is the right thing to do not just switch up when you think no one is watching or when the wrong thing brings you more entertainment or popularity. The last element of compassion is the sympathy and empathy side, how you talk about others in front of me matters because you will talk about me in the same way when I am not there. We say that we FEEL that we can trust somebody but is trust an emotion? To me, it seems like one collects data and makes an informed decision if a risk is worth taking or not. If one does not have the necessary information, one trusts a gut feeling or intuition. What is intuition? While it manifests as the little rumble in the stomach telling me that something is up, I consider it to be your subconscious mind telling me that in my experience this looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and historically, it has turned out to be a duck but, there was that one time when it turned out to be a goose and there were… consequences so, an evaluation is needed to see if the right state of mind is present at this time to take the risk. If all conditions are met, then it is very much the dealer’s choice. Spin the wheel and see if we get the prize. Past experiences such as betrayal, inconsistency, and broken promises, all my past experiences scream out if I should trust someone or not. I suppose like everything, it starts in the family. My parents always had a strong view of lying. Even now if you ask them, they will tell you it is the only reason they have ever spanked us. Spoiler alert, that’s a lie. They had this standard set up for us that we should tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth but when we would then watch them not doing so or making us accomplices to it. “Don’t tell your grandma how much we spent on X thing,” “Don’t tell you’re your mom that we stopped for a beer on the way.” I child watches everything and emulates everything so, there is no conversation needed for me to see that you said one thing and you are lying through your teeth. At a young age, I wouldn’t understand why you are doing this; I wouldn’t understand there are levels to it, but you have just shown me that we can opt out from telling the truth. When and for what reasons, not sure because there was no discussion to explain the situation. Also, similar to this situation is when promises are made and then when you ask your parents, they say that they haven’t made the promise, or they said it, and they now say they are unable with no explanation sometimes even getting me in trouble for asking for reasons why. My favourite one is making a promise based on me fulfilling a commitment and when I fulfil that commitment, they moved the goalpost to make it seem that I was lacking instead of just admitting they couldn’t meet their end of the bargain. Trust comes from consistency. Doing what you said because you said it, acting and reacting predictably. It is the sequence of patterns that lets me know that you will be who I need you to be in that moment and you will react in the way that I need you to react. If you say that you are going to help me and when I come to collect on that promise, you act like the conversation never happened and even more so, you have a go at me and try to make me feel bad for being upset, that creates an environment where I can’t express my feelings, I can’t ask for clarification to soothe myself. If sometimes my input is received with kindness and sometimes it is received with anger, I get destabilized because I don’t know what I am walking into when I have a conversation with you. You are now making me feel like you are not a safe person, you are unreliable. You are teaching me that I need to be hypervigilant because I am always at risk due to your unpredictability. My dad was quite explosive in his reactions so, I had become quite attuned to his reactions to manage my reactions and avoid starting a conflict. This is something that I take with me in every room I go into. If I stay in the same room with a person and they seem upset, I will ask them several times if they are all right. If they decide to not share and just say they are all right, I will continue to monitor the energy and look for clues. It might seem annoying and paranoid, but the reality is that I feel unsafe. Somewhere in my subconscious, I am afraid. Nothing to do with you, I suppose but, I just need a few more data points than the regular person to conclude that everything is fine. Growing up I felt I couldn’t talk to my mom and dad about my issues and my sister was older and interested in talking to her friends and not me, but I did have a few friends I chose to trust along the way. One knew that I liked a boy, and she made a point of dating him, despite claiming that she was trying to help me talk to him. Another shared the notebook we would write all our secrets with other people to read showing that there is no privacy. The desire for popularity made loyalties shift with the frequency with which one hangs out with people. I would get pulled in close because they didn’t have anybody at that time or they needed my help but as soon as they could spend time with other people and they could get something off them, they would talk behind my back to them. I had a friend call me and instigated me to talk about other people in the group while they were listening in on the conversation. This pattern repeated itself and I believed that I was overreacting in the early stages, that I was imagining things, and I thought that I was a bad friend for even considering anything wrong. Life showed me that if anything, I was too trusting. Worst of all, I ignored the evidence to avoid being alone. With my first boyfriend, I found out that he was cheating on me with someone from his class. He was in the high school football team, and they were participating in a tournament, and he told me that I needn’t come. I found out after we broke up that all my friends had seen him at that tournament and not even one of them told me about it. They thought that I would have a go at them if they said anything. I don’t learn though and after a while he comes back and wants to get back together. Turns out he was now cheating with me on the girl that he had left me for. This was the start and there were some manipulators, users, and liars on the way. There have been other scenarios, like being upset with me because I was upset with him, which made no sense but meant that no responsibility was taken, and I was made responsible for ruining the mood. Another one of my favourites was discussing something and agreeing on a plan and when it was time to follow through, I got told “I didn’t say I promised.” Are we adults here or are we playing Simon says? I am sure that if I made a promise and I didn’t keep it, I would never hear the end of it and I would get told that I am not a team player, but Peter Pan over here is telling me that rules don’t apply to him because he had his fingers crossed behind his back? If you ask me how I am doing, really doing and I tell you about my feelings and you try to shut me down, I will not trust you with my feelings again. You can’t hold space for me and that is fine, it is not your responsibility, and we just discovered the boundary of our relationship. Not all conversations are for all people. What I would ask though is that you don’t feel surprised you have been taken out of the loop and I don’t lean on you. I tried to give you access to my inner life and you couldn’t handle it. Sometimes, I even get avoided afterwards or promises are made to meet up that never materialize. I won’t call you up on it, but I know that I can only trust you up to a point. There are levels of friendship and there are levels of intimacy. When you have been lied to so often, it is hard to know who to trust. Of course, I would like to have good, deep connections with everybody, but I have let people in before and they chose to let me down. I kind of started to think somewhere along the way that there must be something wrong with me because it seemed that I was the easiest one to discount. I am the easiest one to leave behind and sacrifice. Without wanting it, I start isolating myself and it gets better in terms of having time to think about everything, but it is not real healing, it just keeps me from being triggered. I started trying to open up more and letting people in, but I remember that being vulnerable and sharing things about myself, didn’t really make people want to be vulnerable back but instead gave them ammunition to manipulate me. I started letting people approach but keeping them at a distance because if they can’t come close they can’t hurt me. I can’t allow myself to get attached fully to anybody because they are going to leave anyway so, just see them as passers-by. Trust issues are viewed as being a red flag and people tell you to stay away from folks who have them. I feel alone, I want to connect to people but I am afraid that they will leave me so I approach them with care, and they leave because I am afraid which then in turn makes stronger the idea that I should be afraid of people. The truth is that while you might scare me, the person that I am doubting is me. I made so many wrong decisions in the past and I stayed in that place of pain regardless of how bad it was sometimes. It was like getting electrocuted and continuing to hold on to the wire. Even when other people tried to break the circuit and save me, I told them not to worry about it because they didn’t know this wire as I did. I have had good experiences too. People that I have shared parts of myself, slowly and awkwardly and they accept them and take care of them. They said they were going to show up for me and they did. They said I can lean on them, and I can tell them my troubles and they have created space for me to feel safe and be able to share and they were able to hold that space for me. When they couldn’t, they were open and honest about it, and they allowed me to return the favour and be there for them in need. It takes two to tango and I must be accepted in just as much as I allow other people in. I am trying my best to fight against everything that my experience has taught me. I suppose the biggest fear is that if someone hurts me, I don’t believe that I can recover from it. I have worked on making my sense of self stronger, raising my self-esteem, and my self-compassion. It’s a mixture of believing in myself more and allowing myself to get it wrong sometimes. I suppose the only way of not making mistakes is not even trying in the first place and staying a hermit. I have also learned to listen to my body and listen to my anxiety. If it keeps getting triggered every time around a person I just listen to it and let that person go. I am trying very hard to get in the habit of saying what I need and asking people for clarification. Accepting that some friendships have expiration dates, it is best to be grateful for having had those people for a while and letting them go to the next chapter of their lives. I can understand that people can make mistakes and people can change but I now know that people only change if they want to so if they want us to get back to a place of trust, we can rebuild as long as the change is real and goes beyond the speech level. Even this is an exercise in trust. I have told you things about me and I have let you into my reality. What you do with this information is up to you. You can use it to hurt me, or you can use it as an opportunity to share something back and show that faith in humanity can be restored one act of kindness at a time.

It is amazing how well we can see other people’s lives. How clearly we can identify their issues and their blind spots? We can see the patterns and if we know them well enough, we can recount instances in their lives where they were in the same situation and had similar decisions to make. We have the perfect advice for them and the perfect strategy that they can take if they only dare to do it. It is easy to advise as we don’t have to suffer the consequences. Then we go back to our own lives, and we blind ourselves to the reality of it. We lie to ourselves that everything is fine, and we hide our heads in the sand. We tell people our stories and hope that if they believe them, we will too. Things change and then reality comes in and shows us that all of those perfect pieces of advice we were dishing out were the same ones that we should have been following all along. After hearing story after story about friends, relationships and so on, the question came to my therapist: “Why do you think you struggle so much with letting go of toxic relationships?” A very good question but one that I, unfortunately, did not have an answer to. I was aware that it was happening, I had been in plenty of relationships that ran past their expiration date and still, I hung on to them. I knew I did it but why was a complete mystery. One thing about me though, I love a puzzle, and I love a good mystery so, I have started to think about it and tried to figure out where this problem started. The easiest place to start was my relationship with men. I have started to think of all my past boyfriends and think about how they treated me. I thought that they were horrible people and then the reality hit that they treated me this way because I allowed them to. There is nothing worse than realising that you are the cause of all of your issues. Every friend group has that one friend who has the funniest stories about the men she has been on dates with. That is me. I am that friend. If I had a pound for every time my friends have asked me where I managed to find this guy or the other… My answer was always that I didn’t find them, they found me but now in hindsight, clearly something in me attracts them. Like the time I went to an office Christmas party, and I had the choice between the two bartenders. The one I picked and went on a date with had told me on sight that I should stop wearing heels because he doesn’t like to be shorter than the girls he is out with. He then proceeded to scoff and look down on me during our entire conversation. At the end, we were walking, and he hugged me all of a sudden in the middle of the mall, and I asked him what we were doing to which we replied, we were looking for each other. I thought I was going to sprain an eyeball rolling my eyes at that one and that was my cue to go home. He was shocked when I didn’t agree to a second date. I have always wondered what would have happened if I picked the other one. Another time, I agreed to a date with the guy that sold me my laptop. We went for a walk in the park and as we walked, I was trying to explain to him what I do for work. He did not get it and kept on insisting that I was a secretary. I get that I had a corporate job where roles and responsibilities are specific but the way he insisted I was a secretary was just unreal. He then decided out of nowhere that he was going to buy me a gift, earrings, opal earrings. I was baffled at this and asked him why he thought that he should get me anything as he had just met me, but he said that it would be his pleasure, and it was his wish. By this time, I already regretted my athletic ways as there was no other way to end this date but to complete the tour of the park and I was stuck. The final nail in the coffin came when I said that I was moving house, and he offered to help me carry furniture and build everything for me and then proceeded to explain the roadmap to us moving in together. No, thank you. Taxi! One of the recent ones was when an acquaintance wanted to get to know each other better and hang out. I told him that I was chatty and friendly but I was not looking for anything so they should be aware of what was happening, and friendship is all that I was offering. I always worry when it comes to being friends with men that the boundaries are going to be blurred so, I wanted to make sure he was aware of what this was. He said that was fine but as the conversation went it was clear that he was trying to stay in the friend zone to get more. I tried to restate my boundaries, and I almost got “yelled” at via text that he was a good guy and that he was going to show me. If you have to say it like that, you are not a good guy. I was so scared by it that I was happy that he didn’t have my address, and I locked my door that night regardless. These are ones that I dodged but there were so many others that I entertained despite the signs. It starts well and it seems all so exciting. They are doing all the right things and saying all the right things and I start to imagine how amazing everything will be, and I start building that pedestal. Time passes and it seems that this might work out, but things change, and they start to say hurtful things. I start thinking that I am imagining things. I started to find excuses that maybe they had loads going on, a tough day at the office. Maybe they didn’t quite say what I heard and that I am looking into things, and I am imagining them. They start breaking promises and say they forgot or don’t even admit to making those promises. More and more hurtful things get said and done like they are trying their best to hurt me and see how much they get away with and because I let things slide or seem to forgive them, the more spiteful they seem to get. And yet I stay and think that I am the problem. That they are right, and I should change things about myself. Everybody leaves and I don’t want to be alone again, so I stay. Better the devil you know. They hurt me and I think why would they do that to me? It is so far from anything that I would do that my mind can’t wrap itself around why somebody would lie and hurt somebody just because they can. I have wanted the best for them. I would have given them everything that they could have wanted or needed and instead, they decided to hurt me. Even worse, they knew that they were doing it, and they didn’t care. I think that they must take pride in it and how they pulled the wool over my eyes. Why do they just want to hurt me? And at this moment, you no longer hear the strong, independent woman who can give herself everything she needs, but a scared little girl, desperate to be seen, understood, loved, and cared for. She is always put to the side and forgotten. The perfect example of seen and not heard. She is quiet because when she talks, she is not listened to, she is mocked, or spoken over so she has convinced herself that she must not have that much to say. She escapes by fantasizing that one day someone will save her. That she too will be like one of those people in the movies and she would just be living her life and boom… fairy godmother comes along and changes everything and makes my dreams come true. It is very tough when you have hopes that everything will change but life keeps going and it stays the same. Everybody that is lost just wants to be found. What happens when you feel like no one is looking? And here comes someone who says they love me. They say that I am special. They say that they have never seen anyone like me. They said they never want to hurt me and in the embers of that promise, it feels so warm and inviting and I am so tired and weary. What would be the harm of one moment of rest? Of course, I can hear the wolves howling outside and the wind blowing a gale but what if I could just pretend that they are not there for a while? Pretend that I too can be at peace and have happiness. I have had my guard up for so long and I am so tired that just this once I will allow myself to be seduced and give into the fantasy that this can indeed work. But instead of seeing it for what it is, I remain trapped and say that I can turn it around. I can make it better. As I slumber, the spider’s web grows tighter around me. More time invested, more feelings added, and a stronger bond created, making it harder to cut the ties. Once I am out of it and I can fully see what happened, I can’t imagine how I ever allowed myself to be treated that way. I think to myself that people told me but no, I had to do my own thing because I knew best. So much time invested and hoped that if I could only show them how special I am, they would love me. All the hatred that I should maybe have for them, turns on me for letting my guard down and allowing this to happen. I thought long and hard as to why I got stuck and the best response that I could come up with was that the models of women that I had in my family taught me that I shouldn’t have boundaries, that I should accept what I am getting, that I should do anything I can to stay in a relationship so if this is what I saw how could I act any different? Toxic relationships though don’t only extend to romantic relationships. For work, it has been the same. Working with people who push my boundaries, tell me that they appreciate me, that we are a team and then they pile on more and more work and when I am exhausted and make mistakes, they are the first ones to treat me poorly. And again, I start believing that I should work harder and that I should not be making any mistakes. That their poor treatment of me is a result of me making their life more difficult and that I should work on improving myself. Once I saw things for what they were, I tried to put up boundaries again and that did not go well. They have actively tried to stop me from progressing and developing, despite years of telling me how they were supporting me and that they are putting my name up for awards. This was an important lesson. I learned that sometimes, the people who seem to be rooting for you and see you as their go-to person might also be the ones trying to hold you back and use you to achieve their purposes. You are there to serve and you should not follow any other goal than working hard to help them achieve theirs. Advocating for myself was a hard-earned lesson. It hurts when this treatment comes from friends. From people that you thought you could trust, people that you have entrusted secrets to and opened your heart and they seemed to have done the same. One friend shared my secrets with other people to make herself more popular despite me knowing hers and keeping them, as a friend should. Worse still is when you are at your lowest and you think that you found someone to support you, and you support them and then you start to realise that they try to stab you in the back at every turn. They are petty and jealous and try to take the little that you have to prove their worth. I saw the signs, but I thought that surely, I was imagining it, that I was being a bad friend for even thinking bad things about her. That she helped me, and I was being ungrateful. I never said anything to anybody about it because I thought that it would mean that I was disloyal. Until it got blatantly obvious what they were doing. Even more so when they were trying to start fights in private and then when we were in groups, they would push my buttons so I would react and then they could make themselves a victim in front of people. I could see the change in her, and I could see the change in other people as they were siding with her and rolling their eyes at what I would say. When I accepted that this is happening, that I am not imagining it and even if somebody helps you at some point, it doesn’t mean that they are entitled to treat you poorly, I decided to break all ties. Finally, I was starting to learn to let go of toxic relationships. It is complicated to be selective when you come from a place of wanting but holding on to things hurts more in the long run. Learning to set boundaries, learning to say no, knowing my worth, and being able to admit that I misjudged people and that letting go of people who are not good for me is the best form of self-care, were all important lessons and they were hard-earned. I can’t change people, I can’t change who they are and how they react, but I can change how I react and for sure, I can fight to see people the way they are and let their actions do the talking no matter how alluring their words are. In the end, I have to be thankful to those people. They hurt me and pushed me so far into a corner that they left me no other option but to come up swinging and give myself the love that they wouldn’t or couldn’t give me. They served a purpose; they are forgiven and their access to me is forever denied.