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I was born on a Thursday. The 21 of November, to be exact, at 1. 20 in the morning. I was told I could have gotten a perfect score, but I was born with the umbilical cord around my neck. Very Chekhov’s gun of me, considering the depression and the suicidal tendencies. It was a more discreet arrival for me after my sister chose to come out with her arm raised; she has always managed to attract attention. I find myself thinking more and more about this connection between my birthday and the nursery rhyme. I keep on thinking of my life and what I have achieved, and still, the only thought is that Thursday’s child has far to go. One of the meanings is that there is a long, successful life without limitations, going far in life. That is for sure one of the fantasies that I have always had. I have always thought that there will be a bigger picture that I am not seeing, a greater purpose that I have, and it will be revealed. I have fully bought into the Disney image that you will have a tough start, but something will happen, the world will realise what a mystical unicorn I am, and everything will go my way for once. Gather enough good karma, and the fairy-tale ending will not be far behind. All the villains will be punished, and all the goodhearted characters will get rewarded for their trouble. I had spent so much time by myself that this was one of the ways to entertain myself. I could remember having full conversations and making up full stories in my head for hours because I was lonely. I did not create stories because I was creative; I became creative because I had to be. Furthermore, I was watching reels on Instagram, and one of them mentioned children who talk to themselves as a coping mechanism because they felt like it was not safe to talk to anybody about their feelings, and it made me cry. Even now, I go walking, and I talk to myself. I let Bruno off the lead, and I walk around, and I talk, allowed in the night, looking at the stars. I want to think that this is all for a wonderful future to come, character development, but for now, the fairy tale ending just doesn’t seem like it is the right meaning. Another meaning is that the child will go on a journey. That is indeed the one I like most. It is truly my life’s dream to travel the world. I used to watch so many travelling shows and used to imagine that I would be able to go and see them all, walk the same paths, smell, and eat the same food, and soak in the atmosphere. Learn from other cultures, have my ideas challenged and let the world be my teacher. My parents never really travelled anywhere. When we were young, we went to the same seaside resort, to the same hotel all the time, or we would go to see my dad’s parents in the countryside. My parents never showed any interest in going abroad. I have been living in the UK for almost 10 years, and I am still sorry that I didn’t get to see more of Romania before I left. I wish I had been a tourist in my own country. I now live in Scotland, and I have seen more places here, and I have a list to see more still. I want to be able to see at least one city in every country in the world, but I am so scared of travelling by myself. I have so many fears around it. To be honest, I have a lot of fears about doing things alone. I have said in the past about going by myself to the cinema or doing it by myself for a meal, and people kept on suggesting that this would be something lame and they would either offer alternatives like doing it together on another day or simply another activity on the same day. This is social conditioning, and it just keeps me trapped in this idea that I can’t do things on my own, that I need somebody as company or as a guide. It enforces the idea that I need somebody else to regulate my emotions, or I need somebody else to save me. This is such a huge problem for me that I have this limiting belief. On the one hand, there are all the things that I want to see, and I want to experience; on the other, there is the belief that if something goes wrong, I might not be able to manage it, and in this mismatch of beliefs, I remain paralysed. Before I can start doing this big physical journey, I need to be further along on my spiritual mission. This image brings us beautifully to the third meaning that Thursday will struggle. This is the meaning that sounds closest to the truth for me at the moment. It feels like a mountain, and I go up the slope, working on the issue, and every time I sort things, I think I've got to the top and lo and behold, it isn’t the peak. It is just another leg of the journey completed. I started out thinking that I have done therapy for so many months and then I came to a stable place and things got easy so that must have meant that I was done and I patted myself on the back and congratulated myself for doing the work and then I realised that I still needed help and then I went back to therapy and I started to dig deeper and I started to wonder how many session it will need to be cured. It became obvious quite quickly that I would be cured as such that I would just have to learn how to manage things and if I become ware of where the issue lays and how my patterns work and what I need to do to take healthy decisions then that will be enough, and this is an ongoing process that I have to accept, and I have to manage for the entire life. Dug a bit deeper, climbed a bit higher, connected so many more dots and kept on climbing that mountain and for a long time, there was a plateau, and I imagined myself at the top again. Patted myself on the back again and figured I had this figured out. Boy, did I fall into a ditch and roll in a valley. I am now three years into this process, and I have changed three therapists. I have moved from CBT to Jungian psychoanalysis. I have awareness, and I have the skills that I worked so hard to acquire, and now I am learning to accept all parts of me, and once all those parts have been resolved, they can be integrated. And at this time, I feel that everything I have worked on until now has just given me enough strengths and it just removed the scab and the scar tissue that had formed over these wounds and now, that they are all raw and I am poking them with a stick and what I feel most of all is anger and out of all emotions I do the worst with feeling anger. I absolutely hate people telling me that I should only have positive vibes or that I should think positive thoughts. I hate people saying that I should be grateful for what I have and that I should consider how other people have it worse. All of these are good pieces of advice, but there is a time and a place for these pieces of advice. If I am in a place where I am trying to express my emotions and express my pain, and I get told that I should only have good vibes when the state of mind that I am in is utter depression, then this is not helpful advice. This becomes an expression of the other person being triggered or not being able to take on my energy, and as they become uncomfortable, they use this message to shut down the emotion and put an end to a situation. Your feelings are making me feel uncomfortable, so you should stop feeling your emotions and change course. I get that on the other side of the spectrum is trauma dumping. I have been guilty of this myself on various occasions because when I started to unravel the thread of my issues, there was so much to process, and it took over all of my thoughts and all of my discussions. I was so caught up in my own thoughts that I was not aware of the energy that I was spreading, and I was not aware of the effect that I had on others. I would not take the time to make sure that they were comfortable and ready to receive the information that I was giving them, and when they were struggling themselves, I would trigger them even more and force them to come on my journey. This was not done out of ill will, but I was struggling so much, and I was turning every conversation into a focus group and holding on to anybody that would listen to a buoy in my storm. I have not had experience with effective and healthy communication in my family, but I am trying my best with the little that I have. It is a matter of whether I isolate and process everything by myself, which means that I am not asking for help, and I am not meant to be hyper independent, as that is a poor coping mechanism too. If I say all that, I feel I am being too needy, or I am trauma dumping. I feel damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Some people also try to tell me how I should feel my emotions and what I shouldn’t feel which to me is not right either because all of my problems have come from tagging my feeling as unsafe and blocking them or not being able to say how I feel, not being able to say the things that have happened to me because people might judge me for them and they might push me away because of them. I know that some people are trying to help, and they have good intentions when they are doing this. One should be aware of what help is being asked for and how help is being given. If you are shouting at me that you want to help and raise your voice with anger, telling me how I should go about fixing my life, I am sorry, but it is not the right way to go about it. The reason that therapy works so well for me is that I can be authentic, and I can share everything that I feel, and there is no expectation whatsoever for me to be in any way other than truthful. No thought or idea is viewed as good or bad. What is brought into question is whether this idea helped or hurt you, and if it hurt you, why do you hold on to it? The sessions allow me to speak about myself and workshop all of my thoughts and set them free. I know for a fact that, at the moment, I am still trying my best to be a good listener but, I know for a fact that I don’t fact the strength to keep my own emotions in check and break from my own patterns of blocking their emotions to be able to allow for space for the other person like my therapist does for me. From time to time, I go through checkpoints, and I try to see where I am. I try to take stock of all that I have learned, and I try to be aware of how much I have come and be proud of myself. I can still see that some of my patterns are repeating, I can see that sometimes I am drawn to my own ways and other times I can stop the dangers and navigate them. Thursday's child has far to go, but I am determined that I will do what it takes to heal my wounds and live the life that I was meant to lead.

I kept on trying to think for a while about where to start and what to say about my relationship with my dad. Living abroad means that I talk to him very little, and that ensures that I don’t really have to think about our relationship. I pushed it to the back of my mind, and I don’t really think about it unless I am going to Romania. Our relationship goes from one extreme to the other, and as I kept thinking about writing this, I realised how much of it I wanted to forget. As soon as I sit down to write, I shy away from it and do anything but focus on it. There is nothing else to do but start at the beginning and see where it leads me in terms of what influence my dad and his family had on me. My gran talked about her childhood as the best time of her life. Her grandad was a priest, and he was a member of parliament for his local area. He had land and forest and money. My gran talked about growing up with peacocks in her yard. Now, she was inclined to… enrich?... embellish?... improve on the truth? My dad confirmed it, and there are news articles written about him; this one is for sure. While I would like to say that I have this great generational wealth and I just keep working to keep myself grounded, that is not the case. Communism has come to power, and because of their status, my gran’s family was considered an enemy of the state; anybody who was not from a peasant family was considered that. All of their wealth had been seized, and my gran’s dad and all the grown men in her family had been arrested and sent to labour camps to dig the Danube to the Black Sea Canal. This moment changed her life completely, and this is the moment she had always seen as the source of all her problems, as she was her daddy’s little girl, and then all of a sudden, she was not protected anymore. She stopped feeling safe. This is also the end of my generational wealth… Oh well, back on the grind… My gran Olga married a man from her own village. She always said that he was beneath her station and nowhere near as rich as she had been, but that was all in the past, and this was now a new world where the peasant roots were the healthy ones and a woman needed to marry. My dad sometimes spoke very weakly of happier times, but those are not the stories that were told. My grandad was an alcoholic, a womaniser, and he was abusive towards my gran. There were long periods of time when my gran had to fend for herself and my dad. She has had to work some pretty tough jobs, she had to deal with everything by herself and endured poverty. There is a story about my dad being left by himself in the house, all night, at the age of four, on a night when cats were mating. He heard those awful screams all night with nobody to comfort him. He was so traumatised that he didn’t speak for a year afterwards. I have very little memory of meeting my grandad in the house when I was a child, but I do remember him all around the city, having meals and having a drink. He was always saying that he had a plan despite the fact that he had no idea what he was doing. He was very hard on my dad and kept looking down on him somewhat. One time, my dad asked for money to get food before his salary, and my grandad said that it was not his responsibility to support my dad and that if he had children, he should be responsible for putting food on their table, which he never quite did for my dad. I remember him smelling of booze and asking me to kiss my cheek, and me not wanting him near me, him promising money in exchange, and then catching me and kissing my cheeks without my consent, really. To this day, whenever I smell the scent of spirits on the breath of a man, it puts me right off and makes me recoil, the same way that when I see drunk people being loud and unpredictable, I go into fight or flight mode because he was violent whenever he was drunk. My dad had said that he wasn’t always like that, but that, at some point, he was taken by The Security, which is the Romanian Communist version of the KGB. He was arrested, and then he came back home a few days later, and he never wanted to talk about it. His hair turned grey, and he started drinking. That seems like a possibility, except I have memories with my grandad with jet black hair. Also, there was a story about how my grandparents had wanted to get a divorce, and my dad was asked in court who he wanted to live with, and he said that he wanted to live with both. My gran had always said that it changed her mind, and she decided to stay because of what my dad said. She always mentioned in passing that her mom had told her that everybody would talk, and it is shameful to get a divorce. I wonder how her life would have been if she had the strength then to let go. I do have better memories of him from after he retired, and he moved to the countryside. I can remember going with him and camping out under the stars, by the fire, when he was watching his crops from warthogs. He was roasting corn on the cob for me over the coals and telling me stories. I liked helping him around the garden and sawing wood for the fire. He and grandma teaching me how to tend to vegetables. Going for walks in the woods and collecting berries for jam. I can remember going with him to hunt pheasants or ducks. I apologise as I sounded a bit posh there, but let me make it clear, they had no running water, and the bathroom was an outhouse. It was not quaint country living; it was Bear Grylls-ing it for 2-3 months a year. While my grandad was a visitor in our lives that we never really got attached to, my gran was the important one in my life. Whenever my parents had to go to work, my gran helped with the childcare, and there is a wonderful story about how she would come back from the night shift she worked at a factory. She was really tired; she would give me a little bit of sour cherry liquor, and she would drink a bit herself to help us sleep. She never really drank; as a rule, she was medicating us. The joys of childcare in the 80’s. I remember spending time with her growing up. I remember her always being quite proud of me and the way I was. She always called me her beautiful garden flower, and she would tell anybody who would listen about my academic achievements. Mine and my sister’s, of course. While she had a very good opinion of and how we were, she had a very skewed view of how a woman should be and how one should dress. She didn’t really take care of herself, never dyed her hair, and never painted her nails. She was a true country woman and had her hair covered. Her clothes were never stylish, just functional. She was not an ugly woman by any means, but you could tell from her features that she had been through a lot, that her life had not been an easy one. She had spent her life being jealous of other women who did all of those things. She would immediately say that those women were loose women and surely, they were going around town. I would hear her talk badly about other women, even if she barely knew them or just saw them on the street. Even further than that, she had gotten into fights with women who she thought were after my grandad or who my grandad was pursuing. My grandparents never really had a peaceful life. They were always fighting with somebody, in a lawsuit with somebody else who had wronged them. They were always the victims, and everybody was against them. When they weren’t fighting each other, they were fighting the world. This is the environment my dad grew up in. His dad is hardly there, hardly caring, and his mom is fully leaning on him. She always said that they only had each other, and they had to hide from the world how they lived and what they ate. She would tell him everything, and they would plan things together and that continued for their entire life. She would come over, and she and my dad would go into the kitchen, and they would talk in hushed tones. It drove my mom crazy because she would be excluded from the conversation. My gran would expect my dad to obey everything she needed, and when reminding him that she brought him into the world and raised him and made him who he was, so he owes her, she would ask me to bring her the pain medication from her bag. She would either get a headache or her heart would act up. Duty or guilt will get the job done. She was unable to control her life; she controlled him. My dad then met my mom and got married after 6 months of dating. My gran told this story that my dad was so handsome that he had women lining up around the corner to be with him, and she just went along the queue and picked my mom. For all her faults, she did like my mom and recognised that she was taking good care of her son. My mom… despised that story and despised my gran. It started from the wedding when my dad took half of the wedding gift money and gave it to my gran because she had another lawsuit she needed to fund. You would think that over 40 years would dull the sting of that, but this is not the case. It is just another token that my gran was always there with them. She was always my dad’s priority, and while he might complain from time to time, when she said jump, he would evenly ask how high. We are going to speed up through them, getting married, having my sister, almost getting divorced and then deciding to stay together and giving it another try and get to the moment when I came in the picture. There is this story my dad likes to tell about me being born. He was home with my sister after my mom got dropped off at the maternity hospital. The doctor called, and he started to apologise to my dad. My dad got worried and asked what had happened. The doctor apologised again and said that he only brings girls into the world, gorgeous and healthy, but girls. They had a bit of a laugh about it since they were mates and he had helped deliver my sister as well. My dad had always been very open about wanting a boy, and he was disappointed, but he settled for what God gave him, aka my sister and me. When the story ends with “What can you do? It is what it is.” And it gets repeated again and again over the years as your parents keep on reminiscing about everything since the beginning of time. It starts to sound a bit like “you are not enough”, and you can never be enough because you are not the right gender. This is to complement the romantic account of how my mom lured him with her nice body and then put two millstones around his neck to lock him down. Fairy tales do come true. My dad had felt growing up that his mom had picked his dad over him. He then got picked by my mom, but then we came along and lost the competition to us. On my side, since I felt that I couldn’t bond with my mom, I sought out my dad. I offered to watch him when he did DIY, help him with it, watch sports with him, go shopping for tools with him, go to different institutions and keep him company. As a result, my dad actually talked to me; he would tell me to put my head on his shoulder, and he would impart the wisdom that he wanted to impart. He treats me differently from how he treats my sister. He has patience with me, he takes my criticism better, he is more open to doing things that I want to do, like shopping while he rushes my mom and has a hissy fit for my sister. I have enjoyed spending time with him, and I have told everybody how my dad wanted boys, and he got me. Luckily, I am a bit of a tomboy, but the reality is, I had to be like that to be accepted in the beginning. He has looked down on things that I liked, and he wasn’t into. Even with food, if you like something and try to share, he will most often say he doesn’t want anything. If he offers something and you refuse, you don’t know what is good. My dad would call me his little boy and call me Ionica, which is the male version of my name. I tried to tell him again and again that it is not my name and that I am a girl, but he kept on insisting, kept on calling me what he wanted to call me, and that made me angry. He just saw what he wanted to see, and I had no say in my self-image. On the one hand, you have the dad that says that I am smart just like him or “look at you, how amazingly you did that cause you are my girl,, complimenting himself, really, but beggars can’t be choosers. On the other hand, you have the dad who has a go every time a mistake is made, which tells me that I destroy everything that I touch, that I don’t have respect for anything, that I am not grateful for anything, that I am good for nothing and unable to accomplish anything. Growing up with him felt a little bit like being fathered by Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. On the one hand, he patiently explains sports and DIY, makes jokes around the house and makes everybody laugh, and on the other, he is explosive, he is unstable, he will go from 0 to 100 in a second. And he will either start yelling, make a fuss and even hit my sister and me. How does one reconcile the only parent who tells me that they love me with the image of him walking towards me angrily? The parent who sees me crying because I already know what is coming, and you ask them not to beat you, and they are so consumed by their own feelings that they don’t care, are not impressed, or moved by it. To have their hand in your throat and for them to lift you from the crouched position you are in even so that the feet no longer touch the ground and then they tell you either that they brought you into this world and they would take you out or that they are going to go through you and while you are crying, all you can see is their jaw tensing, their teeth grinding and the look of absolute hatred in their eyes. This is from the person who tells you that family are the only people that love you, that you shouldn’t trust anybody because all they want to do is cheat and hurt you. You know what the worst part is? That you tell somebody else, and they tell their story about how their dad was a heavyweight boxer who could not control his anger, and she would get beaten and get broken ribs because of it. You hear the story, and you think: “I shouldn’t complain. I didn’t have it as bad”. I think that is why I found the idea that one shouldn’t complain cause others have it worse so appalling. Look, compare, find others wanting and feel good about yourself when in fact we should just see that none of it should have gone through any of it. None of us should have been treated poorly, none of us should have been made to feel insignificant. That the problem was never us, it was always them, and they have taken their inadequacies out on us for no other reason than because they could. Because we were there, and we didn’t have any power to change anything. Where could we have gone? What could we have done? I told my dad about being beaten and spoke to him about it, and he didn’t admit it. He said we were only beaten for lying when, in fact, we got beaten for not wanting to take a nap, for not answering questions about what we were doing fast enough, for saying the wrong thing, for trying to release anger when nobody showed us how to deal with it. When I challenged it, he said that I only focus on the negative. I FOCUS ON THE NEGATIVE. It’s my fault for not looking on the bright side of life. What did I expect from a man who never apologised for his entire life? Our issues never got discussed, not further than him explaining how he was right, and you were wrong, and you will figure out in time that you don’t know enough. Whenever he doesn’t want to talk about something, he just acts like he hasn’t heard you, or changes the subject to what he wants to talk about. That is when he doesn’t just have a fit and leave the room, same as he did when we were young, when he kept telling mom that he was going to leave. He then comes back and acts as if nothing happened. He is over it; he doesn’t really get why I am still upset. No closure, no resolution, no explanation, no apology. What is born of chaos will crave and create chaos; that house is always full of tension, and there is always a fight brewing. He made sure there was one every Christmas, Easter, Bank holiday, birthday, anniversary, and most days in between. He makes jokes, jokes that offend, misogynistic jokes and when he is told that it is inappropriate, that he shouldn’t make them with his daughters, he doesn’t seem to get what the issue is. We were always discouraged from wearing makeup; we were always mocked when we had fitted clothes or short clothes, as we did not want to look good for ourselves but wanted to attract men. Men that he always looked down on as he saw them as competition and us picking them over him, never quite getting picked, never quite getting to be the centre of attention. So, he creates a fight, and then he is the centre of attention. If one can’t be famous, at least one can be infamous, right? It is so hard to trust somebody and bear your soul to them when experience has taught you that every mistake will be recorded and held over you. Everything you say and do can and will be used against you at your most vulnerable time because you thought you knew better, you thought you were all grown up, but what you should have really done is whatever you were told cause mother and father always know best. Even better is when I am given something. It feels like a curse rather than a blessing when you are waiting for the other shoe to drop. For example, when I started university, I told my parents I wanted to get a job, and I was told that my job would be to study. They have decided to give me a “salary”, and this is so that I wouldn’t go with every Tom, Dick or Harry for a juice and a piece of cake. Not fiscal responsibility, not a lesson in budgeting, which would have been an elegant way to put it, a way to guard my virtue. I do like a bit of contempt with my control. It just gives it that oomph that makes it exquisite. Also, the extra excitement of a clock starting until I am told that they are sacrificing and giving me money, and I am ungrateful. Nothing in life is free. All we want for our money is your obedience. Funny how something like that translates to being out on a date and the guy talking about his money and how he can change my life, the things he can give me, and me tuning out because I am bored. Accepting anything from anybody means opening the door to their illusion that they control me, and I have no interest in selling my freedom. My dad always had that old school belief that the man is the head of the household, and he gets to call the shots because he is the breadwinner. Even more so when we told him about our partners being helpful or sharing duties, he would say that he should have a talk with them and tell them how they should behave. Imagine raising daughters and wanting their partners to treat them as less than… It is even more obvious when they are so desperate to be with someone, and they are rattling on about how I am the perfect piece in their life puzzle and how I could just move in with them that night, and they miss the most important thing. They have never asked about my hopes and dreams, never questioned how they would fit into my life, but they expect that I will change everything to fulfil their needs. Just another man who is not interested in seeing me, truly knowing me, but thinks I owe happiness. As we grew older, my sister and I knew that we wouldn’t ever want to be with a man like my dad. He always seemed to be loud, trying to impose his will, bullying everybody. I spent a long time thinking things over and talking about everything that he has been, and he has done, and I have released the anger and the trauma of everything from my body. I felt it like a gunshot wound through my chest that released the pain to escape from my body. I feel it still from time to time. The more I look at him, though, the more I begin to pity him. To see him as a weak man, bitter and scared, who always felt abandoned and left behind. First controlled by his mom and then controlled by his wife, trying to scream the loudest and cling to some modicum of control. It pains me greatly that he will never really see me, he will never really know who I am, he will never know my worth, and he will never truly see me shine. I cried for me, and I cried for him. It pains me to see that he will never leave his self-made prison, but I rejoice for myself, for I am free. I am free to make my life beautiful, furnish it with all the things that I haven’t been given before, and it all started with being able to look at myself and saying I love you; you deserve everything that you want, and I will protect you, and I will make every single wish come true. I am my prince on a white horse, I am my knight in shining armour, and I will save myself.

Some things tend to find me at the right time. I was flipping from channel to channel, looking for something to watch, when I stumbled upon the movie The Joy Luck Club . It was about Chinese immigrant women and their Chinese American daughters, highlighting moments in their lives to show the differences in upbringing and mentality. I identified with it and liked it so much that I bought the book the movie was based on, read it, and took it with me when I moved to the UK. It made me look at the relationships between the women in my family, and I found them complicated and full of tension. I was told that before I was born, my gran Elena told my mom that she had helped raise my sister and that now, since they were having a second child, it was my dad’s parents’ turn to help. My gran was always portrayed by my mom as a cold woman who always pushed to get her way, tried to control everything my mom did, and punished her when she disobeyed. She believed that children should only be kissed in their sleep for fear of spoiling them. My gran had come from a big family, and she had to help raise her siblings. They were not a rich family, so she had grown up used to scarcity. I have seen pictures of her and her sisters, and they were all very well put together. She always said that no matter how cheap clothes are, one should always be clean and dressed with care, putting their best foot forward. She seemed impenetrable to me, and she had strong opinions. I would see her talking away and telling my grandfather what to do and how to do it, and my grandad would just look out the window and say, “Yes, dear!” or “You’re right, dear!” while she kept going and going. My dad used to say she could anger even an angel, and the way my grandad would put up with her was a credit to his personality. I always thought she was all talk, but deep down, I never saw her as a mean woman. She would talk, give advice, and try to control everything, but she never really bothered me. My sister went beyond that and completely ignored my gran’s attempts to be stern and demanding. She insisted on spending time with my gran, and they always got on like a house on fire. I remember her picking me up from school and taking me to their house. I loved her dumpling soup and her courgette doughnuts. She made them often because she knew I liked them. She would put croutons in her tea, let them soak, then add a bit of butter and feed them to me. I enjoyed that because it felt like a special thing between Grandma and me. I also enjoyed watching her cook. She wouldn’t let anybody help, but this was her way of allowing me into her little rituals so I could observe her in peace. I could see the care she put into her cooking. Food had to look, taste, and smell good. Food was her love language. She used to take me with her when she visited her friend. We would take a bus and then walk by a park that had magnolia trees in bloom. To this day, when I see magnolia trees, I smile and think of my gran. There were mixed feelings about these visits, though. I loved my gran’s friend. She was my grandad’s niece but my grandma’s age. They used to catch up on everything happening in the family. My aunt Jenica was the only one who would make remarks that shut my gran up instantly. As a child, I found that amazing because everybody else simply obeyed my gran. The downside of these visits was that they lasted for hours, and I would get incredibly bored and restless. That did not sit well with a generation that believed children should be seen and not heard. I enjoyed visiting my gran Elena and grandad Nicu because I could go out and play with the children in front of the building. I would get treats from the other grandmothers because they knew we would all be there. I would enjoy my gran’s cooking and my grandad’s stories. I loved being at my grandparents’ house, but I didn’t quite enjoy being there with my mom and dad. My mom would be tense and closed off. She would spend most of the time looking down and just listening to her mom. They would all go to the kitchen to smoke, and I would be left to play with my sister or watch TV. When we went home, my mom would have a list of things my gran needed help with, especially after she became a widow. My mom would tell my dad what had been discussed and then pass along the list. My dad would already be on edge going in, and now he would get annoyed at the requests. He thought it was ridiculous that he was asked to do things when he didn’t feel he had any choice but to comply to honour my mom’s commitments. My mom saw her mom as unapproachable. She didn’t feel comfortable asking her anything, so she had been closer to my grandad. She could tell him her problems and concerns, and he would give her advice and decide which things were best kept secret from my gran. My gran enforced the rules, and if my mom broke them, she would be insulted and sometimes even beaten. My mom had wanted to go to university, but my gran told her that they couldn’t afford it and that she should get a job. She did and never pursued that goal again. She said her mom rarely praised her but often spoke highly of my mom’s cousin, always comparing them and telling my mom she should be grateful because her cousin was less fortunate. As far as I can remember, there was always a sort of competition for my mom’s attention. Everyone in the house wanted a bit of her time, and everyone felt like someone else was getting more than they were. My mom was the calm parent in the house. Since she couldn’t talk to her own mom, she decided she should talk to her children, and she would also decide which things needed to be hidden from my dad. My sister was born with one of her hands coming out first, like the Statue of Liberty, so the story she kept hearing was that she could have killed my mom. She was also constantly reminded that she cried all the time as an infant and that if she hadn’t been such a difficult baby, my parents would have had a second child sooner. Then I came along—lucky number two—and while I was born quickly and barely cried, all I heard was how I ruined my mother’s figure and how she was never able to recover after having me. She was forever dieting and telling us how unhappy she was with her weight, so it’s no wonder we grew up insecure about ours, regardless of our size. My mom loves music and has quite a good singing voice. I used to ask her to sing different songs to me growing up, and to this day, I listen to music constantly and use it to change my mood, so she definitely passed that love on to me. She had been a Black Sabbath fan when she was young, and even now, when she is cooking, she listens to the rock radio station. She was not one to have me close while she cooked, and she never really taught me how to cook. Every time I wanted to learn, she would say I would have enough of it when I got married. That made things difficult when I moved out on my own and had to teach myself. She helped me with creative projects for school. She had the patience to explain things to me, but she was also the one who compared me to everyone and their grandmother. She was the one who, in a panic, told me that I wasn’t applying myself enough and that I wouldn’t pass my final high school exams. When I did pass and brought up what she had said, she claimed she had never said it. I remember asking my mom to cuddle with me, and after a while, she would say she had had enough and that I should go away. That always felt like rejection. It felt like a repeated moment of being pushed away. I once watched a clip where Teal Swan described a child as being like a doll—taken off the shelf when the parent wants to play and then put back when they are bored. The child needs to eat when they are told to eat, sleep when they are told to sleep, offer company when requested, and disappear when not needed. It sounded painfully accurate. She was closest to my sister, and because she was colder with me, I slowly stopped trying to get close to her. I accepted things as they were. My mom didn’t seem to have many friends—just a few over the years, and they rarely saw each other. We didn’t have people over often. We never had parties or dinners for guests. I never had a birthday party or any celebration outside the family, so even now I feel uncomfortable when people ask if I’m doing anything special for my birthday. I’m simply not used to it being a big deal. I never had sleepovers either. Whenever I asked, my mom would say we needed to renovate the house before we could receive guests. My parents never went to shows, dinners, or vacations, so I was never home alone. When my university friends asked if I wanted to go clubbing, my mom told me that only whores go out after 10 p.m., so I would say I wasn’t feeling well and take a rain check. After I finished university, I started looking for a job. My mom said I should take any job that was offered to me. That didn’t sit right with me, especially since most jobs had long lists of requirements but only offered minimum wage. I kept rejecting them, and my mom panicked and told me I didn’t actually want a job and just enjoyed freeloading. I stuck to my guns and eventually found a job that paid enough for the life I wanted. When I told her, she once again claimed she had never said those things. My first job allowed me to move into a flat owned by my paternal grandmother. There were many things I had to teach myself, but I was free. I could have people over, go out whenever I wanted, and control how much contact I had with my parents. I would watch movies where daughters cried in their mothers’ arms over breakups, and that was never us. I don’t think my mother ever liked any of the men I dated. As soon as I mentioned a fight, she would say she knew he was worthless. My friends were the ones I talked to about those things. They supported me and gave me advice. After my last breakup, I didn’t tell my parents for a month because I couldn’t handle their disappointment on top of everything else. Over time, I got used to talking less and less with my mom about my life. I feel like if I tell her something, it might later be thrown back at me as criticism, so now I just give a news report—stick to the highlights and expect nothing in return. I try to understand her. I try to piece together how she became the way she is. I try to focus on the good things she has done and let go of the bad. In therapy, I was asked if I thought my mother loved me. I said I thought she had enjoyed having us as her children and continued talking. Later, I realised I had never actually answered the question. In another session, I realised why I felt such sadness about my past relationship ending. It wasn’t just losing my partner—I also lost his mother. Since I couldn’t get my emotional needs met by my own mother, I gravitated toward her. She told me I was loved. She celebrated my achievements. She listened to my worries and offered empathy. Losing that made the breakup even harder. My gran died a few years ago, and even now, my mom says my sister had a better relationship with her than she ever did. My sister lived with my gran for several years after her divorce, and despite their fights, they loved each other deeply. As I continue therapy and come to terms with my past, I know I will eventually accept my mom as she is. I can connect the dots logically, but there is still some mourning left to do and some growing pains ahead. I keep being told not to expect anything from my mom, but in my heart, I still hope she might one day be willing to work toward a better relationship. As for my gran, I often think about the amaryllis lilies she used to have. Now I have some in my own house, and every time I look at them, I smile and think of my gran and grandad.

Reality is but a dream. We keep looking for confirmation that something is true, yet everything is shaped by our own perception. If 10 people watch an event, most will give similar yet distinct accounts of it. Each will focus on what resonates and what triggers their own issues; the main action will be similar, but some will leave parts out, and some will notice different details than others. We get told a story, and because that person said it, we take it as fact, but it is only their account of what happened. It is real to them. They feel emotionally connected to their account, and they worked out the narrative to fit with what they believe in and the version of reality they are comfortable with. It goes even deeper when it comes to memory; the state of mind at the time of the event taking place affects what actually gets stored in our memories. I have anxiety, and that produces cortisol. A little cortisol makes you more alert, and you remember more as your body tries to kick in your survival instincts to get you out of trouble. Too much cortisol and you are stuck in the fight or flight response, and with my freeze response, I dissociate; it feels like I leave my body, and everything is happening to someone else. Put on top of that that some of the memories are repressed as they feel so uncomfortable, and they are so painful to think about. Perception is influenced by the past and my hormones; memories are inconsistent and unreliable. Who can you trust if your own mind is not to be trusted? I believed that I had a happy childhood. I believed that we would discuss everything in my family. I believed that my parents had a happy marriage, and it was the type of marriage that I should aspire to. I believed it so strongly that whenever someone tried to tell me otherwise, I dismissed it completely, and I pushed away quite strongly. I thought they had no idea about what they were talking about. This really helped me live my life and helped me tell my story to other people in a relatable way. I have then started to do therapy, and it felt more and more like my childhood is where I need to look into deeper and I need to analyse what happened again. I started reading this book, and from the first page, I started crying my eyes out because it explained word by word everything that I felt as a child, and it made me feel incredibly seen at the same time; it made me feel extremely exposed. This book was called “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents” by Lyndsay C. Gibson, PsyD. As I kept reading, I got to a test, and I thought, “Oh, goody, goody, gumdrops! This should be fun, like one of those Cosmo quizzes”. There were 15 statements that I had to mark as true or false, and when I finished, I flipped the page to see how I did. The next page had this message: “Since all these items are potential signs of emotional immaturity, checking more than one suggests you well may have been dealing with an emotionally immature parent” Ha, interesting… more than one. Sweet, Lord, Jesus! I had 14, so to me that was a clear indication that I was beyond fucked. I had spent some hours in therapy talking about my mom and dad, but there were just bits and pieces relating to my past and different issues. It had been just a situational thing, and I told the stories like they didn’t bother me, just a matter of fact, a clue to a mystery, but this book was looking at them directly, and it was so deeply cutting that it started to take up all of my mental space. The story about my parents and their perfect marriage… My mom met my dad by chance at work. They had gone to the same school, but because of their age difference, they had never met. My mom got a job after high school, and she was visiting a friend at her desk. My dad came in, and they met, and they started dating. Three months later, my dad got a speech from his parents about his intentions, and he got asked what they were since my mom was a great girl. He was told that he should leave her alone if his intentions were not serious. Well, my dad took that to heart, and six months after meeting, they were married. My dad used to say that I should be so lucky to find someone like they found each other, and that he still loves her after so many years and how they walk hand in hand when they go places. When I started to talk to my sister, she started to bring that myth down piece by piece. She had told me that my mom couldn’t really go anywhere for too long. My dad would start calling and asking where she was and when she was coming home. He would make comments and pout when they would get home, and he would make sure she knew he was not pleased. She has now started to not want to go out as much. It is the same routine every single day. Wake up, cook, go to the supermarket, clean, do dishes, watch TV, rinse and repeat. I had made this idea of a good marriage to answer people’s questions, and I had repeated it so many times that I think I started to believe it. Either that or I romanticised the past so I wouldn’t have to think about it, to deal with it. My ex used to tell me that my parents stay with each other because they don’t know any different. I thought he didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t know Romanian, and my parents don’t really speak English, how could he know what he was talking about when he only saw them a week a year? I kept on pushing this thought from my mind until I could see what he saw. Until I was ready to accept the truth of the matter. I could see that as soon as one comes in the house, there is an energy that just makes one be on edge. My dad starts to get attention and talks about what he wants to talk about, even if you want to or not. My mom tries to censure him, and then there is this passive-aggressive tension of things unspoken. From that book, I found that my mother was the rejecting parent, and my dad was the emotional parent. A few more fun quizzes later. I came to understand how their emotions would affect the way that they behaved, and then came the realisation of how that influenced my life through the healing fantasy and the role-self. The role self was that I need to be understanding and kind, to always be dependable and make people happy and the healing fantasy that is that if I achieve this role and I am this person, then people will accept me and love me the way I need to be loved. I saw that my coping style was that of an internalizer, and that I think that another person’s reactions have everything to do with me and how I am and that if I change, maybe things will get better. Let go of who I really am, of my wants and desires and morph into what my parents want me to be. The book did give me hope as it said that it takes an emotional crisis for the healing process to start. That anger is fine, and it helps propel me towards finding my truth and my voice. That crying is fine, and it is a process of letting go and accepting the things that happened in my childhood. I have read these chapters, and I felt the comfort that I was already on my way on this path. I felt that while this book had brought so much pain as it woke me from my fantasy of happiness, it spoke of healing; it also meant that I would have a happy ending. I realised that I didn’t owe anybody else happiness. That I didn’t owe my parents happiness and that I am not responsible for them. They had made their decisions in life, and they have to live with them, and I need to be strong and make mine. I need to live life for myself and find my own happiness. I need to accept that whatever I need to be happy might not be part of my parents' plan, but that true acceptance has to come from me and not them. I learned that I need to stay strong within myself and show myself kindness at every turn. I struggled so much with this issue, and as I was going through everything in my head, it was truly the only thing that I could think about. It consumed my every thought, my every waking hour. I had made so many assumptions about life, friends, emotions, and relationships based on what my parents said or did. I used those dreams of happiness to create a path in life, and now I had discovered that I had been so wrong in my assumptions. If those assumptions were wrong, what else was wrong? I started to analyse everything, and anger about the way things went down came mixed in with incredible sadness that I had deluded myself for so many years. My relationship could have been so much better if only I had had a better start with them. I have become so wrapped up in this that I inflicted it upon other people, and I didn’t think about their emotions because I couldn’t really see beyond what was happening to me. People told me to let it go and get over it, but how could I do that in the blink of an eye when I had only become aware of it recently? I felt that I needed to isolate and continue to go through this. I took responsibility for my energy, which was toxic for people at that time, and I wasn’t being fair. This is the one thing that I really needed to hang on to. I couldn’t hide it anymore, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore, I had to put my energy into it. In trying to understand, I also started to read about transgenerational trauma and see how issues that had not been resolved had been passed down from one generation to the next and that their poor relationships with their parents bore the poor relationship that I had with them. I tried to understand them, I tried to forgive them, I tried to accept that this is who they are, and since they are not willing to deal with their emotions and they don’t see their actions as an issue, I will never get a different response. My mom and dad will never love me the way that I need to. They will never understand me beyond their desires and what they expect of me. My mom told me that she had always thought that I was most like her, and my sister is like her mother-in-law. I thought if I never felt good enough in her eyes, how could she see me as she sees herself? My dad sees himself as like my sister, that she is like him, and they always had it a bit easier in life because of it. My sister feels so far removed from my dad and unloved by him. My therapist’s answer was simple: projection. They identify with us, and they see their own weaknesses in us. They reject the part of us that they don’t like in themselves. They reject the emotions that we have that they don’t want to deal with. I had gone through all of this, and I had to face my real test. I actually had to go home and visit my family. I had this anger in me for them, and I had to just accept it and try to have a good relationship with my family for nine days. The biggest fear was not that I would not be able to hold it in, but that once I am there, I will lose myself again, and all my hard work will be lost. I stayed as calm as I could. I saw how they would try to pull me into the vortex of their emotions, and I resisted getting caught in it.  I could see the cloud of negative energy they surround themselves with, I could see how my sister is pulled into it, and I could feel my anxiety growing. I could feel myself on the verge of a panic attack because of it. I focused on keeping control of my emotions. I separated myself from them when it got too much by either going to a different room or saying I needed to go home. I told them what I needed, and I was very clear about what I accepted in their presence. After I got back home, I was depressed for a week. I had been drained by the experience, and my body needed time to recharge and let go of all the tension I had stored. I realised that it is easier to manage them when I am far away, but it is incredibly triggering whenever I am close to them. My mind goes into attack mode, and I don’t have my full capacity to actually think things through. While I have realised how far I have come, I know that my journey is long and changing patterns that have been in place for so long will take a lot of work. My dad told me that I used to be so calm and peaceful before, but now he finds me so nervous. The truth is that I wasn’t calm, I wasn’t peaceful, I was checked out, I was paralysed, I was telling myself the lies that I needed to tell myself to continue living. I apologised to my ex. He was the one who tipped me off to the truth of the matter, and I felt that he needed to know that he was right, and I was grateful to him for telling me the truth, no matter how hurtful it was. No longer a dreamer. No longer a pretender. I see the truth, and I accept the truth. I struggle with it from time to time. I get pulled back from time to time. I am kind to myself, as much as I can be. I understand that I need to change my view of myself to reflect all the work that I have done and all the progress that I have made. I am not the scared little girl who wanted to be loved desperately because I love myself now. Seeing them for who they are is not a betrayal but a necessity so that I can free myself of their preconceptions of me and release my true self. A part of me wants to confront them. Tell them how everything felt for me, and despite the fact that I know that nothing will change, and they will not take responsibility for anything, I feel that I need to do this for myself. That nothing will ever be the same, and I don’t want it to be the same. Another part knows that I need to let the anger go and that I need to choose the path of forgiveness. Be kind to them even when they try to be mean. I need to stay strong within myself and not waver in my resolve. I don’t know what dreams may come, but I do know that my eyes are now wide open.

Isn’t it funny how we see other people’s problems so clearly? I kept on looking at people and thinking that they had abandonment issues. In my head, the issues were very obvious whenever it was a matter of somebody coming from a family where the parents divorced, and the parents had remarried, had other children, and spent more time with their new family and did not show up for their children from their previous marriage. Also, in families where one of the parents had left them or had died. I could see them so clearly, and I tended to gravitate towards these people. Looking at my dating life, most of the people I dated came from these types of families. It activated my need to save them and give them stability. Well, imagine being in the middle of a therapy session and the therapist saying: “The woman that you have become needs to comfort the abandoned girl you used to be.” I was taken aback, and I didn’t really know why she would be saying that. After the session, I kept on thinking about it, and I couldn’t really understand what she meant. Surely, others had this problem but me? Both my parents have been together and married for over 46 years now. How could I have abandonment issues when my parents were physically with me? As one does, I went to Google for answers. I kept reading, and the more I read, the more I could see how that would be me. I understood how those emotions came to be and how they affect my life. The first episode that came to mind was my maternal grandfather’s death. He had been such a great influence in my life. My grandmother would pick me up from school, and she would take me to her house. There, my grandfather would just happen to have an already prepared grapefruit with sugar. He always said that he had prepared it for himself, but he would always give it up for me. He had been in the army, and he had been singing as backup at a variety theatre; he knew loads of stories and songs that he would perform for me whenever I had to take my afternoon nap. He was in his seventies, and I was 7 or 8; sometimes he would fall asleep before me. I would sneak out of bed and proudly tell Grandma that I put Grandad to sleep. I can remember he was so calm, and nothing really seemed to get him upset. He felt safe, and he always had time for me. He saw me, and he made space for me. He never told me how I should be. I never felt judged or constricted, and I felt that when he was with me, he was truly with me, and I was the centre of attention. I would love to do errands with him and go buy bread. We would always get an extra one that we would eat on the way home. To this day, my favourite smell in the world is that of freshly baked bread. Unfortunately, my grandad died when I was nine, and it left an impact on all of us. My grandma felt alone and was crying about how he had left her, my mom felt like she lost her best friend, my dad felt he lost a mentor and a father; he had left a huge gap behind that we didn’t quite know how to fill. The events around the death were retold, but the emotions around it were never discussed, not unless it was my mom and dad talking about how they felt when they found out certain things. A big change came at the funeral. I was crying on the day, and I can remember my mother saying,” Stop crying. Just stop crying!” My dad tried to comfort me and get me out of the way, and then we were left in the house, as it was considered that seeing the burial might be too much. No daily grapefruit after that. No stories or songs for nap time, more than that, my dad took over on that side, and he would become extremely triggered by my not going to bed. I got spanked for it. I would essentially cry myself to sleep. It didn’t feel safe anymore. I didn’t quite feel seen or understood. Everything screamed that I am not important. Another thing that stood out was being around while my parents were fighting. My dad always felt that he competed with his daughters, and when something happened, he felt that my mom was always taking our side or trying to hide things from him in some sort of conspiracy against him. After some fighting, he would state that he would pack up and leave her with her daughters, after which he would storm out of whatever room we were in, and he would go into his room to sulk. Because this happened so often, it brought up feelings of shame that it was because of us that our parents were fighting, and one day, my dad might actually leave. My sister and I were sent to the countryside to stay with my dad’s parents during the summer. We didn’t really like to go. If my mom’s parents were calm but stern, my dad’s parents were troubled, and there was always tension. There were not a lot of children to play with. There were minimal comforts like the ones we had in Bucharest. The store was miles away. They had a black and white TV and only two channels because this was a Romanian village in the nineties. We were not able to talk to our parents because there were no mobile phones, and our grandparents didn’t have a landline in the house; we would not see them for long stretches of time. I kept on saying that I didn’t want to go, and my dad said that I needed to go because I was anaemic, and this is where I eat super healthy, and everything is fresh, and I can gain weight. Now, fair enough, I have good memories about going into the garden and just eating fresh vegetables straight from the source. I would climb trees and pick fruit. My gran had dogs, pigs, chickens, and ducks, and I could play with all of them. I remember going to my dad’s cousin and getting fresh honey because he had beehives. I would go camping with my grandad as he was protecting his corn crops from wild boars. We would have campfires, and he would tell us stories. But the fact remained that my parents weren’t there, and I had no way of going back, and they said it was for my own good. Recently, I mentioned to my mom about my being anaemic. She seemed puzzled as to what I meant, as this was such a big thing in my childhood, and my dad kept on mentioning it, so I told her about the bloodwork that I remembered, the stories and being sent away. She just shrugged it off that those were just my yearly bloodwork, and I was not anaemic. It just truly feels like history is getting rewritten, and I just can’t understand if I am misremembering or if I made it up to be more than it was in my head. I can’t tell if I were lied to just to comply and go, not that I would have had a choice anyway, or if this is just my mom thinking that I am trying to get attention by appearing feeble. My sister and I were talking, and the question arose: “What is worse? For the parent to leave and never come back, or for the parent to be in the house and reject you at every turn?” We have seen how it is by example when a parent leaves, so, from what we know, while one has the same experiences of abandonment and feeling unworthy, they can go through the five stages of grief and accept that the person is not coming back. In our case, we have been stuck in the loop because we had been given some hope that if we behaved a certain way, we might be accepted, and then it was pulled away from us, and we would start the process all over again. We got in this loop of feeling that we need to hide parts of us, people, please, try to avoid conflict. We looked at who our parents were as well. My grandad was always leaving my dad and my gran and being absent for days, either having affairs with other women or drinking. My mom felt abandoned as well because her mom was quite cold. Their parents' issues became our parents’ issues, and they passed them on to us. Having this start from my family started to create a sense of distrust in others and their intentions. I started to think that once people saw who I really was, they would leave me. That people don’t really like me, and they are only saying that so they can manipulate me. It didn’t help that I had friends whom I thought I could trust, and they chose to disclose my secrets to others or stab me in the back when they could. I started to monitor for signs of them preparing to leave me, and I took every sign of them distancing themselves as a sign of not liking me anymore. It didn’t help that my dad kept on repeating that one can’t trust people and that it is only family you can trust, and people will take advantage of you at any chance they get. It just felt like, regardless of how much I tried, I just couldn’t create connections that were deep and meaningful. Look at my friend group, and none of them is childhood friends or friends from university. My oldest friends tend to be people that I have met after I started work, after I moved away from home, and I could have the relationships that I wanted to have without my parents’ feedback attached or their influence. Last but not least on the list is romantic relationships. These are an absolute minefield for my abandonment issues. I hate being single because I am afraid to be alone, and then one starts dating, but I don’t trust anybody because my track record and my experience have shown that everybody leaves, and that men will say how special I am, how they don’t want to hurt me, and then they do. I look for people to save, and once I start to help them heal their issues and they become better versions of themselves, the relationship starts to go South, and they leave me believing that I was good enough when they were broken, but now that they are better, I am not good enough, and they are going to go find better. It is very much a Good Luck Chuck situation. What I found out because of therapy is that I am what they call a self-fulfilling prophecy. Is she a fortune teller? Is she a witch with a hump and a raven? Alas, no. I recognise and ignore red flags like a champ, and not wanting to be alone, I instantly look away, and I get attached to the person. I then start gaslighting myself, and I think that despite everything this person shows me, if I put enough time and effort, they will change and they will love me and be the person that they should be, and I start putting them on a pedestal. While this is happening, in the back of my head, I still keep the idea that this is not going to work out, and they are going to leave me. I also keep that person at arm’s length and prepare for a breakup at any time, thus not really allowing for a true connection. And after a while, the inevitable happens, the relationship breaks down, and they leave; the prophecy is fulfilled. I then take this as confirmation that I am not worth it. This is something that has taken me a lot of time and energy to understand and see how it all flows. This is the part that I struggle most with, and I am most vulnerable still. As far as I can tell, the abandonment issue is the root of all evil, and everything else comes from this. There are so many things that came together to create this, enforce it, and maintain it. There are so many things that I refused to accept, and there are so many things that I didn’t see clearly and misrepresented to myself. I wish I could just say that I just read a book, then I hugged myself, and it is all better, but that is just not true. There are so many aspects that interconnect and work together to make up my core beliefs and the makeup of who I am and what I have become. There are decades of me believing these things, thoughts becoming beliefs and those beliefs becoming patterns of behaviour, that it will take some time to rebuild everything that I am. The start is to understand my story and how it affects my present. Accepting everything that was and see what caused it, grieve for it, accept it, and let it go. Learning to disconnect from my emotions and manage them correctly, analyse them and see where they come from, I can change behaviours. The road is long, but I will get there one step at a time. This is the only way that I can live the life that I want, have the fulfilment that I have always longed for and truly belong. It is scary, but one deep breath and away we go…

It was so hard when I first started therapy. That one hour felt so long when I initially thought of it. I couldn’t imagine what I could say to this stranger, since usually I was at a loss for words when meeting someone new. I entered the room, sat, and looked at this person who would assess me, but didn’t feel judgmental at all. Her presence was calm, and despite her not speaking a lot, I felt safe and secure. Over quite a few months, this person would listen to me and being seen and understood was so addictive that all the things that had been hidden for the longest time were coming out of me, and I couldn’t hold them back anymore.  It would seem that it was not a matter of not having something to say, but a lack of people to listen. In the therapeutic space, not only was I contained and all my feelings were accepted, but I was supported in feeling them. I had moved from not knowing what to talk about to not being able to stop talking, and then moved into deciding in which direction we are going to go with discovering who I was. At the end of the day, coping with different situations was a matter of skill as far as I could understand it. I had always been a person who introspects. Sitting with myself and analysing a problem was my go-to, but now I had a sounding board to help me identify flaws in my reasoning and what I still needed to learn. It is very Coraline-like in a sense, except the “other mother” was supportive, gave good advice and didn’t shame me when I made a mistake. Even physically looked quite similar to my own mother, to be honest. It wasn’t conscious at first, but now that I am thinking back on it, it was clear as day, and maybe that is what helped us connect so easily. We started by meeting every week, and I got permission to feel absolutely miserable and evolved to meeting every two or three weeks so I could present my research and my progress. It was very much an opportunity to right the course if adjustments were needed. It seemed that everything had a perfect rhythm, but the circumstances made it so that our partnership had to come to an end. I had been explained why it had to be this way, and I had been allowed to adjust to the reality that was to come. It was very scary to think that I had found a safe space, and now I am losing it, and I might need to go back to a period of scarcity. I had hoped that I could get recommendations for other therapists, but I was told that it is too personal a relationship for that. I must find the person who was right for me. When I felt strong enough, I let her know that I was ready to step into the world and she could let go of my hand. For a time, I was just fine. I was able to have a routine and fit all of the healthy habits that I needed for managing myself effectively and efficiently into my way of dealing with life. I was stronger and more stable than I had ever been. All was looking up until the email came that we all had to go back into the office. Not for the time that we had been promised of three out of five days, but we would have to be back four out of five and as soon as possible. All of this for the culture. I found myself back in the office feeling alone and disconnected. Exposed in the middle of a room full of people who were not communicating and connecting. I felt that we were alone together. All of us were hyperaware of the door opening, meerkats in corporate headsets. All of us were alert to every little change, and the days felt long. We were allowed a period of adjustment before fully ramping up to four days a week, but it felt incredibly hard to be there. I felt drained, I found myself bursting into tears at the end of the day and rewarding myself all the way home, knowing I would have to go again in a couple of days. I didn’t know how I could be so weak. I had gone to the office for five days a week, I had been resilient, and now, I was barely able to sit in this place with people I  had known for years. I felt like I had no friends in the room. Experiencing my emotions in real-time made me unable to cope. I tried to find another therapist to help with this new challenge, and I have been told that I should ask my GP for a referral. I set up the appointment, discussed the situation, and for once, I received real feedback about the state of affairs. I was told that, despite the fact that my problems were real, they would not be a priority for a system that was struggling. That I would probably have my file sitting in a pile for a couple of months, and then I would be refused. I was then sent to speak to charities and see what they could do. I looked online and found a few and called them. I was told that they could do two to four sessions. Which is something, but it is barely enough time for someone to understand the problem, let alone find a way to address the situation. I decided that there is no point in wasting their time.   Next up, I tried to contact my Employee Assistance Program provider. I called them, and I opted to do the six sessions rather than have individual conversations. That meant they had to outsource to another company that would match me with a therapist. Asking for help is one of the hardest things, and this has tested me as I had to chase them and advocate for myself. I did have the support of my mental health first aider, and he has given me strength because once again, I was not managing with everything alone. With this new therapist, I have had to follow a different format. We would assess my situation every two sessions, and she has brought about two revelations. One was that there is still an aura of mourning in me, which was bizarre because I was very clear where I stood with my ex; I stood with it, and it brought the revelation that it was not mourning the loss of him but the loss of his family that had also been mine. Their love and their support, the parts that were missing in mine that they fulfilled, were gone, so I didn’t have only one breakup; I had multiple little ones to boot. Parts of my life that I cherished, and I will not be able to keep because of him. The second one was that while life might fill my glass, I am unable to effectively empty it until my cup overflows, and I end up burnt out. Valuable information, but alas, our time was ending, and when I had to go through my final evaluation, I was doing worse than I was in the beginning. Not her fault, just my health is also becoming a factor and adding to the hardships. Her final questions were if I was likely to take time off, to which I said that I would, but not stress leave, just annual leave. I assume that it was very much against her goals because she seemed upset and disappointed with my replies. Again, here I was without a therapist but facing a new concept. MENTAL HEALTH PRIVILEGE! Some people can maintain their positive attitude towards life with ease.  They know how they can manage hard situations. They know that if they talk about their feelings, they will not be looked at as weak or seen as a liability. I have to fight my demons every day before I get out of bed, and, exhausted, I have to go and face the same challenges as everybody else, but not with the same skills. While I am not starting from a good mental health position, I  realised that I did have privilege, though. I had the money to access mental care professionals on my own. One of my friends was doing therapy, and I asked if I would be able to do sessions with her as well. As that was not possible, as it would interfere with my friend’s process, I received a recommendation, and thus, I would switch from Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to Jungian psychoanalysis. While CBT deals with the conscious mind and looks at patterns in behaviours to help navigate situations, Jungian Psychoanalysis looks at both the conscious and the unconscious mind and the integration of them to further understand oneself. It looks at dream analysis, and it delves into early childhood emotions in order to find the source of emotions. When I first heard about dream analysis, my first reaction was that I would not be able to do any of that because I don’t dream, but I do love props. I bought myself a dream journal so Ican document my dreams, and a dream dictionary to help me interpret them. Such a lovely treat to look beyond the veil and read the energies, just like tarot and see if it is trauma or just a wild imagination. As soon as I thought it, I had the wildest dreams. I kept on dreaming about keys, losing them, finding them, receiving and for some strange reason, I kept on dreaming about rabbits. On meeting my new therapist, I found her to be a comforting presence as well, also resembling my mother, but a younger version of her this time.  This version was about my age, and she was a version of me that knew how to deal with life and what comes up. It did feel like she was the cast member that joins in the sixth season, and I worried that she wouldn’t understand me. I was trying to convey years of sessions into an hour. To explain where I am, who I am and how far I have travelled. I was excited to start this new journey. I felt that it was coming at the right time. This change in strategy was going to propel me further on my way. I would be able to talk and dream my way to accepting who I was and see how I came to be that way. Since in the first part, I got to know who I am, in this second chapter of my life, I would perhaps learn how to love myself and be comfortable living in the confines of my mind.

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.