Wednesday 6 October 2010

On the brink...Part Three


Hum, so here we are at Part Three ~ are you sitting comfortably? Oh go on then, put the kettle on and make yourself a nice steaming hot cup of tea ~ I won’t start without you ;-)

If you have been a regular reader of this blog (and if you have, thank you for sticking with me!), I’m sure you can’t help but have noticed how I never seem to be ‘in balance’. I’m either up or down and very rarely ambling along the much more comfortable middle road. I tell you, it gets very tiring, all this up and down lark. Mind you, I have lived with depression for a number of years now and I really must point out that I am waaaay better than I used to be, believe it or not! It can’t be denied, though, that I am like a butterfly; I flit about from one thing to another, landing here, there and everywhere but never resting in one place long enough to find out what it’s really like there. I am continually looking for the next thing which, of course, means that I am trying to live my life in the future.

This, then, is another change I must make in order that my life can be more grounded in the ‘now’. After all, ‘now’ is the only place where we can truly live; anything else is simply a fantasy. Of course, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have dreams or make plans for the future. But we cannot recapture our ‘now’, nor can we change our past. If we don’t live as much in the present as we possibly can, then we are losing precious time that we can never hold in our hands again ~ EVER!

To be honest, this is a somewhat tricky change for me. I spend so much time making, and re-making, plans for the future that life just slips by without me having taken much of an active part in it at all! Plans and lists seem to have become a mini obsession ~ but what’s the use of making plans and lists that are never acted upon? It just wastes more of that precious time, of which we do not have an infinite supply…..and neither do we know how much we have allotted to us. Madly, I have squandered even more of that precious time wallowing in self-pitying regrets about how much time I have wasted!

So it’s high time I got a grip! Making and re-making plans and lists is simply another way of avoiding living my life. It has enabled me to keep myself locked away from the world in my ‘safe haven’, even though I’ve not been truly happy ~ or even comfortable, if I am honest ~ in there. It’s time to let myself out and join the real world. Not only that, it’s also time I started being my true self, being the woman I want to be ~ doing what I want to do, wearing what I want to wear, presenting my face to the world rather than attempting to make myself conform to one particular thing or another.

You see, as well as my plans and lists mania, I have a companion for it: trying to fit myself into conventional ‘boxes’! (This drives a dear friend of mine up the wall!). So I will attempt to fit myself into a particular dress style, say, or hairstyle, or make-up style, or home décor style…..Well, I’m sure you get what I am saying :-) Thus far, I haven’t actually found any one ‘style’ which comfortably fits me ~ surprise, surprise! I guess it’s time to acknowledge that, actually, I simply have varied and eclectic tastes with regard to every aspect of me and my life ~ I should therefore learn to live with that, and be happy and content ;-)

This change, then, has the exciting potential to replace my feelings that life is fraught and anxious with the far nicer thought that actually, it can be both peaceful and more fun :-)
See you at Part Four.....

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