How are Things?

Tag: love

  • Monday 6th October 2025

    So, I am back in the somewhat sagging saddle. The charm that is work is the main priority for the moment but I am going to make something of this other side of myself. So I need to devote time, and passion, and interest in this. But that means staying up past 11, when I have been awake since 5am.

    So what? Did anyone say it was going to be easy? No, not a single one.

    But my life has been a series of wrong moves, brought about by a need to ‘make something of myself’. I need to find a pathway of accord, one that brings a new level of peace, rather than another dust covered thirst-inducing road that is empty of any meaning at all. I want flow, not force.

    Today I was back in it, exercising, showering, work. My context is off, though, I don’t recall the things that seemed so important. I met with my man from an old time, and I was aware that I had thought of him after our last conversation. No, that’s not true. I had dreamt of him. I dreamt of my loneliness ending. That’s not a euphemism, I dreamt that I was no longer lonely. I woke up aware that I was lonely.

    But the idea of a relationship is a horror.

    I am going to write up some notes. And then I am going to bed.

  • Tuesday 30th September 2025

    I returned to work this morning.

    I’d been away for nearly seven days. My return was marked by absolutely no-one, except for a single colleague who threw a ‘oh, hello, welcome back!’ over her shoulder. I went into my office and threw out the week old coffee from the coffee machine, and got on with it. Remember, you are nothing to these people, and they would not remember your name if you left tomorrow. My own direct line manager has said nothing to me.

    My son is equally the same; the food is prepared and the daily life continues on, so I’m the best ever. My goal as a parent is for my worth and importance in his life to become smaller and smaller, and my life needs more than that.

    So I am setting a goal. I am going to create a life that has worth to me and where I am able to create something I consider important to me. It will be self-directed and it will be based on self expression and creativity. I will be working much, much harder than I am right now, and I will get there.

    Tomorrow, we start.

  • Monday 25th August 2025

    My son is starting secondary school. He is going to walk to school from now on. I am seeing him grow up and become more and more mature. It is both a joy and a sorrow.

    Awful colleague who is working in another unit is off on sick leave. I have no doubt it is because of a capricious nature rather than anything else.

    And in my head is the beginning of a story….

  • Monday 18th August 2025

    Nighttime. My son sleeps. Satie’s Gymnopedies 1 plays. The cat is sleeping beside me. I’m so worn out from being responsive to every living thing around me I dread the presence of another.

    Yesterday we came home from a visit with my 84 year old father. He has a new cat, a 4 month old kitten, that he has no idea how to treat. He has given it no toys, and shook it when it scratched him.

    He is a person who cannot give care, only accept it from others. He waited until my son and I had gone to bed (after I cooked, cleaned, tidied, etc), then proceeded to play erotica at such a loud volume (“HE TOOK OFF MY DRESS AS I PANTED WITH JOY”) I could hear it from the floor below. The following morning he told me over breakfast that I was fat .

    On the way back up the cat threw up on the car, making my son hysterical. Then, as we were nearly home, the cat defecated on the back seat, an event that horrified her as much as anyone else. It also meant I couldn’t rest. In 77 degrees I had to pull out the carpet cleaner and get to it, then wash it all out in the bath, then wash the bath. Then empty luggage, clean the cat of vomit, see to my son, and then rest. Only to discover we were out of milk, so I had to go out at 9.30pm again and get some.

    Today, thank goodness, I had a session with my counsellor. She’s been away and I’ve been away, and so it had been awhile. After speaking to her I felt some of the knot in my stomach and in my shoulders go down somewhat, but it is hard to keep my nervous system in check. My son flares up at everything at present, and there isn’t enough hyper-vigilance on the planet to keep him or me going. I wish I had the energy to cry, but that would mean feeling the pressure had come to a conclusion, and that is not yet the case.

  • Tuesday 5th August 2025

    How to live a good life is a question almost tired, it has been so explored. But for me, the rebirth/requestioning that is taking place is so new, and so unexplored, that really asking it is not a failure.

    If I was to meet myself in five years, and was to find I was living a perfect life, what would I find? A healthy body, exercised and with no problems or stresses. A mind happy and joyful, again capable and with skills, still willing to learn. And a spirit in touch with compassion, aware of the remarkable and the spiritual, connecting with others and with a greater good.

    To have joy, one must work.

    A healthy body can only be arrived at by exercise, regular and routine. So I will have to go swimming and weight lifting several times a week.

    To have a happy mind, I need to take on study and learning. I need to take up a new skill, or skills, I need to practice new disciplines. I also need to take up mental discipline; perhaps Stoicism, though without the frequent foray into a masculinity that romanticizes the hermitic life. (Come at me bro!)

    A spiritual life is one that thinks of others even when it is not necessarily in one’s first interests.

    So lazy! I have more to write and it is so late, and still I dawdle!

    Today I saw my business coach again, and we spoke for an hour and a bit. I left with a notepad covered in notes, but a summation would, should, include;

    Research a particular business topic that will help me guide my team.

    • Rethink the problem and the dialogue surrounding it.
    • Reclaim the space of the problem and add my own successes to it; in some areas of work I have made huge progress, I need to create that energy to this area of work.
    • How do we create a climate of safety for our team?
    • And also, I am responsible, not guilty. I need to take breaks, set boundaries, take the time to learn, and to work well, not more.
    • I need to communicate, and to have the deep fear of not being worthy, of having no right to be here, fade away. Like a smoker needs to examine the emotion before the impulse to smoke, I need to examine my own self doubt before giving into it.
    • I have for some topics passion, intelligence, and am willing to give real support, at times I am almost an evangelist. That is what I should bring to work.
    • Spock is a thousand times better than Kirk (but you already knew that).

    Dear friend, thank you for reading my late night ramblings. I will continue tomorrow to examine these fruits of my thoughts.

  • Monday 4th August 2025

    It is August, already. I have found that, as my own cognition improves, I’m drawn more and more to the mental structures of rationality. I am reading the Glass Bead Game, listening to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, rereading the Stoic principles.

    The positive or negative thing about such pleasant structures is their supposed ease of access. Here, says the Universe, is a method of being Rational/Logical/Stoical, or whatever term is appropriate. Now you can be Rational/Logical/Stoical. Never once does Rationality appear to say, sorry, this is not for you. It does not have any layers that are inscrutable, or beyond you. It merely provides a method, and away you go.

    To use it daily, is to question both the data I take in, and the technique I use to examine it. It means that I am forced to move so slowly over material facts like a glacier taking over a new piece of material; I have to take in the fact, then correctly use the technique with regards to it.

    I wanted to take in and consider the next five years. My son will be 18 by then, and I’ll be 57. Considering that it always takes longer to reach a goal or target than you think, and that cognitive bias is a factor nearly impossible to avoid, setting small targets seems sensible. It is also sensible when you consider the destruction to the West, and to the area North of Africa; the world is going to look very different in five years.

    More on this tomorrow.

  • Thursday 31st July 2025

    If you’re reading this, you are probably imaginary. No one is reading this; the stats remain flatlined, like the heart readout of a patient in a TV ER show. “I’m sorry, Doctor … we did all we could.” So you reading this, are all in my head. A busy bespectacled professional, hoisting a leather notebook out of a satchel, wondering how my day went today. A mom with the sound of happy children coming from another room. A wise old woman, long silver hair in plaits, patchwork quilt to work on as my words go on, a view of old trees outside the window.

    The last day of July. Here comes the commencement of the march towards Autumn, and what I suspect will be a very hard winter for the world. How has my July been, and this rare, unique time that I now exist in? My son is away from the house, with his father and the man I do not like to think of, not least as my ex-husband. I get more than four hours sleep. I exist in a schedule of my own making. I am rested. Unrushed, for me.

    I think that it has taken me days to get to this state, where my pre-frontal cortex is alert enough to contemplate and reflect properly. I need to use this time to think, to really think, and to remind myself of who I am. Who I want to be.

    There is an art to strategy, to ruminating, and it is about time I got back to it. I should sit in the back of the cave and think for a while, the choice to do so won’t be given to me forever.

    One last thing to think tonight; going without sleep makes you stupid, upset, and unable to plan. Get more sleep.

  • Monday 28th July 2025

    I feel an awareness of anticipatory sadness; tomorrow the 29th marks two important anniversaries.

    It was the day I and my son were evicted from our home.

    And it was the anniversary of my wedding day.

    The two days are very far apart, as you might imagine. My wedding day was probably a day that saw a lot of people laughing at me. I was older than the average bride. And fatter, too. I can only guess at the sniggering my attempts at ‘blushing bride’ might have inspired. One thing that made the day particularly hard was that my mum was very, very sick. She had Early Onset Alzheimer’s and on the day wasn’t able to be there; in fact, I’m not sure she knew who I was.

    It is really hard to remember that. So much of that day was hard, and sad, and a struggle and I, I don’t know how to say all of it and keep going tomorrow morning.

    So I might leave that go, with just the comment that it is in itself a novel of sadness.

    And the eviction happened last year. My by then ex-husband left so much junk behind that I received a furious phone call that evening. I was shell-shocked and brutalized getting to my family home. They were so angry with me over the amount of junk he had left for them that they threw out all the things they had agreed to keep until my own sale closed. I saved what I could, it cost me hundreds, but there was so much lost; mementos, things from my son’s childhood, Christmas decorations…

    There had been a little mechanical teddy bear that read The Night Before Christmas. She had been exactly the thing my son loved each Christmas. And I lost her, and she got thrown out on a skip and forgotten, when I loved her so much.

    I got through all of last year with just grit and putting up with things. But somehow when I think of that bear, which I must have loved, I can’t but cry. They threw her out with a sense of anger, of disgust, and she was innocent of all of it.

  • Friday 25th July 2025

    It’s Friday. I made it. I got through the interviews, and the meetings, and the work, and taking care of my son, and now it is Friday. Today, my son went to spend two weeks with his father, and I will get to sleep.

    His father lives with his parents, and has since we broke up, which was in 2021. He exploded our lives with viciousness and resentment; he had in fact been doing that for years, but had never pointed it at my son. It was an ordeal for me that had been going on for the best part of a decade.

    But then he did it to my son.

    My son. He was his father, but he was/is my son. I took care of him, I fed him, I worked from 5am during Covid so I could take of him, I dealt with all the schools. I was the parent. My then husband was also in the house.

    When he did that to my son he screamed at him, yelled at him, then walked out of the room as calm as a swiss knife returned to its slot, leaving a terrified child and myself in freeze/fawn mode, but aware that something was very wrong.

    I am not going to talk about that tonight.

    It is years later. He still lives with his parents, a situation I approve of as at least I know there are two other sane people in the house. I will speak to him every night on the phone. It’s alright. It’s all alright.

    He will be out of the house for two weeks. I will work, work out, and get to cry a lot. I will get to think about myself for a bit, and just… rest. The music can change tempo, be slower, kinder, more reflective.

    You know you have lived a life not many would chose when the idea of being alone is so utterly restful and kind, so peaceful!

    Peace, just peace.

    Good night all.

  • Wednesday 23rd July 2025

    Right, well, here we go. No jazz concepts to calm the soul tonight my lovelies.

    My son has special needs. He can’t spend his summer at Summer camps as so many places won’t cater to him and he thinks they are rubbish in any case. So, there is a scheme where you can hire a qualified person to come to your home and take care of him, for a maximum of 40 hours over the total summer. It is a tiny thing but it is there. You fill in a form, you send it off, you get approved, you’re good. My son has a favorite person who has come to us several summers in a row, and it was all going like clockwork.

    She asked me today about the form, and I should have received confirmation way back in June about it. And I didn’t. I hunted through the items in my inbox, and on my desk, and true to form, there was the fubbing form untouched in the envelope his school had sent it home to me. I think I got it late April but maybe May, and had all of that month to send it in and then June as well. And I ruddy well forgot!

    I now owe this woman three figures that she has more than earned and I have to hand it over straight away, as in, tomorrow. How can I be so stupid? My first reaction in such moments is that I’ve discarded the right to live, I’m so stupid. And I have no one else to blame!

    There was a dreadful moment last year, after we were evicted and living in a city center flat, where I let getting the electricity set up go too long. It was absolutely my fault, I just let weeks go by and didn’t do it. Then they shut us off, and I had to get it back on pronto. It meant paying a reconnection fee, and dinners for my son in McDonalds. I was lucky, I still had a membership fee at the gym so we could go for swims, take hot showers, lunch in town… I was privileged. But it was completely unnecessary, just being too delicate to deal with the realities of life! Lying in the dark that night, I felt that a lesson of life had been shown to me; suffer the pain of practicalities or suffer a greater pain in their absence.

    And yet here we are again! Things sliding off me like algae off the side of a stagnant pond; why am I so stupid?! Why?

    I am supposed to be amazing everyone at work regarding my marvelous skills, and I’m honestly wondering if I should be here at all. What a waste of flesh!