"Remember, in
the next decade you’ll probably get married, buy your first house and have a
baby – isn’t that exciting?!” one of my friends gushed to me whilst I YMCA’d my
way through celebrating my birthday.
Instead of
finding this exciting, I found this terrifying, and this was only intensified
when someone quipped up that there was only X amount of days left of this decade. Similarly to how people
make New Year’s Resolutions whilst in a blind panic thinking back on their
previous year, I started to do this for the previous decade and felt my knees
go weak.
How on Earth
was I supposed to get married, buy a house, excel in my career and have a baby within the next ten
years?? Was this possible? Is this a thing a lot of people did and of which I
was blissfully unaware? Before you could say “internal body clock”, I was looking at ways to freeze my eggs
whilst gripping a glass of red wine in my free hand (I saw a report that said
that this would definitely reduce my risk of a heart attack, so props to me for
future proofing my heart).
Couple the
above with a failure in securing a promotion this week at work and a breakdown
of a few other things and I found myself sat in the bath mulling over my
shortcomings of my 26 years of existence so far and the whole thing was a cess
pit of doom and gloom, exasperated by the shoulder injury I’d managed to pick
up dancing a little too enthusiastically to the YMCA – but enough is enough.
Instead of
focusing on the things that I don’t have, I have decided to rather smugly start
my New Year’s resolution early, and smugly call them something incredibly witty
of the same name of something that I also do not have – 2020 vision.
1. Buy a house / be ready to buy a house
Now this actually isn’t that hard for me to do since I have the
savings put aside and ready, but I need to get my health in order first (i.e
survive and recover from major surgery that may or may not paralyse me
depending on how good my surgeons are feeling on the day), and that is taking
priority right now.
I’m not an interior designer / a DIY guru / a strong packer
and mover, so the thought of designing an entire house and not changing it 10
days later because I got bored of it is somewhat alarming for my indecisive personality.
There’s also the problem of security – several years ago in
uni I watched a series called Stalker and I’ve been terrified about personal
security ever since. Do you know how much a high spec security system costs for
a two storey house??? A lot. A lot I tell you. It’s why I need a dog to protect
me at all cost whilst I hide in bed with a baseball bat at the slightest noise
outside.
2.
Find
a new role
This is more for me
to grow as a person (as clichéd as it sounds, since I’m not a plant or a small
human growing in to a big human), but recently I’ve realised it’s something
that I definitely want to do at work.
When I was younger,
I always wanted to be either a vet (didn’t work, couldn’t stand the thought of
putting animals down and I went in to mourning when my goldfish died), or in
the army (didn’t work because of the above, still bitter over this to this
day).
Neither of those
worked out, and I went to uni and got a good degree and came across a job that I
absolutely loved and spent 2 years cracking on with it and being the human
equivalent of a sponge. Now it’s got to the point where I think my life needs
some big changes to shake me out of my comfort zone from which I have comfortably
been sitting for the past year or so.
3.
Get
back to doing things I love
Now that I’ve
choked down enough clichés to feature in a self-help book , I’m ready to move
on to the important stuff.
Recently I have
stopped doing very much of anything, through a combination of exhaustion,
stress and a complete lack of motivation to get up in the mornings and ‘seize
the day’. I’m slowly starting to set myself mini goals and mini successes to
hit, some of which are; go to the gym
twice a week (maybe 3 if I can), read one book a month, pick up krav maga, stop
eating the same old shit and browse some cookbooks, listen to daily podcasts on
uplifting content only.
All of these things
are very small, but I’ve been like a fish out of water recently with the
motivation of a stone which been thrown around a few times and left to sit in a
muddy puddle for a little while.
4.
Grieve
Probably quite a
sombre one to end on, but something I’m trying really hard to adopt and adapt
to moving forward – grieving.
My nan passed away
in May and I think the grief still hangs over me every single day. When I didn’t
get the role I went for in work, I instinctively went to ring her and then had
to skip out of my address book when I realised that she wouldn’t be picking up
the phone to me again.
There’s not just
grief for my nan either, there is so much grief that I have never expressed in
a way other than something entirely destructive to me, and it’s something which
I’m working on with the help of a very nice therapist and lot of writing in
nightly journals to try and kick in to something meaningful – we’ll see if that
works.