4 years

6th March, 2018

Well I had other ideas for today’s blog, but Facebook reminded me that today 4 years ago I was recovering at home, supervised by my hubby working from home, after a VERY long afternoon/night in the emergency department having finally come to the crunch point of my nervous breakdown.

It was the first day of many days off work: 6th March 2014 to 22nd July 2015.

It felt long!

It felt like it would never to over, that life would just trickle by forever. Me at home, on my own, barely able to fill the hours of the day, just dragging along until the next…what? Hour, day, week, year?

After 18 years of full time school; 4 years of full time study plus part time work; an intern year of full time work and study; and 4 years working full time (apart from a period of 9 day fortnights during 2013 for health/stress reasons, and a brave if futile attempt to get back to work and save my job by dragging myself 2 days a week to work in the outpatient dispensary at the Alfred in the month before my contract expired late 2014) it was a shock!

I didn’t know what to do with myself physically, let alone mentally. So came a long list of attempted hobbies to try to fill up my time, more or less successfully. 4 years on, some have stuck, some haven’t, but it’s a different problem now: finding time for those hobbies! Time for bird watching, for photography, for blogging, and my re-discovered love of gardening. I’m back at work, currently 4 to 5 days a week! Who would have ever thought?! And it’s cramping my style! How’s that for ironic? For months, years in fact I’m dying to get back to work, really back to working full time or close to it, and 5 minutes later I’m missing my me time!!

It could be worse. If anyone can say that it’s me. I was worse, I’ve been worse; so I really know that it could be worse. I do. But it’s the perspective you have at the time that frames how you see things. And my perspective now is mental wellness and relatively good physical health, so the smaller things weigh more, like doing my hobbies! It’s not a bad place to be, hey? Four years on.

Canberra Day Twelve

I had such a wonderful surprise on Tuesday! I was idly wandering around Facebook when I saw a post from some old friends that I grew up with from about 3 or 4 years old which showed their location as Canberra! I thought, really? So I messaged them and yep we had managed to coincide in a city that neither of us had really been to before! So we organised to catch up for dinner and it was the best night! All the years and events that have passed since I left home 10 years ago haven’t changed a thing and it was a fabulous evening of yummy Thai food and chatting about everything under the sun.

So the cake, what’s that about? Well, while this family have been on Victorian school holidays visiting Canberra, the youngest girl had her birthday and this was the cake she had. It was huge, tall and sugary with the fakest colours available, a horror to some of the family who wouldn’t choose this kind of thing ordinarily, and only half eaten. They’re moving on Saturday and really can’t take the cake with them. So a condition of our catch up was coming back to the hotel to eat cake! Not the worst thing in the world hey…and the absolute delight of hubby who will eat anything colourful! Fruit loops, smartie smiley face cookies, sprinkles, cakes of exactly this description etc. It was delicious, but I didn’t get through it; turned out it was pretty sweet after all! But what a lovely way to end the day: old friends and familiar faces in an unfamiliar city. Bliss!

Otherwise the day was washing, drying, folding, making phone calls I’ve been putting off for ages, writing emails I’ve been putting off for ages, organising a catch up, trying to decide on accomodation for a long weekend coming up, and watching for rain so I could decide when to do a bike ride. Turns out that I watched for rain all day and it never rained. But then it was the end of the day. And I didn’t get to ride. I wonder where I went wrong? In my defense it poured the entire previous day. So. Also, I realise as I’m writing this down what a social day I had; quite unusual for me generally. I must be going pretty well at the moment. I guess I already knew that, but it’s nice to have proof.