feeling strange and empty

I've had a really good morning at work, and yesterday was very productive too. 'Good' as in 'got lots done and got through blockages', not as in 'fun': but that's ok.

I feel strange - odd - not lacking anything, but as though I'm finding space in me. I have a compulsion to find things to fill the space. For so long my life has consisted of limping from one crisis to another - and I admit that I created some of these by taking on more than I should. I've been through these 'empty' cycles before, and each time I've run around finding things to fill my time, and tried everything until I've imploded. Then I pull back out of everything (including life) feeling fragile and dispersed and slowly, incompletely, recover. This time it's different because I think I have insight, and can see it coming. Winter times are not to be avoided just because there is an apparent emptiness around - this is the time for hidden regeneration, for letting the pain in the world around blow over. In the past I've tried to build sad little shelters out of busyness to shield me from the emptiness - but when the time changed, I couldn't escape the clinging, cloying busyness and by the time I was in the glare of the summer sun, I couldn't stand being cluttered, subsumed and dragged down by everything. Too late, and unseasonally, I would bury myself and try to recover, but summer is for connections, and autumn is for harvest, trying to enter the dark before its time only lessens the value of the true dark, and mocks the needs of the time.

So where am I now? I think this is still autumn - I am still harvesting the proceeds of the last phase of my life, and I must allow myself to fall silent when the harvest is finished. I must allow some mundane time into my life, and be in it for it's own sake. Soon enough I'll have to start tending the next new growth of my life. Now it's time to finish the harvest - prune away the last of my old life, and gently melt into the rhythm of the mundane. Allow some predictability to protect me while my mind recovers and rebuilds after the assaults of recent years.

The last 4 years - the end with Tony, the separation, the redecorating of the old house, the sale, the purchase, the move, the new relationship, the renovations, the jobs (3 new ones in that time) - have been intense, always looking 3-6 weeks ahead, never time to be in the present, never time to contemplate 'next', no time to deconstruct the past. Now I have time to rest as my life's autumn coincides this time with the calendar. I'm looking forward to winter. It looks like desolation from the outside, but for me it will be about recovery, restoration and the prospect of renewal, maybe not in the calendric spring, but in my own, uncertain in timing, but certain to come.

Sunday night reflection

I now have three 'still evolving' blogs - this one that is (for all intents) hidden, one for lab accreditation as I try to position myself for wherever it is that I go next in my career, and the third for me to collate my dog training notes and revision.

I still have to make a new dog website - and I still have several dogs to rehome. The bathroom is under way, and we may even have it sorted within couple of weeks. I think my life may be finally settling out... and I wonder if that is something I can cope with. My whole life since I married has been a complicated dance around what I should versus what I want to do, and at every step I have failed, miserably failed, and tried to hold to the belief that I am happy inside myself. No. Happy is not the right word. I don't think I've been 'happy' for ... I don't remember a time that I thought was happy that I can still recall in that way. He destroyed every recollection of happiness in those years.

Now I stare into the face of a future without having a picture of what I could be, and I am afraid. I need to be careful that I don't just fill my time out of fear of going forward into nothing. I can see that my years ahead may not be so long as those behind, and there are so many things I still want to do, so much I am capable of that I will never get to try.

I think that all of my life I was a lesbian, I just didn't have any courage or luck. One or the other. Some days I think I was weak, others that I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I have found a love and it is so much kinder and gentler than any I've known before, I am lucky beyond my expectation. This love is what I was born for, and it is what I craved all of my life until she found me. Will the next part of my life be so blessed? Was the pain in my 19-43 years all down to living .... maybe not actually a lie, but .... a life not fully lived? a half-life, in the twilight of who I could have been?

The only other thing I have truly been all of my life is a writer. Since I was a child I have written poetry and framed elaborate tales of adventure, romance, tragedy... for great tracts of my life I lived in these stories instead of in the half-truth of my reality. I think it's time for me to write.

I am not going to say that I must finish this or that before beginning, rather, when it is time to start I'll make a new blog, a private one, and I shall begin. When it is time.

I don't know what the content will be, or whether it shall ever be published, but I will be a writer. A lesbian writer. And going forward into an unmapped future I vow to live my life fully - no longer in the twilight of my true self, but in the glare of ... the full moon.

That's probably enough for now...

Just so tired and unfocussed

Why am I here? I actually like whole bits of this job, but I can't focus, I can't settle to it. I feel as though I'm trying to find more interesting and engaging things all the time - like a bower bird always looking for a shinier bit of anything. It tires me, and I know it would be best for me to stick out at least 2 years here, maybe even 3, but ... I struggle to commit myself for that long to a job.

The fact that I am currently very, very tired is not helping.

Got some files out of my shelves this morning, now on to finish some quality manuals...

But I only got one finished... still it was the most urgent one...

more later