I see last year that things weren't good and in fact as I look back on this blog over the last 7 years or so - I can now see that it never really was great. For many years there had been a gradual erosion of my home life and I couldn't tell you even now why that was. Let's say that things hadn't been good for 20 years or so but they weren't unbearable or anything it's been a gradual process of wearing me down but I combated it with working abroad and long hours and working away and abroad so that I didn't need to be here. I made plenty of cash so that meant that the family never did without and I'd invested well when I was younger and that too meant that around the time I became ill we had little if any debt, the house was paid off, we both have pensions and so on.
In truth we can look at Bladder Cancer as the beginning of the change because since that time I've not had the sort of high powered top of the tree management jobs I used to have. Most of the old me was kicked into touch by being ill. The brash, go-getter, top of my game person no longer exists in that way. My stamina and ability to commit to a long term job or indeed to any job, possibly due to knowing that I really, deep down inside, didn't want to. I recollect writing a lot about collateral damage quite early on in the cycle of treatment I was having. I knew then, if I reflect on it, that it was only a matter of time until something had to change.
Without going in to all of the details, it's fair to say that things were failing on many fronts, communications being just one of them. Let's face it, lots of people have rows and disagreements. We tended not to have those, mainly because I don't particularly enjoy confrontation anymore and also that I am not a pleasant person to argue with anyway as I have a personality INTJ that makes me pretty adroit at it and you have to be on your game to counter me. I DO listen to you if you are arguing a good case in a good way and I can change my mind too. However in a situation in the house which is often contrived and illogical it can get very messy. Again, I look back at the blog and see a number of instances of this emotionally charged half digs that I tend to walk away from rather than see me bite and then proceed to destroy my opponent with words and logic.
On the subject of INTJs I cam across this which I thought was very interesting indeed. I looked long and hard at this because as you probably know I met someone in the middle of the year who made me completely re-think everything. More of that in a moment.
At the beginning of the year, I had been trying to work on what I wanted to do and the business that I am now looking at appeared to be the way forward but something was holding me back and it was to do with support and whether or not living here, in the way I was living was the right thing to do. I was also in the process of going through a series of Psychometric tests and then later some reasoning tests which led nowhere. To me, if I had have got one of those jobs I could have disappeared back into Corporate land and perhaps lived for a few more years in a work defined way, trying to find work that took me away as often as possible and that was all engrossing and I would have earned enough money to have bought Mrs. F. out of this house if necessary and that was an option as I was looking at the options until I realised that it wasn't just the marriage that was over but it was my old lifestyle too as I could no longer work with the "type of people" I had worked with most of my life (not all of them). By that I mean the sort of vacuous, wastes of Oxygen who don't add anything to life or society and appear to only be there to stop the rest of us achieving what we were tasked to do. The ones who are truly incompetent and I am often surprised how well they can breathe with their heads shoved so far up their own arses!
There were a number of reviews, the last throw of the dice I now realise, looking at other things we could do together. A B&B, small Hotel, a Tea Room, a Camp Site and Tea Room anything that might involve the two of us. Mrs. F. was interested until I produced the business plans and ideas and then they too were cast aside and I was left with this vacuum. I realised that Corporate Life may not be right and the people I spoke too were just see through, clone like tossers and I'd dealt with these sorts of people all my life. Surely there had to be something else and also why was I thinking like this? Sometimes I do things intuitively (well I would as an INTJ) and I wonder whether I was giving off an aura of "I don't care" dealing with them - I certainly held no punch back with one of them. The world's moved on and I don't want to be part of that world. I was faced with the choice and all I really wanted to do was to try and find something that I would be happy doing and I did a lot of looking around and did some more plans on perhaps doing some part time work and self employed work which, in part, I did actually do at one time.
My health continued to improve apart from, once again, feeling that I had a recurrence and also the suggestion that they had seen a tumour and once again living through the horrors of perhaps having to go through all of that again or perhaps losing my bladder. So that really challenged me and having to also wait for hours to have the operation - they once again got me in early but didn't operate until the afternoon! They found nothing - which was a great relief but that's twice now. Perhaps that brought it all back to me? I don't know maybe it jogged me into wondering what was I was doing? Here I was a recovered Cancer patient and it may be back and all the old dreams came back in those 4 weeks.
I had been losing weight and I noticed that the panic attacks and the claustrophobia were subsiding and I feel great these days - it was a case in point with a load of us squeezed into someone's living room a few nights ago and it was hot but I was fine - I didn't need to go gasping for air outside like I used to a few years before.
In the middle of the year someone I knew and I became very close and what ever you may want to call it, for it wasn't an affair, nor was it a fling but it was a collision of two people for a short while in the most intense and magical way. For a short time I was immersed in a relationship that could go nowhere but what it did for me was release my mind and allow me to open my eyes, ears and to start to see what life could hold for me. Suddenly it was a new awakening for me. Someone who appreciated me for who I was, who loved my music, my art, my books, my films. Who unlocked all the things that had shut down in me. My writing, my reading, my music everything that I used to be and no longer was.
Then I read Eckhart Tolle's 'A New Earth' and suddenly it all started to make sense to me and I finally realised that for years and years I'd started to shut myself down and become withdrawn. That I'd appeased others and complied and that I was no longer ME. The real me is creative, fun, artistic, musical and above all suddenly I was able to gaze around me at the wonder that's around me. The countryside around here is fantastic and people are great too if you just give them time, if you look with eyes that don't judge and then I realised that I had to do something about it.
There was a sadness knowing that I couldn't go on with either my friendship nor with my marriage and both relationships were terminal and that both had to change if I was to move on. In August I told Mrs. F. that our marriage was over and in September my spiritual Angel and I moved on. I can't even begin to tell you how painful it was but for only a short time. I'm an INTJ, I realise that I have to move on, that whilst it was going to hurt like hell, it wouldn't be like that forever. Time heals but also the ability to realise that in fact I was - or would soon be - free. Free to go and build a life that I wanted, that expresses who I am, what makes me tick, how I like to live and it will be whatever it will be. It will be a bright new world and whether it lasts a month or many years, I plan to enjoy it and to make of it the best I can.
I could dwell on the past or list my regrets and 'what ifs' but to what end - it's all happened, I can do nothing about them. To let them rule my present would be counterproductive and achieve nothing except perhaps more misery and sadness and I've had 8 years of sadness and misery if not longer. In the summer, for a short time, I was alive and felt the sun shine on my body, the air move through the trees and the fields. I wandered around the countryside here on such a high and smelt every aroma, heard every sound and became alive again. I was awoken to how my life could be, what it was like to be loved and to love again. It was like a ray of sunshine from a black stormy cloudy day picking you out for a short while. I've never felt like that before but it was what I'd been looking for - perhaps for all my life. My own little Epiphany, my own realisation that it didn't have to be like "this" it could be wonderful, fulfilling, all encompassing, peaceful, fun, loving, musical, artistic and beautiful. If there is one sadness, it is that the person who unlocked this in me may never be part of it. Maybe that's the way it is. Some people live to enhance the lives of others and you just glance into them in your life and for a fleeting moment, that sunbeam on a stormy day, they light up your life and then they are gone.
Leaving that as a small disappointment on the year because I have to appreciate that it was a sign not a prophesy, I finally arrive at the end of the year in a bit of a bad place because it is difficult in the house. I know the girls both feel it as well and Mrs. F. is very very upset still and carries her misery around for all to see. The pain in this house can be felt everywhere, it's no longer the place it was and it isn't as happy as it once was but I'm not all to blame for that I feel. It takes two people to make things work and up until I got ill I felt that it was alright - not great - but we managed and we fitted around the arrangement. I did all the right things not necessarily for the right reasons and we got on and the kids did well and there was money for holidays and so on. After I got ill it all changed but gradually, not overnight.
2014 beckons me onwards. It will be a little frightening but an adventure and exciting too. It's a clean start for me and a new page. What I do with it is up to me but starting a new business and living a bachelor life should be fun in themselves. I have no doubt that there will be some surprises along the way - I will just have to deal with them as they come along that's all. I have no doubt that there will be a bit more pain in the divorce but this is now what I want and it would be nice to live the next phase of my life and try and be as 'alive' as I was in the middle of the year. Quite how I capture that again I don't know, it burns inside me now so perhaps I'm just waiting for the move to the new place to drop the burden I feel here and finally go live my life the way I want to.
A Happy New Year to you all
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