Queen Elizabeth II

 

Queen Elizabeth II

21st April 1926 - 8th September 2022

Rest in Peace 🌹

🖤

To Be What Others Expect of You

 

Just one weekend 

Was all it took

It gave me time to be.  

Not to think ... to just be.

Minimal phone interaction

No blogging

No Facebook or Instagram

Some sorting through things

Numerous doggy walks

Reading

Much reading

Television

and 

Sitting

Sitting staring into space with an open, empty mind.  

Calming and soothing and a realisation followed.

I hadn't picked up my camera at all, I hadn't once thought ... 'oh I must get a photo of this for the blog' or 'this would make for a good post'.  I had the weekend for me and me alone ...and it carried on forward.

I dared to take more time away than I said I would and the emails and messages started.  

'Are you okay?'

'Why haven't you blogged?'

'You said you would be back after the weekend!'

Yes, it can be called concern, and to those of you that did out of a sense of concern I thank you for that.  For the couple that said 'you have let us down',  I say no I did not!!  (Oh, and I also said 'Oh fuck off ...' when I read your message ... but that's just me. 😎 )

 I warned you I was going and I went, that I dared to take longer than the weekend is tough, but I will not apologise for not supplying something that is not vital to your survival.  I am not and never have been a day in day out blogger, I have dipped in and dipped out at my will and being pressured to supply entertainment is the one sure thing to make me rebel.

But hey, that is not why I have come to a decision.

Now I am dipping out.

For longer than a weekend.

I may be back in the near or far future, when and if I have something I wish to share.  After all there is a move imminent, a house sold and a home bought, so much to do and much to be done.  A life to change and a new adventure to begin, that may or may not work out.

But for now I will live my life without a camera in my hand without a thought of what will or won't make a good blog post.  It's not that I have run out of things to say it's that I just don't want to say them to anyone but myself for a while.

Take care, stay safe and perhaps I'll see you again on here once again.

Sue xx

Oh, I meant to add the blog will remain on here for those of you who use it as a bouncing off point to get to others that you read, or in case you wish to read through old posts again.  But after a couple of days I will be switching off comments ... just to annoy the autobots and trolls  😉

My Grief

Meme - Elephant Journal

You know how many of you tell me in the comments that something I have written about, or a meme that I have shared has resonated strongly with you,  and you thank me for speaking out, publishing it and sharing.  Well yesterday my beautiful blogging buddy Elaine shared a meme on Facebook that stopped me in my tracks  Completely.  Utterly. 

 Like a boxing blow to the solar plexus that left me reeling.  I sat stock still my phone loosely grasped in my hands.  Then I caught my breath, regained some composure and thought it through.  Then I sobbed my bloody heart out ... for what is hopefully the last time.

I have been angry, angry for a long time, on and off for almost exactly three years in fact.

I wrote THIS post on my Our New Life in the Country blog about the day Alan was 'retiring', about how we would be working together more and more and how the 'day job' would be worked from home in a much smaller way.  I bought him the plaque to immortalise the date our new life together was to start.

But bit by bit the day job work ramped up again and he spent more and more time in the office, squeezing the basic maintenance jobs around the smallholding back into the three days a week they had always been done on when he had been away.   Yes, we had more of each others company for lunch and in the evenings, but I think I was always waiting for the 'day job' to be the one or two day a week thing or the three, three day conventions a year part of Alan's life that we had originally planned for.  With us slowing things down on the smallholding for the early retirement together that we had originally talked about sat on the stairs of my little shop way back in 2008.

It took Alan until early last year to admit to me that 'the Good Life' was no longer the life he wanted.  He had loved the putting together of the smallholding, the research into the solar power systems and other eco friendly things we have installed.  He loved acquiring all the machinery that fills his workshop, and I loved watching his boyish delight with each and every machine or gadget being delivered ... and teased him about it mercilessly.

BUT,  then he admitted loved his job MORE, and wanted to carry on doing it for as long as possible.  We sat down and discussed all options, what would we do, how would we want the future and came up with plan to sell this place, to cash in on our investment and move forwards in a different way.  Being nearer family was important for both of us, being somewhere with an equal travel time to Alan's work in Berkshire was important to him, and being nearer to people and life was important to me.

I have told him over the years, quite a few times, on the occasions when he has noticed my despair, how I actually feel.  He knew how dejected I was just a few short months into our new life in the country about giving up what I had left behind.  Leaving my tiny shop in the town I loved and had always wanted to live in.  The business I had built and the friends I had gathered during my time working for myself and for the local hospice.  More recently during flare ups when I told him he has turned on me and told me not to drag up the past, to move forward and that I should simply adapt. 

So for the past year I thought I had been angry, so very angry.  I held it in my tense shoulders, in my snap back words, in the high blood pressure that rises at the drop of a hat.

You lovely lot have seen it on my posts, have read between the lines and asked if I am okay.  There have been emails and comments, love shown and strength offered and I have used that to help me get to this point.  And it took one simple meme, of few words to clarify something that I should have seen so long ago.  

It wasn't anger I was feeling ... it was grief.

I have been grieving the things I gave up, the plans we made together that never came to fruition and were sometimes never mentioned again after the memory of the promises made were perceived to have faded.  

I have been grieving what I had, what I loved and what had been taken away with my permission.  I have been grieving that I have changed so much that I have to dredge the old part of me up on a regular basis to remind myself of what I could be.

Of what I will be again.

Sue xx

Life Will Break You

Ravenous Butterflies

“Life will break you. 

Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. 

You have to love. 

You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. 

And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. 

Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

🍏

You're allowed to ...

You’re allowed to leave any story you don’t find yourself in. 

You’re allowed to leave any story you don’t love yourself in.

You’re allowed to leave a city that has dimmed your light instead of making you shine brighter, you’re allowed to pack all your bags and start over somewhere else and you’re allowed to redefine the meaning of your life.

You’re allowed to quit the job you hate even if the world tells you not to and you’re allowed to search for something that makes you look forward to tomorrow and to the rest of your life.

You’re allowed to leave someone you love if they’re treating you poorly, you’re allowed to put yourself first if you’re settling and you’re allowed to walk away when you’ve tried over and over again but nothing has changed.

You’re allowed to let toxic friends go, you’re allowed to surround yourself with love, and people who encourage and nurture you. You’re allowed to pick the kind of energy you need in your life.

You’re allowed to forgive yourself for your biggest and smallest mistakes and you’re allowed to be kind to yourself, you’re allowed to look in the mirror and actually like the person you see.

You’re allowed to set yourself free from your own expectations.

We sometimes look at leaving as a bad thing or associate it with giving up or quitting, but sometimes leaving is the best thing you can do for yourself.

Leaving allows you to change directions, to start over, to rediscover yourself and the world. Leaving sometimes saves you from staying stuck in the wrong place with the wrong people.

Leaving opens a new door for change, growth, opportunities and redemption.

You always have the choice to leave until you find where you belong and what makes you happy.

You’re even allowed to leave the old you behind and reinvent yourself.

Author: Rania Naim

Sharing this because it resonated with me, it really resonated.

Sue xx