Believe the impossible

Monday morning in Charlton town. Grey, wet, cold and miserable, which accurately reflects my mood. In the absence of anything important or indeed factually based to put in the paper today we are reliably informed that this be Blue Monday – the third one of January when everyone feels worse than they do for the entire rest of the year.

Aside from the fact that this is one of those statistics that has me scratching my head for relevance (do they wish to increase the suicide rate or make everyone feel worse than they already do as they jump on the ‘me too’ bandwagon?) it’s pretty obviously also based on precious little actual cold, hard research. Scaremongering, attention grabbing and something the masses can identify with makes it memorable but it does nothing for the poor saps like me trapped in a cycle of commuting hell, mortgage payments, demanding bosses and the general malaise of a recession.

K and I have been discussing getting out of the rat race for a long time now. Am not sure whether it predates my redundancy from my last job or not, but it feels like forever. We had a real heart to heart this weekend and it’s fairly obvious to me that there is one ginormous obstacle holding us both back.

We’re both fairly reasoned and organised (he’s more spontaneous and I am more adventurous but it boils down to the same thing in that neither of us would throw everything up in the air without having done the groundwork first) and we know if we put our minds to it, sold my flat, cut down our outgoings and set ourselves up outside of London that we would survive and, hopefully, thrive.

We are not materialistic, conspicuous consumers with credit card debts or fancy tastes. As long as he has CD’s and guitars and I have kitchenalia and a pair of trainers, we’d be happy little bunnies in the right environment.

We both know we are capable of getting other jobs. Heaven knows we’ve worked for some of the most demanding people in Britain, so potential employers can see that we can cope with stress, have impressed these titans in the past and possess the qualifications and skills for a wide range of positions.

We love the calm and peace of the countryside. I almost feel compelled to put my hands over my ears on the train these days and the prospect of spending the next 36 years of my life in a city saddens me. I’ve tried i-pods, avoiding the hotspots at peak times (e.g. Oxford Street at any time of day or night ) and basically living a calm and quiet life in the middle of all the hubbub, yet nothing makes it any easier to bear.

Everything points towards selling up, moving out and making ourselves a new and peaceful home somewhere we love with a passion (maybe Rye – oh yeah, definitely Rye!). Yet something huge is holding us both back from saying sod it, let’s do it, namely the fact we can never go back.

It’s just out of the question that when we make this move, one of us turns round after say 6 months and says, I want to go back to what we had before. It’s not an option. Yes, it’s not possible because pride will get in the way for both of us but I don’t mean in that sense. It just isn’t an option to jump back on the frantic merry-go-round of London once you’ve finally, totally waved goodbye. No-one wants a has-been crawling back, tail between their legs saying they have had a change of heart. It’s a new life forever, not until we tire of that one. This (the next) one has to be the one that we construct.

We are both guilty of having fallen into our lives. I was a quiet, reflective, artistic child with an aptitude for languages and a love of homemaking. These qualities, however, did not endear me to my mother who was hell bent on bringing up a mini-me. She did everything to bully me ‘out of myself’, until a few years ago when I finally rebelled and said enough’s enough. Over that time I had done everything the young woman she had wanted to produce was expected to do. That’s how I ended up in London working for a major corporation in the early 2000’s. To get me to that point she had secured me a job in Parliament, then literally driven me away (sobbing on the back seat), from Cardiff where I studied, lest I didn’t get out of there and move to London before it was too late.

This all followed my tormented teens, when she would scream at me for having no friends and then my early twenties, when going home in the holidays from university was not an option; if I wasn’t working shifts behind a local bar within days of returning, I was packed off on a plane to France to au pair before I had chance to catch my breath.

Over the years I have tried. I have done everything to fit into the life that she had imagined for me and I can honestly say I am now certain that mother most definitely does not know best. Far from it. For years I hid my sadness with excessive amounts of alcohol. I felt like the Pierrot clown. All dressed up in a good time outfit, a tear tickling down my cheek (albeit invisibly) as I made small talk with people whose very existence bored me.

K has battled his own demons and we both know exactly how it feels when your life is dictated by other forces; people’s opinions and chance encounters that led to where you study/work/socialise. He’s been through the wringer far more than me, but the results the same. We both want to lead our own lives now, planned out by us from start to finish.

Last year I spent a great deal of time on my friendships. In some cases I made a special effort to see people I had neglected, including a lady in her early ‘70’s that I had worked with over 10 years ago. I also cast off folk whose presence in my life was not enhancing, rewarding nor in any way, shape or form beneficial to either my health or my happiness. I never once regretted cutting ties and whilst some of them still haven’t got the message (12 months on!!) I am no longer meeting people out of obligation or turning up to their parties to stand in the corner counting down the minutes until I can get the hell out. In a slight twist, some people have binned me during my ‘cull’, not necessarily the ones I was aiming to lose! That said, of the people I have somehow offended and who have cut ties with me, I realised they were right and that in spite of efforts on both parts, the end of our friendship was for the best.

I feel sure that my close confidantes are now people with my best interests at heart. I am content with my familial relations, and whilst they are very different to before they are no longer fuelled by hatred and animosity. I am civil to my parents and have re-established loving, caring relations with my brother, aunts, uncles and cousins.

I feel free of all the things that bound me and I’m generally in a good place. So why the hell am I still terrified of jumping off the parapet and changing my life for the better? Because I am unable to believe that my hopes, dreams and ambitions could ever come true. Nope, I do not dream of topping the charts with a self-penned album, jetting off to Milan for a modelling assignment or commiserating with Paula Radcliffe when I beat her in the 2012 marathon. I have found my Mr Right in the shape of K, I have held down a job all my adult life and remained out of debt, other than for very short periods and am fit enough to run a 10k when it suits me. I am not a useless waste of space whose every next plan or project ends in failure. I have achieved a lot in my 36 years, yet I am still surprised, nay stunned, when things turn out alright after all.

Take my current job. I’d been here over 9 months when they made the role permanent and yet I still went down to see HR trembling like a leaf, wondering if they were about to pull the rug out from underneath me. In all the time I’d been here nothing had gone wrong and my boss seemed content, but the relief that I was staying on was palpable. I floated away like someone had handed me the Nobel Prize (rather than a fairly bog standard work contract) for fucks sake. No amount of achievements will ever make the slightest impact on this lack of self-esteem. It’s been ingrained in me ever since my preferences were first challenged as a child and they aren’t buggering off in a hurry. My love of books, painting and crafting was rubbished, sniffed at, laughed at and brushed over, whilst the joy of socialising, drinking and partying were brought to the fore. The fact I didn’t enjoy the opposite to my choices mattered not. The only message I got from that was that I was wrong/weird/misguided to think differently and would benefit from doing all these things that I actually dreaded.

Fact is, I have simply never been in a position to test my actual (as opposed to perceived/imposed) limits. Falling flat on my face isn’t the problem, as I’ve been doing that since childhood and know exactly how it feels to be jeered at and mocked for being lousy at sports, not making the top maths set or failing a GCSE in chemistry. I’ve been shoved so far out of my comfort zone at times that when failure inevitably happened it was spectacular – and almost always my fault. But the driving forces behind these achievements (or more precisely, lack of) weren’t me but other people. My parents, my teachers, my colleagues and my friends. All with my ‘best interests at heart’ because I obviously don’t know myself as well as they do! No-one ever let me indulge my creative streak to see where it took me. My ability to run was a shock to everyone, when I proved I was capable of completing a marathon as they’d written off my sporting prowess years ago. My inability to drive, however, is seen as a huge, serious fault and not as it should be, as a blessing for other motorists! I am lots of good things and lots of bad, all in one imperfect human being. What I’d dearly like to do now is play to my strengths and never again subject myself to the humiliations I’ve previously endured over my weaknesses.

I need to basically tackle what I have always considered the impossible. In doing so I will also have to accept setbacks with good grace, learn from mistakes and move on when necessary. All the fears I have about leaving London are just that; worries and anxieties based on supposition. My heart left here a long, long time ago but my head is taking that bit longer to follow. I have to believe that I can move on, make a new life elsewhere and be happy. For once the place I go, the job I do, the flat we rent will be a choice we make together, regardless of other expectations. And do you know what, that’s putting the fear of God into me big time :-)