Fortunes & Misfortunes: The Hardest Months of my Life

My Nan pulled me up on something a few weeks ago. She said that my blog had gone from being a 'happy blog' to something more 'dreary'. She said I had stopped writing about the positive things in life and that I was focusing more on negatives. She said she didn't want to read about the sad things, only the happy - but I don't think life always works that way. We can create a facade with a blog, put a show on for the world and pretend everything is perfect, but that isn't an accurate representation of things. That's just a fairy story. 

Normally, I'm all about the fairy stories but I'd rather keep an element of truth to this blog. This is a blog about real life, real feelings, even if it sometimes has fantastical aspects, it is always about the truth. And there is beauty in truth, just the same way there is beauty in sadness. It's because the beauty comes from emotion. From feeling, both good and bad. How dull it would be to stay in an apathetic state forever. How dreary would it be to feel numb, anaesthetised, have nothing to compare to joy to realise what it is exactly that defines the joy. 

I'd love to sit here and tell you that my life is always fantastic and magical, but that wouldn't be the truth. Sometimes there is sadness and sometimes it hangs around. 

So she moved back from the city to her beloved Ocean, she graduated University with a 1st class  honours in BA Creative Writing and resided in a small village close to the sea in Cornwall and lived happily ever after with her best friend and love of her life, taking photographs and spending afternoons dreaming up stories on the beach. Everything should be perfect right? 

The past few months have been a storm for me. I feel like I'm caught on a little boat out in a wild tempest at sea with no land on the horizon. The waves are bucking and tossing and I feel like I'm about to capsize the boat. They tell me this is adult life. They tell me everyone feels this way. They tell me this is how it is now for the rest of my days and that I should just get used to it. Oh dear god I don't think I can handle this. 

Adjusting from University to the 'real world' has been so much harder than I thought. Despite a degree, earning money has been so much harder than I thought. Everything is harder than I thought. From the day we moved back to Cornwall, everything has been chaotic. It was almost as if I had been cursed by somebody or had done something horrific to warrant a truckload of bad karma. I lost a great deal of money to an eBay conman the first week I moved back, my car got vandalised (again) and needed repairing, then broke down and required a large payout, then eventually had to be replaced altogether with a whole other car. I took a job which caused me to relapse into anxiety and gave me a great deal of panic attacks, our family dog ended up in intensive care with life threatening injuries and we didn't think she'd make it. We found ourselves travelling all over the country with our little business which was super exciting but often meant we were tired and run down and once, even found ourselves locked out of the car in the middle of nowhere with the keys in the boot with 2% phone battery. George has been run down and sad because he's really struggling to find work as he doesn't have a degree and it's been breaking my heart to see him so deflated and downbeat. 

Last weekend, my camera broke during a job which resulted in it having to be replaced (another huge payout) and much panic. There were so many other minor events over the summer that ate away at my confidence, spark and happiness but I've largely forgotten them. My heart has a self defence mechanism where it works hard to forget misery where it can, still working on it erasing everything. Eventually, after a gruelling and trying summer, George and I became so run down, downright emotionally exhausted and miserable that we decided to call off the wedding. In fact, this summer crippled us emotionally so much, that we broke up for a whole weekend which was possibly the darkest few days of my life. After five years of togetherness, I was terrified at the thought of losing my best friend but we took a breather, cried a lot, held each other and realised that this was one of life's tests. 2016 was certainly out to push us to our limits. 

My wedding dress arrived - that was a disaster too. Not only did it come in a colour that didn't match the sample (a horrid lemon yellow as opposed to a gentle champagne colour) but it was about 2-3 sizes too small (I've not gained that much) and had a whopping stain on the back. Another sum of money lost (although I'm currently trying to dispute with the dressmakers)
Every day I listen to the radio and the news of politics splinters my heart. I hear of the troubles in other parts of the world, I hear about lives lost, families torn apart by war and religion and it seems as though suffering is the theme of this year. I know that my troubles are minuscule compared to so many and I blame myself for feeling this way and I empathise with those who truly are having an awful time. Then I find myself crying myself to sleep about the latest terrorist attack.
So they say this is how it is now. Constant stress, trying to find ways of making more money. Trying to support my partner and keep his morale up when I can barely manage my own. Continually having to spend money (money I don't have) on things that seem out of my control and figuring out ways of being better, being stronger, being an improved version of myself.
I'm exhausted.
I spend afternoons staring into space. I have to take afternoons to go and sit and gaze at the waves, to have a temporary reprieve from the melancholy. I constantly scold myself; "what is wrong with me? at least I can spend afternoons at the beach avoiding the melancholy. So many people have it worse. At least there's a roof over my head, at least I have a job, at least I'm not in a war torn country. Pull yourself together Sarah for crying out loud."
I scold myself a lot. Mainly for being weak, for being ungrateful, for being negative. There's a voice in my head and it's cruel and it constantly tells me I'm a baby, a spoilt and silly child.

This isn't how I imagined life would be. It's been a hard transition. I'm not sure whether it's just a bad year or what 'they say' is true and this is just how it is now. The other day, I sat at work while it was quiet and thought to myself. Good things are happening, it's just that the bad has a tendency to out shadow the joy. It's easy to not notice the joy of things when so many bad things are happening, for some absurd reason in life; pain outweighs joy. I forced myself to write a list of the good things that were happening/were about to happen and the bad things to compare them. I wanted to examine my fortune, to see if I truly was cursed.
I found myself coming up with plenty of reasons to be joyful

• George and I are moving into a little cottage on a farm together on Sunday 
• Milly (the dog) made it through her operation (it could have had a sadder ending) 
• One of my best friends just got married to her soul mate and I was a bridesmaid at the most beautiful celebration 
• I'm healthy 
• I have a really nice part time job now and work for lovely people with great ethics 
• I'm getting really nice feedback about the wedding photography 
• The new Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them film is coming out in November. 
• The trees are turning beautiful colours 
• I've made some really nice new friends this year 
• I will be able to make autumn themed biscuits now
• I get to spend my first ever autumn/winter living in a cottage with a real fireplace 
• I am by the sea 

See, loads of reasons to be happy

It's easy to get bogged down with worry and well worn by everyday struggles, but in between those moments are little joys and glimmers of precious memories. This summer has been the hardest summer of my life but I know that it will strengthen me. I've mentioned before that I believe in prayer and I often find myself praying for strength. Maybe this is a way of it being answered. 

It would be inaccurate to pretend through my blog that my life is always filled with perfect pictures and joy. I wouldn't want you to believe such a lie. 

I do however refuse to believe that this is life now. 

Yes, I accept that the transition into adult life is treacherous, boggy and onerous. I accept that I am now utterly responsible for earning every penny of money that I have and that every single decision I make will have a consequence. I accept that free time is now about to become a valuable and cherished commodity but I make it my mission to not become a slave to this existence. To not bow my head and accept my place on the treadmill of life. 

I've had my pity party, and now it's time to build myself a foundation, to create the best existence I can for myself with the resources I have at hand; my mind, the countryside, my capabilities. Adult life will not be a drudge, it will not grate me down and most of all, it will not extinguish my joy (even if it's been doing a very good job at doing just that lately) 

I will work my hardest to create a lifestyle where I can balance my own time with work and grapple with the modern notion that we have to be 156% productive all of the time. This is something I've really struggled with; this expectation to be so efficient and productive with our time, that life is just whizzing by at a super-fast speed leaving me feeling dizzy and dazed. 

I want to remember how to live slowly (#slowliving LOL) not in the hipster sense, but actually cherishing quiet moments of reflection and pure existence, relieving ourselves of the insane pressure to do so much in such little amounts of time. Remembering that creating art, stories and bakes are just as productive as getting through that 'to do list'. Even day dreaming in a place I love is more fulfilling to me than putting on two wash loads and calling the tax office. Sometimes I just need to make time for those things, even if it's just twenty minutes in the early evening after work. It's easy to let to-do lists take over our lives and forget the connections we have with people, forget how we actually look and interact with things around us like sights and smells. It's so easy to get wrapped up in the concept of the world that society built up for us we become almost blind to the real one that's always been there since the beginning. 

The treadmill of life can do one. 

And with it, all of the notions that adult life should be accepted as something onerous, dreary and bleak 

Not me, Not I. 

I will come out at the other end of this tunnel and reunite with my muchness.