Being brave

This week, I found myself wondering about what being a grown up really means…

I had a bit of an episode, when I got really nervous about something and I think this is what triggered my thinking. You see, I get really nervous around motorways or whenever I’m driving and get lost somehow. I won’t dwell on it on this post (I’ll probably write about this another time), but I just wanted to say that the simple fact of a road diversion can get me all jittery.

This week wasn’t a very stressful one overall, but little things managed to get to me and throw me slightly off balance. When that happens, I usually think “what would the grown ups of my family do?”. These can be my mother, my grandmother, my dad, my stepmother or my stepfather. I have these 5 people on a bit of a pedestal, as they usually have all the answers for me.

I am 33 years old and I still see myself as a teenager most of the time. And then when I do something really grown up, like braving myself through a different route to work, I don’t even remember that no, I don’t really need praise for it. This is what I should be doing all the time at this stage in my life.

The bottom line is that I don’t consider myself a very brave person. You know, like those people that just don’t hesitate to take a risk and just go for things. I need to always have a bit of a plan in place, and when that plan is in place, I always organise a plan B too, just in case. I fear that my very specific approach on taking risks in life means that I’m probably not enjoying it as much as I could. After all, we only live once, don’t we?

When I feel really useless and like a little girl afraid of everything, I try to go through my life and remember some occasions where I did show some sort of bravery. Like, for example, when I moved to a country on the other side of the  ocean, miles and miles away from home, all on my own. I should take the credit for that, shouldn’t I? I know that millions and millions of people have done this before, but for a relatively scared person like me, this should count as a bit of a life achievement.

I was also brave when I decided to stay in this country and start a life here for myself. I have had jobs (and now have one I love after one more little act of bravery!), I have new friends, I have a new doctor, I even have a new mechanic for my car. And I found the way to get all of these all on my own. However, there are still areas where I go into panic mode. When I’m driving, for example. Or when I have to make a big decision.

I hate making a decision. I always analyze far to much and then end up confusing myself with all the pros and cons, ifs and maybes… it’s stressful, but I tend to make it even more stressful than it should be, really. My partner Lee, on the other hand, is a very straightforward person. He is quite quick to grasp if something is a good or a bad idea and things are usually quite clear and simple for him. On my side, I sleep on it, I dwell on it, I stress over it and I always end up making a decision that I’m never entirely sure is the best one. I lack on confidence.

To be a grown up, though, you need to be confident, don’t you? You need to be able to deal with so many things at the same time and also try and keep that peace of mind that is so important. For me, getting paranoid over things means that my energy gets drained and I feel powerless. I have to change that.

Although change is necessary, I’m still not quite sure about how to do this. Do I just start being braver in my decisions and going for it, not thinking too much? But then if I do that and things don’t go well, won’t I regret it all and then blame myself for not having taken a more cautious route? It’s hard to change yourself. You know what people say… start as you mean to go on? Well, I believe in that. I’m a great believer that we do things for the sake of it, because we have done it the same way for years and it has become a habit so intrinsict that it becomes almost impossible to change. But I also believe that we have to recognise when something needs changing. We need to recognise when the way we go about things is holding us back instead of taking us forward.

It is a big challenge to make a big change, especially when some of the things we do and the way we do them is connected so closely with our personality. I want to be braver. I want to have the courage to see an opportunity and believe that I can do something about it. I want my belief in myself to drive me forward and I want to stop wasting time making plans and trying to schedule life so much that opportunities just pass me by, waving at me whilst I sit there with my cofffee and my ‘to do’ list .

To make big changes, we have to start somewhere and I know that most people usually get overwhelmed by how big a task it is to change some of our habits. Perhaps if we take it slowly we can achieve more. We have to keep going, slowly but surely. Things won’t change overnight, but we have to start. I have always loved a sentence from that movie “Vanilla Sky” and I think that I’ll use that as my startying point for my change of being braver in life. If we think about change as putting one foot after the other, maybe the whole process will look less scary. The sentence from the movie is: “every passing minute is a another chance to turn it all around”. Let’s grab all those minutes and make them count just as we want them to.

Tic tac… toc toc toc

And it happens again… Every Sunday night is the same. I watch the clock going… tic tac, tic tac, tic tac, whilst I try to programme my brain to just stop and go to sleep. I know that my habit of sleeping until midday on Sundays doesn’t help my trying to go to bed at a decent time to start the week refreshed and invigorated. Instead, I’m usually dragging myself from bed to work and back home on Mondays, without the energy to do much else.

The problem is, when I’m there, tossing and turning, my brain is working overtime creating all these little situations completely out of the blue, making me end up spending valuable sleep time trying to find solutions for problems that do not even exist in my life. Yes, ok, I have been known for being a bit of a control freak, so I guess I’m just being my usual self. However, when I have meetings on a Monday morning and really could do with a sharp mind, being a control freak doesn’t help me at all!

The rolling in bed whilst trying to shift thoughts out of my head means that I end up thinking about all these horrible scenarios…  I know it sounds absolutely ridiculous, but I’m there lying in my bed, happy and thinking that things are actually going quite ok in my life when, all of a sudden, boom! What if this happens? And how about that? Oh, no, and what if this also happens? And what do I do if all of it happens at the same time? And then I have to go and knock on the wood three times every time I think something bad. If anyone  is listening, they might think that there is a proper set of drums in my bedroom and I’m practising at 1am!

I like to always be prepared for everything, and I am so used to thinking ahead and planning (this has probably got a lot to do with my job) that I forget that most of what I’m planning for will not even have the decency to happen. So there is me, spending all this time solving some (non-existing) problems not only of my little life but of the whole entire world too! Bloody hell! How am I suppose to ever go to sleep!?

This never happens on any other night apart from Sunday, though, which makes me think that the relaxation of the weekend is what brings it on. When I’m relaxed, happy and carefree, some part of my brain goes: “Oh no, she is in the PRESENT and not looking ahead or planning actions to solve future ‘never-going-to-happen’ problems. Come on! Overwork, overwork, overwork… get her worried about something, you lazy brain!” It’s almost like my own mind is against me, which makes it all very hard to control (haha, the control again, you see?).

I can’t be the only one to suffer from brain overwork on Sunday nights, can I? What do other people do? I try to count sheep, I try to imagine myself calmly walking through a lovely and peaceful meadow, I try to hear the sound of music in my own head and even so, there is always a moment when some stupid nonsense thought comes in and breaks my relaxation in pieces… and then I start worrying again about the most absurd things… as if I had to be prepared for the collapsing of the world the following morning. To top if all off, when one bad thought enters the mind, it is generally followed by a trillion more, like a chain of bad thoughts… one after the other…  and then once I’ve solved one problem, my brain kind of acts like the cashier of the bank and shouts: NEXT!

I do feel sorry for myself. And this is only because of the irony of it all. Being the control freak that I am, I feel incapable of controlling my own thoughts… I feel powerless on Sunday nights and I feel my confidence vanishing and my heart pounding because of the frustration that this brings. Ok, you are going to say that I have to relax more. Relaxing has been a work in progress since I was born I think, and I don’t think I’ve ever achieved good marks at it. I keep trying though and I do think that during the week I’m quite good. It’s just the Sundays that throw my efforts out of the window.

It’s a bit sad that I feel the need to worry so much and can’t just shut my brain down and just get on with the snoring. It’s a bit annoying that when I manage to control so much in my life already, I am just incapable of controlling my own little paranoia. I try my best to suss life out every Sunday night, which leads me nowhere, really, because life will do as it pleases anyway. No matter how much I toss and turn, the element of surprise will always be there, and I really really do have to start appreciating the beauty of it.

 

Good riddance…

The worst part of moving house is to decide what to take/get rid of/give to charity/fix. It’s a long process and, in many occasions, it brings up quite a diverse array of emotions. If you haven’t read in one of the previous posts, my boyfriend and I are moving from a house that we share with two friends to a 2-bed flat where it’ll be just the two of us (“Just the two of us… we can make it if we try…!”) haha! The thing is that we are moving into a smaller place. For example, in the house where we are now, we have a massive cellar where we can basically dump anything that we want to keep or anything that we are not quite ready to get rif of… just yet. It’s now the time to go to that cellar and go through boxes and more boxes to decide what we should take to our new life. And oh dear, what a torture this is.

I get easily attached to certain things. Most of them don’t have any monetary value, but the sentimental one goes well beyond the scale. And my problem is that I tend to put a sentimental value into everything that I own, so getting rid of something is a monster decision that can even mean tears. Ok, ok, I’m a big drama queen, I know, but I can’t help it!

Clothes, for example. I’ve gone through my wardrobe about 3 times so far since we decided to move, and in these 3 times, I only managed to get rid of a couple of items. It’s almost a joke. Of course, there are pieces I haven’t worn in a very long time, but amazingly for someone with a bad memory like mine, I remember when I wore some things last and remember that I was with a friend having a good time, or on a trip to some nice place, etc… and then the item goes right back where it came from… just because it made me smile again.

Clothes are hard to dispose of but, when I went through my notebooks, the attachment I create with things went up a whole level. I simply think everything is important. I see a sentence I wrote somewhere and think: “Ah, this might become a blog post one day…” or “I remember when I wrote this…” and then the result? Yes, you guessed: nothing goes. Instead, I spend hours and hours looking at things and never throw anything away because of what I now call my “nostalgic addiction”. Ahhh!

It’s been hard so far, but today, however, I woke up determined. I decided to tackle this task as if I was a professional organiser of houses and nothing really belonged to me. I tried to see it all from above (this is something I like to do when I can’t find a way out of a situation). And so I spent my day filling in the bin and bags for charity with all the stuff that no longer is part of my present.

It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy at all, and now that the task is (nearly) completed, I feel happy for being brave and dettaching myself off things that no longer belong in my life. If it was worth it, it will stay in my memory. Of course I won’t get rid of everything, as some things are far too important to me, but it’s important to be able to differentiate the important ones to the ones that are pure physical and mental clutter.

And this is what my Sunday was like. Full of emotion, a few tears and some moments where I had an item in my hand, going to the bin and then, almost ready to drop it there, I’d take it back for a final look. Very dramatic, me. Dettaching yourself off things is a relief and makes our lives free for new memories. It can be a bit of a painful process, but very necessary, especially when the present is so beautiful and the future is right there, smiling at me.