Insomnia is bothering me. Well, it isn't insomnia the condition per se of course as I've only suffered from it tonight... But nevertheless, here I am sitting on the sofa in the dark, listening to soft snores from inside the cardboard box on the floor. It's the cat's new favourite spot these days; a big cardboard box in which a bathroom shelving got delivered a few days ago. The thing is really ugly and far too big for the living room. But suckers R Us, and the cat is winning 100-1. (The one point comes from me successfully teaching him to move away from the front door when I snap my fingers. Otherwise he just ignores us and does whatever he pleases. Of course. He's a cat.)
There are a million thoughts whirling in my mind, everything to do with what I ought to be doing. Study, work, work, study, study, work, study, work... I don't want to. But it is what I signed up for and it is the price I am paying for leaving a quiet, steady, relatively struggle-free job where I was mind-numbingly bored. Huh, I am most definitely no longer bored. How I long for those easy days now. I'm already feeling my itchy feet starting to want to make a move. But I resist. Still. I can't think of another job that will tick as many boxes as this one. I work with a really lovely bunch of people, some of whom are great friends. I get to spend my time in beautiful and unusual buildings in London, helping the occupying arts organisations build something exciting and thought provoking, to make a difference and to make people feel something. To make sense of the world. I am studying to become a chartered secretary, to become a leader. Only I am not sure if I want to be a leader. I am rather tired, and would like a little time out. But the show must go on. And on. And on.
And here I am, at 2 o'clock in the morning, unable to sleep, sitting on the sofa in the dark, now listening to two soft sounds of snoring (the bedroom door is open). Once in a while I stop writing and look at the night sky. The street lights are polluting the darkness into a hazy dark grey but we have a lovely warm glow from the light post below our windows. If I opened the window I would hear the odd whoosh of a car and every thirty minutes the night bus hums its way past, making all kinds of hissing and sighining sounds, as though it too would quite like to sleep... Sleep. Lovely, lovely sleep!
Ok, enough of this self-centered mild nightime melancholia. Tomorrow is a new day and I will be a new me. Or not. Most likely I will be painfully same. Perhaps a little more tired. I'll be spending the day dreaming about the next trip to Finland, the trip after that to Long Island, the one after that to Berlin and Dresden, and... Well, you get the picture.
Time to go to bed and try the one trick that rarely fails. It's a frustrating one, taught to me by my psychology teacher several years ago. I will count from two hundred back very slowly, articulating every sound carefully in my head, and if thoughts veer off (which they inevitably do), I will just return to the number I remember as the last one I thought of, and continue counting down. I do this twice. Unless I've fallen asleep. It is guaranteed to work, but only if you're able to stick with it. On second thought perhaps I'll get a quicker result by digging the corporate law study book out...
The antibiotics are kicking in and I'm starting to feel like the Old Me again. As in how-I-was-before-the-illness of course; nothing to do with the impending middle agedom in the form of what is popularly called the "new 30". Well, I say impending, but I still have another eight months and one day of the old thirty before hitting the next decade. The next decade, eh? Perfectly ok with it. Doesn't bother me one jot.
But joking aside, thirtysomething has been an amazingly eventful and exciting decade; some great highs, a few lowly lows... At times easy, other times challenging, even scary, often quite confusing yet overall happy. I have worked in three amazing workplaces with the best workmates ever, I have completed my Masters degree, moved from a tiny dark hole into a Real Home (chaining myself into a mortgage...). I also got married, became a slave to two fluffy, sweet cats, got four amazing god kids, and 'nieces' and 'nephews', lost a loved one and travelled more than I could have ever dreamed in my twenties. I've learned a lot about the world and about the kind of person I am and want to be, and ultimately I realised how utterly gormless I was in my twenties. Hilariously, and sometimes a bit tragically gormless.
Perhaps the new decade will be a little bit less of a rollercoaster ride and more serene than the roaring thirties. One can hope. But smite me down if I ever become dull...!!
I am a firm believer in Mark Twain's famous phrase: "Age is a mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter." [Confession: in my twenties, i.e. the wonderfully foolish 90's, I thought a TV aerobics instructor going by the name of Mr Motivator came up with that little idiom. Yes. Really.] Denial, unawareness or selective awareness, I don't care. As long as I keep accidentally ticking the 30-35 age slot in questionnaires I'm all good.
What bliss to have four full days to 'just be'! And how lucky to have a comfortable, light and cosy little home where to spend my unproductive relax-time with the husband and the little fluff butt of a cat. Thinking about it, this is the first Easter in many, many years where I have not given in to my wanderlust, and decided to stay at home instead. In fact, it may even be the first time in my entire adult life that I've not gone with my desire to be elsewhere when I've had a chance to go somewhere. Anywhere. But this time the break came just in the nick of time. I need to shrug off this cold that's been plaguing me for weeks. And I needed time to distance myself from work too. I have been so very, very tired.
Well then, a long weekend at home. How refreshing, how odd, and what a relief! Who'd have thought...
