Choices

When I feel alone and afraid, I remind myself that this is the choice I made – everything that has happened in the past few years has been my choice.

I chose to get divorced. I may have been partly forced into it, but at the end of the day I made the final decision. I chose to buy this house, to settle in this area and stay in this job. Therefore why do I moan about it? We make our life choices – maybe they're not always the best ones - but we should be grateful. We don't live in a dictatorship, generally we are blessed, generally we have enough to eat, generally we are fulfilled, therefore should we not be happy?

I wrote about New Year's resolutions in a previous post. Well, I'm making mine now and it's to stop moaning. I'm a lot better than I used to be. Moaning can become a way of life. My general outlook is 'I can't wait until the weekend'. Surely that can't be right? The weekend is only two days a week...so am I going to spend the rest of my life like this? I shouldn't. We shouldn't!

I am extremely proud of my northern heritage. I love my very slightly northern accent. And, I must admit that I do play it up a bit here in the south. However, I do partly blame my occasional melancholic episodes on my Yorkshire ancestors. My Grandma was known to comment when she was in her sixties that she wouldn't 'get the wear' out of a new hat she'd just bought for someone's funeral. This was the same lady who didn't believe in Christmas. She was definitely a 'glass half empty' person.

Similarly, I once had a 'friend' who was the most negative person I've ever met. She used to sigh down the phone at me and make me so depressed that I would want to end it all after two hours in her company. I know that everybody goes through periods of despondency or self doubt. I know that in life, things sometimes go wrong. And I would like to think that my friends can come to me for help when they have problems. But this 'friend' gave nothing to the relationship. She was bad for me. She dragged me down and made me doubt myself. She has since moved away and I'm so relieved. I used to spend time with her because I felt sorry for her, but I've since found out that she was known to be a person that other people at work avoided like the plague. I have vowed not to spend time with people like that any more because they are bad for me. I have also deleted her off Facebook.

This negative attitude is everywhere. I have a colleague who constantly moans about everything – why has she been at the same place for twenty eight years then? Why does another colleague, every time she sees me, wink and say “Only five days til the weekend?” If she hates it so much then why is she still there? I then find myself entering into this 'isn't life crap' banter and I've begun to find these conversations incredibly tedious. If my life is crap then it's only me that has made it like that. I need to sort it out.

However, I need to be careful here. I always act impulsively, on instinct and I wonder if this is the best plan when making life choices? Snap decisions are not always a good idea but then neither is sticking with a hopeless situation. We make our choices and a choice that can seem unimportant at the time can affect our lives to a huge degree. We need to make smart choices and not moan about what we have chosen.

I can't spend my whole life in my current job doing something that I find highly stressful. I can't spend my life wondering What if ? Therefore, as I said in my first post on this blog, at the end of this academic year, I'm going to make a smart choice and make myself happy. I'm not sure what that choice is going to be yet but I know it should include these points:

No more lusting after stupid men who aren't bothered about me

No more moaning about how crap life is

No more thinking about travelling but not actually doing it.

At the age of eighteen, my Grandma (her with the hat) went for an interview for nursing college. When the Sister who was interviewing her asked her what her father did for a living she said “Mind your own business, you're interviewing me, not him!” I love that fact that she was feisty enough to say that. A couple of years later, once she had finished her training, she was involved in nursing the casualties of the D-Day landings and it looked as if she would have promising career. Then she met and married my Grandpa, gave up work and stayed in Yorkshire for the rest of her life. She never travelled outside of the UK, and rarely did anything other than the housework. Trying to scrape together some interesting information about her life for her funeral last year was really difficult and I remember thinking about her wasted potential, and the choices she  made. If she had been happy with her life then I would think she had made the right choice but I know, from the amount of moaning that she used to do, that she wasn't.

I don't want to have regrets when I'm old about all the things I haven't done. I don't want to realise, at the age of eighty, that all I've done so far with my life is moan. I need to be more positive and change my outlook. I need to change my situation if I'm not happy. And it's up to me. It's my choice.