Terrifying Tango in Paris…..

So tomorrow is big….I’m getting up at 3.30 to catch a 7.25 flight to Paris. My meeting with a panel of 5 people is at 5pm…..I am terrified – I have barely slept for a week and I feel anxious and pressured. If I nail the meeting and the business comes in I will be saved and my role will be safe for around a year…. if I fail then I will have just two months to bring home my target – no mean feat! I have documents prepared and a presentation looking smart….I am packed and I have everything booked. Off to sleep for me now for my 4 hours – wish me luck!!

Dating website blues

I can’t be the only person who has suffered from this? It is so depressing. I jumped on and immediately saw someone I knew so winked at him – a kinda ‘hey who knew we were both on this thing’ to my horror he didn’t respond….cringe.

Then there has been a long demoralising string of short, overweight men with missing teeth and several years older than me. It’s crazy. There are literally thousands of men on there and yet I can barely find any that I would find remotely attractive and until now I didn’t think I had a high bar!

Chrysalis paralysis

So I jumped onto Tinder – such a strange experience – I am very tall so I put a minimum height which has ruffled a few feathers. Men’s egos are pathetic. Admittedly I come across as shallow but it’s more about a deep rooted insecurity about not being and therefore not feeling feminine. So a big tall guy makes me feel fab. That is until he opens his mouth and starts speaking lol.

So the guy I love is finally stepping out of the picture and I am finally coming to a place of acceptance about it all. He will never love me on a deeper level and he certainly won’t love my daughter on that level. He will always be mean and uncaring and I will spend the rest of my life hanging around for the little scraps of affection I can get – conclusion life of misery for me and my daughter – that’s not an option so I finally see a path away from him. Financially life is tough. I owe money left right and centre and I am struggling to keep my head above water.

I need to find a distraction from the man I love and I suddenly find myself thinking a great deal about another man who has stepped into my life very recently. He is unconventionally handsome, tall and has a great charismatic personality. At first o thought the attraction was mutual but now I am uncertain and am only resolute about one thing….I will not chase…..

The three Tinder guys who have passed the height threshold are promising but two are flakey so I think I will kick them

Into touch 🙂 goodnight

Uncertainty is the new black….

Filled with anxiety and melancholy I set about getting through the day. I threw myself into being a jolly kind mum and an attentive friend and a great confidante for my colleague and a walk and a Cycle a phenomenal welsh cawl and a baby (my friends) bath later I feel human. Is this the way forward? It’s exhausting which is good as I may sleep the night but the reality is he is dominating my thoughts my friends ask have I heard from him and I always reply – I haven’t and I won’t – I know him. I am watching old videos of us together and willing myself to move on from this phase of grief. It’s heart breaking.

I bumped into the brother of my first ex on the sea front – we chatted for ages which was lovely. I felt like saying your brother was an abusive man who took advantage of a naive virgin and tore her already fragile confidence and self esteem to shreds. Instead we laughed and reminisced but all the while my head was filled with grotesque images of our cruel time together – devastating. So I was glad then to help my friend bather her beautiful baby boy. How jealous of her o am. He is a wonderful child. I know my time is coming to an end for another child of my own. It saddens me deeply and fills me with a sense of grief. My life now feels directionless and uncertain and I realise that this is the same crossroads so many people reach

Pancake Flat Day

Much like the batter in a pan I am fragile and easily torn today. I happened across some very old photographs of me I’m former lives. In old homes with old boyfriends and on holidays before they were even on the horizon. As though sensing my vulnerability my ex headed for the jugular saying he won’t pay me the money he owes me. I didn’t answer in the end. It’s beyond repair and I am in pain but somehow I know it’s the only way forwards now. He hasn’t loved me for the longest time and I am clinging to another part of the relationship hoping it will rekindle for him but it clearly will not and I am worth so much more. I’m tired but afraid to lie in the dark I am flat and sad and the tears have been rolling down my cheeks for about 4 hours 😦

Sparking the soul

That shit is rare

Groggy from a poor nights sleep I answered the unknown number – half expecting my stalker to be on the rampage again. It was my ex though – he’d locked himself outside his house with no car keys. He sounded panicky – I just dressed and asked my daughter to get her coat on – she was great – didn’t murmur and the dog jumped happily into the footwell of the car.

When I got there 30 minutes later he was on his doorstep playing with the cat from up the road. He was thinner I saw and was pleased to see me. I grabbed the DVD’s and the hoover. It’s bag was chocca. He laughed – mumbled something about getting new ones. I was proud of myself – I didn’t yearn or pine or even hope. I didn’t even have a grain of hope. I came home and worked and then after the BT engineer had corrected my connection I saw the man about the windows and was a bit flummoxed – I think he may just be using his undeniable charm to get a sale and just like the fool who fell for the younger man in love routine for 5 years I fell for the salesman falling in love routine. He was lovely but he strikes me as fickle and maybe even shallow. So I’m

restless tonight – I did a late interview with someone for the US and I just haven’t switched off. Last night I watched a very sad film called the notebook and it stayed with me all night. It showed a breed of love that transcended time and obstacles and I suddenly felt that I absolutely deserved that for myself and how now it had eluded me for over 25 years

Screaming Quietly

I feel quite numb. I know that the door is closing on the man who has dominated my heart for five years. I feel

I should be feeling the usual trauma and anxiety but instead…nothing.

What is this all about? He’s contacted me and I know we could easily fall back into our cycle of shit. He finds an excuse to see me…he fucks me and then he’s funny and charming and I gloss over the two weeks of misery he has put me through not seeing me and keeping me hanging with the odd emotionally charged innocuous manipulative comments. I then fall into cooking for him and cleaning up the meal and then doing the washing and making his tea in the morning and cleaning his cereal Tupperware for work. I answer his texts, support him through his work challenges and listen to his anxiety. He never asks me about my day or indeed cares. He makes me walk on egg shells and I duly tiptoe on said shells. Eventually he makes a demand of me I either can’t physically or won’t mentally acquiesce to. Then he throws his toys out of his plan and dumps me, blocks me off face book and punishes me until we go back to the start ……

Now his has chipped away so successfully at my love for him that it seems to have struck the core of me and nullified any feeling for anything. I am detached from reality and not even my exceptional chilli can bring me back to life……..

Life Paralysis

Today was hell. I got up to an empty house and I started to work early. I had a big meeting with major accountants trying to bring us back into the running on a bid proposal. I couldn’t get on my conference line and I went into a blind panic. I was so stressed I couldn’t speak when I got on the call. My sister and her husband I helpfully turned up in the middle of my rampage around the house trying to get on the conference line. It was horrible. My COO and head of learning were on the call and I was terrible for about 5 minutes. I started to breathe eventually but it was so hard. Anyway the outcome was good but a tough day of back to back meetings and stress.

Also my sister ended up picking my daughter up from school even though my daughter was supposed to be staying for clubs after school and my step father was picking her up. I was notified at 3.26 four minutes before my next call. I just caught my stepfather. I’ve written to the school limiting who picks my daughter up as my stalker ex (not the recent ex the European one I was seeing when he and I broke up let’s call him Stalker Ex for short) has stepped up his contact and I don’t want him abducting her – God forbid. In the midst of all this chaos the slide was delivered. Two lovely men came – we had a really lovely chat and a cup of tea and they ended up comically scaling my garage roof to put the slide on it. The slide is an ex council park one and is huge 🙂

it will sit on my bank of a garden once the worst of the overgrown bamboo is cleared – very exciting!!

9am this morning a call from my ex who has now blocked me off Facebook asking for my help to let the BT man into his new house to get it connected. The sad thing is if I hadn’t been so crazy busy I would have helped. I don’t know what that says about me really. I need to chose a path and stick to it rather than flitting between the two. I know he isn’t any good for me or my daughter because his poor behaviour in terms of how he treats me and others is mirroring in hers. She is so young and impressionable – I feel that I should shield her from it and give her better guidance. He doesn’t show her enough affection and he doesn’t tell her he loves her anymore than he tells me. He has managed to tell me first just once in 9 months. I know this isn’t right and I need to take a path away from him and stop worrying about making the right choice.

Dinner was a rebellious chicken curry with broccoli and sweet corn. I left my lovely cookbook behind with my friend on the weekend so can’t start it yet… symbolic of paralysis in general in my part

The message is there – Just listen…

so many times the message was so clear. I didn’t want to listen though. Love is cruel like that you just want to ignore even loud voices when they say things you don’t want to hear. I have been in love since the 9th of March 2013. It was my 40th Birthday and my wonderful boyfriend swept me off my feet on the night of my Hollywood themed, black tie birthday party. 16 years my junior at 23 he impressed my friends and kissed me and held me and played me the chase and status track – sweet sensation after everyone had left and we danced – it was beautiful and I told him I didn’t need anything from him but to be loved and taken care of and for that moment it seemed possible and I abandoned any qualms about our age gap and fell madly and deeply in love. But the years that followed were stricken with his often cruel manipulative behaviour and a capacity to take what I never would have thought possible emotionally and financially leaving me anguished and despondent that things would ever improve. Of course every time I tried to face this reality and leave him he would express a depth of emotion and a deep connection that I absolutely felt to be unique and special and I believed that we were privileged to feel this way. I didn’t listen to the messages of his behaviour I made excuses often justifying his appalling treatment of me as a product of a terrible series of abandonments. We split for 18 months and entered new relationships – 9 months ago we reconciled on the assurance from him that he was a different man now that he had finally after years achieved a new role in the line of work he was qualified in and had coveted since we’d met. I had missed him and loved him so deeply that I felt I had no choice but to ignore the voices and try again…..big mistake….huge 😦

Spasmodic spice fix

Classic chilli – is there such a thing? Mine is now a vegetarian and meat hybrid and packed full of veg and flavoursome spices. Much like my life….too hot to handle.

I’ve been dumped but I am actually relieved. Go figure after 5 years. He was a complex and traumatised character and I tried to work through all that came with that but in the end my partners intentions weren’t good for me 😦 . It’s always so hard to be around him he is so controlling and well mean. Classic taker – Taking all they can and giving as little back as possible. For instance we went on holiday and I managed to get a week for less than £100 each staying with friends in Switzerland. Not satisfied with that I was pushed by him to book another week somewhere else. I found several great locations but they weren’t up to par. Finally I went for a week on the coast of Italy. Not able to contribute half the cost – we agreed he would fix the roof of my leaky camper to compensate and the proviso of coming was that he would do that and have spending money. In the event my roof still leaks and whilst on holiday an unexpected expense and the insurance on his house coming out in one hit (which I now realise was on purpose) meant he let me buy everything even though I awoke with tears and anxiety every night of our holiday. The other night he had forgotten the camper keys in his house so I had to drive the 30 minutes to go and get them in the middle of the night in readiness for my daughter’s birthday camping trip the following day. The keys had been thrown in a Carrier bag with an open bank statement – that’s when it really hit me. I looked. I know I shouldn’t have but I suddenly felt compelled to know. I was shaking opening the sheets and I searched for our holiday dates and saw that when I was crying every night and he wouldn’t even buy and ice cream he had over £1600 in his account – I know that he needed £800 of that to complete on his house but I was in a pickle and he let me suffer and took all that from me when he had £800 to spare. It’s bordering on evil. The final straw was that 2 nights later we were in his house and I cooked dinner before hand so we could just warm it up and spend 4 hours scrubbing his kitchen as it was so bad after the previous owner passed. All he did in that time was say how irritating I was leaving a bin bag in his path and berate me for not finding the electric key he had lost. I stood there and thought for the longest time. I mused about love and why it keeps us where we are caused pain and wondered what this man who treated me this way could feel for me. I concluded – nothing. That was the moment when I realised that he hadn’t kissed me for months, that he hadn’t touched me as a lover should for months and I hadn’t had a gaze that meant anything for months. He was using me. I had always thought deep down he was in love with me. His ex and I chatted on a train once and she said I should never doubt it. I’m afraid though that this isn’t love and I would literally be happier alone. I can cook my way to happiness and I intend to heal and be happy. I am truly a good person and that I know to be rare. I deserve so much more than to be treated so badly and my daughter – she deserves someone caring and loving. My ex was fine with her but after 5 years he should love her… she is demanding and difficult but she is the light and special and wonderful and deserves love. So embark with me on this beginning, this journey, its going to be fun and hard and Hilarious and harrowing but I know that somehow time means nothing, character does and mine will save me.