This is not me.
Well, obviously it is me. But it isn’t.
You see, I don’t look like that. Not in my mind’s eye. I look more like this.
though possibly skinnier. And less blurry. With better lighting 😉
So where has she come from, this woman in the mirror? She catches me by surprise on a daily basis as I’m leaving the living room, jumping out at me from the mirror as I cross the hall. She follows me around all day, weighing me down and making me feel old and frumpy when I have to put on clothes that just don’t fit right, or if they fit, don’t look like anything I’d ever choose!
I’m back in my own jeans, and getting close to my even skinnier trousers, but my lovely velvet Christmas skirt doesn’t fit, and my top half doesn’t seem to have got the 9 months on, 9 months off message. (We’re coming up hard on the 9 months now, and I’m still well over a stone heavier than I was before I was pregnant.) I know that breastfeeding has some overhead, but I still don’t like it.
And I look around at these (lovely) children around me and I wonder sometimes where they came from too. I mean, I know where they’re from, but at the same time, I can’t quite work out how I got from being that kid not long out of university to being a mother of three, at home with the children, doing things like washing, and shopping, and cooking from scratch.
What happened to changing the world? Becoming a writer? Making a difference?
It appears to have fallen by the wayside somewhere in the last decade.
It’s not that I have regrets about my life, with the whole family and having children thing. I don’t, I’m very happy. It’s just that there are other things I wanted to do as well, and I’m a little surprised to find myself here now without having done them. So it’s time to start, now, doing them.
I’ve started a new personal challenge. It’s the Artist’s Way
or the highway, each morning. I either run (a very short distance atm!) or I do the morning pages and when those two new activities are set in as as habits, I’ll choose some more things to change.
I’d like your support. And if there are things you’d like to start new or change in your life, I’d like to support you too.
So if you do feel like joining in, leave a comment, and if enough ppl want to, I’ll set up a linky. (Oh, and I’ve set this post to allow trackbacks, so if you want to link back here, you can and it’ll link to you too.) I’ll post my update sometime next week and you can let me know how you are doing too and we’ll see where we go from then. (You never know, if ppl want to join in, I might even get around to creating a blog badge 😉 )
Here’s to living otherwise 🙂
Leave a Reply