End of Another Chapter

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Age never used to be a thing that bothered me. I have friends both younger and older than me, I try to treat people on how they are, rather than how old they are. I say this in a time where it feels like every other post on social media, or news media, is about pitting the different generations against one another. Like, people in the younger generation didn’t have it as hard as you, so what? Is that not the point, that we are supposed to be bettering society for those who come after us?

Birthdays seem to be a logical place to stop and re-assess where you are in life, and what you want to get out of it. I always feel disappointed about where I am, and what I have achieved. That I haven’t achieved what I had expected, by this point in life. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but seeing as I am 40 tomorrow, I feel a lot more introspective than normal. Everything, down to the celebration. A night or event to remember. None of that is happening. It’ll be just me, being off work, and trying not to simply spend all my time in my bed. I am recovering from being ill and rundown, so this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

If I was to be honest, I have certainly had a better 30s than my 20s. I struggled a lot in my 20s, really suffered much of the period in a job I hated, and my mental health was at its lowest. I was also discovering who I was, and coming to terms with something like sexuality, can be a challenging time of a person’s life. My 30s, have had me dealing with physical ailments more, but feeling more settled. Yes, my mental health has been crap, but I have felt a bit more settled, in that I know who I am, and the kind of person I want to present to the world. I do find, that I sometimes don’t have the confidence to actually present my true self. Maybe that’s what my 40’s should be about? Giving less of a damn about what people think.

Out of breath

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

I have had a cold brewing for a few weeks. And, with being soaked by the rain when out for the rugby on Saturday, the cold well and truly landed on Sunday. I was so ill. My eyes were swollen, I was coughing, I was sneezing, I had a temperature, I felt terrible. I spent a whole 2 days in bed, and am only now starting to feel better. Still a little blocked up, but a lot better than what I was suffering from.

Today, I had a day off work, so I went to meet my friend. I felt, because I had done so little when I was sick, that i have a ‘in between day’, where I can go out and do stuff, rather than just go straight back to work.

I obviously didn’t realise how congested I still was. I have been struggling to catch my breath. It feels like something heavy is on my chest. I’ve never felt like that before, and I had a wee panic over it. It must be because of my chest still being a little blocked up. So I’ll just have to keep on taking my medication and hope that it gets better. I hope it does, cause I’m back at work tomorrow.

Plotting A Path

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

Further education has been a thing I have struggled with, over the years. I have always envisioned a life for myself higher up than the entry level where I find myself permanently situated. It is frustrating, but, I have to keep plodding on. It doesn’t feel like there is any other option, if I were to be completely honest with you.

When I was younger, I always wanted to be a Veterinary Surgeon. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to get grades that would allow that to happen, I leaned towards Veterinary Nursing instead. Fantastic. Except, when I was staying in Glasgow, to access the Vet School, I found myself really suffering under poor mental health. I didn’t fit in with anyone, and I felt pretty lonely. I remember being shouted at by one of the lecturers because I was helping look after a dog in the hospital, and I couldn’t remember something she asked me. It was in front of so many people, and I was degraded. I think I was 19 at this time, and it just made everything worse. With my mental health already being awful, I then felt I couldn’t do anything right. It became such a distraction, I failed the end of year exam. I went to work in a local vet practice, and the guys there helped me build a new portfolio to submit and helped me study to resit my exam. Unfortunately, my confidence was already rock bottom, so I failed again. At this point, I couldn’t afford the money to re-register as a student vet nurse, to re-submit another portfolio, and sit another test. I was so stressed, I got a job at Greggs and let it all go.

Greggs was not an enjoyable experience, the manager was awful. She was a bit of a bully, and she had a tendancy of firing people who didn’t agree with her. You cleaned a counter wrong, you were written up. It was horrible, so I decided to find a way out of there. I applied to Lauder College (now Fife College), to do art and design. I loved art, and creating things, so maybe I could do this. So I left Greggs, got a part time job in a call centre whilst I was in college. I made so many friends at college, and it was an enjoyable experience. The only problem was I was at college for 8.30am, and would go straight to work after, by the time I was home it was often past midnight. I’d sit up to the early hours doing coursework, going to bed at 3 am, just to do it all again the next day. No surprise, my mental health took a major dip again, and I failed to keep up with the workload from the college. So I ended up dropping out and working at the call centre full-time. It was a horrible job.

I eventually ended up in the warehouse job, where I am currently working. I have been trying to get an IT degree through the Open University. My mental and physical health problems have made any progress slow, but I am still slowly making progress. I think. The problem is, that I have been in my current job for 10 years, and whilst, once upon a time, working hard would see natural progression up the corporate ladder, that is not the case anymore. There are so many people who have degrees these days, they come in at management level, even without experience. So, the only way I thought that I could fix that, was to get a degree myself. As said before, my health problems don’t make it particularly easy, nor does the fact that my doctor suspects I have ADHD, which would explain so much. I have had to pause my studies for a year, to try and help myself, and am trying to get back into things after the summer.

I have come to the conclusion, that as easy as it seems to be for some people, to pick a degree and simply do it. Things aren’t that easy for everyone. It might take multiple attempts to get to where we need to be, and it might never happen. I do like learning, I just need to find away that it works. There is a special type of uselessness that comes with feeling stuck in the same role for multiple years, especially when it seems like everyone around you are progressing. And, I need to find a way to get rid of that feeling. As well as the possibility that I worry that my work may no longer be around in the next 5 years, so I have to work hard and focus on next steps.

Girl’s World

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

I am a huge Formula 1 fan, and over the last few years there has been a push to include women more in the sport. From the female-only grid in the F1 Academy, to female mechanics. Not to mention, that it is estimated that women watching the sport is nearing 50/50 with men, with a lot of young girls watching races. This makes sense, because I remember when I was at High School, during the Michael Schumacher/ Ferrari era, all of my group of friends loved f1, and it was really popular amongst a lot of girls in my class. Over the years, with the shift to online, that has only helped the audience get bigger. And, that is without even mentioning the Netflix f1 documentary, Drive to Survive.

Recently, news broke that Christian Horner, the boss of current champions Red Bull Racing, was being investigated over inappropriate contact with a female member of staff. This happened about 3-4 weeks ago, and the news just keeps getting bigger and bigger, with this week it being leaked that the female complainant was suspended from Red Bull. This has lead to the volume of gossip that I have never seen involved in F1 before. And the female fans, who are incidentally the largest growing market for F1, are understandably peeved at the lack of transparency provided by Red Bull. This has lead to many questioning whether F1 is actually really about equality between genders, or is it all just a cover story, whilst everything that matters, stays the same.

This bad feeling has increased, when the teams arrived for media day in Saudi Arabia last week, and some of the drivers were a bit dismissive of the ‘Red Bull’ situation in their comments. With the drivers who were quizzed on it saying things like ‘it doesn’t affect me, I am concerned about what happens on the track’. This, angered a lot of fans, because it felt that they were treating the issue of sexual harassment or abuse as something trivial, that can be thrown away. Which, for victims of such abuse, is completely not true. For generations, women have struggled to get somewhere in their field, without men of a higher position trying to take advantage. You can think of Hollywood, and the idea of the ‘casting couch’, where women were expected to deliver certain ‘favours’ to get roles they desired. Whilst the idea of the ‘casting couch’ has bitten the dust, it is still common occurrence that men take advantage of women in lower positions that them, and then threaten their careers or even life, if they were to tell anyone. It happens with business leaders, politicians, celebrities, even senior members of someone’s own family.

I have had discussions with work colleagues, friends, and family over sexual assault and abuse. And there is a pattern that has formed. I don’t think that people want to believe that such crimes are so widespread, so they don’t believe them. It’s always ‘they are looking for money’, or ‘they are a homewrecker’. Whilst comments like these seem to come from a place of malice, I believe that they instead come from a place of ignorance. Sexual crimes are a very hard thing to understand unless a person has personally gone through it, or knows someone who has. Especially when it comes to harassment, where someone has said something that crosses a woman’s personal boundaries, and makes them feel devalued and uncomfortable. From my own experience, I have been told that I am ‘too precious’ if I let silly comments upset me. And that is from other women. Just because one person felt okay, doesn’t make things okay with every person.

I don’t really know how F1, the FIA, and the teams, make this right. It doesn’t help that the head of the FIA is getting investigated for a cheating scandal, which is being hidden behind the news and upset of the Horner scandal. Is it that the powers that run the sport want the focus to be on the fracturing state of Red Bull Racing, rather than themselves, no matter the consequences? That the issue of female safety is being trivialised as a scapegoat for the FIA to get away with cheating on their own races? It’s an ever changing situation. But I believe the powers in charge of F1 know exactly what they are doing in stretching out the Horner scandal. The situation has been manufactured to be so big that it is an insult to every woman who has anything to do with F1, the FIA, and all its parters.

Going Down

~ Sue ~ 2 Comments

One day last week, for a few hours, Meta went down. Meta is the collective name for the services under the Facebook umbrella. So, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads. All down. Considering I message most people on Messenger, and chat all things F1 on Threads, I felt like I had lost an arm.

It’s not unusual, to be honest. Not these days. We have become so attached to our phones, that social media has become a major part of our social lives. And during the pandemic it became many people’s only way to socialise with people outwith their household. Something that has stuck, apart from the Zoom quizzes, thankfully they are mostly gone. I like a quiz, but when people are picking questions, it is a reminder that what is well known trivia for one person, isn’t always that for all people.

I have always had a connection online, I remember going on band forums to chat to people about music. Even when you had arguments with people, you closed your computer, and that was that till the following day. So, you had a natural break before you would go back, and usually by then, things had de-escalated. Everyone was friends again. But now, you are never really off-line, or I certainly am not. There is no escape for things when they do escalate.

Which made me think. Maybe the social networks need to crash more often.

Love the music

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

I was watching a video of Dizzee Rascal recently, when he was preforming his song, ‘Bonkers’ in HMV in Glasgow. It seemed fun, and the crowd were bouncing around having a great time. I then looked down at the comments, not always the best thing to do on TikTok, especially if you don’t want your day ruined. There were a few comments saying things like ‘horrible Ned music’. Now in Scotland, a Ned is like a Chav, it’s a way to dismiss an entire section of society, and consider them as scum.

Which is horrible.

The people leaving these comments were self confessed Metalheads. And if they were picked up on their negative comments, the answer would be akin to ‘but they pick on me’. It seems to be just continuing the petty societal warfare that used to occur between different groups at High School. It’s this constant need to beat others down, to make themselves appear superior. Something that I have personally never understood.

Music has always been something that has helped mark key memories in my life, be it good or bad. What I love about music is that it can affect your mood, even encourage you forward when you are ready to give up. I try to listen to most types of music, or at least give it a listen. Some are maybe not exactly to my taste, but I would never dream of criticising someone who does like it. You never know what song will help you when you need it most.

For example, take Ren. He is a Welsh musician who utilises rap, and guitar to create his music. A lot of people I know would dismiss him and his music, without giving a listen. It is to their detriment. Ren writes a lot about mental health and being chronically ill. In one of his songs (Hi Ren) where he speaks about the constant between lightness and darkness not being a battle but a pendulum swinging back and forth. And it resonated with me. Nobody had ever put it in that way for me before. If you have really bad days, at some point things will switch the other way and be more positive. It’s a good, if sometimes difficult, way to think.

That is what is so great about music, for me, is that that you are able to see different perspectives, find different things that match your moods. I just can’t understand why people would invalidate complete genres of music, just because of the people who do listen to it.

Cooking?

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

What’s your favorite thing to cook?

Umm… I am not the best cook. Due to me being sore a lot (thanks arthritis) food has to be easy for me. A lot of the time I don’t have the grip or ability to pick up heavy things. I usually survive of convenience food (pizza, pasta or noodles). I know it’s not good.

I have been trying to work on portion control, something I am rubbish at. I tend to eat everything in sight, and then have the nerve to feel sick.

Note:I wrote this last night, got distracted and didn’t post. I don’t know why.

A Change Is Needed

~ Sue ~ 2 Comments

I have been using this blog for almost 14 years. And, although I do sometimes update rather sporadicly, it has documented a huge section of my life. Something that is tangible, that I, or anyone, can browse through at their leisure. For a person who is as indecisive as I am, it is a pretty big thing to have kept up. It’s become a snapshot of what has been on my mind at a particular time.

I have tried a lot of things over the years. Most of them writing challenges that I have done for 2-3 days, and then proceeded to ignore. I have tried other blogs, ones with a ‘niche’, so that I could turn a blog into something that is more than a blog. But, they didn’t even last the length of time it took for me to register an official domain name. There are other sites, like my Livejournal, which is much older than this site, but… that has fallen into defunct mode, given that any community that was once on there, has now fizzled away to nothing. WordPress, still seems to be going okay. I think.

The problem, right now, is that I don’t know how to personalise this blog more, make it more fitting on where I personally am. The layout, in itself, works, but is that maybe because it has worked before. Maybe, I am comfortable in it. I think this may be a ‘do some research’ on what I like kind of thing. But then, it may just need me being creative and making a new header, maybe creating a new biography. Make sure that any links work (note: they do not work). Maybe I will feel a bit better if I freshen things up a little.

I always have this hesitancy to change things, though. Because, I am a creature of habit, and I don’t really do well if things change too much. But then, all the tools I use to post will be the same, so I suppose not much will change. Maybe. It feels a little bit like redecorating my bedroom, if I make things too different it might start making me uncomfortable, rather than be a relaxing space of safety. I understand that it makes me sound like a 3 year old who doesn’t want to try anything apart from their Turkey Dinosaurs. It wouldn’t be me, if I wasn’t overthinking something so silly.

Let’s see what happens.

Holding Your Tongue

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

I’ve found myself in situations recently where I have had to hold my tongue during conversations. The kind of nodding politely, whilst trying to keep my mouth shut. Because if I say something, I am going to be argumentative and try to put someone in their place. Any objection that I have stays in my head, and spirals to something that just ends up making me so angry. And, I’m pretty sure everyone around me just thinks that I am in a mood.

The thing is, I like discussion. People being civil and discussing ideas and opinions based on their own experiences, is all fine. I welcome that. But I am finding increasingly that people are just saying things ad verbum from tabloid articles and Facebook opinion pieces. They don’t have any original thought of the situation, they don’t research, and they are also not willing to speak to the people actually affected by what they say.

I am very afraid of confrontation, and don’t want to offend people. I think it is an after-effect of being bullied at school (and in a previous workplace), where I end up thinking that having no-one dislike you is better than having disagreements. Which is silly, because I am aware that is not based on anything logical, it is just completely irrational. I mean, a calm mind will tell you that not everyone is going to like you, and that you are unable to please everyone. It’s okay, it is just life. But, as I have discussed a lot on this blog, my brain is never very rational, at least until much after an event has occurred.

I feel rather stupid writing about this. Not having to speak up is a privilege. It is a luxury that many don’t have. And I have spoke up before. I just feel like over the last few years, the world has become okay with being much more intolerant of others. Especially towards people who encounter problems due to race, disability, sexuality, gender identity, or religious identity. People who are shouty and abusive before any discussion has even happened. For a country that is suppose to be pretty progressive, it is really sad to see. And people who have anxiety, like myself, find themselves unable to speak up, because they have been burnt before. They have had the death threats online, they have been cut off from ‘friends’, they have had that moment of reassessing every belief they hold, as it feels they stand alone. And, sometimes, it is exhausting. And life, in general, can be exhausting enough.

Busy Busy

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

It is the busy period at my work. as it always is after Christmas. I am working long weeks, and am rushed off my feet. Though, I say that, it is normally a good kind of busy. The kind where you are constantly working away, so that the time flies by, which is good. I don’t have the time for my brain to wonder onto something else, and get unfocused. And yet, it is not so busy that I am swamped and stressed. It’s a good kind of busy.

I have been trying to make time for reading, which is entirely dependant on how sore I am on any particular day. I currently have a physical book, an ebook, and an audiobook, all in progress at the same time. It is normally my hands that get sore. so I find it hard to hold a book. or even my phone or kindle. Especially as I am travelling to work. I have been listening to audiobooks a lot more than I used to. It’s nice to hear a story on the way to and from work. This year I want to read more, and having a variety of ways to do that, even when life tries to get in the way, is helpful.

As the world seems to be getting more busy, and more intense, it is important to make time for hobbies, things that you enjoy. Over the years I have had lots of hobbies, by the joy has fallen away from them when I found myself stressing over whether or not I can do it. I have always loved drawing, writing, and reading. I am trying to take the pressure out of it, so don’t be worried if my posts on here, as an example is a bit sporadic. Trying to make my hobbies fun again.