Conscious unsettling.

I've gone quiet over the past few weeks, as I have one of my 'hide and talk to as few people as possible' phases.  As winter has finally decided it's going to visit I've been making some big decisions and trying to prepare for some scary steps ahead.  And attempting some as yet unsuccessful toilet training with puppy #2.

Having spent far too much time feeling guilty and ungrateful for feeling low when I have so much, I had to force myself to look at things a little differently if I'm going to get out of the rut.  No magical cures, but a fighting chance.

What this has come down to, I now realise, is letting go of the final vestiges of The Plan.

The Plan was the inevitable path a teenage me would take, complete with a set of assumptions about when I would marry and how many children I would have.  Right up to aged 18 all I wanted was a simple 9 to 5, 2.4.  My teenage years hardly followed the norm but surely I would slip back into the groove and all would be well and ... normal?  Adulthood hit and I went with the flow but if I'm honest the risks and decisions I made were part of my 'student years = anything's allowed before I settle down' chapter.  And then the penny dropped as the milestones and deadlines of The Plan passed and I embraced the idea that there was no inevitable.  I even started celebrating my unsettled soul and looked for ways to find myself on the edges.

I have had a extraordinarily blessed 20s, I haven't saved the world or been happy much of the time but I can't deny how much I have to be grateful for.  Somewhere in the last year or so I got comfortable and settled.  But instead of taking a satisfied breath and sending a knowing nod back in time to teenage me, my spark upped and left.

I'll never know whether depression took my spark or whether my spark leaving made space for depression.  But I know that I started settling for less and stopped pushing myself.  Because I had so much why should I want to change a thing?

Just because I have a comfortable life, doesn't mean it's right.  Just because it's a pleasant plan, doesn't mean it's my plan.  And oh yeah, there's no plan.

So bringing this rambling tale to a point of some kind, I've taken some massive and terrifying steps which will make life considerably less comfortable and rather more precarious.

I'm risking fuelling my depressive voice which will tell me that people will think I'm a failure. There's a niggling train of thought which keeps telling me I'm going backwards; undoing the nice life I've worked for.  I'm admitting that at this time, I have to take the foot of the pedal and find some life balance outside of work.  I'm declaring that I'm not as strong as my aloof persona wants people to believe I am, that I'm far from sorted and I'm weird enough to not be satisfied with what others might give anything for.

He may be cute, but he poops on the sofa.

Of course I'm scared and my ego is bruised that I can't simply move forward from strength to strength.  My hope is that moving forward in weakness will help me to find some unsettled spark that allows me to feel like I'm not wasting time, that I'm not in the wrong place being the wrong person.  That stops the gnawing guilt and the 'shoulds' that strangle creativity.  My plan is to embrace the blank pages and jump into the unknown with all I have to offer.

Fingers crossed on the puppy's toilet training too.