Wow, it has been three years since I last added to this blog. I had intended it to be a regular exercise but a lot has happened and my priorities changed and I didn’t feel like sharing my feelings and experience when it all felt pretty negative. But that is life isn’t it, it has ups and downs and we try to navigate these as best we can with the tools that we have available.

So what has changed over the last few years? I have become older, the children are growing up and are now both at school – a change that I found difficult to accommodate. My hormones have been running the show and I have entered the perimenopausal phase of my life with all its challenges. I feel strongly about this issue as it is so hard and the support and knowledge out there is still low. I had yet another knee operation which put the kybosh on me being able to use exercise as a tool to cope with stress and I missed the endorphin rush so much.  It also went a bit wrong afterwards and I had an unexpected internal bleed which I found hard to manage emotionally as well as physically. I did the Zoe study and have gained a better insight into my physical health and the things that I can do to improve it.  I have also struggled with my mental health after an incident which led to me feeling very low and hopeless for a lengthy period of time.  On a more positive note, we got rid of the vegetable patch which was the subject of my last post and replaced it with a chicken coop and run with beautiful feathered girls who make me happy. Work has continued much the same but has at times felt overwhelming due to all the other things going on in my life. I find writing cathartic so will explore these last few years in due course.

What is the purpose of writing? What is the role of the writer? To entertain the reader? A cathartic exercise for the writer? Both? To amuse? Entertain? Provoke interest? Inspire? Be relatable? Or maybe a combination of all these things. And I think that this is what has kept me from writing anything for so long because I didn’t always feel able to entertain others, I didn’t feel inspiring, I wasn’t always sure if I was relatable or not. So instead I kept it all inside and focused on getting through one day at a time and wearing a mask of being confident, competent and cheery.  I think that this was probably a mistake.   I am sure that this is relatable in itself.  Regardless of whether anybody reads what I have to say, the writing in itself would probably have helped me when I really needed some help and didn’t know where to turn to find it. The answer was always there, I could have found it within myself if only I had taken the time to write and express it.