Confident Happiness

  Anyone who has had a good scroll through my blog entries will know that they have been placed here on this website as a means of self therapy and also because I have always hoped that they will reach someone, anyone who needs to hear the words I have written and posted back out into the world. I have generally found myself to be at my most writey when I have been feeling low and needing to make sense of my emotions and thought processes; I have heard it said that artists do their best work when they're feeling tortured and very possibly hysterical and I agree with that. The more hard hitting pieces of my writings have generally been written when I haven't been feeling quite 'myself'. It has been hard to judge which bits of me are myself and which aren't over the last few years, as people we tend to say that we aren't 'ourselves' when we aren't feeling our best but I tend to wonder if this is the correct way to describe the self. I feel as though I have always been myself whether I've been feeling sad, alright or fabulous because there have been elements of my self in every phase of my recovery over the last ten years of ups and downs.

  So where am I now then? Well I'm feeling very stable these days and I have done for quite some time now. I consider it to be a little miracle that I am living in England again (amongst the blustery winds and dark winter, constantly be-speckled by never ending rain, which sometimes feels as though it might turn into a torrent, which could cascade from the above regions for ever and ever) and not feeling like I'm going to go nuts and jump on the next plane back to Sunny Spain. I have historically not done very well with filthy cold weather, it's pretty much always driven me out of my tree and into the concocting of a plan of action designed to remove me from the British meteorological conditions. Not this year though.

  This winter is progressing nicely. I had already decided that I would need to do things differently, perhaps I would bake my own bread to keep myself feeling cosy I thought; or perhaps I should engage in the doing of a tango class and whilst both are wonderful... it is neither of these things that is making the British winter more tolerable. I have found myself a different kind of sunshine and for once it isn't sunshine of my own making because I, yes I, after five and a half years since my last relationship ended have found myself a man and he more than makes up for the extended summer I haven't had. The interesting thing about my current state of happiness is that I can go on and on and on about how miserable I have felt and how relatable my emotions have been to Adele songs in the past but I very much struggle to discuss it when I am just genuinely delighted with someone else's affection gracing my days. I can only imagine that this is because I have become almost totally dependent on myself and it's true that I don't want to lose me after it took so long to learn to like me.

  The years leading up to this one have been tumultuous, enriching, difficult, meandering, depressing, magical and generally lively with plenty of happenings in occurrence and have given me much to do and to think about. I have lived in one of the most beautiful places that I believe I will ever visit and in doing somade a dream come true, become the person I always hoped to be and I have also been able to share my experiences via eBlogger. I have grown and developed as a person, I'm not the woman I was when I wrote the first entry two years ago. I was haunted by the past then and shortly afterwards my own demons found me and hunted me down until I learned to communicate with them and have a good old chat. We spent some time cohabiting in awareness eventually (like all of the best house-mates) they morphed from devils on my right shoulder to angels on the left; the remnants of a past life and an internal struggle, which is now largely settled. My Angelly-Demons give me encouragement now. They say things like 'well there's no reason for you not to proceed with this', they show me how delightful my new boyfriend is and they remind me that I am not a finished product because I will always have 'stuff', everybody has 'stuff' but my 'stuff' is far less heavy since it was dried out by the sun in Seville and is able to cloud my vision no more. I can see in front of me now and it looks just like home, with some significant alterations to the world it was before.