Hey Sister

N   I have written extensively about my own history but I haven't really commented on the history I have shared with others. I have a large extended family on both my maternal and paternal side and a small immediate family. I come from your standard mum, dad and two kids affair. I'm older than my sister by two years and she's called Our Lucy, but is often known as Luce.

 

   We all came out in celebration of Lucy a few months ago when she got wed to her now husband Jake and finally flew the nest lovingly crafted and maintained by our parents Ange and Gegsy. I don't have any other intimate examples of what it means to have a sibling other than the one set for me by Lucy and I think she's set a high standard of love and care over the 26 years we've been together, often separated by land and sea but always, always a pair. To me having a sister is all about the easy friendship you simply can't duplicate with anyone else other than a very, very close friend or cousin. Lucy and I are the only sisters in a family where everyone else has a brother and I've seen that the brother/sister relationships of my cousins are also strong and precious. I think a very large part of the reason for this closeness between siblings is because we come from a family of which all of our parents are one of seven - meaning that family is important and it has a stronghold within our identities, we were taught to look after each other and on occasion I've felt just as protected by my cousins as I have always felt by Lucy. I remember when a not so comradey comrade gave me a hard time on an idle Tuesday at high school and one of my female cousins, also in the same school and older than me by a year, took much umbridge at this treatment of me and proceeded to put the not so comradey comrade into a position of interrogation and saw to it that the uncomradey one didn't pull a stroke like that again. The cousin in question continues to be a close friend to this day and someone I've put into something resembling a 'big sister' column in my mind.

 

   I don't wish to represent my sister Lucy as being a little saint. A little saint she is not and our dad took great delight in revealing her past misdemeanours in the speech he gave with excellent delivery and aplomb at her wedding. It was of course all said in jest but everything that escaped his vocal box was the truth. We know so much about our sisters; we know why they're a little bit defensive, we know when they started paying a lot of attention to their hair and makeup. We know when they took off from us emotionally to 'find themselves' and we remember when they came back with a greater impression in their mind's eye of who they had become. A sister who is close in age is likely to have been our first friend, competition for parental attention, a yard stick to measure ourselves against and in my case someone who is always, always there, ready to take me in, dust off the day and say something which is unique to her, highly likely to make me laugh and cause me to feel grateful for the 30th April 1989, which is the day three became four and Little Luce began to make her first impressions on the world.

 I have a great deal of respect for and interest in the sanctity of sisterhood. My sister used to be a mucky little thing in the garden who was forever consuming mud pies and leaves, she still knows where they tastiest leaves are… she used to have tasting sessions during her morning constitution as she headed towards school and then inevitably diverted her route and went somewhere else instead. Lucy isn't a mucky little thing or truant anymore, she's just little now and I'm so glad that I've seen and been part of her journey from mummy and daddy's tiny baby to toddler, to my friend, to school, to high school, to A LOT of college courses, (one of which resulted in expulsion) and now to marriage. I'm expecting her with our mum and dad in three and a half weeks time for a week long visit… at the end of which we'll put on our red shoes, click three times and go back to our little town just outside of Liverpool city centre. As Dorothy always says, there's no place like home and it's all the better when you've got a full memory bank waiting to be woken up when you get back. You can stroll along the beach there with your sister who always walks a pace ahead and talks nineteen to the dozen but continually looks back to check you're still there as she mosies with her back straight, senses tuned in and serves to dazzle the world around.

Heart Healthy

 

 

It dawned on me yesterday that we're all living on the same planet but experiencing it completely differently. I was thinking about this and relating it specifically to languages, my flatmate and I have very different ideas about who the Friends characters are. How is this relevant?

  It starts with the fact that my flatmate and I are of different nationalities. I'm English and he's Spanish. I walked into the living room the other day to find myself looking at David Schwimmer's face, now I recognised his physical portrayal of the loveable oaf Ross Geller but I didn't identify with the voice coming out of his mouth at all. What have they done with my Ross? Is what I was thinking. I almost said, 'this is a lot more enjoyable in English yanno,' to my ensconced in his own version of Friends flatmate but then I stopped myself just in time. I stopped because I remembered a conversation I had with a different individual of Spain about how Friends only feels like Friends to him when he watches the American actors running about on the screen with their mouths open and closing but with their real voices hidden behind a Latino voice over actor. If you’re a Friends fan then you'll know that the six principal characters feel as familiar to you as your own friends do and the language you know them in is who they are to you. It seemed a bit mean to tell my flatmate that he was having a second rate Friends experience, he was having a nice time.

  My point here is that we're all watching the same things but from varying angles. I step onto my yoga mat and look forward to thirty minutes of peace and calm, someone else steps onto a yoga mat and looks forward to thirty minutes of boring poses. We then meet in the pub and have a heated discussion which results in someone being called 'snotty.' I feel that as groups of populations we have become very aware of what we think and how we feel but are not very aware of the person sitting next to us at work, we're all on the same planet, we're in the same office but they're in their universe and I'm in mine and we won't meet in the middle until we accept that we must travel to a middle ground and talk things out. It is of my entirely insignificant mind that we often forget to communicate and to empathise, we forget to do the right thing because we're so focussed on what's happening in our individual universes and more often than not in today's cut and thrust world we're forgetting to live, we're also forgetting that other people are capable of enhancing our lives, not everyone is out to hinder things for us.  

 

  I sometimes find myself feeling tied to a career clock, must do this, must do that, mustn't swan off to another country, must start saving for a pension by the time I hit my 30th birthday. The only tick-tock-tick-tock I'm really tied to is the one beating inside my chest and that clock likes action, it likes movement. It likes to be understood and cared for too. My heart, like hearts everywhere in all of the billions of universes millennia wide has on occasion forgotten to empathise and to understand its heartly counterparts, but, but, but, but I am making a pledge to carry about an understanding and forgiving heart. This heart of mine will not screech out 'eeeeeeee ya snotty you' when it doesn't understand another heart beating all alone in another chestly confinement. My heart will opt to communicate instead and by doing so will allow its best friend and close neighbour, the brain, to release nice heart healthy doses of dopamine and serotonin whilst it's support network, the arms and legs, walk around showing the eyes all of the magical sights along the way as the ears take in tinkling, pretty music signalling a story that is just about to begin - with the most colourful and stunning set of lights guiding the way.

 

 

Conscience and Confidence

  My name is Helen Edwards (totally know that you already know what my name is but I'm about to make a declaration and I've heard that announcing oneself is the correct protocol in such situations) and since I learned how to think I've been having unhealthy relationships. I've experienced unhealthy relationships with food, alcohol, men, women, my body and also my mind. I shall outline them forthwith so hold onto your seatbelts…. white knuckle ride coming up.

  When I was a child I was afraid of the other children at my school, they were all a bit rough and ready and I was undoubtedly the studious type so I got rather used to my own company and I befriended a cat called Simba. Best friend a cat aged 11? Yes, I can hear the alarm bells ringing in your head. Primary School finished and on I moved to High School, well that was a joy, NOT. I cried every day for approximately three years of my high school schooling, the fact I didn't dry out altogether was a small miracle. I had pencil sharpenings tipped into my hair, I was always the last to be picked for anything, people would try nice and hard not to invite me to things but always be very careful of making sure that I knew all about the social activities of my peers and one very pleasant girl passed a note around the class with the question Who Hates Helen? written on it and asked all of the yes voters to sign accordingly. My crime? I was quiet, unassuming, unconfident and my face was as miserable looking then as it remains to be to this day when in a resting position. It was an unfortunate sequence of events and I was glad when I was 16 and could walk out without looking back.

  Should have all ended there shouldn't it? Theoretically, yes, and that would have been ideal, but theories don't always work in practice and this theory didn't work in my case. The rot had set in early, damage had been done, rusty nail was already well in place and it was contaminating everything around it. I would walk into a room and expect people not to like me, I had come to expect to fight  my corner before anyone had gotten to know me. I was defensive, I expected the worst of everything and I was incredibly negative. I developed anxiety, OCD (no I'm not a little bit OCD - how I loathe that phrase. I suffered with fully blown, crippling OCD for a rather long time), depressive episodes, I drank too much, I ate too much and I didn't believe there was a happy future out there for me. This up and down fiasco carried on for years and years and it plagued me. I gained weight and I didn't want to go out, I'd feel so uncomfortable when I was out that I'd get too drunk, then I'd feel uncomfortable about being so drunk when I was in the same company again but in a more sober condition. I'd lose weight, I'd gain weight, I'd feel good and then I'd feel bad. It's been the most sickening roller coaster you can possibly imagine but with the added effect of being not one bit imaginary and very, very real. So real that I can remember it because I've lived it.

  I've had some relationships, all of which have failed. I believe these failed relationships can be divided into two camps. My inability to function in a rational way when the chips were down and because I made some bad decisions regarding the other partners in the relationships. My weight has been a massive factor, I just haven't felt very confident for large parts of the last 10 years since my first relationship ended.

   This upping and downing has been ruling my confidence and consciousness for far too long and it is going to STOP. It is going to STOP once and for all. I've fought against the urge to swap newly learned healthy behaviours over the last few weeks, I've been keeping a diary and I make lists for myself about what I must do the next day, I've been practising yoga each day and I've become a vegetarian. I've lost 9lbs (yay me - weighed myself this evening) over the last while and I can feel something changing inside me. The lazy, lethargic, soft and comfy casing surrounding me is falling away and revealing someone with the drive and ambition to make things happen. The slim, bright eyed, confident young woman I was in my early 20s is on her way back and when she gets her foot firmly back in the door, she's back to stay. She'll fit her hourglass figure into a pair of size 10 jeans, let her blonde hair fall over her shoulders, pass her bloody driving test and then she'll buy another pair of size 10 jeans to celebrate.