Everything is changing at the moment and I feel completely
unsettled by it. After two years of
living and working in an amazing flat, I am having to move back to my family
home for a while for financial reasons.
Choosing to do a creative job means that I have to take the good with
the bad, sometimes you can afford a nice place to live and use as a base to
work and sometimes things get tough and you have to down size. I understand that I have to ride the highs
and the lows, and I try to embrace them all equally.
The thing is, that the place that I am living in at the
moment has been more than just a roof over my head, so much has happened there
and I have somehow over the last two years grown into a completely different
person.
I moved to the place that I have been living in as a favour to
my sister. I had spent the last year of
my life before that completely broken hearted after my 11 year relationship
ended and I had to leave my job in the corporate world because of an anxiety
disorder. I wasn’t particularly bothered
about moving away, my whole life had been ripped away from me and I had very
little enthusiasm to do anything. It
suited me not having to worry about paying bills and rent.
My sister was being kicked out of her current flat and she approached
me and asked me if I wanted to live with her as she was desperate not to return
to our family home. I agreed to move in
with her because it seemed like a nice thing to do, I felt sorry for her and
wanted to help if I could. Somewhere in
the back of my mind though I kept hoping it just wouldn’t happen and that it would
all get called off.
I half-heartedly did all of the flat viewings, and I always
found myself making up an excuse as to why I didn’t like the flat, I just wasn’t
sure about the whole move thing. That
was until one day we went to look at a flat and everything suddenly
changed. It was a viewing that I hadn’t particularly
wanted to do, it was a ground floor flat and we were keen on being high up
(reduce the risk of break in’s etc), and I was just getting over a horrible
cold and I resented being dragged from my sick bed on a Saturday morning. Something told me to go to the viewing
though, and I was even the one who said we should still go even though I was
100% sure we didn’t want a ground floor flat.
I was already preparing myself not to like it when we walked
into the flat that day for the viewing, but as we were shown into the front
room I was greeted by a full length window that looked out onto full on
greenery, and something in my heart just clicked. It was like I could already foretell what I
would go onto do in the flat, the writer in me wanted that window and that calm
and peace.
After the viewing
finished we looked at a couple of other flats but I just found myself thinking
about that flat. Later that day when we
went for a lunch break at my sisters flat, I causally looked out of the window
when I saw this man walk by that I used to see in another town when I was going
through a very rough time. He always
smiled at me and I used to feel calmed by his presence because he reminded me
of my Dad. It felt strange to see him in
another town and I kept thinking about the fact that I had looked up just as he
had walked by the window. Later that day
as we got out the car for another viewing I stepped out the three white
feathers in a circle. White feathers had
always been my sign that my mum who had passed away years ago was trying to tell
me she was there with me. Later that day I couldn’t fight this strong urge I
felt that my mum was trying to communicate with me to tell me to go for the flat
that I had liked. The strange presence
of the man that I had always felt comforted by and the white feathers was too
much to ignore, and I told my sister that I thought we should go for the flat.
That following Monday we set about taking the flat, and
everything just seemed to line up for us.
We negotiated a reduction in rent that was accepted immediately accepted
and the amount of money that I was able to withdraw from my savings account
that day was just exactly the amount that I needed to put a deposit down. Things seemed to be coming together very
easily, and I was both excited and nervous.
When I got home that night though we got a phone call that it had been
found that my older sister’s chemotherapy for bowel cancer had been found to
have stopped working, and suddenly it was clear why my Mum was guiding me to
live with my little sister so strongly, she needed me to support her.
When I first moved into the new flat it felt really
strange. I had lived in the same town my
whole life and now suddenly here I was in this whole new place, and I still wasn’t
really 100% sure why I was there. I kind
of felt like a little bit of an accessory to somebody else’s plans and
life. I was still pretty heartbroken
from the end of my relationship and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the
rest of my life, my work ethic was still at zero.
The first few months ticked by and dealing with the fact
that my older sister wasn’t going to recover from cancer was hard, it took all
of my strength just to deal with the fact that I was about to spend my last
Christmas with her. Work was the
furthest thing from my mind and when my Sister finally lost her cancer battle
in the January I put all of my strength into supporting my little sister and
helping her come to terms with her grief, while at the same time trying to make
sense of everything myself.
When it got to March I had been in the new flat for 5 months
and I realised that I needed to make some decisions about what I wanted to do
with my life. I was wiling away the days
reading and kind of just hanging out till my sister came home from work, and if
my older sister passing away had taught me anything it was that life was short
and not to be wasted.
I felt that I should go back to a corporate job even though
I didn’t feel any kind of pull towards it, and I was surprised when I immediately
got an interview for a role that I applied for. On the day of the interview
everything seemed to conspire against me getting there, the trains were late
and then the person doing the interview couldn’t see me at a later time, so
that was that. As I stood at London
Bridge station, I looked around and realised that everything felt different to
when I used to be a commuter and when working in London was my life, everything
had changed, but bigger than that was the fact that I had changed. I realised that I was trying to get something
from the past back and that the City life just wasn’t what I wanted anymore. I still wasn’t sure what I did actually want,
but having that moment clarified to me that I needed to stop waiting for something
from the past to come back.
A few weeks down the line I asked myself what I did
want. I had written a draft of a book
the year before about my journey with anxiety.
It had all been written in notebooks and I always planned to edit and
publish it but when I had moved it had just got shoved in a draw and forgotten
about. I realised that I was still keen
on editing it, but I wasn’t sure I had the work ethic to just sit at a desk and
type. I reasoned with myself that maybe
I could try editing with some of my favourite programmes on in the
background. I gave it a try and that was
it, I was in love with writing again. I
knew that when I worked I would get to watch shows that I loved and I would get
to see this thing that I had created come to life. Suddenly I was addicted to that sense of
achievement, and even though I still didn’t have the best work ethic in the
World I couldn’t wait to get to work each day.
I loved working by the big window in the flat with all the
light and calm pouring in. I could feel
myself changing on a daily basis. I
still felt sad that my career in the corporate world and my relationship hadn’t
worked out and I missed my big sister terribly, but I was healing and
growing. My heart didn’t hurt like it
used to, and I was developing new interests.
When my Sister decided to move out I realised that I wanted
to stay on at the flat on my own. Even
though the rent was a lot when I didn’t have a solid income stream, I was
attached to the place and I liked the effect that it was having on me, but more
importantly than that I wanted to finish editing and eventually publish my book
there. It was there that I had fallen in
love with creating it, and it only felt right that I finish it there.
Sharing the flat with my sister had been great, but it was
living on my own there that I really developed and grew. Now that my heart was healing there was all
this space in my head for old passions and new interests, and I found myself going
into a full on creative over drive. When
you live on your own as a single person there are so many things that you have
to navigate like what do you do at the weekends when all of your friends and
family are in relationships? Finding my way through things like that when I
felt uncomfortable only made me grow as a person. I always swore I couldn’t change light bulbs,
couldn’t cook eggs and would never be able to confront it if a wasp or giant
spider came into the flat. Who was going
to do those things for me if I was living on my own? Me that is who, so you are
damn right I can do all of those things now!
In May this year, around two and a half years after my
relationship had ended, I realised that I wasn’t hurt, upset or angry
anymore. My heart had healed and I was
at peace with everything that had happened.
My heart belonged to other things now and I was waking up excited for
life.
So it is difficult this week facing up to leaving the place
where everything changed for me, but I know that it is life’s way of telling me
that I am ready for something new and that I am being taken in a whole new
direction. It is difficult returning to
my family home as the only times I have ever gone back there have been because of
break up’s with guys. So I can’t help but form negative associations with going
back home. I will approach things with
an open mind and let the experience be what it is while remaining open to new
experiences and whatever life has to teach me next.
I will forever be grateful to the place that life led me to
that healed my heart and awoke a passion in me.
Thanks for reading and come and follow me on twitter
@allie_marie1981
xxx
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