SUNDAY 11TH SEPTEMBER 2022
Well, my mood has definitely been better this week – yay! I decided to stop waiting until I felt I had enough energy to start running again and just do it, in the hope that the exercise itself would boost my energy. I’m not brimming over with the stuff yet but I’m glad to be back and I’m relishing that boost it gives me – definitely the best way to get the day off to a good start.
MY WHY
What has been a good week on a personal level, has been rather more turbulent on a national level – a new Prime Minister and a new monarch, all within 2 days! Even before dad died, I had started to feel like 2022 was shaping up to be a year of endings. It sounds really silly but, lots of box set type series I’ve been following for years have ended this year and, on a less silly level, my children have now both moved out of primary education. Other people have died too, as happens every year, but this year more than ever there has been a sense of those deaths heralding the end of an era. When I watched the Queen on TV during the Platinum Jubilee celebrations, I felt certain that she too would pass this year and now she has. I wouldn’t say I’m a royalist but, like many, I had a lot of respect for her and her passing has made me sad as it truly is the end of an era – her likes will not be seen again, I don’t think. Yes, very much a year of endings so it kind of feels like an appropriate time for me to finally acknowledge that alcohol no longer serves me and move on. People move on from things all the time – jobs, careers, partners, homes. They outgrow things and people, move on and often don’t look back. Yet alcohol always seems to manage to stick around, morphing to fit with people’s new choices – cider to beer to white wine to red wine to spirits to champagne…… and sometimes sadly back down the ladder again to the cheapest of the cheap. Alcohol has been hanging around in my life since I was a teenager and, whereas I admit it served a purpose for a long time, I’ve slowly come to realise that it no longer does. So really, why continue to do it? When I hitched my life to someone else’s, my little flat no longer served me, so I let it go. When I became a mum, the job I had no longer served me, so I let it go. There are more disadvantages than advantages to me drinking alcohol these days – it takes more that it gives – it no longer serves me – so why not let it go? And the great thing about endings is that they bring about new beginnings – who knows how bright an alcohol-free future might be?
Theme Tune: Times They Are A-Changing by Bob Dylan