Working girl

Just thought I'd post a quick update on where I'm at with things. I'm just coming to the end of my 6-week contract. I can't believe how quickly the time has gone. The return to work has been fine. My brain still works, I can still remember how to do my job, my confidence is slowly coming back, I can get on the train in the evening now and not have flashbacks to the night I got the call from the hospital on my way back home from work. It's all good. Thankfully. It was definitely the right time for me to go back and the right place for me to go back to.

What's not good is the lack of personal time I have. A lot of the time I feel exhausted. Or at least drained. I feel tense and like I can't think freely anymore. It's kind of hard to explain but I think my brain got used to having all day every day to process thoughts and emotions and now it doesn't have that luxury and it's creating lots of noise in my head. I'm having vivid dreams and have started waking up at the same time in the wee small hours again. I go straight back to sleep but that's happened before and it's not a good pattern to get in to.

I've said to a lot of people that it seems so wrong to have so little personal time. Not just me personally, but all of us. What are we doing? I get up just before 7am and I'm never home before 7pm. So 12 out of 24 hours are spent on work-related things. You're meant to get eight hours' sleep a night, so out of the 12 hours that's left, if eight are spent sleeping then that leaves four hours. In that time I try and cook, wash up, make packed lunch for the next day and iron an outfit as a minimum. On top of that I normally have calls to make, emails to send and chores to do. Which means that I have absolutely no time to just relax. It's pretty frenetic.

And that pace is set to continue... I've just accepted a six-month contract at a design agency in Covent Garden. They seem like lovely people and it'll be good to have a new challenge. Six months isn't forever but it'll be a good test of the working water. And it might help me make some decisions in the medium to long term. I'll try not to moan and groan about work too much - it is, afterall, my decision to take up this job - so feel free to tell me if I start being too down on life.

I've also been doing some self-analysis and decided that I'm most definitely a control freak. I don't like being out of control. I don't particularly like taking risks. I like to know what's going to happen as a consequence of making a decision. Even though that's impossible. But this explains why not working was freaking me out. I had all these options available to me and I didn't know what to do for the best. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do something extraordinary and not go back to the daily grind. I agonised about what the 'right' thing to do would be. Should I retrain in something completely different - but what would that be? Should I move abroad and escape things here? Should I get a more mundane local job to get me out the house and earning some money? Should I move north? The list goes on...

So my current situation makes me feel a bit happier. A bit more in control. I feel like a decision has been made for me. Although I have to remember to acknowledge that I'm the one who made the decision (I can hear my counsellor's voice in my head). It's funny how it all worked out - a random and lovely recruitment consultant got in touch with me out of the blue on LinkedIn. We met and she put me forward for four interviews. One said no, one offered and two invited me for second interviews. I hadn't even been actively looking for work and here I was with the possibility of three offers if the second interviews went well. It was great for my confidence. I'm also able to acknowledge now that I'm someone who gets off on being liked and loved. So those three thumbs up gave me a big boost. I wasn't being perceived as a widow who hadn't worked for 14 months, but as me; a capable and likeable professional. I need to remember that. I'm still me, despite what's happened. Some bits of me will never ever be the same again, but some bits are exactly the same and will never change.

And here's one final thing I wanted to share: in all of my interviews I was completely and utterly honest. I told them exactly what had happened. I also laid my cards very clearly on the table. I told them my conditions and that no amount of money would sway me if those basic conditions weren't met. I kind of said, 'this is me, this is what I want, take it or leave it'. It made the whole process so much easier. Instead of saying what I thought the interviewer would want to hear, or what I thought I 'should' say, I said what I wanted to say. It was liberating and empowering and I think it earned me some respect. I urge you to give it a go.

Right, that was meant to be a quick update and turned into a download. I haven't even touched on the 10k run I did last weekend (52m56s), or the fact I gave blood last week (and nearly fainted), or that I had a lovely night with Singapore Pam last night (with far too much NZ sauvignan blanc), or that I'm off to South Africa at the weekend (and I can't bloody wait)... I'm contemplating the world's highest abseil off Table Mountain. But that probably won't surprise you :o)