People say…

‘No pain no gain’

‘Better to have lost in love than never to have loved at all’

‘That which does not kill me makes me strong’

‘You learn from your mistakes’

And I have said them too, although today I am looking at myself (metaphorically) and these old saws and shaking my head in disbelief for being had. This is a temporary state of affairs. I am someone who has been strongly influenced by Freudian theories and by what’s often termed ‘The British School’ of psychoanalysis which would accept the importance of disappointment in terms of the structuring of the psyche – and I am in agreement.

But just not today. I’ll be back to my old self tomorrow or even later on this evening, but right now a pox on all this bollocks. I am sick and tired of the struggle life is. I am bored rigid with my job and cannot cope with the silliness of it and the small-mindedness of many of the people I work with. People who think that a strategic plan is a list of things to do over a certain period but who never open their eyes to look at the big environmental picture, the competition, the changing basis upon which we work, the challenges posed by funding changes and so on.

I am fed up with builders, sick of DIY and the ways in which my house has sucked up the resources I don’t have be they mental, physical or financial. And I am totally bored with being in this strange state where I’m not really broke, but I have a very large mortgage, some credit card owings and an overdraft. That which does not kill me isn’t making me strong right now, it’s making me very tired and depressed.

Which makes for a decidedly cheery blog!

One of the things I have noticed, tho’, is that when I say no and stick by it (especially at work) people get rather agitated and then often see my point of view (I’m always nice when I do this…) and then resolve whatever it was that led to the ‘no’. Interestingly, I am one of the few people I know who does this and I think this probably means that I have a ‘reputation’ – which is fair enuf as far as I am concerned. If I was a bloke saying this, I’d be heralded as a great and glorious leader, being female, saying ‘no’ makes me scary and troublesome. Maybe we should eschew the ‘hard’ road for once, refuse the unreasonable, the stupid (or troublesome or plain inconvenient). I don’t want my life and its learnings to be a summation of hard knocks, difficulties and failures I trenchantly (and allegedly) learn from.

Let’s hear it for learning from pleasure, sensuality, mystery and beauty.