I couldn’t bare to open my eyes this morning, I just didn’t know how to as even the light in the bedroom was hurting them. I for one and I am sure there are many out there the same, I often find that my eyes become painful when I am desperate for sleep and light becomes growingly unbearable, well that was how my eyes were when I switched off the alarm, my desire to just go back to sleep seems to be growing. Once again my sleep was broken a couple of times, just long enough on one occasion to see the clock and on the other to bring my legs, once more back into bed. From the second the alarm sounded, I was aware of the pain building, it made me want less than ever to get up, I just wanted to go back to sleep, but I pushed myself on to my feet, dressed, went to the loo and fetched my coke all with either my eyes shut, or at best less than half open. When I got to the living room Adam had already opened the blinds, not fully but just by 10 inches, I had already been sat here for a minute waiting for my PC to come to life and of course enjoying my first cigarette, still through shut or almost shut eyes, when I made a comment about them being open, so he closed them again. Right through the summer I have been finding this light thing hard to deal with, I am not sure if it is because I spend the entire winter in the dark, or if there is something else behind it, all I know is that bright light, even from my PC is often too much and I seem to be spending more and more time with my eyes shut, be that through choice or through sleep. 2 hours on and my eyes are fully open, with the light from the desk lamp and my PC still annoying them slightly, but not half as badly as the desire to close them and sleep is.

I have at last had three days where I have had the spare time to just sit and play a game, something I haven’t done for months. My stripping back on the levels of “work” I do has made a huge change, in the amount of time I am finding each day to just sit and play about doing nothing of any value, something I realise now that I had been missing for a while. I have resisted the desire to use it as extra sleep time, although I may well in time do just that, for now, I felt it was far more important to do something that was nothing more than fun. I suppose we all go through spells when we forget how to have fun, when our lives become so cluttered with work, home, TV and the never ending chatter of social media, that just stopping and playing a game, or going for a walk, but for no reason than to just be out there, becomes forgotten and lost. Years ago when I was still working as a DJ my favourite thing in the summer was to go for a walk when I got home from work. Yes, when I got home, anything from 12:30am to 4am, that would be my start time and I would walk across the city to Glasgow green, the nearest parkland to my flat. I loved it there in the middle of the night, I rarely saw another living sole and I had the entire space to myself, freedom to walk and to think. Often I would head across to the river and just sit there watching the water, something rather odd when you consider that my living room window was just 20yrds from it and I never watched it from there, but sat alone in a huge park on soft cool grass with those huge softly whispering trees, made it somehow special and so different from the house where the hum of the city always took over.

I haven’t thought about that for a long time, the odd thing is no matter how much I can see it in my mind and I can still smile at the memory, I have lost the desire to be there. I lost it a long time ago, life took over, things changed and I stopped going there, I stopped wanting to be there. I never thought of this until now, why I haven’t seen it I don’t know, but when I was a teenager in Aberdeen I had a place not dissimilar that I went to a lot, at first it had to be during the day, but then the point appeared when I had the freedom to go at night and I did, I went there a lot. The same thing happened again in Rhu, not long before I found the strength to leave my husband, I would go there night and day, walking and sitting by the water in the dark, with nothing but the light of the night to see the world by. All of them were special to me and all of them were places I hid before my life changed beyond recognition and I moved myself into a new phase, but not once do I remember thinking about making the changes that happened, they just did. I got a little side tracked there, but that is the thing with writing free flow style, what appears, appears and you don’t know when or why it is just there.

Even though I am sitting here smiling at those memories, I can still quite honestly say I don’t miss being out there, being at home all the time has grown on me, I have adjusted, something we humans are actually really good at doing. Just think about your own life and the different phases you have adapted to, the things you thought you would hate, but learned to be at peace with, even if you never learned to love it. So many of us including myself have been guilty of just plodding along because what else is there, well actually there is a lot, all it takes is the determination to try something new and belief that change is always possible. We all adjust to what life brings us, but it is too easy to just keep going and to not reassess, to ask yourself the difficult questions like “am I really happy”, without finding yourself justifying the reason for life being as it is. I can actually answer that question honestly, yes I am, can you say the same for yourself?

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 17/07/12 – Stranded 

Well the fog goes on and now the pain is rising as well, it looks like it is going to be one of those weeks. As yesterday drew to what should have been the relaxing end thing started going wrong, my left leg didn’t seem at that time much worse than usual but by 7:30 when I closed down my PC and went to sit beside Adam for the rest of the evening, the lower half was agony. I had taken my……