bookshoplaura

It's that time of year again where everyone sits down and takes stock of their life so far and resolves to do better in the year that comes, making promises they have no hope of keeping. I am looking back tonight because tomorrow my brain will be too fried after a twelve hour shift (and another to follow on New Years Day) to do very much of anything.  I don't think its been too bad a year but mind you I hadn't set myself much in the way of resolutions so its hard to fall short of nothing. All the same 2015 will be the year I finally got out of retail and into social care which I had been swearing I would do for the last three years, I think I had reached the point where people stopped believing me. I had been the girl who cried I'm quitting so many times I think it took people a little while to believe me when I finally got to say it to my boss. I remember I was so nervous she thought I was about to tell her I was seriously ill. I got that out of the way in January ...

This year I was delighted to make it home for Christmas even though I didn't feel it approaching. In my current line of work the nature of the work I do isn't any different at this time of year. To be fair I can't say I really missed the hustle and bustle of the festive season. I did visit my former work place on Christmas week and I can say I was only too happy to run out of there once I realised how crowded it was. I worked twelve hour shifts the two days before Christmas so my suitcase was well packed and in my car heading to work Christmas Eve. After a truly woeful nights sleep I was planning to get through the day on sugar and the promise of three days off and thankfully I got through it without any major incidents and was down at my parents house before 10 feeling ready for bed. I thought it would feel strange when we were all gathered together in my parents new house, this would be our first Christmas not in Beechmount but it felt like we had been doing it...

I remember my nieces a year or so back asking me in an incredulous tone how long it takes to learn to drive because for as long as they could remember I had L plates on my car. The answer in my case is four years. Admittedly I probably could have gotten my full licence sooner if I hadn't been so hesitant to do my test in the three years that have passed since my last attempt. I get very anxious during tests or Interviews and so do not perform particularly well at either. I will put that in my list of things I need to work on in the new year. In time since I have learned to drive I feel I have accomplished a lot and yet I will go out of my way to avoid having to parallel park because I feel like its always going to be my Achilles heel. At least I have come a long way from the days when I used to feel anxious about getting into my car and was likely to bunny hop across roundabouts in third gear. The problem with learning to drive is that the older you do the harder it is and...

If there ever was a woman who needed mindfulness I would be her. I am a big ball of stress, sugar and coffee most of the time and the rest of the time I run on stress alone. For those of you not familiar with mindfulness, its not a new concept. Eckhart Tolle is quite well known in spiritual circles for bring the idea to light with his Power of Now and its quite straightforward. It's about living in the moment and actually enjoying and experiencing things as they happen. I am not very good at this. I frequently find myself driving somewhere and realise I have missed a good chunk of the journey. This is probably because I know the route well enough that I am driving on automatic but this is worrying both from a mental and safety point of view. I eat much too fast. Often I don't quite taste the food. As you can imagine this plays havoc on my digestive system as well as meaning I often eat more than I intended at any one sitting. Just recently I ate a sour dough sandwich so fas...

I have found that being an adult involves a lot more paying of bills and a lot less eating ice-cream in my pyjamas than I envisioned when I was younger. I wish someone had told me, as I rushed to be more sophisticated, more grown up, more adult that this is what it would be like and I might have taken my time getting here. A lot of being an adult seems to be faking it until you either work out what's going or someone calls you out for being the fraud you feel like most of time. I still can't help looking around when someone calls for a grown up until it dawns that's me, I'm the grown up. I can't help wondering if that feeling ever really goes away. I think I pictured myself more together, my life in a neater order and not hastily thrown together as I do my best to cope with adult challenges without consulting my mum too often. Then again I also use to discuss sharing a house with several close friends without even contemplating children or partners. If that had...

Prepare to declare me very boring but my idea of partying over the Christmas season will largely involve pyjama parties. By that I mean me in my pyjamas on my own in bed.  To be fair it's not just this year that I'll have missed out on the mile long queues and fighting my way to the bar. I've sat this season out for a few years running and actually it suits me just fine to not be there. I see to have reached a point in my life where I no longer have fear of missing out ( fomo ) and it's more like fear of having to socialise in large crowds of drunk people.  The funny thing is I'm dating someone who is virtually my polar opposite and who's been asking me for weeks what our New Years plans are. The honest answer is I think I'll sit this one out. Luckily for me the decision was pretty much taken out of my hands by the fact that I'm working until 9pm on New Years Eve and back in at 9 am New Years Day so my options for socialising are limited at best. My b...

.A lot of people have a difficult relationship with food but mine is a bit more complicated and twisty than most. I've spent most of my life as a fussy eater, something it's been difficult to grow out of but let's just call me a work in progress and leave it there. Then there's the added component of my vegetarianism, gluten intolerance and weird thing with sugar. If all of that wasn't enough for you to digest then there's also my emotional relationship with food. I spent many years just being weird about food but not really examining the relationship. I was awkward and picky and preferred to prepare my own food and not discuss my diet. As I have gotten older and become more of an adult and been forced to adapt my diet somewhat for health reasons, I have started to pay more attention to my disfunctional relationship with all things edible.  My bizarre love hate thing with sugar would be a prime example of this. Over the last few years I have discovered sugar ...