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After what feels like a really long time, but in reality has only been a month, I am finally moving to Kilkenny. Tonight will be my last night living with my parents and I am certain once I am feeling less exhausted I will be very excited about this. Its been a strange few weeks between the break up and moving home and it feels like my life has been moving so fast but so slowly at the same time. I am trying to find the positive in all of this and I have decided that Kilkenny will be a brand new start for. A clean slate, my Taylor Swift moment , the old Laura is dead and the new improved version is on the way.  I am going to try and change as many things as I can in order to find this happiness lark that everyone is always talking about. I have already walked out of relationship and prepared to make my home in a city where I know no one bar a few colleagues so that's a pretty decent start. I am also doing my best to commit to a return to training and eating well. Its only been t...

All of the things that have happened to me so far in life have shaped me into the woman I am today. You could say I currently have a 100% survival rate because I have survived every bad day so far. I always find it strange when I recount things that have happened a long time ago and find myself becoming tearful because it brings home how much an impact certain experiences have had in my life. I can't change my past though, however much I want to. I can only learn from it and try to find that tiny sliver of light in even the darkest days. I was bullied quite a lot in my secondary school days and this has cast a shadow over my memories of those years even though not every day was terrible. It led to me suffering anxiety and depression in my final years in school and not getting the results I wanted or being willing to ever go back to school to repeat the subjects I messed up. As shitty as this was at the time I am a stronger person because of this. I did eventually redeem myself ...

Now that I am doing the whole solo thing, i.e. being single, I have resolved to start taking better care of myself. This is all kinds of good because I don't even enjoy being sad and tired all the time. In order to be better and feel better I have started doing a lot of different things and knowing me only some of them will stick but for now we will say here's to wellness and I'll toast that with a nice mug of herbal tea. First of all I have stopped eating refined sugar. Obviously I knew it had yet again become a major problem but with the help of xtc oil and a bit of added willpower I have now gone a full week without eating any sugar and no cravings whatsoever which is a little bit miraculous. I have also stopped eating bread. This a wonderful change because it makes my stomach look and feel horrible. I have gone a week and a half without any wheat and my stomach already looks a bit smaller. I have had a few days where I have come close to buying bread out of h...

I know there must be more to life than buying myself a small present whenever I feel a bit down which lately is more often than I would like. One of the things I am prone to doing,for as long as I can remember, is taking stock of where I'm at in life and usually I find myself coming up short. Perhaps Im too harsh a critic but I don't think this is necessarily a terrible habit given  that occasionally it gives me that extra push to make changes in my life. So this is where I am at right now. Im 35, admittedly this panics me a little as I keep getting older without meaning to and I can't seem to stop time slipping through my fingers. Not that anyone can but in some mad way I feel like there's a place I would like to be in life and I'm nowhere near there and time is running out. I'm living with my parents but this is a very short term arrangement. I'll be moved into my new accommodation in under a fortnight. I will be renting again and it feels like I...

The other day I was looking in the mirror scrutinising my face in a critical fashion and thinking how badly overdue a hair cut I am and I realised, much to my horror, that my face is after becoming terribly round. This should not be a shock. I had become very neglectful in terms of gym attendance and between the demise of my relationship and the aftermath I had been eating sugar as though my life depended on it. I had also been eating a ridiculous amount of bread which does as much for my digestive system as it does for my waistline. I am not one of those magical women who can eat whatever I want without consequence. I seem to wear the consequences primarily on my face and muffin top before it spreads to other areas. This is not an acceptable state of affairs. My hair has become very shaggy and its not a good look but before I deal with my disastrous hair, I must first tackle my moonface. If I know anything about the bob hairstyle, and I should know plenty as I have had ...

Today I got word that the house I looked out in Kilkenny is actually going to be mine to rent. I will be moving in at the end of the month. In case you didn't read my previous post, it's just outside Kilkenny but close enough to make my commute a dream compared to what I have now. It's a bright spacious two bed house just a few feet away from the bigger house the landlord owns. I have been describing it like a granny flat that's not attached but I am not sure it does it justice. It's a lovely space that I can actually afford to live in and soon it will be all mine. Naturally I am excited because this is the move I knew I was going to make before the break up but also one I had been thinking about even before that point when things weren't going well. Particularly when I was in over a 3 day weekend and I was spending so much time driving home to sleep and then come back in and do it all again. I will say however that as much as I am excited to be starting ...

( This is not a potential place for me to live as it's a castle and not for rent) So two weeks ago today I moved out of the apartment I had shared with my boyfriend(now ex) for over a year. It was a sad day but as I moved all my stuff into my parents house I knew this would be a temporary move and soon I would be living 'the life' in Kilkenny city. That's not to say I wasn't grateful to have somewhere to go at that sad time. As temporary as living in my parents house has felt, I would have hated to be dealing with the horrible first days of breaking up and adjusting to living somewhere new in Kilkenny or looking desperately for somewhere to move into. Despite the fact that I need to go outside to make calls and I can only get internet in one corner of the sun room, I have been very glad to be here the last two weeks. My parents have been away the entire time since I moved in which in a weird way helped too. It has been pretty lonely here at times but at least I ...

Being brave means many different things to different people. To me right now it is about being by myself and not defining myself as the other half of a relationship and you know not freaking out everytime I remember I have do this solo going forward. Apologies to anyone bored off their ass by my break up tinged blog posts but it's only been two weeks(tomorrow) so bear with me, I will be thinking of him less with every post (at least I hope so). Bravery for me is wearing all four shades of irridescent eyeshadow from my new eyeshadow palette because this bitch likes to sparkle and hoping I look more like the beautiful mermaid of my dreams and less like a drag queen. It's about wearing ultra tight leggings into town because I have convinced myself they are flattering but still hoping I don't look ginormous in them and that no one moos at me (even in their heads). It's about driving that shortcut to my sisters house even though I have only gone that way once...

One of the hardest things about coming out of a long term relationship is working out what to do with yourself in their absence. Before my weekends would revolve around my boyfriend and if he was off we would make a big effort to go somewhere together. So I found myself with a long weekend looming ahead of me and no plans to speak of. I will admit I woke feeling sad friday morning and the temptation was there to stay in bed and have a one woman pity party. In fear of turning into an actual hermit post break up, I fought this urge and went and made some plans for myself. So in order to cheer myself up I took myself to Kilkenny for the day. It was initially supposed to be a house scouting mission but that got somewhat abandoned when i realised im not going to be able to afford my own place at current rental prices and really I can look into my house sharing options from the comfort of my phone. Suddenly my day had morphed into a 'treat yo self day/ date with myself and it turn...

(not a photo  of me post break up just an old photo of me crying because it felt appropriate) I have been through break ups before and lived to tell the tale so I know how this goes. I was only mildly traumatised by my last break up and that was a pretty awful relationship so I have high hopes for how well I will bounce back from this admittedly flawed but altogether more reasonably adjusted relationship. I just don't seem to be doing all that much bouncing back yet. I know there's a stage where I will feel inexplicably sad, where I wont be able to talk about him without crying and where everything reminds me of him. I know this stage only too well. And I know there will be a stage where I am angry about all the tiny injustices unaddressed in the course of our relationship and the not so tiny ones. I will be so very angry and I will vent in an incredibly venty way but not here because after all he is still a person I loved and that would be horrible. Ther...

As many of you know I currently work as a Health Care Assistant and will soon be working as a Social Care Worker in the not too distant future. While most people are familiar with the physical aspects of care work, few stop to think what being a professional carer actually entails. I am the type of person who cares too much about everything. Try as I might, I cannot seem to switch this off. I care and I worry and I over think the shit out of everything. While this does have the potential to drive me just a little bit mad, it also makes me good at my job. The trouble with being a natural empath is you feel sorry for the assholes too. That's a paraphrased quote I read somewhere and while it's accurate I can't quite remember where I saw it. While this has been known to have some downsides it has proved helpful to me working as a carer. When working with vulnerable adults it's always good to put yourself in their shoes and think about what they might be experiencing ...

I have now lived in the city for a long time and while I know ill be living in a city again soon , for now my living situation feels like a stark contrast. The thing is the last few years I have not just been living in Waterford city but living right in the heart of the city. When I worked in the book store I didn't have to drive to work. Obviously since I started working in Kilkenny walking to work was no longer an option. I was saved the trouble of paying for parking in town. The shops and restaurants and bars were only a few steps away from my door. The broadband was high speed and pretty much a given within city limits. These were all good things and some of them I will miss to a degree but not everything about city living was amazing. For starters living in The Glen I had to have a parking permit but while this offered me free parking for my car it did not guarantee me a space anywhere close to my apartment especially on bingo nights and it was even worse during any of the ...

This day a week ago my boyfriend of almost four years parted ways. In the briefest of conversations he went from being the person I tell everything to being someone I may never speak to again.  That's not to suggest the end of our relationship came as a shock to either of us. It lay lingering in the air unsaid and the magic relationship fairy seemed to be taking her sweet time waving her magic wand over all the cracks in the relationship so the words were said and once out there couldn't be taken back and just like that we weren't a couple any more. Breaking up is a much messier affair when you live together because while you are deciding what to do next, you also have to decide where to go next. This is one of those times where my anxiety actually helped me out. I had spent months worrying about this obsessively and the only thing that calmed me was planning what to do in a worst case scenario. When I  was faced with the reality of the end of us, I found myself prepare...

So after a lifetime  ( or 11 years) of living in Waterford city I find myself saying goodbye. I had been wanting to leave the city for a while, it had lost its allure for me but I didnt envision myself leaving quite like this. Rather than packing excitedly thinking of new possibilities, I find this move is tinged with sadness as it was prompted by the end of a relationship which had been the last anchor keeping me in Waterford. When I first moved to Waterford, it was for college and I spent four years living in student accommodation on the cork road. They were a great four years in rather shabby apartments and many lifelong friends were made. Much as I enjoyed my time in Waterford, I wasn't exactly heartbroken when a group of us moved to Edinburgh at the end of college to start some new adventures. A mere four months later I moved home for the sake of a relationship that clearly didnt work out and 6 months later when it all went up in flames, the sensible thing to do would have...