bookshoplaura

It's been a big year for me as these things go and I'm sure anyone who has read more than one recent blog post is well aware of this fact because I can't seem to shut up about it. Sorry about that folks I lead a busy life and I don't have time to keep up a blog and a diary so this is a bit of both. Anyway I have found something weird has happened to me in the last year or so and it's that I seem to have lost the ability to make plans. Which is how I have ended up with an expired passport and two random weeks booked off over the summer but no actual plans made for them ( I left it so late I just had to take weeks that no one else had booked rather than being able to pick times I'd like to be off)  So last summer I was in the same predicament but that was different. I know why I was so indecisive. I guess ultimately I knew my relationship was ending well before my ex was willing to admit it but then again he was a bury his head in the sand kind of guy (by sand

In some ways I feel like I have been single a really long time and in others it feels like its only been weeks (without the feeling really sad part that would follow such a reality) but the truth is it's been nine months. I did actually have to count because I haven't been keeping track. When I first split from my ex I thought I had cracked the break up formula with a distraction technique so within weeks of the split I was set up on a dating site and flirting my little heart out. Who knows what I thought I was doing because I certainly wasn't ready to start dating again at that point. I don't think I need to argue my case when I have already admitted to taking up with my ex again when we first ran into each-other post break up. Then continuing to see him on a casual basis for about 3 months until I could no longer deny it was a very silly idea. That was back in January and since then I have dusted off my dating profile and updated the info and photos as relevant. I

The first time I can remember really noticing my body as a thing one might like or dislike was in my teens. I was a slim teenager with clear skin, one spot at a time was unusual for me and I will be damned if it wasn't wasted on me because it was only looking back at photos of that time that I realized what I had not then appreciated. Since then my body and lifestyle choices have changed many times. I have had lots of different feelings about how I look and been a number of dress sizes and learned a lot of hard lessons along the way. I used to idealize slimness. It was this ultimate goal and once I arrived in this beautiful place all my problems would go away. I let myself off the hook too many times in not taking responsibility for my own happiness because I believed it couldn't be achieved without a smaller jean size. I think somewhere in my head I remembered being a size 8 at 16 and being happy and I thought all I needed to do was get back there in jean size at least and

Sometimes you have days where even simple things seem impossible. I think this idea is prevalent in my mind because I am coming to the end of a fortnight of night shifts and I feel like every day has been a bit like this. It is possible however that tiredness is skewing my perception of time. I have said before in my blog that from time to time I suffer from depression which comes and goes (thankfully self managed so I consider myself lucky in that respect) and anxiety is my constant companion to one degree or another. Mostly right now my anxiety is about not getting enough sleep. I think I might just have generalized sleep anxiety while on nights and this ironically keeps me from getting as much sleep as I need post night shift. Now some people can cope admirably on very little sleep but I am definitely not one of them. I fall apart and have been known to lose basic adulting skills like cooking and driving for hours at a time. I don't think I realized quite how much I needed g