Getting In Your Own Way

I recently found myself caught in a mental loop, revisiting choices I’ve made and where they’ve led me — the kind that leaves you questioning everything.  It genuinely felt like a heavy blanket was weighing on my shoulders. 

As we age, life seems to accelerate, and wasting precious time agonising over the many choices you made in a different time and place, or what you should have done is completely pointless. It’s also incredibly easy to miss the good stuff.  Sometimes I have to remind myself of this several times a day to break the brooding cycle I’m prone to. 

Having someone by your side to reason things through with, whether it’s a partner or a friend can be all we need to get us out of the funk.  However, we’re not all in that position and don’t always have someone readily available to speak to.  As a single woman, I need to be the yin to my yang and vice versa.

Of course, we can’t change the past, but we can change our attitude toward it and the wisdom we’ve accrued along the way. This is the hard part.

When I travelled around Spain and Portugal in my old and much loved camper van, it was broken into.  My camera, jewellery, passports and journals were stolen — my most valuable things, which I’d put into one rucksack for safekeeping, making it easy for the thieves to grab and go.

I was gutted and ruminated endlessly about what had happened. If I hadn’t gone to visit the place suggested by someone I’d met, which meant doubling back on myself, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.  If I hadn’t put my precious things into one bag and instead hidden them around the van, then the thieves mightn’t have been so lucky.   

In the end, I beat myself up over something that had already happened and was largely out of my control.  As it turned out, there were loads of similar break-in stories in the same area I’d visited.

Still, I felt completely flat and nearly called off the rest of my trip, even wondering why I’d gone away at all. I carried on, though, and although there were a few more challenges still to come (scraping my van door against a wall), I kept going.  

It was only after I got back and finally looked at everywhere I’d been, the people I’d met, and what I’d achieved that I broke the loop.

You can’t rewrite your story up to this point, but you can learn from it and become the hero of your next chapter.