#29 Everything has changed.

(This is a very self-indulgent one, feel free to skip it!)

How often do you look at your life and not recognise yourself?

I still have the same dimples and tendency to mentally escape to Hogwarts that I had at the age of 8, but so much else has changed. Recently, I seem to be living a different life every few weeks.

Some changes have crept up on me, undetected until someone else points them out: the ginger in my hair is fading as I spend less summers outside. Others happen overnight and hit me like a truck.

My experiment of not allowing myself to think about the past (especially as I fall asleep) has been going amazingly, but that means that I’ve felt less and less ready for the switch-ups, and when they do happen, I wonder how I got here. There’s so many trucks crashing.

Today one of my favourite online creators said it would be an honour to have me attend their course for free. Crash.

Today I was offered the job role of my dreams. Crash.

Just a few years ago I worked as a waitress at a restaurant where I was not allowed to do the cashing up of the money (they wouldn’t trust my mathematical skills to get it right). I’ve been going through a day of flashbacks, memories of all the (recent) times I’ve been over the moon for £10/hour, of all the jobs I’ve been told off for taking initiative beyond my paygrade, scolded for outworking my managers and wanting to quit but feeling I had no other options.

I know I tread the line of pointless pain and suffering carelessly, sometimes properly taking a hike into the territory of needless self-flagellation, but I honestly don’t think I’d be here today without that Elizabeth.

While I do wish I had earlier and better examples of standing up for myself, confidence, being a go-getter and understanding the professional world, I think it’s overall ok that I got to work on all these a bit later.

I remember my timidness, fear and self-doubt. I even often feel them, but against different challenges, different players, in a completely different game.

Everything has honestly changed.

I wish I could be more specific, but I just needed an emotional brain-dump. If this resonated, I'd love to hear from you. Do you recognise yourself?

Wishing you an absolutely brilliant week,

Elizabeth xx