Stress can affect people in different ways. You might lose sleep, or drink too much, and consequently because you are 37 years old, you spend half the night in the toilet having ladywhizzes (but not vomiting because at 37 you can drink a little better than when you were a young child – not that I was a child drinking, you understand, but it seems so long ago that I started drinking that I may as well have been a child. Except for the time where I didn’t drink for four months. I had spent a night on a disgraceful mix of pints, shorts and shots and ended up quite literally in a gutter, with my dress – buttons all down the front, split open. As I say, I was a child then, so it wasn’t such an horrific sight).
Or you can have dreams where you are having sex with someone you know to be gay, whilst beside the bed your old HR manager reads from a list of things that you have done wrong in work. Ah, my former employer. I find the best way to deal with painful moments, or many painful moments as the case may be with my former employer, is to simply block them out. I am Irish after all, and discussing difficult issues is strictly forbidden, although drugging yourself up on prescription tablets is both socially acceptable and morally encouraged.
Occasionally though I am reminded of the madness that once was my life, when having to speak to individuals this week, who may or may not have sneered across a table from me as I cried my eyes out. Memories of emails about incorrectly discarded sanitary towels, sitting in the disabled toilet in the basement meditating my anger away every hour for fifteen minutes, particularly in the mornings, of the constant need for headache tablets, and the constant scarity of headache tablets for some reason (could we ALL have had so many headaches?) and naturally, the day when it all ended and a new life began.
But rather than dwell on that, like a thoroughbred Irish national I will brush it aside, to be stuck under the rug for another day with a big pint and a soapbox.
So in summary a few stresses this week, coupled with some painting, of the new baby room for Preggers and Firstbrother, which has completely destroyed a pair of tracksuit trousers, covering my legs and arse in magnolia for evermore. Not to mention the sheer frustration and horror that is painting anyways, but also in a room where my bloody brother did not even empty, leaving me to paint AROUND the furniture, walk into it, and generally curse the day he was ever born. His feedback? ”You got paint on the wardrobes”. Job satisfaction, indeed. I did too. This is what happens when you don’t pay professionals. Not counting the chips I was given on Friday night, which were yummy I must admit.
Whitesnake Said it Best 