Have you ever felt raw, like you've been rubbed over with sandpaper and lime juice dripped in the wounds?
Your nerves frayed, your patience waning, energy depleted. Just... nothing left to give?
Of course you have.
If you're reading this I know that you've done this dance before.
Right now I'm hiding in a safe space. I'm not at *that* place yet, where the world is overwhelming, too loud, too bright, too demanding, where everything hurts and nothing soothes.
But I'm on that path.
It's been a day.
It's been one hell of a day.
It's been a fucking day.
Do you remember when you first decided what you wanted to be when you grew up? Maybe you wanted to be an astronaut or a ballerina or a vet.
Me?
From age 9, I wanted to be a lawyer.
You see, I had decided that my super power was to help people, to sort chaos in to order. I would protect people who needed protection from the bad scary things out there.
Like every 9 year old child, I thought I could change the world.
I worked so hard to become a lawyer; form applying for work experience age 10 (I was told to come back when I was a little older!) to applying for mini-pupillage left, right and centre.
This was difficult to see on my Facebook ‘on this day’ today.
This post, this day, was one of the proudest moments in my legal career. My first ever magazine article published, first of many.
This magazine gig led to me contributing to the Solicitor’s Journal, a Law Society magazine piece, my first ever contribution to a book.
The week before this I had travelled to Manchester to speak at the APIL conference, in front of so many people more qualified and experienced than me, including Lynne Bradey, the lawyer who literally wrote the book on paying for care.
This was also my week from hell.
Over the past 24 hours I have gone in depth into my vision of the next level of Searching for Serenity and of my own life.
I talk all the time about getting clear on your goals, your motivations and inspirations, getting clear on what you want to achieve and then breaking it down to get there. I firmly believe that a woman without a goal is at the mercy of every person around her.
Yet, there I was. Nervous, hesitant to speak up, feeling a little bit directionless and aimless. Knowing that there was so much more to do and yet not really knowing where to start.
Today I got involved in something completely unexpected. In the course of supporting someone in my network who very bravely shared that she had also experienced sexual assault and harassment, I became drawn into a dispute.
I say drawn in because, aside from feeling taken aback and a little shocked, I didn't really get angry or upset. For a redheaded Leo former lawyer who used to frequently find people on the internet who were 'wrong' and try to put them straight, this was a huge achievement.... yay me!
