One thing I am missing this year is a clear boundary marking the end of the ‘summer holidays’.  My placement was due to start in January 2026.  Unfortunately, due to some issues beyond anyone’s control I didn’t get started until April.  This meant working on through the whole summer playing catchup.  I am on a two week break from counselling currently and that will be the extent of my summer holiday from college work this year.  I had a meeting in the college on Monday last week to get my placement paperwork all finalised and I submitted my final assignment for year two on the 11th of August, three days before the deadline.  I was hoping I’d get my final grades on Monday but I’m assured they will come early next week by the latest.

Someone once told me families are complex and familial relationships are hard work.  While this is a general statement, it’s important to remember that sometimes cutting your losses and minimizing contact with certain family members is often the only logical and sensible course of action.

Aleye Boyle, in her book, The Identity Bracelet, uses a beaded bracelet as a metaphor for all the elements that make up our identity: our values, core beliefs, roles we have taken on and roles we have had thrust upon us, our coping mechanisms that we have developed over our lifetime.  Each item is another bead on our own personal identity bracelet.  Other beads comprise our fears, hopes and dreams, material things we value are also beads on our bracelet, our cars, home, a prized and much-loved childhood toy or family heirloom passed down the generations.  Our status, educational or career achievements, the meaningful relationships we have forged in our lifetimes are also beads that make up our identity bracelet.

In April 2009 Simon did the splits with his back legs, broke his pelvis and severed a blood vessel causing slow internal bleeding.  Simon, according to the man that sold him to me was a Connemara pony crossed with a Thoroughbred.  I cried for three days and in between sobs I wrote a silly rhyming poem which I don't think follows any rules of poetry or if it does it certainly wasn't deliberate!  People said 'All that carry on isn't just about a horse'.  I can tell you it absolutely was all about a horse.  In the style of Black Beauty (the horse is the narrator), this is Simon's Autobiography.

As a child I immersed myself in books.  What those books taught me was that In the battle of good versus evil, good always wins out in the end.  The hero or heroine in the story always came out on top and they all lived happily ever after.  I had inadvertently conditioned myself to believe that a happy ending would eventually present itself to me in any set of circumstances or situation.  As long as I was honest, true to myself, did my best and helped others that crossed my path where I could, then at the end of the story my happy ending would appear.  I spent a lot of time in my life sitting around waiting for happy endings that never appeared.

The battery in my bathroom scales has been dead for quite some time.  I keep forgetting to grab a steak knife from downstairs to prise it out of its little compartment and replace it with the new one sitting on the shelf adjacent to where it sits on the floor.  At last count I was 22 stone.  My job is somewhat physical.  I puff and pant at times.  People offer to carry things for me sometimes, the shop girl who has just put my groceries through the till, my colleague from my course who I’ve met at the bottom of the hill leading up to the college as I stand there with a small stack of library books to be returned, or a nice man in the college canteen who offers to carry the tray that holds my plate and my drink to a table.  I accept these small offers of help with gratitude; however, my biggest wish is that a day will come when I don’t need them to go about my day.

Since my course wound up for summer I have been taking myself on a creative journey.  The Artist's Way program was recommended to me by a friend as my next step in my personal growth journey.  (I got my results for year one, am relatively happy with them and in the past few weeks I have been offered and accepted a place to do my placement hours - I'll come back to this point at a later date!),

“Trying to Live My Best Life” – this is my tag line on my Facebook profile.  Something that has come up a few times in the past few months for me is the concept of toxic positivity.  In the Disney movie Inside out the character Joy is the personification of toxic positivity.  Joy is an emotion that lives in Riley’s head, In the first part of the movie Joy becomes increasingly overbearing and dominates Riley’s other emotions.  Riley is only allowed to feel happy and in the process of making this happen, Joy unwittingly suppresses Riley’s other emotions.

I happen to like a very wide range of musical genres.  So here’s my shortlist of songs for growth and healing, in alphabetical order.  There are more I could add but the list could go on forever, so I picked out a dozen.  There are a few wildcards in there, others are self-explanatory.  I often find myself singing away to the radio in the car (when I’m on my own lol) on autopilot.  I often don’t pay attention to what the words are or the meaning of the lyrics.  If you feel inclined to listen to some of my playlist, do listen to the words as they are important in this instance.

In less than 3 weeks, my new course starts.  I’m really looking forward to getting started.  I’m trying to get myself motivated for restarting personal therapy, for reading, trying to retain information and for learning new things.  I’m preparing myself for meeting my fellow classmates, hoping I’ll find among them like-minded people.  Hopefully they are not all very, very young.  I’m preparing myself for juggling the course with work and the rest of my life, all aspects of which are equally important.