Procrastination

Do you have those days, where a looming deadline has the opposite effect on your productivity that it should have and you have to take a good look at your life?

So that is where I find myself today. Eyeing my work laptop bag with disdain and a sense of guilt that I've yet to get cracking. Sure it could be the veritable 'round the world in Shiraz' journey I took last night with my lovely friends. Perhaps it has to do with all the emotional drama of late, courtesy of yet another messed up "relationship" that is now over. To be honest it is all rather exhausting and combine that with the horrific sights of the Grenfell Tower fire watched in real time courtesy of round the clock news and it could be enough to send a less resilient person to want to do something drastic. Thankfully, that's not me.

My birthday is coming up and it is always an unwelcome reminder of another year passing. Dreams left unfulfilled, achievements unrealised, and the prospect of another birthday as a singleton and feeling rather unlovable.

In relation to that, I often think it might be easier to find some other corner of the universe where the men aren't typically Australian. I hate to generalise, after all there are some wonderful men out there who are Australian - sometimes though it just doesn't feel like it. I'd just like to find one who isn't the victim of that ever pervasive machismo that is threatened by a woman with a brain, that can't see themselves honestly and believes they deserve a partner based purely on physical perfection. It is usually a mask to hide their rampant insecurities, as if they will be magically transported into a more impressive individual if they have a certain kind of looking woman on their arm.

 I'm tired of constantly having to dumb myself down to be less threatening and more agreeable. I'm over being made to feel like I'm not good enough because I don't have the body of a twenty year old supermodel and no-one is going to make me give up high heels - I like the way they look. My body is a machine,  a fairly reliable one and I'm grateful for it. Sure it doesn't look the way I'd like a lot of the time, and I'm working very hard to be healthier and to lose weight so that I feel more comfortable in clothes and I have better clothing options - I'm not huge, I'm actually pretty fit, just bigger than I'd like. That's it. I've been thinner before, it didn't make me feel any more confident. Rather, it made me feel more vulnerable, in the way men looked and acted towards me. It is as if you, as a woman, have to make an unbearable choice of either being treated as an object of ridicule and disgust or as an object of unwarranted attention and objectification - neither feels particularly great.

So where to from here? The only way is up they say. Lucky for me, I have amazing, brilliant, gorgeous friends that build me up in a way I can only hope to find in a partner one day. That's what real friendship is, people that have your back and vice versa. That's a much more real love than any romantic entanglement and an aspirational goal for those too.

I keep thinking back to Ikiru, life is brief, I want to enjoy it before the tides of passion die and I intend to go out and do just that. Who's with me?

Oops, first though, I really need to go do some work, later readers x