MINUTES of a MONDAY #117
#minutesofamonday
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Slán - Niall☘️ **
📻REAL LIFE AUDIO 👇🏽🎧
BRAIN FOOD: Future Grieving
“When I wrote last week in a now viral post about the complex emotions I’ve had over finding out that he has chosen to move on with a much younger woman - I settled on the conclusion that it really has nothing to do with this girl or her 2002 birth year. And everything to do with my own buzzing insecurity of wanting kids, fretting the final society-deemed “attractive years” for a woman, and unable to - simply put - metaphorically give myself a do-over.
And all that’s true. I’m incensed with jealousy. Enraged by the injustice.
But what I’m also uncovering during my midnight hysteria is the stark realization that his choices after our split (and many long before it) are a hard slap in the face to whatever lingering, wishful narrative I had clung to for our future.
That my self-centered delulu has done absolutely nothing but push me further away from accepting my wayward reality as it is today.
With the introduction of a new girlfriend, there is no way I can continue to gaslight myself, or willfully believe the many proclamations made following our split that promised time for emotional and financial “growth” and maturation so we could find ourselves back together one day like some 2005 Julia Roberts romcom.
(Side note: didn’t that whole era of movies really just fuck up love for our generation of women and men?)
Only now in my whirlwind of self pity am I also forced to contend with the harsh facts that I am truly back to square one: single, flat-footed, embarrassed, dream-less, without a city to call home, and stuck within the waning clock of fertility to have a kid with a suitable partner who I pray I won’t just haplessly choose in a desperate attempt to procreate.
At the heart of all of this, I’m grieving a future I’m never to have and currently unexcited for a future I cannot remotely envision right now, lost at sea with no compass pointing ashore.
Which leads to my next point.”
writes about ‘The embarrasing search for love as a 35-year old nomad”SOUL FOOD:
“A mother's arms are more comforting than anyone else's.”
Princess Diana
LOL:
Andy Huggins dropping some one-liner gold:
APPENDIX:
“You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn’t very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren’t good, the parts that aren’t yours. It’s called feedback, and it’s the most direct route to learning about your own vision. It’s also called doing the work. After all, someone has to do your work, and you’re the closest person around.”
Extract from Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland
A.O.B.
That’s it for installment #117.
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I hope there was something in there for you this week.
And until next week - mind how you go out there - Niall