When I grow up

Childhood dreams……

When I was a child, I can remember imagining myself becoming a nurse or an author and writing books. My mum didn’t really talk about or encourage big ambition and I never really felt much more was possible than becoming a secretary or having a family of my own. When I daydreamed though I would dream of other more wild and unachievable paths in life, like writing a novel or working as a nurse in a hospital, at least they felt pretty out of reach at the time. I haven’t actually achieved either although I have always worked in a profession where I am caring for others. I almost became a nurse but never quite made it, life threw me a curve ball and took me down a different route and I never came back to it. No regrets there though, I still work in the field of care, which is in my bones but my family took priority and that feels right to me.

My caring career started as a personal journey when my first child was born with Cerebral Palsy when I was 18. That experience determined my path in supporting others who were in a similar position after my personal caring role ended. The thing is I also knew from a very young age I wanted to be a mum, have kids and that was where my heart lay so even though I hadn’t expected to be a young single mum to a disabled child, I was a mum and that felt like where I was supposed to be.

When my son passed away at 13 years old, I then pursued work in the caring arena starting as a childminder, then respite carer for disabled children, a nanny, a carer for elderly, an advocate and now a Social Prescriber for local GP surgeries. I’ve worked in social care most of my adult life and have a passion for helping others. Its a fantastic and rewarding sector but requires a lot of self care too and boundaries, especially when you have experienced social care from a personal perspective on the other end, you need to be able to separate yourself and take a step back.

As for writing, I have always enjoyed putting pen to paper, or now more fingers to the keyboard. I remember as a child my best friend and I would sit for hours with our Victoria Plumb notebooks, writing, talking and imagining our stories being made into books in their own right. Kaz and Suze, famous authors, just like the wonderful Enid Blyton, whose books I was devouring at the time. As a teenager I can remember fanatically chain-reading the Sweet Valley High series of books, whilst my hormones were racing and by the end of my teens I was a proud Stephen King and Dean Koontz horror addict.

It’s interesting because in thinking about this a memory resurfaced of a time when I was around 17/18 and I became quite low. The one and only time in the first 40 years of my life I can recall that I may have possibly had some depression. I remember sitting in my room, not wanting to leave, staying in bed but mostly, I remember writing, mainly poems. I think I still have them somewhere, in the back of a closet. They were quite dark poems and I find them difficult to read even to this day. This time of sadness and introspection soon passed and I moved into becoming a carer, in my personal and professional life and writing took a back seat.

Its intriguing to me that now, at this point in my life where I am going through some quite traumatic major life changes, I have finally come back to writing down my thoughts and seeing where it takes me. This process is becoming therapeutic to me. When I get my thoughts out and onto paper/ screen, everything feels clearer, there’s a clarifying of a situation and an unscrambling of the jumbled up stories that frequent my mind. Some fact and truth, others the result of me overthinking and hoping, catastrophising and stressing. I’m an overthinker and have recently become aware of the stories I can allow myself to create in my head which are not based on fact, so I am learning to come back to what is real. Writing helps with that. So for now this little blog is my therapy I think, my thought decipherer, and the blog allows me to explore ideas and thoughts about myself and that’s enough for me. Who knows maybe one day I’ll get that one book written and become the author I dreamt of being as a child but if nothing else writing heals.