56 Years
A slightly melancholy reflection on 56 years
If it’s not clear from the title, I turned 56 this week. The 1st July is absolutely bang on in the centre of the year, so beautifully equidistant from christmas past and future.
When I sit and consider my 56 years on this planet, I have to reflect on the ups and downs of my life. One failed marriage. Two redundancies. A nervous breakdown. Cancer. All of them leave their own legacy on my body and my mind. Mainly my mind, but the cancer did its best to fuck up my body, and thus affect my mind in the process.
I did warn you this would be melancholy.
The positive part of me celebrates that I’ve made it to 56, what with all the obstacles in my way. I’ve picked through the destruction and detritus of my ravaged past and always kept one foot in front of the other. I have been fortunate. Despite an upbringing that can be considered cold, I became someone relentlessly driven. I inherited drive and stubbornness that has got me through a lot.
At 56 I have the advantage of slowing down a little. I don’t need to prove myself any more, and part of my reflection is my therapy. Therapy has opened up swathes of my past and helped me understand the impact it made on my life. I realised - sadly too late to do anything meaningful about it - that I have ADHD (well, the traits). I know myself a little better than I did before. I know the reasons why I behave the way I do.
I’m also aware of the things that drag me down. A lack of routine, often mistaken for a lack of discipline, can torpedo a day. Poor memory means that routines take a lot to stick. Like any long term ADHD sufferer, I have built a scaffold of systems around me to get me through a day. To-do lists. Relentless dependence on a calendar. Routines that define how I handle certain tasks. An infinitely patient wife.
There’s another side to this that I’d forgotten to address - the fact that I have made it to 56 at all. I’ve had a remarkably good life and I don’t see that changing any time soon. I have a good job, albeit slightly frustrating, friends, a home, a wife and a kid, and I want for nothing other than easily dismissed trinkets.
When I pause to consider the net positives of my life, I have a lot to be grateful for, and very little to complain about.
That’ll probably set the tone for the other posts on this blog, until I find something else to rant about and vent again.
When I’m all grown up - i.e. in the next year, I will endeavour to be more positive and also edit more. I really need to edit my writing more, and not leave it to a thursday afternoon when there is no more room to tidy up.