What a month - I've just realised I've been over a month at this temp job. Its been a roller coaster ride and I've learned or rather re-learned so much.
1. You can't cope easily with what life throws you if you are ill and tired. REST is the no 1 cure for it.
2. Reframing - commute = thinking time not waste of time.
Temp Job = Arts grant
3. How much I've lost my connection to my original self. How much I've put other people before my needs.
4. Clawing back that slightly eccentric self. You will find me standing outside the main entrance of the World's 10th Largest Employer determinedly knitting at lunchtime in a bid to push back SAD.
5. Self care only I can do it and sometimes it means saying 'no' and I hate saying 'no' - it pushes every one of my people pleasing buttons. I have to practice more 'no'.
6. You can have a job and still create step by step. In between all this crazy temping, communting stuff I've put together a proposal with my noble long suffering producer. Its away being considered please annoy small mammals on my behalf.*
7. Awful things happen, which seem to career out of of nowhere. You survive. I've lost the drama perhaps because of the tiredness - I just don't have the energy. I just think 'This is the way it is'. And as soon as you stop banging your head on circumstance then there is more energy for other stuff.
8. Acceptance see above
9. Gratitude - focusing on what I do have instead of what I perceive as lacking makes life a lot easier.**
10. Stepping away. I keep on being tested. People keep arriving in my life or reappearing in my life who I realise are only there to distract me from what I really should be doing or really should be feeling. I'm practicing counting to 275, feeling guilty and walking backwards anyway.
11. When I don't listen to the wisdom of my body and walk in the wrong direction the pains in my feet tell me where to orientate myself.

*I used ask people to sacrifice small mammals on my behalf then I became friends with a vegan so instead if you see a fox just really annoy them by saying things like 'I don't think that colour suits you' and 'Didn't I see that coat last year in Maplin'.

** Sound glib but when a friend phoned and told me about the papparazzi attended vast media party launch do which I couldn't go to in London because I was temping I had to practice this a lot.