The Movies

I watched a movie from the nineties tonight - Sliding Doors. If you haven't seen it it's just brilliant. Well anyway you know the way we were so unknowingly influenced by the media and the noughties provided us with glitz and glam and Carrie Bradshaws and Edie Brits. We had this ideals and dreams conjured up in our minds about Jimmy Choos and cocktails at 2 with your gang of four - anything less and you're a weirdo, nutter, outsider. The movies of the nineties was a bit less demanding, not so much glamour and pr but a lifestyle being professed nonetheless, school, group of friends, college, hobby, career, man, Friday night with the girls, Saturday night with Mr.Big/Darcy, Sunday in the park with roller blades and Sunday afternoon with your retired parents and successful siblings - anything less and well you know....Nineties, noughties whatever we have this exterior vision board loaded with obligatory rights of passages, shoulds, expectations, ideals, prototypes, stereotypes, types and rights.

After what seems like months of painful, challenging, sobering realisations it's nice to have a relieving one. When I have not been managing my parents moods and people pleasing I was spending the rest of my life moulding my time and being into achieving the ideal body, the ideal social group, the ideal friendships, the ideal lifestyle, the ideal career - all of which meant some kind of busy social butterfly type creature who gets manicures, parties at the weekends, shops on the weekdays, has a Miranda, Carrie, Charlotte and Samantha - anything less and well you know. I burdened and cursed and abused myself with this non attainable, static, unreal, un achievable altar I had to reach in order to call myself normal, acceptable, a human even. Everyday I quadruple guessed myself: you should be with this person now, you should be doing x now, you should, you should, you should.

I have realised that when I haven't been managing, fighting, struggling, surviving, existing I've been striving for a life that will never exist for me nor suit me but blocking myself from never mind thriving or flourishing but living.

This new year I promise myself to release fear of others in every way, to release guilt that is wholey unnecessary not so that I can fly and flower and flourish but so that I can acquaint myself with simply living which will enable me to learn all about me - my likes, dislikes, my qualities, my flaws, my talents, my strengths, my body clock so that one day soon I too can embrace this life and myself too and watch sparks fly as if like fireworks. Today I honour myself with the decision to live. Joyce xxx