I am struggling to eat and sleep properly, not sure really what’s wrong with me; I am barely able to eat more than 900 calories most days now and I am sleeping an average of 5 hours per night.
This is why I am going quieter than normal again.
I am trying hard to keep my activities up but I am just zoning out a lot during the day because I am tired and uncomfortable and there is this strange feeling as though, something in my life is going to be turned upside down… whether for good or bad I am not sure…
I know something big has already happened in my life, I have gained two new freedoms in this past month – one could be life-changing, the other was kind of predicted by me a few years ago.
Paul and I are living together but we are no longer in a relationship – we have our separate rooms and we are starting to kind of get separate lives too – but we’re still friends. He is more of a guardian of me now, really.
The other change is my personal finance, I have paid off one of my personal debts which helped us get by Christmas to Christmas over the years and soon another debt will be completely gone too. This will make my £25 per week treat money go up by another £15 in January! Now that’s not all, because Paul is now officially retired, it means I have the option of self-employment without the guilt of cutting family funds down if I fail.
So Paul is trying to help me learn how to use technology in order for me to do the YouTube channel I am interested in doing and to also learn how to monetise Pinterest, Instagram and this blog. So for the next month I may be quieter than usual, only doing one to two posts per day whilst I get educated about what I need to do for self-employment.
I am trying to write a business plan out to see where I could potentially earn an income and how; whilst improving my creative outlet, because ultimately I want my job to be creatively based – not just promoting and advertising.
Paul has a good concept I am thinking of running with – putting my poems on Instagram with royalty free videos as one of the things to do.
As I am getting healthier and able to do more things physically, I think I may be able in a month or two to start going for walks at the local wildlife reserve again and take photographs to sell as postcards and other things.
I particularly like taking photos of dawn and dusk – the twilight hours, I love twilight! I am not talking about the sparkly vampire novels and movie; I am talking about the time of day!
Our wildlife reserve has a very high hill that is perfect for landscape photography at those times of day for you can see for miles around you – the problem is getting up there when you are sick and not as fit as you used to be! Five flights of stairs over a twenty minute walk; each step is a different size from 2 inches to 2ft! Some of the steps you have to hoist yourself up or jump down! They are wooden and rickety and look like something in a fairy forest because they are covered in moss and lichen and go through the darkest depths of the woods, which can be spooky at times!
Especially as these woods have something the locals call “Screaming deer” a small deer that sounds like a woman being murdered from time to time, unnerving when you get to the shady depths of the wood and you get to see the glimpse of one in the darkness scurrying out the brambles and hopping over the dark stream away from you!
They are a kind of muntjac, not native, but escaped into the British wildlife a few years back!
There are quite a few things I am planning to do, unfortunately a gardening blog and vlog will have to wait until I move away, because the bad neighbour practically lives at his window waiting to see me do anything in the garden before he comes out and harasses me again.
I had thought the garden blog and vlog would actually probably be 50/50 with my writing up until 2yrs ago when that horrible man move in next door! He is so unpopular in the village he has been more or less banned from three of the local pubs for his obnoxious behaviour and nobody will employ him as a handyman either!
The dog he has he has made vicious lunged at Paul the other day and Paul fell into a dog rose bush and has really nasty gashes all up his forearm – Henry has a phobia of big dogs like that Dalmatian because of what happened when he was a toddler when he was playing in a park, a dog jumped at him and bashed his head hard. He is OK with little dogs though.
Henry and I don’t use our garden path anymore because of both the man and the dog, we cross to the left and use an alternative neighbours path, which takes us about 300ft out of our way whenever we want to go out to the right side of the street, but at least we don’t get harassed!
When the dog is in their back garden we can’t be in our back garden either, because it uses their outdoor dining table as a means to jump over the fence to try and attack us yet still Paul won’t complain to the police about it all.
So we are one of the lucky families to have a garden that is bigger than 20ft by 20ft which is rare in this country and area, but we can’t use it because of one neighbour and his dog!
My child stuck indoors all day every day summer or not – just so he is safe!
I am only thankful that I have a washing machine with a dryer, I would hate having to go into the garden risking all sorts of things to hang clothes up like how we used to a few years back!
You know this neighbour has affected my mental health so badly that whenever I so much as think about gardening, I have nightmares of him doing things to sabotage my efforts or hurt me or the family, that night?
Something as simple as a flippant comment about wanting to grow Blue Himalayan poppies as a goal, made me have a horrendous dream about him last night and no doubt today I will have a worse one!
What really ticks me off is that the man isn’t supposed to be living next door, he is a tenant – so it would be easy to have him moved on, but Paul is too nice and passive, just because he is fond of his nice step daughter.
Paul is trying everything he can to appease me about the situation whilst not solving it – he is doing everything he can to try and get me an allotment so I can garden again, but that would mean I have to go 10 minutes down the road to grow my flowers, fruits and vegetables on land that isn’t my own whereas I have a 50ft by 30ft back garden and a 20ft by 30ft front garden which we own! Not only that but it will cost us around £80 a year for the privilege and we’re limited to what we can and cannot grow there!
Before this bad neighbour became a problem, I gardened so much it saved us £60 a month in fruit and veg, right now we need to garden more than ever – but we’re going hungrier than we should be, because of peace sake.
I’ve never known a man like it and I am talking about both Paul and the bad neighbour here!
I do know one thing – if an apocalypse was to happen Paul won’t help defend me against other men and that’s a scary thought! Very scary! And I know my fears aren’t unwarranted because I first learned of Paul’s cowardice when Henry was 3 months old, when a man tried to attack me when I was pushing Henry in the pram – Paul was walking several feet behind me, whilst I dealt with the man myself, Paul walked right past us like he was pretending he didn’t know us!
I called after him about what happened when I chased the guy off – he claimed he never saw a thing! I said, you heard shouting and roaring though didn’t you? No.
So when I say I literally do a lot by myself, I mean it. I can’t rely on Paul for anything, the house is falling apart – shrug, too tired and busy to do anything oh and play the poverty card too!
Very convenient for him!
So in the past few weeks in particular, he is becoming less like the Paul I know and more like someone I don’t want to. He has changed a lot since he felt he could reject me and then reclaim me at the drop of a hat without ramifications… he had a shock when he learned I don’t work like that. You reject me for someone you haven’t met yet, and then you reclaim me when she turns out to be a fake… on your bike!
So that’s why I am going self-employed and this is why I won’t be giving any of my money to Paul to help with anything. I will give to my son and for us to eat, but that’s about all I will do – I have had enough of him sitting pretty thinking I am totally helpless and I want a life – I can’t bare this mediocrity any longer, even I or this lifestyle has to die – one of us and I would rather it not be me!
I would rather not be lonely either, but hey ho, sometimes we’re lonelier when we live with people!
To say I am not heartbroken by how my life has turned out is an understatement; I had hoped I would do better than this! Much better!
Thanks for reading!
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