The irony here is that the title of this blog post and the original post itself is a draft I wrote a year ago, talk about falling down on the job! It has been a long time since the world changed utterly and I was left wondering what to do with myself other than feed, water and exercise the children. I hadn’t been back to the clinic all that long and I really loved being a working Reflexologist and Reiki Practitioner again. However working with the family I have fashioned (Erin my friend of 24 years whom I bought a house with, my son, her son and a black and white dog) made us an even closer knit team. It was a much better place to be than in a slowly disintegrating house with no real income and my six year old child.

We were really disappointed that we had to cancel our trip to Mexico in 2020 but circumstances could not be helped. Since then we have tried to make the best decisions for our family and by good fate we have made it through unscathed and un-Covid contracted. Last January Erin and I had started 2021 off with Adrian’s 30 Day Yoga Challenge. Her big thing was “Showing Up for Yourself.” It really became the cornerstone of all our good health initiatives and helped us make priorities, or if you will sorting out the shit I have to do and the shit I would really rather be doing. Both were equally helpful.

I made lists of things I had accomplished. One column had things like wills, taxes, balancing my budget, purging and remembering to floss and the other had find an online writing community, try to date during covid, use the fire pit, Star Wars Marathon, use the skating rink across the street and potty-training Junior.

Attacking the list we also made room for failure for as Erin always tells me this is a learning curve. Every success is usually preceded by a failure. The things on that list were not potty-training Junior, not drinking too much wine (we started ordering by the case), not dating during covid and not staying up and watching Outlander or Bridgerton. Yes they were glorious failings that we peppered our success with as sometimes things didn’t work out, and sometimes we just needed what we needed i.e. Jamie Fraser in a kilt.

So where are we now? I found an online writing community called Sapphic Online Writers which have selected me to be represented in three Zines from their Online Zine Collection, Issue #3 Closer, Issue #4 Out of the Wardrobe, to which I submitted an excerpt of my new fantasy novel and the Valentines Day edition so that’s great. We started January 2022 with another 30 Day Yoga Challenge and went for about 10 days, yeah it’s February I know. We have slowed down the wine and chocolate consumption but we have had some epic fails where dating is concerned and now watch The Discovery of Witches and burned our way through all three seasons of Sex Education. All we can do is keep plodding along succeeding and failing where we must and hope that the rest of 2022 will show us the best of ourselves, and the selves we can forgive!