40 In A Week, 60 The Week After

This post may seem like a whole load of nothing if you are over 40, but I am not (for exactly another week anyhow) and I'm feeling somewhat surprised and disgruntled about the situation I find myself in.

I know this sounds like a huge cliché, but I was just 14. I was just standing in the playground with my friends with back-combed hair in the shortest navy skirts we could get away with, discussing how old we would be in the year 2000 - and now the Millennium was 11 bloody years ago! How did that happen? It is unthinkable.

Then I was around 28, suddenly I was 35 and now I find myself on the brink of 40. I've mentioned before that I'm aiming to live until at least 85, so I'm nearly half way through! Half way to the end. What the fuckety fuck?! I daren't close my eyes tonight because I feel certain I'll wake up and be 47. 

Of course we all get older but I am shocked at how quickly it seems to have happened. The view of my face in the mirror bears little resemblance to how I see myself. They're the same cheeks that my Mum wiped tears from when I was a baby, the same eyes I unwisely applied blue mascara to as a teenager, the same lips that have created thousands of screams, howls, laughs and kisses, the same face that I have cleansed, plucked, moisturised, inspected and peered at for 39 years. But I somehow can't seem to accurately visualise or project myself back to see myself as I was through those eyes. I can only see me as I am now.

A lot of people are completely comfortable with the idea of getting older, but I think they're either lying or they haven't thought it through properly. Who wants to get old and die? I don't mind getting older in theory, but I don't want to wrinkle up and drift south; I want to be young and sprightly Goddamn it! They say that youth is wasted on the young and they're right. 

I suppose it comes down to the matter of control. I do not like that I will get older and older, until one day I will cease to be. I am extremely unhappy and put out that I have no say in the matter. I don't like being made to do anything and this is the ultimate in lack of control I guess. 

I've been obsessed with dying and the reality of existence since I was very small; I've never gotten my head around the fact that one day everyone will no longer be here. I'm incredulous about this - how can this be? I can't imagine that it could be so. I know that 40 is not old, but It's certainly another milestone on my journey down the road.

My birthday is a time when I get very reflective. I have a little audit and check that I'm on the right track and where I want to be. I'm truly happy that I'm where I am, but as I get older I'm more keenly aware that I'm being shoved rudely along to an ending I'm not keen on. And I'm not happy about that at all.

Imagine What The Front Looks Like

So ladies, if there was ever a time to reach for the sunblock and that iced doughnut - it's now.

Never a Truer Word Unspoken

I have been working like a bastard this week. Because I was doing ok, I took my foot off the marketing pedal for a while plus I kinda lost my enthusiasm for the whole thing to be honest. It wasn't like I hated freelancing, it was just that I got a bit lazy, procrastinated a whole lot, and perhaps just burned myself out a little bit.

This resulted in me being short of clients this month and poorer than a church mouse on benefits. I'm not going to beat myself up about it; I'm (just) in my first year of business and I'm going to learn from it and move on. Things are looking up but I've learned a valuable lesson - life never gets any easier and you will be flogging yourself to the bone until you're on your death bed with little or no reward.

I did hope that at 38 I would have furthered myself a bit more than this though - sometimes I think that if you'd have told me life would be this hard when I was a kid I wouldn't have bothered. "sweetie-pie, when you're nearly 40 you will never have had a proper home, you'll be single and ageing fast, you will have no money to do anything you like, and you'll be working like a sod but will have nothing to show for it except debt... now run along and play darling"

Raisin Wears Bikini

Put The Gun Down Lady

This blog started off being called 'Cashier Closed' as I'm one of those people that get narked about lots of small mundane things; I try not to, but I just do. I decided recently though that I was going to try to be a much more positive person and stop letting those day to day annoyances bother me and attempt to 'let it wash over me', as being annoyed about things all the time is, well... annoying!

This week however I'm feeling a bit arsey; I go back to work on Monday and I don't want to; what I want to do is get my business off the ground and work for myself, I want to find love and not be single anymore, I want to have more money and not be constantly on the verge of poverty, I want to be 30 again and not age anymore, I want to be a stone lighter and want to love exercise instead of hating it. 
Some of these things are doo-able and I'm working on them, and some of them I can't do anything about - but today I'm having a whinge about them.

I've decided that this week I'm going to wallow in my arsey-ness and demonstrate the things that piss me off and then I'm going to shut up about them and get on with it. I'm sure you'll recognise some of the following...

A Prune is Just an Experienced Plum

It’s my 37th birthday today and I’ve just read that it’s pretty much over for me.

Not even mentioning the fact that time seems to have sped up and I rolled over in bed and suddenly woke up aged 37 when I was in fact just 28; scientists at UCLA have compared how quickly a group of men aged from 23 - 80 could perform a motor task and then correlated their performances to their brains' myelin integrity. The researchers found a striking correlation between the speed of the task and the integrity of myelination over the range of ages. So basically after middle age, we start to lose the battle to repair the myelin in our brain and our motor and cognitive functions begin a long, slow downhill slide… Brilliant.

Other fantastic things that happen to the body of a thirty-something woman are loss of skin elasticity, weight gain, diminishing fertility, and wrinkles. Then I have the menopause, Alzheimer’s, incontinence and osteoporosis to look forward to, as well as a possibly hunch...why, I just can’t wait! In the last year or so I have also noticed lines appearing on my upper lip - too much kissing I thought, or too many years of smoking; however I was inspecting my mothers face last week and noticed that she had pronounced lines there too and she’s never smoked a cigarette in her life! Bloody genes!

When I was younger, I thought that a ‘middle aged’ person was in their 50’s; but thinking about it logically, the average lifespan of a woman in the UK is 82 so middle aged is in fact 41 - only 4 years away! Personally, I’m aiming for 85 (it’s a good figure and achievable) with a plan to let myself go at around 70 where I will start an extensive experiment studying the effects of surviving on just cake, Maltesers and party rings - which I’m hoping the state pension will cover as I will have spend every last penny on shoes.

Not a lot I can do about the whole thing I guess; I’m doomed. It appears that unless I start exercising like a loon (I HATE exercise; we’re not friends) my body will just start folding up like an Autumn leaf. I didn’t think I’d be one of those women who was vain enough to mourn the passing of time and yearn for her lost youth - but it turns out I am. I don’t think it’s the ageing so much as the speed of which it is occurring.  None of this was in the bloody handboook!