The Clockmaker

New week tomorrow, new start. Positivity and all that. Cheering up. Recognising that there are good things in my life. I know I can't win every day but it does feel like I've had more loses than wins recently.

You can't depend on other people to make you happy and there are many things I can do myself to make me happy. To completely mangle a quote: "Life is what happens while you're waiting for other people". I'm not waiting for them anymore. I'm doing things and seeing things and it's very small-minded of people I called friends to say things like "You need to find a boyfriend... you sort of mess up the numbers." Fuck that. It's my life and I don't want a boyfriend in it. I will not conform to your petty little social statuses. You will not make me feel like an outcast because my life doesn't exactly match yours. And you know what? I've seen your life. It doesn't appeal very much. It seems to involve spending a lot of time sitting at home with a husband who doesn't strike me as a terribly interesting man and doesn't seem to even speak very much. (Not aimed at anyone in particular.)

Have you ever looked at the midday sun from halfway up a Transylvanian mountain you never meant to be anywhere near and felt glee? Have you ever shrieked in adrenaline-fuelled triumph while standing on a plank? Have you ever sat in a darkened room surrounded by strangers, unable to breathe because you're laughing so hard? Well, I have. And I wouldn't have done any of it if I'd waited for someone to come with me. Sometimes I'm "lonely", yes. But most of the time I'm "independent" or "free". And besides, it's not a crime to be a person who finds being alone more comfortable than being surrounded by people. It's not a crime to not be a people-person. As long as you're happy with that. And most of the time, I am. I came to terms long ago with the fact that I'm happier hiding in my room than I am at a party.

I know that I don't quite fit into any of the boxes you want to put me in. Is she a shy quiet meek little mouse? Yes! And yet is she a bold, pig-headed, too-fearless-for-her-own good bulldozer? Yes! Dreamer or doer? Yes! To both! Jenny once told me I was cool because I didn't care what anyone else thought of me. And that's something that a lot of teens think about themselves and they are sadly mistaken and for that reason, I don't entirely like the description. But I can't deny that there's a certain amount of accuracy in it. Whether or not you find that admirable is up to you. I'm not striding out there radiating "I'm weird! I don't care what you think of me!" because that makes me fucking cringe. But neither am I skulking around going "Please like me, I'll die if you think I'm weird."

The upshot of this all is that I am, like most people, a bit of a patchwork (and probably a patchwork in progress at that) and it's time for me to embrace that a bit, cheer the fuck up and not give a damn about whether or not my friends have got any time in their tedious little lives for me.

(Please note the shitehawk icon. I am pouring out words and emotions and not necessarily phrasing things how I might if I was trying to be diplomatic)

I'm in a good positive mood today so I'm going to ramble about that a bit. I've just finished reading The Order of the Phoenix and am now getting into the Harry Potters that I don't remember very well because I read them the day they came out, in a hurry, and haven't reread since. I say I don't remember them very well. I hardly remember them at all.

Anyway, I've brushed my teeth so I'm feeling minty and proud. I've had a text exchange with Mandy about Brownies and discovered an email from her - seems she's noticed I was acting odd last year. I've admitted to her that things weren't quite right and told her that I'm lots better now and she's coming over for lunch tomorrow and we'll talk about Brownies and she'll talk and I'll nod and fail to get a word in.

Partly the improvement has come about because the moment I decided to give up on people I got an out-of-the-blue invitation to spend a day with my two best friends and it actually happened and I enjoyed it. This has gone no little way to restoring my faith in people, as has Mandy's email. But something that I think has made a particularly noticeable difference is work.

I've had a busy fortnight. Everyone's piling stuff of me and telling me it needs to be done sort of now. And I admit, it's getting to the point where it's almost too much and I very nearly started snapping at people today. We had two new people back in November. One of them has taken 75% of my accounting jobs and the other has kind of taken my place as the logistics backup. (I don't think he's staying past his trial period. He's not good enough and he admitted himself within two weeks of starting that he doesn't really want to stay). For a while, I felt like all my jobs were being taken away, like I was gradually being made redundant, I'd had a massive problem with some shipping documents I hadn't sorted out that dragged on for two months, I felt like I was rubbish at my job and I was living in terror of being fired. This was a completely misplaced paranoia. I said here, for crying out loud, my boss said a while back, probably in September/October, if I was happy here he had no problem whatsoever keeping me. That was probably around the time my "occasional bouts of misery" were at their most persistent, maybe he'd noticed and thought I wasn't happy here. What he said was that if I wasn't happy and wanted to leave, they'd find a replacement who could do all the stuff I could do while they were hiring. But if I was happy then he had no problems keeping me. I know I've already said that. It bears repeating. I should have paid more attention to the second bit than the first bit. He said months ago that he had no intention of getting rid of me, didn't he? But paranoia piled upon misery and I took it the wrong way and let it make things so much worse.

These last two weeks, as I've said, I've been incredibly busy. I've been working to breaking point. I've finally realised it was a good thing the accounts stuff was taken away. It reduced my workload down to "manageable". God knows what state I'd be in if I was trying to keep up with the accounting on top of everything else. Well done bosses for knowing things I didn't, even about myself. But the point is that I'm delighted to be busy because it's stuff I can cope with, provided I don't end up wasting too many days in unnecessary meetings and it's stuff that I'm needed for. I feel useful, I feel needed, I feel like there is definitely a job for me and without me, the office would be in a certain amount of chaos. I'm essential. They don't get rid of "essential".

Realising that I'm in demand means paranoia about potential firing has gone. Friends contacting me eases the loneliness. I don't know what happened to me over the last few months but I'm definitely well on my way back to my normal self. And that's a great thing. I'm reading! I'm intending to go snowboarding! (Tried to go last week. Drove seventeen miles there to find the slope was closed because of technical problems. Drove seventeen miles home again. 17 miles, incidentally, would seem like another world to some of my friends. I'm genuinely curious - does anyone think it's a ridiculous distance to go snowboarding? Not that your opinion is going to stop me going, obviously)