11

Tonight, Mat is out having drinks with colleagues. I got home after an horrendous week at work and, having the house to myself, I proceeded to sit on the sofa and read articles on the internet. I sat there for an hour before I realised I wasn’t doing this right. I nipped to the supermarket and bought a box of brownies, a bag of crisps, a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of wine. I am now SORTED. Seriously, after the week I’ve had, this is just…. bliss.

I suppose lots of things have been going on recently so it’s probably time to give some updates.

1. I took two weeks off work and fucking relaxed the shit out of myself. It was awesome. Mat and I visited Paris for a couple of days before going to spend the weekend with my sister. All of it was wonderful.

2. During my time off. my manager called me to tell me about the annual pay rise. I had actually expected there to be no pay rise at all this year due to the fact there was severe cost cutting in all departments and because many people had been laid off. Last year, I got a 2% rise, which was calculated by my annual appraisal score. 2% basically meant I did well, most people got 15 so it showed I was above average. This year, our big boss pushed for me to get the maximum pay rise, which is 5%, because apparently I make a huge difference to the team and he wanted my salary increase to reflect my contribution. I mean, wow. The maximum? I literally could not be doing any better.

Thing is, I took those two weeks off because work had been getting me really down. I was super stressed and overloaded with stuff, and I was constantly worried I wasn’t doing enough. Getting the maximum pay rise (as well as being informed most people got only 1% and many got no rise at all) made me realise I am doing FINE, better than fine. I am doing really well. So I returned to work not only feeling well rested but also confident in my abilities. Since then I’ve relaxed a lot about work and have found that my new found confidence has made me more focussed and a hell of a lot less stressed.

3. Was in a dramatic car crash the other day. The roads in Belgium are just terrible, you’d think no one even understood how town planning works. There are many areas where roads are organised so badly that you expect there to be accidents because of the way junctions are set up. Add that to the fact that Belgian drivers are just TERRIBLE, you have a recipe for disaster. Every day when we drive to work, we are often held up in traffic because there has been a horrendous accident. In fact, most roads are littered at the side with shredded tires, broken wing mirrors and other crash debris, and I just knew that sooner or later, I would be involved in a crash too, it was a statistical certainty.

So I was driving home after a TWELVE HOUR DAY at the office in my boss’ car. She slowed down as a traffic light turned to red and noticed that the huge truck behind us wasn’t slowing down at all. For reasons unknown, the guy in the truck decided to plow right through the red light, BETWEEN two rows of cars. He hit the back left hand side of the car we were in and scraped all along the drivers side, carrying us along with a horrific crashing, scraping plastic noise, pushing us almost onto the verge. Then just sped off into the night. A driver in a side lane saw the whole thing and actually CHASED the lorry, calling the police to call in his license plate number and then driving in front of the lorry and slowing down, managing to stop the guy so the police were able to apprehend him. THEN, they even came back to make sure we were ok.

And we are fine. We got out of the car without a scratch on us, which was extremely lucky. If my boss hadn’t noticed the guy not slowing in her mirror and swerved as much as she could out of his way, I might not be writing this entry right now. We suspect her car is a write-off, but we won’t know until the insurance company assess it. But FUCK, are we lucky!!

4. Mat has been diagnosed with proper, clinical depression. They’re going to put him on anti depressants and get him some serious counselling/therapy. I think this can only be a good thing. Looking back at his general apathy, lack of ambition and general motivation, I’m actually surprised I didn’t notice the signs sooner. But he is now aware of his problem, able to identify when he is feeling shit, and has realised that it isn’t normal to feel like you have to just survive through the day to make it through to the next. I’m looking forward to him getting better now that he knows there is a serious problem to be dealt with, but also reserving my optimism so that I don’t have super high expectations of how he will be once his treatment is complete. I’m glad there has been an official diagnosis and that there is now a sensible and concrete plan of action.

So, yeah. A lot of stuff going on, but I think regardless of the bad or horrific sounding news, all of these things have positive outcomes. Mat and I are also trying to separate ourselves from each other a little bit, because I read this article about couples getting too close that they basically "friend zone" each other, which I was already worrying was happening to us. We love being in each others company so much we’re kind of attached at the hip, but this article made me see that perhaps that’s not as healthy as it seems, and that actually, if we metaphorically take a step away from each other, we will learn to appreciate each other in different ways and will not end up just cuddling every night, we will have our own lives, thoughts and feelings and will become two separate parts of one whole, rather than merging into one entity as we were doing.

It’s why he is out with friend tonight, we’re trying to have some aspects of our lives away from each other to get the balance right. It’s a little painful, we’re so used to spending every single moment we can together, it’s a bit weird going off and doing our own things, but I think it’s healthy and will improve both longevity and the quality of our relationship.

Ha, one of my colleagues took a sneaky photo of me at work today, and weirdly, loads of people have liked the photo on facebook…. I mean, for sure my new shows look FUCKING AWESOME, but I’m a little lost as to why so many people are clicking ‘like’ on this…

I bloody love those shoes. They are the shit.

There is a lot more that I could discuss in this entry but I’m a little drunk and still struggling with this AZERTY keyboard, so I will try to leave it at this for now. Things seem to be going well, and things that aren’t all have sensible and workable actions plans to improve them. Heh,

XxX