My Life and Other Things

Today is my 34th Birthday … and life has to change.  It has to change in many ways. It’s going to be a struggle.  It’s going to hurt.  It’s going to be a slow journey.  But it has to change and change NOW.

Onwards and Upwards …

After my last post about new starts, I wasn’t sure how to follow it up, other than jumping right back into things .. and somehow that just felt wrong. Then I caught up on some RSS reading and came across Katlyn’s post over at The Dreamy Meadow and thought it was such a great idea that I decided to take on her challenge and do the same.

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Let’s pretend that we’ve never been in contact before.

You’ve never visited this blog before.

You’ve never heard my name before.

So who am I?

What is this blog all about & why do I want to have my voice be heard?

The questions above are good .. and they are similar to many I have been asking myself a lot lately. Why am I like I am; why do I do the things I do; what has made me who I am today and so on. The answers are coming slowly and I am starting to learn a lot about myself, which is proving interesting. I have worked out that I am better at keeping on top of things if they are in a good place to begin with, that I am more organised when other people are either involved or will see the thing I have organised and that, despite laughing it off and/or denying it, I actually don’t care about myself enough (at all?).

To give you the brass tacks as it were, I am a 33-year-old single woman living and working in Hampshire, UK. I enjoy doing things for other people, whether that be in a charitable way (I am a member of Lions Club International) or the more personal thing of making someone smile through something I have done for them. I hate the idea of someone not liking me, even if it is someone I have muted feelings for. I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but it does .. so if you are reading this and don’t like me, please don’t ever tell me!

I love the opportunity life presents to us, hence my list of 1001 things to try to do whilst I am around .. the excitement I get when adding new items or planning to cross things off is childlike! If I could win the lottery, my idea of bliss would be to go off travelling round the world seeing and experiencing as much as humanly possible .. preferably with a close friend or loved one.

I want to be more organised, tidier, thriftier, more social and definitely more active .. much more active. I want to be braver, more assertive and I really want to be a great friend, daughter, sister, niece, granddaughter and one day, I really hope to be a great wife.

 My name is Emma Louise Donovan and my life changes now.

 I challenge you to introduce yourself. Tell me who you are now and who you want to be.

The definition of an anti-climax can either be “a disappointing decline after a previous rise” or “a sudden change from a serious subject to one that is disappointing or ludicrous”. For me at the moment, it is probably a mix of both. Working in the events industry means that, by its very nature, there are peaks and troughs of busy and quiet periods, but they can be really quite hard to deal with occasionally. Going from dealing with a hundred emails and calls a day and sometimes working 12 hours to having very little to do can seem strange and can sometime be a little frustrating. Having said that, there is normally another team gearing up for an event that could do with some help and this is what you tend to find yourself doing until the next project comes along.

The last few months, life has been aiming towards the end of June and a large project I was working on. Hours were long (but productive – I never mind working late when you actually feel like you are achieving things) and the rest of life was put on hold to a certain extent, including my writing of blog posts. I tend to find that something has to be the main focus of my time, whether it be work or one of my past times, I can never seem to find a happy medium. I am an all or nothing person and this can cause a lot of anti-climaxes in my life.

It actually screws with my mind a lot; I am forever saying “when x has finished” or “once we are past x date”, but of course it is the same as saying “tomorrow”, for we all know that tomorrow never comes. In 2006 as part of my Sailing Trip, we each had to complete a Belbin Personality Test and I discovered that I am an out and out Teamworker.

“Teamworkers helped the team to gel, using their versatility to identify the work required and complete it on behalf of the team.”

I think the wording here is interesting (‘complete it on behalf of the team’) as I am definitely NOT good at delegating and do tend to have the attitude of ‘I’ll just do it myself’. One other interesting thing that I got from it is that I am most definitely NOT a Complete/Finisher .. well not in its basic meaning – I never finish anything! I am forever starting things and not seeing them through to the end, and this also frustrates me. Interestingly, the definition they give is more like me:

“Completer Finishers were most effectively used at the end of a task, to “polish” and scrutinise the work for errors, subjecting it to the highest standards of quality control.”

I am a perfectionist in a lot of areas of life and like things ‘just so’. Really, these two things to go hand in hand in a way, I think the reason I never see things through to the end is because I know that they will never be done to the standard I want them done. Which is ridiculous. Surely I should be able to persuade myself that it being done on even the most basic of level is better than not at all? You’d think so. But no.

Of course this is totally separate from my inability to look after myself (and all things related). If it’s just for me, ‘I don’t care’ and therefore it will either not get done at all, or only when I have the enthusiasm to do it, which happens to be very rarely. This is something that I have been talking through with my counsellor and so far I haven’t been able to answer the question of “WHY?” so I shall keep on talking and trying to work it out in the hope that one day, I will be able to finish the HUMUNGOUS list of things that I have waiting to be finished and that life won’t seem like an endless anti-climax.