40 days

2 days after Christmas I lay on the couch, watching the cricket with a fist full of ham off the bone and realised that I had hit a fork in the road. One path, the one that stretched out in front of me requiring nothing other than inertia involved changing nothing and continuing exactly as I was. Cycling between manic and exhausted. Working longer hours indefinitely while my flaccid body refused to sleep and I lived between panic and collapse.

The other path immediately looked unappealing. Stairs for as far as I could see. Steps and stumbling blocks. Difficult. But if I wanted things to be different for 2025 then that was the path I was going to take. And I did what I do best in those moments, and I looked at the enormous task that seemed impossible and tried to prise off small chunks. Achievable goals. Small targets.

And it wasn’t that hard in the beginning. Easier because the family all went off to do Summer Holiday things while I was alone with just me and work and Summer and my little goals. Some infinitesimally small.

I kept finding ways to keep going and not turn around. And then at the top of the first flight of stairs at the end of the first month there was an immediate fork again. A path heading down. Easy, appealing – joining back onto the familiar. Or again, more steps.

They say when you make these sorts of changes that it takes 4 weeks to feel different. 8 weeks to see different. 12 weeks to hear different. I’m on day 40 now, nearly 6 weeks in and it’s different to previous times I’ve been here. Consistency over perfection. A quiet conviction that this is just the way it is now. I don’t see any difference but I definitely feel it. And I feel how easy it is and would be to just step off this path onto the other one.

The biggest change I notice is that I am actually sleeping. There were weeks and months in the last year that I was lucky to get 3 or 4 hours sleep. I lived in a pervasive fog of rumination and fatigue while trying to work harder and parent better while doing neither well and leaving myself behind. My vision was affected. I would be sitting working and my heart rate would suddenly be pounding away over 100bpm. I noticed that there was a lump of tissue at the back of my neck that had never been there before. I enjoyed little.

There is no magic cure for this. No wishful thinking. But now that I’m sleeping I can actually see the path I need to take and although it will not be fast it also feels possible.

Back to the couch and the ham and the cricket – it’s tempting to think that that was rock bottom. But it wasn’t. It was actually the first time I felt relaxed in months. Like I didn’t have to do anything else. And the first time in maybe years that I felt that maybe I needed to prioritise myself and what I need. An epiphany of cured pork and MCG green.

So that’s where I’m at. And that’s where I’m going. And hopefully where I’m going to arrive. I don’t think I’ve said it out loud before. But it’s hard to get there if you have no destination.