I've always wanted to grow spiritually. I wonder if what's happened to me is God's response. I've always read that everything is life is impermanent, and you can't find love and security outside of yourself. Yet still I guess I didn't believe it just because I'd read it. I thought I could find love and security, I thought I'd found a reliable, loving man who would be there, care and stand by me no matter what.

Then I woke up one morning and all of that was gone. My every day life as I'd known it was gone. My life was literally turned upside down. My cousin had died, my marriage over, and I was out of Loughborough, out of my home, away from my job and all the people I saw on a day to day basis, and back with my parents. 

It all turned out to be true. Everything is impermanent, and you can't rely on anything but yourself. My whole way of seeing life has been transformed forever, in a way that can never go back. My worst possible nightmare has taken place. I thought I would die. But I haven't, I'm still here. My heart has broken, my life as I knew it has fallen apart, but I'm still here. 

All I can do is take life day to day. Focus on small achievements and small every day pleasures that remind me that life still contains some happiness and is still worth living.

If I can find the strength to shower, brush my hair, put on a bit of make up, and get through the day, that's an achievement. If I eat and drink and look after myself, that's an achievement. I have small goals.

There are things in my life to be grateful for. Family, friends, pets. I have to focus on what I do have. Take one day at a time.

I'm getting over the emotional equivalent of a serious car crash. It's going to take me time and I have to give myself time to heal. It's 5 weeks so far, who knows how long it will take? Probably months, hopefully not years.

But I trust that there are lessons to be learned from this, and that there is a future out there for me. I will take my happiness on a much more day to day basis. I won't compare to others, I won't try to succeed or impress. I won't make big elaborate plans about my future. I'll just try to be happy day to day.

It takes two people to make a marriage work, I could not do it alone. I don't want to go into the details of the marriage, except to say I was not able to be myself, to be Rachael. I had to constantly mold myself into being the woman he wanted- which evidently was not me.

Now I have to learn to start again. Learn from my mistakes, and let this make me not break me. I need to find Rachael again.

I am not ashamed, because I trusted, and I tried my best, and I am now doing my best to be strong in the face of circumstances I never could have predicted.

"There is no perfection, only life." - Milan Kudera

Stanzas to Augusta

Though the day of my destiny's over,
  And the star of my fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
  The faults which so many could find;
Though thy soul with my grief was acquainted,
  It shrunk not to share it with me,
And the love which my spirit hath painted
  It never hath found but in thee.

From the wreck of the past, which hath perish'd,
Thus much I at least may recall,
It hath taught me that what I most cherish'd
Deserved to be dearest of all:
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

Lord Byron

Dedicated to my cousin, James (1989 - 2016)