Over the last decade, I went from being a Senior Banking Consultant, government researcher and corporate researcher to now being a fledgling author and artist. During all of this time I was renovating and maintaining a mansion which will never belong to me and taking care of my parents.
At the beginning of this period, I had around six ex-boyfriends who used to come and visit, thankfully missing each other in the process and helping out if they felt like it. None of them were particularly keen to get me out of my shell, they kind of delivered themselves like pizzas as and when they were not busy.
Overall, the crucial years from the age of 25, a long time ago now, were taken up with my parents and family. I had previously been a successful chef, and was out-earning the rest of the family when I was told that I was to take care of things as nobody else would do it. I could have ignored this, but it turned out to be a statement of fact.
I only really realised that my life was over at around 33 or so, when it proved impossible to get decent employment locally, and I could not leave my mother to take care of my father alone as she was not a natural carer by any means.
So, from being absolutely work-obsessed, driven and very keen on pretty poor quality relationships with equally lazy boys, I have become a loner, who slowly moves towards a life of self-expression, for good or ill.
My friend from Slovenia, who I got to know when building the island in Second Life, is now married and is contemplating, at 40, having a child. I am contemplating the fact I will never have a child as I do not leave the house and have no prospect of forming any new relationships. The old ones were curtailed as a result of my overwhelming feelings for Wolfe. I do not regret this at all. In many ways he was an excuse to move on from a rather stagnant life. Nor do I genuinely envy anybody. I just feel rather despondent at the moment and am struggling a bit with the idea of moving on with no goal in mind.
As it is evident that I will never trust anyone enough to have a child with them now, I am inclined to focus on my appearance as a major project that I can spend a lot of time thinking about. I also need to resolve some of the issues that caused my current problem set in the first place – the fact that I never felt that I looked good enough, the fact that I have insufficient real emotional support to let things go easily, (my reaction to Wolfe was most uncharacteristic) the fact that I have failed to get any of the things I wanted – life in a rural location, career, children etc. A major worry is that I have no real way of building a pension.
I always have at least half a dozen plans, which I usually carry out within five years or so. A former friend recently commented that it was always worth dropping in on me every ten years or so because it is never boring and there is always a masterplan. This is not the problem. The problem is that my heart really isn’t in it at the moment, and I feel as if I have been swimming around the same bowl for the last decade. I can handle being wrong, I have been wrong countless times. I just don’t know quite how to break out of the cycle of being wrong over and over again.
One good thing about the Wolfe era was that it forced me to give up a lot of things that were holding me back, and it forced me into a situation in which I had to express myself publicly since there was no way of doing it privately. For this I am strangely grateful. Every step I take at the moment, however, is tempered with a feeling of impending doom. I am sure that this will pass, but at the moment it is rather sad.
None of the people that I have left behind over the last few years did anything unusually wrong. There was more of a generalised wrongness that meant that I was constantly feeling suppressed or undervalued. Wolfe was very much the last straw in that lengthy period. I was insulted, under-valued and not listened to, not directly by him, but by his associated entourage, and after the experience of my family stabbing me over and over again in the hope of gaining money from my parents, enough was enough.
So, although I am numb, lonelier than ever and again forced into a situation in which I have to come out of my shell or perish, you will not catch me genuinely hating Wolfe or his crappy idea of business practice. I have learned and observed a lot that I would never otherwise have noticed, and I am overall better off as a result. despite my almost total destruction in the course of my latest metamorphosis.