What advice would you like to have been given
On so many occasions during my life I would have loved to have had the guidance I craved – it was as though my parents assumed I automatically knew how to handle money, how to make friends, how to form good patterns and habits in my life. I was never taught any of those things and so my young life was one mistake, crisis or traumatic experience after another. I attracted the wrong in everything, friends, boyfriends and general experiences, but I didn’t realise any of this at the time. I married the first man who asked me and it ended in divorce, after two children. I was still looking for that happy-ever-after when I married for the second time and had two more children, but again it ended in divorce.
Throughout my adult life I thought I was depressed but I worked through it, because I was told by my mother when I was tearful to pull myself together. It wasn’t until much later in life, in my 70s that I found I wasn’t depressed, just unhappy. I was listening to a podcast and the speaker said that many people come to him saying they are depressed, but when he questions them and after a short conversation with them it becomes apparent they had an unhappy life – they are not depressed, they are unhappy. I’d had an unhappy life but didn’t realise it, I thought the way I was feeling was all my fault, that I couldn’t do anything right and it was down to me to fix things.
It was a revelation when I realised I wasn’t depressed, I was unhappy and the more I thought about it the more it became clear that this was the case. I found myself going back over my life and every bad decision I made was down to the fact I was unhappy and I was looking for a way to be happy.
It’s true, you do learn through bad experiences – they become life experiences and there’s a wisdom that comes from these which you realise as you get older. It wasn’t until later in my life that I realised happiness comes from within.
What stories would I like to have read
Anything to do with life that wasn’t a happy-ever-after life – married, healthy children, devoted husband, nice home, regular holidays, money to spend, this was what I wanted, but never had. I wanted to read about people experiencing life the way I was at that time. Looking back, it seemed everything I did was in the search for happiness, but instead of finding happiness I brought more unhappiness into my life in one form or another. But again, looking back I had never been encouraged to make my own decisions, I just went along with things as they came up. Even the job I did when I left school, it was never discussed with me – I was sent to secretarial college to learn shorthand and typing, wasn’t asked if it was what I wanted, just told by my mother that it was costing a lot of money.
I would have liked to have known I wasn’t the only one in this position and I think reading other people’s stories then would have made me question my situation sooner. As it was, I was in my 50s before I sought counselling for the first time.
When I was in my 20s it was the 1960s and I think the sort of stories I wanted to read from women in the same position as me just weren’t found anywhere. It’s only been since the internet and social media and the ‘self-help/self-improvement’ genre was born – I was an avid reader of anything to do with self-help!
Other stories I would have liked to have read when I got older was how to get over the shock of having four lovely, loving sons who were really close to me and then losing them to their respective wives/girlfriends. What with ‘empty nest syndrome’ and then this realisation, I was very upset, quite resentful really and still am at times, like when I don’t hear from any one of them for more than a week or so, or even longer. There’s an old saying – ‘When you have a daughter, she’s yours for life, when you have a son, he’s yours ‘til he gets a wife’ – and that is so, so true. Thankfully, I am very independent which makes it easier for me, but not every woman is and I can only imagine how hard it must be for them.
