My head hurts

The problem with having options is knowing which one to take. As a child I hated the choose your own adventure books. I always wanted to know what the consequences of my choice were before I made it. To save myself the pain of making the wrong choice I'd look ahead and work out which one appealed most and then take that path. In so doing the surprise was taken out of everything.

I wish now, like in childhood, I could just skip ahead and find out which road leads me not into the path of a two headed gorgon but to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Unfortunately life isn't like that and I must instead make my choices on the basis of the information available to me.

Today my head was filled with information about job hunting. As part of my redundancy package my employer offers the services of an outplacement company. Not one to turn down an opportunity I'm using the services to get my CV and job hunting skills up to scratch before I go off into the wilds. My aim is to have all my stuff sorted so that when I do decide to come back into the world of employment I can go straight into it.

My head now hurts as a result of all the things I now have to think about to make sure I'm well prepared. On top of that I'm in the process of selling my car and looking at putting my flat on with a rental agent. The market for property sales is so slow as to be almost non-existent so I'm trying to get my head around agents fees, rental prices, emptying the flat, moving dates, and the list goes on.

Frankly the fact that I still have to go into the office is a distraction I could do without!

I've been remiss

I'm sorry, I've been very slack in my entries recently but that's what happens when life just seems to roll on by you. I've been continuing to plan my journey, strangely in reverse order and now I think I have my route from the UK to Australia planned. The next step is to work out where I require visas and which ones I need to get in advance.

The plan is to travel from Edinburgh to London and then on via Eurostar to Brussels. From there I'll head east to Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and St Petersburg in Russia (with maybe a few detours into places like the Czech republic). From here I'll pick up the Trans Siberian railway and head for Vladivostok in the far east where I'll get on a ferry to Japan.

From Japan I'll take another ferry to China and then onward south to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia. If possible I'd like to see Myanmar but that will depend on the political situation when I get to Thailand.

From Malaysia I'll take the bus to Singapore and then ferry to Indonesia where I'll island hop my way to Dili in East Timor. In East Timor the plan is to get on the weekly Perkins freighter to Darwin which I need to do a bit more investigation on.

My gut tells me it's going to take me about six months to get to Darwin as I want to stop and spend time in each country seeing things. This isn't a whistle stop tour of Europe and Asia.

In with all this planning I'm supposed to be doing my outplacement stuff for finding a job. It's just I can't find the motivation to do it at present. I often seem to bite off more than I can chew and this may be a classic example of that.

Ah well, only thing to do is keep going.

Help fund me

To help fund my trip round the world (as I'm loath to go down the path of finding a sugar daddy) I've added Google ads to my blog. If you see one that interests you please click it as I will then receive revenue to help keep me in rice (and beer) for the next year.

Denial is not a river in Egypt

It is a state of mind.

In a moment of clarity I admitted today that the speed with which I returned to work following Mum's death was probably not helpful to me, or if I'm honest, to those around me. The idea of taking some time out is making me look at life through different eyes. Over the last few days I've been looking back at the past months and realising that I've been in denial about a lot of things.

My haste to return to work and the UK was me denying the effect that the months of caring for my mum had on me. Beginning a new relationship, even though it was a welcome distraction and is now missed, was also a reaction to my loss. There's a gap, now I must fill it was my driving mantra and still is.

All this activity was and is a denial of the fact I have suffered a major loss and a life changing experience which has been profound in it's effect. For months now I have pushed memories of the last months, weeks and days of Mum's life from my thoughts in an effort to show the world I'm coping.

The truth is a long way from the mask I show the world. In moments on my own I often find my eyes becoming hot with tears which roll down my cheeks unbidden. That denial has turned itself into a white hot anger which has no aim and falls like lead shot on anyone who mistakenly gets in it's way.

It's not how I want to be, nor is it particularly healthy. With little focus of it's own, my anger has become directed at the thing which most often causes rancor, work. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty to get annoyed about on a daily basis at work, but the explosive reactions are not justified. The problem is I just don't know how else to deal with these feelings which will not subside.

I do some form of physical exercise everyday in an attempt to wear myself out and raise my endorphin levels. This alone does not seem to be working. At the end of the day I still find myself restless and my mind will not be quiet. I can not sit still for more than a few minutes, my mind a constant whirring of cogs and sprockets connected to a hair trigger.

I guess I just have to float down that old river until it spits me out in the ocean.