The future in All Good Things

So far I haven’t minded the lockdown in the UK too much. Although I’m not one of those lucky enough to have a job where I can work from home, I do have savings that will get me through at least six months of no work, so I’ve been relatively relaxed and done my best to enjoy being home.

But I’m starting to realise that my career, as I knew it, is gone. It’s never coming back. Not the way it was, the way I’d finally got it to work for me after years of struggle. The only reason I can live by the sea is because I worked all over the world so it didn’t really matter where I lived as long as I had easy access to an airport. Of course, there are no aeroplanes now. There’s no international travel. And I don’t think it’s coming back, certainly not like it was.

Which means I’ve lost everything.

Even if I get something of my career back, I’ll only be able to work in the UK so there’ll be a lot less of it. Will there be enough to earn a living from? I have no idea.

I’ve done this for almost twenty years. I have no other skills. This is all I know, all I can do. And I’d finally got to the point where I was really enjoying it. And now it’s gone.

I was walking home from grocery shopping today along the beach and thinking about why I feel so devastated suddenly. I realised that this is the sixth time in my adult life that everything was good in my life and I was positive and happy and content and fulfilled - and some external event obliterated everything.

The first time I was 22. I’d left the terrible country where I grew up and was developing a new life in a first-world country. It was at a very high cost, I’d had to leave the man I loved behind. We’d broken up and I honestly thought it was the best thing for both of us. But he coped a lot less well with it than I realised at the time and he blew up his life in a massive catastrophe that even now I still feel sick when I think about. I still feel partially responsible for it twenty years later.

We managed to get through that. He was rebuilding his life and I managed to move to England to live the dream life I’d always wanted. He was about to come and join me two years after it had all gone wrong - and then he was killed.

I was 24, and I had no idea how to go on. I literally couldn’t let myself fully believe he was dead for three years because the only thing keeping me alive was the hope that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t really dead, he’d just disappeared. I never saw his body, but I knew his brother had so I knew he really was dead, but I couldn’t actually let myself believe it.

It was particularly hard that first year, but I had my literal dream life in London and gradually I rebuilt myself and found happiness again. I had a new boyfriend, my career was going amazingly, and other than constantly missing my fiance, my life was pretty much perfect.

But then I lost it. Because of immigration rules and visa requirements and the unique nature of the industry I was in that meant I had to be self-employed, which meant I couldn’t stay in England. I lost everything. My boyfriend, my career, my friends, my home....everything.

I ended up in Australia, which I hated. I was miserable, had no friends, had no life, and was working in television, which bored the crap out me since I don’t even like watching television. That was the lowest I’d ever been. But I managed to rebuild yet again. I was able to resume my former career, this time in Hong Kong (which was amazing), and via that I was able to finally return to England with my original career just after turning 30. A year later I met someone and fell in love and agreed when he asked me to marry him, and we were married just after my 32nd birthday.

He turned out to be an abusive bastard and there followed years I can’t even think about.

But at age 36, I was able to leave him and find a new community. I had to take a break from my career because it had caused me enormous physical and emotional damage, which was devastating because I’d loved it, but I’d saved enough money (originally for a round-the-world trip) that I was able to take the majority of two years off, just working very occasionally whenever I was about to run out of money entirely, and I found a place where I belonged, where I was surrounded by constant love and friendship and a sense of belonging I hadn’t felt since my fiance died.

I had a year and a half of that before the man who was the bedrock of my life died and I fell in love with someone I shouldn’t have and my best friend decided I was evil and took everything away from me. By the end of 2015, I’d lost everything again. Every single thing.

I managed to get back my career. To find a way to have it without it damaging me. I managed to find a way to live without all my friends, without that love and support and community that I’d come to depend on. I moved out of London and got over my incapacitating fear of flying and although it took me four fucking years of enormous effort, I got over my agoraphobia and anxiety and depression, and 2020 began with me looking forward to things for the first time in forever. I had so much planned and I was excited and energetic and enthusiastic....

And now everything is gone. Everything I had planned. Everything I was looking forward to. My career no longer exists. I’m not going to be able to afford to keep living here much longer so I’m going to lose my home too.

I just…

How do I rebuild yet again? I’m actually scared to. Every time in the past when I got my life sorted out and got into a good place emotionally, everything got annihilated. I don’t think I could take it happening yet again.

I don’t know if I can take it happening now. Part of me feels like I should just go out when we’re able to again and not bother taking precautions and just let the virus kill me (I’m a vulnerable person) because what’s the point?

And I hate this. I worked so hard to stop feeling like this. To WANT to live.

But is there even a point in trying again?