It's one week until Valentines Day and a few friends have commented, some have actually ranted about how much they hate this Hallmark holiday and yes I get it, it's commercialised, it's showy and really we should all be showing love to those we care about every day of the week, however and in the words of Christian from Moulin Rouge, "Above all things, I believe in love, love is like oxygen, love is a many splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love"

I am a romantic, I think with my heart, I believe that if you have love in your life you can do anything, amazing Abigail made me a jar of 50 reasons she loves me for my birthday, it's the sweetest present I've ever had and one of the 50 reasons was "because you are proof that love is all you need" I spoke to her about it (after we both had a few tears together) and she said it didn't matter what we were doing in our lives I had brought them up to know that money isn't important, love is" Yay me for teaching my kids a good lesson and how amazing is Abigail to be so insightful at 14.9?

She's right though and I've written about how love is the highest of all powers many times, each time we put more love out into the world, the world smiles back at us and the greatest thing you'll ever learn really is just to love and be loved in return.  Sadly thus far in a romantic way at least it's something I've never quite achieved on any kind of permanent basis but when I have had it is when I have found my happy place.

The thing is, and we need to remember this, we have days that celebrate all kinds of things, so why not have a day that celebrates love and wonder, even if it is with heart shaped cookies, hang on a minute, it's a day that celebrates romance and you get to eat baked goods, are you freaking joking me?  This is the best day ever!!

I'm a die hard romantic, I love gestures, I love sending the people I care about small surprises to show that I'm thinking of them, cards, flowers, random animals with sad faces, chocolates, cakes, playlists, every day you make someone smile is a day you feel it yourself because the love we put out into the world always comes back.

I also realise that a lot of big manly men have a problem with showing the more feminine side of their personalities and Valentine's Day encourages them for one day to be the big romantic lead, move over Segal, Cary Grant is here for just one day and if that's what it takes, one Hallmark day every 14th February then I am happy to be on board because everyone deserves a little love and romance.

Over the many years I have had some of the most awful Valentine's Days on record, I've had cards telling me that I'm not loved, I've had painful dramatic days where I would be put through hell until the very last minute when late at night I would suddenly be presented with Champagne or flowers from the supermarket or the least romantic gifts you would possibly imagine so I for one should hate this sacred day, I should declare that I never want to even hear of it again but that's not me, I am forever living in hope that I'll just get my turn to have something more than heartache and disappointment, I guess like always being hopeful that someone will love me properly one day.

So if you hate Valentine's Day then I understand, I completely do and I'll try to always respect your feelings as long as you respect the fact that I am a hopeless romantic who lives in hope, someone who sends her friends and children cards and tokens on that special day because I feel there's not enough love in the world and because I think this day where we celebrate the greatest of all powers in the universe should be shared with everyone we care about, why wouldn't I want to show my kids or my friends just how important they really are, love isn't just the romantic kind, Love is everything, if you want to come and find me, I'll be over in the corner eating a heart shaped cake with pink buttercream icing!

A Brave New Dawn

It's Monday, start of a brand new week and I have much to achieve, for the first time since Christmas I actually got up before my alarm went off at 8 am, I'd promised I was switching the Apple Bedtime settings back and unlike pretty much every day that's gone before I wouldn't then switch off the alarm and go back to sleep.  I'm even dressed and it's not even 11 am!

In closing Twitter off I've got a big gap in my life and that's what I needed, I was never going to achieve anything in all of the time I spent scrolling, even though I'd set up smaller lists, life has felt pretty weird over the weekend but I know it's all good, what's lovely is a couple of people who I used to speak to all of the time are now on my Facebook with all of the other lovely people of the world and I've upped my Whatsapp usage a little bit, it's lovely to have private conversations and not have to worry about what you're saying, how odd that I'm only just coming to this epiphany.  I think a couple of people I know do Twitter so well, you feel they are giving their all and they are transparent with no hidden bits but really, they're just better at social media than me, they're masters of letting people in but only as far in as they want them to be, to those people I salute you, I just can't do it, I'm either public or private and there's not much in between.

This morning I started to build my new website and as it's a blog site it really didn't take too much time but I congratulated myself that I could still point domains, change cnames and change templates without too much trouble at all.  I'm also so glad that I bought the domains when I did as it's a term that is on the rise, both in the urban dictionary and in real life, many of the social media accounts are already taken but I have adapted those, I'm only going for Twitter (oh yes, the blooming irony) and Facebook because I don't think I'm going to need Instagram and I'll use my own Pinterest as it's relevant.

The site is launched already because it's just not possible to not publish it, however, it's far from built and it needs populating, something I'm working on over the next few weeks and hopefully it will have it's big proper launch sometime around the start of March.

In starting the new site, I wanted to do something fun but I also wanted to do something which wasn't in my own name and that one day I can hopefully sell, I started with an exit strategy and worked backwards in many ways but I also wanted something I would enjoy doing and something that I could do from anywhere.  This year has been the year I've earmarked as transitioning to writing on more of a full-time basis, I'm not giving up photography, I love that too much but I also know I'm 43 and I won't be able to shoot weddings forever, I have big plans to become a digital nomad once the kids are finished school and so that hard work starts now, it's about preparation for the future, my future.

At the moment I am looking at making every aspect of my life the best that it can be, I'm getting to grips with things personally and professionally.  I am so lucky in my life to be surrounded by the best people, people I can count on for help and advice when I need it and I, in turn, support and help them in their daily lives, it's how life should be and it's taken me so long to find my own people, like a parent who has children later in life, I'm in awe of just what an amazing thing true friendship is.  I spent a lot of years feeling isolated because of myself and others, I was always an odd bod from my earliest days, a square peg in a round hole and it's taken me so many years to feel like I fit into any kind of group but I have and that's amazing, I mean obviously the people closest to me are also a little weird and esoteric but they're also special and most of all unique.

So what will the week hold, well hopefully hard work, satisfaction, I need to work on making some actual money this week, it's a quiet time in the world and I have children and animals I need to support and my dog is also hoping that this weekend's long walkies translate into the every day, hence the need to get up earlier in the mornings, an hour just won't do, my new work schedule should hopefully allow for a couple of hours in the middle of the day to get outdoors for my own mental health more than anything else.

A brave new dawn is just around the corner and I for one am ready to throw my hands in the air to scream if I want to go faster.

Twitter Detoxification, A Social Media Addiction Story

Sometime on Friday I sidled out of the big exit door from Twitter quietly, I promised myself that for the next month or so I would only go on Twitter to reply to mentions or to tweet about my new blog posts, that way if people want to chat to me then I'll be there but I won't purposefully go and get lost in the endless scroll of watching what other people are up to and getting involved, it's a pretty intense detoxification process and reminds me of when I gave up sugar for 3 months (yep, I need to do that again too but one step at a time).

So let me give you some background, currently, on Twitter, I have approximately 7800 followers, I follow just over 4000 and I have a couple of lists set up with around 100 people I speak to on a regular basis.  In September last year I was doing as I've mostly always done, dipping in and out, having a bit of a scroll and I got talking to a few people and it kind of just escalated from then really, in October I started talking to M and then because of him I kind of ended up being a member of his Twitter community, 3 months later and I found myself spending all of my time on Twitter, spare moments in between work, days where I have nothing else to do, evenings when I am on my own, Twitter, Twitter, more Twitter.

Twitter is the biggest time suck that there is and I've found myself talking about anything and everything to people I almost know nothing about, it's the place for free speech don't forget but I wonder if I'd just met someone at a pub or a concert would I be so quick to reveal myself? (steady on, you know what I mean) The point is that I feel like I became an oversharer and also I lied to myself that I was a part of a wonderful community but I think it's hard to be in a community with people you don't actually know, it's fake and no matter how much I care deeply about people I don't think it necessarily means they feel the same about me.

What I did do before I wandered off into the bright lights of reality was to move the people I really did care about to FB or Whatsapp because they feel much more real, you can only be yourself on FB and Whatsapp is just like a conversation, it's certainly the way I keep up with my real life friends during the week when we are all going about our business.

There were one or two people I spoke to more than anyone else and it's kind of weird not having that constant connection that Twitter provides but I like to think of this in a real life way, in real life do we know from moment to moment what our friends, family members and the people we care about are doing?  Twitter is a great place for stalkers, I know that and I don't think there's ever a time when anyone would consider stalking to be healthy!

So it's when we separate back to basics that we have more to get on with in our own worlds and more to tell those important people what we've been up to when we do talk, it's a proper conversation, a bit like the one I have with Harriet every day, I don't see Harriet every day but we always catch up with each other, I still don't know what she does with every second of her time though, that'd be weird, right?

I'm not a stalker, I'm not a voyeur, I don't really have an addictive personality but I am someone who doesn't tend to do things by halves so I either give my whole self or I don't give anything at all and that's where my attachment to Twitter isn't healthy,  it's made me put my trust in people who really aren't giving the same back and at the end of the day the only person who's getting hurt in this scenario is me so right now, I have to weather the storm, I have to cope with the deafening silence, I'm not conceited enough to think that anyone will even blink an eyelid or wonder where I've disappeared to, no one is going to be sending out a search party and that's fine, Twitter is so big now that people come and go all of the time.

Me, right now?  I should probably get dressed right, take my dog for a walk in the sunshine, listen to Elaine Paige on Radio 2, make Sunday lunch for Abigail getting here, it's all real life stuff and it's all good...

I've Made A Decision

Sometimes in life the hardest thing is to live in a fog, you can't see ahead of you and sometimes in the thickest fogs you can barely breathe, that's how parts of this year have seemed so far, thankfully we're only just over a month in and so I'm fairly certain that the other 11 have the potential to be brilliant beyond brilliant.

I spoke to Harriet last night about the medication predicament, up the dosage, be immune to love, unhappiness and the human condition but also lose laughter, feeling and be numb to almost everything including my children  and at the heart of it, they were the most surprised when I started laughing, it never even occurred to me that I hadn't laughed in 10 years.

I have a very weird love/hate relationship with social media, Facebook has always been my constant because it's where my real friends are, the people I love, the ones closest to my heart and I know that with all of the support I've received in the last few years it's not something I would want to be without, other than that though I fall in and out of love with most other forms of social media and being trying to be present on all of them saps both my energy and my time so it was whilst I was lying in my purple fluffy nest during yesterday's amazing Reiki session with Susan that I came to a huge decision.  I need to get some time back to refocus, I need to sort out my psyche, my business and my personal life, I want to live more in the real world and away from the constant microscopic examination of Twitter et al.

Obviously, I can't just give up social media or dramatically delete it, I do still need it for my career but what I can do is go on a digital diet, that means I get more time back for me, I can keep in touch with those closest to me via other means so I'm reining in my tweeting and going back to basics and this means I can concentrate on the things that matter, I have big aspirations where blogging is concerned and this is going to be my year when writing and photography lead to great things, I know it in my heart but that's not going to happen without a lot of hard work, I have a domain I bought at Christmas and I need to build the website for that,  I can't do that when I'm blabbering on Twitter about absolutely nothing!  

I've got the whole weekend off and I plan to take some time to reconfigure, work out what the important next steps are I need to take, both in life and in business, my future looks so bright and shiny but I'll be the first to admit I need to get a little help so yesterday I self-referred to Talking Helps in Newcastle, a much quicker and more effective way to have therapy than the last time when it took pretty much 2 years of fighting.  When I came out of my last relationship, I ended up being the woman with such low self-esteem, very little self-worth and my self-assurance was ultimately completely ruined.  I thought I had gotten that all back but it's only in the last few months that I've realised and I'm going to quote Ru Paul here because, why shouldn't I? "If you don't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else?"

I spend a lot of my life blagging confidence and sparkle and really, I'm either being very silly or very serious and there's not a lot in between, it's not that I'm lying it's just that I'm trying to convince myself I'm not so broken, I realise in the last few weeks I've decided to just own the fact that I'm messed up but wouldn't it be the dream to really be those things, to have self-esteem and self-worth, to really feel as self-assured as I would like to, well maybe I won't be able to reverse the damage completely but I think there's a fair chance I can at least feel good enough for myself and not be too much of a nightmare to date either.

So here's to the weekend and here's to the future, a future of good things, happy things and productive things and more time in the real world, walking in the sunshine, feeling the warm glow on my skin accompanied by a happy beagle and even more so here's to more weekends with real people, good people, people who fill my heart and soul with joy, let's call them friends, close friends, my wonderful friends.

I Care Too Much, I Worry Too Much

This week has been exhausting, stressful, confusing and I'm coming out of it not necessarily in a better position than I was when I went into it, my life was put under a microscope more than ever before and at one point I was even considering my position within blogging and whether it was all worth it.  Many good things have happened too, though, I have had some moments in the last week where I felt truly alive again for the first time in years and moments where I smiled with every entire muscle of my face so would I change anything, would I do anything differently?

I'm fairly sure I wouldn't change a thing and whilst I could change the tone of my blog and walk away from writing anything personal again, I'd be doing myself a great disservice if I did because when I write with my heart people read and when I write my innermost thoughts there's such a great cathartic effect.

I have lived a life with so many twists and turns, I'm 43 now and I've packed a lot in, some of it intentional, some things not so much but if there's one thing I do know it's that a lot of my life has been impacted by the fact that I've lived with a diagnosis of bipolar for the last 13 or so years and I've pretty much managed my own mental health, medication, self-care for the last 10.  I have bipolar type 2 which is the less serious than type 1 although don't believe for a moment that it makes life simpler, sometimes I have rapid cycles but not all the time, I tend to feel everything intensely, either at the joyful end of the spectrum or with pain, confusion, and angst.  The hardest thing I'll ever have to deal with is my reaction to human relationships with the opposite sex because they're the emotions it's hardest to deal with for anyone.  I think what happens with me is I feel everything so intensely it often leaves me exhausted.

I'm someone who has mostly everything she wants in life, I'm never envious of others because we are all unique as human beings and also on the surface where people can seem perfect you often find that you can't really know what goes on behind closed doors.  I have the friendship, I have the career I want, I rarely feel lonely, except, and here it comes, when I feel lonely in my soul, this week has taken much out of me, I haven't had any kind of meltdown except that I have had tears every day, I am so lonely in my soul and it's hard not to project that onto other people, whilst I publicly keep my feelings in check most of the time I would be the first to admit that I still try to refuse myself permission to cry because I know I can't handle it.

I always knew that dating was going to cause issues inside my own head, I'm too messed up in the head to function like a normal person, strangely when I was on the highest dose of medication I didn't even notice men and I mean, ever, at all, I was a high-functioning robot and for about 6 months when I was single again but recovered enough from separation that I should have possibly thought about it, I just didn't care, I was happy on my own.  This leads me to think I could swap emotional swings and roundabouts, I could swap the highs and the heartbreak that dating will inevitably bring and just take more medication as a replacement but what I would essentially be doing is leading myself into a long term loneliness type of situation and I would also miss out on the happiness, the laughter and the special feelings you get from sharing time with someone.  I do just wish for a moment I could stop the world and find a way to reconfigure my brain so that it would feel like normal people's brains (whatever that is) I wish I could not feel everything so intensely and I wish that I could find a way not to be Mandy the Overthinker (even if it is a bit of a snazzy title).

Another problem that I have is that I either let you in or I don't and once you are in, you are really in, once you have crossed my barriers, knocked them down and found a way to really get to know me, there's no way I'll let go without a fight, it's something that friends appreciate because when I care about you, it's deeply and I would do anything for you, it's why I only have close friends, I don't really have acquaintances because they're the people I'm not letting get close in the first place.

I really don't know what my future is going to hold you know and it's almost terrifying, I'd say where people get excited about the unknown in the future it actually scares the living bejesus out of me, perhaps why I loved the years of being in a settled relationship so much, I just sort of knew what was going to happen from day to day and that felt good.  I guess it takes a brave man to date me because I'm so complex but it many ways I can be straightforward too (yeah I know, I'm a contradiction, an oxymoron), I'm always honest so people know where they stand and I'm basically good and kind I would hope, I would never hurt anyone intentionally and I've never ever been unfaithful.  I will find 100 new ways every week to show him the ways he rocks my world and one day I will sing to him because he has made me brave and courageous, I will make him laugh, I will make him smile and I will wow him with my ability to deal with his issues way better than I can ever deal with my own.

This weekend I have literally nothing in my diary again, I could go anywhere I wanted to, well apart from the fact that a self-employed non-working person hasn't exactly got the money to run around the country but what I am going to do this weekend is read some books, namely F**k It and also The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k, both required reading in my case because there's no doubt that I definitely care way too much about everything!

Dating in 1998, A Simpler Time

I want to take you back to a simpler time, the year was 1998 and I'd just started dating after the end of my first marriage, I was 24 years old, a single mum and Iain was 2 years old, it was 2 years after my first marriage and a year before I would meet the man I married to for 15 years,  Simon Cowell wasn't on tv, mobile phones were in their infancy but if you were lucky like me you carried around a Nokia 5110, I'm sure you're all jealous, it even had the Snake game!!

When I say it was a simpler time, it really was, there was no such thing as internet dating, eBay, Facebook or Twitter and if you were looking for dates you did it in the pub, nightclub or for the really brave you tried telephone dating.  Telephone dating was a total lie, I mean for everyone who's fallen for someone with a photo on an online dating site it was 10 times worse to speak to someone with a sexy sounding voice imagining a Scottish adonis to turn up at the planned meeting place only to find they looked more like a Macsween Haggis than Ewan Mcgregor and yes Ewan was still yummy in 1998, remember him in Little Voice?

I digress just a little but let me take you on a date in 1998, so, you'd met in Baha or  on the Tuxedo Royale  (if you lived in Newcastle) a floating nightclub with a revolving dance floor, bad combination after too many vodkas I can tell you, especially for the male population of Newcastle who were not known for their stability and dance moves at the best of times.  Nightclubs would close at 2 am so if you hadn't spotted someone before then the men of the North known as the "Ten to twoers" would home in on you, if you wanted to you could kiss many lips but I was never one for massively casual encounters. On the few occasions, someone did catch my eye, I would kiss them, sometimes I'd snog their face off if I got the right spark and then we would exchange numbers and hope that we both had the right numbers or they hadn't given you a fake one (yes, that happened).  Then you would go home, go to bed and sober up!

The next day you'd question if it was too early to call someone and hope they called you first and when they did you would arrange a date, text messaging was a brand new thing and limited to 160 characters so messaging took a long, long time, mobile phones were also incredibly expensive in terms of calls and messages and not everyone had a mobile so you actually had to speak to people! Once you had spoken you would arrange a date and usually, that would be drinking, I'm not sure I did a lot of going out to dinner with dates in 1998 but it was very much a simpler time.  On the first date you would hope you came away liking them and I still had a rule of the kiss goodbye to see if any sparks happened, more often than not they didn't but I'm pretty choosy, I've had very few relationships in my 43 years on the earth.  Quite frequently it would be date 5 or 6 before I'd made my mind up and in between dates you would maybe speak once or twice, usually just to say hi and make arrangements for the date the next week.  The giveaway as to whether you liked someone after 5 or 6 dates was if you were thinking about them in between dates or if the frequency of dates was increasing.  There wasn't a great deal of overthinking and dating was just a whole lot easier.

Now it could be that I am wearing rose tinted glasses about the past and maybe it's because I was 20 years younger but really, I think in these times of social media and being constantly connected to each other it's all gotten a bit mad, whereas absence makes the heart grow fonder we as humans feel the need to worry if we haven't heard from people within minutes of us sending a message, a friend tonight was saying that she'd noticed that someone she had been speaking to on Whatsapp about a potential date had gone quiet and not only had he gone quiet, he'd seen the message and not replied, he wasn't even speaking out loud and yet the silence was deafening.  Social media, messages, WhatsApp, they're not good for us in a dating sense, we pensively wait for people to get back to us as quickly as possible and if they don't we internalise that we're not good enough or they don't like us and do you know what?  I don't think this is the route to happiness, I think it's the exact opposite, I'm like the queen of the overthinkers and often wish for a simpler time, Now I realise I'm a blogger, social media queen and I'm also someone who likes to be in constant contact but it wasn't always like that, at some point I quite happily existed with just a house phone,  I spoke to people, yes me, phone phobic me, I had real life conversations so I'm not sure when I sort of got lost along the way.

I think there's no point in overthinking and overanalyzing every move we make just because we have the direct line to do so, maybe we need to take some tips from 1998, chill out a little, relax a bit and see where the journey will end up taking us, we spend so long thinking about the destinations we're just missing the fun we're supposed to have on the journey and who hasn't had fun on a National Express coach on the way to your holidays 1998 style?

So I'm going to say something either brave or insane, take this tech woman back to 1998 for a week, to a simpler more straightforward way but while I'm there...Can someone email me my tweets/messages/FB requests/Instagram notifications, I'd hate to miss out on something important.

Today, I am 43!

Today I am 43, yay, Happy Birthday to me!  

This means of course that whereas the meaning of life is 42, those dastardly mice in charge of the universe failed to give me any great understanding of why I'm on the earth and so as the clock struck midnight I really failed to be anything other than just 43.

During the last year, I've seen many changes in my life, I've squeezed a lot into the last 12 months, I finally dealt with the end of my marriage and moved on, I'm happy to have achieved ambivalence rather than hatred, it takes a long time to get there and whilst I'm far from healed I have at least healed enough to begin dating again without the fear that I'm just going to mess someone else up, I'd definitely recommend that 2.5 year break where I got to find myself again, well sort of find myself, some days I'm so lost even the mountain rescue with a large St Bernard dog couldn't find me.

I've certainly had some interesting dating experiences online but no one particularly piqued the interest until the man with all the smarts came along and though we don't know what's going to happen, where it will lead or if indeed it will lead anyway, my life has been changed and made better by his presence in my daily life, the man has a bit of an obsession with analogies though, that's all I'm saying!!

I've travelled a lot in the last 12 months and I find that it fulfils my soul, the need to travel and explore is deep within me and it doesn't matter if it's in this country or overseas, I find that I am happiest whilst travelling, I don't see that changing in the next 12 months, I've travelled on my own, with Holly Bobbins, with Harriet and with my kids and each experience is different and brilliant in it's own right.  I have watched sunsets over mountains and trekked with alpacas, I have stood on high and looked down upon beautiful landscapes, I have felt the warmth of the sun shining on my skin and I have seen the stars as the brightest landscape all combining together to make a heavily twinkling patchwork in the skies up above.

I've been lucky enough to make a whole host of new friends this year and mostly they've sprung into my life through my blog, there's not a day goes by when I don't get an email or a message from readers and I love that, as I've said befoe it's incredibly heartening to know that I'm not just rambling to myself but the people who truly rock my world are the people I know in real touchable 3D, the people who gather around my dinner table on Monday nights when I cook and the people who give me cuddles when I need them and who I actively get to hug and support in return, each one of them is a great presence not only in my life but in that of my children's too, my kids are so enriched because of the people who come to dinner and who spend time with their mama and I wouldn't have it any other way.  The most important of those is Harriet, my soul sister who even Abigail says is like a step mum to her, I am just so utterly grateful we have found each others friendship, I believe it was destiny that we met and now we'll always be friends.

Lastly and I couldn't end this review of 42 without mentioning my children who continue to be the most brilliant teens on the planet, there's not a day goes by when we don't grow closer together and I'm amazed by the wonderful relationships I have both with Abigail and Looby and also with Iain, I am proud of them every single day and there's rarely a day that they don't make me laugh, I would not have got through the last year without them because we are a super team together.

I can honestly say that I don't know what's going to happen this year, it's probably the biggest unknown quantity there's ever been, it's part terrifying, part exciting but one thing I know and I know this for sure, when I started the year I was overwhelmingly lonely, my darkest moments were there on the day's I spent alone but going into this next chapter I still have occasional lonely moments but who doesn't?  It doesn't matter, there's always someone there, whether that be in real life or online at the end of Skype, Twitter or simply down at my local pub where I spend a fair bit of time discussing life, the universe and everything with friends and Holly Bobbins at my side.  Whatever this new year brings, one thing I am sure of it's going to be so much better than the old one