Scents etc…

I have had a fairly horrific week, worried about losing somebody close to me who ended up in hospital. Worried about what the future would look like, about family and financial security etc… College work was put on hiatus for the week which means I have to work twice as hard to catch up for the next few weeks. Not panicking (yet!!) but a lot of clever time management will be required.

There was a lot of crying and praying this past week.

I did odd (out of character) things to cheer myself up. I had my nails done – I have only had my nails done twice previously in my entire life. I bought a bottle of perfume. A perfume which I wore for more than ten years and stopped wearing when I became very ill about fourteen years ago. I can’t quite remember why I stopped wearing it, something about wanting to be more mature, about ‘now being a different person’, about associating it with bad memories and failures etc… Thinking of it as a perfume I wore when I was still a little silly, young and girlie.

But I found myself walking into the shop this week, smelling it and falling in love with it again. Feeling terribly sentimental. Cherishing the memory of the girl I once was and her romantic silliness and aspirations. A huge luxury for me and yet I splurged. There was something in the nostalgia of it that deeply comforted me during this terrible week. 

I also thought about how I got my hair done in September for college. I had stopped dyeing my hair, I was letting the glorious grey shine through – to everybody’s horror. Actually I have very little grey and the truth is there wasn’t enough grey for it to look glorious. I had been cutting my own hair for a year and a half. My mother kept urging me to go to the hairdresser and so I relented and did. As I sat in the hairdresser, I realised that I had been neglecting myself because on some level I felt I deserved to look terrible. That I wasn’t worthy of good self-care.

So this year is not just about college and getting the academic degree of my dreams, of my need to fulfil my potential and remedy my past failures, about moving on from it all, it is also about starting to seriously look after every aspect of my health and my appearance.

The longer you wait, the longer you let things go, the harder it becomes to turn things around.

Wish me luck!