As usual, it's hard to believe a year has past. Isn't that always the way? My brain warps time so dramatically that just one year can feel like a life time and no time in the same space. I don't feel changed in any way, I'm still in the suspended reality of bankruptcy. I'm living with a constant wariness, will those who know betray me? Are there people who know and pretend they don't? Sometimes I don't care, other times I am wrung out with anxiety. Filling out applications is fraught with barely concealed panic. I'm always expecting a box that asks me to declare if I am bankrupt - with a little note that says "IF YES, PUT YOUR PEN DOWN AND LEAVE IMMEDIATELY, FRAUDSTER!!".
I was at a business event a few weeks ago and someone mentioned bankruptcy. A senior business man made a comment, something along the lines of: "Oh, but these days, they all just declare bankruptcy and then they're back in business the next day. I remember when you couldn't even have a bank account if you were bankrupt!" I just nodded with a bemused look on my face which I assume he mistook as disparaging agreement. I felt like I had told a lie. Maybe we do get off too easy, sometimes I feel like I did.
So apart from my ongoing nightmares about having to re-sit my final year exams at five minutes notice with no clothes on - you know the sort - and torturing myself by googling my ex-business partners, I'm doing OK. I found an old friend from university on Facebook who is as broke as me and just as depressed. We have enormous fun competing for the title of most unlikely to succeed. I've certainly learnt the value of good friends and genuine laughs, both at my own expense, but who cares - that I can afford!
Two more years seems daunting. I know they will fly by as quick as this one did but then I will be forty. I wish that didn't bother me, I try so hard to convince myself it doesn't. But it does. When I break it down, everything associated with getting old doesn't bother me. I am truly fortunate to have such a wonderful family. My sisters share their children so generously with me and I know I'll always be a fixture in their lives. I know I will always have the security of a home and people who care for me, even if I get sick or become disabled. I can only assume that it is just the social stigma of reaching 40 and not having all the recognisable trappings of success. Also, everything in the media; movies, television and most of all romance novels, all suggest that a 40 year old woman is just ripe for some bloke to come and rescue her. She's always built a life for herself which is some sort of farcical facade to compensate for her innate loneliness and repressed need for satisfaction. I mean, you ingest this crap often enough and you're bound to be affected by it. It's all pretty shallow - nothing a concrete milkshake won't fix.
So, one year on, I am still surviving, not happy but not always unhappy. Certainly better off than before I declared bankruptcy and there is hope for the future. Not the future I would have chosen for myself but a future to look forward to none-the-less. I have a few things on the go that I'll tell you about in my next blog... unless, of course, some spunky billionnaire whisks me off to his home on the Amalfi coast...
JOKING! You know I can't leave the country for another two years!!
