You may (or may not!) have noticed the lack of blogs lately.

It has been quite a strange time for me, my beautiful dog, Brae,  that I adore  has been diagnosed with cancer for the third time.  I have once again had the lump from her leg removed but my heart and head have not been where they should be when it comes to writing anything on here.

I have also had to face up to some quite hard realisations with my personal life and had to let a wonderful woman go.  I was simply unable to feel what I should feel and realised that perhaps the best thing for me at the moment is to spend my time as a single woman and concentrate on my wee dog and my garden!

I have been speaking to women of my own age (50 and above!) and they all seem to understand my need for my own space at the moment, it is a very strange thing … and not like me at all, but something very important to me and something that I simply need to do.

In all honesty it is like I am on a voyage.. it feels as if I am rediscovering me all over again. I seem a very different person to the emotionally led, heart on sleeve type of person I was a decade ago.

The decades that have gone past have left a path that I can look back on with many a smile and the occassional wee tear but they have formed me into who I am now.   I am actually very comfortable with me, I do not feel the pressure of having anything to prove to anyone, apart from me, and that’s a very important thing.

It took me a long, long time to realise that the only person who can make me happy is me.   I have loved and I have lost, I have held on too long to something I truly wanted to work only to realise that the reason it wouldn’t was because I wasn’t loved back and I had to walk away.  You need two people to make things work otherwise one of you is just “hanging on”.

Sometimes you have to take these things on the chin and face reality, and I know I have become real ..

 I have posted this before, but it now seems more appropriate than ever 

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

(quote from The Velveteen Rabbit)