A memory I can still taste, a future yet to unfold #nhbpm #9

I remember sitting on a bus, at the back, downstairs, I was 15 or 16.  I was day dreaming about my future. It was 1983.  I had spiky hair and baggy trousers and pointy shoes. I wore my Dad's old jumper, cut down, an old man's jacket from a charity shop, lots of eyeliner and I was clutching my acid dyed, pink denim bag from Chelsea Girl that I loved. It was the days before mobile phones so I was just looking out the window. Going through town, Glasgow city centre. It was raining outside.

I think I'd just go some preliminary exam results or something. Or maybe a teacher had just said something nice about me being clever. Something had happened, I don't remember what, but it must have opened a door in my mind to the future and it suddenly looked really rosy. The thing I remember the most is the feeling I had. A feeling of excited anticipation, like the night before Christmas.  I was thinking to myself, "I'm going to do really well in all my exams, I'm going to go to university and then I'm going to get a good job and then I'm going to be really successful and then I'm going to be a freelance consultant and not have to work full time but people will come to me for advice and it's going to be great." Where on earth did I get the idea from, at 16, that I would end up a freelance consultant??  My Dad was sometimes freelance, otherwise I don't think I'd have even had the vocabulary. I liked the idea of not being tied down.

I wasn't dreaming of babies or a husband or a beautiful house. None of that entered my mind. For some reason I was dreaming about what I was going to do. And I just had this rush of certainty that I could do a lot and it was all going to go really well - and I felt incredibly happy.

Fast forward to now. Bizarrely I have indeed become a freelance consultant and I did have that glittering career, kind of, that I'd dreamed of. I did some interesting stuff at any rate, before I got ill. I guess I envisaged becoming more senior than I actually managed to do when I was employed. (Hell when I was eleven I thought I might have a shot at being prime minister one day - I had  HIGH hopes!) I do think that the illness kind of cut me off a bit in what might have been my prime. I know I was getting ill for a long time before it reached crisis point and I had to, for a short time, "give it all up". I believe now with hindsight that it was affecting me more than I realised for a long time before I was ever diagnosed and I do feel a bit aggrieved that perhaps it may have held me back a bit.

But hey ho, here I am.  As the John Lennon song goes:

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." 

I did some of that stuff I dreamed of and somehow, where I've ended up is where I was aiming for all along, despite many unexpected predicaments, distractions and deviations that arose along the way. I always longed to live by the sea and now I do. My freelance career is very new but it is going well. My health,  having totally collapsed, seems to be slowly but fairly steadily coming back. Total bonus I have an adorable husband too, I never expected that!

Life so far has been nothing if not interesting and it continues to be so. I love that little memory. Thinking back to the naive yet supremely confident little thing that I was at that moment, makes me smile.

Who knows what the future holds now. I intend for my health to get better and better and I intend to bring more opportunities in to my life where I can express myself and make a difference for others. Ooh, my mind just went off on a tangent there, thinking of possibilities and I've got a little bit of that feeling again!

This is my latest post for WEGO Health's Health Blog Post Month #nhbpm, using prompt  #9: Tell a descriptive story about a memory