WTS Day X

Have finally looked after my health and went to the GP yesterday. It was a locum and I'm not going to take the anti-biotics and inhaler she prescribed. At least not until I've heard back with my X-ray results. I went yesterday morning. They gave me a disk with the X-ray on it and of course I've run it on this laptop, alongside watching a good few Youtube videos on "How to read a chest X-ray". It doesn't look too much like sarcoidosis, although there may be some degree of hilar enlargement. It could also be completely normal. It probably is completely normal.

I expect they will be providing abortion services. I disagree with this, not because I don't think women shouldn't have the option, but because I think it makes it too easy for GPs to decide who'd make a fit mother.  I think there should be reproductive health clinics that offer both GP referral and self-referral. The way that fertility clinics do. What if I'd become pregnant, back in the day? I would have been pressured into having an abortion. I am sure of this. I remember the doctor in A&E who wanted me to go on the pill. Prick. 

I grow old, I grow old. The health niggles will intensify and multiply. I should be enjoying what remains of my relative youth. "I should." Always I should do this and I should do that, when really the only shoulds are moral ones. 

Up in Borris I was thinking about what happened last week with Person. I thought I have found out that I thought I was one type of person (would never engage in sexual activity with some-one else's husband), and then found out I was another type of person entirely (one ready to engage in said activity with very little persuasion at all).  Maybe if I was wrong in that area, maybe it's wrong to ever think one is a "certain type of person". I could be any kind of person I wanted to be. 

This was of course me trying to put a silver lining on a very sordid event. I was influenced by that Netflix documentary on monogamy, even though I disagreed with it when watching it and still disagree now. What if I hadn't clicked on it? What if I didn't have Netflix to begin with? It's like paying the stupidity tax or something. 

When it comes down to types of people, I think it may be true that there is no such real thing as personality. I also believe that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. On that level, what happened this day last week was predictable. 

Reinvention of the self is still an interesting concept. Life is too long to spend it all being just one person. 

One of my colleagues has left and has gotten a fulltime job with her own hours elsewhere. I didn't apply for the this job as it was all-boys and I doubt my behaviour-management skills are up to it. I am jealous now though. I think I should have taken a career break. It would be easy to say the reason I didn't take one was because my mother keeps encouraging me to take one. I will be sorry going back to work in August. I hate my job. I really hate it. And I have expended my health and my youth in working there. That is my fault. I should have gotten out years ago. One possible answer is develop a slash/career where I am a teacher/writer until the latter takes over. To do this I need to do more writing. Even though it's unlikely I'd ever make enough to give up the job, I'd have some level of identity and self-respect. 

I am good at writing. That is why if I were back again I would go and be a journalist. It stings me still how little encouragement I got. But that is a long time ago and I do not want to be the type of person who blames her parents and teachers for the failure she made of her own life. Am I a failure? I feel like a failure, even though the past ten years have seen me be more of a never-tryer. You can't fail unless you try. That isn't true though. you can only succeed if you try but trying or not-trying can both result in failure. One is active failure and the other passive. Even then, it is surely preferable to fail actively than fail passively. Daring Greatly and all that. 

I do want to cry when I think back, and maybe it is no harm to think back. It helps to innoculate me against what is still happening. I can see through it now. There is no actual belief in me at all. But that is okay, and not at all unusual or linked with failure. It is enough that I believe in myself.