Three: It’s A Magic Number

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” ~ Robert Frost

So I have a few posts in the pipeline where I’m struggling to express myself in quite the way I want and I’m a bit too preoccupied this week to attempt to resolve that, so in the meantime I’ve borrowed this idea from Tim over at Short Stories and Sustenance.

Three Things About Yourself:

1. I’ve been shot at. It was in Lilongwe in Malawi. It was a case of mistaken identity, or crossed wires, I’m not entirely sure which. Some armed men thought that I had stolen something when, obviously, I hadn’t and so they chased after me and then fired at me. At the time I had absolutely no idea what was going on so I just ran away. My training group at my new job thought that I should tell more people this as they decided that it was one of the most interesting things about me.
2. If the only ‘meal’ I could eat for the rest of my life was hummus, flat bread, and balsamic vinegar I’d be perfectly content.
3. I went to see the psychiatrist today. She diagnosed me with some new things. So, now apparently in addition to complex post traumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder I also have generalised anxiety disorder (no shit…) and borderline personality disorder (I haven’t yet processed what I’m supposed to do with this particular piece of information).

Three Things That Scare You:

1. Spiders. Which is unfortunate since my house seems to have been built on some ancient spider mating ground or gathering place. I’ve killed at least two dozen of them today and I’m still surrounded by the fuckers. It’s no wonder that no matter how many of them I clean up the house is constantly covered in huge cobwebs that make it look like nobody has lived here in forever.
2. Boredom. It bothers me when I haven’t done anything worth talking about for even any short period of time. I start to panic that I’m wasting my life, and that I’m going to become too uninteresting so that no one will like me anymore.
3. Driving. I hate it, absolutely hate it. So I just don’t do it.

Three Of Your Every Day Essentials:

1. Like Tim, I can’t live without my WiFi. I don’t need the internet for work but the vast majority of my information, entertainment and communication comes via the internet. I tend to panic if it’s not there.
2. Tea. Caffeinated tea. I drink ridiculous amounts of tea and I’m well and truly addicted to caffeine. If I don’t get enough of it I’ll get in a mood with myself if there’s no one else around. I once tried to do one of those stupid detoxes, and at the time the only bad things in my diet were the caffeine and sugar in my tea, the withdrawal symptoms genuinely made me feel like I was dying.
3. Sleep. I don’t function well if I don’t get to sleep properly.

Three Of Your Favourite Hobbies:

1. Blogging. Obviously.
2. Watching too much television. Although that’s a relatively new one. When I lived on my own I hardly ever watched TV.
3. Is travelling a hobby?

Three Careers You’re Considering/Have Considered:

1. Between the ages of birth and fourteen I wanted to be a vet. Then I had to pick the subjects that I was going to study for GCSE and A Level and I didn’t want to do any more sciences than I absolutely had to, so becoming a vet was out.
2. I’d love to be a writer but there’s zero chance of that ever happening. I don’t have the confidence to even try for a start.
3. I’m considering my options if I were to carry on working in finance in the long term. The private sector has so far been much more understanding and accommodating of my mental health problems than the charity/public sector organisations that I’ve worked for, they seem to be fine with it because I’m good at my job. I never got any credit for being good at my job when I worked for the housing charity.

Three Books You Have Recently Read:

1. The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
2. FT Essential Guide to Negotiations: How to Achieve Win: Win Outcomes - Geof Cox
3. The Lady In The Looking Glass - Virginia Woolf

Three Things You Are Working On, Writing Wise:

1. I’m trying to make an effort to blog more consistently; I’m not doing very well, I know.
2. There are a lot of things lately that I’ve wanted to work through by writing about them but don’t feel as though I can without encroaching on the privacy of other people, so I’ve started tentatively working on examining them fictionally. I don’t have much practice in writing fiction. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything worth reading.
3. Erm, I don’t know other than that. I suppose I need to update my CV now that I have a new job, does that count?

Three Things That You Want To Do Before You Die:

1. Most of my current mental health problems essentially boil down to the fact
2. That I can think of literally nothing in answer to this question.
3. Except possibly to overcome the permanent feeling of fatigue that I’ve experienced for the last few months.

Three Celebrity Idols:

1. Helen Bamber
2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. Katherine Hepburn

Three Quotations:

1. “I have no regrets. I wouldn’t have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what other people were going to say.” ~ Ingrid Bergman
2. “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” ~ Anne Lamott
3. Pixie: I really hate cows. My Life As An Imposter: Note to self: hire a cow.