can i get a martini for my internal critic?

I’ve hit the wall.

What are you dong with your life? Why aren’t you doing anything more productive? Why aren’t you moving forward with your life? Why are you wasting your life?

The questions of self doubt are having a tea party inside my head drinking lapsang souchong and dunking pain aux chocolat in their milky cups.

Don’t get me wrong, I am having a very delightful time here in the United States.

I have lived with structure for the past several years, and there has been a false comfort to that. When I lived in Sydney during my twenties, I was constantly working from contract to contract and making money to pay bills and take dance class and go to the cinema et al. Life wasn’t complicated. Bills got paid (sometimes on time, sometimes not) and nothing was ever reprosessed.

So why now that I am almost ten years older do these feelings of insecurity kick in?

At this point I need to introduce you to someone. I like to call him, “Crazy Libran Man” (no, it doesn’t come with tights and as cape). Crazy Libran Man lives inside of my head, and has a habit of popping out on occasions. Crazy Libran Man normally only appears in private where he gets to express his dire rants and raves, providing a whole hots of hysteria that would make a manic depressive’s ward at your local looney bin look like a day at Royal Ascot. Unfortunately their have been occasions that he has sneaked out and had a major tantrum in public.

Probably his most notable appearance was during a meeting with one of my direct managers who was offering me a promotion. I was out of the office at a ridiculous training seminar in Telecommunications Complaint Management. Thinking that I would only be there for a few coma inducing hours and then have the rest of the afternoon to skive off, I received a text message to return to the office. So not in the best of moods, I reurn sans eating any form of lunch and completely low in blood sugar. Of course, my direct report and our reporting manager were not in the office. Crazy Libran Man was not impressed and immediately called Direct Report Manager and advised that I was back in the office at my desk and if she would like to miraculously appear that would be very nice of her thank you very much.

Oh but wait, Crazy Libran Man’s antics don’t end just there.

Finally Direct Report Manager and Our Reporting Manager came back into the office and dragged me into the private meeting room. Our Reporting Manager congratulated me for my work on the ramp up of a new contract, and impressed as she was, would like to offer me a promotion to the next level and ramp up a new and exciting contract unlike any performed in the business before.

This is when Crazy Libran Man took over the conversation. Let’s just say that Our Report Manager sat their looking at me like I had taken a week old sturgeon that had been lying in the gutter and begun beating her repeatedly across the face with said fish. Direct Report Manager, who is also a very dear friend, sighed and shook her head thinking what an idiot I was.

Somehow throughout this conversation I managed to accept the role before Our Reporting Manager ran screaming to Human Resources to get me terminated as quickly as possible.

Oh we laugh about it now. Yeah, good times.

Ask me to sack thrity staff, change the very nature of they way the business runs, and I am there. But ask me to accept personal change, and I may need a little heads up first to let Crazy Libran Man out of his box for a few mindless minutes in private.

The rhythm and flow of my life has been dictated by external forces for such a long time that freedom can be a little frightening. And also, how many people approaching forty suddenly pack up and head off overseas and seek enlightenment into their lives.

Surprisingly more and more people are doing this. Many people I was made redundant with have taken this opportunity to leave the confines of their daily lives and seek something new, something better than what they have had.

I just need to keep reminding myself of that. And putting a gag in Crazy Libran Man’s mouth. But not my own, of course.

Internal Critic