Ok, so hands up I am having a a few hours of post traumatic birthday stress.
This time ten years ago I was lying facedown on the concrete by the pool at our villa in Ibiza trying to remember what had happened in the last 48 hours.
My friends had treated me to a night at Pacha where Roger Sanchez had blow the crowd away with an epic closing finale* of Candi Staton, White Stripes and Eurythmics.
I loved it.
Even having our car searched by Police added to the potentially epic tale, I’dloveyou to think it was like the ‘Hangover’ movie, but, really I was just a hopeless mashed up Essex boy lost in his own crap world.
This year I drank juice and sat round a candle lit table with our friends in their garden. I was asleep by 11pm.I loved this even more.
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Everyone else stayed up, I found a sofa with #babybernie. Not so much because I am tried, more because I am relaxing, unplugging and a big fan of sleep.
I find it really hard to stop my brain and unplug, in the last few years my default setting was so “really fucking anxious” that I have to double take what is happening.
What I am do know is that 99.9% of what we think, fear and expect to happen simply DOES NOT.
Yet my head immediately slips into panic mode. This in it’s self is exhausting, it is like double handling everything emotionally.
Life is what happens when you are making plans.
Suddenly…all the people who were little are suddenly big, all the roads in Krakow that were empty apart from a few Lada’s are now home to traffics jams full of Honda’s and Audi’s.
The other eye in the photo above is our God-daughter from Poland and she is now six but in my head she was born 10 minutes ago.
If she asked me to sit down and explain to her how I have spend the last decade, or even the last six years she has been with us I’d be a bit embarrassed.
Of course good stuff has happened, even amazing stuff has happened. However, a lot of my time has been spent living in fear and procrastination. Questions like ‘why did you not move to Poland or Argentina like you wanted to?’ Would strike me down like lightening.
I’d be honest and tell her that I was dithering around, waiting for all the planets to be aligned, waiting for exactly the right price on ‘green eggs and ham’ before I moved.
Right now I am more self assured and more at home in my own skin. My priorities have changed dramatically in the last ten years.
Sunday morning was always the day to nurse a hangover and the killer downer brought on by the night pbefore. These days Sunday is wake up early and get to the park with #babybernie ASAP.
2004 – This time ten years ago I had just got back from Poland and went straight to Ibiza and then V festival. I’d been living clean and healthy with no drink or drugs for six weeks (well a couple if beers at the end!)
After landing in Ibiza I was wrecked for two weeks solid until we got back from V festival. For some of that time I was awake three days in a row, I remember my mate driving me across Ibiza to meet a girl and I fell asleep at the table while talking to her.
2014 – This morning I was in the garden with #babybernie at 7am sat at this table writing what I want to do for the ten years.
I thought about how I’d feel if I knew after my first trip to Poland in 2004 I’d would be back here every year for the next ten years, if I known that six months later I’d meet #Supercoolwife in Krakow and we’d have so many mini adventures with friends and family in London and other places around the World. Best of all #Babybernie would arrive one day.
It is hard to write this and keep the ‘if I’d known then what I now’ tone out of it, that is not my point.
My point is this, I messed up, got depressed and still got this far.
As I write this I have never ever felt more alive, supported and focused, my head still has bad days and I am craving a long period without a day of being anxious and I certainly fear suddenly being badly depressed and skidding back to where I was.
When I got back from the summer camp in 2004 I don’t think I ever imagined being anywhere that group of people again. The downer was huge, so I quickly reverted to my then coping mechanism hoovering up drugs and guzzling alcohol.
The voice in my meditation app reminds me to ‘think of the benefit that people around you will enjoy when you are centred and less anxious’ (or something like that). I wonder what my ‘getting wrecked app would say?
‘Think of the obnoxious and intense arse hole you will impose on the people around you as a result of binging on drugs and alcohol.
We have zoomed around France and Poland this last week and one think I really noticed was how I felt the morning after every party, happy and inspired.
I had to pinch myself as I was expecting to feel crap, when I thought about it I realised that I not longer have that manic vs tragic aftermath downer.
I am sure there was something else!
Have a great week and thanks for reading.
As always…. Sent from my mobile device!
