Tag: stress

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu…

~ janeishly ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a blast, Britain, and you’ve put on a thoroughly entertaining play, but I’m afraid I’m going to step out before the end of the last act.

Because it’s pretty obvious that despite all the lies and the electoral fraud and the lies and the misrepresentation and the lies and the BBC’s “mistakes” and the lies and the obvious unfitness to govern of pretty much everyone in a leading Conservative role – oh, and the REALLY VAST LIES, I MEAN, LIES SO HUGE YOU CAN PRACTICALLY SEE THEM FROM THE NEXT GALAXY… the British electorate is going to vote the Tories back in again. Again! I mean, I still haven’t forgiven them for the 1980s yet, and you think this utter shower of shite can be trusted in any way?  

Which means there’s going to inevitably be a no-deal Brexit, with Britain leaving the EU at the end of 2020.

And I’m sorry, but that’s really not my problem any more. I voted Remain the first time around. And I could see which way things were going right from the start, which is why I applied for Swedish citizenship the day the referendum was announced, a year before it was actually held. Long before that, I always voted tactically against the Tories, even when that meant voting for my idiot boss as the Liberal candidate (he lost, unsurprisingly). But this time I can’t vote in the General Election at all, because I’ve lived outside the UK for so long.

Which says it all, really. I’m a European. I’m not British any more. I don’t need to worry about what’s happening in that quaint little country where I used to live. I’d fix things for you if I could. But I can’t. So I’m going to do what the rest of Europe is doing – shrug my shoulders, wash my hands of you and get on with doing European things, like having a huge market to sell my services to and being able to travel as and when I like. Rejoicing in our differences and our similarities and our varied cultures and languages. Trying to move away from colonialism, not towards a mythical Golden Age of Empire. Accepting that the world is getting less and less white and more and more generally brownish and being perfectly happy with that. Not being offended by people speaking foreign languages in the street – because usually the person speaking the foreign language is, in fact, me. The immigrant. The economic refugee.

So I’m unfollowing all the Twitter people who have striven bravely to prevent Brexit. I’m even, regretfully, going to unfollow my beloved Ian Dunt, who’s put in a Herculanean effort explaining this insanity, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis. I’m even going to abandon the utterly wonderful Jess Phillips. Because British politics really isn’t relevant to me any more. And I simply don’t need the stress. My feed’s going to be pretty empty for a while, but there are plenty of other things I can fill it with. It’s a big world out there, after all.

A matter of the heart

~ janeishly ~ 12 Comments

Yes! Two blog posts in the same day! That’s because I already had this one written when I got a mention on a radio show.

Don’t worry, it won’t happen again.

I know I often bang on about how life is short and I’m very lucky and so on, but these are subjects rather dear to my heart.

And in the last month or so it’s my heart that’s been giving me gyp, which has made me even more conscious of the brevity of our stay on this planet.

I’ve been having the occasional burst of palpitations for ages – like, months. But I haven’t been able to tie it down to any particular activity or posture. Often they arrive when I’m lying perfectly still in bed. Sometimes it’s when I’m talking, sometimes it’s when I’m eating. It’s fairly unpleasant, as experiences go. My heart suddenly rushes a whole sequence of uneven heartbeats together, like a particularly heavy-footed and unsyncopated tap dancer.

But over the last month I’ve become even more aware of my internal pump. At almost every moment of the day and night I can feel it, thumping away in my chest. The blood fizzes right through my body and out into my toes, and my heart feels like it’s struggling, flopping about gasping for air, while my chest seems about to burst open.

None of this has been exactly helped by what appears to be the world’s longest-lasting cold. I’m now in week four and while a lot of the sinus gunk has subsided, I’m still coughing all the time. It’s a dry, stuttering cough concentrated right in the centre of my chest, and I can feel it pulling at my costal cartilage, trying to make everything pop. I’ve started having to wrap my arms around myself when I feel a cough coming on.

On the journey back to Sweden on Friday, I was sure my time had come. Travelling from Normandy to Sweden in a day isn’t a particularly fun trip, and by the time my plane had finally boarded, after two gate changes and 20 minutes waiting in full sun in a glass tunnel at the hideous-as-ever CDG (surely the worst airport in Europe for passenger comfort?), I was feeling really quite ill. Looking back, the flight is a bit of a blur, but at some point I made myself a promise: “If I get through this, I’m going to change some stuff”.

That may sound vague, but it’s mostly the usual kind of thing you promise yourself in such circumstances – enjoy the simple things in life more, be a bit kinder to myself, try not to eat quite so many snacks consisting entirely of bread and butter, get more sleep (ha! my insomnia is really going to cooperate with that one!)… but also to stop taking bullshit from people. Despite not actually liking the human race very much I’m fairly polite in face-to-face interaction – too polite, in fact. I tend not to call people out on their obvious lies and self-deceptions. But I dislike that placatory attitude in myself, so that’s something I’m going to try to improve.

Anyway, I went to the doctor’s yesterday and had my heart checked, and it’s fine. It’s not struggling. It’s not flopping about, gasping like a gaffed fish. My blood pressure is, as usual, lowish. My heart rate is pretty good for someone of my age. “Do you run?” asked the doctor. And yeah, I do, kind of, but only insofar as I go for the occasional jog that’s a bit faster than my normal walking pace. So that made me smile. We agreed that it’s probably just the menopause finally hitting me, at the age of 51 (and who knew that one of the symptoms was increased heart rate? Certainly not me, not before the last month). So the next stop will be the gynaecologist to see if they can give me HRT or something, because I don’t relish feeling like this for however long it takes for my body’s hormone levels to settle down.

In the meantime, however, I’ve found a remedy for the exploding chest thing. I have a corset that I wore in the winter for a fancy dress event, and before I bought it I did quite a lot of reading about corsets. One of the books was “Solaced”, by the fabulously enthusiastic Lucy Williams, which relates many experiences of corset wearers finding the garment useful to help with a variety of conditions, from scoliosis to depression. So, I thought, rather than try to hold my ribs in place myself, why not let my corset do the job? And it works! I don’t have it laced up particularly tightly, but it’s just like a constant gentle hug (and who wouldn’t like that?) – and one that relieves me of that horribly chest-explody feeling every time I cough.

I’m sure that eventually the permacold will go away and my corset will go back into the drawer. In the meantime,  this is what all the best-dressed translators are wearing: