Edging Above Zero

It's been a weekend of brunches. Met Bibi yesterday and had a brunch today with the Maestro. Got a massage in yesterday too. I know, life is rough.

I finally feel like I've caught up with my rest and sleep. Late yesterday I crashed and burned and ended up having a good cry - for no reason of course, other than I think sometimes this is how I vent things physically.

I hate it when it happens. I feel a bit crazy, particularly when I can't say definitively what's wrong. But sometimes it's best just to have it out and release the burden however you need to. It's like Bibi says, sometimes "overwhelmed" is a feeling, not a reality. I think for me it's been both the past while.

I think also it's because I watched this show called Secret Millionaire. It's a show where very wealthy people go work undercover in impoverished communities and then at the end, reveal their identities and give out money to those whom it will really help. The latest episode featured a woman who has made millions helping to retrain workers and after two desperate days of unrelenting negativity in Dagenham in London, she is visited by a neighbour Whin, who welcomes her to the neighbourhood with a box of tea cakes and an invite to come down to the local volounteer centre. There, mentally challenged adults are employed packing boxes for various companies, and Whin is a regular volunteer four days a week.

Whin reminded me a lot of my maternal grandmother. I saw Whin playing cards with her grandkids and it brought back a lot of memories of my sister and I doing the same with our grandparents when they'd babysit us in the summers. Even Whin's home, due for a spruce up by the local council, had similar carpet and decor and her community, [all of them on this show by extension], are like my grandmother's community of Possilpark, which has a history of industrial decline, poverty, drugs and the lost potential of its inhabitants that inevitably results.

I suppose in a way that this is always a shadow on my life, knowing where one side of my family comes from, wanting to make them proud, feeling like I fail when I can''t live up to my own potential, learning to see the opportunity to do so, even if it comes along in a way I didn't foresee.

Walking around after brunch was bliss today, not only because it was above zero, but it was sunny to boot. All weekend there's been that nice hint in the air of the spring that's on the way. It definitely lifted my spirits a great deal and I have a feeling that after a long, hard winter, better things are yet to come, that this will be my year.