Bernie Takes Mushrooms Part 5
Or how work is taking over Bernie's life (like it does for many midlife women)
This is another short extract from my new book. This book is fiction but it does have a LOT of myself in there. I am finding it massively cathartic. Some of these extracts are offered for free and then some will be paid. If you can afford a paid subscription right now then please do give it a whirl as you’ll be supporting a writer who is also holding down a 9-5 job and 2 kids (and doesn’t actually even have an agent right now). Okay no more sob stories and hope you enjoy it. Bernie is 50 and works in a start up. She is struggling in many areas of her life and is starting to realise that she has an unhealthy relationship with work. She doesn't quite know what to do about it but sees an advert for a menopausal retreat in Spain and decides it might just be the ticket!
Here goes:
I knew that I gave too much of myself to work. When had that started? It wasn’t healthy that so much of my identity was tied up with work.
I had watched a video a few weeks ago on IG and it showed a professor standing in front of a group of students. First he put some large stones into a glass jar.
‘Is this jar full?’he asked and the students nodded as it did indeed look pretty full.
‘Okay is this full?’ He asked adding in some smaller stones that took up space between the big ones.
The nodded again.
‘Right what about now?’
This time he added in a load of sand which seeped between the stones and filled the jar to the brim.
‘These big stones are the important things. Like your family. Your relationships. Your health okay? And the small ones are like work, tidying the house, that kind of stuff. And then the sand…well the sand is the inconsequential stuff. The stuff that doesn’t really matter. And you need to be mindful that this small stuff, the sand, well it’s just sand and it is can sometimes feel like it takes over your whole life.’
The rocks therefore represented the most significant tasks and priorities, the pebbles symbolizing secondary stuff, and the sand stands for the smaller, less critical tasks.
For me there were two big stones in that blessed jar - work and family. The work stone was massive and took up about 70% of the jar and then the family one, the one that was supposed to be more important, well that often felt like it was only 30% but then there was also so so much sand. And the issue with my brain was that I couldn’t differentiate anymore.
The sand was all the images I saw on Instagram, the outfits I wanted to buy, the relationship advice, the tips on how to get stains off your trainers, the dogs who didn’t bark but screamed, the sloths, the baby sloths, then also the violence, the terrible violence which just popped up out of nowhere, and then someone my age dancing and saying that they were ‘owning their midlife,’ and then life coaches and health and wellness gurus and then more sloths, then screaming dogs in prams being pushed down a Copenhagen street. And so there was work and then there was this kaleidoscope of content which was steadily taking over my jar (my brain that is) and it meant that when Elizabeth was being mean, when she was doubling down on the KPIs or whatever mission she was on that week, that my brain was in fact scrambled.
‘So let’s break down what tasks you need to complete?’ she’d said on the latest Teams meeting, her expression unreadable on the screen, ‘So you have to get Fausta in Vogue. That’s number one. Okay?’
‘How do I do that?’
‘I thought you said you’d got experience working in PR,’ she said, ‘Right so that’s number one anyway and you can figure it out. Then I want you to re-write all the blog content. I want all the content on our website to be medically accurate so do lots of research on the menopause please and make sure the stats are accurate.’
Whilst she spoke I felt my head swimming with sloths. Sloths with big eyes reaching their strange, long arms up to the heavens. Vulnerable. Optimistic and yet about to get hurt. This was how I felt. An abandoned sloth clinging onto a tree branch and Elizabeth was a tiger, and she was steadily gaining on me, about to reach the end of the branch and underneath was a steadily moving river, in fact the river was about to burst its banks and it was moving at pace. And in the river in a really shit raft was Pete and he was trying to keep himself, and Tasha afloat but instead the raft was just coming apart. He had made it out of an old box and then put some twigs inside so it was in fact already submerged and not watertight in any real sense. I really needed to just let go of the branch and let myself fall backwards onto the damned raft but (and okay the analogy is clumsy) it was obvious that the raft was flimsy and couldn’t carry a giant sloth, definitely not a family of sloths. So I just clung on with my scrambled brain and wished I was dead. I needed to make the raft and sort out this stuff with Elizabeth. I had to do it all.
‘What sort of menopausal stats do you want in the blog?’
‘I need stats on hot flushes. I want stats on night sweats. How many women get brain scramble?’
‘Did you just say brain scramble?’ I said feeling like perhaps I was experiencing vertigo right now because Elizabeth’s face was hard to focus on. She was so beautiful but also so cold. Like what I imagined an AI manager would be like in the future. She perhaps had a long seam at the back of her neck where she could pull her face off and it would be a metal skull with piercing eyes who would continue talking about KPI’s and spreadsheets and how much time I had to write 40 blogs on menopausal symptoms which were somehow linked to Fausta and their supplement which as far as I could tell didn’t have any meaningful impact on menopausal symptoms at all.
It was just a few vitamins ground down and put into a sachet so women like me, women who were desperate and had no libido would purchase it for 30 quid and hope that their problems would be solved but they wouldn't (because it wasn’t just the menopause we were dealing with. It was also partners who made rafts out of boxes and then jumped into the deadly river with them and expected to survive okay).
That morning Pete had barely noticed that I wasn’t listening to a word he said (he was talking about whether we needed to get milk perhaps but wasn’t entirely sure and then had he said something about pasta for dinner?) and Tasha gave me a small peck on the cheek, and then walked to school. I had refilled her school bag with her water bottle and taken out an old crisp packet but I hardly remembered when I’d done this. I’d also put a wash into the machine whilst on auto pilot. I got dressed (putting on brightest jumper and combining with black trousers and a blazer to make myself feel more professional- even though everyone dressed down these days) and then walked to the tube. It was Spring but the wind was bitter cold. There were little bits of blossom appearing on the trees and I tried to focus on them to take my mind off what would happen at work and what kind of mood Elizabeth might be in.
The photo shoot had gone well and we had some great shots of the models wearing Fausta leggings. Now I needed to get a couple of these shots into Vogue magazine. I’d done the odd bit of journalism here and there (usually for marketing titles and quite niche) and yet Elizabeth firmly believed that our supplements and the new leggings (‘to support you in all the right places through menopause’) were enough to warrant a Vogue spread. I had tried to chat to Adrienne about it, perhaps so that both of us could talk to Elizabeth together (strength in numbers) but she had been signed off work because she was apparently ‘chronically stressed’.
‘She’s not really cut out for work in a start up,’ Elizabeth had said when I’d asked, ‘This isn’t a place for nervous people. You only really survive if you’re strong and confident. This is why I hired you…you’re older so you are more resilient. Plus you are menopausal so you can keep things in perspective and know not to sweat the small stuff.’
I had learnt (quickly) not to contradict Elizabeth and just to nod when she said things. I had actually still been getting periods and so wasn’t strictly menopausal but it was easier to just let her think I was. When I got in, the office was empty with only the two men (I struggled to remember their names and it didn’t matter as they never looked up from their screens anyway) sitting at their desks.
I just booted up my laptop and then checked through the agreed KPIs and thought about how it was achievable. I could do these things. I just needed to believe in myself and have more confidence. I wasn’t like Adrienne who was weak and cried too much. I was hard. I was a hard, menopausal bitch and I would succeed and then Elizabeth would be pleased and I’d have proved that I was still relevant, that I could work in a start up and not crumble. Then perhaps I could stop making work the only thing that mattered. I could dedicate more time to Tasha (was it too late though as she was already in secondary school and didn’t really want to hang out anymore, preferring to be with her friends now anyway). Or I could spend more time with Pete (and we could stop discussing what we were having for dinner and maybe even go out to the theatre or an art gallery, maybe start having sex in public which was something we’d done at the very start of our relationship - once in a pub toilet and once in a park hiding behind a large tree).
I looked around and worried for a second that others could read my scrambled mind. I was thinking of sex one minute and then the next I couldn’t think of anything worse. I had a libido that would launch itself and then would sprint away before I could catch it. Like when you chase a child in a maze and they disappear around the corner and you can’t find them again. It was something to do with testerorone perhaps and needed more of that in my body. I would get that sorted once I proved I could do this job. I would also finally, finally do something for myself. I would book the retreat. The one I had seen advertised on Instagram that morning.
‘Midlife Renaissance: A journey to true authenticity,’ and a visual of a beautiful swimming pool and a villa and a single rose lying on the table next to a jug of water. The text below read:
Do you feel like you no longer know who you are? Do you feel like you’ve abandoned yourself? Are you just someone who looks after others? Or are you someone addicted to productivity and being useful? Do you find yourself at work trying very hard to please and then disappointed when you don’t get the affirmation that you need? Do you feel lost? Do you have no sex drive? Does your sex drive come and go at a single moments notice?
If you agree with any of the above then come to this exclusive retreat on the beautiful Spanish coast. You will meet like-minded women and be led through some revealing and inspiring exercises by life coach June Mayfield who has 25 years experience working with midlife women and harnessing their unique and beautiful power? This retreat is competitively priced and only 6 places are available. Think about the changes that this exclusive offer could bring into your life.
I had then clicked on the weblink and seen the price was 5K. Who had that much to spend on a retreat?
What planet did these people live on?
What kind of person could just up and leave and go and find themselves when they worked full time and had a family.
I did however have that money in my savings. I was that person!
These were the savings that I kept incase things went tits up at work. The advice was always to have something in the bank and when mum and dad had died I’d inherited the lump sum of 25K (unfortunately they hadn’t owned any property or assets really and so that was it). We’d had the roof fixed and also got the garden landscaped (a garden that nobody actually used apart from in the summer when Pete would sometimes sit on a deck chair with his iPad and scroll through the news) and that left me with about 6,000 in the bank.
I could go on this retreat and find myself. All was not lost.