Hair cuts and back hip circles.

I have neglected my poor blog again. 

Last week I got my hair cut. It is now the shortest it has been in 8 years and I like it. My hair was waist length and now it sits at my shoulders. My mum had been pestering me for months to get it cut, so finally last Friday I walked into a salon I had never been to before and told them to give my hair a chop. The lovely lady who cut my hair said that she had been told that hair holds onto bad memories, which is why you can feel so much better after a hair cut. 

Whilst I do not believe that somewhat romantic notion in a literal sense, I did feel like a whole new woman after my hair cut and my head most certainly was lighter for being rid of about 25cms of hair. I do also very much like the idea that I have snipped off about 8 years worth bad memories, there sure have been a few.

I don't know if a change is as good as a holiday but I do know that the mind is the most powerful muscle in the body. As long as you believe in the change, then it shall be. 

As of Sunday I am now on my way to becoming an accredited gymnastics coach. I was the only one from my club to attend the course and I was also one of the older participants. 

Whilst most of the other trainee coaches were bored teenagers, I was really nerdishly excited. The all day course was held at the Victorian Women's High Performance Centre, the Victorian Institute of Sport's women's gymnastics facility. It is the most incredible gym I have ever set foot in and now that I have done a back hip circle on the same set of uneven bars that an Australian Olympian has trained on, my life is certainly a little bit closer to being complete. 

So many balance beams... (7 all together, so many that I couldn't fit them all in the one  frame).

Now I have to complete the written coursework and supervised coaching component with my club. 

The day was long and tiring, but I was hopelessly inspired. I couldn't help but think that if I could work in a facility like that every day, I wouldn't care what I was being paid. I can't wait to get accredited, get stuck into my new uni course and throw myself full time into making my crazy dream of making my living from gymnastics based work a reality. 

The main reason I haven't written anything recently is because my mind has been very occupied. 

I've been struggling a lot with some of my important interpersonal relationships and I haven't felt it appropriate to express my feelings about that situation here. There is a level of responsibility that comes with having a blog, even one with a readership as modest as mine. No good can come from making the identity of the person I am struggling to get along with known here.

I am hurt, frustrated and exhausted by the situation. I am trying hard and in many different ways to improve it, but to no avail. 

In recent times, I have come to refer to this chart:

It turns out, the happiness chart does have its limitations. The happiness chart only works in instances where your happiness only depends on yourself. My happiness depends also depends on the people around me, because I care about them. 

I am coming to accept that maybe this is a situation that I cannot improve by being involved and that maybe my only option is to maintain a concerned gaze from a distance. I will have to try and focus on happiness that can be derived intrinsically. 

I know that this person and I are not getting along at least in part because that person is struggling with some things themselves.

One of the scariest things about being in a serious emotional hole is accepting that you are the master of your own destiny. You don't have to do it alone, but you are the one who decides whether anything is done at all. It frustrates me that I cannot decide for this person that the time to take control and improve their life could be now. They have to come to that realisation in their own way, in their own time.

I have said it so many times and I will say it again, I am here for you if you want me to be. I'm not perfect, but I am trying and if you tell me how to help then I will.

I am not a person of faith, but I think the serenity prayer (adopted by alcoholics anonymous) says it well;

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

The irony of this situation does not escape me and it is giving me a far greater appreciation for what people like my mum must have felt when dealing with me.

Life is mysterious and let's face it, we're all just making it up as we go along. I will keep trying my best.

Wish me luck.

Baby Brebles goes to the formal!

The purpose of this post is purely to share how handsome my brother looked going to his year 11 formal on Thursday night. His date, the truly lovely Clara, looked absolutely beautiful. 

They matched perfectly. Their sandy hair and blue eyed complexions matched Alex's pale blue shirt. His champagne coloured tie matched her dress and the pale yellow roses that made up the corsage tied in wonderfully.

We have known Clara's family since the families each came to exist, Clara's Mum and my Mum became friends in early high school. Clara and Alex have known each other about as long as they have been alive and have always got along famously.

Clara was just about the ultimate dream formal date for a teenage boy.  Ever since they were tiny, Alex and Clara have seemed to be at complete ease in each other's company. It's hard to avoid the fact that she's an absolute stunner, resembling something like a combination of Brooklyn Decker and Taylor Swift. As well as gorgeous, Clara is outgoing, bubbly and intelligent. She is the kind of girl you can take to any occasion and know she'll get along with everyone. 

That being said, little brother isn't a half bad formal date either. I'm yet to come across a teenage boy who likes being in a suit more than Alex! I think he'd be perfectly happy to wear it everyday. A lot of teenage boys look awkward and physically uncomfortable when suited up but Alex looked like he was born to wear one and he did so with a cool, calm  confidence. He looked very sharp and he has such nice friends, so I was confident he and Clara would have a great time.

From a big sister's point of view, there is significantly less to do for a brother going to the formal than a sister. I did Kate's hair and makeup for both her formals, as well as being involved in dress selection, which I loved being a part of. We usually allowed 2 hours of preparation time on the night. 

All Alex had to do to get ready was have a shower, a shave and put on his suit which took all of about 25 minutes and required absolutely no input from anyone else! I wanted to mark the occasion in some way, so I got him a bottle of nice smelling man-fume as a gift. All Kate and I really had to do on the night was play paparazzi!

Since my own year 11 formal was a little bit of a disaster, I was only too happy to live vicariously through my brother and revel in the smiley, happy, perfection of it all.

Brebles and Cla

Learning lessons

I lost my wallet yesterday. I didn't even realise it was gone until I had a number of missed calls from my parents. As it turns out I had left it on the Frankston train and some lovely soul had picked it up. Said lovely soul rang every phone number I had on bits of paper and business cards until he got onto my dad, who got onto my mum who went and picked it up from the Good Samaritan. All of this happened before I even realised it was gone! I'm incredibly lucky, I had ten cents in my wallet (which was still in it) and none of my cards were missing. 

I really can't quite believe how lucky I was to get it back.

I have been struggling to engage with uni this semester. I have been aware of this and trying my best to get myself back on track. Last week I missed an online quiz which was worth 10% of my grade for that subject. I grovelled to my lecturer to no avail and up until today I have been extremely mad at myself for missing an opportunity for some pretty easy marks. I am now trying to view the lost 10 marks as a wake up call. Even though I will be doing a different course next year, I have worked too hard over the last two years to get my academic record back on track to have blips appear on it now out of laziness. 

I'm annoyed I had to learn this lesson the hard way. Now I have to stop being mad at myself and use the frustration as motivation to knuckle down and do better. 

Speaking of uni, I have decided what I'll be doing next year. It got to the point where I just needed to make the decision. The uncertainty was making losing sleep and was making me  feel constantly nauseous. I was mentally burned out from thinking about it. I didn't think there was any aspect of the decision that I hadn't thought over a thousand times. Each time I thought about it I came up with the same three options, the ones I talked about in my last post, but was not getting consistently closer to picking one. 

I made my choice last week. I had taken the train home from uni and had started to think that one of those options might be the right one. When I got home, Mum told me that she had been reading my blog and that if I really wanted, she would tell me what she thought I should do. I said, "Yes please!" Mum's advice was to do the course that I had been thinking about on the train home, so I decided then and there that I would apply for that course for next year. 

I felt instantly relieved and excited. It will be another big change and I am committed to seeing this course through to the end, come what may. 

It is a 4 year double degree, but I should get credit for a number of units I've done this year and a few from my arts degree. I'm excited that after those four years I will have 3 undergraduate degrees all together, each very different from the other. This somewhat excessive undergraduate education will provide me the opportunities to be employed or pursue some very exciting postgraduate options. 

This educational change will be the biggest one yet. If I'm accepted into the course, I will be attending a different university, leaving Monash and the Group of Eight. One of the degrees is in a field I have never studied before in my life and the other is science related, but different again to the science studies I'm undertaking in the present. 

The hardest thing about making this decision has been finding the courage to follow a very different path to the one I always imagined I would. 

I'm a smart person and I come from a family of smart and very accomplished people. I had fallen into the trap of thinking that I should do what I perceived smart people are expected to do, go to the most prestigious university that would take me and go onto become a doctor or a lawyer or some other highly respected and highly paid professional. 

Now I don't think there is anything wrong with following this kind of path in life, if you have a reason to. The problem I kept coming up against was that I was only contemplating this kind of path because I could, not because I had a deep intrinsic motivation to. It would have been a decision to follow a path I've come to see as predictable and very socially acceptable, which made it a very attractive 'default' position. There are plenty of 'right' reasons to pursue an elite education of this kind, but these are not some of them.

I've realised that if I want to be happy, doing something just because I can is probably not going to procure that. At times throughout this process I've been concerned that if I don't do something like law or medicine, I won't be able to afford the kind of lifestyle I'd want to provide for myself or my family, if I have one in the future.

I'm so lucky and grateful to have a very comfortable life. However, as I made this decision I've been thinking a lot about what parts of it I would want to provide for a family of my own and which parts are not so important to me. For example, I don't think the last three and a half years of my private education were worth their considerable cost and whilst I very much enjoy living in a beautiful home, I would be just as happy living in a nice home in a less affluent suburb. 

I want to do things in life that I enjoy and that I'm passionate about. I want to succeed in what I do and be surrounded by like minded people, but I don't want to be consumed by my work in a way that makes me chronically unhappy or unhealthy. I am starting to realise that if I live my life this way, the calm and fulfillment might be more valuable to me than social status or large amounts of money could be.

I would be lying if I said that success and financial reward are of no importance to me. For me, this decision making process has just given me a better idea of where those two things fit on my list of priorities. 

I feel like I'm being a bit crazy going down this path, pursuing a career in a field that many would probably not consider "serious". However, this just serves as further motivation to have faith in my own abilities. Besides, taking healthy risks is part of what makes life interesting and I haven't heard of anyone who did anything truly great without taking a few. 

Yikes

I did pretty well on the punctuality, exercise and food side this week. Much better than last week, but with a couple of areas for improvement, too. 

Last week was a pretty good week. A basketball incident at uni left me with two fingers about double their usual side and very bruised. The doctor wanted me to have them x-rayed, which thankfully revealed that they are not broken. I didn't realise just how much I use the middle and ring finger of my left hand until now. It turns out taking off the hand break, tying my shoes and putting my hair in a ponytail are all activities made far easier by my left hand. I'm really glad they're not broken.

I'm losing sleep over tertiary applications for next year. I basically have it down to three options:

• Law
• Exercise Science & Sport Management
• Some 1 year diploma/ certificate 3&4 course to give me more time to think about what I really want to do

My family have been great at trying to help me talk through the options but I'm feeling the pressure to get this decision right. Don't misunderstand me, I know that it's pressure of my own making, but I feel like the weight of it is putting dents in my shoulders.

I need to put my head down and start working a whole lot harder at my uni work until the end of the semester. I need to make a decision about what I'm doing next year and commit to the course and career for the next 5 years. I need to be on time to everything, attend all my classes, start my assignments, eat and exercise like a monk.

I know this is stuff we all say to ourselves that we actually never do, but since writing about it I have improved. 

In conclusion, I'm over it. "It" translating to "being me, living my life and making my decisions". 

I think I'll just skip straight to crazy, lonely, cat lady...