The Right Question

So, I have been going to an acupuncturist / osteopath since mid-2000.  At least I think it will be since around then.  I remember that it was a few months after I first moved to London.  At first I went because I wanted an alternative approach to my eczema.  My relationship with my acupuncturist, R, has been one of the constants in my life ever since.  There have been times when I haven't seen him for months and months - perhaps even the better part of a year.  He was the first person to suggest seriously that I could perhaps benefit from some counselling.  He was kind of alarmed at how miserable my weight problem made me and at the negative and hateful language I used when talking about my body.


He gave me the number of a counsellor contact of his who worked out of the same practice.  And two years later I asked for the number again and got in touch with the counsellor, A, who I ended up seeing on a weekly basis from Feb 2008 to April 2009.


I went to my first session with two questions: why am I overweight, and why am I single?  Over a good number of weeks A managed to get me to re-address even these questions and morph them into a statement, a mission statement for what I was doing with my counselling journey: I want to be happy.  Rather than "I want to be thin" or "I want to be in a relationship".


The theory being, asking the right question leads you to making the right decision.

Ready to Begin

Early in 2007 I realised I was heading for somewhere quite dangerous. Dangerous for me in particular, being a single girl with two mortgages (one let-to-buy, but still). I was headed for a sacking. I was miserable where I worked, but not because I couldn't do my job, more because I just didn't want to be arsed. I would spend almost all day doing anything but work - googling my favourite band, or Keanu Reeves, or just reading news sites. Emailing friends was also big on the agenda. I even bought a pair of headphones and started listening to podcasts and doing youtube searches all day.

I habitually did the bare minimum to get by. And then realised I hadn't even been doing that. And I also realised that this was not a new thing but the way I had handled every job I had ever had. So I decided to hand in my notice before I got the sack. I started looking around for other jobs and although I interviewed well for a few and was always getting onto the last shortlist of 2 or 3, never got the big win.

So, long story short, I went to visit a friend in Hawaii. She was spending a year working in Honolulu, living in Kailua. On the island of Oahu. And I realised it was paradise, and I wanted to live there forever. As I say, long story short - it is much more involved than that. Recently, almost two years later, a friend said to me "I've known you over a year, and you never stop talking about Hawaii. What are you doing about it?"

So, this blog is about my efforts to move to Hawaii. Or, in other words, you could also say, it is about my effort to be happy. Hawaii means happiness and healing to me. I have a long way to go - emotionally as well as geographically. If you think how far away away from each other London and Honolulu are - well, I'm not saying I am that far away from happiness, but it is a fair distance. Sometimes what is just around the corner feels inconceivably out of reach.

The blogging process in itself is part of my healing. If you are reading this I hope together we can make sense of healing and happiness and find some common ground to be brothers and sisters.