There was once a reason we didn’t stray too far from the comforts of our existence. I don’t remember what it was now but there was a reason. Now, outside of the confines of the lives we’ve been tied to for so long I feel my breath soar. The freedom is intoxicating. So this is what we worked so hard to achieve – this is it.
When you start working at the age of 16 you only think about the money and that sense of achievement when you receive it. Your wages are mostly spent enjoying yourself, tying yourself up in circles of new friends and even newer places of sordid secrets and dark twists and turns you’d rather never recollect.
It’s so easy to get lost in that place and many do for more years than they care to remember, but others get caught up in the gravy train – driven by success and fuelled by a desire to out-do all of those naysayers you experience through life. Others do it to prove that one road doesn’t suit all, though she’ll regret that decision later.
The truth though is that life runs away with you and before you know it you’re earning more, working more hours and forgetting what life was once about. The trap catches you in its midst and before you know it you’re on a path you can’t get out of. You build your own success, you carve it out painstakingly over so many years and then you get to a point when you’re up on that mountain top and you start to see the cracks beneath you. Slowly you move from the edges as they start to crumble away and fall carelessly into the depths.
No one cares how hard you worked, no one cares what it took to get there. All they know is that it’s now unsustainable. So what do you do? In that moment do you jump and hope something soft breaks your landing or do you implode and hope that the crumbling mountain still has some life left in it yet?
I don’t think there’s an answer, but escape is a powerful word and underestimated. Self-destruction is one way to achieve it, but for others a two week holiday would suffice. A break into the distance, a trip that you can remember the next time you’re missing your family because you’ve worked the longest, latest hours you’ve ever suffered. It’s so easy to make a change, it’s so easy to give it all up and start again somewhere else in another setting with new people but all would be lost. So instead you hold out for the four weeks of holiday you’re allowed – that precious time when you can be yourself. Truly be yourself. I mean isn’t that what we signed up for when we were eager 16 year olds looking for a future. Four weeks holiday and a shitty pension plan when we’re 75?
Then we can start living again.
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