My decision to write a blog has me dying every time. Who do I think I am, what do I think I have to say and am I having a mid-life crisis?! Probs. This is what my brain does every time I try to put myself out there, it humbles me, shuts down my ideas and makes them seem foolish. In the spirit of telling my intrusive thoughts to STFU, I’m doing it anyway.
Here’s the prologue;
My name is Antonia and I’m 28. My, thankfully divorced, parents meant I grew up with alternating weekends of brown stew chicken and pub roast dinners; the dream. My biological father is Irish (I met him once in person and he died 10 months later- see, so much to get in to). My real Dad is English and has the kindest heart I know, a heart which is now full of metal. My mother is Jamaican and needs a whole post of her own. I have the big sister of all big sisters who is actually my Mum in every sense of what makes a person someone’s Mother.
I wouldn’t say that I love music, more that my mental wellness depends on it. I am fiercely independent because I spent a great deal of my time as a child alone and at the hands of a mentally unwell guardian. I have control issues (see previous sentence for likely cause) and my default emotion was anger for a long time (until I went to therapy and now.. I am completely fixed). I am empathetic to my own detriment and have cried more than once at someone running for and missing a bus. People used to assume I was not very nice; nothing to do with the resting bitch face and everything to do with the fact I’m just shy of 6ft tall and black. Oh and most of the time, I’ve got a lot to say.
I am basically married (not actually because she’s got some feelings about marriage over here) to my genuine bestie. He allows me space to be myself, unapologetically, and shows me the greatness a stable upbringing affords you as an adult. I don’t know how our relationship practically works as he is the attention deficit to my obsessive compulsive, but it does. Everything I lack, he is. I feel awkward displaying love publicly and therefore default to talking about our relationship as if it is a well written P E A paragraph (if you don’t know what that means, did you even school bro?).
More to the point, I’m a Midwife. Well, I was. I technically still am. But I recently walked away from my midwifery career after a very difficult and emotional decision to protect my own sanity rather than continue to drown as a slave to the NHS (more on this to come). I’m now sort of directionless and trying to figure out WTF I’m doing with my life and WTF I am as a person, drama.
Picture the scene, first of Jan 2023, feeling like I needed to make some revolutionary decisions, I wrote the word ‘INTENTION’ in a journal. At the time I had no idea what the end goal or intention even was. I just knew that, after years of Midwifery being the be all and end all of my life, I now found myself imagining how else my life could look and I needed to move through the year INTENDING to come out of it differently. So “intention” made sense. I fell back on this word again and again throughout 2023 and oh baby.. we made some moves.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CyeDXuXgwJ0/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
With no idea what was to come next, I stepped off my inevitable career path and decided to go travelling for an indefinite – money dependent – amount of time and I made both of these decisions terrified but with, intention.
Fast forward six/seven months and I’ve landed here.
A space to talk about things I’ve experienced or at least have experience talking about.
I’ve got some chat where I feel like there isn’t enough and you can expect anything from emotional abuse to curly haircuts.
I’ve had a lot of recent experiences that have given me tangible context to “you don’t know if you don’t try” so, let’s gooooo!
K bye!