I've started working on a job for the same company that XH has done a lot of high profile (and very successful) work for in the past.
When we were M, I felt like I was known more for being his W than for the work I did for them in my own right.
Over the past couple of years, whenever I've worked for them, I've felt his shadow looming over me and the conversations I had with colleagues.
But I feel like I've turned a very small corner this time.
I've just come back from my holiday with the wonderful man and I'm aware that I look better than I ever have done on one of these jobs. We don't really get much sun up here in the summer, and I'm very golden brown at the moment. Obvs I've been enhancing it as well
I've been having lots of very intense dreams related to work and to XH, pretty much every night since I started this job. In one of them the building where we met and in which I later worked for 8 years in, was being taken apart, brick by brick. I think it was going to be rebuilt somewhere else. But I remember feeling devastated in my dream and wanting to let out a very visceral cry, but it getting stuck in my throat. I still feel a little out of sorts from that dream, even though it was a couple of nights ago.
Well, I feel like I'm well into this job, even though it's not been too long yet, and I feel like the team around me is knitting together well, in the way that I like it to. I like to make sure my staff feel comfortable enough to be themselves, and to feel like they have something of value to contribute. It takes a few days for this to kick in, but it's very powerful when it does. One has already described this job as the best she's ever done.
I guess one of the things I've learnt over the past couple of years, and that I'm still learning, is that I have as much a powerful personality as my XH as regards work and working with others. It's maybe not as flashy and in your face as his, because of the nature of what he does and of what I do as much as personality, but it's there nonetheless. I had so many people (very highly regarded industry professionals) come up to me and say they were so happy when they saw that I would be working on this project. It kind of bowled me over, to be honest.
So I feel like I should continue to work on this side of me and allow it to grow some more...see where it takes me and what comes of it.
House wise, I started a tidy up of my jewellery. I have a lot of it. I have some very nice storage but I wanted some smaller opaque plastic boxes for inside the storage. I found some business card boxes with lids (very cheap) and ordered a whole bunch of them. They're a perfect size. It's a work in progress at the moment, I just do a little every day, but hopefully I'll wear some more of my lovely jewellery now.
One question that's come up is what to do with all the jewellery XH gave me over the course of 18 years. And funnily enough, the wonderful man I'm with mentioned the same kind of hing a while back in regard to the photographs he had of his XW, her family and their children.
He has a lot of printed photographs as their M was pre digital (they've been D about 8 years). I think my answer was along the lines of keeping them as they are a part of his past and of who he is now, maybe finding a nice box to keep them in, and storing them away somewhere. That way he'd be honouring them (his past), which I feel is important, in spite of what happened. But they're closed in a box and away.
Maybe that's what I should do with the jewellery XH gave me? Maybe at some point in the future I might feel differently and feel like they're just items of jewellery, rather than jewellery that was a gift from XH?
Who knows. In in the meantime, I have another little drawer of jewellery I bought to explore today and sort out...
