OK

 Whoever said that it’s ok to be not ok is bonkers. Right? It’s not ok. It’s horrible. Really. And at this time of year so many people are right on the edge of not being ok that they don’t want your ‘not ok’ to worry about as well. Seriously woman, can’t you just hold it together until books-in day? Fall apart then, like all good musicians do, when no one will notice. That will feel so much better. 

The truth is I’m not ok at the moment but I don’t want you to know. 

Why are you writing this blog then, idiot?

It’s not as stupid as you might think. The worst thing, for me, (and I appreciate that everyone is different) is that people will notice that I’m not ok and treat me differently. 

I suspect that in this month of overwhelm my ‘perfectly fine’ suit has taken a few knocks. It’s looking a bit battered and dented in places. The metal has cracked and in a few areas the light of my bonkers is shining through. 

It’s my fault. I took my eye off it. I didn’t write about the niggily little problems. I didn’t laugh at my own stupidity and so here we are with you probably noticing and me confessing so that you don’t think I’m just a grumpy old anti-social twit. 

If you do see me and notice the bonkers shining through the crack can you just pretend it’s not there? Imagine you see someone funny and great to be around. For me, it’s not ok to be not ok. Do everything you can to pretend that I’m perfectly fine. 

The Long Suffering Husband is good and bad at this in equal measure. Being an engineer, he got out the fragile tape, which was both funny (good) and terrifying because he’d seen the cracks and was prepared to highlight them with the tape. 

He was away for the weekend and before he went I had a small panic about not having started any Christmas shopping. 

“Perfectly fine,” he said, “You’ve got a whole weekend without me. You can go shopping then.”

Great. Except that I wasn’t perfectly fine.

“Did you go shopping?” he asked.

“Hmm Mmmn,” I mumbled vaguely.

“Oh good,” he said, pretending not to notice. 

“What did you buy?”

“A chalk pen,” I swallowed my words, ashamed of my inability to buy a single Christmas present. And this is where he was brilliant. Instead of noticing that I had spent a whole weekend eating biscuits (thank you to the person that delivered a box to my house) and drawing on the windows, he pretended that I had done something amazing. 

Ok.