The noughties: the decade of stress and destress. Stress!

I have been reading my friends' summations of their experiences in the last decade with interest. It's probably a factor of our age (thirties heading into forties), but really, the noughties seem to have been littered with stressful (not always bad, but still stressful) personal events and major investments which did or didn't work out.

Oh and careers.

Lots of career magic thrown in there to keep us on our toes.

No different for me.

I've been trying to think what I did in the last decade.

Good opportunity to sit down and think about it, what with the ice pellets flinging themselves against the front windows, the dog having her post-walk, mid-morning nap, and Himself upstairs asleep after working all night again...

The major event of the decade for me was moving to Canada in June 2005, roughly halfway through the decade. Consequently the first half is a bit of a blur in my memory.

The first couple of years were spent mostly trying to flog the dead horse of a relationship I was in. In my twenties and early thirties, I liked nothing better than to flog dead horses. Out-dated left-wing politics, selfish men, pointless arguments over a bottle of wine ... that kind of thing.

I remember sitting in the park in Ballsbridge having lunch with Accent Monkey explaining the latest series of 'death by a thousand cuts' that was going on, and she wasn't saying much, but I started getting this very strong vibe that manifested itself as a voice in my head saying 'would you just fucking leave him so we can all get on with things'.

I'm not saying the vibe was coming from Accent Monkey, but the voice in my head had a strong Dublin accent.

So I did, readers.

Took a while. A long while. Very painful. Very very painful. Thankfully I took a notion one day in 2001, and bought an apartment in a dingy part of town, so although I wasn't living the glamorous life of a Celtic tiger cub, I wasn't homeless. But for the first time in years all the animals had paired off two by two, and I was solo, bunking down the back of the ark. The loneliness was a physical beast that prowled around me. I didn't sleep for months. I thought I was going to go mad from the tiredness.

My parents and my girlfriends and their partners hauled me through it.

That and India. I went to India on a truck trip towards the end of 2002 (I think). It opened a crack of longing for something in my mind that ended up with me leaving Ireland. I went to find myself, but instead I found a place at the other side of the world that has such hope and despair and joy and sorrow and materialism and spirituality all wrapped up in each other... coiled round and round each other like snakes in the temple of Haripad ... presided over by a pantheon of gods and goddesses that encapsulate all that is good and bad in all of us and in the world.

A place where healing and politics and sexuality are all written about in the same texts ... where they lay fibre optic cables using families that live in the trenches to do the work ... where filth and rubbish and all kinds of human squalor wash up against sublime architecture ... where animals are worshipped and lepers ignored.

A place where all of the world's major religions jostle for position in ways that are ugly sometimes but where the overwhelming sense of culture is that there is a reason for all of this chaos... there is an energy in the world that we are all part of.

There is no either or in India. There is what there is and it is all connected.

I also decided in India that I didn't like cities.

Back in Dublin city I limped along for a while, but my heart stopped being in it sometime in 2003. I had moved to a new job and I was working very hard and enjoying the stretch in my brain and my energy, but the by-product of that job - hanging around the social partnership clique - was not good for either my soul or my liver.

Social partnership is a good idea, but it needs work. You cannot 'help' run a country without any accountability. The representatives of workers and employers and farmers and the like, sitting round the table were accountable to their members but not to a higher outcome (e.g. social cohesion, prosperity, competitiveness, etc). That meant that they looked after their members' interests (of course), and so hobbled the hard choices that might have led to us having a chance now.

As for the government ... I won't talk about that here.

By 2004, I was earning enough to get out of dodge, but not enough to buy a house of course (that was for lawyers and couples only), so I traded up to a classier version of the apartment I was living in.

It was interesting that throughout all those years of banks flinging, throwing, shovelling seven, eight times their income at people, offering 100% mortgages over 45 years, with a line of credit to pay the taxes and the moving costs on top of that ... I was never allowed to borrow more than 3.5 times my income, and never allowed more than a 90% mortgage ... despite the fact that I was earning good money working for the government and had no debt to speak of ... other single women I know encountered the same discrimination.

... Although I was annoyed at the time ... it does appear we were saved by our unemployed girlie bits in the end ...

After the excitement of the move and the decorating wore off, I took a long, long, look at my (admittedly) very nice apartment and realised that 467 square feet was all I was going to be able to afford by myself.

And slowly fell into the worst funk of my life.

The city was getting pretty chaotic. It was easier to walk an hour to work than to take the bus or drive, but a two hour walk on top of a nine hour day was pretty tiring.

I took to going to the supermarket at 9pm on a Wednesday night, so I could get a parking space. Getting petrol took an hour. Going to yoga took an hour. Everything took an hour.

Life consisted of work, shopping to cheer myself up about work, going out or entertaining, then lying in bed all day Sunday feeling sorry for myself and agonizing about how soulless my life was.

I took a few weeks off and went to Venezuela for another truck trip. I was hoping for another India (great driver, great people on the truck, great country). We had some nice people, but the truck was partly populated by the four rudest people Britain has ever produced in millennia of producing arrogant jingoist arseholes...

I still had a good time. Again, Venezuela got me thinking about the pointlessness of a job tinkering at the edges of the reality of the economy. Apart from it paying the mortgage.

Then one day I had a stupid argument over nothing but a status issues, with somebody in work. Went for a walk to clear my head. Picked up the paper and saw an ad for visas to Canada.

The light went on in my head.

Canadians don't have egos big as the Rockies, sure they don't!! They have trappers and lumberjacks and people who have calluses on their palms!!

I'll go there!!