Being honest with yourself...

And if I were actually being honest with myself I would also include the thing that probably hit me hardest yesterday during the Melbourne trip.

Those who know me know that I'm a bit of a Christmas junkie. I love the whole Christmas thing. I love decorating the tree and buying lovely things to adorn it. I love making lace bows to go on it and the whole "traditional" colour scheme for it. I love seeing Christmassy things around the house. I LOVE to wrap gifts and add gorgeous ribbon to them. This year I want to go with just plain red, plain green and plain gold papers and decorate them with contrasting ribbon. I had such plans for this to be a special Christmas. That was until I got to the Santa Cave yesterday.

Wandering through looking at the incredible trees and all the lights and decorations I was suddenly overcome by an overwhelming sensation of loneliness despite being surrounded by literally hundreds of people. And I suddenly recalled the terrible feelings of last Christmas and all that happened then. I realised a whole pile of things all at once. One was that it didn't really seem like I had achieved anything in almost a year. Two was that I was about to face yet another Christmas alone. And three was that I had no idea this was going to creep up on me until that very moment but all I wanted to do was get out of there and get some fresh air poste haste before I passed out. Stupidly before I did that I made a phone call because I needed to hear a friendly voice and some reassurance. If there is something I should have learned in this life is that if you go looking for reassurance, it's bound to come across sounding not very sincere. And all that does is to make you feel even less assured and more depressed.

I replaced my proposed purchases hastily on a shelf and vacated the building. If I could have had one wish right there and then it would have been to have my car parked right outside, to be able to hop in and drive myself home. Thank god for a bit of shade and a cool breeze. A seat would have been welcome but I guess what I got was enough. I'm still here.