On climbing back on.

"Get straight back on!" my instructor would shrill, marching over to wherever I was picking myself up out of the dirt. "Up you get! Get back on!"

That's the first rule that I remember learning about horses, apart from never using a mane comb on the tail. If you come off, get straight back on.

It's decent enough advice, and intended to stop setbacks from sticking long enough to become issues and obstacles. See that crappy thing that just happened? You can get over it and move on and still have a great time, and that crappy thing becomes a great big nothing.

It's been a strange time in life lately, and I fell off this blog. I fell off normal life. I fell into being somebody else for a little while, and realised it was no fun. Worst of all, I climbed off my horse. I climbed off, voluntarily, intentionally. Even though I landed on my feet like a regular dismount, I might as well have thrown myself face first into the dirt. My demons cackled with glee.

See these crappy things that happened? They're huge and terrible and your life is over and you'll never be happy again. You are a great big nothing.

It spiralled. I watched myself behave in a way that I hated. I listened to myself say things to Cowboy that were unfathomably horrible. I felt myself sliding like a poisoned body into a murky swamp, completely apathetic to stop it from happening.

It wasn't quite what I wanted, given that I was making plans for my whole future at the time, and a murky swamp wasn't what I really had in mind.

Shut up, the demons said. What you want doesn't matter. You'll never get it. You're going to fail at everything you ever do, you'll lose everything you've ever had, and you'll never have anything again.

And then I finally saw the sunshine. I saw this Sunshine:



I sat in the saddle in tears, about to climb off again (throw myself metaphorically face first in the metaphorical dirt). I had a violent meltdown. I was on the verge of quitting - quitting everything. I'd just go back to bed and never get up again.

Cowboy gripped my knee as I went to dismount, holding me still. He was unusually forceful. He almost shook me.

"Stay on the horse," he said. I fought him feebly for a moment. He said it again, slower, more urgently. "Stay. On. The horse."

"I can't," I protested, sobbing. "I'm just not in the right mood." I'll never be in the right mood again. Everything is worthless and useless and my life is already over.

"She doesn't care," he said. "Go ride." He let go of us, and chased Sunshine off into the middle of the arena.

I sat there as she walked about, looking for a spot where she might be allowed to stop. I didn't even pick up the reins. I watched her look back at me first with one brown eye, and then the other. She listened to me as I tried to catch my breath between the tears. She heaved a big sigh, and stepped onwards across the sand.

I finally came out of the haze. I emerged, squinting, from the toxic fog where the demons muttered at me, and I noticed the way she moved beneath me. I noticed her gentle, deliberate footfalls, and her patient breath. When we finally stopped, I felt her big heart pumping.

We had a big breakthrough that day. I say "we" did. I mean me. She has life all figured out already. I needed to hear it from her. She turned her head a little, looked up at me on her back. I like to think she was saying "Hey, human, what's the big deal? I've got this."

She became a safe place. That's an amusing notion, given that just a few weeks earlier I had been frightened to be on her back. Now, I will climb on her fresh from the field, and we put the world to rights.

Except now I am back in England, thousands of miles from her, and looking into the fog once more. In searching for another safe place, I'm climbing back on to the blog. Let's ride.

Fear and hate

I had flu the last few days. It was pretty miserable. I'm starting to come back from it now, and I'm enjoying the "massive and sore lymph nodes in the neck" phase. Immunity is an amazing thing.

I am often overly concerned with other people's feelings, to a fault. It's a weakness of mine, a powerful urge to please everybody, all the time, even if it means sacrificing my own needs, wants and desires. I take grudges held by others very personally, even when they're not held against me.

I'm reminded of Master Yoda's wise words.



Fear is our protective emotion. It drives our desire to survive. But to live in fear of other people being fearful, angry or hateful is not really surviving...

So, I'm taking a lesson from this guy:

Keep your footing, as best you can, and trot on...

Pushing forward

Last night a friend of mine posted a link to this video on Facebook. It was about 1am and I couldn't sleep. I thought I'd watch the video, turn everything off and then go to sleep.



Suffice to say, I watched the video, cried, and then couldn't sleep. I'm excessively emotional these days. Sam Berns sadly died just a few days ago, just 17 years old, but that's not why I was emotional. What struck me was his uplifting positivity and perseverance.

Those of us lucky enough to live in relatively wealthy and developed countries are privy to a very safe, comfortable lifestyle. We are rarely hungry or thirsty, we have warm beds to sleep in, stylish clothes, and if we have a headache, we can take one of any number of painkillers to get rid of whatever is challenging us. We face so few real challenges that when something difficult does come into our lives, we flail about in panic, wondering how on earth we will cope.

The human body is extraordinarily resilient. Even with Progeria, Sam's body endured 17 happy years and allowed him to achieve some of his ambitions. Whilst he may appear slender and fragile, his skull protected his brain through the years to produce this intelligent, thoughtful and inspiring young man, who wants to show other people how to be happy. It's ironic that we so often look up to people who appear to have 'difficult' lives for advice on how to be more content with our own. Sam is firm on the point that he has a very happy life. Is that despite the challenges he lives with? Or do the hurdles give him perspective on what is important in life? Maybe we would thrive a little more with a few more sticky situations to battle through.

I loved him most of all for his words on pushing forwards. I am often guilty of lingering over the past, or dragging it along with me, or looking back at it and sighing. Challenge can stall us in life, surround us and make us come to a standstill, as if we can do nothing until the challenge has somehow disappeared again. Sam encourages us to push forward, move on through it all, to not be embodied by the obstacles in our lives.

I'm adding it to my resolutions for the year. I'm going forwards this year, not back.

Obligatory 2014 post

2014 is the Year of the Horse (so they tell me), which seems to me like a pretty good start. I actually started 2014 in the bathroom, picking at in-grown hairs on my legs, because I'm just that glamorous and exciting.


I hear Sunshine has turned into a bit of a snarky biatch whilst she's had some time off over the festive period, so Cowboy has gone back to ride her fat butt off and remind her not to be so uppity.

I spent a few hours yesterday with a notepad and a pen, and scribbled out two pages' worth of things I wanted to achieve, acquire and investigate at some point in 2014. Some of them were urgent, and need to be done two weeks ago, including renewing my passport so I can go to the US in February, which is cutting it really rather fine indeed... Well done, Bee.

My two page list has been streamlined and formatted into a colourful Excel spreadsheet of a checklist, with headings like "URGENT", "SH*T THAT NEEDS DOING" and "SOUL FOOD". There are other, more boring and business-like headings for more boring things like my business.

"Soul food" is the biggest category. It's a list of things that I want to experience, skills that I want to practise and improve, new things that I want to learn about. It includes conquering my fear of making bread, learning about how to keep chickens, finally learning how to use my camera in a more advanced way than just pointing it and pressing the button, and going back to do more horse archery.

As I enter 2014, jobless and living with my parents (again, the patient souls), with my partner in crime on the other side of the planet, and having given up something that I worked extremely hard for when I eventually admitted it wasn't what I wanted, I put together this list of soul food in a bid to seek out happiness and success this year, without having to radically change my entire diet, appearance, wardrobe or daily habits.

Yes, I would like to develop gluteal muscle mass, I really would like to have an arse to fill out my jeans, so I will probably need to do something different there, but generally I just want to enhance what I am already very lucky to have in life.

Wishing all of you a successful, happy 2014. Spend time with your friends and family, give some things away, go outside and play in the rain. Be excellent to each other. Etc.

Seasonal thoughts

Christmas Day has come and gone, and as with everything in life, it wasn't exactly all to plan. Cowboy was struck down with germs and spent all of Christmas Day in bed with a fever. My niece ricocheted around the house with luminous green snot pouring out of her nose and a very productive cough - which I appear to have now caught.

We ate food, we played Monopoly, we opened gifts, and eventually I went to bed in the guest room whilst Cowboy sweated out the last of his illness without me. We have bailed out to a family bolthole in Cornwall, where we are doing very little - I am coughing up my lungs and he is enjoying not needing to get dressed today.

I took a few minutes to watch the glorious sunset this afternoon, the sun slipping into the ocean and even seeing the elusive green flash.

I love to come down here, to the very end of the country, and perhaps I will come back here after the New Year and spend some time alone. It is a good spot to work on a book, or a business project, or both.

It's also getting around to the time of year when we all start thinking about the ways we want to change our lives, and make those over-ambitious resolutions. In her Christmas speech, Her Majesty The Queen talked about reflection, and how important it is to take time to look at one's life and think about what there is to be thankful for, in the past, the present, and the future. She has a good point.

January sales and the festive season encourage us to consume, to eat all the food, buy all the good deals, want all the things, be at all the parties, have all the fun. Didn't get what you wanted for Christmas? Buy it for yourself in the sales.

I shy away from all that these days. All I wanted for Christmas, I got: my Cowboy right here where I can touch him; most of my family together for a few days; a cozy nook with a warm fire and a spot to put my feet up.

I hope all of you were similarly lucky :)

Downtime

Our broadband at the house was cut off for a while, due to some disorganisation and miscommunication, and as such I was limited to my 3G allowance on my phone (which rapidly ran out), and to trying to remember what I did before we had the internet.

It provided some downtime, and gave a kickstart to a few projects. I started packing up my possessions ready to move out of London. I've filled ten archive boxes with junk, and don't appear to have made any headway whatsoever.

I started writing again: I made a small dent in both the trashy romance I started a while ago, and a dent in the rewrite of my trashy fantasy novel which took me ten years to put down a complete draft.

I even picked up a book and read for a while. I often feel guilty about reading, as if I should only do it when I have nothing better to do, and certainly not in the daytime, and really the only acceptable place to read is in bed, and only then if there's nothing else that needs doing.

Reading has become an expensive luxury, not a commodity. I remember when I was younger, I would pull out the futon in my room into its chaise longue shape, sit under my reading light and plough through an entire Robert Jordan novel in a day or two (Aside: I never did finish the Wheel of Time series, I think I gave up caring).

These days, I can barely get through ten pages. I'm not sure why. It might be a lack of a suitable space in which to read, or that I always feel there is something more important that I should be doing. Of course, I am no longer a teenager who doesn't have to feed herself or pay rent, so there are a few more important distractions about than there used to be, but it would be good to re-establish a reading habit. The last book that I chewed through at a voracious pace was Lonesome Dove, which was more addictive than my Xbox at the time. I'm yet to find a book that sucks me in so well.

I have also watched a lot of The West Wing, as I have the DVD box set (stolen from my parents), and as a result I have a slight girl crush on CJ Cregg, who is probably the most inspiring, wonderful, powerful female character I've seen on TV since Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the only situation in which Buffy would beat CJ would be in a vampire slaying competition (and even then I'm not sure).

I have upgraded myself to an iPhone 5s - it's white and shiny and has a fancy red leather cover because I don't trust myself not to drop it or try to hold it in my teeth and other foolish things to do with expensive equipment, and I've already put Siri to good use texting people while I'm driving. Siri is not good at understanding me yet, but he's trying. Mostly, I am enjoying the lack of delay between touching the screen and things happening. Good night, sweet iPhone 4, you have served me well, but your day is done.

Upgrades

I'm taking the plunge. I'm leaving my current university and abandoning my physio degree to pursue life with Cowboy. I'm moving out of London. I'm clearing out my possessions.

Let's gloss over the part where I clear out my freezer and promptly buy 30 packs of fish from the door-to-door fish guy. Way to downsize, Bee.

Part of my strategy for this next phase of life is to consider how to best equip myself for the future. I recently purchased a laser printer - an extravagance by usual standards, and I'd never considered how much of an improvement it might be over my juddering inkjet. My inkjet guzzles ink cartridges, and clunks laboriously through the pages. Its saving graces are that it is red, and it has a flatbed scanner built in.

Then my black box of a colour laser printer arrived, and quietly glides through a 20 page print job in next to no time. All it asks is that I reinsert the paper so it can print both sides.

"Do I really need this?" I asked myself when it arrived, still packaged and returnable. I thought about it for a moment. I was still a student, and had pages of notes to print out most days. There were long articles to read and annotate. Then I thought about my business, and how much paperwork gets generated by the day to day admin of keeping the company going.

Then I thought ahead to when Cowboy's business is up and running, and we'll have liability release forms to print, records for the horses, invoices, advertising materials, letters... If I have a second business alongside that, there's more paperwork than you can shake a stick at. I've conveniently skipped over the paperwork involved for our visa application that faces us in the future, because I don't want to think about how stressful that's going to be.

I look at Black Box with a vague sense of respect. If it can keep going and keep up with what we'll be throwing at it in the future, it will be worth every penny.

I now look at my battered iPhone 4, which has tolerated all of the abuse I've put it through over the last three years and only protests by occasionally not letting me press the home screen button. Is it time to upgrade myself? My dad is starting to eye up my iPhone as his next phone (he is still using my cast-off Nokia from 2004). Perhaps it's time to invest in the next phase, for both of us.

When I move over to the US, it's probably time to splash out on a really good kettle. A few really good saucepans. Things that will last. The days of buying the Argos Value range are probably numbered.

It's about time.

"The Road Not Taken"

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Robert Frost had it about right. For over a week, now, I have been looking down each road as far as I could, considering which would be the best to take. Like this traveller in his poem, I can't take both. I also probably can't come back and walk the other one later on.

Today, I took the necessary steps down the road I have decided on. I have emailed my course tutor to explain that I am withdrawing, and emailed my landlord to tell him I am moving out. So many other people are excited for me, and congratulatory.

I am bricking it, for want of a better expression. I am looking at my comfortable, lovely little home here in Tooting, and wondering why on earth I am about to leave it. I looked at my fellow students and the interesting timetables that we have, and wondered why I would ever want to give it up.

Perhaps that is the difference here, from previous "life-changing" decisions that I've made: before, I had something that I wanted to leave behind that was pushing me forwards. This time, I don't want to leave anything, I just want to reach one thing sooner, and that means I have to leave something.

I just hope that this road will be interesting and rewarding. It will not be without its challenges, I'm certain. I hope my sense of trepidation is a healthy caution that will stop any foolish impetuosity from clouding my judgement.

Because, of course, there is nothing foolish or impetuous about rushing off to America to fall in love with a cowboy, chase cows around, and decide to eat nothing but beef for the foreseeable future...

"Is she stupid?!"

Maybe she is. Let's see...

Something in the mechanism of writing this blog prompted me to be honest with myself about my depression, and prompted me to be honest about needing to seek help, which I did. The counsellor at university, whom I've now seen twice, was very good, and his acknowledgement of how I'm feeling about life has prompted me to think a little harder about things.

When I applied to university to study physiotherapy, life was very bleak. I had a dead-end office job that I largely hated, lived in a shabby house in a busy corner of London, and despite my best efforts, I couldn't find a decent man anywhere and was beginning to feel that I was destined for tragic spinsterhood.

When the offer from the university came through, and it was unconditional, it felt like the start of a new life ahead. I'd get a decent qualification in something that would be a good, solid career, and still live in London so that I might yet bump into that nice, wealthy banker who would eventually marry me and install me in a house in suburbia where I could raise organic children and go to yoga.

Then I discovered Cowboy. I had been determined not to discover anybody, but they say it happens when you stop looking, and after a whirlwind summer with him, suddenly I was in love with a man who was neither wealthy nor a banker, and his ambitions couldn't be further from a house in suburbia, organic children and yoga.

It was early days in our relationship, so I threw myself into my new degree with enthusiasm and enjoyed my first term immensely. I lived in a lovely little house in Tooting (they do exist), and I waited out the long months until Cowboy would visit for Christmas with a rosy optimism. It wasn't clear where this relationship was going, or if it would last that long, so I kept my sights on finishing my degree.

After he left from his long visit over the Christmas holidays, depression hit me hard, and I told myself it was just because I missed him. Looking back, it was the first sign that my goalposts were moving. After my trip over there in the springtime, I felt less and less interested in my degree, and more and more interested in how I was going to end up where I wanted to be: with him, raising partially organic, free-range children and probably working so hard I'd never have time for yoga.

And now? I spent long, glorious weeks with him this summer, and it was obvious where this relationship is going: marriage. Let's gloss over the part where I don't have a ring on my finger and he hasn't learnt that he can't propose with a bottle cap that says "Marry Me?" on the inside. His intentions are noble.

Now I sit in my lovely little house in Tooting wondering how best to forge our life together. Now I sit in lectures and tutorials imagining how long it will take for me to finish this degree here in London, move to America and get established before we're in any position to start a family. Then I think about how I could make that time shorter.

I could stop studying physiotherapy. I could enrol at a manual therapy school in Seattle and study there for 11 months, and come out with a diploma that enables me to be licensed to practise in America without any further hassle (glossing over the whole Green Card thing). I'd be educated in the requirements for running my own practice, I'd be informed about how to be accepted by insurance companies. I'd be two hours away from Cowboy instead of 24 hours.

This is of course dependent on being accepted to the school, on being granted a student visa, on finding somewhere acceptable and affordable to live. It's a little terrifying to imagine just flying over there and landing myself in a whole new city, a whole new country, but I have friends over there already, and the prospect excites me.

It's all theoretical just now. Cowboy is doing his best to be supportive and understanding, although I can tell he is freaking out. He confided in a friend of his that I was thinking of leaving my course.

"Is she stupid?!" was the response. Time will tell...

Perspective: Spiders vs South Dakota

Like many people I'm sure, I am often lacking in a sense of perspective. I have a tendency towards drama and exaggeration.

"There was this spider in my house and it was literally about twenty feet across and had laser eyes and napalm breath!"

Well, look at the sucker. I wasn't that far off...


Sorry for the gigantic spider image. That should maybe have come with a warning...

I woke up today convinced that the next two years were going to be difficult and terrible and miserable, and that I would genuinely be better off staying in bed all day.

Then I got hungry, so I ate two banana maple oatmeal cookies and had a cup of tea, and life didn't seem so bad. I did some research into various things that have been troubling me, and read some magazines, and dealt with a couple of business issues. I took a step in arranging to catch up on the classes I've missed over the last few days (due to certainty that bed would be a better place to be - thanks, Black Dog).

Then I read about South Dakota and the snow storms. To those of us living in cushy little England where it barely dips below freezing and there's a Tesco's on every corner, understanding just how devastating and destructive the weather has just been is a little difficult.

Dating a cowboy means I can see how the loss of a vast proportion of your livestock would be damaging both financially and emotionally. Many ranchers put their cattle before themselves time and time again, sacrificing lazy lie-ins to go and feed and check up on their animals. Whole families revolve around the cycles of cattle: brandings and sortings and shipping.

I've started to see my future with Cowboy as having a large element of cow in it - he'd like to run a small herd of cows one day, alongside our horse business. That means I will probably have to help with the round-up, the branding, the sorting, the shipping. It means I will have to get up early to help feed (if only to help feed the hungry humans who go and do the real hard work). It means we might have to put our bedroom on the ground floor of the house so that when there's a sick cow or a difficult calving, Cowboy can go out every two hours without disturbing the kids or having to negotiate the stairs in his exhaustion.

Reading about those who have lost their cattle, and some who have lost their lives, was rather more emotional than I expected. It certainly put my problems a little more in perspective, made me rethink what was really important, and gave me a kick up the backside that I sorely needed.

Confession Time

I have a confession to make. I decided I should make it now, whilst I don't have many (any) readers and it's less terrifying.



I suffer from depression. That's not a bad mood, or a sad mood, or any kind of mood. It's a mental health condition. It's an illness. It's chronic, and it doesn't go away. Sometimes it's "in remission" and sometimes it's crippling.

I went to my doctor a few years ago whilst I was working at an office in London, concerned about my lack of sleep, my poor appetite, my unruly digestive system, my fatigue and my general sense of dread about life. I'd actually gone to see her about something else entirely, and added on a nervous question about stress as an afterthought.

"I wanted to ask you about managing stress," I said as she scribbled me a prescription for something else. "I mean... I'm not..."

I burst into tears. She offered me a box of the finest in NHS-funded flimsy tissues.

I was lucky that my GP was so kind and attentive and listened to my garbled sob story (literally) as I tried to explain that I couldn't get up in the mornings, that I felt like an observer in life, that my guts were churning over every single worry and fear I could think of, and that I was thinking of a lot of them lately.

She smiled sympathetically and said, "I don't think it's stress that we need to address here. I think it's your very obviously low mood."

Low mood. That's how the medical profession label it to start with. It sounds innocuous enough, as if it's just a little deflated and needs some air. My GP offered me antidepressants, although even she admitted they were little more than a chemical scratch for an itching sore, which I declined for exactly that reason. If my mood was low, I needed to find out why, and I needed to fix that.

She gave me a leaflet for a counselling service which had a sliding scale of fees depending on your income, and suggested they would be better than NHS therapy which would only be a few sessions, and likely wouldn't be of much use in managing a long-term condition like mine.

I went to weekly therapy for six months back in 2012. If anything, it gave me a morning off work once a week, and a place to go and say things that I thought were too idiotic to say to my friends and family. For the first few weeks I would sit and cry and talk about how I couldn't stop crying even though I didn't know why I was doing it. After that I began to struggle a little with what I wanted to say.

That's the problem with depression. It isn't about anything. I wasn't sad. I wasn't angry. I wasn't frustrated or tired or embarrassed. I wasn't anything. I felt like a big void was inside me, and I was drifting through each day just hoping to make it to bed so I could at least be unconscious for a few hours and not have to think about how empty and useless I felt.

Then I met Cowboy and my life changed direction entirely, and my demons took a pretty decent break. I no longer had the office drudgery, I lived somewhere new and quiet and pretty, and I met a whole new bunch of people. Gosh, I even had some fun.

In January and February this year, I had some low days. I had days when I couldn't get out of bed - I just couldn't do it. I hid away from people, convinced they didn't want to see me anyway, and certain that if I saw them, I'd only make the emptiness worse.

I still get those days sometimes, and I've noticed them sneaking back in more and more since I've come home from America. I need to take a stand, and writing this post is part of it.

A young man on my course took his own life over the summer, having battled his demons for some time. His counsellor came to speak to us to explain how good he had been at recognising his low moods and suicidal thoughts, and how diligent he had been at seeking help. It made me realise that I am no good at seeking help when I need it.

It feels like a failure to admit that I am in a place where I can't help myself, where I can't just snap out of it and get on with it. Even though I am one of the millions of people enduring the long battle with depression, I am all too quick to pass judgement about it, and deny myself the help I need.

Not any more. This week, I'll be going back to therapy.

Powerless

Sometimes in life, we are powerless. The media and marketing moguls would have us believe that we can have anything, do anything, be anything, any time that we want (provided we can pay for it, of course), but the reality is that some things are just the way they are and there isn't much to be done.

As I lay awake last night until around 6am, fretting that I wasn't sleeping at the correct time and agonising over how this would ruin the rest of my entire life, I eventually shrugged and said to myself, "So, you're wide awake. You'll catch up eventually. Just be awake, then." Of course, the moment I let go of the angst I had pinned to my insomnia, I fell asleep.

I have an exam scheduled for tomorrow morning, which I'd very much like to have done already so that I can get on with my life without having to think about it, but there is nothing I can buy that will make the exam move, or make time go quicker. I could sit and fret, or I could sit and wait. Either will work, but one is more stressful than the other.

This morning, I heard from Cowboy that one of his employers doesn't think he's pulling his weight - opinions are like arseholes: everybody has one - and I get very defensive about him when people put him down. He doesn't deserve it, he works harder than anybody I've ever met, often for difficult people, and I am the only lucky soul who gets the brunt of his frustrations. There is nothing I can do about this, though. I can't snap my fingers and make people change their minds, nor can I magically whisk up the money and wherewithal to get him out of this job and in to a well-equipped ranch of his own so he can work for himself. Right now, I can't even give him a kiss and rub his aching back.

Powerlessness is an uncomfortable feeling, and many people would demand to try everything possible to avoid it. Some might say "There's always something you can do about your situation." They'd be right, but in cases like these, the only thing you can do is accept the situation. Be patient. Be forgiving. Be resilient.

There is a curious strength in giving up the fight against something you cannot overcome. 

A small thought about long distance relationships

 A casual 5,500 miles separate me and Cowboy for the majority of the time. Another part of the deal is the 8 hour time difference, which means that when I wake up, he is just going to bed. I am lucky that it is only 8 hours, and I do get to speak to him for the last part of my day, and sometimes first thing in the morning if he stays up late.

Getting to see each other is expensive, both in terms of high flight costs and in terms of the time needed to get across the planet and back.

It's really not the best idea either of us ever had (but he started it, so I like to blame him).

For a little while, I joined a very popular forum for people in long distance relationships, and for a while I thought I'd found a good place to hang out. Then I grew tired of the threads detailing how somebody hadn't replied to a message, or somebody hadn't wanted to sleep with Skype running, or how somebody had said something like "We need to talk" and the forum was supposed to suggest what it was about.

I realised I didn't identify with any of these people. Sure, they were in long distance relationships, just like me, but I came to the conclusion one day that, actually, I was secure enough about my relationship not to need to wise counsel of complete strangers. I didn't panic (any longer) when I didn't get an immediate reply to my message. I would put my phone down and go and get on with something else. I didn't get jealous of his friends who are girls. I didn't feel the need to share my relationship with these people.

Cowboy and I take it one day at a time. We say good morning, we say good night, every day without fail - unless we have no signal, no battery, or one of us is drunk. We don't get angry with each other for having a life outside of Skype and What'sApp. I encourage him to go out and socialise and flirt, because I know he enjoys it and I also know that he would never go beyond flirtation and a dance. We trust each other completely. We talk openly and frankly about marriage and kids, so we both know where this is going. We also avoid games at all costs.

There's no time for sulking or manipulating, and where would it get us anyway? When he does or says something I don't like, or that upsets me, I tell him as simply and honestly as I can, as soon as I can. He usually then tells me simply and honestly that he's sorry, and also that I am overreacting. He rides out my moods with patience, unphased, and doesn't hold it against me. Maybe that's from his work with horses...

We true to keep the bigger picture clear. When times are tough and I'm lonely and sad, and I miss him so much I could chew through a pillow, he reminds me that "one day we'll be together all the time, and then you'll get sick of me."

He is probably right, but distance seems to have taught us a great deal of tolerance. Those little things, the missed messages or the plans that don't include waiting by the phone or the computer, don't matter. The geographical space between us isn't enough, we give each other space away from communicating. And we work hard at keeping drama out of it. I choose not to mind about his grubby fingernails or his (obscenely) smelly feet, because on balance he's a pretty good catch. I like to think we'll keep these things going when we finally live together.

I don't think our relationship is special or different because we're long distance. Maybe that's why I didn't last on the specialist forum. 

A Japanese proverb (which I found on Pinterest) says: Who travels for love finds a thousand miles not longer than one. If you find the miles long, maybe it's just not quite what you should be chasing after...