Table for Five

by Izzy Bromley

‘This is something you can use. Your emotional response to the injustice can be harnessed to create great work in the future,’ she says.

I’m time rich and motivation poor which is not a space I’m used to occupying.

I’d thought that I had my life entirely under control, that I was precisely where I needed to be. Yet when I scratch at the shiny surface, that veneer of perfection seems to be coming away under my fingernails. Things really weren’t as wonderful as I let myself believe.

‘I never understand that expression,’ says Ethel. ‘Just because other people have it tougher doesn’t make your problems any less valid.’

‘Well, I’m left with plenty of time on my hands, and enough money for now, but none of the things that make life magical,’ I say. ‘I need to regroup and rebuild.

I can see how it only takes one tiny problem for someone’s life to change. Something that starts out small, trivial even, can grow into a problem we can no longer find solutions for, and faster than we might believe. Don’t they say that we’re all just a couple of bad decisions away from catastrophe?

She carries an infectious energy that I enjoy. Being with her is like standing in a room full of lightbulbs on a cloudy day.

She sees things differently to me. Where I spy potential pitfalls, she sees only possibilities. It’s very refreshing.

I’ve never been lacking in confidence until recently. I was so sure of myself and my place in the world. I don’t think I’d realised just how much of that came from what I was signalling about myself through what I did, rather than who I am.

It’s strange because people like us probably don’t look lonely from the outside, and yet there we all are. There seems to be a hole in our lives, a space that I always expected would be easily filled but which seems to be empty. I’ve found everything I’ve ever dreamed of and yet something is still missing.

Maybe a lifetime of sharing everything online has had an impact on us millennials, made us retreat into ourselves somehow. We curate this life for ourselves on social media but then are wary of sharing what’s really going on in case it doesn’t match up.