Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up

by Alexandra Potter

If you need some inspiration, here are a few things to get you going: I am breathing. Are you kidding me? Breathing? There’s grateful and there’s pretty much dead if that’s not on my list.

On the contrary, it means starting a whole new topic, usually involving telling me about someone I don’t know, who is related to someone else I don’t know, who lives next door to someone I truly have never heard of, who has died.

What I want to know is, when did busy become better? When did a jam-packed diary become a measure of success?

And yet how can the world keep on turning, business as usual, without them in it? As time moves on, the further away you become from the last moment you saw them. They retreat into your past as you travel into the future. The distance between you growing as their voice fades and the memories blur.

He smiles and does this sort of wink that would have made my younger self think he was flirting, and my forty-something self wonder if it’s less of a wink and more of a squint as his eyes ‘are going’.

Even in death, timing is of great significance.

the people who matter will see you, no matter what.’

Please RSVP when you’ve finished googling ‘100 ways to get out of a hen do’ and realized there isn’t one.

Everyone’s just faking it! No one seems to have a clue what they’re doing.

For all of us, it seems, life isn’t always easy, and the lesson I’ve learned is that you’re not fucking up if life hasn’t worked out how you expected. Because real life is messy and complicated.