Arthritis, chin hairs and recipe hoarding

This week marks the official entrance into a new phase of my life. My mid-thirties. Who’d have thought that 33 to 34 would be such a big transition? Obviously, I have a few more wrinkles and perhaps I am a tad more bitter, but up until a couple of weeks ago I didn’t think that this impending birthday was going to be such a big deal. Then I really started thinking about turning 34 and all those little changes that have slowly taken hold of my life. Before I knew it, the first half of 2018 has just been revelation after revelation that being in my mid-thirties is significantly less glamourous than my early-thirties (and don’t even mention my twenties). The more I thought about it, the more I was hit with the undeniable realisation that I am one birthday away from hair rollers, shower caps, ten cats and wearing a nighty until 11am on a Saturday morning. Case in point

1) I don’t recover like I used to. This has spread over several areas of my life. For example;

• A month ago, I climbed Mount Cooroora with a couple of friends. It was fun, scary and a lot bloody harder than I was anticipating. Half way down I could feel my dodgy left knee starting to grumble. If it wasn’t for the burger and beers we had at the Copperhead Brewery after I would have whinged the whole way home. The next day my knee was so damn sore and by lunch time I had pretty much convinced myself it was time for an MRI and an early knee replacement. Two surgeries on it in my teens has ensured that I will have early onset arthritis. Thankfully the old girl settled down and I am back running with minor twinges here and there, but my King of the Mountain days are over before they even started.

• Exercising; how the hell did I use to do 2-3 hours every day? Was I deranged? Now, I give myself a pat on the back if I get 30 minutes of exercise done every second day. I need at least 24-48 hours between any physical activity. This old bag needs her beauty sleep, arthritis needs to settle and gone are the days of exercising in the cold, dark or rain.

Tuesday morning 

  Wednesday morning  

• The prolonged recoveries are most notable however, after a night out. If I can manage to bypass feeling unwell and achieve intoxication, holy hell the hangovers sure ain’t what they used to be! I mean, what is with a four-day hangover? This is probably the sole reason that big nights are limited to approximately three times a year when about 15 years ago it was common for them to happen at least three times each week. 

2) There is now the need for considerable research and a long-term investment in a good beautician. There is a lot to be said for chin and facial waxing now I am approaching mid-thirties. Firstly, I can’t see these damn hairs I wish to pluck, secondly, they seem to be multiplying at a rapid rate and thirdly I really don’t think I will look good with a beard. As my eye sight starts to fail and my neck movement becomes more restricted (more arthritis) I am acutely aware that I can’t even see these fuckers. Whilst on the topic of hair, when did my toes decide to join that party? Thankfully my ankles are still really bendy and I can pluck every last one of those little buggers out. I have also come to the conclusion that I need to stop plucking my own eyebrows. I made a trip to the beautician last week for an ‘eye combo’ (eyebrow wax, lash and brow tint) where I was told that one of my eyebrows is too far away! Since then I have considered leaving the house with an eye patch due to my eyebrow spacing complex. This is also the age where I am now seriously considering botox. I am happy to age gracefully with injectable assistance so any recommendations as to where to go are welcome. 

3) I can no longer deep squat, kneel or even take a t-shirt off without joints cracking/ creaking or involuntarily groaning in pain. I have successfully put my neck out by reading a book in bed. I shudder when I need to put on or take off a sports bra. I’m pretty sure useful days for my hands, thumbs and wrists are numbered thanks to working as a Physiotherapist for the past 13 years. I don’t think it’s ever too early to put in bathroom rails or invest in a toilet/ shower chair. 

4) I now drink Gin and tonics. Funnily enough this is also the drink of choice for psychopaths and narcissists. In saying that; thanks to everyone reading and sending me comments, you are feeding my narcissism. Reader’s digest however, suggests that this makes me sophisticated and the ‘cool’ one in my friend group (HAHAHAHAHA). I have also refined my wine choice to ONLY Pinots (Noir, Grigio or Gris) and the recent addition of Tempranillo. Don’t even mention the ‘C’ word to me….. that’s Chardonnay you filthy animals! I am now the proud owner of a wine-rack which may need to be replaced soon as it only holds 6 bottles at any one time. How did I think this was going to be suitable? (<= subtle hint for a birthday present people 😉) I am currently researching wine clubs which deliver a dozen at any one time, so this wine-rack and I really aren’t going to go the distance together. To complement the wines in the rack and the G&Ts, I am never without blue cheese in my fridge. 

5) I tear recipes out of magazines and screen shot them on my phone. I bought a pretty folder to file these recipes in under specific categories; breakfast, salads, mains, drinks, baking, desserts & cheesecake, which deserves to be a stand-alone category in my opinion. Spending a minimum of four hours of food prepping, baking and cooking on a Sunday is my idea of time well spent. For example, this past Sunday I toiled over a honey, soy chicken salad for my weekly lunches and cooked up a lamb roast with a roast pumpkin, beetroot, orange and goats cheese salad. How am I not a bloody catch? 

6) I hate making plans on Sunday nights and have serious anxiety associated with anything organised at 7pm or after on a school night. I like to be in bed by 9pm and don’t really function on anything less than 7.5 hours of sleep. Gone are the days of pushing through on 5 hours of sleep and responding to late night booty calls. These things need to be scheduled in advance at a decent hour of the day or evening. 

7) My feet hurt at the sight of high heels. I take two pairs of shoes out to all functions and unless I park directly outside of restaurant I’ll be wearing flats or wedges. I look absolutely ridiculous trying to walk in high heels. I am that girl who looks like she is trying to walk on a slack line, arms flailing, legs akimbo and moving at snail pace. Don’t talk to me whilst I am trying to walk in heels as this task requires 100% of my concentration to ensure I don't snap an ankle. 

8) I love mid-rise jeans. I’m conscious of sporting a muffin top and mid to high-waisted pants tend to hold all my mid-thirties softness in quite effectively. Gone are the days where I risk arse-crack when bending over to pluck out my toe hairs or put on my (flat) shoes. 

9) I don’t listen to the radio any more. I am obsessed with podcasts. True crime gets me every time (see Case File, Trace, The Teacher’s Pet, Dirty John). I indulge my inner nerd with ‘Science vs’, laugh my arse off with ‘My dad wrote a porno’, feel my heart break with ‘Alone; a love story’ and melt at the voice of Richard Vidler on ‘Conversations’. If you have never heard Richard speak you are seriously missing out. My all-time favourite though, is Andrew Denton’s ‘Better off dead’ where he investigates voluntary euthanasia around the world. When it comes to music my taste has regressed to the music my mum listened to when I was a kid and anything from the 90s. Enter; Phil Collins, Crowded House and Billy Joel. Of course, I still absolute love Keith Urban.

10) I now require an exorbitant amount of caffeine just to human. A shot before morning exercise, a double shot before work, sometimes one mid-morning and always one at lunch. I also have a Pepsi max at exactly 3pm which I start thinking about immediately after my coffee at lunch.I love the smell of coffee, the taste, the buzz, everything about it. 

In saying all the above, the most beautiful thing about my mid-thirties is I think I am starting to know who I am, what I want and what I don’t want. So far I have tried to live my life without the intention of pleasing someone else. Mid-thirties are that sensitive age in life where I have seen things start to not work out. Due to the fact that I take my sweet-arse time making life decisions, perhaps I will skip that stage in my life? I love my own company. I'm happy to be alone, travel alone and sleep alone. I think I might even actually like myself as a person. I won’t settle for anything less than I deserve in my friendships, relationships, work and life. At this point in my life I take a lot less shit than I used to. If you don’t value my time or me as a person don’t expect us to be friends for long. If you are passive aggressive or a bully I will call you out. My circle has got a whole lot smaller over the past few years but those who remain in it are truly exceptional people. I have had a pretty decent thirty- four years, aside from a few little challenges. I come from privilege with access to high class education, quality health care and I am lucky to have a stable career that funds my love of travel. So if all I'm now challenged by is a few chin and toe hairs, a little arthritis (mainly from treating my body like a rental car) and deciding what to cook on Sunday night, then I suppose my mid-thirties should be celebrated. And celebrate I will. With cake.

What's wrong with Rachael?

As I settle in for another sad Saturday evening, I have just finished baking banana muffins and am literally sitting in my bra eating eggs on toast. It’s that time of year when it’s not yet completely winter and inside it can still get a little balmy. Tonight, is one of those nights where my jumper is just a bit too hot and I really don’t want to dirty up another t-shirt. Sitting here in my skin-coloured bra, really is a good look when it’s teamed up with my back, pleather skirt and polka-dot ugg boots. It’s all about balance, right?

Speaking of balance, I’m off the red wines and am back on the G&Ts. Yup, I’m officially old. Gin really is an acquired taste as up until two years ago I thought it was like drinking poison, now I think it’s heaven in a hipster, mason jar. It’s the perfect drink for another date-less Saturday night, when the only thing on TV is the royal wedding. Speaking of which, I have just learnt the most distressing and infuriating fact. Meghan Markle’s first name is actually RACHEL! 

What the fuck? How can I not take offence to this?! Aside from the fact that her real first name is missing the second ‘a’, what’s wrong with the name Rachael? I think Princess Rachael has a rather nice ring to it. In saying that, I was never the girl who dreamed of being a princess. I was the ten-year old that told everyone she was going to be a lawyer. Talk about going around it the long way because it looks like I may get there eventually.

Ten-year old Rachael, however, also thought that she would be married with two kids by the time she was 33. Instead I went on a first ‘girl-date’ today. No, I’m not questioning my sexuality, but a new friendship is not dissimilar to a new relationship. You go through that period of conversation over beverages and meals to find out each other’s story, likes, dislikes, common interests, differences, wants, needs and to see whether or not you mesh. But friendship is a funny thing where you never have to ask; ‘what is this?’ It just is. You don’t have to have that conversation where you agree to be friends. It’s just organic. Then you introduce them to your circle, hope they slot in and share them with your established friends. As I get older, making new friends becomes harder. Because I am in my early thirties without a husband and 2.5 children I don’t have much in common with other women around my age. I can count on one hand how many 30-something single friends I have, so if one positive came from my drunken words last weekend it is that I have connected with another normal, single woman in her 30s. Thanks drunk Rachael (Paxton not Markle, just in case you are wondering). When I meet other normal, intelligent, fun, interesting, single woman it gives me hope that there may not be something majorly wrong with me that I cannot identify. Well, aside from the fact that I am extremely picky.

Additionally, I need help with dating, lots of help. Clearly, I am rubbish at dating, rubbish at tinder-ing and rubbish at identifying when someone is remotely interested in me. Apparently, I can also be quite stand-offish with potential love-interests. This is why a single girl need single girlfriends. We need our own personal coaches and confidants to help us navigate through the messy, complicated and turbulent world of dating. Yes, my married friends have obviously won at this game, but times have changed, the dating world has upped its game and it is brutal out there. I recently lost my go-to single girlfriend. She quit her job, sold all her belongings and moved to the Northern Territory. So that position is currently open and I am taking applications. Obviously, Rachel (Meghan) Markle won’t be applying.   

Paxton out.  

Is a third life crisis really a thing?

I will be 34 in a month or so. Thirty fucking four. How the hell did that happen? Here I am approaching mid-thirties, doing a job that is taking me no-where and having had a random hook up a few weeks ago with a guy I used to party-pash at uni. Geez I’ve come a long way in the past thirteen years. I mean, I purchased an iron a month back, the first one I’ve owned or had access to the past five years. When did they get so expensive? Over the past few years, I’ve been quite content to walk around in crumpled, creased and crushed clothing which, in part, is possibly a direct representation of my life.

For the past year and a half, I have been living life in this weird, hazy funk. I now know what directionless means. I have achieved exactly that. No direction. I have been asked time and time again, ‘are you really finished with triathlon?’ I feel that I have answered that question by selling off my race wheels, race kits and time-trial bike. Yes, I am done. I happily drive past the pool on a daily basis, with no intention of stopping in for a swim. I relish the fact that when the days get shorter and winter sets in, I don’t have to haul arse out of bed at 4:30am for a couple hours on the bike. What I do miss is purpose. I miss having a goal and a reason to get out of bed. All I have now is this massive, gaping hole that fills with anxiety and discontentment. What do other people do with all this time? Is that why people have kids? To fill some time and remove the painful boredom of a mundane existence? I have since tried to figure out what drives others to get out of bed? The thing that has hit me hard over the past eighteen months is now trying to fill this gaping hole in my life with work. I am trying to fill it with a job that doesn’t really excite me. I don’t hate my job, but I am not passionate about it. I go to work, do my best, walk out and try not to think about it until the next time I step through the door. For so long work was just a means to an end. It was the sponsor to my real love that was triathlon. But when the tables turn and work is now the nucleus of my life some severe re-assessment in warranted. I have reached a professional ceiling in my current place of work and I have no-where to go from where I am unless I open my own clinic. I once heard that if you look at your boss and are not striving to be them in five years-time then you probably need to re-assess and move on. Another thing a patient said to me was, ‘if you don’t like something, fucking change it,’ simple, straight to the point and it triggered a level of embarrassment from me. Time to stop whinging and bloody do something! But then I thought; maybe this is it? This might be all there is to life. Was I living in a fantasy world for the past ten years and now I have opened my eyes to reality? Am I seeing life for what it actually is for the first time in my adult life? The incredible Samuel Johnson once said something that resonated loudly with me;

‘We are chasing constructs like freedom and happiness & I’m not sure that those things, the way they are sold to us, are true at all,’

Yet I have this undeniable gut feeling, there is so much more. I’ve been spending the past year trying to work out what the hell I want to do for the next 40 years. I love writing and need to remind myself to do it more. Just write. I listen to podcasts in the car and on the bike and read at any spare moment and think ‘Yes! I could do this.’ I have fodder constantly flowing through my mind and then nine times out of ten, when I sit down to tap it out on my computer I get stuck after a couple of lines. Or, more than often than not, I think ‘ugh, I’ll write tomorrow,’ and then tomorrow turns into weeks, months and then it’s a year gone and I have written sweet stuff all. I made my first ever new year’s resolution at the beginning of 2017: to write something every day, no matter how short, irrelevant or shit, just write something. It went well for about two weeks and then my journal came to an abrupt halt. So, I did a writing course; Introduction to Creative Writing. A five-week online course through the Australian Writers Centre. It was great. I consumed the content. At first, I thought that the information was common sense, but the more I listened and read I realized that it was exactly what a rookie writer needs to hear. I thought I wanted to write fiction, maybe I still do and perhaps sometime in the future I may just do that, but when I go to write, what I really want to get down onto paper are my thoughts, emotions, struggles, confusions and unease. One of the biggest things I learnt through the course was that the characters your write about are not you. The problem is I know me best, but then again, do I really know myself at all?

I suppose I’ve had bigger things to worry about the past five years than a creased shirt or getting to know myself. On the 27^th of June it will be my five-year anniversary of being diagnosed with cancer. In the scheme of cancer this is a big milestone. Five years means you become one of the positive statistics. Most of the time, cancer is so far at the back of my mind until someone asks, ‘how’s your health?’ I have to contain my laughter when I get asked this. It sounds like someone is asking about the black sheep of the family. Don’t get me wrong, I still feel my neck on a regular basis checking for enlarged lymph nodes, swelling or asymmetry. Panic sets in around any persistent chesty cough given I’ve been through cancer and have an indolent metastasis behind my sternum. These days, however, trivial things are the biggest anxiety drivers in my life. Will there be a car park available at work? Can I get those concert tickets before they sell out? Will I get out of work on time for trivia on Wednesday night?  

The question is; how do I get out of this low point and make my dull life more exciting? You can’t blame me for not trying. I put my QTAC in two weeks ago and got an early offer to study a Bachelor of Law through QUT. I have applied for the Virgin Australia Cadet Pilot program. Today I got my motorbike learners licence. I spent two weeks travelling through Vietnam and Cambodia over Easter and I have a two-week trip to Borneo in August to do some scuba diving, hike Mount Kota Kinabalu and see the orangutans. I am currently researching my holiday for 2019. I have forced myself not to delete my tinder account after 48 hours even though it is still uninspiring three weeks on!

Somehow, I don’t think my romantic life is the key to my happiness. The truth is I think I’m happiest on my own riding my push bike, reading my book at a café or sitting at home alone with a glass of red watching ‘The Bachelor’- how do I make room in these places for someone? I recently went on a couple dates with a guy and he couldn’t understand how I don’t get lonely living alone. I felt like a freak and rather offended when he repeatedly asked me this question. I spend ALL DAY with people. Some days I see 18 patients plus the people I work with. Most days I just want to come home, not say a word, sit on my couch and watch trashy TV. Additionally, I am not in a rush as children aren’t really in my plans. There is no awareness of my biological clock ticking as my eggs age and commit suicide each month. It’s like my body knows that it is never going to produce new life. Seriously, I think my ovaries go on holidays for 6-8 weeks at a time and every now and then they wake up and are like; ‘holy shit, we haven’t sent a tribute out for a while now- someone get out there and remind her she's still a woman!’ The beginning of the end was when I started going to the movies alone. Oh my god, the absolute bliss of it! Two hours of my life where I had no guilt in switching off my phone, eating rubbish and occasionally bawling my eyes out with absolutely no shame. Two weeks ago, I went to my first concert solo. Talk about liberating. I knew no-one. I could dance, sing and duck in and out of the crowd without worrying about someone else. I also got to see an amazing artist that most people don’t know. (Halsey- check her out, she is bloody brilliant!)

Just to clarify, I’m not completely asexual. For one, I am very straight. I like men and occasionally, one will knock me for six. Case in point; about three months ago I met this guy and I became a blithering mess, appearing completely incompetent at cognitive function and being a functional human in general. My head takes about ten minutes to catch up with those butterflies certain males can give me and by the time I realize they are making me nervous, I have morphed into a ditzy fool. Shame. He was cute and even seemed half intelligent. On the positive side, at least I can still be attracted to someone.

So here’s to a future of options…. Or not. Who the hell knows?