My beautiful husband died just over 12 years ago. His death hit me hard, and hit me hard for a long time. I felt like I had a sense of the dimensions of the impact of his death. Thinking about my career, I’ve come to realise I hadn’t fully appreciated how it had affected me in terms of the extent to which I find it difficult to make longer term plans.

His diagnosis – already terminal by that point – came only 6 weeks after I’d finished my MSc. I’d already started job hunting but as soon as we got the news I stopped that immediately. Being able to have a job where people already knew and trusted me meant that when things were unstable and I needed to not be at work it was manageable, my incredible manager helped make it manageable. I could still work and support us both, vital given he wasn’t eligible for benefits and was working in a contract job – so it was only me who could provide an income for us.

After he died, for at least a couple of years, I just didn’t have any interest in getting a new job. I didn’t have much interest in anything in truth. I certainly didn’t have the energy to voluntarily start a new job and feel like I could bring a positive energy to it.

That gradually shifted and I started looking and applying and thinking. Eventually getting something and moving on and feeling like it was a positive reflection of my progress and recovery that I’d got to that point. That it was right that my life looked a bit different to when he was dying, that I was carrying on and properly trying to live and thrive.

When that job started to feel like it wasn’t right for me I started getting my job search on. Similar kinds of roles but different organisations. If people asked I sounded like I had a clear direction – the same subject, public or community sector but maybe a different kind of role. That felt ok. Then when a couple of job searches didn’t get me out of my current predicament, as privileged and first world problems as it is, I then had to try and figure things out a bit more.

Paying more attention to the bored, sinking feeling when I’d read a job advert that theoretically was a good fit and trying to figure out why I found it so uninspiring. Trying to wrangle with what it means to look around and not have people that I want to steal a job from – what kind of career path is it if there aren’t any jobs I see that I want?

Reading and thinking about how to make a change, there’s lots about goals and ambitions and dreams. Realising that I don’t have this big picture sense of what I’m aiming for career wise. No massive ambitions or sense of what good looks like or things I’d like to achieve by the end of my career. Trying lots of exercises to try and figure it out. In lots of ways I would think of myself as ambitious, wanting to push myself and do good things, learn and make a difference.

Yet again and again I would hit up against the sense of how impossible it feels to think longer term. It’s all so precarious and at any moment could fall apart. I can do longer term planning for things like a mortgage or pension. Which I think had hidden how much I didn’t do longer term planning or dreaming or scheming in other areas. With a mortgage, I think it’s because after the initial slog of saving up to buy somewhere, it’s usually cheaper to pay a mortgage than to pay rent. So in the moment it still makes sense to be doing the longer term thing even if I die two minutes later. Before Chris got ill I felt like I was thinking longer term – hence signing up to do a Masters. Since then, I’ve just not felt able to think longer term in a serious way – it just doesn’t feel possible. I bump up against the part of me that doesn’t trust in the future so I make a funny face, side-eye to show I know this is all ridiculous and then couldn’t quite get past that.

And there’s something good and true in that disbelief or mistrust. Simply setting aside those feelings doesn’t seem like a good idea, however uncomfortable it is to deal with them. It gives space for uncertainty, reminds me to be grateful for what I’ve got now, or at least try to. Gives some distance and perspective, a way to try and come back to what really matters and remember how lucky I am to be alive, briefly in time and space but as fully as I can be.

Instead it’s been about trying to find a way to sit differently with those emotions. To accept that it’s all fragile and contingent and make plans and think about hopes and try to translate them into reality anyway. Allowing myself to wonder and accept it’s all a work in progress. Making plans and committing to them, whilst trying to accept there will always be unfinished things. Life is a marathon not a sprint, even if we don’t all get to finish the marathon.

We don’t get to tie a bow around everything and actually that’s ok. It means we keep on living, right up until the point we’re no longer alive – and that’s about as much as we can hope for.