Or you can read Julie’s story below:
It’s mid-December and our client Christmas party is in full swing at our Minories building in Aldgate. Our head office team, of which I’m a member, is based in the building. So as internal clients, it’s our party too.
Christmas music plays through the TV in the breakout space. There is the hum of conversation as people tuck into traditional Christmas fair, washed down with plenty of beer and wine.
A few stragglers remain and it’s rude to leave clients unattended. So I’m chatting to a couple of them, but very conscious that I need to be home soon. Not that I’m going to forget how much my presence there is required. I’m getting messages every few minutes asking where I am. When will I be back? Don’t I realize the children need me? One of the clients I’m chatting to cannot fail to notice how distracted I am by the incessant messaging and how anxious it’s making me to the point that he asks me if I’m okay.
I’ve known for at least seven years that I want a divorce. I was unhappy for a good while before that, but I didn’t have the courage, nor was I in the right frame of mind to do anything. My youngest child was just one, my eldest, 12, with a 10-year-old and a 6-year-old in between. So I’ve stayed in my marriage for another seven miserable years, painting a smile on my face every day for the sake of the children, always knowing the day would come when something would happen that would be the catalyst for me to do something about it all. So of all days and of all things – this, strangely, is it. It’s taken a complete stranger to make me realise that now is the time to leave.
It’s almost New Year, and I finally build up the courage to tell him that I want a divorce.
Suddenly he’s treating me like a princess. He can’t do enough for me. Would I like a new kitchen? Should we get a new sofa, like a new kitchen on a new sofa, can mend an irretrievably broken marriage.
Four months later, and I’m a shadow of my former self excruciatingly thin on antidepressants, taking Nytol to help me sleep, calms to moderate my nerves during the day, and beta blockers for when the stress overwhelms me so that my heart races uncontrollably.
My husband’s solicitor is being particularly vicious, especially because there is someone new in my life who is helping me through this whole nightmare. Work is an escape for me, with my wonderful colleagues helping me through the emotional rollercoaster I’m experiencing. Friends too come and meet me in Aldgate during my lunch hours offering support and TLC. I meet them at the nearby Sapphire Bar at the Blue Orchid Hotel by Tower Bridge or the hotel’s fabulous Italian restaurant, Cento Alla Torre. If the weather is good, we head to one of my favourite spots, Trinity Square Gardens opposite the Tower of London. I’m also lucky to be able to stay at the company flat on occasion on the top floor of our Minories building.
A year has passed now, I’m staying in the company flat for New Year’s Eve with my new partner and our two respective youngest daughters. One of my lovely colleagues whose father is a Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London, has arranged for us to go into the Tower just before midnight so that we can watch the fireworks. What’s an incredible honour? The trauma of last year is far from a distant memory as I’m still living through it, but I’m in a much better place. I’m full of hope that the new year will bring with it a new start.
I thought I’d found happiness with the man who supported me so wonderfully through my divorce. But happiness is a fickle friend sometimes. It turns out that alcohol is a demon for him.
Needless to say, I’ve kept him away from the wonderful work-related functions I get invited to. Keeping him away from these events doesn’t go down so well with him. So I finally relent and let him attend an awards event with me. We get ready at the flat and head to the O2. It doesn’t take him long to very quickly down a few glasses of champagne on an empty stomach. And so it begins.
It’s midnight now, and I’m back at the flat on my own. We are finally done. It’s felt like my life book was destroyed, my past, present, and the future I thought I had, torn to shreds before my eyes. Thrown into the wind. I could only watch powerless as the breeze caught up the fragile pieces of my life and carried them away until there was nothing left.
Fast forward a few months and I’m so horribly lonely. A friend sees how desperately sad I am and arranges for me to meet someone. Almost a year later, and that someone and I have hardly been apart. We’ve had the most wonderful times together: holidays, seeing friends, going for long walks in the park, coming into London to go to museums and galleries, but we’d also do absolutely nothing together and I never knew that you could be so happy doing nothing with someone. He’s taught me that you can be content, not living life at a million miles an hour, which is what I used to do to try and mask the unhappiness which consumed me.
I will always associate this period of my life with Aldgate, how it gave me the space to deal with the nightmare I was living through and offered respite from the chaos.I returned there often for meetings. Our head offices moved to elsewhere in the city, but we still have our Minories building and I have other commitments in the area which bring me here.
I’ve been rewriting my life book and I will continue to do so one page at a time. Not ever taking anything for granted or planning too far ahead, but being happy in the here and now, in the knowledge that I’m wanted, respected and cherished for the good person that I know I am.