My relationship with Time by Madeleine Lee

From as long as I can remember I was scared of getting old.

I don’t quite know what I thought would happen to me. Maybe I envisioned that one day I would walk out of my house in a trance, go to the hairdressers and get a blue rinse and disappear in a puff of smoke.

When I say old, I mean fifty. That was the figure I had carved in my mind.

Fifty and my life as I knew it would come to an end and I would become invisible!

It seems so ridiculous now to have wasted all those beautiful years with a huge time-bomb in my hand, tick, tick, ticking away, when now I see how wrong I was.

It doesn’t help of course when we live in such an ageist world.

I remember when I started out in the music business at twenty three, I was constantly worried of time running out, especially when a well known producer said I had to succeed by the time I was twenty five or it was too late.

Now I say ‘too late for what!’

Would my audience not care for my music if I had a few lines on my face. But no, I ran with it.

This gave me a rather fractured relationship with time and time soon became my enemy. So much so that I wrote about time in my songs and cast time as a man-made monster in my seven book fantasy/ fairytale series, ‘The Angel of the Seven Shards’.

From an early age I started giving myself time limits.

Someone once said to me:'do you want to go with God’s time or your time'.

It took me many years to realise exactly what they meant.

My time was making me ill. I was never going to catch up with myself by running to get to a destination!

The problem with that is that you always feel as if you are in the wrong place. Cast in the wrong play. Your life feels out of sync with where you feel you should be. I had this map in my head of how I expected my life to be.

This is a dangerous game and has taken me years to master.

In fact moving to rural France has been a huge lesson. No distractions & He, that dark voice inside, says 'you can’t run away from me now'.

I thought thirty years of therapy and healing had taught me so much. I even gave away all my self help books at my leaving party in England.

Little did I know I had yet another huge lesson to come.

Anyone out there that’s scared of getting older. STOP!

Life does actually get better – not everything of course, I would love to have my twenty year old face and body.

But would I swap it for what I have learned. No!

Would I swap it and feel all those insecurities again. Never!

And look around. The world is opening its eyes.

I am fifty -seven now and (apart from having Lyme disease/chronic fatigue /hashimotos) I have never felt so good in my skin.

And you know what? I still believe in my dreams and I haven’t had a blue rinse and I most definitely haven’t disappeared.

In fact it is only now that I can say I truly believe in myself!

Wow that was some time coming!

All you beautiful girls out there … take note .. our time is now!!!!

To be continued … we have work to do .. to spread the news!!!

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