Aibu to ask if you are living the life you hoped for?

[thelastjedi]

Hi all,

Just wanted to get some views to see if people are living he life they want to live basically being nosey.

On paper I have the life I've always aspire to have, two kids, my own home, a very good career that lets me work 4 days a week with pension, good holidays etc.

In reality I am so tired from keeping up this existence and I have a bad hip/pelvis which started to play up over a year ago and hasn't been right since. I'm still young-ish and I just feel I'm on the treadmill of life, commute, pick ups from after school club and childminders and rushing around like a maniac every evening before bedtime only to have very early starts the next day with a long commute to work.

If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that by the time I was 30 I would have a great career,two gorgeous kids and my own (mortgaged) place, younger self would have thought my life was set. Present self feels like it's not all it's cracked up to be.

So.... is it normal to feel this way or would you say your life is what you expected it to be and do you enjoy it?

I'm not trying to sound ungrateful but sometimes I wish life would let me have time to take stock of things instead of moving in a hurried blur.

So weird to see this thread title as it is just what I was thinking about this morning.

I don't exactly know what I was expecting my life to be, but now that I am older and wiser and I realise how I could/should have done things differently when I was younger I am massively pissed off with myself. I don't feel like I have achieved as much as I should have done, and it has taken me 20 years to get my head around how I ought to be doing things in my 'career' whilst others who are 20 years younger than me are already far far ahead of me the second they spring out of uni.

I have a DD who I love beyond words and I never knew if I would become a mother so I'm really thankful and blessed to have her, though she has anxiety issues I could not have forseen. My DH is a good man who loves us and works really hard but who has a lot of demons and is prone to depressive episodes, he blows up and threatens to leave whenever anything difficult happens and throws him off kilter - so that isn't what I was expecting from our life together.

If I could go back and do it all differently I would - if I could guarantee I could have my DD too. I would go to uni - which I didn't. I would move to the West Country - which I haven't, am in the South East, too worried about leaving family and friends behind to make the move. And I would make a success of myself in a way that I was just completely not capable of with the limited knowledge I had of my chosen field when I left school. Life is not what I expected - though it IS as difficult and scary sometimes as I always feared it might be. I feel I have wasted 20 years of my life being mediocre.

Hindsight is a bastard.