Unspoken
By Lilian Kendrick
At fifteen, the whole world lies ahead of you...at forty-four, has it passed you by?
Lydia had forgotten all about the list she made thirty years ago.
Now she has just six months to make her teenage dreams come true, before she turns 45.
Determined to turn her life around and achieve her goals she embarks on a series of quests for happiness, aided and abetted by her trusty sidekicks Trudi and Des.
Stumbling from one disaster to another, will she ever make it on time?
Is it ever too late to chase your dreams?
Chapter 1 Action Plan
It all started in October when I decided to clear out the attic. Trudi thought it would be a good idea to take my mind off 'recent events' as she put it. Why she couldn't just say to take my mind off Bob, I'll never know. We both knew what she meant; not that I was thinking about him much by then. The hurt was healing at last. Hearts don't really break, do they? They just get squeezed out of shape by life, and I was better off without him anyway - everyone said so.
No, it wasn't Bob who depressed me this time. I did it myself. If I hadn't found that bloody list I'd have been fine. "My Plans for Life" - written when I was fifteen - my hopes and dreams summed up in a few bullet points, and here I was, well past my sell-by date, and I'd achieved none of them. So I did what any woman would do in the circumstances, I sat on the floor and cried my heart out.
The next day, Des called round for breakfast. I hadn't seen him for a few days and he was just what I needed. He always knows the right thing to say.
"Why don't you just go for it?" he asked me.
"What do you mean?"
"The list - why not do all the things you wrote down? How hard can it be?"
I loved his optimism. I'd known Des for eight months. We'd met at a Creative Writing class just after my divorce and had been great mates ever since. He was a dreamer too, but he had this really positive outlook and once he made up his mind to do something it usually got done. If anyone could make dreams come true it was Des. He asked me to give him the list.
"I'll help you. We can do this." Then he looked at it and laughed out loud. "Lydia, honey, you are one crazy lady."
I bit my lip.
"It's impossible, right? I'm just one big, fat failure destined to live a life of disappointment!" I was close to tears again, but Des put his arm around my shoulders and stroked my hair.
"Not at all. You're just unhappy and lacking in confidence." He hugged me. "But, you're also a bit of a drama queen!" He released me and sat at my desk. "Now let's look at your list again and get this show on the road."
So I made some more coffee and Des drew up an action plan. Seriously, he tackled my list as if it were a business proposition!
"We need targets," he said. "SMART targets."
"As opposed to dumb ones?"
"It's an acronym. S.M.A.R.T. Your targets should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-scaled. That's how it's done in the business world."
"We may have a problem with achievable and realistic," I said, looking over his shoulder at the table he was creating on my laptop.
"'Don't hit me with them negative waves so early in the morning'." Des's impression of Donald Sutherland in Kelly's Heroes always cracks me up.
