How do you define success in life?

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Success? Well, surely that’s just achieving the outcome we desire? In life as in anything else?

What we might desire, though, is totally subjective.

My own desire was always to live comfortably and quietly. Now that I won my fight for finances, I am doing that. I have a modest, paid-for house in a place I love. As I write this, all I can hear is birds singing. I decide what I do, when I do it. And even as prices around us skyrocket, that I don’t go out much actually works out well for me, things like food and heat are still affordable. I don’t care about much else.

I always liked the idea of having children and ended up with a daughter. Bringing her up was immensely hard work but I’m glad that, in the end, she is her own, autonomous being and that when we do cross paths these days, it is on a friendly basis. But I’m also glad she lives 100 miles away, so her visits are planned, she can’t just drop in.

I don’t have a wide circle of friends, but those I have, I enjoy their company very much. In any case, I’ve always been happy to spend time on my own. Plus, the people I mix with virtually, like on WordPress, seem like a decent crowd. Pretty much entirely, I’ve cut bad people out of my life. I certainly restrict my contact with people I have doubts about. I’m divorced, but by the end, I considered her to have been one of the “bad people”, so it’s a definite plus that we have severed our ties.

So overall, I’m happy to live with that level of interaction with people.

I wish some things were better. I think I just heard a rat scurrying around in the loft, but I can’t get up there any more so I have to rely on traps set near the entrance hatch, and throwing blocks of poison up. But, you know, first world problems…

And healthcare here is woeful. People seem to love the UK’s NHS. The idea of universal healthcare is a great one, but in my experience, it just means a universally poor service. I want better. I don’t bleat on about it but when I suffered my stroke, the hospital initially sent me straight back home again, and I wonder to this day whether that delay is why I’m left disabled? You hear about all these clot-busting miracle drugs, but none were ever offered to me.

My local surgery is no better – I had a single visit there this year, and it resulted in two formal complaints against them. And I raised another when they screwed up my repeat prescription. Maybe it’s just me becoming more bloody-minded in my old age, but as far as I’m concerned, every mistake boiled down to simple matters of competence. And I’m far less willing to tolerate incompetence, especially when an organisation puts itself forward as a “healthcare professional”. I’d have been fired if I made some of the mistakes that they made.

So the end result is that I don’t feel I have any medical support. But that just means that I take more of the responsibility on myself, which is probably how things should be. It sometimes means that I need to learn more details than I particularly want to know, but at least I’m empowered to make my own decisions.

But there’s no point bitching. It is what it is, and we’ll all die one day. I guess the most any of us can do is to try and make the best of things, before that day comes.

To conclude, then, there are certain aspects of my life that I wouldn’t particularly wish on anyone, but overall, in terms of achieving the outcomes I desired, yes, I’m pretty happy that those boxes are ticked.