Hi Susan.

A tough life, my heartfelt congrats on your strength on surviving as you have – incredible strength, I am not at all surprised you are exhausted and have no idea where to go from here. After all, life so far has literally been head down, survival, get through it, right. For the first time in what must feel like forever you have the space to raise your head and say – so hang on a minute – what about me, what about what I want. Your life hasn’t been wasted – it’s given you strength – but it is time to use that strength for yourself, to look after you and put yourself first for a little while, I’d say.

What can help is to try to breakdown what would make the biggest difference to you first, as if you try and think about everything you’d like to change it can quickly just get overwhelming and you end up doing nothing. For example, is it the loneliness or the financial situation that is harder to deal with.  Yes, despite all the legislation that says otherwise, it’s tougher to get a job when you are older when you haven’t been employed. What were your degrees in, what would you like to do? A lot of the bigger employers have “return to work” programs aimed at recruiting people like yourselves, it helps them bring diversity and different experience into their workforces. Worth seeing if anybody near you is doing anything like that.  It’s also sometimes worth thinking differently and instead of simply looking for a different job, think about what you enjoy doing and see how you could make money from that, a lot of people make good money from their so-called side businesses, often more than their day jobs!

On the loneliness/socially awkward front, best way is to slowly reintroduce yourself into social situations, not expecting much from yourself but just be proud of yourself for showing up. It can be helpful to set yourself mini-goals if you are that way orientated, e.g. I will go to one event this month, next month I will go to two. It’s one of those things that you just have to practice and get back into the swing of, like riding the proverbial bike. If you get anxious about, think ahead about a few things to say and mostly just listen, be interested in others – it’s easier if you are shy and people generally love it!

You can also think about using your hard-earned experience of your second child to help others, you must have a lot of what worked/what didn’t type advise that would be worth sharing.

Hope that helps a little, sorry you are in a tough place – feel free to share more, we’re here to listen and help where we can.