There is a stage in adult life when you come to a crossroads. Usually about late twenties, early thirties. It is often a time in life when popular culture tells you this life should have panned out differently.

The problem is entirely to do with love and guilt, or more to the point the need to be loved and lose your guilt.

As children we love our parents unconditionally. As adolescent adults, we transfer this need for love to our sexual partners. As young adults there are usually one or two major relationships where you become part of something else. For a time we feel that this whole is us! There are friends, there are good times, times when you feel complete as part of the whole, it swallows us up.

The stability of this whole hinges entirely on your desire for 'love' and someone else's desire for yours. Invariably such a relationship is never made up of two equals that love in the same quantities. Generally one is more dominant, the other loves more. Over time individuals change, your minds 'self' emerging with passing years, ironically, often from the strength of these relationships. The balance shifts. If there is to be continued success one of you has to accept something that is not you.

So then, we drift. Different people do different things. Sometimes they will launch into another relationship, for that short term fix. Sometimes they find faith, a career, religion, others have babies and create devoted love of their own.

So few of us actually do what we need to do, because its the hardest option. To truly anchor yourself, the absolute first person you need to love is yourself. I don't mean looking in the mirror and liking what you look at. I mean looking at that person and loving what that person stands for, what they think. What are their passions, what do they love, hate and what makes them insecure. Taking these insecurities and looking them in the eye, managing them, accepting them. THIS IS ME!! I DO NOT HAVE TO BE PERFECT!

I think we desire to be perfect because our childhood leaves us with so much guilt. We start out on the back foot. I have felt guilty all my life, as a child I turned left I should have gone right, do this not that. Why did you think this, think that. As an adolescent, girls; bad. sex; hell and brimstone. Babies outside of wedlock; Your life will be nothing, you will amount to nothing, you will go to jail!

By the time I was 34 I had worked so hard at overcoming the objectives set by my parents, exceeded them, obliterated them, so lost myself and my frailties in relationships that when I found myself ejected into the big wide world, alone in 2000 I felt utterly disconnected. In truth I had been adrift for a lot longer. I had built a shield through which people could not see me. Anyone that knew me at the time would probably have summed me up as confident, assertive, successful, occasionally overbearing and sometimes witty. Inside I was still petrified like I had been at 18.

I don't recall that I made a concious decision, I think some part of my mind strove to be anchored, that part of me that is strong beyond most peoples comprehension decided it was time to stand up else I was going to sink. I strove to work out how it had come to this, why and to what purpose. Why did I feel so guilty? Even for feeling this! Who the fuck was I?

The very first thing that I decided to do was work out what I believed in?