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#866 Smita Tanna Reflections on Life

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Smita Tanna

So 50 was really amazing but turning 60 was incredible as well. I have 64 years of experience of being a giver because that’s what I’ve chosen to be. Suddenly I’m just allowing myself to give to me.

At 50 I was pretty much ending the menopause and I was making my life work for me so I’d have little naps in the afternoon. I was involved with lots of events like International Women’s Da​y, looking after an elderly gentleman​, ​working for the Royal Volunteering Service.

I think the freedom to be me happened around 50. I remember around that time someone asked me to do something I didn’t want to do and I just blew a raspberry at them and that just freed me so much.​ ​I thought oh I can actually say no and that felt so good. When I turned 60 it was just coming up to the pandemic and I wasn’t working that much at that time and then my husband to be decided to ask me to marry him. So we got married In 2019.​

Around that time we went to Scotland to visit my husband’s brother, ​he’​d​ been in a car accident that​'d​ left him with really severe injuries and he was actually really depressed and really struggling to do things. He wanted to commit suicide​. ​So we talked him around​. ​ And we decided to move to Scotland where my husband could be much closer to that part of his family. Now we live only 30 miles apart and we visit each other a lot. So we often meet with him and we do lovely things like go out for meals with his three kids his ex and her new partner so often as a group of 12 of us and we have a really nice time so the focus has gone from interactions with my family in Leeds to now investing in his family in Scotland.


Precis

At 50, the speaker experienced a sense of freedom and the ability to say no, while at 60 she felt incredible and allowed herself to give to herself, with significant life changes such as marrying her husband and moving to Scotland to be closer to his family.