Daylight when I was doing my exercises this morning. A temporary respite – the dark will soon catch up again.
The level of chaos in my house and in my life has been creeping up again. Every room is infected by it. But I am busy, I have things to do, so I have excuses not to do anything about it.
Because no one comes into my house from outside – and I’m not expecting anybody for the foreseeable future – there is nobody to judge me – and I am working very hard on not judging myself.
A couple of days ago I didn’t have a photo to post on Facebook, so I took one of the chaos on the living room floor, and the cat behind it with a look that said: ‘how do I get round this?’ Then I made it my cover photo, thinking: ‘this will let people see who I really am. They’re my friends, they’ll accept me, they won’t judge’. Then a comment from one friend showed that she assumed it was the cat who had made the mess. How can you respond to that?
I am trying to untangle the threads of my identity, in the hope that I can learn to live at peace with myself. I am trying to embrace the Wild Thing, not fear and judge her and lock her away. Yes, I am chronically untidy and disorganised, and I understand now that there is a reason for that, although that doesn’t necessarily make the consequences of that chaos any easier to live with. I also know that I should make more effort to deal with it, but at the same time I know I ‘shouldn’t’ keep ‘should’-ing myself all the time. I hear the voice that says: ‘how can you learn to improve if you’re not constantly judging yourself?’ and the one that says: ‘how can you learn to love yourself if you’re always listening to your inner critic?’ and the one that says: ‘stuff this for a game of soldiers, do what makes you happy’ along with all the rest, they go round and round each other, and the little one in the corner just sits and cries and wishes she was anywhere else but in my head.
I ask: ‘This is who I am, do you think that’s okay? Can you let go of who you want me to be and accept this version of who I am?’ I get two kinds of feedback when I try and talk about dyspraxia – one that this isn’t the ‘real me’. It’s just another stick I’ve found to beat myself with; and the other that it’s just an excuse for being untidy, disorganised, lazy etc and I’m not trying hard enough to get myself sorted. The latter is what I’ve lived with all my life, and internalised at an early age: of course I can sort this chaos out if I keep at it and stop whining – the gremlin voice, the inner critic voice.