I spent most of yesterday getting stressed over how much I hate this time of year. All the miserable and uncomfortable Christmases in my life, even though outnumbered by the happy ones, rise up from memory like a dark tidal wave, and completely overwhelm them. I spent the morning working on the weather blanket and listening to podcasts, and then in the afternoon telling the therapist how ashamed I am that that’s all I’ve been doing, as well as about all the dark Christmases there have been in in my life, and how much I hate this time of year – in between bouts of weeping.
We got into the usual argument about what I ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be doing (‘should’ is like a red rag to a bull for her) and when she asked if it wasn’t just those voices from the past telling me what to do, I got irritated, because, no, it isn’t just that – I know for myself that I would feel better if I did all those things that I ignore in favour of sitting and crocheting.
‘What do you think will happen?’ she asked.
‘Well, it’s not healthy is it? I’d just go into a downward spiral and sink down and down’ I told her, waving my finger round in circles.
‘What’s your worst fantasy of what might happen, if you took it to the extreme?’
To the extreme??? I thought. What a bloody stupid question – like the question about what do you really want from life if money and reality and the law of gravity were no object – what’s the point of asking that?
‘That by the time I was missed, someone would have to break into the house and find me rotting, surrounded by piles of rubbish, and with half my face missing because the cat’s eaten it’ was what I actually said.
I woke as usual at four this morning, but instead of filling the time with podcasts and reading, I spent an hour brooding, just like old times. Then at five, I started reading some more of ‘Out of Sheer Rage’, and to my surprise finished it, although my Kindle said I was only 85% through it – the last 15% was taken up with footnotes and a preview of another book. I was telling the therapist about it yesterday, and how much I’ve enjoyed it, and she asked if it made me feel less alone, which it did, but like the dyspraxia forum in a bittersweet way, because it IS good to know I’m not the only one, but also depressing in that it suggests to me that there really is no way out.
But there are so many bits that I wanted to highlight, and I will share this one:
‘thinking of giving up is probably the one thing that’s kept me going. I think about it on a daily basis but always come up against the problem of what to do when I’ve given up. Give up one thing and you’re immediately obliged to do something else. The only way to give up totally is to kill yourself but that one act requires an assertion of will equal to the total amount that would be expanded (sic) in the rest of a normal lifetime.”
“Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence” by Geoff Dyer