remembering – Page 8 – Linda Rushby

10 November 2020

Brain Freeze

Back in front of my PC after my weekly trip to the shop. Oddly calm in the morning the last couple of days. I think it’s because I’m slipping back into the lockdown peace, no stress, nowhere to go, nobody to see, just my own peaceful life. Won’t last, of course it won’t, it can’t, at some point the world will wake up and I’ll be forced to deal with it again, but not now. Can’t believe it’s only a week since I took the van out, it feels like ages ago.

The sun is shining at present. I didn’t mow the grass when I said I would – maybe I will today, if it stays sunny, though it must still be wet underfoot.

I’ve not been remembering my dreams recently. When I wake up, I know that I’ve been dreaming and now I’m awake, but the content of the dream is completely gone from my awareness. It’s like watching something on the telly, and you know you haven’t been asleep, but you haven’t got a clue what just happened, or what was said, and you have to rewind the last few minutes to find out. Of course, that also happens when I’m listening to the radio, or reading, or even in the middle of a conversation (though in that case there’s no rewind button), and as I now know, that’s all part and parcel of dyspraxia. But I’m sure I used to remember my dreams.

Incidentally, although for me the lack of short term memory had always seemed to be the key aspect of dyspraxia, from which all else follows, it’s only recently that I’ve started to think it might be the other way round. Starting from the premise that it’s due to faulty message processing in the brain, and that that makes it hard to focus on more than one thing at a time, this leads to the phenomenon of ‘absent-mindedness’, whereby I have no recollection of where I put my glasses, because when I put them down no part of my brain was processing the information : ‘I am putting my glasses on the bookshelf/back of the toilet/behind the fruit basket/they just fell on the floor’ and so doesn’t leave an imprint on my memory.

Sounds like a good theory – it definitely reflects my personal experience, anyway. I expect somebody somewhere has thought of that before, but as I mentioned yesterday (I think), my PhD supervisor pointed out years ago that I struggle to accept things unless I can understand them from first principles. What I don’t think he understood at the time was that it wasn’t due to bloody-mindedness so much as that my brain couldn’t hold and process that information if I didn’t have the right pegs to hang it onto. Which sounds quite paradoxical, because although I can have enough flashes of insight to have achieved a PhD, there are times when my brain freezes and I’m incapable of absorbing what I’m being told.

28 October 202028 October 2020

Wednesday

Where do the words come from? Same old question. I’m not sure any will come at all today, I will just burble on about the daily battle with my cat for space on the desk to put the keyboard – I’ve made a lovely empty space to the right of the monitor, from where she can watch the street, or leap at the odd bluebottle battering itself against the glass. I found a silhouette of a bluebottle on the living room carpet the other day, spread out with its wings either side, like a cartoon character which has just been hit by a falling 50 ton weight. How did it get that way? I don’t remember smashing any recently, and I don’t think it would have come from the bottom of my shoe, so I suspect she has had a rare hunting success, though how such soft paws can apply such force is a mystery.

There’s a camper van parked directly across the street, a big beast, about three times the size of mine, parked across the fronts of two houses, and with a door halfway down the side. Thinking about it, maybe it’s only twice the size of mine, twice the length, anyway, though it might be wider… no, not even that, because it fits behind the dotted parking lines. I guess if you take off the cab, the living space is more than twice as big anyway. It seems to have been there a while – can’t remember when I first saw it. Maybe the owner is leaving it there for the winter. They’d have to be a resident of this parking zone to get a resident’s parking permit for it – you have to send a copy of the log book with the address on to get one (or possibly not now it’s all online). When I moved into this house there were no parking restrictions on this street, but since then the zoning system has been extended. I don’t have a permit for my van because I rent a garage for it from a friend who lives in a neighbouring road. The first winter I had it, when I was living in the flat, I kept it out on the street and it was broken into and my folding bike was stolen. It was very upsetting at the time. Bad things happen.

Speaking of which, I just moved my hand and accidentally whacked my cat in the face, so she has now slunk off to ‘her’ chair, a spare office chair which I keep next to the desk for her.

The website’s done (fingers crossed) and is waiting to be signed off and invoiced. And I have finally decided that the jumper is big enough to separate the sleeves. I hate wearing anything that’s too tight under the armpits (not that I’ll be wearing this one). It’s now on three circular needles (body and sleeves) with four balls of wool – looking forward to spending more time untangling than knitting.

27 October 2020

Running With Wolves

The deeper I get into the book I’ve been reading, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the more I relate it to my life, the more I can see how broken and bent my life has been. I know how melodramatic this sounds, I can hear the voices telling me all that stuff: how lucky I am to have had such a (materially) comfortable life; that I should stop whining and practise gratitude; that I should stop reading books that make me unhappy; that I should stop thinking so much and simply be.

I was never cut out to be a nice, good, well behaved girl, but I tried, I really did. Some of my struggles in that regard were clearly related to my dyspraxia, interpreted as clumsiness, untidiness, laziness, carelessness, not listening, not paying attention, all those traits of the ‘difficult’ child. I wasn’t deliberately ‘naughty’, in fact I tried very hard to avoid it, which still holds to this day – needing to know the ‘rules’ so I can stay on the right side of them always, never causing trouble, never making waves – except that doesn’t always work, isn’t always possible, there were/are/will always be times when through carelessness etc I overstep the mark, or get trapped in a situation where to please someone upsets someone else and so I keep falling over my own feet (metaphorically as well as literally) and bringing down judgement on myself, which is why, as you must know by now, it’s easier for everyone if I just keep away from other people as much as I can.

The book, written about thirty years ago, is a Jungian analysis, illustrated by myths and fairy tales from all cultures, about how girls and women are socialised into conforming to culturally required feminine norms and roles. The author’s main thesis is that by trying to live up to those norms and roles, many women suppress their creative spirit, or ‘wild nature’. I gave up on it the first time I tried to read it, two years ago, because her writing style irritated me and it seemed related to New Age ‘Goddess’ cults, which feel a bit whacky to me. Now I’ve persevered I’m more impressed by the psychology behind it, and anyway, it was recommended by my therapist, and I have great respect for her academic credentials.

And, as you can probably guess from that description, the idea of the ‘wild nature’, the alternative female archetype and alter ego of the creative spirit, whose suppression can cause great harm and distress in women’s lives, struck a mighty chord for me. Hence the posts over the last few days about the Wild Thing who lives caged inside of me: self-destructive, resentful and raging as any caged beast has the right to be, but only ‘evil’ if seen from a specific, limited perspective.

I sat down to write almost in tears because I didn’t think I could find the words to express this. But it happened anyway.

14 October 2020

Detritus

I think: if I start writing, maybe the ideas will come? And in a way they do, but they’re not necessarily ideas I want to write. I think: if I do twenty minutes of movement, light candles and incense, sit quietly, maybe the thoughts will go away? And sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t. I lie in bed and do backwards-counting exercises to try and stem the flow so I can get back to sleep, and sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn’t.

Why am I constantly engaged in battles inside my head? Is this just normal, does everybody have this never-ending struggle to manage their thoughts? I used to think that, and that it was just me doing such a lousy job of it. Now I’m not so sure. Now I think: maybe it’s my curse, maybe it’s just another part of my chaotic weirdness. Maybe it’s the cause of everything.

This morning, in bed and after, I was thinking about fear. What am I so afraid of? Failure and rejection, that’s what I thought. I deal with rejection by avoiding contact with other people, pre-emptive rejection. Failure is trickier (not that avoiding human contact is always easy). The best ways of avoiding failure are never to try to do anything and to give up – I am an expert on both of those.

But what did I say a couple of weeks ago? ‘The greatest pleasure in life comes from doing something you don’t want to do and then knowing that you’ve done it’? True enough. Life is a bugger sometimes.

I remember getting into a conversation on Facebook a while ago about the ‘detritus’ that accumulates in your mind, that you have to wade your way through. I feel like I said something quite clever, but now I can’t remember what it was. There is certainly a lot of detritus in my mind.

I’ve just remembered a conversation with a counsellor over twenty years ago – I know it was in autumn 1999, because I saw that particular counsellor then after my parents had died in late winter and we’d moved house over the summer and I was getting about three hours sleep a night and was referred by my GP for six sessions of counselling, but she was offering bereavement counselling, and as I told her, after six months since their deaths I didn’t feel I’d even started to mourn them. But what I remember telling her was about this big well of shit in my head, which I can never empty and which keeps getting refilled all the time. I think the idea came from the title of ‘The Well of Loneliness’. But what was in my well? Loneliness, certainly, but not just that: shame and guilt and fear, and of course , failure and rejection.

Within ten years I’d left my husband, in the hope that that would bring me new opportunities – which it has, it has, but why has so much stayed the same?