Category: retirement

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Dull

I lay in bed this morning listening to a distant susurrus – was it wind, rain or just in my head? I got up, sat on the edge of the bed to dress, and in the mirrored wardrobe door facing me I saw the clothes I’d chosen for my exercise/meditation session (purple yoga pants, red long-sleeved tee shirt) and thought they looked wintry compared to yesterday’s sunshine – not that it matters when I won’t be going anywhere. The weather app told me 2 minutes to a break in the rain. Five minutes later I checked to see if it had changed, and it said rain was expected in 83 minutes. Following from a previous post, it really is that precise. Now it just says: ‘Current: Cloudy, 16C’ and ‘Looking ahead: Pleasant Sunday’. Well, that’s something to look forward to.

I opened the door to let Miko out onto grey sky and trees shaking in the wind, but it wasn’t raining, and the ground didn’t look as though it had been. By the time I got back downstairs from my half hour session, she was curled up in her bed, so I closed it again.

Not so many people in the street today. A couple just passed, walking a dog – the man in lurid shorts, dull tee shirt and face mask, the woman in jeans and a yellow coat. Come to think of it, they’re the only ones I’ve seen so far. A few pigeons and gulls flying sideways. Every so often the sound of the wind rises above the murmuring of the computer.

I wrote yesterday but didn’t share – only with my therapist, and she agreed it probably wasn’t one to post generally (though I’m sure she has an unrealistic idea of how many people are likely to read this stuff). Maybe I won’t share this one either, maybe I’ll stop posting altogether or post on a secret blog and not share it to Facebook , or share it to a page that no one knows about, which is how this one used to be when I started it.

I have the tail end of some paid work to do, and I think that’s been responsible for my bad mood over the last couple of days. I’ve been putting it off, or rather, it’s been put off for me because of delays in the arrival of the proof copy, which finally turned up on Wednesday, so yesterday was pretty tied up. I think I should stop committing myself to doing things for other people, though this is a long-standing project –almost six years on and off, and it will be so good to get it out of my life at last.  

Just realised that that strange noise I’ve been hearing for the last few minutes is the venetian blind in my spare bedroom (where I do my exercise) banging against the wall. I always open the window when I finish to clear the smell of incense.

Time to get to work.

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Somebody Else’s Problem

Today I think I will write about what I was planning to write about yesterday, before I was hijacked by a poem. But first I’d like to observe that the sun is shining, the gulls are flying past the window, the pigeons are woo-wooing, Miko is at her neighbourhood watch post and not bothering the keyboard, and for once it feels as though the day is off to a good start.

I used to joke that my mid-life crisis began when I started a PhD at the age of 38, and has continued ever since. I remembered that when I was sharing all those memories from Facebook at the start of May, and realised that, though I may still feel in crisis some days, it’s definitely no longer a mid-life one. So I started to ponder on when exactly that transition happened.

My first thought was – well – it must have been when I moved to Southsea in 2015 – that was a major break in my life, and marked the end of that period of rootlessness which had been ongoing since I split with my husband in 2009. But then I thought that my first months here were still part of that churning, the excitement of a new life, new place, new people, all that. Plus of course, the curse of the Madwoman in the Attic – the stuff that had been left behind in the old house, the emotional and physical baggage which had remained unresolved – was still hanging over me. That wasn’t sorted out till I moved into this house in autumn 2016 –that was the next significant point. But then what happened? Yep, 2017 – cancer year.

So now I think that when I look back over my life and mark it off into chunks, chapters of my autobiography, if you like (though this is the closest I’ll ever get to writing one), the present stage started at the beginning of 2018, when I began to pick up the threads of a life no longer dominated by concerns over my health. Comparing notes with my brother (who was treated for prostate cancer in that same year) and my therapist (who I started seeing in early 2018), I discovered that it’s a known condition for people who’ve survived cancer to experience depression after the treatment is over. For me, intellectualising it two years on, it’s about ‘what now?’ – the realisation that there was more future than I’d subconsciously been anticipating, and that finding things to do with it could be a challenge.

And – this has just popped into my head, and I have 70 words to express it in – being treated for cancer, travelling round Europe, being in lockdown – all have this in common: every day is just about itself. The future can be put to one side; maybe it will happen, maybe it will be somebody else’s problem. ‘None of the crazy you get from too much choice…’, no stress, no sweat.

Well, that’s something to talk about on Thursday.

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Routines and Decisions

Structure and chaos. Rules and freedom. Dyspraxia and social inadequacy – nature and nurture. Cats and husbands. This and that. Writing and not-writing.

I’ve been awake for two hours already, but I observe my routines. Time is open-ended – until 1pm, when the afternoon’s radio marathon begins (though I can delay that by setting the TiVo to Radio 4 Extra so that it can be paused and rewound if I miss anything). Little happens in the mornings beyond the routine of: feed cat; half hour yoga, tai chi and meditation; shower; coffee; blogging; breakfast (which can end up being at 11, or even later). Except for shopping days, of course, but that was yesterday. There are other day-related things, apart from shopping (which isn’t strictly day-related, but has fallen into that pattern because it takes me exactly a week to use up two litres of milk), like putting the bins out (Tuesday), Zoom tai chi (Wednesday), Skype therapy (Thursday), but they all happen in the afternoon or early evening.

This is very different from pre-lockdown routine, when on most days I needed to be up and ready to go out by a certain time. Which may mean – if those activities eventually resume in a similar format to before – that post-lockdown life (which, may I say, I’m not anticipating any time soon), will be different again.

None of which is what I was thinking about in those two hours before I sat down at the keyboard.

By the way, the Joni Mitchell song I quoted from the other day wasn’t ‘The Blonde in the Bleachers’, as I said, but the one that begins:

‘Two waitresses both wearing black diamond earrings
talking about zombies and Singapore sleeves.
No trouble in their faces, not one angry voice,
none of the crazy you get from too much choice,
the thumb and the satchel or the rented Rolls-Royce…’

Joni Mitchell

But surprisingly, even though I can now hear it clearly in my head, I can’t get as far as the refrain to remember what it’s actually called (nor do I have a clue what ‘Singapore sleeves’ are) – and I still haven’t got round to looking it up.

Choice as tyranny, that’s what I was going to write about. The comfort of routines versus the horror of being forced to make a decision. That’s why I cling to them in the mornings; though I don’t always wake – or get up – at the same time, the sequence of activities is quite consistent. Otherwise I lie in bed and do nothing – which is not, repeat NOT healthy for my emotional wellbeing.

I still have to make decisions, of course, and I find the two most terrifying are: what to wear, and what to have for dinner; terrifying because they are relentless. And every decision (however trivial) entails judgement: options must be evaluated, probabilities and utilities assigned; projected outcomes considered (especially unanticipated ones) in order to identify and attain an optimal solution.

It’s exhausting. Better to sit in the sun and drink coffee.

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Business is Business

Just had a one-sided conversation in the shower (not that unusual) about the winding up of one project for a long-standing client (her proof copies have just arrived) and another job she asked me to think about to create a website related to her book. I told her I’d give it some thought, which I haven’t really over the three weeks we’ve been waiting for the proofs, but now I have to, I think I’ll suggest setting something up on WordPress.

My hosting is still paid for until September 2021, but every time it comes up for renewal I have this inner debate over whether it’s worth continuing. I don’t host sites for anybody else any more, and my own has been pretty much in limbo for years. I had a go at tarting it up a couple of years ago, when I added an online shop (through which not one single copy of any of my books has been sold), and created this blog. The cost of hosting keeps going up, and although I can still afford it, I do get this sense of good-money-after-bad. I don’t need to make a living any more (not that I was ever much good at that anyway) and although I used to enjoy the challenge, I never thought that what I produced was much good (which to be fair is true of anything I do).

One of the issues that has always bothered me over design work is that by and large my clients were people like me, individuals with small businesses, scrabbling in the marketplace to try and sell their services. I had the suspicion that they thought having a bespoke website would raise their profile and bring new clients flooding in, whereas I knew from personal experience that that was pretty unrealistic. So I was torn between wanting to do a professional job, put in the time, make things as good as I possibly could, and the feeling that I was acting under false pretences, that if I charged a professional rate for my time, they would never make back the money they were paying me. So I would only ask for what I thought they could afford to lose, but still put the work in as long as they wanted me to, and told myself I was still learning, and some day I would feel confident enough to charge a realistic rate. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t – and conversely, sometimes I still priced it too high and lost work that way.

What goes for web design also goes for print – who really cares about the aesthetics of a book, now that self-publishing is so easy? And who wants to pay someone like me to take the time over the details, when there’s so little potential financial payback? Just because I want to weep when I see another badly designed, amateurish self-published book doesn’t mean anybody else gives a crap.  

Oops there I go, completely blowing my business credibility.

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Passing Time

I was standing in the street in my dressing gown, it was 10.45 and I wondered how come I had slept in so late.

Then I was in bed looking at the clock, and it was 5.17, and I realised I had been dreaming. I was reassured, because that made so much more sense.

Thinking of what to write every day is difficult (except when it isn’t, when it just pops up) but the writing itself is easy.

The days go by so fast, even though I do hardly anything, one day after another, hard to tell the difference. The longer it stays like this, the less I feel inclined to interact with people. Life is so much easier this way. I think it will be a shock when external things start up again. I’ll have to make decisions then, do I make myself go out or do I carry on as I have been doing?

Over the last couple of years, people have said to me: ‘You do such a lot!’ and I’ve thought: no, I don’t, not really. When I listed all the external things I did each day: Monday: swimming, writers, yoga; Tuesday: tai chi; Wednesday: coffee (sometimes) etc etc it might sound like a lot, but it was just me, making myself go out, trying to make myself be sociable because I thought that was what I needed. But I wasn’t DOING anything – I would meet ‘the writers’ in the library, but I would never actually write anything. Now I am staying home and writing, but still I’m not actually writing ‘anything’, just spewing out words. Passing time, revelling in the dullness and emptiness of my life. Sometimes crocheting or weaving, but not to make anything – I’ve unravelled this latest cardigan so many times that by the time it’s finished I’ll probably have made it twice, then it will just go in the wardrobe and I’ll never wear it. The weaving and the weather blanket, both completely pointless (though I’ve promised this year’s weather blanket to my daughter, and I gave last year’s to my son). But the point is in the process of the making – it passes the time and makes me happy. And then there’s killer su doku – can’t even pretend that achieves anything.

The same goes (in spades) for the writing, of course. I’m quite impressed that I’ve kept it going for as long as I have – though in the past I’ve done it for years – why did I give it up? Maybe partly because it takes up a huge amount of time, that’s why the mornings go so fast, and afternoons are always filled up with the radio, so that’s the day gone. It’s interesting, though, to reflect that it’s not these things that make me stressed. I’m calmer and happier now, and that’s because I’m doing these things by myself – these pointless, meaningless things – and I don’t feel like I have to make myself go out and be with people.

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Retirement

I didn’t write a long post yesterday (if 500 words counts as ‘long’ – probably does, in today’s frantic world). I missed out my morning routines because I got up and went straight to the shop, then when I got back I made a poem of it and felt I’d done my ‘writing duty’ for the day. Today I feel inclined to do the same, because I had a poem that popped up first thing and then developed while I was in the shower. But I mustn’t keep doing that.

Have I mentioned on here yet about the phrase that’s apparently going round: ‘…if you don’t come out of this with a new skill, you never lacked time, you just lacked discipline’? Bollox to that say I – (but then I would, wouldn’t I, because I’ve always been a lazy, selfish cow who’s never even tried to become a better person… etc etc etc).

What occurs to me is that what’s currently happening to a lot of people (but not everybody, let’s not forget that, a lot of people – including but not exclusively those employed by the NHS – are having to work their arses off) is a kind of enforced premature retirement. Of course, the fantasy of retirement is that you’ll have the freedom to go swanning off wherever you like, and do those things you never had time for, but in reality lots of retired people just don’t have that many options – whether because of lack of money, poor health, commitments to others (lots of older people are carers for their partners, or want to be available for children, grandchildren, friends, even cats and dogs). Even without those limitations (and I speak from experience as someone who retired relatively young and financially comfortable), sometimes you just don’t have the energy or motivation to get out and do stuff.

I’ve always thought of it as the housewife syndrome (apologies if that sounds sexist, but I spent a lot of my middle age involuntarily unemployed/underemployed so I know what I’m talking about). When you theoretically have lots of time to do things that need doing but you really don’t enjoy, and there’s no formal commitment or external authority (like an employer) imposing sanctions (like the sack) if you don’t do them, it’s easy to slide into a mindset where you’ll do anything but, and spend huge amounts of emotional energy and time on finding reasons not to do those things, and by the end of the day you feel like you’ve achieved nothing, but you’re still exhausted, frustrated and bitter. Well, you do if you’re like me (but then we’ve already established that I’m lazy, selfish, self-pitying… see above).

I think many people who are currently on furlough from work are in that position. It’s not an easy adjustment to make at the best of times, and I’m sure that knowing it will end at some point in the future – but not when, or if, or how, or what happens next – exacerbates it.