Category: angst

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Boring, Boring, Boring

Yesterday I experienced something I haven’t been aware of in a long time: boredom. I finished bringing my financial spreadsheet up to date, but didn’t feel as satisfied as I expected. The afternoon plays on Radio 4 and 4 Extra respectively were: the first episode of a three-part adaptation of ‘Tess of the Durbervilles’ (well done, but hard to avoid the sense of impending doom) and a thirty-year-old drama about a divorced sixty-something woman with breast cancer who is reunited with an old admirer, has a mastectomy and moves to Australia (either breast cancer treatment has improved a lot since the early 1990s, or the writer didn’t have much idea of what he was writing about – no chemo or radiotherapy, just straight to the knife).

Ironically, I also listened to a programme on boredom, but I didn’t take much of it in.

I’m getting bored with the jumper I’ve been knitting, the one I pulled down because it didn’t fit, and I haven’t quite caught up to where it was before. I’m not looking forward to doing the sleeves, which are going to be fiddly, but I want to get it done so I can wear it at least once before the weather gets too warm. If current trends continue, it may be even smaller by next winter (think about it).

Which reminds me, on this morning’s weather forecast they said that it will get a lot warmer, maybe as high as 17o  this week, which would be white and green within a week!

I saw a picture on a Facebook crochet group last week of a blanket with an amazing spiral pattern. There was no pattern attached, and I couldn’t work out from the photo how it was done, so I Googled it, and found a simple technique for making a four-colour spiral – not quite the same, but still interesting. I made a start with four colours of cotton yarn leftover from last year’s weather blanket (I have changed to using a different, lighter yarn this year), and it’s given me the spark of an idea.

I also saw a cartoon on Facebook yesterday titled something like: ‘The Mind/Body problem’, showing a man sitting on a sofa, with a thought bubble coming from his head saying ‘Get up!’ and one from his body saying ‘Nope!’ or words to that effect – exactly summing up my mood, but I can’t remember where it came from.

But for this morning I have some editing – which will be interesting and, being a commission for someone else, takes priority over housework, decluttering, study-tidying or any of those other multitudes of Jobs That Needs Doing.

I keep thinking of things I could do, hobbies that I could take up or restart, projects that I would enjoy getting stuck into, most of which I already have the materials and equipment for, or could easily get hold of online. Books to read, jigsaws to do, projects to complete, all at my fingertips, but can I be bothered?

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Untangling

I didn’t write yesterday, and I don’t want to write today. The emotions and thoughts that swirl around in my head are probably best kept to myself. Everything is complicated and tangled up together, and if I find a way through and come out the other side, I daren’t look over my shoulder because I know it will drag me back in again.

I like that metaphor, and here’s another one. When you have a tangled ball of yarn (which happens to me a lot), in order to untangle it you have to start with an end. Ends aren’t always easy to find, but you can make one, by choosing a thread at random and cutting it. You now have two ends, and you pick one – maybe the one that has a longer ‘tail’ – and tug gently on it. You should then see a movement of one of the threads in the tangle, so you put your thumb and finger through the gap nearest to the movement, take hold of the thread that just moved, and pull it through the gap – if you’ve got the right thread, the cut end will follow, and now the tail is a little longer, so you repeat the process and watch for the next movement. The tail gets longer, and eventually you have to start rolling it into a ball, or else it might create another tangle. But then you have to pass the whole ball through the tangled loops – you can’t just pull on it from inside the tangle any more, because the ball will just unroll. At that point, I hold the ball in my hand and slide my hand through the loops, so that they’re effectively wrapped around my wrist. In this way, I can gradually free up more of the tail – or rather, of the ever-growing ball.

Sometimes, in the middle of the tangle, you come across a knot in one of the threads. You might be able to pull it open with your finger nails, or slide a needle under one of the loops and gently pull it looser, and in that case, once you’ve made one of the knot-loops big enough to pass the ball through, you can get rid of it. If it’s in a single thread, it’s easier just to leave it there, but if it’s two (or even more) knotted together, it’s got to be dealt with. However what’s even worse is when two threads have rubbed against each other long enough to effectively become stuck together, but not actually knotted in the sense of being wrapped around each other. These can be a nightmare to prise apart. If you can work out which ends belong to which thread, sometimes it’s possible to grasp both ends of one thread in one hand, and of the other in the other hand, and tug them apart, but then they’ll both be left with a fluffy bobble attached. And of course, they might snap – or you can cut it.

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Palpitations

A few weeks ago, on a Thursday evening, I started having heart palpitations. It only lasted a few minutes, but it felt so weird, and when it happened again I got quite worried. I spent a couple of days hoping it would just go away, and trying to decide what to do. The following Monday morning, I went on to my GP practice’s website to see if I could book an appointment – the new appointments come up on Monday morning, and you have to be quick to get one. I got a phone appointment for 9:40 this morning, and now I am wondering what I’m going to say when the doctor calls.

The palpitations are still happening, probably three or four times a day, for a few minutes each time, but I’ve got used to them. I’ve got a history of suddenly developing weird symptoms which then lead to investigations (sometimes quite nasty, invasive ones, like gastroscopy and colonoscopy) that don’t come up with any answers – except referrals for counselling and once, a prescription for amitriptyline, which made me feel like a zombie and was followed by two months of double vision which meant I could only see by closing one eye (no proof that there was a causal relationship, but it was enough to make me stop taking them after three weeks and swear never to touch them again).

The background to the palpitations is that in late 2019 I had a senior patient health check (or some words to that effect) at my GP surgery, which among other things tested my cholesterol and found it was quite high. So I was prescribed statins and went back after about six weeks – last January – for a check-up. I’d been noticing palpitations after I started the pills, and mentioned it, but all the tests were good, I had an ECG which was normal, and my cholesterol was down. The doctor wasn’t concerned about the palpitations but reduced the dose of the statins just in case and told me to come back for another check-up in three months.

Well, that didn’t happen of course. I kept taking the pills, the palpitations went away, the prescription was renewed every month. I tried to cut down my cholesterol intake (not going out for breakfast two or three times a week probably helped). But I didn’t have any way of checking any of this.

And then the palpitations came back. I couldn’t find any suggestion online that they might relate to Covid, but I’d had a recurring cough for a few weeks after Christmas, so I got a home test kit (which came back negative) and made this doctor’s appointment. I know she probably won’t be able to say much over the phone without repeating the tests I had last year. She’ll probably tell me – as my daughter did – that palpitations are often caused by stress and worry. At least I’ll be waving a flag and saying: ‘I’m still here, don’t forget about me!’

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Happy Days

I called my brother yesterday morning. We have this thing of checking in with each other on the first Sunday of the month, which sometimes we forget, but mostly at least one of us remembers and is available. He and his wife, who both turned seventy last year, have had their first vaccinations, and so has their eldest daughter, who has been shielding because of a history of autoimmune problems. I should be in the next cohort, but haven’t heard anything yet.

We talked about the calm of hunkering down in lockdown, and I heard myself saying the words: ‘I’m happy…’, knowing in that moment it was true, and wondering what he would make of it. Looking back, I can see that at any moment of the conversation, with a carelessly chosen phrase he might have completely shattered that sense of wellbeing, but it didn’t happen. He said: ‘…it feels as though this is what retirement should be like…’, which this time last year (when he was planning to leave for Antarctica within the week) would have sounded bizarre, coming from a man who ‘officially’ retired in his fifties, and has spent the years since recreating the bustle and stress of his business life in numerous ways. I reminded him of the plaque our Dad put on the wall when he retired: ‘How good it feels to do nothing and then… rest afterwards’ and we shared a chuckle.

I know this is not a sustainable situation. Every morning I have to get up and do battle with my demons, dragons, bogies, black dogs, gremlins, negative vibes… whatever you want to call them. During the day, as long as I can escape interacting with others, avoid the news (and most of social media), don’t give too much attention to the ambient chaos, focus on doing the things I enjoy and give myself time and space to do the things that make me stressed (including being prepared to abandon them mid-stream and try again tomorrow), life feels okay.

Five minutes ago, while I was pondering that sentence I noticed a single white speck floating past my window. Now they are coming in ones and twos every few seconds. If this is going to be snow, it’s the first I’ve seen in three years. The sky does have that look to it, but we shall see.

I know this situation – the sense of peace, not the possibility of snow – is not sustainable. At some point, the world will start to intrude again.  The madwoman in the attic can only be ignored for so long. But happiness is about les petits bonheurs (and I wish I’d thought to say that to my brother yesterday, a missed opportunity to show that I’m also capable of being pretentious and intellectual), the pleasurable moments. Looking out of a window, whether of a train passing through the Dinaric Alps or counting the snow specks falling on passing cars, knowing I have nowhere to go, except downstairs for breakfast.

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Alternative Reality

On Facebook recently, somebody shared a question on the lines of:

‘If you had the choice of going back to when you were ten but with the knowledge you have now, or $50k and fifteen years into the future, what would you do?’

My reaction was: it might be interesting to see what the world’s like by 2026, but why would I want to go back to the age of ten and live through all that shit again? What use would the accumulated wisdom of half a century be to a ten-year-old girl?

Anyway, what would I do differently? Skip the first marriage, obviously – but not the second, because of the children. And it was my first husband who pointed out to me the job advert which led me to Bedford and ultimately to Hubby 2. On the other hand, if I knew then what I know now, I could look out for that job in the early summer of 1975 and apply for it anyway. I could apply for that degree course in maths and linguistics that was in the list of degrees I looked at in 1971, instead of the one in economics and statistics in Southampton. I’ve often thought that might have been an interesting path to take – I can’t remember which university it was, but I’d be in a different place, with different people, my student life could have been completely different. And I could still have applied for that job in Bedford – assuming the rest of the world was still running on more or less the same tracks.

There was a film in the 1980s, called ‘Peggy Sue got Married’ in which a suburban American housewife (played, I think, by Kathleen Turner), disappointed with her cheating husband (ditto Nicholas Cage) and teenage children, is sent back in time to her high school days. In the climactic scene (spoiler alert), when she is trying to explain to her childhood sweetheart and would-be fiancé (the aforementioned cheating husband) why she doesn’t want to marry him, and how she knows for sure that he will be unfaithful, she pulls off the locket round her neck and shows him the pictures of their son and daughter as babies to prove the truth of her time-travelling tale.

‘But they’re us’ the puzzled lad replies. ‘Our moms must’ve given you those photos of us as babies.’

Cue big moment of realisation. She looks at the babies, and looks into his eyes, and says, breathily (in a young version of Kathleen Turner’s voice):

‘You’re right, they are us, they’re you and me!’

Or words to that effect – it must be over thirty years since I watched that film. I don’t remember how it ends – probably she awakes from a coma because it was all part of a concussion dream, or whatever, with her loving husband and children around her bed, and realises how lucky she is to have them all.

But no, I couldn’t write my children’s father out of my story.

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Not a Competition

In a chat on Zoom, I mentioned that I suspect I’m going to be facing my second consecutive birthday in lockdown, and got this response from one participant:

‘We all are!’

‘That depends on when your birthday is’ I stuttered, not having expected this somewhat aggressive response.

‘Well, none of us were allowed parties!’ she shot back.

There I go again, showing my self-pity. I should know by now to keep my mouth shut. But the only reason I’d been thinking about it was that next week it will be my sister’s first birthday in lockdown – last year she and her husband went for a holiday in Devon, and for my birthday I was looking forward to a canal holiday on a narrow-boat with my son and daughter in law. When it had to be cancelled, I thought: ‘oh well, not the end of the world, it’s just another day, I’m used to being on my own at home after all’ etc etc, but on the day itself it hit me harder than I’d expected. It was near the beginning of the first lockdown, and over the last few weeks I’ve been wondering whether this current situation will still be in place by then. But, first-world-problems, what do birthdays matter when people are facing much worse problems: illness and death, losing loved ones, losing jobs?  Maybe this lady had problems I wasn’t aware of, and my remark about my birthday was insensitive?

‘It’s not a competition’ my therapist said when I told her about it. ‘Whatever’s going on in her life, that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to feel sad! And instead of self-pity, why not think of it as “self-care”?’

Still, I think I should keep my mouth shut. It’s safer. Which is ironic, because as a child, and even later when I was a young woman, I was always being told to speak up for myself (except when I said things the other parties didn’t want to hear, as in this case, and how was I supposed to anticipate when that might happen?) Better to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, when to share them might invoke other people’s anger, and hence my shame, or even laughter, and my humiliation – or sometimes both shame and humiliation at the same time.

Yet I come on here and talk about my feelings every day. Why is that? I’ve been through this before – because I can, with a near certainty that no one is going to respond.

I have a friend who occasionally contacts me on What’s App, who has severe physical disabilities and is in a far worse position than me. Sometimes she amazes me with her positivity and resilience, but this week she was very low. I tried to tell her how I felt for her, I didn’t belittle her suffering, I told a funny story against myself, I said I’m here if she ever wants to share. What else could I do? It’s not a competition.

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Throwaway Writing

Sun shining this morning. I have been to Tesco, my least favourite of the three supermarkets within five minutes walk, but it has the right kind of cat food (unlike Sainsbury’s) and self-checkouts (unlike Co-op), reducing the need for social interaction. In general, I find the Co-op has the best stock for my needs, but some mornings that risk of social interaction is enough to drive me in the other direction.

I raised that question about controlling my thoughts a couple of weeks ago, but here is a related one which was bugging me when I woke up this morning: do thoughts control emotions, or emotions control thoughts? Which is the chicken in this arrangement, and which the egg? But this question is just as impossible to answer as the original, given all the feedbacks between the two states.

If I’ve learnt anything about this topic, I would say that trying to control emotions by thinking alone – in other words, wishing them away – is a waste of effort. The fake-it-till-you-make-it idea of slapping on a happy face and banishing all that negativity has always failed and frustrated me, but I’ve discovered from experience that there are activities that improve my mood. Finding the ones that work and can be done with the resources you already have is a great gift.

Writing can be one of those things – although sometimes the mood improvement doesn’t come until after it’s done, rather than in the process. When it’s going well, it’s the best feeling in the world, but when it’s a slog, it’s hellish. There isn’t really a basic process to follow that can make it happen if it doesn’t come spontaneously, except this sort of stream-of-consciousness brain-dumping that I do every morning, and which has yet to cohere into anything tangible. What I’m thinking of here is that I can at any moment pick up a hook and a ball of yarn and start to make something, or continue with what’s already started, and that doesn’t really require any thought. It might go wrong, and that might seem enough to induce frustration and disappointment, but somehow it doesn’t – I just unravel it and do it again differently, or put it away and do something else till I feel ready to get back to it. There’s always something I can do, and if it doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal, I can leave it and do something else.

But isn’t that what I’m doing every morning? Maybe this is my way of applying that approach to writing. Now, that’s something that I’ve just thought of in this process, that wasn’t in my head when I sat down to write, or even when I started that last paragraph. This is my throwaway writing, it doesn’t matter whether it means anything to me or anyone else – but it’s not really ‘thrown away’, I just shove the words to the back of a digital ‘folder’, it doesn’t take up any space, not even ink and paper.

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Calendar Puzzles

Imbolc, Candlemas, Ground Hog Day… my hatred of January used to extend to February too, but now I’m more relaxed about them both. February is the month when I: moved into my first flat (2009); ran away to Europe (2012); came back from Prague (2014); started chemo (2017)… I could go back further into previous lives and remember: broke off my engagement (1975); had a miscarriage (1985); lost my Dad (1999)… 1996 wasn’t that great either, for reasons I won’t go into, and no doubt I could dig out other disasters if I thought some more, but at least for this century 2009 and 2012 were positive, and 2017 was too, if not particularly pleasant at the time (actually 1975 was positive too, but the mistake was that I didn’t stick with that decision).

February… well we all know it’s the shortest month and the only one that has different numbers of days depending on the year (but still stays the shortest). Why, when the calendar was being designed, wasn’t it given a couple of extra days, taken from, say August and December, to make seven 30-day months and only five 31-days, or six of each in Leap Year? Even better, why not alternate them by making February, April, June, August, October and December 30 days , with the Leap Day added at the end of December? Aha, that rings a bell now, isn’t it the case that March used to be the first month, which would make February the last month, which would at least make sense of Leap Day being then?

The Celtic quarter days are at the beginnings of February, May, August and November, which are not exactly mid-way between the equinoxes and solstices, but do correspond to the beginnings of calendar months – isn’t this something to do with the adjustments that had to be made to the calendar to deal with the fact that somewhere in the middle of the last millennium it was noticed that the seasons had moved since Julius Caesar’s time because the solar year isn’t exactly 365-and-a-quarter days long, and hence we don’t need a Leap Year exactly every four years, but more like 97 years out of 400? Every time I start asking these calendar questions I know I could just look them up on Wikipedia, but I’m not Wikipedia and I like to raise the questions and make everybody else as confused as I am.

I’m also puzzled by the fact that according to some sources Imbolc/Candlemas is on the first of February, while others say it’s the second. Why worry about things which have their roots back in times when few people were literate anyway, and they were probably decided – quite arbitrarily –  by various factions of various religions, and not in some boring, rational unified way?

But why is Groundhog Day now so closely linked with time repeating itself? Is it just down to the Bill Murray film, and why did the writers decide to do that?

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Home to Roost

In my study, but once again, Microsoft decided it needed to reconfigure my version of Office, so I had to wait. I spent the time picking some more books to go downstairs on the new shelves, and looking for more yarn to match the cardigan (or maybe it will be a blanket) I started crocheting two days ago, when I realised the fair isle jumper was going to be too tight, so I gave up on it till I decide whether I’m going to pull it back to the armpits and do it again, or leave it unfinished like so many other things I’ve started in my life.


Then I felt the urge to listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Judgement of the Moon and Stars’, which I’ve been listening to on cassette in the kitchen, and I thought I must have uploaded onto the PC when I was doing that a few months ago. I couldn’t find it, but I did find the files for her album ‘Hejira’, and played ‘Amelia’, which got me into a sad and thoughtful mood, which wasn’t necessarily where I wanted to go.


By that time, Office was reconfigured and Word was open. I suspect it’s now reconfiguring every time I restart the PC (which should be every day, but I must admit sometimes I forget to switch it off properly and it stays in hibernation till the next morning). I don’t use the PC much in the daytime after I’ve finished blogging, now that I’ve got the laptop downstairs, where the wifi’s better and it’s warmer – I don’t have the radiator switched on in here because it’s under the window, behind the desk and printer. Ironic to think that I bought the laptop at the end of 2019 so I could take it out and sit in cafes to write – one of many small ironies of the last twelve months.


Maybe what I’m doing here is reconfiguring my mind every morning. It’s a thought.


In telling the story of the Madwoman in the Attic, I flitted around quite a bit chronologically, and I think I may have missed out completely the time in Prague. I started going through the blogs from that time about three years ago, after I finished the first draft of ‘The Long Way Back’, but I gave up on it quite quickly. Maybe that should be a task for this year – or would be, if I was setting myself tasks, which I’m not.


The gist, I suppose, of the Madwoman idea, was that through those limbo years until I moved into this house in October 2016, the Stuff was always hanging around in the dusty corners of my mind, along with the knowledge that at some time the house would be sold, and it would come home to roost, but also I would be in a position to buy a permanent home for it (and me). And yet, although I’m here, and it is too, the chaos remains unresolved.

Amelia, Joni Mitchell

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Maybe

Some mornings I feel as though I’m balanced on a knife-edge. Maybe walking along a cliff edge is a better metaphor, since, clearly, no one can balance on a knife-edge. Maybe a tight-rope. Maybe I’m over-thinking this. Maybe I am digressing into choosing the right words because I’m evading the concept. And maybe the use of ‘some’ suggests that this experience is rare, which is not the case – or maybe that’s just an extreme version of an average morning.

I’ve just remembered trying to explain it once to a counsellor – the one I was seeing in 2006-7, which dates it – that I felt I was walking along a very narrow ridge running through a bog, and at any moment I could slip, and potentially disappear without a trace. That describes the feeling, better than a knife-edge (which is a cliché anyway, as well as being impossible) or a cliff edge. There are no degrees of falling off a cliff edge – unless you land in a tree or on a mattress or something else which breaks your fall. Falling into a bog can be fatal, but my perception is that there’s a better chance of being pulled back, providing there’s someone around to do the pulling, or a handy branch or edge or something to grasp onto and pull yourself.

Which is a complicated way of saying that my morning routine is my branch. Not always easy to drag myself away from the night and that ‘oh shit, I’m still here’ feeling that descends on waking, but I know what I’ve got to do, and I do it. And by the time I’ve posted my blog, and am downstairs with my porridge and su doku, I usually feel somewhat better.

I don’t know why I’ve written that this morning, which doesn’t feel any worse or better than any other day. I guess if I was trying to learn a lesson from it, I could say – do something so you know what you’re doing; try things and push yourself a little bit, but not too hard; give yourself time and be ready to stop when it starts to get to you; come back when you’re ready, it doesn’t matter whether that’s tomorrow or in five years time unless there’s some external commitment or deadline.

It strikes me now how different that is from the usual sort of advice about setting goals and getting things done. Maybe those things are really not so important in a life like mine (retired, living alone). If I find myself struggling with things (like the bookshelves, or the housework) maybe I can live without them for a bit longer. If I carry on struggling, I might come to hate whatever it is, and swear it’s impossible, I’m useless and incompetent and should never have started in the first place and I’ll never try it again. But if I stop, walk away, do something else, maybe I’ll be more inclined to try again later.

Lots of ‘maybes’ today.