Category: Belinda

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In My Head

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.

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Order and Chaos

In the last week I have: walked to the beach twice; had breakfast out twice; had a cream tea out once; had a flu jab; walked to the garage to drop off the van keys (for MOT); been to a real live tai chi lesson at the community centre (just restarted after the teacher’s quarantine); resolved the initial issues and produced a reasonable stab at a first attempt on the website, to show to client; ditto the Christmas jumper (except the ‘client’ can’t see it because it’s going to be a surprise); phoned my sister; as well as writing every day (last Thursday’s effort handwritten in a notebook on the beach) and did at least some of my exercise and meditation routine every day (which reminded me to go and look in the spare room and check that I’d blown the candle out, which I had).

Also I notice that I haven’t been moaning about not being ‘motivated’, although I must admit the house is even more chaotic than usual. Earlier I filled the plastic water jug for the coffee pot while I was trying to tidy up around the sink, then moments later knocked it over and half the water went over the counter. I managed to mop that up and make sure it wasn’t too close to any of the electrical stuff, then turned round and knocked it again, with the rest of the water going over the floor. However, this is not to say that that’s in any way unusual, just that my feet and my dressing gown got wet.

Years ago, I remember a friend telling me that her cat disapproved of her standards of house-keeping, and kept giving her disapproving looks. I laughed at the time, and thought ‘crazy cat lady!’, but now understand exactly what she means. I feel so guilty sometimes watching my cat trying to pick her way around piles of junk on the floor – often knitting yarn, or books (or clothes – mostly in the bedroom) but also random other things which have fallen or been dropped or knocked off the furniture and not picked up, whereas I just step over it without even noticing it’s there. Also she is terrified of sudden movements and loud noises, which must make living with me a nightmare, as I blunder my way around the place.

All thoughts of trying to impose any kind of order on my life and my living space seem to have gone out of the (smeary, blurry, fly-specked) window. Having ‘projects’ to do somehow gives me licence to ignore that stuff – and go to the beach, or eat scones in a quiet café.

And yet… in the mornings, I feed my cat, do my exercises and meditation, write my blog. Every day (mostly) – and have done consistently for months. Yet making ‘to do’ lists and sticking with them is beyond me – I keep trying, but it all falls apart.

Sun shining this morning. Skype therapy at 2.00. That’s today.  

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Bother

Why do I bother? God knows. I haven’t got a clue.

I did another of the five items on the list yesterday – and a bit of another (sorting out my accounts, which is going to be a long job), and had a stab at another (renewing the insurance on my van) but got stymied by the technology, because I thought I could renew it online, but couldn’t see how, so now I don’t know if it will renew automatically or if I have to call them – which reminds me that the van itself is a can of worms, because I need to call the garage – but I don’t want to use it at present anyway.

You’ll notice there are still five items – I haven’t added any more, although I keep thinking of them, but I never remember to write them on the list. However, I did do last night’s washing up when I got up, and tidied and wiped the kitchen counters and sink (again). We’ll see how long that lasts.

I made a plan yesterday evening that if I was awake early enough this morning I would walk to the beach and watch the sunrise, but I slept in till 5.20, so there wasn’t time to get myself sorted and to the beach before the actual sunrise at 5.37.  And although I don’t really like lying in bed when I know I won’t get back to sleep, I still don’t want to get up either, even now, when it’s warm.

This is why I’ve decided that routine is so important, because if I know what I ‘should’ be doing, maybe that will push me (‘motivate’ is too strong a word) into doing things even when I really don’t feel like it (which is about 23 hours and 55 minutes of every day). Given that I’ve got quite good about doing my half hour of exercise and meditation, and writing my 500 words of drivel, over the last few months, I’m hoping that maybe I can squeeze some more useful and positive habits into my days.

I’ve given some thought in the past to how to get over the problem I was talking about yesterday, of never knowing where I’ve left things. One solution would be to constantly scan every room for anything which isn’t in its ‘specific place’ and return it so I can find it when I need it again – the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I guess that’s what most non-cahotic (I like that typo, I think I’ll leave it) people do automatically – but the idea fills me with horror and deadens my soul. There wouldn’t be time for anything else, would there? But then if it actually worked, wouldn’t it save the time and stress of constantly searching for things? I think of my spirit animal, Mole from The Wind in the Willows, throwing down his paintbrush and running out into the springtime to cries of ‘Bother!’ and ‘Oh blow!’ and ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’

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Addictions

Yesterday evening I remembered something else the counsellor said last week, which was that the image of me smashing the mirror and thereby myself made her think of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. My first thought was: no, that’s not right because it’s not my idealised image that I want to destroy, it’s the ‘real’ me, but then I realised that it’s the portrait which is the raddled and depraved monster that Dorian has truly become, and that he destroys to achieve the peace of self-destruction.

Can I find peace without destroying myself in the process – if peace is what I want? I sometimes – when I’m striving for the positive – feel grateful that I’ve managed to avoid becoming addicted to drink, drugs or risky sex – (though I also suspect that my life would have been more enjoyable with more of that, especially the sex). The fact that I didn’t go that way wasn’t down to lack of inclination or innate moral sense so much as lack of imagination when it came to the possibilities, not knowing how to go about getting that sort of a life, and assuming that it wasn’t for the likes of me, that I was just too boring. So I tried to become Mrs Sensible, although the irony was that I was equally shit at that; not bohemian enough to make it as a Bohemian, but miles away from being bourgeois enough to be convincing or content as a bourgeois wife. Then I searched for solace in the life of the mind, and thought I’d found my true calling at last – except that the intellectuals weren’t ready to budge up and let me in, either.

Somewhere in all that mess I managed to spend twenty years raising two children – for which I’m grateful every day, because if I hadn’t I would now be truly alone. Not that emotional support in old age is the best motivation for having children, any more than financial security is a good reason for marriage – but sometimes life has a way of subverting your best intentions and aspirations by providing (you just might find) the things that you need.  

So I didn’t become (as a kind friend once predicted) an alcoholic, or hooked on anti-depressants, or any other kind of prescription or non-prescription substances. But am I addicted to self-analysis, to rumination, to trying to tease out what exactly feels so wrong? I can see there’s a strong argument for that, and also that all the self hate, anger, frustration, disappointment, is just as dangerous and self-destructive as any other kind of addiction. But like any addict, I don’t really have a choice – if there was ever a time when I could have chosen another path, it is too far back in the past to unravel and retrace the steps that brought me here.

Where does ‘trusting myself’ fit into all this? What about trying new things, learning from failure, acquiring wisdom, moving on?

It’s raining. And I need my breakfast.

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#amnotwriting

Awake at four thirty, I thought I would listen to a radio play, because that sometimes sends me back to sleep, or at least passes the time. I picked ‘Marian and George’, about how Mary Anne Evans in her mid-30s met the love of her life, ran away with him to Europe, and started writing novels as George Eliot.

And that kicked me in the teeth in two ways, because her lover, George Henry Lewes, was a writer whose work I came across when I was doing my PhD, at roughly the age she was when she met him, a philosopher whose words clicked something open in my brain and showed me a little of the pattern of the universe, and now after thirty years I can’t even remember what it was that he said that was so inspirational.

I sat on the bed and screamed at myself in the mirror, because wasn’t I going to write something wonderful that would inspire people, or at least entertain them, and whatever happened to that? Whose fault was it? And why? It wasn’t the brain or the intelligence or the thirst for knowledge or even the writing ability that was lacking, it was, and is, the guts, the determination, the ideas, the twin abilities to sit down and start and to sit down and finish. Not only can I not start that work of genius that will make readers gasp in awe, I can’t finish a silly little fantasy novel that I’ve been picking over for thirty years. Not only can I not be George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, I can’t even be Barbara Cartland or JK Rowling.

This is what tears me apart and makes me hate myself with such deep loathing that I want to smash my skull into that mirror and shatter them both. And now I’m 66 and what chance is there that I will ever rise above, get beyond that failure? To write something and know it was good but for it never to be recognised by the world would be bad enough, but not even to write anything that I can look at with pride, or to finish anything at all, that is not just disappointing it’s deeply shameful, a betrayal of myself and the dreams I’ve had for sixty years, from the moment I knew what books were, and realised that they were made by people, that there were people who could bring these wonderful objects into the world, and wouldn’t it be exciting to be one of those people?

But if I could wind back time for sixty years – or thirty – how would things turn out differently? How could they? Because I would still be me – all the chaotic, lazy, self-doubting aspects of my personality would be there in me, just as they are now, waiting to trip me up. A lifetime of trying to correct them has been as much of a failure as my intellectual and literary pursuits. How could it not?

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Same Old Same Old

Every day starts the same, same old stuff to get out of bed to.

Same old effort to justify myself to myself, to occupy myself – my time, hands, part of my brain that doesn’t need to be taxed too much. Just ‘do’ it, whatever ‘it’ is, get on with it. Going through the same old pointless motions. Trying to manage the thoughts in my head. Trying to drag out words from the back of my brain, words that never add up to anything, words that no one wants to read. Piling them up inside my computer, words upon sentences upon paragraphs and on and on, words that might last forever out in cyberspace but will never be consigned to ink on paper.

Trying not to think.

But when there is something else to do, something else I need to do, or feel I ‘should’ do, it’s even worse. Then I panic, because I don’t want to be dragged out into the world.

What a sorry specimen I am.

Yesterday I knew to expect a parcel delivery. But I ate breakfast in the garden anyway. And when I came inside there was a note through the door from UPS saying they were sorry they’d missed me, but the parcel is now at Costcutter on Such-and-such street, and if I don’t collect it within ten days it will be returned to the sender. Bugger.

It’s a big heavy parcel, too. So I’ll have to take the car – I had a similar one last year and tried walking with it, and wished I hadn’t. But the car hasn’t moved since I got it back from its MOT right at the start of lockdown, in late March. What if it doesn’t start? Then I’ll have to call the guys from the garage. When can I pick up the parcel? Not till tomorrow (ie, today now). I couldn’t spend 24 hours worrying about whether or not the car would start. So I had to drive it somewhere.

That took effort. But it did start. Which was a relief, because what if it hadn’t, and I had to go through the same conversation with the garage guys that I have every spring about the van (which as far as I know is still immobile. I spoke to them about the MOT a couple of weeks ago, and they confirmed that it doesn’t need to be done now till December, but although there are two sets of keys, and they have one from when I asked them to get it going pre-lockdown, and I have the other, I can’t get into it because they have the only one for the garage.)

But the car started. And I drove it about the back streets for a while, but all the roads are a mess because they’re laying 5g cables everywhere. So today I will have to think of a different route to go and collect my parcel.

And for this I’m getting wound up. I am a wreck.

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Pointless Pills

I was going to try sitting with my anger again this morning, then I got lured into Facebook by two private messages. You get into these conversations and then… you don’t know how to bring them to an end.

Then because I had the browser open to answer the messages, I started looking at the ‘highlights’ which Firefox puts on the page when you open a tab, and some of them look really quite interesting, so today I’ve already opened three… I must stop, I really must, or I won’t be able to write anything.

Well, what can I say, does it matter if I do or don’t write anything? Yes, some days it’s good, some days it’s not. It may be helping with the therapeutic self-understanding process, but it isn’t stimulating me into making progress on any of my three suspended writing projects, or to start anything new. Just more of the same.

It rained in the night, but the sun is starting to come through the clouds now. The outside table and chairs will be damp. What time will it be by the time I’ve finished this and had breakfast? I have no idea. What will I do with the rest of the day? Ditto.

I wonder how I’d be now if I’d carried on taking antidepressants? I started in 2001 – almost twenty years ago – and took them till the end of 2004, though I never felt they helped in any way, didn’t even improve my sleeping (which was why I started taking them). I kept going back to the GP and saying they didn’t help and he told me to take more, till I was taking four a day. I was taking them all the way through the two-year research contract I had from 2001 to 2003, last full time job I ever had, and when the contract ran out I knew there was no future for me in academia, though I kept on applying for jobs for a couple of years more.

In the summer of 2004 I went to see a hypnotherapist, she said she could solve my problems in six sessions. I did feel somewhat better and started to wean myself off the pointless pills. In that time I ducked out of auditioning for ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, and she said that was good because I was ‘learning to say no’, but actually it was because I made the choice not to put myself through the stress and humiliation. Then later when I turned up to help backstage the producer asked why I wasn’t singing, made me promise to audition for the next show, ‘Titanic’, which I did, opened my mouth in front of the panel and what came out was so pathetic that the musical director got cross and made me start again. Completely humiliated – as expected.

So I weaned myself off the antidepressants, and didn’t notice any different, finished at the end of December 2004, joined a meditation group in January 2005

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Happy Families

Yesterday I wrote but didn’t post. Because… I’m not sure why, now. Except I was full of anger.

I still don’t really know how to write about this. But I don’t think that my previous approaches to dealing with the sadness and frustration of various times in my life by trying to forget them and/or blaming myself has been very helpful in the long run. I think I am slowly moving away from the shame/self-blame cycle, but that has unleashed a lot of anger and resentment, as I try to find and understand reasons for why that became my default way of dealing with difficult emotions.

By coincidence, on my Facebook ‘Memory’ feed this morning, up popped a photo of my family which I scanned and posted two years ago, but which was taken when I was twenty, at my niece’s christening: Mum and Dad, my brother and sister and their spouses, my nephew (still not quite two at that time) and the baby, and me. Of course, we are all happy and smiling, as everybody does for family photos (apart from my brother-in-law, who’s just that sort of bloke). I remember the dress I was wearing that day, pale green printed with a pattern of tiny cream roses, very pretty and totally unlike anything else I wore at the time (or do now). I remember buying it with Mum from C&A in Hull (pre-Humber Bridge days, so we must have gone round the long way, because I’m sure we didn’t take the ferry – those were the days, when a shopping trip to Hull was a day out because there were exciting shops like C&A which we didn’t have in Scunny.) Dad must have driven (because Mum never learned how), no doubt under sufferance and with a lot of bickering. But he would have done it because he loved us, even though I don’t ever remember that word being used until decades later, when life and time were drifting away from them both.

That dress later became my interview dress, when I was trying to find my way through to the next stage of my life. I don’t suppose there’s a decent photograph of it anywhere, which is a shame. There I am, just a face, hiding at the back between my brother and brother-in-law, and it seems significant that I was the odd one then, as I am now (though with two broken marriages in between) while both my siblings are still with the same partners, almost fifty years later. ‘Between’ boyfriends, as I usually was, smiling for the camera, but lonely, sad and scared of the future, about to embark on a summer full of heartbreak and a desperate search for love and stability which would precipitate me into my disastrous first marriage.

I weep now for that pretty girl, full of misery and shame rather than hope for the life to come, and quite unable to talk to any of those other people, her ‘nearest and dearest’.

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The Chain

Wrote this yesterday. Didn’t share it – chickened out. I’m sharing it now.

Rejoice, rejoice,
We have no choice
But to carry on.

Stephen Stills, 1970

Will I be doing my bit to support the economy by going shopping today? Probably not. I’ll stay at home and carry on doing what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months, thank you very much.

This morning I am lost for words, a strange experience for me. Poised on a knife edge between opening myself up and expressing my honest feelings and thinking of something else, less contentious to write about – at the same time as watching on YouTube – really watching for once, not just playing music as a background – Fleetwood Mack performing ‘The Chain’ live, witnessing the rage flashing and crackling around and between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, feeling it entering and reflecting my pre-existing mood of pent-up furious chaotic self-destructive energy.

Why? Why this morning, why today?

‘Where [am I] going now my love?
Where will [I] be tomorrow?
Will [it] bring me happiness?
Will [it] bring me sorrow?

Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams
What you do with what you see…

Stephen Stills

Woke up with my usual mixture of shame, self-hatred and despair, but instead of taking the path of trying to calm it down and hush it up, I decided to go the other way and face it all head on, and this is where it gets me. For once I can feel all that anger in my body, not just think it in my head.

This was happening in my therapy sessions towards the end of last year, when we were still meeting in person. Every week I would come into the room with whatever was in my mind, but before the end of the session I would be screaming and grinding my teeth and smacking my fists against the arms of the chair to stop myself from smacking them into the side of my head.

It would be easy to put this down to the repressed frustration and anger of a child whose voice was never heard; whose questions were met with impatience if not downright anger; whose feelings were never acknowledged without disapproval; who learnt that those feelings of sadness and loneliness and inability to mix with other children or interact with adults were her own fault, a wilful failure to play the ‘happy little girl’; who lived in a world of confusion, constantly trying to anticipate what was wanted of her, never knowing when she might unwittingly overstep some implicit boundary and suffer the consequences.

Maybe that is a true story, maybe not. I honestly don’t know. In last week’s therapy session, I said that I’m sure there must have been happy times in my childhood, but I can’t remember them, which to me feels very shameful, my failing that I should be so unfair on my parents, but the therapist’s reaction was that it was very sad.

After sixty years, after multiple attempts to resolve these questions, can I ever find a way out?  

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Screws and Fuse Blues

After my post yesterday I went hunting for the poem I mentioned, and couldn’t find it anywhere. I think I know the title: ‘Walnut’; I know the last line: ‘I was younger then, and I looked good in pink.’ I can remember the experience which inspired it – both at the time I wrote it (finding a matchbox with ‘Walnut’ on the side) and the memory of that restaurant in West Hampstead which it triggered. I know it was in this house, so has to have been within the last three years (most likely 2018), and I know I blogged it (or at least put it on FB) because I remember a comment from one of my FB friends.

I’ve scoured through my poetry folders, through this blog and the previous one for that time period, even my two Facebook pages, but with no luck. All my blog posts are saved in Word in either of two folders, one on Onedrive and one on my desktop, the former imaginatively titled: ‘Blog’, the second: ‘blog’, saved with a filename of the date when they were written. I didn’t look at how many files were in those folders, by that point I was losing the will to live.

The day went on. I decided to fix the hedge trimmer (I cut through the cable when I tried using it last month). When I went to the shop on Wednesday I noticed the hedge is growing over the gate so that soon the postman won’t be able to get in (or I out – I could become like sleeping beauty, there’s a thought). So I got out all the tools and found the bit that I’d cut off (it was still over one of the kitchen chairs), unscrewed the connector that my ex attached the first time I cut through it, cursed the fact that I couldn’t find the better screwdrivers and myself for not being able to get a screwdriver into the slot correctly and hold it tight enough to actually turn it so I always ruin screw heads and drivers alike; chanted to myself: ‘don’t lose the screws’ but of course did, lost every little thing that could be lost and had to look for them all three times, but that’s my life in a nutshell, just a normal part of dyspraxia.

Then when I had it all back together I plugged it in and – nothing. Of course, it must have blown the fuse when it happened. Did I have any spare fuses? No, but I remembered two old appliances (coffee maker and microwave) were still in the bottom cupboard – but both their fuses had already been cannibalised. Went round the house looking for other things with fuses that I don’t want. Found my old hairdryer and tried that, but it still didn’t work, that probably blew when it broke as well.

In bed this morning I remembered I’ve got an electric heater I shouldn’t need any time soon. I’ll try that today.