Category: chaos

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State of Alert

I seem to have been dreaming much more vividly the last few nights – vividly to remember them when I woke up, but not now. And in the shower I was thinking about thinking – the constant, ‘stream of consciousness thinking’, the ‘catastrophic’ thinking as someone recently called it, though it’s not always dark, it’s where everything comes from, including all my writing, especially poetry. But no poetry today. And I think I’ll just write about what happened yesterday.

I mentioned on Tuesday that I had to get blood tests (which is normal) and a Covid test prior (within 72 hours for the latter) to my 6-monthly infusion on Saturday. I rang up both the relevant hospital departments and got the Covid for 14:05 yesterday and the bloods for 13:45. The lady in haematology told me sternly: ‘don’t come in more than 5 minutes before your appointment!’ Then on Wednesday afternoon I got an automatic text from a 5-digit number asking me to rate my ‘recent experience of our outpatients department’. This threw me. I ignored it, but started to wonder whether it had been triggered by my appointment – maybe they’d made it for Wednesday and not Thursday? It wasn’t worth the trauma of trying to call the hospital back (which is a nightmare for anyone, not just a phone-phobic like me) so I decided to leave it and turn up anyway.

Because my time management is so poor, I have a habit of allowing too much time to get to appointments, and arriving far too early, to make up for all those times when the reverse has happened. Plus I wasn’t at all convinced that 20 minutes between appointments would give me enough time. I knew where I had to go for the blood test, and where it was in relation to the car park, but not for the Covid, except that it was on the same site – I’d just been told: ‘turn left into Nightingale Rd, follow it round and you’ll see it on you left.’ I knew where Nightingale Rd was, but I didn’t know how long I would have to follow it round for.

Too many times I’ve set off with great confidence for somewhere, assuming that I’ve understood the directions, and got horribly lost. As it happened, that wasn’t the way it worked out yesterday – also the blood people were expecting me and saw me when I arrived at 13:40 and all was well. But it so easily could have not been.

This is the ocean in which my thoughts swim – in a constant state of alert. Stress was worrying away at me all Wednesday evening and yesterday morning – the poem I posted was a reaction to trying to deal with it. In situations like that, I try to think of the worst case, and really all it meant was that I’d have to make another appointment for the blood tests, either today or tomorrow.

It worked out – but there’s no guarantee that the next time will.

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Another Monday

Yesterday I had a horrible day. I spent most of it crocheting, but for once it didn’t make me feel happy, just guilty because I knew I was just doing it to fill the time and avoid all the more important things I probably should be doing to sort out the house. Also I had some phone calls to make, which I always dread (I did one, to the vet, but not another, to cancel something which is costing me money and I need to stop it). And I was expecting a ‘phone consultation’ with the breast cancer nurse, about my next 6 monthly infusion at the hospital. The one in April was cancelled, and if that had gone ahead this should be the last one, but I asked her and apparently it’s based on number (six times), not time (three years), so I’ll have to have another one next spring as well. Anyway, this one is on Saturday, and I knew about it because I’ve had the appointment letter since April.

I always have to get blood tests beforehand, and usually there’s a walk-in service at the hospital. But what I hadn’t realised until I spoke to the nurse is that now I have to make an appointment. Also she asked if I’d arranged a covid test, but I knew nothing about it being required. She said it should have been mentioned in the letter, and I wondered if it had been, because I hadn’t reread it, but when I said the letter came in April she said ‘well it wouldn’t have been then’ in that sort of fussy way that some people have that makes everything sound as though it’s your fault and you should have known. She’s not the same nurse I met when I was having the original treatment in 2017, and I didn’t recognise her name, but I know the drill now, or thought I did, till this year. She gave me a number to call to book a test at the hospital for Wednesday, and also suggested I call the blood-test centre and get the appointment there close to the same time, so I wouldn’t have to make two trips to the hospital. So I made those two phone calls and got both tests sorted for tomorrow.

If you’re thinking either: ‘That doesn’t sound too bad’ or ‘Poor you, that sounds horrible’, I should say that my bad mood was not related to having to make these extra appointments (though they didn’t help), but I’d been feeling it all morning as well. So much so that I was trying to find excuses to get out of going to yoga in the evening, but I made myself do it, and felt much better for doing so, which I knew I would, but still… It did help, and now I’ve made a commitment with the teacher that I will definitely go next week and she has put me on the list, so I can’t back out.

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Log Cabin

Very late this morning – although I’ve been awake for two and a half hours already. I decided to start doing my half hour yoga etc in the mornings again, and had a shower and washed my hair, and just generally time passed as it so often does.

Routines, as I’m sure I’ve said before, are both constraining and liberating. I half thought last week that I wouldn’t restart these two morning routines – exercise and blogging – but that’s because I was in a pretty shitty mood after returning from Cyprus. It’s so easy to slip down into chaos – especially for someone like me. Spontaneity can be exhilarating, but it can also be terrifying. Sometimes the chaos reaches a point where the only way I can deal with it is by ignoring it, and so it grows exponentially until it reaches a crisis and I fall apart emotionally. I was getting close to that point last week. But yesterday I wrote my blog; tidied the kitchen; loaded, ran and emptied the dishwasher; hoovered the stairs and landing – never really know what brings me back from the brink. I might say: ‘a decent night’s sleep’ but that wasn’t the case. Taking the van out on Friday? Doing that one, big(ish) stressful thing and then putting it to one side? Putting everything else into perspective? Maybe.

When I was learning to drive, the instructor told me that the greatest pleasure in life comes from doing something you really don’t want to do, and then afterwards, knowing that you’ve done it. Over forty years later, I think that’s still one of the wisest pieces of advice I’ve ever heard.

I’ve started a new crochet project – while still finishing off the previous one (both cardigans). I started following a pattern for what’s called a ‘log cabin’ design, starting with a small square, then every few rows rotating the work and picking up stitches along the edge of the existing work so that you have a rectangle that keeps growing – like a spiral growing out from the centre, but with straight edges. I’m using a ‘cake’ type yarn with large blocks of colour, and it looks pretty good. But I don’t like the shape of the pattern in the book – which makes a sleeveless waistcoat, which I’m not that keen on. So I’m trying to think of a way of adapting it to make a cardi with sleeves. This is the sort of thing I like to do – trying out something new and seeing how it works out.

Every so often I think I’ll give up on crochet, because it’s too repetitive and I feel like I’ve exhausted the possibilities. Then I get an idea like this and get interested again. Admittedly, I have cupboards full of projects that I’ve never finished, and garments that I’ve never worn. But I keep going back to it. And today I’m looking forward to sitting in the sunshine and trying again.

Maybe there’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.

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Blame Game

By chance this morning, looking for something to read on my Kindle, I found a book I’d forgotten I had, by Tara Brach. In fact, I was apparently 25% of the way through reading it. She’s an American meditation/self help guru who was recommended to me by someone I met at a mindfulness retreat a few years ago. I watched/listened to a few of her videos on Youtube, and downloaded this book.

I needed something to read on the loo, so I read on from the point where it ‘opened’. It was an anecdote about Christmas dinner with her family, where every individual was being annoying for one reason or another. In a huff (she didn’t put it like that), she went out for a walk on her own in the snow, reflecting on this, and realised that while she was blaming them she was really angry with herself.

I finished on the loo and went to the kitchen, where the radio was playing Thought for the Day. The speaker was also talking about deflecting our own blame onto other people, and how we should face up to it and take responsibility (maybe not in those exact words). And I thought, well, that’s what I do all the time, isn’t it? I always take the blame onto myself, and like apologising, somehow it can make people even more irritated with me, and I with myself. What am I doing wrong?

My late mother-in-law used to say: ‘Everybody makes mistakes, but I try not to make the same mistake twice’, the implication being that you can’t be blamed for the first time, but you should learn not to repeat whatever it was that you did. Because if you do repeat it, you become culpable for failing to learn the lesson the first time.

I’ve taken a lifetime of blame, but I just keep on and on making the same mistakes. I’ve tried to learn the lessons, take responsibility, be a ‘better’ person – but there are aspects of myself which will never change no matter what I try to do – and I am trying to explore and accept them, because I’m tired of fighting against myself. It’s easy to get frustrated and irritated with the chaos of my life, but as long as it’s just me on my own dealing with the consequences, it’s not so bad as when it affects someone else, or there are witnesses, and I have to deal with their reactions, and my own reactions to them.

Yet at the same time I have this compulsion to ‘come out’, to explain myself, to be understood and accepted for who I am. Judge me if you must, but please try to judge me on my own terms, not by comparing me to the person you believe or want me to be (or think I ‘should’ be).

Perhaps all our perceptions are illusory, but my self-knowledge is based on a lifetime’s study, and – I think – deserves to be heard.

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Rabbit in the Headlights

Today I am in freefall. I know I’m losing my grip on life, I can feel time whooshing past me ever faster and I am so paralysed… I can’t move, I can’t function. I know this is a difficult time, I know the reasons behind this stress this week, but how do I deal with it? I am sitting here writing, rabbit in the headlights syndrome. I haven’t done my morning tai chi/yoga since Thursday, or blogged since Friday, though yesterday I wrote but didn’t post. I remember being in bed looking at the clock at 5:50 thinking – I’ll get up now – then finding myself sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the wardrobe, glancing at theclock it it was 7.05 and what had I done in that hour? I couldn’t remember – not asleep, just lying in bed, thoughts churning, maybe looking at my phone, everything pulling away from me, leaving me behind, sitting on the edge of the bed, panicking.

Someone on the dyspraxia Facebook group yesterday evening posted a question about ‘imposter syndrome’, other members’ experience of it, and its relation to dyspraxia. My feeling is that it’s probably not directly caused by dyspraxia, but like many things it can be a consequence of the things that are. It relates to what I was saying the other week about lack of control – when I manage to do something ‘right’, it feels like luck, or a fluke, because I can’t see any way of making sure it always happens that way again, but when I do something ‘wrong’ I can see exactly how my actions have contributed to it, though I can’t see how to stop myself doing them again. So past experience of getting something ‘right’ isn’t helpful in making me believe that I can do something else ‘right’, because it’s in the past, and there’s no guarantee that I can do it again, or that my past success wasn’t just down to some external conditions which won’t apply the next time.

Confidence and self esteem are supposed to grow through small incremental steps, through trying things and learning and taking pride in achievements, however small. There are plenty of things I have learned to do by practice and repetition – like driving a car, or cooking Bolognese sauce (though last time I forgot the bacon) or the first 28 movements of the tai chi form – but none of that is a guarantee that I won’t make a catastrophic mess of any one of those at some future attempt (though I admit that ‘driving’ is the only one with the potential to be truly catastrophic), and it’s not much of a help in learning something new, or applying old skills in new settings.

This is why other people’s beliefs and expectations about me become such a burden. I feel as though everything I’ve ever done is built on sand, however irrational that may appear from the outside. Every new challenge is a new opportunity for disaster.

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The Next Fifty Years in 500 Words

I can’t use anything of what I wrote yesterday. I was trying to explain how I became who I am – as far as I understand it. But what’s the point of that? It’s only the pattern I’ve imposed on my memories from the context of where I am now.

How can I untangle how I feel about myself and the life I’ve lived and what part of that is down to dyspraxia and what is just who I am? Dyspraxia is all the frustrating, annoying, depressing, heart-sinking little stupid things that happen all day, every day. I have always known I was worthless. This is not new because I have suddenly discovered an explanation for it – it was always there.

I could carry on describing the last fifty years – university; struggling to find a job, failing interview after interview; rushing into marriage because someone asked me and I thought this was the only chance I would have to avoid going back and living with my parents; marriage broke down within two years; more shame, more guilt, more failure, all piled on  top of who I was, because of who I was; getting a job and working at it for nine years; marrying again and giving up my job at the age of 30 to become an ‘ex-pat wife’, not knowing that that would be the last full-time permanent job I would ever have; babies and post-natal depression and loneliness and coming home; getting a chance to do a PhD and thinking this would transform my life, then afterwards finding that at the age of 43 with a 13 year gap on my CV, still no one wanted to employ me despite my qualifications; more failed applications and interviews and a string of part-time admin jobs; breakdown of my second marriage, feeling trapped because I couldn’t earn enough to support myself so I felt obliged to stay; finally leaving to live on my own at the age of 54, happy to be living on my own at last, but still financially dependent on my ex – as I still am, living on a share of his pension – more guilt, more shame. After three years trying to create a new life, trying to find more permanent work, doing more training (web design), trying to write, trying to start a design/publishing business, I used money from the divorce settlement to go travelling across Europe, planning to write a book about it and support myself. Came back with even less chance of ever getting another job – did a TEFL course in Prague but couldn’t find teaching work without experience (and anyway I was a terrible teacher because of my lack of social skills and inability to explain myself). Used my share of the proceeds from the sale of the marital home to buy a house on the south coast and retire on my ex husband’s pension, where I am now, looking back over a lifetime of repeated failure, depression and self-loathing, and failing to write.

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Meltdown in Sainsbury’s

Let me start this post by stressing that I am not anti-mask. I don’t feel very comfortable wearing one, but I understand the reasons and am quite happy to conform – in principle. But today I had a bit of a meltdown in Sainsbury’s.

I’ve been wearing a scarf over my nose and mouth for shopping since the rules came in (and I’m still avoiding going into shops as far as possible anyway). When my daughter came to stay, and we were going out more often, she gave me two fabric masks that she had spare. They’re both in horrible flowery printed fabric, which I hate, but that’s probably why they were the ones she didn’t want either.

A few days ago I read about a study which tested the different types of face covering, and found that properly made fabric ones are the best, better than just a folded scarf like the ones I’ve been using. So I took the less hateful of the two to Sainsbury’s this morning, and put it on before I went into the shop.

The problem I had was that I couldn’t get the elastic to stay behind my left ear – and also my glasses kept falling off. I remember I had the same problem (with the elastic) the first time I tried to put it on, when my daughter was here, and she helped me with it and got it to stay on. This morning I was on my own, and had no idea what subtle thing she’d done to it to make it work. It was bad enough walking around the shop, but when I got to the self checkout it all went horribly wrong – I think partly because I was looking down – it kept popping off, and my glasses kept falling off, and I was trying to hold it on with my left hand and scan and put the stuff in the bags with just my right hand – a couple of times it came off altogether, but what could I do?

Writing this now, it occurs to me that I often have problems with the self checkout, so you might ask, why don’t I go to the staffed checkout? But the answer to that is that if I’m going to make an idiot of myself I would rather not have someone watching me – I know that the self checkout doesn’t make me invisible, but at least I don’t have to acknowledge and interact with another human being when I’m f*cking up the simplest tasks and being that crazy old lady that nobody wants in their shop.

And this is the thing that will never go away. There isn’t any way round it, no solution to the problem of me being me. I can try to hide – and that’s easier now than it used to be, now I can just hunker down and avoid going out into the world of rational human beings and mature adults, the world where the normal people are.

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Going Through the Motions

Going Through the Motions

Get up and do what you always do,
even though your head is full
of all the times it hasn’t worked before;
of all the reasons why it doesn’t work;
of all the many ways it might go wrong;
of all the problems you can’t imagine
until they happen.

You want to run away and hide,
but you’ve tried that before,
and it never worked
so why should it now?

This is life,
this is how it works.
Stumble on,
from one day to the next
and maybe you’ll
get away with it
for one more day.

Linda Rushby 18 August 2020

There was a post on the FB dyspraxia group asking how many members write, and what we write. I started thinking about poems I’ve written down the years which relate to my dyspraxia (even when I didn’t know that’s what it was). They tend to be the ones I don’t share much, because I don’t expect people I know to understand them or like the fact that I’ve written them about myself. The two I first thought of were ‘Cahos’, from 2005 (oh, look at that typo again – I may make that the actual title of the poem from now on) and ‘The Awkward One’ (2017, I think).

I saw the post at bedtime, and started going through my Google drive from my phone looking for the two I’ve mentioned and to see how many more I could find (a very bad idea when I was supposed to be going to sleep). And then when I got up and was doing my morning routine, I came up with the one above.

I could probably fill a whole book, but I doubt it would be very popular. From one point of view, these poems are seething with self-pity, self-loathing and shame – which is why I often keep them to myself. On the other hand, they are also searingly honest, full of pain, sadness, regret, frustration and barely suppressed anger. Both of those descriptions sum up my underlying emotional landscape a lot of the time.

The anger in particular WAS COMING OUT A LOT IN MY THERAPY SESSIONS towards the end of last year (oops, must’ve hit the caps lock without noticing, but that also seems quite appropriate!) I suppose my current task is to learn how to deal with it without turning it onto myself – incredibly hard and stressful, but I am trying.

One way of doing that is to have routines and stick to them even when I really don’t feel like it. Yesterday I skipped my weekly yoga-in-the-park session because I convinced myself it would rain – but then it didn’t. And I felt bad for making that an excuse for my lack of commitment. So I’m trying to deal with that.

I heard a podcast of the TED Radio Show on BBC R4Extra yesterday, about choice and making decisions. I need to listen to it again, then maybe I’ll have something to say about it.

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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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In Absentia

I said yesterday that I’d started a to-do list. I actually did one of the five things I’d written on it – clear and clean the kitchen table. I also did other things related to that which I hadn’t written on the list – like putting away (or rather, dumping in the study) the toys the grandkids had out last week (not just the ones on the kitchen table, but also the ones in the front room); cleaning the sink, draining board and surrounding counters; pulling bags of yarn out of the Chinese cabinet looking for something to use for the border of the baby blanket I’m making for my daughter’s ex-sister-in-law’s second baby (and hence Flick’s cousin) who was born last week (because I need to use all the yarn I have for the blanket itself or else it will be unbalanced because I only had four balls of the original and have had to do a band of a different colour in the middle, and don’t want to go back and start again given that the baby’s already arrived).

I started wondering how much of my time in an average day is taken up with looking for things, often things I’ve only mislaid in the previous five minutes. My first instinct was that it’s probably between about one and two hours. That might sound like a bit of an exaggeration, but I’m sure it’s never less than half an hour, and that is balanced out by days when I might spend several hours on trying to find one particular thing. More than once I’ve had kind people (who presumably think I’m incapable of thinking this out for myself) suggest that I have specific places for things like my glasses, phone, keys, wallet, hand bag, coat etc etc etc so I always know where to look for them. I then watch their expressions go from helpful to sceptical as I point out that the problem doesn’t arise at the point when I’m looking for whatever it is – when my mind and concentration is focussed on finding and I do indeed go straight to those ‘specific places’, before starting to figure out exactly where it is this time – but at the point when I put it down, when my mind is NOT concentrating on what I’m doing, but probably on what I’m going to do next; or what needs doing and what I should be doing next; or what I’m going to cook for dinner and when I need to start that; or what somebody said to me earlier or last year; or what I should have said or done in response but didn’t; or what I’ll say next time; or just generally (in that lovely phrase) ‘away with the fairies’.

To use another lovely phrase, I am ‘absent-minded’, and most of the time my mind is completely absent from whatever and wherever I need it to be in that moment, and this, I suppose, is the root of all my difficulties.