Category: frustration

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Finding the Way (or not)

Now my proof-reading job has finished, I was planning to get on with ‘The Long Way Back’. But I’ve reached the time when I was in Prague, and even starting to read back the blog posts from that time has reminded me of how stressed I was over the teaching course, interviews, flat, etc, not to mention the accident when I fell on my face and the problems with my teeth. There’s a story there to be told, but it’s not a very cheerful one, nor is the year that followed it, and I’m back with a sense of not wanting to touch it, as I had the last time I tried, three years ago. But if I leave it like that, I guess in a way it will always haunt me, and I have to draw a line under it somehow.

Yesterday I ended by quoting from a post on a Facebook group for dyspraxics which bothered me, about how people like me should stop apologising and feeling ashamed, and sorry for ourselves. That is me in a nutshell, right there, but how do I stop? If I am to be true to my nature, that is how I have always been, and always will be. I can’t be strong and proud of myself, because this is who I am, this is my lived experience: that I try things, mess them up, break things, am constantly late, messy, chaotic, forgetful, all those things. I read other people’s posts on the group, where they talk about repeatedly failing at interviews, hopelessly looking for jobs but never being accepted for anything that matches their qualifications, getting bullied at work and at home for being slow, chaotic, etc, and so on, and so forth. Is it so surprising that we are apologetic, full of shame, sorry for ourselves? Don’t we deserve somewhere, one place at least, among our peers, where we can share these stories and feelings?

But at the same time I can see where this person is coming from. I despise myself when I feel sorry for myself – I have written about this before, the horrible vicious circle that makes it so hard to have any kind of self-love or self-belief. That’s what is so stark when I read the blog posts from Prague: how out of depth and hopeless I felt. I now know where those feelings originate from – but knowing that there’s nothing I can do to change the way I am doesn’t help.

In the ‘affirmative’ ending to my ‘Square Peg’ poem I wrote that I’ll never find a space to fit my edges unless I ‘make one for myself’. By that I am acknowledging that no one else can help me to find a way of accepting myself – I no longer fantasise about finding an ‘other half’ who will make me whole at last – but I still don’t know how to do it for myself, except, as I’ve always done, by running away and hiding .

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Two Days in One (Again)

Wednesday, 05 May 2021

I started writing, but after about 100 words looked up and realised nothing was happening, the last couple of sentences I’d typed weren’t there. I thought I must have accidentally overwritten it, as sometimes happens when I’m not paying attention, then I found that my mouse wasn’t working, tried the touchpad on my keyboard and that wasn’t working, nothing was working, I had no cursor. I waited for a while, then tried alt-del-ctrl and that didn’t do anything either, everything was frozen, so I switched off and started it up again. When I finally got back into Word, what I’d written wasn’t autosaved, so I had to start all over again, even though I didn’t really want to write this morning anyway.

When I got home on Tuesday I called my cat a few times, but she didn’t respond. This isn’t like her, when I’ve been away she’s usually really pleased to see me, but I didn’t worry, thinking she would come out when she was ready. I spent about an hour in the kitchen, very excited to have wifi in there at last – my son installed a booster for me when he was here on Saturday, and I now have wifi in the kitchen and bedrooms, which has been a huge bugbear for me in the four years I’ve been living here. I thought she’d appear, but she didn’t, so I went round everywhere calling her name and looking in her usual hiding places. Got my dinner – and hers – then afterwards went into the front room for my evening telly-watching. Still no cat. About eight o’clock I went all round upstairs again, and in the study (I’d been in there before) I found a little face peeping out nervously from the bottom of a book case hidden in the corner behind piles of junk and stuff.

I need to do something about this room. It is so awful. I just leave it and leave it and let it get worse.

Thursday, 06 May 2021

That’s what I got to yesterday and then gave up. Maybe today I’ll just fill up what’s left. This week I don’t seem able to come up with a full 500 words on any day. The words are there, they always are, but the inner critic keeps batting them away as being too boring or too depressing or whatever.

I got a text from my daughter, asking if I want to go and stay with them after the 17th but before she goes back to work. I told her about losing and finding the cat, and about the mess in the study. She and her sister-in-law want to go away without the kids and husbands for a few days, maybe to the cabin and I have a key now, so I could get the train and she could meet me at the station. Or she might come here and help me sort out the study, then take me back with her. I sent her photos of the mess.

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May Day, M’Aidez

Well, it’s May Day, how did that happen? How are we already a third of the way through the year?

And another anniversary, and not just of the second day of the move, but a year later, when I got an email from my ex-husband saying that he’d had an offer on the house, which set the wheels in motion towards my finally moving into this house – with all the Stuff from the attic and both cats – but not till another six months later.

On my walk yesterday, I wrote a poem in my notebook while sitting behind the café, but didn’t post it on here, because I had to do the final NPWM as well (I’m tired of that acronym and the alternating shift-key-no-shift-key palaver). I will type it now and see what the word count is, and decide whether I need it to fill out this post or I’ve got enough to say otherwise.

Just the one poem. I mentioned in my therapy session that I came up with four poems on my walk last Saturday. The therapist didn’t respond directly, but later referred back to me casually mentioning it, as though it was nothing much, whereas to her it seemed like it was some kind of achievement. But then, what was it? It was just me going to the trouble of writing down some stuff that came into my head – that’s all my poems ever are, after all. If I’d casually mentioned that I’d hoovered my whole house, or cleaned all the windows, inside and out, now that would be a remarkable achievement.

I can’t repeat this often enough: I don’t know where my writing comes from, I have no control over it (especially poems). It’s all about this torrent of words in my head. That’s how I manage to churn out these 500 words a day – how I even once managed to produce five thousand words in thirty days (and what a massive waste of time that was). I know sometimes I say that I don’t know what to write about, but that’s usually not because there is nothing there but because what is there is stuff I’m either embarrassed to show or something which might cause trouble in some way if I did share it. Sometimes it comes in a kind of rhythm, and then it might be the start of a poem, and it might go on to be a poem.

The Square Peg

You’ll never file my edges off
to make me fit the hole
you planned for me,
however hard you try.

I tried so many years
to mould myself
into the space I thought
I ought to fill.
I always failed, and
took the failure on myself,
and blamed myself for failing
every time.

My edges are what
make me who I am;
they fuel the restless longing
for a space where I could fit;
a space I’ll never find
unless I make it for myself.

Linda Rushby 1 May 2021

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Gobbledygook

Thursday, 22 April 2021n the Windows logn screen eing part of the same, instead of both yrtnewswf what is ectrum  sf te ends si are somehow at oppentertainmentport’ and enas though .ekt do you remember from the news this wekhenthing in betwSport to entertainment and everr: ayinessage here was a  PC this morningon my…

When I glanced up from typing, the above gobbledygook was on my screen. How it got so mangled I have no idea – clearly in some places I had hit the ‘up arrow’ and taken my cursor – and hence my typing – up to the line above – something that frequently happens when I’m typing without paying attention, often leading to whole lines being overwritten and I have to copy what’s there onto the ‘clipboard’ and carefully go back through ‘undo’ to get back what’s disappeared. If I untangle the mess, I think what I was trying to say was this:

‘On the Windows login screen on my PC this morning there was a message saying: Sport to entertainment and everything in between, what do you remember from the news this week?’ as though ‘sport’ and ‘entertainment’ are somehow at opposite ends of a spectrum of ‘the news’ as opposed to being both at the same end…’ and I was intending to go on to write something about the implication that the genuinely important stuff about what’s happening in the world can somehow be dismissed as less significant  – but I’m not going to go into that now because I’m just amazed at the madness I seem to have unleashed, and would like to make the analogy that that is pretty much what it feels like inside my mind most of the time. (Forgot tpo mentione that somehow I also caused this paragraph to go to double spacing, but I’ve corrected that. ‘to mention’.)

Well.

I have written two poems (one for today, on efor tomorrow – maybe) on my notebook with my black crayon pencil while still in bed. This new technology of discovered is still working find, though no doubt the ‘lead’ will snap soon. ‘one for’ not ‘on efor’ and ‘I’ve’ not ‘of’. It’s interesting to note that writing words that sound vaguely like the one I intended to write seems to be quite a new phenomenon in my wrting/typing’. ‘fine’ not ‘find’. ‘writing’ not ‘wrting’. And so it goes. My typing is becoming, at first glance, almost as illegible as my handwriting. I now the right words perfectly well, they just come out wrong. ‘know’, not ‘now’ – and I promise you I am not doing this deliberately, just not making the corrections when I notice them. And Word spell checker just automatically corrected ‘diong’ to doing’ – but not that time. Interesting.

Well, that has taken up most of 500 words this morning, writing about my terrible typing. I once wrote about this before and read it out at a writers group and everyone laughed. It’s mortying when everyone supposedly laughing ‘with’ you fails to notice you’re not laughing. Mortifying.

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Seeds

Ennui

Today I feel nothing.
no words in my head,
no thoughts worth sharing
just a dull emptiness.

Why am I here,
staring at this screen?
The keys touch my fingers
but they won’t help,
they are mocking me.   

Why am I writing
staccato rhythm?
Short lines?
Empty words?

Yesterday the spinner
rolled out her thread
into this future,
which became
just a day,
like any other.

Linda Rushby 10 April 2021

On my desk I just noticed a seed pod. This must sound bizarre. How can there be a seed pod on my desk and me be surprised to see it there? Believe me, there could be anything on this desk and I wouldn’t know where it came from. But thinking back through the last few days, I remember emptying out a drawer from a cheap plastic chest of drawers, one of three which I bought in B&M the first summer I moved here, to store stuff in my flat, things which were in boxes which I was going to ‘sort out’ into these drawers, but in the event they just moved from one chaotic mess into another. And this week I decided I would empty one of the chests and put it out in my new shed, for storing shed stuff, with the vague sense that this would somehow make the chaos more manageable. Each chest had four drawers, some of them only contained things which were already in boxes which could be moved and put on top of the IKEA shelves. Another was mostly full of cassettes and CDs, a staple gun and various other junk which I piled up on the desk, including, apparently a seed pod, like an elongated, thin brown pea pod. Before I moved here, I collected all sorts of seeds from the garden of the old house, and put them all in envelopes with the names written on the front, but I have no idea what happened to any of them – I didn’t plant them, that’s for sure.

This long, thin brown pod looks vaguely familiar, as though I should know where it’s from. I might even have taken it from a plant in a park. There were still seeds inside it, I popped them out while I was thinking about what to write, and they are sitting in a cluster on my phone, about eight or ten of them at a guess, papery round the edges with a brown centre about a millimetre across. I could try planting them and see what happens, though after all these years it’s unlikely that anything will grow.

But I need to find a seed and make it grow, and this morning that feels really hard. I pick up the staple gun – I bought it over thirty years ago, when we were living in the USA, and I’m not sure whether I still have staples to fit it, and if so where they are. I probably can’t get any more now.

But I haven’t used it in thirty years anyway.

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Ducks in a Row

I am not two different people, or three or four, or however many I might have said at different times. Just want to make that clear. I am not Linda H OR Linda R; or Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra, Cat by Herself; I am both, all of them, or possibly even none, but in the end I am still me. When I switched on my PC this morning, Microsoft welcomed me as Linda H, while my laptop knows me as Linda R, but it’s just a matter of context. To family, Facebook, Twitter, close friends and acquaintances I’ve met since I moved to Southsea, I am R, but to most of officialdom (Portsmouth City Council, HMRC, DWP, DVLA, banks etc) and most people I know from Bedford days, I am still H – there is even a very small number of people I’m still in touch with who knew me from when I was ‘R’ before, forty years ago now.

I didn’t set out to write about my identity today, in fact I was intending to pull together some threads which I was thinking and writing about last week – so here goes. I was talking about card-making, and all the different items and processes involved in it that make it so unsuitable for anyone with dyspraxia and hence so stressful. Every time, I start intending to be more organised and keep a lid on the chaos, but it never works out that way.

But I was thinking about it as a microcosm of my life. There are things that need doing, and I have to think and decide about what’s the best order to do them in, and how I’m going to do them, and what I need to do them with, and by the time I’ve made a decision on any of those things, I’ve forgotten what I decided about the previous ones, and so I go round and round in circles.

I have spent a lifetime thinking that there are answers to these questions and that I should be able to get on top of them, that if I try just a bit harder I can make everything fall into place, and my life will become so much easier. Now I’m coming to accept that all the planning and to-do lists in the world are never going to change me, or change the way things are. There’s a saying going the rounds on Facebook (is ‘meme’ the correct word for that sort of thing?) which I’ve seen a couple of times: ‘Not only are my ducks not all in a row, I don’t even know where my ducks are!’ I’m not even sure whether I’ve got any ducks in the first place.

I sit in my chaos thinking about how to resolve it, and never manage to break out of those circles. Except sometimes I get an idea about one specific thing – like my google drive – and keep looking for an answer, however many times I fall down

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Crafting Chaos

Yesterday I started off with one topic but didn’t finish it before I moved on to something else – okay, you could say that I never finish anything, and that’s true, but I didn’t really say what I wanted to say.

I thought I had a great start going, I’d been thinking it in my head a couple of previous days but then discovered I had other stuff to say when I got onto the keyboard. That’s how it works. I can’t remember what I said that was so good, because once it’s written it goes, and that’s how it works too. I could open yesterday’s file and read it back but I don’t usually do that.

This coffee is weak. I only drink decaff, but that’s not the issue, it’s the flavour. It’s disappointing. I must have misjudged the amount of grounds I put in the machine. It was getting down to the bottom of the tin.

This is my mind, and the way it works all the time. That’s what I wanted to write about, about how exhausting it is to bounce around inside my head like this all the time and not have anything to show for it. I do nothing, I achieve nothing, but I’m not resting, not relaxing.

I sat and stared at all the mess on my kitchen table, trying to work out how to sort it all out. Some things have to be done before other things can be done (that’s also true of the process of card making, which I also mentioned yesterday – now I’m beginning to remember). I have to sort out in my head which is the best order to do it in and what I need to do first. There are tools, like the scissors, tweezers and the pokey tool (apparently that’s its official title), they all go in one of the small drawers, which are somewhere in the mix, but should I do those first? There are piles of paper, card, sticky-back paper, stamps, cutting dies; packets for the stamps to be put away in; packets for the dies, which come in sets; packets containing dies or stamps which I got out but didn’t use; ink pads; plastic wallets containing scraps of paper; scraps of paper left over from cutting, some of which can go into those plastic wallets but some which should probably just go in the bin; bits of backing from used sticky-back paper; plates from the rolling machine; envelopes; finished cards; the machine itself; two guillotines; the cutting mat; the craft knives…every time I think I’ve finished the list, I remember something else.

It makes sense to put the small things together in piles eg one of dies, one of stamps… but there isn’t any space left on the table, so things spread further around the kitchen. The stamps and dies from a specific set can be collected together and put into their packet, if I can find the packet, which is somewhere on the table…  

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Making Stuff

If you should happen to see me sitting and apparently doing nothing, I can pretty much guarantee that I won’t be ‘resting’. My mind will still be whirling around, jumping from one thought to the next and doubling back on itself without ever reaching any conclusions. I might be re-running an ancient conversation in my head, thinking of what I could have said differently to prove my point irrefutably, or composing a poem or a blog post, but most likely I will be thinking about what I should be doing instead of sitting there and thinking. This was brought home to me yesterday when I was facing the state of my kitchen table in the wake of a week spent (intermittently) making two birthday cards.

The process of making cards, while both creative and fun, is also quite stressful, and the clearing up afterwards even more so. It involves a lot of processes, with lots of bits of equipment and materials, some of them very small, others which are messy (glue and ink), and great potential for things getting lost, spilt, sticking to each other, hiding behind each other etc. As well as that, the creative process itself, the design of the thing, from sitting down with a mental connection such as: ‘Laura – tea and cakes’, ‘Chris – fishing’, ‘Simon- robots and/or dinosaurs’ (my 34 year-old son, by he way, though it could equally be my 5 year-old grandson), assembly of any materials relevant to that topic and trying to come up with something significantly different from last year’s effort is quite taxing in and of itself. Because I’m making them to give to other people – this has really only just occurred to me – it’s a lot more stressful than starting a jumper or blanket or whatever in knitting or crochet, when I know that it doesn’t matter what a pig’s ear I make of it, because no one has to see it but me.

Now, that is an interesting though. Making cards always implies the intention of creating something to give to someone else. Perhaps I should spend some time on using stamps, cutting dies and paper just for the fun of the process without producing anything which might be seen and/or judged by anyone else? When I started doing this craft, I was going to classes and workshops, where I was just making for the sake of it – I have stacks of cards made at those events hidden away in the cupboard, which I wouldn’t dream of giving to anyone else.

This is not what I started to write about – but I think it is a valuable insight, and it applies to lots of things I do – including writing this blog. I can do it because I know it is just for myself, although theoretically it could be read by anyone, very few people ever actually do read it, and so it doesn’t matter, there’s no requirement for it to reach a certain standard of quality, it is just itself.

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Lost Hour

On a clear, bright morning in spring, it would be good to set out on a new adventure, in search of a new life.

But today is neither clear nor bright, just dull and grey with the sound of the wind between the rooftops. And there are no new adventures in the offing, nor, most likely, any new lives to be had which are substantially different from the present one.

Just to say, that first sentence popped into my head as I sat down at the computer. I know it sounds like the start of something, but I’m buggered if I know what. Except that the first phrase – up to ‘spring’ – has a nice lilt to it, as though it could be the first line of a poem. Quite clichéd though, like all those folk songs that start on the lines of ‘One morning in May…’ but which, come to think of it, descend into tales of lust and seduction (when sung by Steeleye Span), and sometimes betrayal, revenge and horrible death.

Well, that’s got those cheery thoughts out of the way.

I put my bedside clock forward last night at bedtime, and when I woke it said 5:20, which was good because I thought I could get up at my usual time and slip quite easily into the new time frame – but in reality I ended up lying in bed anyway listening to podcasts and not getting up till seven. Then I messed about with changing the central heating clock, which was easier than I expected, but as I’ve been doing it every six months for the last four years I should have got a bit more proficient by now. The thing that still bothers me though is that there are two programmes, one for Monday-to-Friday and one for weekends, and I can’t work out how to get onto the weekend programme to change it. At the moment I have it coming on at 6:30 in the week but not till 7:00 at weekends, it took me a while to realise why it was still cold when I got up on Saturdays and Sundays. The instructions I have are on the inside cover of the little box, small print and hard to see, so I have to take it off the wall and into a well-lit area in order to read them, but even then I can’t find out what I need to know. I can override it by pushing the ‘up’ or ‘down’ buttons to adjust the thermostat, so that’s what I do in the mornings if it feels too chilly, but I would like to sort it out.

Other than that – and something falling through the basket of the dishwasher and jamming the rotating arm so that everything which should have come out clean is covered with crud which has baked on during the drying part of the cycle – there aren’t enough words left to say anything else – except I had to unravel my jumper again yesterday.

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Pinball

My new glasses had been missing for over twenty-four hours. Five minutes before my Skype therapy session, I picked up a glasses case from the bookcase in the hall, which I knew I’d picked up in a previous search, but at that time I shook it and thought it was empty, this time I opened it and there they were.

I went into the front room to set up my laptop for the Skype session, for which I wore my reading glasses, but I knew I needed the varifocals for the session proper. When Skype was open, I took off my readers to put the other ones on. They weren’t on the sofa next to me, they weren’t on the bookcase. I went back into the hall, just to make sure I had actually picked them up and brought them into the front room. I had walked maybe four metres up the hall and into the front room with them. I went back into the front room and checked the sofa again. Sitting on the sofa, I glanced round and saw a black glasses case on the rosewood table, just in my eyeline. Was that it? I walked over and picked it up and opened it – yes, there they were. I must have put them down on the table (amongst all the other junk, including another glasses case) as I walked past it en route to the sofa and the laptop. From start to finish, this took less than five minutes, but I had no recollection of where I’d put it down because things like that don’t register in my head.

Now, you’re probably thinking: ‘Oh, that happens to me all the time!’ or ‘We all have days like that!’ but that is not the point. My entire life revolves around things like this happening, so frequently that I couldn’t possibly count how many times a day (and I’d forget to anyway). Why am I focussing on it this morning? Because it’s symbolic.

I am thinking about fractals and granularity. Incidents like this happen at a microscopic level, but if I zoom in or out on my life, I can see them happening in different ways, at different granularities, over different time periods. They bounce around my head and it’s impossible to impose any structure over them, or to focus on more than one at a time, or to string them together into any kind of rational order. I have been card-making all week and that is all about tiny things and tiny actions, but what order do I need to do them in, and where are the things I need, and now I’ve found this, where did I put that which I had in my hand only minutes ago?

My therapist says: ‘that’s because you’re multi-tasking’ but with dyspraxia ‘multi-tasking’ is impossible, because you can only focus on one thing at a time and you lose track of everything else, and so you constantly bounce around like a pinball.