Category: grief

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Space

Yesterday I went for a walk in the morning, and wrote in my notebook, then came home and typed up what I’d written, and started to carry on describing the walk, but stopped because I had some proof reading to do, so did that, and now that project is over and done with, and that’s a relief, but in the rest of the day I never got back to writing.

I guess I could be finishing it now, but I woke up thinking about the struggle between my dyspraxia and daily functioning in the real world, how it’s always there and how it consumes so much energy. I had several attempts at writing the first half of that sentence without explicitly mentioning ‘dyspraxia’ – my first inclination was to talk about my ‘true nature’, which sounded very airy-fairy, then my ‘natural tendencies’, but I settled on just calling it ‘dyspraxia’ because I’ve come to realise, by comparing notes with other people in the online group, how many aspects of my personality and behaviour which I used to find awkward and hard to explain or justify are common among the group, and how many other people in that group also find life a struggle because of them.

In my therapy session on Thursday, I read out the ‘Square Peg’ poem which I wrote last week. Her response was that it’s quite upbeat and ‘affirmative’ because of the ending, and I wondered why it didn’t feel that way to me. I thought about other similar poems I’ve written, like ‘The Awkward One’ and ‘Declaration’, where overall the message is so grim that I’ve tried to turn them around at the end by suggesting that I’m on top of it all. I tried to explain this, and she said: ‘So you’re saying that you try to make the ending more upbeat for the sake of the reader?’ which didn’t really sound right, but I didn’t know what else to say.

I guess that in each case there is a kind of aspiration in those endings, but a hidden doubt as to whether those aspirations are achievable. They’re also very angry poems, I notice, along with another one I remembered, ‘The Answers’, which I also looked up and realised that it didn’t have an optimistic turn at the end (and in case you’re wondering what ‘answers’ it refers to, it’s about dealing with chemotherapy, so it could be argued that there was a ‘happy ending’ but anyone who’s been through it can probably tell you that that is hard to hang on to at the time).

So, where do I stand with regard to the ending of ‘The Square Peg’?

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

How much progress do I feel I’ve made with respect to ‘finding’ or ‘making’ that space?

What can I say? Watch this space.

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Morning Walk Continued, and NaPoWriMo Stress

Two observations about yesterday’s blogging attempts; firstly, the post on here was written in a notebook while sitting in the park, without the benefit of automatic word-counting until I got home and typed it up and discovered I’d written 700 words, so I saved the last 200 for today. The other issue was that I hadn’t got a clue what to write for NaPo, nothing came to me till dinner time, when I thought of something quickly and shoved it out.

Here is the last 40% of what was in my notebook from yesterday:

…

…

Eek, it’s not on the PC, because yesterday I sat downstairs and typed it on my laptop. There will be a brief delay while I run down and email it to myself…

…or maybe I’ll carry on with what I was going to say about napo first 9dammit, still got that problem with the keyboard and still haven’t ordered a new one).

When I started the NaPoWriMo poem(s) this year (consciously using the left shift key now), they kept coming every day, but I was aware that this was a risky strategy

Over the last few days, although only half way through the month, I felt that I had reached so far into the dark, that I was obliged to start coming out. By opening Pandora’s Box, and acknowledging the Hope that hides at the bottom, I started turning it around – although that wasn’t at all how I was feeling. Is it a good idea to have a crisis bang in the middle of a narrative? And after all, hope isn’t always to be trusted.

…Then I remembered that the gates to the garden behind the Natural History Museum were open when I passed the other day, and as that is quieter than the Rose Garden I decided to go there – it’s on my usual route. I found another sunny bench near the tree where I used to go to outdoor yoga classes last summer, and sat with my coffee and notebook, listening to the birds and the sound of tennis racquets and writing this (which I’m now transcribing at home).

I know it’s not unusual for people of my age to grieve for the past: the career, the family times, the children now grown up, and so on. But I think I grieve more for the future, or futures, in which I was going to raise a family; study for a PhD; live in a big house in the country; end my marriage and live my own life; go travelling alone across Europe; write and publish a book; move to the seaside. Now when I look to the future I see that my son-in-law is planning to build a ‘granny annexe’, so that when I’m no longer capable of looking after myself, I can return to Bedford and live with them. Which is reassuring, in lots of ways, but what else is there? What about the years – hopefully many – between now and then?

Linda Rushby 15 April 2021
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Poetic Rage

Maybe I won’t write today, not let it out of my head.

There’s a nice rhythm to that, I thought, as I was getting out of the shower (and thinking: I can’t be arsed, why do I even bother?) Two lines, seven syllables each. Where are the stresses? First, fourth and last syllable of the first line: MAYbe I WON’T write toDAY – Tum, ta, ta, tum ta, ta, like a waltz, three-four time, then a final TUM and a pause for breath.

What about the second line? I fiddled with that a bit as I repeated it in my head. It had started as ‘I’ll not’ or maybe ‘I won’t’ (I can’t exactly remember), but I didn’t like the unstressed first syllable, and I counted syllables on my fingers and realised that if I dropped it, the rhythm was exactly the same again: ‘NOT let it OUT of my HEAD’, but I didn’t like the ‘not’ at the start of the line, it seemed clumsy like that, but how about ‘won’t’ again? ‘WON’T let it OUT of my HEAD’? Now I have repetition of the second stressed syllable of the first line as the first word of the second line, and I like that, I like it a lot.

I am thinking like a poet, and when asked, as I have been in the past ‘What makes it a poem rather than anything else?’ I can say: the rhythm, of course, but also the brevity, because it expresses something in a very short space – I hope so, anyway, I hope it gives you a flavour of how I’m feeling this morning, even if I don’t write another word all day.

I notice that all the words are monosyllabic, except for the first and last words of the first line, and the stresses are at the start and end of each line, with another one bang in the middle. They’re not iambic stresses, not alternating, they have those two quick syllables in between, which is what creates the three-four rhythm, and somehow makes the stressed words harder and the whole thing more staccato, full of pent-up energy, rage, frustration and… another word which flashed into my head and has now gone – resentment, yes, I think that’s it. Resentment that I have set myself this task of writing every day and I can’t be arsed, I really can’t, I have nothing to say, nothing to write about except all this… rage, frustration and resentment.

I don’t want to let it out of my head – or rather, I want it all gone, but I don’t want to have to sit in front of the computer and let it out, because I don’t want to do anything any more, I can’t find the enthusiasm and motivation to carry on doing the things I do every day. But do I want to share it? What else is there in my head right now? What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

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In My Dreams

This morning, I remembered enough of a dream to make some sense of it. I was with a group of people (dream people) who were preparing and rehearsing a play. I didn’t get on with one woman in particular, who was constantly making snide remarks and putting me down (may I say, there have been many such people in my life, both men and women, but this wasn’t anyone I knew). I don’t know if this was supposed to be a professional or an amateur production, but I wasn’t being paid, I’d just been asked to do it as a favour, on the understanding that I wasn’t any good but I would do my best. I got angry with the snide woman and pointed this out to her, sticking up for myself, but I woke up before I heard her reply, woke up with a sense of anger and resentment towards this non-existent person, and lay there thinking: ‘wow, I was really pissed off, and now I’ve woken up!’

Once or twice in my life I have got really pissed off with people like that, and told them so, but it rarely improves matters, in fact it usually ends up with me in tears feeling even more resentful and humiliated. Actually, more than ‘once or twice’, a lot more, but it always makes me cringe to remember them. Mostly I just swallow it down and try not to cry, and try to avoid those situations in the future, mostly by keeping away from people. We’ll never know what might have happened with the woman in the dream, whether she would have developed a new respect for me, and I for myself – possibly, as I do seem to be much better at putting my point across and convincing people in my dreams than I am in real life.

I didn’t post yesterday because the previous evening I watched the Trump supporters marching around the Capitol in Washington on CNN, and though I wasn’t late going to bed (half past eleven, fairly normal) I did keep watching telly till that time (waiting for the police to take charge or the National Guard to show up or SOMEBDOY to take control of the situation), and then I couldn’t get to sleep and lay awake for hours. The result was that, when I finally got back to sleep, I slept in till nine, waking up feeling crap, as I always do after a really bad night, and didn’t bother with either the exercise or the writing part of my routine.

By the way, the motion sensitive light on the landing started working again after I put it back on the wall. And I unravelled the bit of my jumper I was taking about a few days ago and did it again. I showed it to my therapist yesterday but also said I will probably never wear it. I’m going to count all the things I’ve made over the last few years and don’t wear.

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Husband or Cat?

We moved into the house with the attic in 1999 – our last home as a family, though I wasn’t exactly the first one to leave it – that honour goes to our son, who left in 2004 to go to university, though he was back in the holidays for a few years, and also for the ‘industry’ section of his third year, in 2007.

I announced that the smaller attic room would be the birthplace of ‘…the first great novel of the twenty-first century!’ With a legacy from my parents (who had both passed away early in 1999) I bought a new computer (the first time I’d had one that was all my own, instead of sharing a family one), a leather-topped desk and captain’s chair (which I still have) and a suite of flatpack office furniture (which I assembled by myself, but which has suffered after multiple house moves since and has mostly gone). I filled the shelves with books and filled my time with housework, job applications and managing the activities and transport needs of two youngsters who were rapidly morphing into teenagers. I was living in a Grade 2 listed Georgian house and garden, beautiful beyond any realistic expectation I might have had, and I told myself every day how lucky I was.

Six years later, in the middle of an autumn night, I went up into my attic room, switched on my computer, Googled ‘free blogs’, found a site called ‘blog.co.uk’, created my first blog (which I titled: ‘Husband or Cat?’) and wrote the following:

Here’s my scenario…

I have had a cat for nine years. Before we got the cat, my husband always swore he didn’t want one, but since we have had it he has always got on very well with it and has never shown any animosity towards it.
I recently decided to get another kitten. My husband’s reaction went something like this:
Hubby: If we get another cat, we have to get rid of the old one.
Me: We’re not getting rid of the old one.
Hubby: In that case, I’ll go.
Me: OK, you go then.
In spite of this conversation, I went ahead and got the kitten on the assumption that my husband was not serious, and that he would learn to love the new cat just as he had with the old one.
However, he refuses to be in the same room as the kitten, to the extent that he will not eat a meal with myself and our daughter if the kitten is present. When he is not at work, he has taken to spending all his time in a room in the attic.
When I asked him how long he intended to keep this up, he announced that he did not wish to be in the same house as the kitten and would find somewhere and move out.
I offered to get rid of the kitten, but he replied that it was too late and he was going anyway.
This after 23 years of marriage, 28 years together, and never any hint in the past that he was dissatisfied with our relationship in any way.
No one would make this up. This is my life.
What happens next?

husbandorcat, blog.co.uk, 16 October 2005
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First World Frustration

Two things I have to do today: call Virgin Media to try and sort out my broadband issues; and try to find something for dinner on Christmas day. Neither of these is an exciting prospect, and both I’ve already spent too much time on yesterday.

Of the local shops, I’ve already tried the Co-op, the Romanian butcher and Sainsbury’s. I may head for Tesco shortly, but without much hope. On Sunday I saw a boneless turkey crown joint for six people in the Co-op. I didn’t buy it, because it was clearly way too big, but I did have regrets afterwards. I’ve got some pre-made pastry, because I was planning on having salmon en croute for New Year’s Day, but now thinking that I can get a steak and have steak en croute – or just steak. But I can’t find any decent steak either. First world problems. I can always get something out of the freezer, curry or casserole or something. Still got a couple of days to sort it out, but I don’t want to go to any of the big supermarkets and battle with the queues, or to walk twenty minutes through the rain to the butchers.

I may go and ring Virgin now. I got more worthwhile interaction from them in the morning yesterday – in other words, I got to speak to a human being. I didn’t when I tried again in the afternoon – because the guy had said ‘try this and if it doesn’t show any improvement in a couple of hours, call back’. Yeah, right. I tried calling back again around four, and got lost in that awful endless loop of listening to options and pressing buttons, then snagged on the request to enter characters from a password that presumably I was told five and a half years ago but have no recollection of now.

…

I abandoned writing, and went to call again. When it asked for the password, I sat and held the phone until it gave up waiting and transferred me to a young woman whose job presumably was to be shouted and sworn at by angry old women (or was this morning, at any rate). She said she’d send me an email with a link to change my password, and handed me over to a young Scottish man who asked for my password. I told him I was waiting for the password reset email, which he told me could take up to five days. I told him I didn’t have five days because if I wanted to cancel the new contract I’d have to do it this week. Then he asked me some security questions, looked at the new contract, compared it to my current usage, asked if I really wanted the features I’d never used, and managed to reduce it by £20, which made it less than my previous contract. He also said that I can get boosters online, but they are introducing new ones in January.

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Running With Wolves

The deeper I get into the book I’ve been reading, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the more I relate it to my life, the more I can see how broken and bent my life has been. I know how melodramatic this sounds, I can hear the voices telling me all that stuff: how lucky I am to have had such a (materially) comfortable life; that I should stop whining and practise gratitude; that I should stop reading books that make me unhappy; that I should stop thinking so much and simply be.

I was never cut out to be a nice, good, well behaved girl, but I tried, I really did. Some of my struggles in that regard were clearly related to my dyspraxia, interpreted as clumsiness, untidiness, laziness, carelessness, not listening, not paying attention, all those traits of the ‘difficult’ child. I wasn’t deliberately ‘naughty’, in fact I tried very hard to avoid it, which still holds to this day – needing to know the ‘rules’ so I can stay on the right side of them always, never causing trouble, never making waves – except that doesn’t always work, isn’t always possible, there were/are/will always be times when through carelessness etc I overstep the mark, or get trapped in a situation where to please someone upsets someone else and so I keep falling over my own feet (metaphorically as well as literally) and bringing down judgement on myself, which is why, as you must know by now, it’s easier for everyone if I just keep away from other people as much as I can.

The book, written about thirty years ago, is a Jungian analysis, illustrated by myths and fairy tales from all cultures, about how girls and women are socialised into conforming to culturally required feminine norms and roles. The author’s main thesis is that by trying to live up to those norms and roles, many women suppress their creative spirit, or ‘wild nature’. I gave up on it the first time I tried to read it, two years ago, because her writing style irritated me and it seemed related to New Age ‘Goddess’ cults, which feel a bit whacky to me. Now I’ve persevered I’m more impressed by the psychology behind it, and anyway, it was recommended by my therapist, and I have great respect for her academic credentials.

And, as you can probably guess from that description, the idea of the ‘wild nature’, the alternative female archetype and alter ego of the creative spirit, whose suppression can cause great harm and distress in women’s lives, struck a mighty chord for me. Hence the posts over the last few days about the Wild Thing who lives caged inside of me: self-destructive, resentful and raging as any caged beast has the right to be, but only ‘evil’ if seen from a specific, limited perspective.

I sat down to write almost in tears because I didn’t think I could find the words to express this. But it happened anyway.

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Lurve and Marriage

How could anyone in their right mind pretend to ‘like’ autumn? Who wants to be reminded of death, darkness, cold, and the knowledge that for the next half of the year that’s what’s to be expected?

Well, admittedly, death, darkness and cold are inevitable parts of life, and we all have to face up to them and accept that that’s how it is, but do we have to embrace them?

Try to believe that you’re not alone, thrown here by chance into this god-forsaken century on this god-forsaken planet. That there is goodness and beauty and hope in this life, sunshine and stories and singing and, in the foreseeable future, springtime again.

I’ve been reading about ‘love’ this morning, and suddenly all the bitterness and disappointment and despair that I have managed to rationalise away has come back in that old familiar rage of: ‘Why me? What’s so awful about me that I don’t deserve/am not capable of being loved?’

So I cry and shout and stop just short of smacking my head, then I will sit with it, face up to it, observe it for what it is, composed of chewing over old disappointments and rejections, sexual frustration and hopeless fantasies, envy and jealousy, shame and self-blame and simple loneliness. All this will pass just as winter will pass, or night. I will have breakfast and get involved with what needs to be done (back to the website) and remind myself of the many reasons why I prefer living alone.

After all, ‘romantic love’ is a social construct, composed of sex, companionship, physical affection (ie non-sexual touching), shared child-rearing, practical support, emotional support, interest in each other’s interests… I have found all of those in various relationships at one time or another, but never all of them rolled into one. I can see it might be unrealistic, to hope to find them all at once, but what is the minimum to settle for? Is it asking too much to hope for more than one or two at a time? By the end of my marriage, I would say that’s about what was left (companionship and practical support, and both of those were pretty lukewarm). For some couples, it seems there’s a fundamental loyalty that underpins all of those and keeps the relationship going when those other criteria have become irrelevant, something I’ve observed in my parents’ and siblings’ marriages, maybe it’s just inertia and lack of imagination, or maybe it’s True Love, who knows? (I wouldn’t, because I’ve never experienced it, and maybe that’s because I’ve never met ‘The Right One’, or more likely because of a fundamental flaw in my personality).

Well there you go, I’ve written and rationalised my way out of my rage again.

I heard the rain in the night, gently, the sort of rain that patters on the roof and makes you feel glad to be safe indoors. It’s been threatening for a couple of days, and now it’s here. Time to hunker down.

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Detritus

I think: if I start writing, maybe the ideas will come? And in a way they do, but they’re not necessarily ideas I want to write. I think: if I do twenty minutes of movement, light candles and incense, sit quietly, maybe the thoughts will go away? And sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t. I lie in bed and do backwards-counting exercises to try and stem the flow so I can get back to sleep, and sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn’t.

Why am I constantly engaged in battles inside my head? Is this just normal, does everybody have this never-ending struggle to manage their thoughts? I used to think that, and that it was just me doing such a lousy job of it. Now I’m not so sure. Now I think: maybe it’s my curse, maybe it’s just another part of my chaotic weirdness. Maybe it’s the cause of everything.

This morning, in bed and after, I was thinking about fear. What am I so afraid of? Failure and rejection, that’s what I thought. I deal with rejection by avoiding contact with other people, pre-emptive rejection. Failure is trickier (not that avoiding human contact is always easy). The best ways of avoiding failure are never to try to do anything and to give up – I am an expert on both of those.

But what did I say a couple of weeks ago? ‘The greatest pleasure in life comes from doing something you don’t want to do and then knowing that you’ve done it’? True enough. Life is a bugger sometimes.

I remember getting into a conversation on Facebook a while ago about the ‘detritus’ that accumulates in your mind, that you have to wade your way through. I feel like I said something quite clever, but now I can’t remember what it was. There is certainly a lot of detritus in my mind.

I’ve just remembered a conversation with a counsellor over twenty years ago – I know it was in autumn 1999, because I saw that particular counsellor then after my parents had died in late winter and we’d moved house over the summer and I was getting about three hours sleep a night and was referred by my GP for six sessions of counselling, but she was offering bereavement counselling, and as I told her, after six months since their deaths I didn’t feel I’d even started to mourn them. But what I remember telling her was about this big well of shit in my head, which I can never empty and which keeps getting refilled all the time. I think the idea came from the title of ‘The Well of Loneliness’. But what was in my well? Loneliness, certainly, but not just that: shame and guilt and fear, and of course , failure and rejection.  

Within ten years I’d left my husband, in the hope that that would bring me new opportunities – which it has, it has, but why has so much stayed the same?

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Dyspraxia and Social Anxiety

Words churning through my head… they are always there, a continuous monologue/narrative – sometimes a dialogue, even a full-blown row. Is that dyspraxia related or something else? It is there when I wake in the early hours, it keeps me awake, I am exhausted but can’t sleep. It is there in the daytime, it churns around and around, I can’t focus, I can’t settle, I can’t concentrate because I am exhausted because I don’t sleep at night.

Is this dyspraxia? I know dyspraxia is responsible for the time I waste looking for the glasses/phone/keys/wallet/cup of coffee or whatever that I put down somewhere 30 seconds ago. That’s exhausting too. Dyspraxia means I have to read everything at least twice, three times, or more before it starts to sink in. It means I often don’t take in what’s been said to me without that being repeated, too, and often I just forget anyway, which means I panic when someone does speak to me and I can’t think what to say in reply, so even if dyspraxia is not directly related to social anxiety, it exacerbates it.

Sometimes I struggle to know what to say, then think of it too late, or I think of something I could say and I want to say it there and then, and I say too much then get angry with myself. When I’m in a group sometimes I’ll think of something to say but can’t get a word in edgeways, or when it comes to my turn I’ve forgotten it or thought better of it and someone says: ‘I think Linda has something to say’ but I just say ‘it’s ok, it doesn’t matter, it wasn’t important’ even if it was. Once someone who had been facilitating a group I was in said to me: ‘promise me that the next time someone interrupts you, you won’t apologise’. If I know I’m right about something (factually) and I say it I expect people to accept it, and if they don’t I get frustrated. I hate arguments, I won’t say anything which I think the other people will disagree with.

I apologise constantly, which ironically most people find very irritating. Usually when something goes wrong, even if I’m not completely responsible, I can trace it back to some contributing factor that’s down to me, and so I apologise for that. It’s easy to assume I’m responsible, because I do so many stupid, clumsy or thoughtless things. Apologising is my way of trying to compensate for all those things I do that inconvenience others, but it often doesn’t deflect anger, but rather makes it worse – this used to happen a lot with my parents. If my apologies are not accepted I feel trapped, because I don’t know what else to do, so I get frustrated, ashamed and angry – and I always turn anger onto myself. I can forgive other people but never myself, because I’m not in control of their behaviour, but I feel that I should be able to control my own.