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
Linda Rushby 1 May 2021
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.
How much progress do I feel I’ve made with respect to ‘finding’ or ‘making’ that space?
What can I say? Watch this space.