Category: Invisible Woman

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Walking

Friday, 07 May 2021

Writing that date jogged something in my memory, and I’ve realised what it was: my wedding anniversary, 38 years ago today.

But that’s not how I intended to start.

As far as I can remember (I was planning to start) it’s over five years since I wrote a ‘story’, by which I mean a short piece of prose with a beginning, middle and an end, worthy of submitting to an anthology, reading out loud or sharing with an online group (though I have written quite a lot of poems in that time, some of them not bad).

Sitting behind the café, with traffic passing, and dog walkers and joggers and wild swimmers, the sun is warm on my face and the wind mercifully calm. I can even hear the waves during lulls in the traffic, though to get the full impact I would have to walk down the beach past the terrace of pebbles, where there’s nowhere to sit except on the ground, and hence nowhere to write. From this vantage, I can see the sea, but not the water’s edge. I can’t even see how far the tide is in.

I’m drinking coffee from my flask. The café won’t be open till nine o’clock, as it’s a week day. I check my phone. It’s bang on eight. I don’t know whether there is anywhere else that’s open already, possibly the Coffee Cup, but I don’t like their breakfasts.

I set off to walk, in the opposite direction, heading for the pier. I pass the café and a couple of kiosks, but none of them are open.

But the pier is open, so I walk to the end, where, clearly in expectation of a busy summer (or at any rate more so than last year), more fairground rides have been erected. When I first moved here, the pier was closed for renovations, and re-opened in 2017, since when attractions have come and gone, but I don’t remember seeing this many before.

It was quite surreal, to be walking around them alone, apart from a couple of guys fishing, and one lady sitting outside the cafe at the end of the pier, who told me it would be open at nine. I leant on the railings for a while watching the sea, and the Isle of Wight ferry, then walked back along the other side of the pier and turned left on the prom.  

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Creative Spirit

I was going to walk down to the knitting shop today, but… looking out the window, I don’t think I’ll bother. This is a bit much even for me with my oh-we-often-get-snow-flurries-at-the-beginning-of-April smugness – not that we’ve got actual snow here, just freezing rain, but still, it’s a bit much. I wasn’t planning to buy more yarn (still working my way through the stash) but could do with a 5.5mm circular needle to replace the one I’ve been using, which is on the verge of breaking, but over the weekend I’ve started two more top-down jumpers (one knitted, one crochet) to go with the two I’ve got that I can’t make progress on (one because of the needle breaking and the other because of lack of the right yarn). Three of them are knitted, the latest one (started Saturday evening, pulled down and restarted yesterday) is an experiment to see if it’s possible to use the same general top-down approach but with crochet, and if it works will use up a load of yarn which I’ve had for about a year and have tried to start various projects which I’ve later abandoned.

Do I want/need/will I wear all these jumpers? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

I was going to write about creativity – I half started yesterday, at the end of ranting about something, I can’t remember what. If I’m making something, or thinking about something to try – it doesn’t much matter what – I can sort of keep my head above water – as long as I keep my expectations low, and don’t think that what I make will be wonderful when it’s finished, of course, but when it’s done, it can be pushed to the back of a cupboard and forgotten about – or, in the case of writing, in the back of some folder on my hard drive, or shared on Facebook, or even better, Twitter, where I have 200 ‘followers’ but none who ever respond to anything I share (that’s an exaggeration, I’ve had two ‘likes’ in the last two years, both from people I used to know personally but haven’t seen in years).

For most of my life I haven’t considered myself at all ‘creative’ – except for this half-arsed idea that I might have been a ‘writer’ if I’d ever worked at it, but even then I was always conscious that I didn’t have the guts, talent or chutzpah to stick at it and make it work as a career. When I read ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ last year, I came across the idea of the ‘creative spirit’ which is crushed out of young children if they don’t get the chance to use it. This resonated with me, as I thought about my fear of judgement, of what I make never being good enough, of the ludicrous hubris of ever thinking I was ‘good enough’ at anything, the ‘who do you think you are?’ arrogance of that whole idea, and the ridicule that followed from it.

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Desultory Equinox

Yesterday I was thinking about Prague – in fact it has been in my mind on and off for the last few days. Often, when I was there, I used to question why I was there, and what I was doing. If I could have found a compelling reason to stay, I think I would have, but my presence always felt anomalous; I wasn’t a tourist, but nor did I ever become a resident, nor even an ‘ex-pat’, just this invisible woman who slipped around the city with no-one really noticing whether I was there or not – except possibly my landlord, when he made his monthly visits to collect the rent (in cash). In the end, coming back to be near my daughter and granddaughter and make some efforts towards selling the old house and ‘moving on with my life’ had to take priority

Those same questions keep coming up lately: Why am I here? and What am I doing? At least now I have some answers which make sense superficially: I’m just another retiree who’s decided to come and live near the sea, buy a house, make this place my home. After six years, the deeper questions don’t seem quite so compelling – I’m retired, with a comfortable pension, and the sale of a large family home enabled me to buy my little Edwardian mid-terrace outright, so why shouldn’t I be here as much as anywhere else? It’s a lot more congenial than either of the two places where I’ve spent most of my life.

This lockdown has felt harder than the one which started this time last year, but I think I’ve become ‘harder’ too, more settled with being at home on my own – most of the time. But if you asked me – if I ask myself – what I’ve been up to, what I do with my time, I’m hard pushed to come up with an answer that makes any kind of sense. I’ve got my editing job, which I’m doing two chapters at a time as the client sends them to me, and each chapter takes about an hour; I do my half hour of exercise and write my 500 words most days; I listen to the radio; crochet my blanket (which also takes about an hour each day) and mess about with other craft projects in a desultory way. Since I finished the blue fair isle jumper, I’ve picked up another top-down jumper, in different yarn on a bigger needle, which I started and abandoned about six months ago. Because it’s a ‘cake’ style yarn, with long stretches of colours blending into each other, I decided to do a design on the front with different stitches, rather than different yarns, but I’ve tried one idea, pulled it back and tried another, and that isn’t going very well either.

But this is just a temporary setback – isn’t it? Something will happen soon. That’s the way it goes, I’ll break some more bits off the old shed and keep going.

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Looking for Love

Recently I realised that this year marks ten years since the last time I fell ‘in lurve’. It started in February, and was finished at the end of July, when the other party’s (supposedly) estranged wife decided she wanted him back, and he went.

A friend had tried to warn me quite early on (towards the end of April, when I was beginning to believe I’d finally met a man who genuinely cared about me) not to ‘…get involved in someone else’s train wreck…’, but of course, I was the fool who went rushing in. I’d been on my own for two years, I was tired of chatting to men online, meeting them once and convincing myself that they were really nice, interesting guys who were worth getting to know, only to find that they disappeared without a word or made it obvious that all they wanted from me was sex. Yes, I knew that he was jumping straight into a new relationship, and that that was dangerous, but I’d had my time in the wilderness, and I was sure that if I just gave him time and space to see how well we fitted together…

Well, if I ever meet that woman, I will thank her from the bottom of my heart, because if we’d stayed together, I wouldn’t have caught the Eurostar nine years ago today and gone travelling, never have lived in Prague, never have moved to Southsea… Of course, at that time, I wasn’t expecting it to be the last romantic relationship of my life. I thought maybe I’d been trying too hard, I should stop looking for love, I should just give up and wait for it to happen naturally – I was a free spirit, I would take my pleasure wherever it came my way, I would live the Bohemian life I’d always dreamt of, and some day, I’d fall in love again.

I won’t say I can count the number of times men have ‘come on’ to me in those years on the fingers of one hand – I can count them on my thumbs. The first was the old boy on the bus in Rome (‘Single to Sirkeci’, p165). The other was in my first summer in Southsea, one Friday afternoon in a pub overlooking the harbour, as I was settling myself with a pint of cider, and waiting for my fish and chips, when a creepy middle-aged man plonked himself down at my table with the words: ‘I don’t mind sharing if you don’t!’. (In case you’re wondering, there were plenty of empty tables, and I removed myself to one straight away).

For a few years, I still hankered after the fantasy of finding love – or at least, occasional male company. I used to wonder: what’s so awful about me that no one wants me? Is it my looks, personality, intellect, expectations too high, or too low? Is it just bad luck – or maybe good luck – that I’m the way I am?

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Dichotomy and Transitions

Thinking of what to write today, and how to carry on with the thread of the last few days, it occurred to me that the two examples I gave as people noticing a ‘transition’ from ‘Belinda’ to Melinda’ were from my twenties and thirties. Not only that, but it might seem that both refer to a single period of change – which isn’t correct, because the conversation where I was warned ‘not to go back into my shell’ happened long before my first meeting with the other person, so I’d obviously slipped right back into my shell by that time – just as I did between the networking and the travelling.

Which might sound as though I see ‘Belinda’ in a negative light, and ‘coming out of my shell’ as progress, when actually I’m coming to recognise that both of them are so integral to my personality that I need to embrace them both.

The other thought that struck me was that these days, and for the last several years, the issues I have are largely concerned with ‘transitions’ in the other direction, when people who think they know ‘me’ are surprised by encountering Belinda – the ‘this isn’t like you! This isn’t who you are at all!’ reaction that I get when I share my self doubt, fear and sense of inadequacy. Though now I come to think of it, that’s not recent at all – it’s been an undercurrent that’s been there for decades, at least as far back as my mid-thirties.

It seems that a pattern is now starting to form: timid Belinda dominated in my childhood, when Melinda, or the Wild Spirit described in ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ (incidentally, I think the author should have made more effort to find a synonym for ‘Run’ which starts with a W) was systematically crushed and squeezed out on the grounds that A) ‘good girls’ didn’t behave that way; and B) her aspirations weren’t realistic for such a mousy little nonentity (here I can’t help thinking of Janis Ian’s song: ‘I learned the truth at seventeen/That love was meant for beauty queens…’).

Melinda (and I’m annoyed with myself that I’ve slipped back into using that dichotomy, but it is very convenient) crept out cautiously when I slipped out from under the parental yoke and ran away to the comparative freedom of university, where ‘A’ was no longer being so closely monitored, though I was still often stymied by ‘B’. Then I got married and started work, and found myself staring down the barrel of adult life…

I’ve just got into my stride, and the word limit is looming. And I still haven’t answered the question I asked two days ago: ‘Do I control my thoughts, or do my thoughts control me?’ I think the answer is quite clear – it’s my thoughts which are in charge, and there isn’t a great deal I can do to bring them into line, any more than I can give precedence to either Belinda or Melinda.

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Still Holding That Thought?

Yesterday morning, I posed a question, started to explain what I meant and got distracted into another part of my past. I will try to answer before the end of these 500 words, but as I don’t know what I’m going to say till it happens, maybe I won’t.

I started thinking afterwards though: I mentioned (if not yesterday then recently) that I don’t like meeting new people and making small talk, but presumably I must have got over that to some extent when I was going to the networking meetings – yet I went from there to travelling alone, where I became the Invisible Woman. How did that happen?

There’s quite a simple explanation really, and one I’ve thought about a lot over the years. When I first started blogging, I described it as two different personalities, and gave them different names: Belinda and Melinda (later to be extended by the addition of Cassandra and, ultimately, Cat By-Herself). But that led me down some strange paths, to the idea that I could somehow do away with Belinda and become Melinda permanently – Bel symbolizing all the things I disliked about myself, and Mel some kind of happy-crappy life-and-soul fantasy me. Part of the thinking behind that was the times when people have commented that I’ve ‘changed’ dramatically when they got to know me better – telling me that I’ve become a ‘completely different person’ and that I mustn’t ‘go back into my shell’. What they were seeing was just that I had grown used to them, to the setting in which I interacted with them, and was more relaxed – which is clearly what happened with the networking group. It’s not the case that anything has changed within ‘me’, just that this is a process I always follow with new people. I meet someone, I don’t know them, they don’t know me, I don’t know if they’re going to like me, I don’t know if I’m going to like them, it takes time to negotiate all that to the point where I can be comfortable. It’s a scary process, and one which I’d really rather avoid. I don’t have a problem with being somewhere I don’t know anyone as long as I can stay the anonymous ‘Invisible Woman’ and don’t have to worry about whether or not they are going to accept me.

Also, I implied that nothing came out of the networking group for me, but that’s not strictly true. One week the speaker had just finished writing his autobiography, and was looking for an editor. I spoke up, said I could help him with that, had a chat with him, talked about self-publishing (about which he knew nothing and I knew very little more, but, I thought, enough to sound convincing) and he promised to send me some of his first draft. That was the first germination of the idea of Damson Tree Publishing, even though he never got back to me, and when I contacted him he’d employed someone else.

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Hold That Thought…

Do I have control over my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?

When I was going to ‘business networking’ breakfasts, ten years ago, the speakers often emphasised the importance of having the right attitude: plan for success, visualise what you want to achieve, believe in yourself, banish negativity etc. Softer, gentler life-coach types would also add things like: practise gratitude, be in the moment, take care of yourself; but the general thrust was pretty much the same – you can do this if you think you can. Think right, and everything will fall into place.

Needless to say, I struggled with all this. I would go to the meetings, listen to the talks, chat to people, get a momentary buzz of: ‘I can do this!’ and then go home and remember: I had no clients, I didn’t know how to persuade people to buy my services, and I wasn’t sure that what I could do would be ‘good enough’. And, also needless to say, I blamed myself – I was never going to get anywhere with an ‘attitude’ like mine, if all these shiny, happy people could make it work for them, what was wrong with me? And the answer was: this is what’s wrong with me, the fact that I have to ask: ‘what’s wrong with me?’ and so it goes, round and round and round.

But I met some nice people, and I ate some good breakfasts (not necessarily a healthy habit to get into) and gradually – mainly in retrospect – I came to realise that they were mostly in the same boat as me – scrabbling around trying to get business from other people who were also scrabbling around trying to get business, in the belief that by behaving like ‘business people’, they would magically find success, by ‘investing’ their hard earned profits into subscriptions that accumulated up and up the pyramid to the people at the top. I was ‘invited’ to be a local organiser, which meant my subscriptions were halved in return for a few hours spent every fortnight sending out invitations, following up to check who was coming, getting there early and checking people off the list as they arrived, collecting £10 from each and paying the venue for the breakfasts, then passing on the balance to the regional organiser. And every day of the week, in a different venue, there would be another one of these meetings, where I could go and pay £10 for another breakfast, another pep talk, and maybe meet a different group of people, but most likely many of the same, and so on. At least I felt I belonged to something.

I seem to have digressed a bit into reminiscing about those days. I’ve never been happy about meeting people, or good at making small talk, but I suppose I bit the bullet and got on with it and it didn’t kill me, though it didn’t make me a business person, either.

But that’s not what I was intending to write…

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What Changed?

When I returned to England at the end of July 2012, I found that not only had Ex-Hubby not put the house on the market, he wasn’t in any great hurry to do so. With a sigh of relief, I made plans to return to Central Europe the following year, not to Budapest, but Prague, where I’d found I could do a crash course in TEFL with a (potential, but at the time I thought it was definite) six month placement to follow. Neither of us knew then that it would be a further four years before things were finally settled. Looking back, I can see that he was procrastinating no less than I was, each in our respective Limbo, his of denial and inertia and mine of footloose running away. During those four years I was to live in five different locations: with our daughter; in the attic flat in the Fens; in Prague; sharing with him in the old house and finally renting a flat in Southsea.

Going through those old blog posts from 2008, I found one in which I shared an old fantasy about travelling across Europe until my savings ran out, in the hope that something would turn up before I had to come back. The same person who commented about me undervaluing myself had this to say:

I would guess that if you did take off and travel on your savings for 3, 6, 12 months or whatever it took to exhaust the piggy bank, at the end of it your circumstances would be vastly different. Your experiences during those months would have inevitably changed your outlook. Maybe for better, possibly for worse but I am willing to bet you would have found the time has led to any number of possible situations.

Maybe sitting in a cheap hotel on a Greek island, lap top at your side and your new found male friend opposite? Surrounded by people you have met during your travels who have altered your perceptions of who you are, what you want out of life and where you are going.

All I can say is – your state of mind would not be as it is now.

Comment on Husband or Cat, 17 October 2008

Well, although I stayed with existing friends in some places, I didn’t make any new ones, male or otherwise, or even have any racy encounters. On the contrary, rather than ‘possible situations’ and any alterations in my ‘state of mind’ or ‘perceptions of who I am’, what I discovered was that travelling is a great way of avoiding contact with other people. I became the Invisible Woman, anonymous and solitary, sitting on trains or in cafés, reading, writing, or doing killer su doku, living in cheap hotel rooms, behind whose doors I was safely insulated from the world. Now I have my own door to hide behind, complete with cat, and other hobbies to pass my time with, and the sense of isolation is not so different, except that the view doesn’t change.