Category: madwoman in the attic

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Still Here

If I started writing again… every now and then…

The above is as far as I’d got before I decided to a) make a coffee and b) have my morning crap, which entailed finding my Kindle and reading the next chapter of The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde while sitting on the toilet (and incidentally downloading a sample of The Terracotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri, which came up as a ‘you might enjoy…’ recommendation. I discovered the other day that at some point in the past I’d read the first of Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano books, but I couldn’t remember when or why or anything about it or why I hadn’t chosen to download the next one. So, if I have the sample – and the title did catch my attention – I might read it sometime and decide to buy the whole book – or not, but if I don’t I never will and that might be a shame.

Anyway.

What was that first sentence again?

‘…every now and then ‘ I think maybe I will (start writing again), or perhaps it was going to be: every now and then the thought strikes me that maybe I should, but usually I get involved in doing something else and time passes and it goes away again without me doing anything about it. And reading that back, it occurs to me that it could be a metaphor for sitting on the toilet (or vice versa)

Anyway.

I think I was going to make a serious point, and end up with sharing a poem I wrote a few years ago, which may or not be relevant. A point about making goals and plans for the year and trying to satisfy other people’s expectations (which is a hiding to nothing, it seems to me).

I don’t do goals and plans any more. I never was very comfortable with them – I’ve blogged about that times without number – and at my stage of life, honestly, why should I? Who cares what I do with my time, if I don’t?

There are, in theory, at least two books which I ‘should’ be trying to finish. The start of a year is supposedly a spur to effort, but at my age it is also a reminder that my remaining stock of years is steadily going down, and raises the question whether it really matters that much how I spend them? It’s not as though the ‘dreams and plans’ I’ve made in the past have made much difference to the world.

So here I am, a week into 2023 – not even starting on the first of the year, as far as those things matter, fifty words short of my arbitrary target of 500 per day, and not even having said what I was intending to say. I’ll see if I can find that poem and share it.

#notwriting

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Triumph of Hope

Yesterday I was debating over whether to take the van out to the country park for a picnic, or the car to B&Q to spend some coupons on stuff for the garden, or a combination of the two or something completely different. In the end, I went to B&Q in the car, and it was lucky I didn’t try to combine that with a picnic, because by the time I’d finished (after almost an hour), I felt quite worn out. I came home with compost, basket liners and enough plants to hopefully ensure one or two of each type might survive my half-hearted and inconsistent attempts at gardening.

I sorted out a few things into larger pots during the afternoon, the rest are lined up in a tray supported by two upturned buckets, along the fence, along with some sweet peas and other stuff in trays that I’d bought earlier from the Co-op as I walked past on my way home from tai chi sessions in the park.

They say a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, and I did that, but gardening fits into the same category for me. Maybe the same conditions apply to both – a lack of attention to nurturing the first time around, or, in the case of gardening, of all previous attempts.

Today I need to get out there and do some weeding to make space for my new purchases. As usual, there was minimal planning and organisation behind the things I bought. There are three wall-mounted baskets, two small and one large, on the wall outside my kitchen window, along the little alley between my house and the neighbours, which had trailing begonias in my first year living here, but which have deteriorated over the last few years until there were just a dead fuchsia and some very straggly geraniums, which didn’t flower at all last year. It’s not an ideal spot for geraniums, because, squashed between the two houses, it doesn’t get much sunshine. I can’t remember when the begonias gave up, but over the years I have made various attempts to replace them, but this is the first time I’ve replaced the liners, so hopefully that will help, and maybe give me something attractive to look at while I’m doing the washing up.

The large one was screwed to the wall, so I left it in situ and just reached up (it’s just slightly above my eye level) to put the new liner, compost and plants into it. I took the two smaller ones off, as they were just hooked over the nails, but didn’t think about the fact that one of them had come loose from one of the nails and was dangling at an angle from the other one, until after I’d filled them both and went to try and put them back. The first one was okay, but there was no second nail in the wall for the other, it had rusted or come away altogether.   

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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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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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Procrastination

An interesting question came up on the dyspraxia Facebook page, as someone commented that their procrastination had: ‘…gotten (sic) out of control’, especially in relation to washing up. The first person to comment said; ‘You’re punishing yourself, stop it’, and the second asked what they were doing instead; was it something else on their to-do list? (to which the answer was: watching telly). Mine of course would be: knitting, or crochet. Or maybe, as the temperature is now gradually creeping up, sitting in the garden in the sunshine (though not actually doing any gardening).

I say it’s interesting because instinct tells me that my tendency to procrastinate is somehow linked to dyspraxia, but the stern voices in my head say: ‘no, that doesn’t make sense, it’s just because you’re a lazy cow and you’re trying to make excuses by blaming dyspraxia for everything’. The tendency to dither, take too long over things, and get easily distracted is certainly related to dyspraxia, as is the generation of so much chaos in your surroundings that you learn to ignore it and accept it as a fact of life – not to mention feelings of exhaustion and lack of energy to tackle any of it.

I also believe that lockdown has been responsible for encouraging this kind of procrastination. It creates a sense of unlimited time and reduces stress by eliminating the need to leave the house and engage with the world, while also removing the enforced motivator of anticipation that outsiders might come into the house and see what a shithole it is, which is usually a major driver for me to engage with housework.

That said, I’ve been making more of an effort against the washing-up-sitting-in-the-sink phenomenon. In my dim-and-distant days as a Young Mum, I was well known for my inability to sit down and relax with a drink until after the washing up had been dealt with. These days I can’t wait to get out of the kitchen-dining room and retreat to the sofa, my latest project and a couple of episodes of ‘Law and Order’ (my latest retro-catch-up series from twenty years ago, which has intriguing plots and engaging characters without the visceral gore that’s obligatory these days). In the last few months I’ve been struggling to revive that past diligence by at least making an effort to leave pots and pans standing for no longer than one day – last week I even found myself one morning spontaneously cleaning the top of my gas hob while I was waiting for the coffee machine.

The neighbouring house on the side that shares a wall with my kitchen is rented out on short-term lets, so the tenants change quite frequently, and I don’t have much contact with them. The last few mornings I have heard the sound of a plug being inserted in a socket the other side of the wall while I’m having breakfast, and then the drone of a hoover. Every. Single. Day.

Is it me, or is that ‘normal’?

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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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(Non)Poetic Thoughts

This morning, I wrote a poem while I was still in bed, after I’d finished listening to the last volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiography on BBC Sounds. I was thinking about her poem: ‘Still I Rise’ (that expression occurred in the final episode), and about my life, and the things she went through and my wimpish reaction to the things I’ve gone through, which boils down just to being myself, the me I am inside, rather than the external struggles she had to deal with as an African-American woman in the 1930s-60s.

Poems written at that time of day tend to dissipate quickly however hard I try to hold on to them, so I grabbed a notebook and black Crayola colouring pencil (all the pens in my desk having dried up – a reflection either on modern technology or my dependence on it) and wrote it down.

I wanted to share it, as an accurate reflection of my inner feelings towards myself after listening to the words of one of the greatest female writers of my lifetime, but I thought of the likely reaction to my honest thoughts about myself, especially the ones that come first thing in the morning, and thought better of it. I will, however, type it up, pack it away and probably read it to my therapist on Thursday.

One of the lines I rejected included the words: ‘I wish I could believe I deserved…’ – at the time I thought it was part of a killer ending, then forgot it, then remembered it while doing yoga, and realised it was best forgotten.

‘What a string of woolly verbs!’ I thought to myself. Let’s take them in reverse order, as being the closer to the object of the line (which was probably another verb: ‘to be’, followed by some complimentary and hence wholly unrealistic hypothetical idea of myself). First, ‘Deserved’ what does that mean? It’s completely subjective. Does a convicted murderer ‘deserve’ a second chance at life; to rot in jail for the rest of his/her natural days; or a speedy execution? ‘It all depends…’ which is why we have jury trials and other complicated (and expensive) systems of justice to decide such matters for us. You can’t talk about whether anybody ‘deserves’ any particular outcome without taking it from a specific point of view.

Next: ‘believe’, which is also subjective, though in this case it’s clear that the subject, ie) the one doing (or failing to do, or incapable of doing) the ‘believing’ is myself. Why am I incapable of believing I deserve whatever goodies (probably praise, or love, or happiness) I had in mind? Arguably, ‘belief’, or ‘disbelief’ just is what it is, but if I had to justify or rationalise it, I would probably say it was based on the evidence of a life-time of living inside this head, and as no one else has access to that mental space, their ‘beliefs’ can be discounted.

And finally: ‘wish’ the woolliest of the lot – enough said.

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grim

I didn’t write yesterday. It was one of those utterly grim mornings when I couldn’t think of anything which wasn’t… utterly grim, so I couldn’t bring myself to say anything at all.

I did my napowrimo thing, but thought; what can I say/ it’s not even half way through the month, and if I’ve reached the darkest point already, what am I going to do for the next two and a half weeks? (Seventeen days counting today). To add to the frustration, the shift key on the right side of my keyboard has stopped working, which means it’s a pain to do the capitalisation for NaPoWriMo 9and if I don’t keep on top of it lots of other things go down the toilet, like question marks, brackets and i0.

But the keyboard thing isn’t really relevant to my general feelings of despair, and I just need to get round to ordering a new one. I came up with a Napo-etc poem yesterday, but couldn’t quite bring myself to use the word ‘hope’. That’s the problem, isn’t it? When you can’t see any hope you can’t wish it into existence from nowhere. It doesn’t matter how irrational that is, that sense of everything falling apart. What makes any one morning feel any worse than any other? All mornings are shit – if you choose to write in the morning, it’s not surprising if everything comes back to moaning.

But if I’m honest, I know exactly why yesterday was so hard – because it was the first session of tai chi in the park – as opposed to on Zoom – and I’d been dreading going out and interacting with other people – even a nice, friendly group of people whom I used to see every Tuesday morning. Did walking twenty minutes to the park make it somehow worse than three minutes to the community centre where the classes used to be? No, not particularly. Anyway, I could have driven, but that would have meant finding a parking place near the park, and another one near home when I got back, and I need the exercise. The fact that it was in a new place probably did enter into it somehow, even though it’s a place I’ve driven past many times, it’s still a new walk and a new location. But mainly it’s the experience I HAD AT THE END OF THE FIRST LOCKDOWN (not shouting, just demonstrating that because I’m trying to use the left hand shift key I keep getting caps lock instead without noticing. Also, on the sentence I started with ‘Anyway’, I accidentally hit the ctrl key, and when I glanced up everything I’d typed so far had disappeared, because it had done ‘select all’, and I carried on typing – I didn’t realise that was what had happened, but I managed to keep hitting ‘undo’ till it all came back).

I have to go out again today, for a Covid test, but at least that only requires the minimum of human interaction.

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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.