Category: madwoman in the attic

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Because

I will write this now and not give myself a chance to change my mind. I will write this now because I want to capture these feelings. I will write this now without exercise, meditation or coffee because those might make me feel better, and I want to explain how I feel right now, not how I feel when I’m looking through a positive filter of exercise, meditation and coffee . If I don’t catch it now I will never be able to explain. I will write it now before I have the chance to slip into the mask, the ‘yeah, I’m fine, it’s a beautiful day!’

I told myself last night that if I was awake early I would get up and walk to the beach. I woke before 5.00. I could have done it, but I didn’t. It’s now 6.15. I am at the computer. I am dressed and I have fed my cat, but not watered the plants because that too would probably take me away from these feelings.

I am afraid. I don’t want this. I want to stay in my bubble. I don’t want to have to go out and interact. I don’t want to be with people. I like not having to do those things. I can be happy here.

I want to stay in a safe place where I don’t have to think about what a shambles my life has been. I don’t want to read about how happy people are with their plans. I don’t want to make plans. I don’t want to feel guilty about wasting the summer by sitting in my garden.

It’s not just because I’ve been reading stories about racism and police brutality in the US; or how our daily death-rate is greater than the combined total of other European countries with comparable data, and yet restrictions are being lifted and we’ll soon be ‘back to normal’; or about the shamelessness, incompetence and venality of those in power in this country; (though none of that helps). It’s not just because I’ve been reading about friends who are getting on with their writing, promoting their books, have completed books to promote (though none of that helps either).

It’s because I am me, it’s because my failure has all been down to my lack of determination, lack of persistence, lack of ‘resilience’ maybe, if that’s the current word of choice. Why am I am I so shit in all those areas? Because I am me. Why do I f*ck up everything? Because I am so shit in all those areas. Why is that? Because of my personality, because of who I am. Why is that? Because I was never, ever going to get anywhere with all that negative baggage. Why can’t I change that? Because it wouldn’t be true. Why do I hate myself so much? Because I know it is all down to who I am. And why can’t I change and become a better person? Because, because, because.

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Let There Be Light

The light switch in my downstairs shower room and toilet has an intermittent fault. When I say intermittent, I don’t just  mean sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t, I mean it stops working and stays not working for indeterminate periods, and then one day, unpredictably, it will start working again. A friend (the same one who helps with the hedge-cutting and feeds the cat when I’m away) once took it apart and put it back together again and it started working, but he admitted he didn’t know what he’d done. It’s the sort of job that’s not really worth calling a professional electrician for, but it is annoying.

It was still working at half term when the family came, but it stopped again soon after, round about the start of lockdown. There’s no window, but there are frosted glass panels in the door, so some light comes in from the hall, good enough to get by, but really not good enough to clean. A bottle of nail varnish fell out of the bathroom cabinet one day and the top came off, so the hand-basin now has turquoise stripes (and I can’t have turquoise toenails, which is a source of great sorrow). Also I worry about the hygiene implications.

I have thought about attempting the taking-it-to-bits approach – after all, I salvaged the hedge trimmer, but I can’t quite face the palaver of it all, especially as I’m not sure I’ve got a decent torch. Even if I could find one, standing on the stepladder holding a torch would be enough of a challenge, never mind trying to wield a screwdriver (or whatever) in the other hand; and with my eyesight, I probably wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing anyway.

So this morning I was sitting on the loo in the gloom muttering to myself: ‘must remember to take the basket of washing out of the kitchen when I go back upstairs, don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget’ and thinking about my yoga teacher saying: ‘always have a place for everything and you’ll know where to look’ and me replying: ‘…I do, but the problem is not knowing where to look, but remembering to put things in the right place at the time I put them down’. In 2011 I did a Businesslink course on Self Organisation, talking about time management and list making and prioritising etc, and I broke down and confessed to the tutor that I just can’t do that stuff. She replied: ‘Maybe you should think about trying to get a job instead of starting a business’ and my heart sank as I thought: ‘If I could find anyone who would give me a job I wouldn’t be doing this.’

Well, after my exercise session I went for a shower, pulled on the switch without thinking and heard a snap. I expected it to come away in my hand, but when I noticed it hadn’t, I pulled again and the light came on.

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Big stuff, small stuff

I wrote a post yesterday (limited to 500 words and everything) but decided not to share it. Second time I’ve done that recently.

How do I feel about that today? Well, without going into too much detail, I did it because I wrote about my Thursday therapy session, in which – because I didn’t know what to say, I showed her the photo of my son and myself when he was a baby, and then I told her in detail about the pregnancy; preceding troubles with conception and miscarriage; the isolation I felt living in Dallas; about giving up my career and being out of the job market from 30 to 43; my sense of inadequacy as a mother and conviction that my son would grow up to hate me – I’ve been through this before on here. I cried, and she said she felt close to tears when I was telling her.

I wrote about all that intense unhappiness and hopelessness, about the cycle of self-pity leading to anger with myself, and anger leading to shame, and shame leading to more self-pity, and I didn’t want to share it yesterday, probably because I was right in the middle of it at the time.

There have been other times of such intense unhappiness in my life – that wasn’t the first or the last. I’m not suggesting I’m in any way special in that, it’s just the human condition. Perhaps I’m worse than other people at dealing with them? My therapist has spoken in the past about my lack of resilience, which I take to mean my low tolerance to unkind remarks, criticism, perceived rejection, my own failings (which are legion) etc. All these apparently minor irritations and frustrations can plunge me into that cycle of anger, shame, and self-hatred simply because I know they are minor, I know the healthy thing to do is to rise above and laugh them off, yet I can’t, and so everything becomes my fault, I take on all the blame because the fault lies in my inability to accept these things like any mature person would do.

I could feel the anger rising as I wrote that last sentence, all that shame and frustration and self-loathing, I can feel it now. Probably why I didn’t post what I wrote yesterday.

But what do I do with the big stuff? Somehow I hide it away, I don’t want to talk about it, because it would be unbearable and I’d never be able to come out from under it, and you have to live, don’t you? I think back to all the shit I went through in the second half of 2011, all the things I don’t want to talk about now, but at the time it felt like a perfect storm, and what did I do? I ran away. I ran and I kept running, as I’ve said before, till a couple of years ago.

And now I will go and eat my breakfast in the sunshine.

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Squaring the Dodecagram

Time is strange these days. It feels like ages since I started the project I’m going to write about, but I checked out the photos on my camera, and the ones of the first attempts were dated the 9th, 10th and 12th of May, which is only a fortnight ago.

I bought this beautiful varicoloured cotton knitting yarn online, and got obsessed with it, buying up different colour combinations with no clear idea what to do with them. I crocheted two shawls, then decided I would make myself a beach cover-up/summer top. The idea I had was that the front would have a starburst pattern in the middle, which I would gradually extend outwards, then at some point I would square it off and do rows along the top and bottom to the right length. It all seemed fairly straightforward, but I thought it would be fun.

I started from the middle with an ‘icicle’ design from a book of crochet stitches, a hexagon which grew into a six pointed star. Then, still working in the round, added stitches into the space between the points, and turned those into additional points, while still extending the original six points, so I ended up with a 12 pointed star (dodecagram).

That’s when it started to get interesting.

My plan was to keep extending the star until it was wide enough from point to point to go across my body and then ‘square it off’, filling in the spaces between the points. Except… For a start, once the points got to a certain size, I couldn’t get them to lie flat. Also, if I wanted to keep working in a circle, the points would keep growing while I was also trying to fill in the gaps. I could complete the star to the desired size and then fill in all the spaces individually, but that would disrupt the sequence of colours and besides, that wasn’t what I was trying to do. So I pulled it down by a few lines. Then tried something else. Then realised I needed to go back further, so undid what I’d just redone, plus some more. And so on. Every day I give up, put it away, get up the next morning, pull down what I’ve done, and try something else.

Then I started thinking more about the geometry. If I just filled in the spaces between the points, I would end up with a 12-sided polygon – a dodecagon. After a couple of days puzzling over this, I realised I should think of it in groups of three points. If I identified four main points and laid them out like the points of the compass, the next step should be to merge the pairs of points between them. If I could flatten them out, I would have a diamond shape in the centre and then four triangles round the corners.

Don’t know if this counts as ‘creativity’ sparked by the lockdown. It’s pretty pointless. But I’m enjoying myself.

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Dull

I lay in bed this morning listening to a distant susurrus – was it wind, rain or just in my head? I got up, sat on the edge of the bed to dress, and in the mirrored wardrobe door facing me I saw the clothes I’d chosen for my exercise/meditation session (purple yoga pants, red long-sleeved tee shirt) and thought they looked wintry compared to yesterday’s sunshine – not that it matters when I won’t be going anywhere. The weather app told me 2 minutes to a break in the rain. Five minutes later I checked to see if it had changed, and it said rain was expected in 83 minutes. Following from a previous post, it really is that precise. Now it just says: ‘Current: Cloudy, 16C’ and ‘Looking ahead: Pleasant Sunday’. Well, that’s something to look forward to.

I opened the door to let Miko out onto grey sky and trees shaking in the wind, but it wasn’t raining, and the ground didn’t look as though it had been. By the time I got back downstairs from my half hour session, she was curled up in her bed, so I closed it again.

Not so many people in the street today. A couple just passed, walking a dog – the man in lurid shorts, dull tee shirt and face mask, the woman in jeans and a yellow coat. Come to think of it, they’re the only ones I’ve seen so far. A few pigeons and gulls flying sideways. Every so often the sound of the wind rises above the murmuring of the computer.

I wrote yesterday but didn’t share – only with my therapist, and she agreed it probably wasn’t one to post generally (though I’m sure she has an unrealistic idea of how many people are likely to read this stuff). Maybe I won’t share this one either, maybe I’ll stop posting altogether or post on a secret blog and not share it to Facebook , or share it to a page that no one knows about, which is how this one used to be when I started it.

I have the tail end of some paid work to do, and I think that’s been responsible for my bad mood over the last couple of days. I’ve been putting it off, or rather, it’s been put off for me because of delays in the arrival of the proof copy, which finally turned up on Wednesday, so yesterday was pretty tied up. I think I should stop committing myself to doing things for other people, though this is a long-standing project –almost six years on and off, and it will be so good to get it out of my life at last.  

Just realised that that strange noise I’ve been hearing for the last few minutes is the venetian blind in my spare bedroom (where I do my exercise) banging against the wall. I always open the window when I finish to clear the smell of incense.

Time to get to work.

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Somebody Else’s Problem

Today I think I will write about what I was planning to write about yesterday, before I was hijacked by a poem. But first I’d like to observe that the sun is shining, the gulls are flying past the window, the pigeons are woo-wooing, Miko is at her neighbourhood watch post and not bothering the keyboard, and for once it feels as though the day is off to a good start.

I used to joke that my mid-life crisis began when I started a PhD at the age of 38, and has continued ever since. I remembered that when I was sharing all those memories from Facebook at the start of May, and realised that, though I may still feel in crisis some days, it’s definitely no longer a mid-life one. So I started to ponder on when exactly that transition happened.

My first thought was – well – it must have been when I moved to Southsea in 2015 – that was a major break in my life, and marked the end of that period of rootlessness which had been ongoing since I split with my husband in 2009. But then I thought that my first months here were still part of that churning, the excitement of a new life, new place, new people, all that. Plus of course, the curse of the Madwoman in the Attic – the stuff that had been left behind in the old house, the emotional and physical baggage which had remained unresolved – was still hanging over me. That wasn’t sorted out till I moved into this house in autumn 2016 –that was the next significant point. But then what happened? Yep, 2017 – cancer year.

So now I think that when I look back over my life and mark it off into chunks, chapters of my autobiography, if you like (though this is the closest I’ll ever get to writing one), the present stage started at the beginning of 2018, when I began to pick up the threads of a life no longer dominated by concerns over my health. Comparing notes with my brother (who was treated for prostate cancer in that same year) and my therapist (who I started seeing in early 2018), I discovered that it’s a known condition for people who’ve survived cancer to experience depression after the treatment is over. For me, intellectualising it two years on, it’s about ‘what now?’ – the realisation that there was more future than I’d subconsciously been anticipating, and that finding things to do with it could be a challenge.

And – this has just popped into my head, and I have 70 words to express it in – being treated for cancer, travelling round Europe, being in lockdown – all have this in common: every day is just about itself. The future can be put to one side; maybe it will happen, maybe it will be somebody else’s problem. ‘None of the crazy you get from too much choice…’, no stress, no sweat.

Well, that’s something to talk about on Thursday.

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Memories

Yesterday afternoon I wrote a poem, I thought I would post it today, but now I feel perhaps it’s better to leave it where it is and go back and look at it some other time.

The beginnings of another one came to me in the shower, now I don’t know what to do about it.

What happens to sadness if you push it away?
Does it fester in the dark, like words never written?
Does it burrow its way into your soul
and feast on what it finds there?

From the surface, you brush away the dust,
shake out your feathers
and get on with life.

You won’t let it hurt you,
you’ll face the new day,
and the next, and the next.
Slide into the mask
and smile for the camera.

Then thirty years later
you look at that smile,
and remember, remember,
the pain that those moments
were trying to cover.

Linda Rushby 17 May 2020

Well, there you go. I finished it (I think). That’ll do, anyway.

Yesterday I came across a photo from 1987 and posted it on Facebook. I remember that time as being amongst the most miserable of my life. We were living in Dallas, I had given up my career to be an ex-pat wife, and found myself sitting in the wreckage of the fantasy that at last I would have time to do some ‘serious’ writing. I had left behind my family and friends; I was getting hardly any sleep, struggling to cope with this terrifying new role of ‘mother’ for which I felt utterly unprepared and unsuited; wracked with guilt and shame for having those feelings; convinced that my son would grow up to hate me because he cried constantly, while I was incapable of meeting his needs; totally dependent on and in awe of my husband who, as well as doing a full time job, was able to understand, soothe, and care for the baby with endless patience and all the parental instincts which I so badly lacked.

And needless to say, I was far too ashamed to seek outside help, even if I had a clue where to look for it. The few ‘friends’ I was able to make were other young mothers, all much more well-adjusted than me, all making it seem so easy, so how could I own up to any of them what a monster I felt inside?

With all those memories, I looked at the two smiling faces, my own and that of the perfect little child, standing with hands holding onto the coffee table while I sat on the sofa supporting him under his armpits.

Oddly, when I look back over my life, it seems that ‘motherhood’ is the one thing I somehow got right, the one project of my life whose outcomes – two wonderful, loving, caring people – I can look at with pride (or maybe that’s down to their father’s contribution, rather than mine).

I don’t know why I wrote this. It’s not what I expected.

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Hedgehog Song

I’ve got into the habit of ending the evening by listening to Amazon music. I try to avoid watching telly after 10 o’clock, though I’m not always very good at sticking to that. I don’t really understand how these streaming services work, obviously they go on the basis of what you’ve chosen before but the random playlists can be extremely random. It’s moved on from giving me lots of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash, Cat Stevens and Fleetwood Mack to deciding I like early 70s folk-rock, which is quite intelligent of it really, though I haven’t heard a lot of those artists for a very long time. In particular it’s picked up on the Incredible String Band, which I didn’t know much about and I find their songs pretty mixed.

Last night it flashed up ‘The Hedgehog’s Song’ (by ISB) which made me laugh, because it reminded me of Nanny Ogg’s Hedgehog Song from the Discworld books. But as soon as the music started, I knew it instantly, though I don’t think I ever knew what band it was associated with. It was just one of those songs that everybody sang in the folk clubs of fifty years ago:

‘Well, you know all the words, and you’ve sung all the notes,
but you never quite learned the song’ she sang.
‘I can tell by the sadness in your eyes
that you never quite learned the song.’

Incredible String Band

Naturally, I sang along, as I’d probably done dozens of times in my youth in smoky clubs and pubs – it had a jaunty tune, quirky rhythm, and apparently silly but actually quite thoughtful lyrics. I thought about my eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old self not giving a thought to the woman who would be singing it half a century later and ruefully reflecting how accurate it was.

Sometimes with these songs from those days I think about the fact that the people who wrote them, if I could see them now at the age they were then, would seem ridiculously young, but at the time they were so much older and more mature than me, role models I admired and hoped to emulate. But here I am with all these years, experience and supposed wisdom, still haunted by adolescent confusion and doubt. I knew all the words, and I sang all the notes, but I never quite learned the song. You can tell by the sadness in my eyes, I never quite learned the song.

No, that wasn’t going to be me. I wasn’t going to turn out to be that sort of sad old lady.

An old friend commented on yesterday’s post that maybe heartache is harder to recover from than heartbreak. I think she’s right, because a broken heart is an acute trauma, that you have to deal with and move on from, but heartache is something that lingers, a chronic condition that fluctuates but never completely goes away. Maybe that’s why my therapist used that word. Interesting.

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New Morning

Wasn’t really expecting a poem today, but here it is:

New Morning

Coming out of the darkness, temptation whispers
how good it would be to return to oblivion
and slide back down into happy dreams.

‘That’s not how it works’
cries Morpheus, slamming
the door on your pleading.
He won’t take you back
any more than the womb
will take back the newborn.
This is the new day.
You’re on your own.

Though the smiley sun
may peep round the curtains,
the darkness still hovers
at the back of your mind.
Thoughts cluster like midges,
buzzing and nipping
with spiteful glee
as you pull round the blankets,.

There is no escape from
the heartache that lingers,
the memories that creep near
and poke bony fingers
at the half-healed bruises
you thought you’d forgotten.

You must make the choice
(though you know there’s no option,
and choice an illusion),
or regret it forever.

Every day, every morning,
the same demons taunt you
till you gather your strength,
and all of your will power
and get out of bed.

Linda Rushby 14 May 2020

And here’s one I opened at random yesterday and found left on the computer when I started it up this morning:

Look Inside

What do you see when you look inside?
Fear, frustration, disappointment?
All of those.
Loneliness, anger, regret?
Not so much as once there was.

After all this time and striving,
don’t you think it should be clearer?
After all this time and striving,
this is as clear as it is.

Do you long for the striving to end?
Do you think of what that means?

Linda Rushby 17 January 2016

From the tone (and especially the last two lines) I thought it was a ‘chemo’ poem (I’ve got at least one of those, and probably others lurking around), but was surprised to realise it was a year earlier, from January 2016. I don’t really remember it, but it definitely feels like another first-thing-in-the-morning poem.

This is pretty much how every day starts for me – any time between about 4 and 7, that limbo of ‘should I get up now?’ or ‘I’m sure if I stay here I’ll doze off again’, and sometimes I do, but mostly I don’t and realise after a couple of hours that there’s no putting it off any longer. Today was perhaps a bit worse than usual because of quite a heavy therapy session yesterday, in which at one point the therapist said: ‘you’ve had quite a lot of heartache’ which is why that word popped up, and in retrospect, I think: she doesn’t know even the half of it, and do I want to go back through my emotional life and dig it all up and show it to her, including the most painful, shameful and embarrassing bits? But maybe that’s what I need to do.

Aside from that, I’ve said in the past that sometimes I think getting up in the morning is the most difficult and stressful thing I do all day, and this is what I mean.

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Corrections and Clarifications

The anger came back this morning, in the I-should-get-out-of-bed-but-not-yet time. I suppose it may have been partly triggered by the new uncertainty caused by images of commuters on trains and station platforms. However, as always, it was turned against myself. How can I keep writing about my real feelings and put it on show? How can I come on here and share my true thoughts, take that risk of being seen for who I am, all that self-pity and negativity and doubt? I’ll stop, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll give up again as I always do with everything.

But I got up and did my half hour practice, and when I went downstairs and made coffee I realised how valuable that is, that it actually does help – or something does. Routine and discipline, you see – it makes life possible. Which I guess includes this as well. Here I am at my keyboard with Miko on the desk beside me, supervising the street outside, both of us listening to a sudden outburst of gulls. Blue sky and sunshine, and I can’t really tell whether there are more people and traffic, though I can see that there are at least six empty parking places across the road whereas they’ve been full for the last few weeks, but I guess the consolation is that at least six drivers aren’t taking the bus.

I didn’t speak to my daughter yesterday, but I assume she for one hasn’t gone back to work. She’s not waitressing any more, but she still works in the leisure/hospitality business, her job involves visiting pubs, so I’m guessing she’s reprieved until they reopen. Anyway, she has two children at home.

I am still in my cosy bubble, for as long as it takes. I may never come out. I still feel that life is less stressful like this, but I keep panicking that eventually I will have to engage with the world again, and wonder what exactly that will mean. It’s like when I was travelling and would every so often get a reminder that, at some point, I would have to come back and face up to life again.

Just remembered that I have some corrections and clarifications for my quote from the Joni Mitchell song yesterday (I finally looked it up). The song is Barangrill and the corrections are: it’s three waitresses (not two); they’re talking about Singapore SLINGS (which makes so much more sense than ‘sleeves’, a mistake I’ve been making for almost 50 years), and there’s ‘not one ANXIOUS voice’ (I think I said ‘angry’).

So there you go, I’m not perfect (as if I ever claimed to be).

Oh my goodness, I just glanced through the window, (checking for swifts) and saw a plane flying over – it looks like a commercial airliner, rather than anything naval/military. Strange how something so familiar can disappear without being missed until suddenly it’s there again.

Check out Barangrill, if you like Joni. I hadn’t heard it in years.