Category: motivation

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Tackling the… Whatever

Some days when I start writing without knowing what to say, it develops, and by the end I feel as though I’ve written something interesting – or at least not too shameful. Then there are days like yesterday when I start but stop half way through because I’m not getting anywhere and, honestly, I just can’t be arsed.

There are many mornings when I start off wondering what I’m going to write and my head is so full of worry and fear about things that no one but me could possibly think were worth being worried or fearful over, but the worry and fear are there anyway, so do I write about them? I am trying to stop beating myself up over this, but it’s become apparent that it isn’t really just the ‘beating up’ that’s the issue, it’s the fact that the feelings are there anyway, it’s the things that I have to do, and the things that I fail to do, and the flotsam that swirls on the dark churning maelstrom of memory.

Planning and organisation are anathema to the dyspraxic brain, because while the attention is fixed on one thing, action or requirement and trying to assemble the others required to precede and follow it, the rest of the mind-stream is charging off into completely different paths, cul de sacs and labyrinths. ‘Write it down!’ I hear you cry, but any attempt to do that initiates mind-block and stasis – a Mexican stand-off while the focussed brain tries to remember what it was thinking of in the first place.

The only way to make things stick is through rote learning and repetition, so the same things are run through over and over again. ‘Planning’ consists of reminding oneself multiple times that ‘something’ needs to be done before a certain date, which induces panic that it will be forgotten, or done incorrectly, or will take a lot longer than the time allowed, and ‘writing down’ becomes a substitute for action.

In situations like this, ‘self care’ can only mean ignoring all that and doing something pleasantly mindless (or mindful) while all that other stuff goes to hell in a hand basket. Which famous author said: ‘I love deadlines, I love the swooshing noise they make as they pass by’? Can you remember? No, neither can I.

Incidentally, the Word grammar checker wants me to change that last ‘I’ to ‘Me’. Grammar checker, in this instance you are wrong, so wrong. How about if I turn it into a question? Can I? See, you can’t object to that, can you?

Why do I even leave the grammar checker turned on? Because it’s the default, and I can’t be arsed to change it, so I just ignore it because I have more confidence in my own understanding than in its – except sometimes I can’t see what it’s objecting to, so I follow the explanation and have a good laugh at its incompetence.

The routine is: write 500 words. And so I have.

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Listing

I’m still doing my lists – sort of, though I’ve slipped a bit this week.

You may or may not be aware that I have a ‘long list’ (written in a ‘Things to do Today’ notebook that I bought eight years ago, when I was living in the Fens – I know that because I have a distinct memory of buying it in the Wilko in Huntingdon – and have used intermittently since) and a page-a-day (except weekends) A6 sized diary that I bought online last month. The former is where I write things as they occur to me – which may vary in scale and/or importance from ‘Sort out study’ or ‘car insurance’ to ‘Empty dishwasher’ (that one not so much now I have a diary). Items on this list may or may not have a do-by date next to them, and the ‘system’ used to be that when the page was full I copied those which hadn’t been completed on to a new page and threw the old one away – or sometimes, when I was trying to be more organised, I started a new page every Monday, copying things as before – but this always feels like a waste of paper. Now I have a diary, the ‘system’ is that every morning I copy into it items from the long list that need to be completed that day, and/or others that I feel I can tackle that day, and/or carry-overs that didn’t get done the previous day – as well as things not worth putting on the long list, like ‘empty dishwasher’. Plus, of course, appointments and deadlines and things like ‘pay credit card bill’ get written in when the dates are set.

That’s the system – in theory. I have tried many, many systems down the years – most of which didn’t last long, as you can tell, and also attended many courses on ‘personal organisation’. I have a horror of lists, but I do understand the logic behind them. When I was employed in offices, I suppose I must have organised my workload somehow – even more so when I was doing multiple jobs from home (though my daughter and ex-husband would probably say I just never stopped working). Managing life in retirement – not to mention lockdown – is a different ball game.

As you can probably guess, lots of items from the long list never make it beyond being copied to the new long list when the old page is full – sometimes not even that. There’s a theory that things that have been on the list that long probably don’t need to be done anyway – that’s one thing I learnt from all those courses, and it may be reasonable in a busy work setting where there are lots of priorities to be juggled and, crucially, other people who eventually notice if the whatever-it-was really was important.

There’s a sense that the writing of an item onto a list is an action in itself, and once that’s done, it can safely be forgotten

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Boring, Boring, Boring

Yesterday I experienced something I haven’t been aware of in a long time: boredom. I finished bringing my financial spreadsheet up to date, but didn’t feel as satisfied as I expected. The afternoon plays on Radio 4 and 4 Extra respectively were: the first episode of a three-part adaptation of ‘Tess of the Durbervilles’ (well done, but hard to avoid the sense of impending doom) and a thirty-year-old drama about a divorced sixty-something woman with breast cancer who is reunited with an old admirer, has a mastectomy and moves to Australia (either breast cancer treatment has improved a lot since the early 1990s, or the writer didn’t have much idea of what he was writing about – no chemo or radiotherapy, just straight to the knife).

Ironically, I also listened to a programme on boredom, but I didn’t take much of it in.

I’m getting bored with the jumper I’ve been knitting, the one I pulled down because it didn’t fit, and I haven’t quite caught up to where it was before. I’m not looking forward to doing the sleeves, which are going to be fiddly, but I want to get it done so I can wear it at least once before the weather gets too warm. If current trends continue, it may be even smaller by next winter (think about it).

Which reminds me, on this morning’s weather forecast they said that it will get a lot warmer, maybe as high as 17o  this week, which would be white and green within a week!

I saw a picture on a Facebook crochet group last week of a blanket with an amazing spiral pattern. There was no pattern attached, and I couldn’t work out from the photo how it was done, so I Googled it, and found a simple technique for making a four-colour spiral – not quite the same, but still interesting. I made a start with four colours of cotton yarn leftover from last year’s weather blanket (I have changed to using a different, lighter yarn this year), and it’s given me the spark of an idea.

I also saw a cartoon on Facebook yesterday titled something like: ‘The Mind/Body problem’, showing a man sitting on a sofa, with a thought bubble coming from his head saying ‘Get up!’ and one from his body saying ‘Nope!’ or words to that effect – exactly summing up my mood, but I can’t remember where it came from.

But for this morning I have some editing – which will be interesting and, being a commission for someone else, takes priority over housework, decluttering, study-tidying or any of those other multitudes of Jobs That Needs Doing.

I keep thinking of things I could do, hobbies that I could take up or restart, projects that I would enjoy getting stuck into, most of which I already have the materials and equipment for, or could easily get hold of online. Books to read, jigsaws to do, projects to complete, all at my fingertips, but can I be bothered?

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Groundhog Day All Over Again

Two days late to talk about Groundhog Day, but that’s just par for the course for me.

Groundhog Day is one of those weird North American customs – like Thanksgiving and the Superbowl – which only enter the consciousness of most of us because of the all-pervading presence of the USA in popular culture. It was first explained to me forty years ago by a young woman I worked with (I was young then too, but she was a couple of years younger still), whose father worked in the diplomatic service, so she’d lived a lot of her life hitherto abroad, including part of her childhood and adolescence in Canada. According to her, groundhogs come out of their hibernation burrows on the 2nd February, and if they see their shadows, they run back underground and hide for another six weeks (or some period like that), but if not, they stay above ground and that is the signal for spring to start. In other words, if it’s sunny on Groundhog Day, paradoxically, spring will be late.

The film of the same name was made in 1993 and starred Bill Murray as a reporter who goes to a small town to report on the behaviour of the local ground hogs, and finds himself waking up the next morning in the local hotel and living the same day over again. He finds that whatever he does that day, by the next time he wakes up, it’s all been forgotten by everyone but himself. At first he’s desperate to get away, but over time he uses this weird condition to his advantage by changing his behaviour, avoiding mistakes, learns to play the piano, woos a girl… It’s a clever gimmick, and a funny film, though ironically, it doesn’t bear watching too many times before it gets very irritating.

It’s that endless repetition that sticks in my head, and that I associate now with Groundhog Day, rather than the arrival of spring (though it was gloomy here on Tuesday, which is supposedly a good sign).

Over the last year, like many people I’ve felt stuck in some endless loop, where every day I get up and do mostly the same things, with occasional variations. The character in the film starts off cynical and bitter, but gradually uses his repeated day to learn new skills, become a better person, fall in love, pursue happiness, and in the end he gets the girl and his life moves on. But what have I learnt, how have I developed?

Well, I’m learning lots of new crochet and knitting skills. On Monday evening I started unravelling the fair isle jumper that I made too small, and yesterday I finished getting it back to the point before I separated it for the sleeves (which was a lot more complicated than you might think) and was able to start knitting it again. I guess you could say I’ve learnt patience, acceptance and perseverance, but only in that very specific context.

Still, today’s another day.

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Blogging about Blogging

I do this every morning, supposedly first thing, but in fact I’ve usually already been awake for two or three hours, lain in bed thinking, listened to the radio, fed the cat, exercised, showered, prepared porridge, loaded the dishwasher…

This morning I answered a comment and made a comment on a friend’s post on our group blog, changed my profile picture, then noticed that the second comment wasn’t appearing, realised I hadn’t saved it anywhere else and didn’t want to have to retype it from scratch; thought maybe it was there but needed to be approved by an admin. Tried logging into the email account for the group blog; couldn’t get the password right; tried hunting for the bit of paper with the password on, which I was sure I’d seen in the last few days; decided to go downstairs and use the laptop because I was sure the email and password were saved on there; they weren’t, but the admin account was the saved login, so I managed to get into the group blog and confirm that the comment had never been saved; came back up here, typed it again (as best I could remember), posted the comment.

I could change the password for the group blog – no, it’s not the blog password I need but the gmail account – I can change the password for that, because I think I’m the only person who ever uses it, but it’s annoying me now and I don’t want to. That bit of paper must be around here somewhere.

I have a thing about not wanting to retype something I’ve already written – which is why I always do blog posts in Word first and save them, so I don’t have to do it again. Even a three sentence comment, I want to be sure I’m doing it the same way as I did the first time (or maybe even better, but I can’t know that if I don’t have a record of the original). It’s a foible of mine.

None of which is what I was intending to write about before I sat down at the computer (well, maybe the first paragraph was). My friend’s comment and his post had got me thinking about how and why I write this blog, because he said ‘Your words often make me wonder if you are searching for direction and whether or not I should be following a dream again.’ Then in his own post (referring to himself or a generic ‘you’, I presume, not me specifically) :

‘But really, the question means: what have you done with your life so far? And what are you going to do with what’s left of it?’

Well, what I write is just what comes into my head at the time, and some of that leads to thoughts of my life so far. As for what’s left of it – which is kind of what I thought I would write about, before I got distracted – I’ll start that tomorrow.

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Superficial Stuff

Yesterday I received my first Christmas card of the season through the post, and it was from the friend I mentioned a couple of days ago (hers is always the first). There wasn’t a long letter this time, just a handwritten note in the card to say her Mum died in May. Luckily I hadn’t already sent my round robin letters, so I can write a personal note to her. It’s a worry when you don’t have any contact from one year’s end to the next and don’t know what might have happened in between.

I don’t have to go anywhere today, and although the sun is shining I doubt I’ll be tempted out of my burrow. Yesterday after my trip to the hospital in the morning, I made the mistake of going into the Range on the way back to see what Christmassy paper, cutting dies and stamps they had. Unfortunately, this hobby is really about buying stuff – which looks amazing and inspiring in the shop and then disappears into the cupboards when I get home. And then there was the depressing socially distanced queuing. Most of my shopping this year has been online. I had to buy a winter flowering shrub (skimmia), two boxes of coconut Lindors and a kilo of Fox’s biscuits to cheer myself up.

In the afternoon, I completed the interiors of three of the cards I made the exteriors for at the weekend (which means I now have a total of four usable cards), but got stuck on the remaining two because I thought I’d got a second sheet of the matching paper for the front, to do the internal decorations with, but couldn’t find it anywhere. After I’d spent an hour going through the mess on the table, it was getting near dinner time, so I left it, with a plan to start some new ones today with different paper in hope that the other will turn up, or if not I’ll think of something else to go on the inside.

This is why I have to allow so much time to do these things. Ten days from today to the last second-class posting date. Also I need to re-order some teas, coffees and hot chocolates from the Whittard’s website, because an order that I thought I’d sent over a week ago never turned up – when I checked, the order wasn’t registered, although I remembered doing it on the ‘Black Friday’ weekend, so I must have just put it all in the basket without confirming it.

Just had a text from someone I’d arranged to see next Monday in Bedford and hadn’t told her I won’t be going. Still haven’t rung up the steam train people to cancel the booking so I can get my money back (in the form of vouchers to go next year). At least I contacted the catsitter yesterday and rearranged that.

Not very deep today, am I? This is why my head is always in a mess.

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Rabbit in the Headlights

Later this morning, I’ll be going to the hospital for my annual mammogram, postponed from last month because of the lockdown. I don’t want to go – not that it’s that painful (though it’s never comfortable), but I don’t want to go to the hospital, or anywhere really – just as I didn’t particularly want to take the van out last week, but this time I really have no choice.

The card-making didn’t go so well yesterday, partly because I was, like Friday afternoon, trying something different (for the inside of the cards), and I only completed one. So I’m still not ready to send off my letters, which feels a bit as though time’s running out.

Thinking about all this yesterday after I’d posted – and when I was getting frustrated with how I was going to do it, and panicking a little in case I did anything that would ruin anything I’d done so far – it struck me that there is a distinct ‘first world problem’ side to all this. It’s all so trivial, isn’t it, on the global scale? Yet it feels so important to me. It feels – at risk of sounding melodramatic – like an act of courage, something I’ve had to psych myself up for, and have to keep motivating myself to continue. Now, not that long ago I would have been berating myself for that, feeling stupid, frustrated and angry with myself for making such a big deal over it. I’m trying not to do that, though several times over the last few days I’ve been struck by panic about it all. I honestly know how ridiculous and irrational all this sounds. This is a side of me that nobody knows about (unless they read this blog, and even then they probably won’t take it seriously). These are the sort of battles that I have with myself all the time, to ‘get over myself’, in that weird phrase that just popped into my head.

This is the rabbit-in-the-headlights me that somehow – not sure how – I manage to hide from other people a lot of the time. Life is easier if I don’t set her challenges, and there are enough challenges in everyday life to try to protect her from (though fewer during lockdown). I can never get rid of her – I’ll never ‘grow out’ of her if it hasn’t happened by now. She is the essence of me, and I’m not sure whether referring to ‘her’ in the third person is such a good idea, but there again, it does convey the point that ‘I’ don’t have a lot of control over her – I can threaten her and bully her but doing that always has consequences for me, because I’m the one who feels the pain (even more so when I get angry with her). But there are things which she/I now can deal with and enjoy only because I/she have persisted in making her/myself do them.

Little battles can be as difficult as big ones. I have to keep trying.

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Round Robin

I didn’t post on here yesterday, but I did write my annual letter, sent to a handful of people from years ago whom I’m still in touch with enough to send Christmas cards and write to once a year. I don’t really know if the recipients are pleased to get it or resent being sent a computer-written and printed ‘round robin’ style letter. I used to edit each one for the specific person it was going to, but as the years pass and the interval since I saw them all in person grows longer, I think – well, at least this is better than nothing. At least they know I’m still alive. One person sends me a similar letter, one sends me a handwritten letter, most just a card with maybe a few words or just the usual greetings.

The handwritten letter is from the longest-standing friendship of them all, a friend from school, who went to teacher training college in London for three years in the 1970s and returned afterwards to the village she’d left, married the brother of a girl we were at school with, and taught at the village school all her working life. The last time I saw her was at her silver wedding anniversary party in the village hall in 2004, and before that, her 21st birthday party. In the quarter-century in between, we’d lost touch, until my Mum, one day in the 1980s, had a phone call from her asking ‘are you the Mrs Rushby who used to live in…?’ and passed on my address.

The letter I wrote yesterday turned out to be a little longer (600 words) than these daily offerings, about how I’ve been, and what I’ve been up to (not a lot, apart from the wedding) and my plans for Christmas – which changed anyway in the course of writing because I got a message from my daughter saying that my granddaughter is now quarantined till the 16th because a child in her class has tested positive for Covid, so I won’t be going to see them next weekend. And as usual it’s a computer-produced letter, but I decided yesterday morning that I would make Christmas cards this year, using the vast array of card-making equipment (die-cutting machine, metal dies, stamps, inks, sheets of patterned card and paper, scissors, glue, stickers etc etc etc) which I’ve acquired over the last two years.

I won’t go into the background story of how I started that particular hobby (not today anyway), but I will say that although it’s fun some of the time, I also find it unbelievably stressful. This is partly because there is absolutely no way for me to avoid creating a massive mess with all the stuff, and also (and related) that it takes me ages to make anything because I am constantly looking for the thing that I had in my hand only ten minutes earlier.

Yesterday I started with a determination NOT to get stressed, to keep it simple, and tidy.

I will try again today.

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Shoulds

I can see from my window that it must have been a glorious sunrise, but even though I was awake in time – even though I was up in time – I didn’t go to the sea to watch it, and now I wish I had. Wait, didn’t I say a while back that I didn’t do regret? I think you’ll find I said that the only things I regret are the ones I don’t do, and I didn’t go to see the sunrise.

Yesterday was such a nice sunny day that I thought, I should really have taken my van out – I thought that at about half past eleven, when it was really too late, so I told myself that today I’d plan to go out and take a picnic, because if I tell myself in advance there’s a better chance that I’ll do it. But then yesterday evening and first thing this morning I looked at the weather forecast, and it said it was going to be cloudy, so I more or less convinced myself that that was a good enough excuse not to do anything about it, to stay home again listening to the radio and sorting out my weather blanket. Now I can see sunshine on the roofs opposite and a clear sky behind and I’m not so sure that that excuse is valid.

Taking the van out always feels like it’s going to be a chore, to make sure the battery doesn’t pack up and avoid getting a telling off from the guys at the garage. It’s taking up time that I could be spending sitting in the armchair crocheting. Because yesterday I finished the Christmas jumper – apart from annoying tasks like sewing in the ends, and I’m not seeing my daughter till Friday week, so there’s plenty of time to sort those out.

Now that shaft of bright sun has disappeared, and I can see that what looked like a ‘clear’ sky is actually a solid sheet of high, light cloud – but it still doesn’t look bad enough to use as an excuse. And it’s a month since I took it out – once a month over winter should be enough to keep it ticking over. Do I have to go all the way to the country park? My parking season ticket is still valid. I can go into Sainsbury’s on the way and buy a picnic, drive there and park under the trees, make a cuppa and sit inside the van if it’s raining.

I know that’s what I should do. Here we go again, about the ‘shoulds’. This is not just what some voice from childhood is muttering into my inner ear. It’s something that I know will make me feel better once I’ve done it, and that I also know won’t be as bad as it seems once I get started – but I still don’t want to do it. Which is the story of my life – so really, I know I have to go.

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Seasonal Rant

I spent most of yesterday getting stressed over how much I hate this time of year. All the miserable and uncomfortable Christmases in my life, even though outnumbered by the happy ones, rise up from memory like a dark tidal wave, and completely overwhelm them. I spent the morning working on the weather blanket and listening to podcasts, and then in the afternoon telling the therapist how ashamed I am that that’s all I’ve been doing, as well as about all the dark Christmases there have been in in my life, and how much I hate this time of year – in between bouts of weeping.

We got into the usual argument about what I ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be doing (‘should’ is like a red rag to a bull for her) and when she asked if it wasn’t just those voices from the past telling me what to do, I got irritated, because, no, it isn’t just that – I know for myself that I would feel better if I did all those things that I ignore in favour of sitting and crocheting.

‘What do you think will happen?’ she asked.

‘Well, it’s not healthy is it? I’d just go into a downward spiral and sink down and down’ I told her, waving my finger round in circles.

‘What’s your worst fantasy of what might happen, if you took it to the extreme?’

To the extreme??? I thought. What a bloody stupid question – like the question about what do you really want from life if money and reality and the law of gravity were no object – what’s the point of asking that?

‘That by the time I was missed, someone would have to break into the house and find me rotting, surrounded by piles of rubbish, and with half my face missing because the cat’s eaten it’ was what I actually said.

I woke as usual at four this morning, but instead of filling the time with podcasts and reading, I spent an hour brooding, just like old times. Then at five, I started reading some more of ‘Out of Sheer Rage’, and to my surprise finished it, although my Kindle said I was only 85% through it – the last 15% was taken up with footnotes and a preview of another book. I was telling the therapist about it yesterday, and how much I’ve enjoyed it, and she asked if it made me feel less alone, which it did, but like the dyspraxia forum in a bittersweet way, because it IS good to know I’m not the only one, but also depressing in that it suggests to me that there really is no way out.

But there are so many bits that I wanted to highlight, and I will share this one:

‘thinking of giving up is probably the one thing that’s kept me going. I think about it on a daily basis but always come up against the problem of what to do when I’ve given up. Give up one thing and you’re immediately obliged to do something else. The only way to give up totally is to kill yourself but that one act requires an assertion of will equal to the total amount that would be expanded (sic) in the rest of a normal lifetime.”

“Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence” by Geoff Dyer