Category: motivation

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Monday Morning

Back here again. Why? Because half the time I swear I’ve given up for good and then one morning I think I might try again. Just this once. On the understanding that it’s the same old nonsense and, basically, a complete waste of my time writing and yours (whoever you are) for reading it.

But we both still have a chance. You can stop right here – or I could, in which case you wouldn’t have the chance either way, because obviously I wouldn’t bother to post this. But I probably won’t – stop, that is. Though with another potential 400 words… Who knows?

It’s nine o’clock now (I went to the Co-op before starting) and it’s Monday. Does that mean I can play music without worrying about disturbing the neighbours? There again, they might work shifts, for all I know.

Okay, now I’m playing Roxy Music’s ‘Flesh and Blood’, that being the first cassette I pulled out of the shoebox at random that I haven’t already transferred to the PC. Still haven’t done anything about replacing the stylus on my turntable.

Reached the second track, ‘Oh Yeah’, and the sound quality is pretty awful. I have the original album somewhere, so if I get my finger out and do something about that stylus, I can play that. But I still feel a bit wary about playing these old albums – they’ve been kept for all these years and moved from place to place, and maybe it’s all been a waste of time because they’re ruined anyway.

Next track, ‘Same Old Scene’, isn’t much better.

How do I manage to do anything? Repetition, routine, and constant self-bullying. I bullied myself into going to the Co-op this morning. I bullied myself into putting the shopping away when I got back, and starting a ‘to-do’ list. The weight of the things I don’t do is always in my head, because I’m always thinking about them, except the times when I let myself off and sit in the sun or listen to the radio and/or crochet. Or else I’m thinking about other things, worse things, that I’ve read or heard or people have said or done to me that make me angry or sad or hopeless.

I think constantly about these things, but never do anything – worse, the thinking itself is completely aimless and futile, it’s not even as if by thinking I ever produce a coherent plan of action which I then proceed to complete. Except – well, I did start making that to-do list. If I completed some of those things, I suppose I’d be happier. But a more reliable way of becoming happier is by quietening the thinking – and the way to do that is by doing things that make me happy directly – like sitting in the sun, listening to the radio, and/or crocheting – all of which I may do later after I’ve had breakfast.

The second side of the album sounds better than the first one did.

Think it’s time for breakfast.

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No Pressure…

Wisdom of a lifetime, accumulated from what I’ve read, been told and learned from experience:

  • I think too much;
  • I never think;
  • I feel too much;
  • I am selfish and don’t have enough consideration for other people;
  • I care too much about other people’s feelings and what they think about me;
  • My expectations of life are ‘through the roof’;
  • I don’t expect enough from life – I should dream more, decide what I want and go for it;
  • I need to get out more and meet people;
  • I am happier on my own and should keep away from other people because being with them makes me stressed and frustrated;
  • I need an occupation that will give purpose to my life and focus my energies;
  • I need to do less and stop running myself ragged all the time;
  • I need to try harder;
  • I shouldn’t have to try at all;
  • I need to write every day – doesn’t matter what about;
  • I need to be focussed in my writing and finish what I’ve started;
  • I need to tidy up after myself, because how can I focus and be comfortable when I’m surrounded by chaos?
  • I need to stop beating myself up about the chaos and learn to be happy as I am;
  • I need to organise myself, make lists, set goals and get some structure into my life;
  • I need to take each day as it comes and be spontaneous;
  • I need to sort myself out;
  • I need to be less self-centred;
  • I need to be more self-disciplined, to stop floundering about and getting nowhere;
  • I need to stop being so hard on myself.
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Control

I finished yesterday’s post with a rhetorical question – which I intended to continue today – I remember that, but I can’t remember what it was. Excuse me while I have a quick check…

…

‘Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many ideas about how my life should have been (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?’

Ah right, yes, that is what I was going to write about. It’s been in my head quite a lot and I thought I had an answer…

The main one, I think, is that that is the only one of the four which is still within my control. I could argue over whether any of them are realistically feasible, but I’m not going there today, beyond saying that all of them rely on huge amounts of luck, but also, more significantly, on other people – potential lovers, potential employers, potential clients. One thing I have learnt to accept in life is that any situation where I have to persuade or convince anyone else is stressful, unlikely to end well for me and hence best avoided.

But I can write. I can even ‘publish’ – even if it’s only posting these daily 500 word mini-essays about this, that and nothing in particular, it’s still publication in the sense of putting it into a public space where anyone with access to the internet can potentially read it. I can even go further, I can gather my words together and dump them into e-books, or have them printed into paperbacks which I can put on my shelves with my name on the spines. The technologies and processes are all at my fingertips.

A couple of years ago I met a life coach who suggested I visualise writing a best-seller, then plan the steps to get there. I don’t really know why I reacted the way I did, but I got very angry – she was trying to help me, but setting extremely unrealistic aspirations just seems frustrating and depressing, not motivating, as far as I’m concerned. I suppose it’s the tired old chestnut about the glass of water again – the significance of the gap seems overwhelming compared to that of the contents.

What I really long for is that buzz of excitement from creating a world in my head, finding out what’s going to happen next, bringing it all together. There really is nothing in the world quite like it – except the buzz of intellectual discovery, the moment when the ideas interconnect and click together and suddenly some small part of the world makes sense in a way it didn’t before – I’ve felt that too, but not for many years.

So, all I can do is to keep going, doing what I can, not being distracted by what I can’t. Letting go of expectations, and letting the words take control.

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Thinking, Writing, Writing, Thinking

What I write here is whatever pops into my head, and that’s all I can write.

How many times have I said that? Yeah, I know, a lot, I keep droning on about it. What am I doing wrong? I used to think that as long as I kept writing every day, something miraculous would happen , and I’d find a way of being able to write ‘properly’, to think up stories, to go back to my novel and finish it. But it doesn’t work, so why am I still doing this?

‘Oh, you have to write through all that shit’ people tell me. That’s easy for them – maybe they only have a small amount of shit to get through. For me, it seems there is no getting to the other side.

‘Write another story like that one’ someone said to me yesterday, referring to ‘Eagle Flight’, which has just gone into ‘Flights and Fancies’, the upcoming Southsea Storytellers anthology. And yes, it’s a good story, I agree, one that I wrote about twelve years ago. But how did I write it? Where did it come from?

The answer to that is that it was inspired by an object (a soapstone eagle) which was used for an exercise in a creative writing class, and worked up into a story for an end of term assessment. If I dig around I might be able to find the tutor’s comments, but obviously in those days they were all handwritten on the hard copy.

Just before the lockdown started, I went to another creative writing course, with similar exercises to stimulate writing. I went to the four sessions and brought the material home and haven’t looked at it since. A friend invited me to join a writing group on Facebook which has regular prompts, and I’ve done nothing for that either, bar sharing a couple of poems.

I don’t engage with any of this any more, and I haven’t for years. Why do I still hang on to this tiny, frayed thread of an idea that I might ever be ‘A Writer’? Why do I even want to? I am very late writing this morning, and I almost didn’t bother at all. It’s stressful. I’m stressed enough, worrying about parcel deliveries and my sick cat, how can I get medicine down her to help her appetite when she won’t eat anyway? Worrying about so many things, most of them not so important in the scheme of things but they still need to be dealt with, they require action, and action requires thought and decisions and plans and comparisons of the best way to do them and then energy to get on and do whatever it is.

And I want to run away, not necessarily to another geographical place, but into an emotional place where I can be and let other things be and not have to think about making up stories or whether I can write or not or if it’s worth trying.

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Advice From Very Successful People

Yesterday I started writing about creativity, but I got distracted and gave up. So I’ll try and pick up the threads of what I was saying.

Trying to make things is risky. Friends sometimes describe me as ‘creative’, but I don’t really think of myself that way – I may be a ‘tryer’, but I give up too easily – or, if I persist to the end, I’m inevitably disappointed. And no, that doesn’t make me a ‘perfectionist’, I have an extremely high tolerance for things that are a long way from perfection.

To be honest, I never really know how to judge the things I make, whether that’s a poem, my PhD thesis or a crochet shawl. I don’t trust my judgement on external things, other people, what clothes suit me… (actually, that’s not quite true, because I do have very strong opinions on some things, but I hate arguing so I only express them to people and in contexts where I feel safe that they’ll agree with me). But when it comes to aesthetic judgements… well, the same applies, because I don’t want to admit to liking something if other people around me aren’t going to agree, but it also goes deeper because sometimes I just don’t know (or care) what I think.   

I don’t really feel like writing this morning. I’m a bit late because I’ve already been to Sainsbury’s, but I haven’t had breakfast yet. I want to sit in the garden but I’m not going to because DHL are supposed to be delivering a parcel, and I don’t want to miss it and have to go to Costcutter to pick it up like I did a couple of weeks ago. But here in the study I am right at the front of the house so will be able to hear if anyone knocks. So I might as well persevere. I haven’t had a text with an estimated delivery time, just that it will be today.

I just tried to check the ‘tracker’ from my phone. And – as you do – got sucked into reading an article with the headline: ‘Steve Jobs Said One Thing Separates Successful People From Everyone Else (and Will Make All the Difference In Your Life)’. The answer, of course, was predictably summed up as: ‘Trust yourself.’

Oh yes, that good old self-belief.

‘Trust that you’ll figure out how to react and how to respond to roadblocks and challenges. Trust that you will become a little wiser for the experience. Trust that you’ll grow more skilled, more experienced, and more connected.

Try enough things, learn from every success and every setback, and in time you’ll have all the skills, knowledge and experience you need.’

There’s a reason why you only hear this advice from mega-billionaires – because the people who try all those things, trust themselves, try to learn the lessons of their failures, keep going and still get nowhere, those people don’t want to talk about it. Or if they do, why would anyone listen?

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Rising and Retiring

While the cassette recorder is on my desk, there’s even less space than usual for Miko to squeeze into. Which makes typing even more than usually awkward. At least I have my reading glasses today.

Yesterday evening I was writing an email to an old friend and listening to music, and I got to thinking about the south of France, the scents of flowers and herbs, and the little shops in out of the way towns selling unbranded local soaps and colognes; the paintings of Van Gogh (partly because of the jigsaw I was doing earlier that morning when it was pouring with rain here); the woods around the retreat centre in Limousin where I stayed six years ago. I started putting together bits and pieces for a poem, including kittens playing in a pile of nets in the harbour at Sorrento (different country, I know, but same sea). Then into the music stream popped a young Joan Baez singing ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ and I thought ‘oh, how appropriate!’ but I’d already sent the email by then.

Why is it that I often feel quite peaceful and comfortable with the world in the evenings, but then almost always feel miserable when I wake up? No, it’s not related to alcohol consumption – I’ve thought of that. Someone once told me that what you think when you wake up relates to what you were thinking when you fell asleep, so make sure you’re always thinking happy thoughts before you drop off, but this is clearly nonsense. How can you know exactly the point you will be falling asleep before it happens, let alone control your thoughts in preparation? What would happen if you were lying there thinking: ‘Right, am I asleep yet? No? Better think of something happy then. How long can I keep this up for? How long do I need to keep it up for? Has it happened yet? How long am I going to have to keep up these happy thoughts? What if I drop off just when I’m getting frustrated or stressed?’ etc etc. You’d never actually fall asleep – unless this is just because, as I keep forgetting, my brain is weird and doesn’t act in the same way as normal people who can control that stuff?

I’ve been told: ‘You’re obviously not a morning person’, but that’s not true, I’m better if I get up in the mornings, I hate lying in late and losing half the day. But it’s like everything else, I have to motivate myself to do it, the activity, the process of getting out of bed, it’s not even that I particularly dislike it when I do it. Sometimes I even talk myself through it: ‘right, duvet off, one foot on the floor, sit on the bed, second foot on the floor, brace yourself with hands on the mattress, push down and straighten legs’. It’s the gap between thought and action that stretches out and out, as though thinking is a substitute for doing.