Yesterday I ended by quoting from a post on a Facebook group for dyspraxics which bothered me, about how people like me should stop apologising and feeling ashamed, and sorry for ourselves. That is me in a nutshell, right there, but how do I stop? If I am to be true to my nature, that is how I have always been, and always will be. I can’t be strong and proud of myself, because this is who I am, this is my lived experience: that I try things, mess them up, break things, am constantly late, messy, chaotic, forgetful, all those things. I read other people’s posts on the group, where they talk about repeatedly failing at interviews, hopelessly looking for jobs but never being accepted for anything that matches their qualifications, getting bullied at work and at home for being slow, chaotic, etc, and so on, and so forth. Is it so surprising that we are apologetic, full of shame, sorry for ourselves? Don’t we deserve somewhere, one place at least, among our peers, where we can share these stories and feelings?

But at the same time I can see where this person is coming from. I despise myself when I feel sorry for myself – I have written about this before, the horrible vicious circle that makes it so hard to have any kind of self-love or self-belief. That’s what is so stark when I read the blog posts from Prague: how out of depth and hopeless I felt. I now know where those feelings originate from – but knowing that there’s nothing I can do to change the way I am doesn’t help.

In the ‘affirmative’ ending to my ‘Square Peg’ poem I wrote that I’ll never find a space to fit my edges unless I ‘make one for myself’. By that I am acknowledging that no one else can help me to find a way of accepting myself – I no longer fantasise about finding an ‘other half’ who will make me whole at last – but I still don’t know how to do it for myself, except, as I’ve always done, by running away and hiding .

I’ve been to Sainsbury’s already this morning to find that they didn’t have any of the usual cat food (trust me, it’s not worth buying any other kind), and, more seriously that they didn’t have any Marmite. I asked a young man who was restocking the bakery shelves, and he showed me where it should be and said ‘it’s in short supply everywhere isn’t it?’ Is it? I didn’t know, and I’ve completely run out. ‘You could try one of the larger stores, or’ and he lowered his voice confidentially and pointed across the road: ‘Tesco’s!’

I will return to Tesco, but I wasn’t about to go over there with my three bags of shopping from Sainsbury’s, so I came home.

I had a bad night last night – they’re never good, but this was particularly bad, and I don’t know why. I tried listening to two programmes I’d downloaded, and they were both pretty depressing, one the fifth episode of a series, and I’m not sure if it’s the last or just the last I’ve downloaded, and the other the start of the second series of something else. They were oddly similar, both about feisty women in history, one being Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the other a fictional Icelandic woman from some period in history, which come to think of it could be about the same. The actresses sounded very similar, both with Northern English accents (in Eleanor’s case, presumably to emphasise her provincial back ground) – I suppose it could even have been the same actress, but I haven’t checked. I’m not sure I want to listen to any more of either of them, not even in the early hours – as I said, they were both very depressing, although Eleanor was the less sympathetic of the two.

Although I’ve lived with this insomnia all my life, so that it’s part of my life, I still keep wondering if there is any better way of dealing with it. I lay there doing my downwards-counting in my head, and thought: well, soon it should be warm enough to be worth getting up and sitting in another room when I can’t sleep, even though it’s never helped when I’ve tried it before. But I feel so tired when I’m lying there, I don’t have the energy to get out of bed – and that of course carries over to the morning as well, I never want to get up, but I also hate lying awake.

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.

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

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

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

I have been getting discouraged about a lot of things lately – mainly the garden. My Facebook memories keep showing all the lovely things which were in flower at this time last year. Someone said to me the other day that my garden is ‘blooming’, but he was judging it from Facebook, where I have posted pictures of every single flower I’ve seen so far – sometimes several pictures of the same one, over a number of days, as I’m still trying to post a photo every day. The actual total of flowers so far has been: one yellow and three white daffodils on the forecourt, and in the back garden one blue hyacinth and a handful of mini daffodils; two hellebores (one single and, more recently, one double flower), a few blossoms on the rosemary which were only visible if you looked very carefully and a couple of yellow celandines under the camellia (which I only just remembered). The rest is a desert of weeds, rotting planks and general junk currently in transit between the sheds. Is this disaster down to the hot, dry summer last year, or a total lack of interest and attention? I assume most likely a combination of the two.

It’s the curse of social media. However honest I try to be about my general worthlessness and self loathing, it seems that people want to keep seeing me in a more positive light. Which is very frustrating – but on the other hand, if they could see me more clearly, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anyway. And then I’d feel even worse.

I honestly don’t know how to shake off these feelings, and more and more it seems that there isn’t any escape. The effort required feels overwhelming, but so is the effort to pretend to be what I’m not: brave, positive, upbeat, hopeful, happy etc. Feelings always take control over intentions to change, to find a better way to be.

I almost didn’t write today. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t throw all this out into the void. But I usually feel better afterwards

I lay in bed for quite a while and got up late. I felt overwhelmed with anger and despair, as I sometimes do in the mornings. I have got a lot of medical stuff to deal with over the next few weeks, I need to make appointments for blood and Covid tests, which I tried to ring up about yesterday (the GP and hospital respectively) but couldn’t get through. And I need to book my car in for its MOT, and started to think: the MOT is due by the 7^th, and I have to go to the hospital on the 17^th, and need a Covid test within 72 hours, so what if I book the test for the 15^th but then find the car fails the MOT, then I would have to take the van, but the drive through testing at the hospital is under cover, so would I be able to take the van? And will the van even start? I need to know this well in advance so I can tell the hospital I’ll need an alternative non-drive through test. All the what-ifs, what-ifs, what-ifs and all the phone calls I need to make to sort it all out hang around me like a lead collar, and this is why I get so angry with myself. I thought I would get better with this stuff as I got older, but I never do.

I know that everyone’s struggling at the moment, but I can’t help feeling as though everyone is now just getting a glimpse of what it feels like to be me.

‘We all are!’

‘That depends on when your birthday is’ I stuttered, not having expected this somewhat aggressive response.

‘Well, none of us were allowed parties!’ she shot back.

There I go again, showing my self-pity. I should know by now to keep my mouth shut. But the only reason I’d been thinking about it was that next week it will be my sister’s first birthday in lockdown – last year she and her husband went for a holiday in Devon, and for my birthday I was looking forward to a canal holiday on a narrow-boat with my son and daughter in law. When it had to be cancelled, I thought: ‘oh well, not the end of the world, it’s just another day, I’m used to being on my own at home after all’ etc etc, but on the day itself it hit me harder than I’d expected. It was near the beginning of the first lockdown, and over the last few weeks I’ve been wondering whether this current situation will still be in place by then. But, first-world-problems, what do birthdays matter when people are facing much worse problems: illness and death, losing loved ones, losing jobs?  Maybe this lady had problems I wasn’t aware of, and my remark about my birthday was insensitive?

‘It’s not a competition’ my therapist said when I told her about it. ‘Whatever’s going on in her life, that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to feel sad! And instead of self-pity, why not think of it as “self-care”?’

Still, I think I should keep my mouth shut. It’s safer. Which is ironic, because as a child, and even later when I was a young woman, I was always being told to speak up for myself (except when I said things the other parties didn’t want to hear, as in this case, and how was I supposed to anticipate when that might happen?) Better to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, when to share them might invoke other people’s anger, and hence my shame, or even laughter, and my humiliation – or sometimes both shame and humiliation at the same time.

Yet I come on here and talk about my feelings every day. Why is that? I’ve been through this before – because I can, with a near certainty that no one is going to respond.

I have a friend who occasionally contacts me on What’s App, who has severe physical disabilities and is in a far worse position than me. Sometimes she amazes me with her positivity and resilience, but this week she was very low. I tried to tell her how I felt for her, I didn’t belittle her suffering, I told a funny story against myself, I said I’m here if she ever wants to share. What else could I do? It’s not a competition.

I can’t really work out whether the fact that my mind works like that is unusual or not, given that I can’t get inside anyone else’s head to find out how they think. Up until a few years ago, I assumed that’s the way everyone thinks, that constantly rolling narrative, the barrage of words running through the head, and when I discovered that some people actually think in pictures  (allegedly most people, though I find that hard to believe) it – well – blew my mind. I mean, maybe partially – I can ‘visualise’ some things, but I have to make a conscious effort to do – but as a main way of thinking? How do you visualise abstract concepts? I had this conversation with a friend a while back, and he said that he sees the words as he thinks them. To me that sounds bizarre.

But I started this train of thought by thinking about whether I can control my thoughts. The theme of those pep talks I used to listen to over a full English was that it is possible to control your thinking and by doing so change your life, but my mind seems to have a mind of its own. The actors’ names and knitting designs kind of thoughts don’t bother me at all – except when they interfere with my ability to do more important stuff (which is quite often). I don’t even particularly mind the might I have a stroke and will the cancer come back thoughts too much – they’re awful at the time, of course, but tend not to come very often or last very long.

The ones that really get to me are the regular, unavoidable ones that come in the early hours, or occasionally in the day time, the: I hate myself and wish I was dead, why has everything I’ve ever tried to do with my life come to nothing, why do I always give up on everything, why can’t I write anything apart from this drivel? Those are the ones I’d really like to be able to control. Daylight and doing things can sometimes blow them away – knitting, crochet, reading etc are usually pretty reliable; walking by the sea can be too, but it requires effort to get myself out of the house (not always easy, even when there isn’t a lockdown). Being with other people can be, but it’s risky, it can also have the opposite effect, so in general being by myself is safer.

Writing these daily essays – I think that helps too. I usually feel better afterwards, anyway, even if I don’t have anything to say.

In autumn 2008, I worked out all the money I earned from the five part-time jobs I was doing at the time, and worked out that my regular annual income was £8,500. I just looked that up in my old blog, and made the mistake of reading some of the surrounding posts, which has reduced me to tears. So many things still resonate, some are strangely prophetic, and many make me wonder how I got through that time, and fill me with gratitude that I’m in a far better place now. I remember a previous post (before I’d worked out the exact sum) when a fellow blogger had asked in response: ‘Why do you need money?’ I don’t have the exact response, but I did find this:

‘I’m sure people think I’m very mercenary/materialistic when I say I can’t leave because I won’t have enough money, as though I’m saying I don’t want to give up my skiing holidays/ Caribbean hideaway/ new car every couple of years (I don’t have any of those things, BTW, that was a joke)… People with comfortable middle class salaries don’t, I think, quite understand where I’m coming from… There have been times when we’ve not had much disposable income, or when I’ve not been earning anything in my own right, and I’ve managed without things, that’s not a problem, I can do that, if I can’t afford something I do without… But I’m scared of not having enough to live on, of having bills I can’t pay at the end of the month…’

Husband or Cat, 17 October 2008

One comment I got on this was: ‘…I really do not understand why someone of your obvious talents and abilities can under value yourself so much.’ To which I replied: ‘It’s not a question of me undervaluing my talents and abilities, but of prospective employers doing so…’

Three years prior to this, when my husband threatened to leave me over the cat, a door had seemed to open on a different life, but when I called his bluff, he said that he couldn’t leave because we/he couldn’t afford to pay for two places to live, which told me all I needed to know: until I could be financially independent, I was stuck, and I had to keep on compromising. I needed to find a real job before I could start to have a real life – or jump anyway, and trust to fate – which in the end is what I did.

Am I obsessed with money? Financial independence means freedom, autonomy, control of one’s own destiny, self-respect. So don’t talk to me about feminism, because if it’s not about all those things, what DOES it mean?

This was a question posed to me yesterday by my therapist.

‘Imagine it as a title on your blog’ she said. ‘What would you say? I’m trying to challenge you.’

She’d accused me of being obsessed with monetary value, with trying to apply a monetary value to who I am and the things I do.

‘Very early on in this process’ she said ‘maybe in the second session or so, you were quick to tell me that, although you’re financially comfortable, the money you were living off had come to you from your husband in the divorce settlement, and somehow it’s not due to your own efforts’ (or words to that effect – I’m paraphrasing, because I can’t remember exactly what she said).

Which is true. But what I’d just been talking about was the amount of time that goes into things which I know have no realistic possibility of a monetary return, specifically my knitting and crochet (and of course, so obvious that it wasn’t even brought into the conversation, my writing). I’d mentioned that earlier this week I’d been asked how much I would ‘charge’ to make something as a commission – a question I never know how to answer, because half the time I say too much and put them off, and the other half I aim too low, which can also put people off, or just leave me thinking that I’ve undersold myself and somehow failed in that way. Underlying this, I suppose, is an assumption that I am a professional person who sees the things I make in terms of exchange, and has a system for determining prices, whereas from my point of view, they’re just the (rarely useful, and occasionally embarrassing) results of me finding enjoyable ways to pass the time – in other words, hobbies. Incidentally, the word ‘amateur’ comes from the latin word for ‘love’, meaning someone who does something for the love of it, so that a century ago, ‘amateurs’ in most fields (particularly sport) were afforded more respect than supposedly self-serving ‘professionals’.

I know all this, I know that for creative work the price depends on what someone is prepared to pay, rather than the effort that went into doing it, and I also know the argument put forward by creative people that the workman is worthy of his hire. And I know that I’ve never been able to square this circle, and this is a big reason why I’ve never been able to make a success of business, and it all ties up with social anxiety, lack of self belief, and not being able to ask for anything from other people.

But I can’t see the leap from this to the suggestion that I’m fixated on monetary value. She mentioned the struggle to change the law so that it affords value to the traditionally unpaid work of housework and child-rearing, but to me, any capable adult should be able to pay for their own needs. To be continued…