Category: self hate

Posted on

Going Through the Motions

Going Through the Motions

Get up and do what you always do,
even though your head is full
of all the times it hasn’t worked before;
of all the reasons why it doesn’t work;
of all the many ways it might go wrong;
of all the problems you can’t imagine
until they happen.

You want to run away and hide,
but you’ve tried that before,
and it never worked
so why should it now?

This is life,
this is how it works.
Stumble on,
from one day to the next
and maybe you’ll
get away with it
for one more day.

Linda Rushby 18 August 2020

There was a post on the FB dyspraxia group asking how many members write, and what we write. I started thinking about poems I’ve written down the years which relate to my dyspraxia (even when I didn’t know that’s what it was). They tend to be the ones I don’t share much, because I don’t expect people I know to understand them or like the fact that I’ve written them about myself. The two I first thought of were ‘Cahos’, from 2005 (oh, look at that typo again – I may make that the actual title of the poem from now on) and ‘The Awkward One’ (2017, I think).

I saw the post at bedtime, and started going through my Google drive from my phone looking for the two I’ve mentioned and to see how many more I could find (a very bad idea when I was supposed to be going to sleep). And then when I got up and was doing my morning routine, I came up with the one above.

I could probably fill a whole book, but I doubt it would be very popular. From one point of view, these poems are seething with self-pity, self-loathing and shame – which is why I often keep them to myself. On the other hand, they are also searingly honest, full of pain, sadness, regret, frustration and barely suppressed anger. Both of those descriptions sum up my underlying emotional landscape a lot of the time.

The anger in particular WAS COMING OUT A LOT IN MY THERAPY SESSIONS towards the end of last year (oops, must’ve hit the caps lock without noticing, but that also seems quite appropriate!) I suppose my current task is to learn how to deal with it without turning it onto myself – incredibly hard and stressful, but I am trying.

One way of doing that is to have routines and stick to them even when I really don’t feel like it. Yesterday I skipped my weekly yoga-in-the-park session because I convinced myself it would rain – but then it didn’t. And I felt bad for making that an excuse for my lack of commitment. So I’m trying to deal with that.

I heard a podcast of the TED Radio Show on BBC R4Extra yesterday, about choice and making decisions. I need to listen to it again, then maybe I’ll have something to say about it.

Posted on

Coping (Barely)

Yesterday evening I felt overwhelmed by the futility of everything, and started weeping uncontrollably – which is unusual, because that’s how I normally feel in the morning. By the evening, it’s usually much better.

On Thursday, the therapist asked whether the dyspraxia assessment I had two years ago had come up with any advice or strategies which might make life easier. I couldn’t remember. I said I would look at the report, but when I started looking for it I couldn’t find it – because although I’d saved it in a folder in my documents, I’d done it under the name of the consultancy that did it, and I couldn’t remember what that was.

I went into my accounts for 2018, and found the name of the consultancy with the payment. I then searched on that, but Microsoft Search showed me links on the web, not in my files. So I tried again by searching for it in my emails (miraculously, although it could have been under any of four email addresses I use, it was in the first one I tried). I found the pdf attachment of the report, but it was password protected, I had to read another email to get the password, then I kept getting it wrong, but finally got into it. (It was after all this that I found that there was actually a folder under the consultancy name in my documents folder, plus a word document with the password in, but now I know it’s all there I will change the folder title to include ‘dyspraxia’ to make it easier to find next time).

The answer to the therapist’s question about advice was: ‘If Linda requires support whilst working as a self-employed writer and publisher she could consider workplace skills training with a specialist dyspraxia/dyslexia tutor’ but nothing about coping with daily life. Also, if I ever take any more exams, I should be entitled to extra time for completing them.

Under ‘Implications for work and study’, the consultant says: ‘Because of Linda’s difficulty processing information, she is likely to have problems: assimilating information when reading (thereby needing additional time to do so); formulating her thoughts, fluently and quickly…; with handwritten tasks (eg copying information); with memory (eg remembering instructions, sequencing, retrieving information and planning ahead); multi-tasking (eg dealing with multiple pieces of information/documentation)… with personal organisation; with co-ordination; and working within time constraints… she will require more time to learn and undertake complex tasks.’ (But no mention of cat food in the coffee pot, or where I put my glasses thirty seconds ago.)

Well, tell me something I don’t know already – but at least it’s reassuring to know there’s a reason why I’m so chaotic, even if there’s nothing I can do about it. Except, of course, to be a ‘good person’ – to become self-disciplined despite all my instincts and inclinations, organise my life and myself and keep on top of everything all the time – but somehow without being self-critical and beating myself up.

Posted on

Exit, Pursued By a Bear

Felt so wretched this morning. Try and list the reasons? Would that help? I don’t even know what they are. All the little frustrations and irritations of the week? Worry over my cat, who is still not eating well, refusing the kidney-friendly food recommended by the vet, and her old food if I try to sneak in her medicine? Apprehension at the opening up of the lockdown?

All of the above. The daily world has enough causes for anxiety without digging into the past. But the past never goes away, it’s in everything I do and feel, and the same emotions I was feeling fifty years ago well up again, the shame, frustration, self-hatred. I thought they would go away when I grew up, that they were caused by external circumstances, but they’re still there, and am I any better at dealing with them? Have I learnt anything over half a century? Maybe this: that whatever else may change, these feelings never do.

You know, you start something with good intentions, you make it a habit, and then a day comes when you think: ‘F*ck it, this isn’t working, I’m not doing it any more’.

This may be that day.

Posted on

Trying Not Trying

After I’d submitted my post yesterday, I realised I wasn’t happy with what I’d posted. At some point I’d slipped into the idea that my self-reflection (or wallowing, as it can also be called) was a kind of addiction. But this buys into my brother’s idea that I get a kick out of being miserable, and want to bring everyone down to my own level, as though unhappiness is a choice that I make and that I can stop any time I like – well, okay that does make it sound addictive, I can see where that idea came from. But it’s not quite what I meant, and I don’t want to be misunderstood, and I want to apologise to anybody who has to deal with the consequences of a chemical addiction, either their own or somebody close to them, and I’m sorry for any hurt or offence I may have caused by that analogy.

I know when I had the thought that triggered that post, the evening before, it made a different kind of sense, and it seemed very clear (as they always do), but now I just can’t think what it could have been.

Now I’m sitting here and I thought everything would come, but it isn’t. Staring out of the window at the early morning street, which seems no more or less busy than it has at any time in the last four months while I’ve been doing this regularly.

I sat on the bed this morning as I always do when I’m getting up, and noticed that although I was only inches away from the mirror, I wasn’t looking at it. I’ve said a lot about that mirror recently, but, as I realise now, I don’t actually look at it. Mostly I look at the floor, or I don’t look anywhere. Looking at my own reflection is a conscious choice, and mostly I choose not to. I remember sitting and looking at myself one morning – I think it was at the therapist’s suggestion, it feels like a long time ago, when we were still meeting face to face, but I also remember writing about it – I think the idea was to encourage compassion for myself, but what I remember was that it made me cry uncontrollably – not because I didn’t like the way I looked (although of course I don’t) but because of the misery and the pointlessness and emptiness in my eyes. I haven’t tried it again since, and I didn’t try it this morning.

Does accepting myself mean accepting all my failures? Does redefining ‘failure’ as ‘a learning experience’ make any sense if there’s nothing new to learn, or nothing that you can see and implement other than: ‘stop trying’? I’ve tried to make myself a ‘better’ person and it highlighted my faults and made me stressed and anxious and even more self-hating than I already was. Now I’ve stopped trying I’m probably becoming a worse person, but I’m trying not to care so much.

Posted on

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?

Posted on

Still #notwriting

I’m going to change tack today. Sort of. Thinking about making things – including stories – and the relationship between the process of making, the end result, and assessment of that result. I’ve been quite careful with the words in that sentence. I deliberately used ‘making’ instead of ‘creating’, and deleted ‘judgement’ to replace it with ‘assessment’. Even ‘end result’, which feels much more neutral than ‘product’ or ‘artwork’. Because there is a minefield here, in the language.

Yesterday I spent some time listening to (I don’t bother trying to watch things on my phone when it’s the words that are significant) assorted TED talks sent to me by a friend who tries to encourage me. The first one was by Alain de Bouton, about redefining ‘success’, which personally I didn’t think said anything new, though he is quite entertaining (I could see why my friend sent it, but to me it says she’s just missed the point of who I am). Then there were talks about ‘creativity’, including one by a writer of an extremely successful book about the capriciousness of inspiration, how can you ever know how anything you make will turn out, and, if you’ve hit the spot once, how can you ever be sure you can do it again?

This friend is always sending me stuff like this. She thinks I’m ‘creative’, but I’m never comfortable with that word. It sounds much too pretentious – like calling yourself an ‘artist’ or a ‘writer’. Every time I tell someone I’m a ‘writer’ I cringe inside, wondering where the conversation is going to go next – the same way I do when I tell people I have a PhD. ‘Poet’ is easier, because then they tend to be less impressed; they jump straight to the idea that I’m either a crackpot or a charlatan, and they either laugh it off or give me a wide berth (or both).

And now… I have ground to a halt. I am in front of the computer with tears rolling down my face. I have, unexpectedly, cracked through the armour and reached the soft place of grief, where I might say to the therapist ‘I suppose it’s a bit sad really’ and she says ‘It’s tragic’, and I take on board the pretentious, egotistical, over the top melodrama of the word and nod my head, speechless because I can’t talk through the pain. THAT is what I mean by ‘failure’. My inability to love, defend, stand up for the things I make.

I can’t write any more today. I give up.

Posted on

Little Failures

Years ago, I was thinking of the things I wanted to exclude from my life – as if I could wish them away – and came to the conclusion that they boiled down to: loneliness and fear. Since then, I have come to appreciate solitude, and recognise that for me, fear (like hell) is mostly about other people. These last three months of lockdown have thrown that into a clear perspective for me. Now I have to start thinking about how I negotiate going out and interacting in the future – returning to the ‘real’ world. I’m in no hurry, though I have been to one socially-distanced outdoor yoga class (I found an excuse not to return last week), and I’ve been semi-invited to coffee at an outdoor café with members of a group I used to meet regularly. Maybe I’ll go – if the weather’s okay. I don’t know yet, it’s a couple of days away.

Looks sunny this morning, but I won’t be rushing to the beach – even in a normal summer, I avoid it at weekends. Be nice if I can sit in the garden though.

I wrote yesterday about the big things that have been missing from my life: professional career, satisfactory relationship; financial independence and writing…That last one is weird, I don’t know how to explain it, because clearly at the moment I am ‘writing’ every day, and if I say ‘writing success’, it will sound as though I mean mega sales, but that’s not what it’s about. Nor is it just ‘completing a book’, because I’ve done that, and got as far as self-publishing – which impresses some friends who don’t realise how easy it is. More sales would help, of course, but probably wouldn’t encourage pride in what I’ve written.

Well, as often happens, my writing is taking a different turn from what I’d planned this morning. I was going to set aside the big failures – the ones I have to live with and let go – and talk about the little ones that constantly trip me up – the daily ones that grind me down, and are probably responsible for my inability to achieve any of the big ones. But now I’ve started to write my mind has gone into a fog of wordlessness about all that shit. Although I’m slowly coming to recognise them more and more clearly, I still can’t see a way of explaining them without being misunderstood. And that’s part of the problem – my inability to explain myself in ways that make sense to anyone else. That’s one of the ‘little failures’ that I’m talking about. What else? Inability to make decisions; fear of expressing opinions that other people might disagree with; forgetfulness (the big one); inability to absorb instructions and implement them; conversely, inability to give instructions to others; untidiness and inability to self-organise; lousy time management; procrastination; lack of motivation, lack of empathy; all that stuff. In other words: dyspraxia.  

Inability to see any value, or take any pride, in anything I do.

Posted on

Dreams

I’ve had a poem kicking around my head since the weekend. Every so often a new line or few lines will pop into my head and perhaps I’ll jot it down – though when I checked last night, there wasn’t so much of it as I’d thought.

It’s had a couple of working titles: first ‘Plaisir d’Amour’, and then ‘Riviera Reverie’ – though strictly speaking it’s become more about the Camargue and Languedoc, and I’m not sure which bits of the French Mediterranean coast count as ‘Riviera’. The current first line is: ‘Picture a landscape in Van Gogh colours’. I keep picking away at it like a jigsaw, like the partially done jigsaw of a Van Gogh painting on my kitchen table.

Poems don’t usually work like that. They pop up mostly complete, or if it’s just a couple of lines, they disappear again quite quickly, they don’t hang around for a matter of days.

Just had an oddly surreal experience. A van drove past my window with ‘Books2vessels’ on the side and back. Obviously, the ‘Books’ part grabbed my attention, but it had gone out of my line of vision before I had a chance to look properly, so I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d seen. I googled it, and yes, that is the name, it is a registered company based in Southampton (so not unreasonable to be driving through Southsea), but all I can find out about it is the Companies House details, which don’t say what it actually does. Maybe it’s a library or bookseller that specialises in supplying books to people on boats? Maybe even – given that it’s in Southampton, cruise ships? How intriguing.

I was thinking a few days ago about dreams – not the sort that come in sleep, but idealised plans, goals and wishes for the future. One of those things I’ve written about before. What dreams do I have now? Most of my past dreams have come true, but not with the outcomes I’d imagined. For years I dreamed of finding a soul-mate, or at least a lover, but I realised in the end that dreams which depend on other people for their success are very difficult to manage. When I look back on my ‘successful’ dreams – eg leaving my husband; travelling; doing a PhD; moving to Southsea – sometimes I can feel despair that the underlying wish of them all – that I should become a better person, more content to be myself and take pride in who I am – has so spectacularly failed. But if I think – what was the point? the answer is that if I hadn’t tried – if I’d stayed with my husband, for example – I would always wonder about how different my life might have been.

Now it’s become clear that that underlying wish is impossible – that I am who I am and can’t change, can’t become a better person, can’t learn to love and/or have pride or respect for myself – what would be the point of striving for more dreams?  

Posted on

#amnotwriting

Awake at four thirty, I thought I would listen to a radio play, because that sometimes sends me back to sleep, or at least passes the time. I picked ‘Marian and George’, about how Mary Anne Evans in her mid-30s met the love of her life, ran away with him to Europe, and started writing novels as George Eliot.

And that kicked me in the teeth in two ways, because her lover, George Henry Lewes, was a writer whose work I came across when I was doing my PhD, at roughly the age she was when she met him, a philosopher whose words clicked something open in my brain and showed me a little of the pattern of the universe, and now after thirty years I can’t even remember what it was that he said that was so inspirational.

I sat on the bed and screamed at myself in the mirror, because wasn’t I going to write something wonderful that would inspire people, or at least entertain them, and whatever happened to that? Whose fault was it? And why? It wasn’t the brain or the intelligence or the thirst for knowledge or even the writing ability that was lacking, it was, and is, the guts, the determination, the ideas, the twin abilities to sit down and start and to sit down and finish. Not only can I not start that work of genius that will make readers gasp in awe, I can’t finish a silly little fantasy novel that I’ve been picking over for thirty years. Not only can I not be George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, I can’t even be Barbara Cartland or JK Rowling.

This is what tears me apart and makes me hate myself with such deep loathing that I want to smash my skull into that mirror and shatter them both. And now I’m 66 and what chance is there that I will ever rise above, get beyond that failure? To write something and know it was good but for it never to be recognised by the world would be bad enough, but not even to write anything that I can look at with pride, or to finish anything at all, that is not just disappointing it’s deeply shameful, a betrayal of myself and the dreams I’ve had for sixty years, from the moment I knew what books were, and realised that they were made by people, that there were people who could bring these wonderful objects into the world, and wouldn’t it be exciting to be one of those people?

But if I could wind back time for sixty years – or thirty – how would things turn out differently? How could they? Because I would still be me – all the chaotic, lazy, self-doubting aspects of my personality would be there in me, just as they are now, waiting to trip me up. A lifetime of trying to correct them has been as much of a failure as my intellectual and literary pursuits. How could it not?

Posted on

Happy Families

Yesterday I wrote but didn’t post. Because… I’m not sure why, now. Except I was full of anger.

I still don’t really know how to write about this. But I don’t think that my previous approaches to dealing with the sadness and frustration of various times in my life by trying to forget them and/or blaming myself has been very helpful in the long run. I think I am slowly moving away from the shame/self-blame cycle, but that has unleashed a lot of anger and resentment, as I try to find and understand reasons for why that became my default way of dealing with difficult emotions.

By coincidence, on my Facebook ‘Memory’ feed this morning, up popped a photo of my family which I scanned and posted two years ago, but which was taken when I was twenty, at my niece’s christening: Mum and Dad, my brother and sister and their spouses, my nephew (still not quite two at that time) and the baby, and me. Of course, we are all happy and smiling, as everybody does for family photos (apart from my brother-in-law, who’s just that sort of bloke). I remember the dress I was wearing that day, pale green printed with a pattern of tiny cream roses, very pretty and totally unlike anything else I wore at the time (or do now). I remember buying it with Mum from C&A in Hull (pre-Humber Bridge days, so we must have gone round the long way, because I’m sure we didn’t take the ferry – those were the days, when a shopping trip to Hull was a day out because there were exciting shops like C&A which we didn’t have in Scunny.) Dad must have driven (because Mum never learned how), no doubt under sufferance and with a lot of bickering. But he would have done it because he loved us, even though I don’t ever remember that word being used until decades later, when life and time were drifting away from them both.

That dress later became my interview dress, when I was trying to find my way through to the next stage of my life. I don’t suppose there’s a decent photograph of it anywhere, which is a shame. There I am, just a face, hiding at the back between my brother and brother-in-law, and it seems significant that I was the odd one then, as I am now (though with two broken marriages in between) while both my siblings are still with the same partners, almost fifty years later. ‘Between’ boyfriends, as I usually was, smiling for the camera, but lonely, sad and scared of the future, about to embark on a summer full of heartbreak and a desperate search for love and stability which would precipitate me into my disastrous first marriage.

I weep now for that pretty girl, full of misery and shame rather than hope for the life to come, and quite unable to talk to any of those other people, her ‘nearest and dearest’.