The Chain

Wrote this yesterday. Didn’t share it – chickened out. I’m sharing it now.

Rejoice, rejoice,
We have no choice
But to carry on.

Stephen Stills, 1970

Will I be doing my bit to support the economy by going shopping today? Probably not. I’ll stay at home and carry on doing what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months, thank you very much.

This morning I am lost for words, a strange experience for me. Poised on a knife edge between opening myself up and expressing my honest feelings and thinking of something else, less contentious to write about – at the same time as watching on YouTube – really watching for once, not just playing music as a background – Fleetwood Mack performing ‘The Chain’ live, witnessing the rage flashing and crackling around and between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, feeling it entering and reflecting my pre-existing mood of pent-up furious chaotic self-destructive energy.

Why? Why this morning, why today?

‘Where [am I] going now my love?
Where will [I] be tomorrow?
Will [it] bring me happiness?
Will [it] bring me sorrow?

Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams
What you do with what you see…

Stephen Stills

Woke up with my usual mixture of shame, self-hatred and despair, but instead of taking the path of trying to calm it down and hush it up, I decided to go the other way and face it all head on, and this is where it gets me. For once I can feel all that anger in my body, not just think it in my head.

This was happening in my therapy sessions towards the end of last year, when we were still meeting in person. Every week I would come into the room with whatever was in my mind, but before the end of the session I would be screaming and grinding my teeth and smacking my fists against the arms of the chair to stop myself from smacking them into the side of my head.

It would be easy to put this down to the repressed frustration and anger of a child whose voice was never heard; whose questions were met with impatience if not downright anger; whose feelings were never acknowledged without disapproval; who learnt that those feelings of sadness and loneliness and inability to mix with other children or interact with adults were her own fault, a wilful failure to play the ‘happy little girl’; who lived in a world of confusion, constantly trying to anticipate what was wanted of her, never knowing when she might unwittingly overstep some implicit boundary and suffer the consequences.

Maybe that is a true story, maybe not. I honestly don’t know. In last week’s therapy session, I said that I’m sure there must have been happy times in my childhood, but I can’t remember them, which to me feels very shameful, my failing that I should be so unfair on my parents, but the therapist’s reaction was that it was very sad.

After sixty years, after multiple attempts to resolve these questions, can I ever find a way out?  

Light Bulb Moment

Back from Tesco and realised that I haven’t written yet and need to do that before breakfast.

In case you’re wondering why shopping day has moved from Tuesday to Friday, last week there were no four pint bottles of semi-skimmed, so I got a six instead, which didn’t run out till yesterday.

Although I wasn’t late waking up (around 5.30), the day seems to have slipped somehow – not helped by me sitting and staring at the screen.

Yesterday I was talking about my parents, and the apparent contradiction between love and tolerance for mankind in general but severe judgement and criticism of individuals, and inability or unwillingness to see things from someone else’s perspective – lack of empathy, I suppose you could call it. Here’s a really trivial example that popped into my head a while back when I was trying to remember my childhood. Like many of the generation who lived through the war, my parents were keen on saving electricity (for financial reasons, not environmental). So at certain times of year, while we were eating our breakfast in semi-gloom, comments would be made about our neighbours in the house behind, on the lines of: ‘They’ve got that light glaring out again! That house is lit up like a Christmas tree! They must be made of money!’ etc. Since I’ve been living in my present house, (where the kitchen is at the back and faces east, but is also quite long, so that the kitchen end can be quite dark, though the sun may be coming into the dining area) I’ve been reminded of those conversations. Yes, the back room of my childhood home faced south, so the neighbours in a comparable house in the next street ate their meals in a room that faced north – but for some reason it was okay for my parents to pass moral judgements on them for having the lights on.

Well, yes, I did say it was very trivial, but I also think it’s quite illuminating (sorry about that!) When it occurred to me, it was a bit of a light-bulb moment (really, I just can’t help myself!) For a start, what gave my Mum and Dad the right to make these moral judgements? And even if that was okay, there was a reason why the neighbours’ experience was different from ours, so weren’t they entitled to behave the way they did?

I often feel that much of the unhappiness in my life has come from this sense that there is a set of ‘rules’ that sometimes I break consciously (and live with a morbid fear of being ‘found out’ and ‘punished’ for), but often I don’t even know what they are, or where the boundaries are drawn, so at any moment I might overstep them without even realising it and bring all that judgement crashing down on myself. And if I am ‘caught out’, what might the punishment be?

Where could that sense of shame and fear possibly have come from?

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.

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.

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.

Business is Business

Just had a one-sided conversation in the shower (not that unusual) about the winding up of one project for a long-standing client (her proof copies have just arrived) and another job she asked me to think about to create a website related to her book. I told her I’d give it some thought, which I haven’t really over the three weeks we’ve been waiting for the proofs, but now I have to, I think I’ll suggest setting something up on WordPress.

My hosting is still paid for until September 2021, but every time it comes up for renewal I have this inner debate over whether it’s worth continuing. I don’t host sites for anybody else any more, and my own has been pretty much in limbo for years. I had a go at tarting it up a couple of years ago, when I added an online shop (through which not one single copy of any of my books has been sold), and created this blog. The cost of hosting keeps going up, and although I can still afford it, I do get this sense of good-money-after-bad. I don’t need to make a living any more (not that I was ever much good at that anyway) and although I used to enjoy the challenge, I never thought that what I produced was much good (which to be fair is true of anything I do).

One of the issues that has always bothered me over design work is that by and large my clients were people like me, individuals with small businesses, scrabbling in the marketplace to try and sell their services. I had the suspicion that they thought having a bespoke website would raise their profile and bring new clients flooding in, whereas I knew from personal experience that that was pretty unrealistic. So I was torn between wanting to do a professional job, put in the time, make things as good as I possibly could, and the feeling that I was acting under false pretences, that if I charged a professional rate for my time, they would never make back the money they were paying me. So I would only ask for what I thought they could afford to lose, but still put the work in as long as they wanted me to, and told myself I was still learning, and some day I would feel confident enough to charge a realistic rate. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t – and conversely, sometimes I still priced it too high and lost work that way.

What goes for web design also goes for print – who really cares about the aesthetics of a book, now that self-publishing is so easy? And who wants to pay someone like me to take the time over the details, when there’s so little potential financial payback? Just because I want to weep when I see another badly designed, amateurish self-published book doesn’t mean anybody else gives a crap.  

Oops there I go, completely blowing my business credibility.

Chaos in the Co-op

I keep thinking I’ll get up first thing and walk to the seafront. Delayed gratification – I know it will make me happier, but I still don’t do it.

Yesterday, I thought: I’ll run out of milk by the end of the day, so I’ll wait till tomorrow, and go to the shops on the way back. Because the lovely sunny mornings are here to stay, right?

I could hear the rain when I woke up. I dozed off again and woke at 7, and got up and dressed ready to go. I’ve been rotating around Co-op, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, it was Co-op week, and I remembered they don’t have self-checkout, but thought, I’ll go there anyway, they might have stuff I can’t get in the other two.

The plan is go-straight-there-and-get-it-done. No exercise, no writing, no breakfast, not even coffee. I started looking for my credit card, it’s not the only one I’ve got, but I get 1% cashback for using it in supermarkets. Looked everywhere – no sign. This is hardly unusual, but still annoying. I know the last place I used it was in Tesco last Tuesday. I checked my online banking and it hasn’t been used since then, so it’s probably still in the house. How desperate am I? Milk’s the main thing, and I’ve got a pint of UHT (for making yoghurt, but also as a backup). That’s ok then, I don’t have to go out after all. Leave it for another day, when I’ve got my card and it’s not raining.

Well in that case, I’ll revert to normal morning routine. Did my half hour tai chi/yoga/meditation and felt loads better. And it had stopped raining. Right then, it’s still only 9 o’clock, off to the Co-op after all.

There was no queue at the shop, but no baskets, just the things with wheels that the baskets are stacked in, and trolleys which require a pound, and I’d only brought my phone, credit card and loyalty card. I looked around for someone to ask, and saw someone using one of the basket holders as a substitute trolley, so thought, I’ll do that then.

I found most things I wanted, including the last bottle of Lea & Perrins but not Marmite. I got to the checkout and got into an altercation with the checkout lady about why I’d got the basket holder.

‘You should have got a basket, or a trolley.’

‘There weren’t any baskets.’

‘They’re just over there.’

‘There weren’t any when I got here.’

‘Well you should have asked.’

I got angry and swore. I knew it was myself I was angry at, not her, so I apologised. Then I tried to swipe my card but it was too much, then I used the wrong pin number because it wasn’t the card I normally use.

‘It’s getting to all of us’ said the checkout lady kindly. But I wanted to tell her: this isn’t who I am. Well, the chaos is, but not the rudeness.   

Dilemma

Because I thought up a poem (of more than four lines) first thing yesterday, I ducked out of writing anything else for the rest of the day. I guess that’s cheating really, but it’s not the first time I’ve done it. Today I’m clueless as regards poetry, but we’ll see how the day develops. I write spontaneously or not at all. If there isn’t that voice in my head telling me what to write, it’s all much too stressful. Of course, when I start writing, I often get into a flow, but usually what flows out is more of the same; hard to spot the gold dust, however fine the sieve.

Last week I sent the link for my blog to my therapist (we’d discussed it the week before and I asked if she’d mind or if it would be professionally inappropriate). It made our weekly Skype session a bit odd, as we started talking about poetry and writing in general and bizarrely I felt a bit awkward. She said she liked my poetry, but the rest not so much, because of the way I write about myself – which I found quite surprising, because I thought I’d been remarkably chipper recently. She commented that she could understand why my friends get exasperated with me over it, but that’s inevitable, isn’t it? When I write I’m writing about the real me, the person I am inside, the person I live with first thing in the morning and last thing at night, the woman I wake up in bed with at four in the morning, not the fantasy Melinda or Cassandra they have in their heads, so of course they’re not going to like this woman with all her self-loathing and insecurities – she’s hardly an attractive person. Isn’t that why I write about it? Because I can explain who I am without being shouted down and told not to say those things, like my brother reducing me to tears in a curry house or the ‘friend’ who rang when I was very depressed and then hung up the phone because she didn’t want to hear me talking about how I felt.

The therapist wants me to stop judging myself but how is that even possible? How can I think honestly about myself and the things I do and the thoughts I have without making implicit judgements – the language doesn’t exist. I can say: ‘I know I’m lazy, disorganised, chaotic, forgetful – most of that is down to dyspraxia, and I accept that that is who I am and I can’t change’ – but I can’t say any of those things are not true. Are there any words to describe those characteristics of my personality that don’t carry some negative charge? There have always been two choices: to become a better person, or to accept who I am and say it doesn’t matter. This is the dilemma which has torn me apart psychologically and emotionally all my life, and still does.

All for what?

Lambeth Bridge from Millbank, London

I didn’t go to the beach to photograph the sunrise, though I was awake in time to get there.

Instead I lay in bed, as I do, thinking.

And then it was seven o’clock, and then it was eight o’clock, and I was still lying there. And I thought how pointless everything is, and wouldn’t it be better to just let go, let everything go and stop trying to find reasons to stay alive?

All these stupid tasks I’ve been setting myself, like doing yoga and tai chi and meditation in my spare room, and writing 500 words. All for what? To make me think I’m doing something worthwhile with my days? All that self-bullying that I usually put into getting myself to leave the house I’m now focussing on creating a ‘structure’ for my life (though not on housework, no, never on that). And I resent it just as much, and find reasons for telling myself how pointless it all is, nobody’s making me do it but myself, so why shouldn’t I just lie in bed all day hating myself and feeling miserable, because that feels like the easiest and most natural thing in the world. After all, it’s what I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, why change the habits of a lifetime? And now there’s no one to judge me for it but myself (and anyone who happens to read this, of course).

Someone said in a private message last week that I ‘torture’ myself. Well, why not? Maybe I deserve it. Maybe it’s all I know how to do.

While I was sitting on my cushion I thought about being on Millbank, upriver from Tate Britain, leaning on the wall and looking at the river and the new spring shoots on the plane trees, unfurling between the bobbles of last year’s seeds. I feel as though I have been there many times on lovely spring days taking photographs in the sunshine, and later crossing Vauxhall Bridge and going to the café which I can never remember the name of, but it’s also an antique showroom, and sitting outside drinking coffee surrounded by quirky statuary and old garden equipment, hiding from the noise and stink of buses. I’ve been going there for years, but I know it was still there last summer (maybe not the next time I go though, if there is a next time).

Hiding and running away are two sides of the same coin – yes, yes, I know, I know, I repeat myself, keep churning out the same old nonsense time after time. So why can’t I repeat the ‘good’ stuff? How the f*ck do I know? I don’t have control over what pops into my head. It’s all just bollox anyway, whatever I say.

I was planning to venture out again when I run out of milk – which will probably be today, or maybe I can stretch it out till tomorrow. Fact is, I don’t really want to any more.

Gremlins

Here I am again. Today I feel overwhelmed with the pointlessness of it all. I suppose a week isn’t that long. I said last Friday that I would keep doing it ‘for as long as it takes. As long as what takes? I guess if I don’t identify a ‘goal’, how will I know if I’ve achieved it? And a week is nothing. In the grand scheme of things.

There are things I have to do today – nothing that awful, just stuff beyond sitting in the sunshine, listening to the radio or crafting. Or writing blogs. So the gremlin on my shoulder says: ‘why bother? Who’s keeping tabs on you? Nobody but you. Tell that bitch to go and…’

‘Okay, okay’ I say. ‘I get the point. No need to share that sort of language on my blog.’

I’d forgotten about the gremlin. I was flicking through ‘Single to Sirkeci’ the other day – can’t remember why, it was something to do with checking the layout related to another book I’m designing for a third party. And the gremlin caught my eye. I seem to remember it came in quite early on but I dropped it and don’t refer to it much later in the book. Shame, because it’s quite a good idea. Every time I want to write about what I really feel, my deep, dark, nasty feelings, I should just say: ‘the gremlin says…’ or turn it into a bit of dialogue.

But reading back what I’ve just written, I realise the gremlin has two aspects. The one I mentioned above is the one that says: ‘f*ck it, f*ck them all’ (but without the asterisks). The cynical, vicious, nihilistic one. Then there’s its alter ego, the judgemental one: ‘just get on with it, set those goals, do those chores, you worthless piece of crap. Enough with the whining self-pity, you know why nobody loves you? It’s because you don’t deserve it, you have to earn love, you don’t do that by moaning about how miserable you are.’ Ooooh, I think I prefer the first one.

‘Celebrate your achievements’ says some non-gremlin – or maybe just a more subtle, and hence more powerful, gremlin. ‘You’ve blogged every day for a week, and you’ve nearly done it again, so you have 4000 words – at that rate, you’ll have a novel by the end of May!’ Or maybe not.

‘You’re “pantsing” again’ says Gremlin 2. ‘It’s a week since you did that online meeting, and you downloaded the handouts and have you filled in the table yet? Of course not, you’re an incurable “pantser”, and that’s why everything you write is – well – pants! You go through the motions, you go to the workshops, and still you don’t get your finger out and do anything worthwhile. Do you seriously think that writing this bullshit every day is achieving anything? You’re just deluding yourself…’

‘… except you’re not really, are you?’ pipes up Gremlin 1. ‘You know perfectly well you might as well give up.’