Cycle of Emotions

Are human emotions just illusions that conceal the deep heart of everything? Or are they the deep heart of ourselves?

I think: if I didn’t fight it every moment of every day, I would cry every moment of every day.

This morning I did something I’ve been thinking about for a while, restarting my morning routine of 10 minutes yoga followed by 10 minutes meditation. And the above two paragraphs are the thoughts that came into my head at the end of that time. Which some might say is an indication that yoga and meditation in the morning are not a good idea for me.

Yoga, meditation and writing 500 words first thing in the morning are very old habits, tried many times, discarded many times. In the quiet street outside my window I spot the occasional vehicle, the occasional jogger. Sunlight illuminates the top storeys of the red brick houses opposite; the bottom storeys shadowed by the terrace that includes the house where I sit at my computer.

The bucket has brought up some odd thoughts from the ‘writing well’ this morning, not at all what I was expecting to write about when I sat down, or planned yesterday evening when I thought about writing this morning. Maybe I’m getting back into the swing of this.

I don’t want this blog to turn into a whine-fest. That’s what I was thinking yesterday, when I walked by the sea. I can’t let it degenerate into a mire of self-pity, it’s too public for that. And I freely acknowledge that on most scales that mean anything in this everyday world, I have far less cause for self-pity than many people – most, even. Maybe I could even offer it out as something that might help others, a way of showing them: this isolation isn’t so bad, this lack of structure and excess of choice over how to fill the time, can be survived, can be dealt with and got through – look at me, welcome to my life. All those good, strong, positive people out there who are putting their efforts into making this situation better for others – that may sound sarcastic, but it’s not intended as such, I admire people like that, I really do, but I’m not brave enough to count myself among them. And if I tried, I’d only f*ck up whatever I tried to do – that’s my lame, selfish, mealy-mouthed excuse.

Self pity or self compassion? How do you tell the difference between the two? The former evolves rapidly into its close correlatives, self-disgust and shame. Ah yes, shame, the driving force of my vicious emotional circle – I am ashamed of myself for not being a better person, and that makes me angry and frustrated with myself, and that makes me unhappy which makes me sorry for myself which makes me more ashamed which makes…

Is this cycle of emotions an illusion that distances me from the deep heart of everything? Or is it the deep heart of myself?

The Examined Life

Socrates is often quoted as saying: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, but what if you’ve examined your life to the nth degree and realised that it’s STILL not worth living?

Actually, although this reflection has come to me quite independently through my own experience of life, it’s not exactly original. Just this morning I was delighted to find this version from the great Kurt Vonnegut:

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

(Notice that he attributes it to Plato, and it variously seems to be attributed to both of them by different people, but given that what we know of Socrates mostly came down to us through Plato, I guess that’s not too surprising).

A similar version which I like is from Ruby Wax, who said: ‘Self knowledge isn’t always happy news’. Well, you could argue that that’s slightly different because it’s about knowledge of the ‘self’ rather than the ‘life’. But I guess self-knowledge is what one hopes to gain through examining life, so in that sense they’re directly comparable. And it’s that sense of an examined life implying an examined self that interests me. Is it the events of life which construct the self, or is it the nature of the self which determines choices and actions and hence the way life works out? A bit of both, probably.

Why am I doing this? When I woke up it seemed like a good idea. But I don’t know. Been wondering for a long time about whether it’s worth trying to write again. In my heart of hearts I know it’s all pretty futile. What else would I rather be doing? Right now? Listening to the radio and crocheting or weaving? Playing freecell or Killer su doku? Walking on the seafront? Eating breakfast? All pretty futile, apart from breakfast. Washing up, hoovering, sorting out washing? Clearly, I don’t want to do any of those, and am an expert at procrastination when it comes to all of them, in fact I carry it to such an extreme that I prefer not to have friends so that no one comes into my house and sees what a shit-hole it is. (Actually there are other reasons why I don’t have friends, but that is quite a significant one.)

So, examining self/examining life. Begs the question of to what extent there is a single ‘self’ to examine. Clearly, the ‘self’ that I know (and hate) is quite different from the person that other people perceive me to be, which is frustrating at times, but on the other hand, is probably the only reason anyone has anything to do with me at all – if they knew the me I know, why would they bother? If I could get away from myself I would – in fact, I have tried in different ways at many different times, but it never works. One of the repeated motifs that has appeared though my examination of my last 60 years of life, the impulse to run away and keep running, which is continually thwarted when I realise that nothing inside has changed, and being in a different place is only superficially preferable to what went before. Now I have reached a place where I really feel I have nowhere else to go – that’s wisdom, I guess. No point in wishing for anything better, looking to the future and hoping for a change. When I moved here I was reminded of the Eagles’ song The Last Resort: ‘There is no more new frontier/We have got to build it here’. I came to the end of the country, with nothing beyond but sea (and the Isle of Wight, of course, let’s not forget that). My last dream, my last throw of the dice, and here I am.

Yesterday I saw my shrink and read her this poem, which I wrote in 2017:

The Awkward One

I never learned to smile.
I never learned to play the happy fool,
to put them at their ease,
to read their minds.

So I became
the awkward one,
the difficult one.
I learned to be alone.
I never learned to make a friend,
I never learned the way
to make them love me.

I hated mirrors, and cameras,
I hated the plain, sulky face
they showed me.
I knew that face,
with its curtain of straggly hair,
and that skinny body,
would never be loved.

I never learned to turn on the charm.
I had no charm.
I never learned to play the game.
I turned inside myself,
became invisible,
played my own game.

Afterwards, she said: ‘that last line is quite hopeful. You played your own game.’

Really? I suppose I felt I had to put something positive at the end, but I’m not saying that’s how it was. I didn’t choose to be that way (except maybe in some very deep self-hating, self-punishing way), I’m sure that as a child and teenager I would rather have been accepted by others, liked even. It was just an adaptation to the reality of not being the sort of girl anyone wanted to be with. I did say to her ‘it’s a kind of sour grapes’ and the more I thought about it, the more that seems to be true – ‘Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going down the garden to eat worms’. When you have no one to play with you have to make up your own games or do nothing at all (of course, what I did a lot of the time was the classic lonely-child thing of retreating into books). As I said to myself when I was alone in Paris in February 2012: ‘I’m still the woman nobody wants’, and that is just as true now as it was then and as it was 50 or 60 years ago.

Ah well. The examined life. Maybe I could start a new blog with that as the title. And what am I going to do  with this? Where should I put it? Somewhere where there’s a possibility of it being read? Or where there’s a theoretical possibility, but I know no one will bother?

Procrastination

How do I change? How can I ever either become the person I wish to be, or come to terms with being who I am?

That immediately begs the question: who is the person I wish to be? What is she like, and how will I know when I have become her? The problem with asking that question is that it encourages the creation of an impossible standard. If you ask me who I wish to be, I might say: beautiful, successful; confident, 25 years old etc and then we’re getting into realms of fantasy straight away. What I really want is to be not-me. Once I would have said: what I want from life is to feel loved – not just to be loved, but to feel loved by someone whom I also love – that kind of mutual relationship which creates a ‘couple’. But is that right? Once I would have said that what I wanted was the opportunity for a series of relationships.

Oh, I don’t know. I went down and had breakfast in between and now I’ve lost the thread.

Back to the question: what is wrong with being me? Maybe that wasn’t exactly the question, but it’s a question.

No answer to that. I went off and did something else then just came back to Word to look at C’s Dad’s book and there it is.

Am I going to write any more of this today?

Stink of cat pee in this room. Someone to clean carpet? It’s the hall carpet. What to do. Just get rid of it? Or find someone who can clean it. Or put it up in loft. Go into loft and check leak. Where is the water coming from?

No, I don’t want to do any of those things.

What is wrong with being me? Procrastination. Well, that’s something I can do something about, right?

If I can’t become someone else, what is the point?

Chaos. Procrastination is part of that. Dyspraxia? I have finally sent email to dyspraxia people, after two months – hooray! Must mean that there’s something I want to do even less, ie C’s work, although she is keen to pay me for it, am I keen to do?

What is so awful about me? I give up. No, I don’t mean I give up on the question, I mean that is one of the things that’s wrong with me. I give up on everything. I have no self-discipline. I am lazy. I run away. These seem like things that it ought to be easier to do something about than the chaos. Given the (possibility of) dyspraxia.

Why do I hate myself so much? Why not? Why wouldn’t I hate myself, given that I know all my faults and I can’t escape from them? I am stuck here with them. I have to do this work and I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything that I have to use my brain for. I am afraid of failure.

Conditional love

I had a lot to say yesterday but stopped at 500 words. Then I kept on thinking. But what was I thinking about?

Yesterday I called my True Self a bitch – which may be a little unfair. She’s just… I didn’t really hear from her much last night. I woke about half four, got up and had the last of my antibiotics and a drink of water, played a programme on iPlayer, dozed off at some point then woke up before the end and tried to rewind but couldn’t get the touch screen on my phone to respond properly (common problem),finally managed to get it back further than I wanted to then played to the end and by this time it was getting on for 7, so got up and sorted out a few things in the bedroom then had breakfast, hung the washing out, came on here and faffed about some more.

I started thinking about despair yesterday. It was very strong yesterday morning. Where does it come from and why? What is the shape of it? Absence of love. Inability to accept love because it is directed at the lover’s perception of who I am, not the true me. The true me is loved by no one, including me. All love is conditional on conforming to the lover’s idea of who I should be.

The sense that when I’m giving of myself, the truest I can be, the ideas, feelings, thoughts inside me, everything  I have to offer is not wanted, not understood, rejected, ignored, discarded. Valueless. If no one else can see and value who I am, how can I?  I am lost, I am nothing.

When I was young I hoped one day that someone would understand me, see me for who I am. I can only be myself, after all, I can’t be anyone else. So love me for who I am. But who ever wants to do that? Instead they would rather tell me the person they love is me. But then what happens when they see the true me? When they realise I can’t live up to their idea? They get angry and tell me to stop being like this, they want me to be like that. Love is conditional on my ability to live up to what they want. This is the crux of everything.

I have tried for so long. And I get angry and frustrated and afraid and lonely. Because who am I really? Who am I if I can’t be who you want me to be? I can only be myself.

So, I will be myself. I will do everything I can to be myself. People will not like this. They will try to ‘help’ me, to ‘encourage’ me, but they won’t succeed. I will be myself and I will write about my true feelings. I can’t write short stories or novels or funny little snippets. I will write about myself and they won’t read it, but that’s fine.

Madwoman in the Attic

If I was going to write, how would I start?

I had the beginning of a poem earlier when I was watering the plants, if I can remember what it was:

If you could see me as I am…? Something like that.

But it’s gone now. Bugger.

Anyway, no one sees me as I am. That’s the point. The old chestnut.

If I keep picking and picking and picking away at this, will it ever lead on to something else, some kind of breakthrough or revelation?

Wish I could remember that effing poem. It’s gone now. It had a good rhythm to it, and some internal rhymes. Something about: ‘…where the broken rivers run…’ I remember thinking – how can a river break? But it didn’t matter because it fitted. Bloody obscurity for its own sake, that’s what it was. And ‘through the cracks between the pavement…’

About the real me who is inescapable and always torments me but no one can ever see it/her.

You see, the myth is that when you find your True Self, everything will make sense and you’ll find peace. Except my True Self is a bitch. The more I get to know her the worse it all gets. She’s the one who makes me cry in the night with despair, but I can’t stop her or ignore her or get away from her because she’s me.

And if I say: ‘I will accept myself as I am’ that means accepting her. If I can’t root her out I can never find peace. But the more I dig away at her, the deeper the wound she leaves. So what does it mean to accept her?

Accepting loneliness. Accepting anger. Letting go of the dream of ‘love’, but without resentment.

The path of acceptance feels like the path of papering over the cracks. Or perhaps a better metaphor, filling in the cracks in the pavement with wet mud, which dries out and crumbles or washes away in the rain. I remember doing that as a child, over and over again. It never worked, but I kept on playing at it. Till I got bored and gave up. Which, of course, is what I always do.

Can I escape into meditation? How deep into that despair do you have to go to find a place where you can rest in emptiness?

The woman who cries in the night is trapped – labyrinth, hall of mirrors, which is the correct metaphor? Or that one from the Cat Stevens song when you end up back where you started?

Whatever, she is in a trap: she cries for love, but when she cries no one can love her. So she cries for the knowledge that she will never find the love she craves. Because love is always partial and conditional: ‘We will love you on condition that you stay happy and don’t give in to despair.’

So the despair has to be hidden away. The Madwoman in the Attic. She’s still there.

Emails

I am going back to my ‘secret’ blog, had enough of telling people how I feel. This will have to do.

I didn’t write yesterday. Instead I spent an hour and a half deleting and/or opening over 3,500 emails which hadn’t been opened on my yahoo account. The oldest were from September 2017, which I guess was the last time I had a purge. Which I suppose means that I average about 400 a month that I don’t bother to open – 100 a week, or 14 a day, which sounds about right because I counted how many I got yesterday and it was 15.

I keep unsubscribing from lists, but there are always some where you want to keep getting them because every so often there’s a good offer or something. Like Travelzoo. I bought a special spa deal which I have to take before the end of July but haven’t fixed it up yet.

Mornings are always hard. It’s the time when the self-hate and desperation are really at their peak. I don’t know why that is. I was told by Michael from the School of Philosophy group in Peterborough that whatever you’re thinking/feeling when you fall asleep at night is what you wake up thinking/feeling, so be careful what you think about before you go to sleep. What a load of bollox! If you were trying to control what you were thinking about before you went to sleep, how would you ever get to sleep? And then if/when you wake up in the middle of the night, presumably you again have to control your thoughts before the precise moment you fall back to sleep – whenever that may be! Maybe it works for him, but it certainly doesn’t for me.

I read or heard something recently saying that it helps depressed people if they make a to do list for the next day before they go to sleep – or maybe that’s insomniacs? Whatever, both those apply to me anyway.

My to-do for today: wait in for delivery of yarn that is finally coming (yay!) two weeks after the order – it came yesterday when I was out at lino printing but I didn’t know because the email saying it would arrive between 10 and 12 came at 10.17 and then it was delivered (or not) at 10.39, and I didn’t read either of them till after lino finished at 12.00. It said redelivery would be tried today, but I don’t know if I’ll get an email today and if so how helpful it will be.

Now I’ve got the yahoo sorted out I will have a go at the gmail, which is not so bad, only a couple of hundred. Then I should go into Thunderbird and sort out the damson-tree ones, which are mostly forwarded to gmail. But there is always tons and tons of spam on those. I can’t have them on Outlook because it doesn’t like the servers. But forwarding them to gmail means they’re always duplicated.

Bugger. Word’s wordcount includes numbers, but the one on WordPress doesn’t.

Bank holiday

It is a beautiful morning. Looking to set the record as the hottest May Day Bank Holiday ever. I will go out, but I will do some jobs first. Including writing this.

Woke at 6, read for a while, did my yoga and meditation. Have to clear all my stuff out of the van, but I can’t do that till tomorrow when the garage opens and I can get my keys. Although I guess I could call Darren’s mobile and get them from him. Really I should have got them on Friday afternoon but didn’t think about it till it was so late I couldn’t be bothered.

What am I doing? Who am I? Why am I obsessed with people seeing me as I see myself? I don’t know. Obsessed with demonstrating that I am who I am, not who they want me to be, or I might want me to be. Chaotic, lazy, irresponsible, unattractive, selfish, self-obsessed, clumsy, incompetent, disorganised. Why can’t I just be? If other people can’t accept me for who I am, how can I accept myself? I’ve tried to change, honestly I have tried so many times to live up to their unrealistic expectations, tried to believe it was possible to become that better person, brave, strong, hard-working, competent, attractive etc etc etc, all those things I’m not. I’ve really tried, but now I’ve had enough, enough of that stress, that pressure. I want to let it all go and just be who I am without feeling I have to justify myself, without having to be ashamed of myself constantly, always afraid of being found out, of failing, of disappointing them – I mean, I’m used to being disappointed by me, I’ve learnt to lower my expectations of myself, I know who I am.

Trying to be better, trying to be successful, trying to be kinder, more generous, more sociable, more conscientious, not letting everything slide like this. I’ve had enough of all that, it just makes me miserable knowing that everything I try is futile.

I want to be free. What does that mean? Free of any expectation, free of any commitments. What would I do? Is that really what I want? Would I be alone, scared, lonely? All those things, but aren’t they the main conditions of my existence? To be alone, scared and lonely? At least I wouldn’t have to pretend, wouldn’t have to push myself to do the things I don’t want to do, to take care of myself.

There is no answer to that. We all have to take care of our own needs to some extent. Otherwise, life would become… what? Where am I going with this? How have I got to this point? I need a coffee. I will go downstairs and make coffee.

So, coffee made, I need to write another fifty words. What is the answer? There isn’t one, clearly, there never has been and I just can’t change. How do I get round that? How do I cut through these feelings and move on? It’s no good just asking questions if there aren’t any answers.