Category: self awareness

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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.

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Aspiration and Achievement

Woke up with odd fragments from a dream in my head this morning. I was standing on steps leading up, and there was water below me. The woman in front pointed out I was still holding my phone so I tried to throw it back to the ground, but it fell in the water. I asked her (it might have been my daughter) if she could dive, and she dived straight into the pool and got it for me. Now, those steps must have been to a diving board or a water slide, so why was I on them when I’m terrified of both those things? Then later I was on similar steps going up a hillside but they ran out and I had to go the rest of the way just on the hill itself.

Returning to my therapy session, the therapist asked what she called ‘the death question’ – if you knew you were facing death what would your reaction be? I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant but I had an answer – two, in fact. When I had cancer in 2017 I decided that the best thing to do was focus on doing the little things that made me happy each day – like: listening to the radio, knitting and crochet, reading etc – more or less the same things I’ve been doing for the last three months.

Then I remembered the feelings I had at the end of 2011, when everything significant in my life seemed to have fallen apart or be falling apart. There was a lot of nonsense around about the Mayan prophecies and the end of the world, and though I didn’t take it seriously, I thought: what would I do if I knew the world was going to end next year? And that gave me the impetus to go travelling.

These two things might seem quite different: focussing on the everyday versus making a huge leap into the unknown – but in the details they were very similar. The happiest memories I have of my travels are of those little everyday moments: sitting in cafes; looking through train windows; finding my way around unfamiliar places; walking through parks; reading my Kindle or writing on my laptop; su doku. Doing and going where I wanted, not having to deal with other people or think about their needs or what I ‘should’ be doing; being free; being myself.

Why does my mind keep being drawn back to those big gaps in my life: career, relationship, financial self-sufficiency, writing? I can’t rectify the first three now, it’s too late, I have tried to accept them and be glad that I can cope so well without them. The last one is the one that still nags at me.

There are two ways of dealing with that gap between aspiration and achievement: lower expectations and/or take steps to get closer to the goal. I am a past master of lowering expectations, but not so good at finding ways of making progress.

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Socially-Distanced Yoga

After I finished blogging yesterday, I got a text from my yoga teacher to say that she was holding a socially-distanced class in the park in the evening and would I be interested? So I answered yes, and then spent the whole day stressing over the fact that I’d committed myself to going out and interacting with other people.

I went early, thinking I could go to the seafront to take pictures or take something in the park, because I’m rapidly running out of anything photogenic in my garden for my daily Facebook photo post, but I saw them all sitting around when I got there and couldn’t think of a way to avoid joining the group. We sat around for quite a while chatting because we were waiting for the last two people – as it turned out they hadn’t been able to find places to park. I was surprised at how busy the park was, and I presume the beach (two minutes walk further on) must have been the same. There were seven of us in the end: the teacher, her daughter, me and four others, two of whom I knew by sight, but I wasn’t sure about the last two, though presumably I’ve met them before. I don’t know any of them very well, and I didn’t say very much.

I thought it might just be a short session, but no, it was the full hour and a half, including lying down at the end. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it – though I felt a bit awkward during the chanting (given that there were other people around, although we were in quite a secluded part of the park). I’d dressed in my usual leggings, tee shirt and sweatshirt, thinking it would be colder later when I had to walk home, I felt a bit overdressed at first by comparison with some of the others, but it did cool down before the end so I was grateful for that.

I went telling myself that I always come back from the sessions in normal times with a smile on my face, the five-minutes-just-round-the-corner community centre sessions. I didn’t feeling exactly elated walking back from the park, but thinking about it now, I’m glad I did it and I guess I’ll go again.

I was very unsettled all day yesterday, I suppose partly in anticipation. Today all I have to anticipate is taking the bins out and Zoom meditation for an hour at seven. I need to go to the health food shop to see if they have whole wheat flour – my last loaf had to be all white because that’s all I could get in Tesco. And I thought I’d go and check if the florist is open, as they sell garden plants too – in normal times – and my sad garden needs something to brighten it up. But who knows how many of those small shops will be opening again?

So maybe I’ll go out today – or maybe not.

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Jigsaws

Said a painter called Vincent Van Gogh,
‘My surname sounds just like a cough!
It causes such trouble,
because foreigners struggle,
and some of them don’t even know.’

Linda Rushby, 21 June 2020

Well, I’ve got that off my chest.

Very late this morning. I woke about the usual time but haven’t been able to get anything in gear so far.

Lay in bed thinking; ‘Why do I bother to do anything?’ Exercise, meditation, shower, blog… nothing particularly unpleasant about any of them, all likely to make me feel better, if anything, but I couldn’t be arsed. Who knows, let alone cares, if I don’t do those things? Only me. I am in sole control of how I start my Sunday morning – any morning – the only obligations are the ones I left off the list: feed cat and open the door to let her out, and even if I missed those for once, there wouldn’t be any sanctions, but I would feel pretty mean.

The sun is shining – once those things are completed (and I’m currently on the last one), I can sit outside and eat breakfast, and then the day is my own. Any day is my own. What shall I do with this one?

I need a new project – all the ones currently on the go are beginning to bore me. Maybe this passion for crochet is waning, and I need to find a new one. Current best guess is jigsaws – I started one on Friday. Some weeks ago, when lockdown was well bedded in and I was responding by frivolous online shopping, I ordered three jigsaws from ads on Facebook, none of which have yet turned up. Having cleared the kitchen table of the card-making/paper-crafting stuff which had been there since the beginning of March, I thought that maybe if I started doing one of the many jigsaws I’ve acquired in the past and never done, that would speed them on their way. I chose the most recent one, which is of Van Gogh’s painting of the café terrace at night – which is what inspired me to pen the limerick above,

Of course, I could also put my energies into something practical and useful, like tidying the study. I started on that yesterday – emptied a whole box of old photos and albums and stuck them on a shelf, then put the box in the recycling bin – which sounds good, but I only put that particular box in here last week some time, prior to that it had spent some time in the hall, after I took it out of the Chinese cabinet in the front room so I could clear away some of the bags of yarn and half finished crochet projects. Okay, slow progress, but it is progress.

Yesterday I ordered a replacement stylus for my turntable. When that comes, I can start playing my old records again, maybe transfer them to the PC. There’s a project. Hope they’re not too damaged.

I could even sort them into alphabetical order.

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One Day

Second poem from yesterday, as mentioned last night on Facebook – written yesterday evening just before I went to bed (I’d had a night cap of Becherovka with my hot chocolate, and was quite merry).

One day I’ll leave this house,
walk to the bus stop,
catch a train to the city,
or anywhere else,
under the sea,
and into the sunrise.

Or go like a snail,
with my home on my back,
to the forest, or the marshes,
or into the sunset.
To friends, and memories, and new beginnings,
talking and laughing and dancing and singing.

But today I am here,
and here is my home.

Linda Rushby 19 June 2020

What follows is a few lines I jotted into my notebook after I got into bed – they’d popped into my head as I was getting ready for bed, and sort of follow on, but are a bit different. It was actually after midnight at the time, so I added today’s date.

While there are:
Books left to read.
Words left to write.
Waves to listen to.
Gulls to fly over me.
Songs left to sing.
Wine left to drink.
Places to return to.
New ones to find.
I am glad to be here.

Linda Rushby 20 June 2020
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Non-attachment

What will I write about today? Therapy day. What will I talk about? I have two blog posts to read out, at least.

Is anything shifting inside my mind? If it is, it’s probably due to the lockdown, which has given me peace and space to be by myself. But it can’t last forever. How will I cope when I have to start engaging with the world again? Well, I have some control over that. When I first moved here I felt I needed to get out and make contact with other people. Now that seems less important. When I was a child I was told that shyness and introspection are things to be conquered, but these days I can see my self-containment as a gift. Am I getting any better at managing my response to and interactions with other people when they do happen? I suspect not, but I’m more comfortable about avoiding them, and less concerned about ‘missing out’. I can look back on memories of happy times with friends without feeling an urgent desire to repeat them – which is a good thing, I see that now. I can have my own happy times,

Trying to explain how I feel about that at this moment, I’m grasping for the right words. Contentment, maybe? No, too mealy-mouthed. Maturity, a feeling that I am on a mountain top, where I can look back and see my life and the things I’ve done, experiences I’ve had and people I have known laid out below me – no that sounds arrogant, which isn’t at all what I mean. Enormous peace that I can be who I am. Gratitude to all those people who have loved me and whom I have loved, forgiveness of those who’ve hurt me and of myself for hurting others, and knowledge that I no longer have to seek after love, but can be whole and by myself. Non-attachment, not detachment.

Well, what a wonderful epiphany for a Thursday morning – one which won’t last, I realise that. But it is there, and might return. I want to sit with this, be bathed in it, but also to keep writing, to complete this task, this daily commitment to myself, if for no other reason than that I can then get dressed and have my breakfast.

I’ve just expanded the sentence about being on a mountain top, and it’s brought back to me a quotation I first read almost fifty years ago, when I was a student and I have to admit I got it from the cover of a Strawbs album, but I think it was originally from Lao Tzu (a name which would have meant nothing to me then). I will have to look it up…

For once Google let me down, but I did manage to find the album on my shelf and scan it in – and lo and behold, it’s from the Buddha. Doesn’t quite say what I wanted though.

I expect Lao Tzu would have said it better.    

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More Thinking About Thinking

I rounded off my post yesterday by saying flippantly: I guess the real lesson is: don’t get caught up in stuff on Facebook. But for once I’m really glad I did just that, because it’s opened up a whole area that I can write about.

People (specifically at the moment my therapist, but in the past my brother) have asked me why I’m so open on my blog, why I share so much of myself on social media, why I don’t just write a diary and keep it private. I’ve thought about that myself, because of course it can be risky, the sorts of risks I’m not prepared to take in face-to-face conversation (maybe not equipped to, because I can never think fast enough to be able to speak my responses). Yes, sometimes I get irritated, often frustrated that meanings which seem clear when they leave my brain don’t enter someone else’s in the same way, and depressed when there’s no response at all. But occasionally there’s a spark of something that maybe leads somewhere else, to something interesting. Nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without some risk.

We always assume that other people think the same way we do because we can’t imagine any other way. I only started thinking about the visual/verbal thing when I shared an early draft of Single to Sirkeci with a couple of artist friends. One commented: ‘You don’t paint pictures in the reader’s head’. I was upset because I thought, well, I’ve only got what I wrote at the time, if I didn’t describe the places I saw when I saw them how am I supposed to do anything about that now? I got round the problem by looking at my photos and describing what I saw in them, but it opened up a whole conversation about visual memory, and how can you describe something you saw two years ago? I can’t even tell you what colour the door of the house opposite is painted, even though I see it every day (it’s black with two glass panels and a silver coloured knocker, if you’re interested – I just checked through the window).

Returning to the Facebook discussion, something that amazed me was people talking about imagining scents and tastes. How is that even possible? I’ve thought about describing scents and I can’t find any words – other than very basic ones like ‘sweet’ and ‘pungent’ – which don’t compare them to other scents – how would you describe the scent of a rose to anyone who had never smelt one? (‘Sweet and flowery’? How does it differ from lilac?) Or coffee, fresh bread, smoke, shit… you might describe a scent as being ‘like’ any of those things, but you can’t really create them in the mind of someone who’s never smelt them. As I sit here I can sort of conjure up the scent of, say, coffee, but only with an effort.

Mmm, coffee – maybe something is reminding me that it must be time for breakfast.

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Left, right, Verbalise, Visualise

Things in my head today, I don’t know if I want to share them or not – not because they’re angry or shameful thoughts that potential readers might be offended or shocked by, just because they’re so incoherent, not sure if I can knock them into any sort of shape.

In the last few days I have seen one post on Facebook asking if people ‘hear voices in their heads’ when they think, and another two where you look at images and depending on what you see tells you if you’re predominantly ‘right brain’ or ‘left brain’ To deal with the right/left tests and get that out of the way, the first one told me I was ‘left’ brained and the second that I was ‘right’ – which says more about the kind of tests that get posted on FB than anything important to do with my brain.

The discussion on thinking styles was more interesting, but in the end I stepped away, even though this is something I have given a lot of thought to in recent years, because I could feel myself getting frustrated and irritated. One friend made a very good point about it illustrating how little we are able to understand what goes on in other people’s heads. It’s a few years now since the conversation I had when I told a friend that I don’t ‘see’ things in my head (unless I make a deliberate effort to do so), but that my mind is full of words, a constant narrative. I’d always assumed that that was what ‘thinking’; meant, that it’s about the words and concepts in your head, but he spoke to me as though it was a kind of disability, an affliction that marked me out from the rest of the world.

In the FB exchange there were some contributors who, like me that day, were just shocked at the idea that anyone could think any other way than with words. Others started talking about having multiple voices, ‘hearing’ accents, even linking it to schizophrenia, although to me it’s not about ‘hearing’, it’s not a voice, it’s just more like a voice-over or continuous narrative.

Someone else was sceptical because, she said, the internal narrative couldn’t be ‘continuous’, it’s always possible to stop thinking. I thought about my years of meditation – I won’t say I’ve never had any moments of a completely empty mind – but it takes effort and practice and even then it’s incredibly difficult and frustrating. The same person said she wondered if verbalisers (I hate inventing labels, but don’t know how best to express it) can feel any pleasure in reading fiction if they can’t picture the characters – I wanted to scream, because fiction is all about the story, and what are the building blocks of stories if not words? It made me think perhaps this is why I prefer radio to the telly, and reading to Youtube.

I guess the real lesson is: don’t get caught up in stuff on Facebook.   

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Camper Van Woes – (and) an Epic Saga

Yesterday I called the garage because my camper van is due for its MOT on 18th June. They told me I didn’t need to get it done – I said I’d been told the grace period for MOTs stopped at the end of May. He’s going to check and get back to me.

They’ve still got the keys, because I tried to start it in March and couldn’t, so I dropped the keys round for them to look at it. He said yesterday that they’d done that, but they hadn’t told me – not that I could have done anything, because it was in that week when the lockdown started. I normally disconnect the battery when it’s standing over winter, but they put a new one in last autumn and the nut was screwed up too tight for me to turn it.

He’s going to find out about the MOT and call me back today.

I went on the camping club website to find out when the campsites will be opening – I’m assuming July. I checked the two sites I use most often to see if I could book, there was nothing to say I couldn’t, on the booking page it just said ‘click on the calendar’, but I tried that both times and nothing happened – I don’t know if that was because the links weren’t there or just because my wifi is so poor.

What are the campsites going to be like anyway? If I could find somewhere that’s guaranteed to be quiet it would be okay, but I don’t want to go anywhere that’s rammed with people. I haven’t even used my car since it was MOTed in March. I could take the van out for picnics rather than overnight stays, but I’m not sure where. It feels like it might make sense just to leave it in the garage for a while, maybe even SORN it, and get the MOT done when I’m ready to use it again.

I do wonder how I’m going to organise my life when things open up a bit more. It’s a strange world out there. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t make plans at the best of times. Euphoria, existential despair, or what-shall-I-have-for-dinner? (Good question – probably leftover curry and rice.) Zoom tai chi this evening – if the sound works – it didn’t last week, I struggled to follow it, but if that happens again I won’t bother.

Been listening to ‘Tumanbay’ on BBC Sounds, an epic saga set in an imaginary middle-eastern country – 1001 Nights without the magic but with lots of intrigue, spies, deception and violence. Radio 4 is currently broadcasting series 4, but I discovered it in 2017 when series 2 was being broadcast, didn’t think it was my kind of thing at first, but when I went back to series 1 it made more sense and I got hooked. I’ve spent the last two days binge-listening to series1 again, now I’m looking forward to the rest.

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The Ultimate Question

Just heard the national weather forecast which said more sunshine and a degree warmer everywhere today, but it’s pretty grey out there. My handy ‘Minutecast’ says ‘No precipitation for at least 120 minutes’, but ‘mostly cloudy’ and a high of 17 for the rest of the day. I spent some time yesterday sitting outside, but it was pretty chilly.

There I go, talking about the weather, clearly I’ve got nothing of importance to say – no change there. Not even any reflections on mirrors today (ooh, sorry! No I didn’t mean to say that, it was just the word that popped into my head. I wonder if that’s what happens though? That subconsciously my brain made that association and that’s why it gave me that word before I’d had time to think it through properly?)

Woke up thinking I had nothing to say, but then got to thinking (partly inspired by a response to Sunday’s post) about the Why Are We Here question. I’m sure I’ve said all this before – know I have, or at least thought it – but I’ll say it all again (maybe in a different form) because I haven’t got any other ideas today.

Do I believe we’re here for a reason? Yes, and that reason is cause and effect, ie we are here because our parents had sex and conceived us – maybe intentionally, maybe not, maybe they raised us, maybe they didn’t – some of us might have been conceived by IVF so the above is not strictly accurate, but whatever, it’s certainly true that we came from the conjunction of sperm and egg (unless there are any clones or aliens out there that on one’s told me about).

Do I believe we are here for a reason in the sense of having a purpose? No, except insofar as our parents chose to have us for their own reasons – to make them happy (a high risk expectation), complete the set, pass down the family business or whatever, or the evolutionary sense of passing on genes to another generation.

Am I an atheist? Yes. Do I believe in life after death? No. Does that bother me? No, because if I’m dead there won’t be a ‘me’ around to be bothered about it, or to regret the things I have or haven’t done, so why should I care now? Do I feel a responsibility towards my children? Yes, enough to have prevented me from attempting suicide in the past, and to know that I won’t in the future (as long as life is still physically bearable, but I’ve arranged for them to have power of attorney, so in extremis they can make their own decision about whether to keep me alive).

It’s amazing how little I can say in 500 words once I get going. Am I an existentialist? Am I a nihilist? As far as I understand those terms I would say: yes to the former, no to the latter.

Can I see myself ever changing these views? No.