Category: self awareness

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Dreams and Explorations

I mentioned a few days ago that I haven’t been remembering my dreams. Yesterday I tried to remember as soon as I woke up, and retained a few things, which I didn’t write down and now they’ve gone, but today I did the same and am going to write what I can remember.

The main theme was that I was visiting an old, strange house, near the sea – not here, but somewhere with cliffs and a rough grey sea, a dangerous sea. The house appeared to belong to my ex husband (although part of it was rented out to some other people), slightly ironic because I was always the one who wanted to live near the sea, and he was never interested. Rough seas and old, strange houses have cropped up in my dreams from way, way back, though I can’t remember them ever occurring together before. Exploring an old house signifies exploring your own psyche, and I’ve certainly been doing a lot of that. I don’t know about rough seas, but I wasn’t on the sea or threatened by it, just watching it from the beach, and also from the house.

One specific incident in the dream that I remember was that I got stuck in an automatic door leaving a supermarket, and couldn’t move to go either in or out. I could see my ex, who was loading shopping into the back of a car in the car park, and I kept calling his name to get him to come and help me, but he couldn’t hear me because he was busy with the shopping. I don’t think you have to dig too deeply to find a message in that. Another man came up behind me from inside the shop and I suppose he freed me. Also, later I was in the house and washing up at the sink, when a strange man came up behind me, put his arms round me and kissed the back of my neck (or was it the side of my face?)

Thinking again about the stuck-in-the-door incident, I don’t actually remember the second man freeing me, just talking to me. So it could be that I managed to free myself – which would be a better reflection of what happened in my life.

Yesterday in my therapy session I read what I wrote on Wednesday about my childhood – though she’s heard the story before, of course. I’m still reading my way through ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’. She recommended it – two years ago, when I didn’t read it – because of the part about transitioning into the third stage of life, as the Crone or Wise Woman. But it’s leading me to re-evaluate the whole course of my life – which is why I wrote about my childhood expectations of what life as a woman would be like. Often I read things in it which bring me up short – about being lost, wandering, not knowing what you’re looking for – and finding a new self.

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The Way It Was Then

When I was very young, all I wanted to do when I grew up was to be a writer. However, if anyone asked me, I would say I wanted to work with animals (mainly because I’d rather spend my time with them than with other people). I never told anyone about the writing idea, because I knew that writers were very special and talented, and I was far too dull and not at all special, and besides, there was another girl in my class who wanted to be a writer, and she wasn’t the sort of girl I could ever compete with. Also I knew that the main goal of a girl’s life was supposed to be to find a man, get married and have children (although I never really liked children, didn’t even play with dolls), or, if she couldn’t find a man who was interested in her (which seemed the most likely scenario for me), she had to stay at home and look after her elderly parents, and most likely become a teacher (a horrifying prospect). At least marriage and children (if achievable) offered some likelihood of financial security and time to write (when the children started school).

Before you ask, no, this wasn’t the Victorian era, it was the 1960s, but when I looked at my mother, and my aunts, and the neighbours, and my teachers, there didn’t seem much evidence of women breaking free of those stereotypes. The pattern was: you worked until you were married (or, if hubby was particularly enlightened, till the babies came along), then you gave it up, and maybe when the children were older you got a part-time job in a shop, or the Birds Eye factory, or the biscuit factory, or cleaning offices, for ‘pin money’.

As I grew older, I discovered there was a route out of this: university. If I did well enough in my exams (which I would), I could leave home and go away to a place where there would be lots of young people, in a new, exciting town, probably in the sophisticated, even decadent, South, where no one knew me as the pathetic little nobody I truly was, and even I might stand a chance of finding a boyfriend (boys outnumbered girls three to one in universities at that time), and best of all, I could go with my parents’ blessing, and as long as I kept my nose clean in the holidays, they wouldn’t have a clue what I got up to, they might even be proud of me, and at the end of three years I could get married, and maybe a job, and never have to go back again.

Funnily enough, that is more or less how the plan worked out. I met someone in the second summer vacation, when I’d managed to wangle a job in Reading so that I didn’t have to go home, he asked me to marry him, I said yes, and that was that. Sort of.

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Tangled Again

I wrote yesterday, but when I tried to upload it, I found that there was no wifi. I restarted the router, tried to get on from the laptop, switched the telly on and even the Tivo wasn’t connected. Went looking for the contact details for Virgin Media, funny how they never give you a phone number, or if there’s a letter or document somewhere that has that information, I couldn’t find it. It was down all morning, came back up just before one o’clock. I’d texted a friend who lives a few streets away who also uses Virgin, he replied mid-afternoon, when mine was back, to say that it had been up and down all day.

So I never posted what I’d written, but might do later.

Horrible weather yesterday. That does sometimes seem to correspond with the wifi being crap, I don’t know if it’s related, or if so how, it’s just an anecdotal correlation.

When I wasn’t fretting about the wifi not working, I was fretting about my knitting. I have one knitting project (jumper) and one crochet project (weather blanket) and they both have multiple colours of yarn which are permanently tangled, so that it feels some days I spend more time untangling yarn than I do crafting. Sometimes it can be quite a soothing thing to do, but mostly it’s a frustrating chore. I don’t know what I do to make it happen and I don’t know what I can do to stop it happening, except not use so many different colours – and I don’t want to do that, which would be very boring.

For the Christmas jumper, I’ve currently got two additional balls of white on the back (for snowflakes), two on the one sleeve that I’ve started (for candy canes) and seven on the front. You may ask why I make it so complicated, but the point is that it’s a pictorial design, and unlike cross stitch or tapestry, where you can work on one area at a time, everything that appears on one row has to be done at the same time.

I’m also having doubts about what the recipient (my daughter) will think of it. Is what I’m doing completely bonkers? On the current bit of the front, there’s a gingerbread man flanked by two candy canes and two cup cakes – okay, I admit, that IS a bonkers idea. I’ve adapted it from a cross stitch pattern and a jumper a friend of mine had last year, with the slogan: ‘Calories don’t count at Christmas’. Over the last three years I’ve made jumpers for the grandkids, and my daughter kept saying: ‘when are you going to do one for me?’ but I do wonder how she’ll react.

I always have this when I make things for other people. Will they like it, will they wear it? Personally, I wouldn’t be seen dead in half the things I make. I’m following my creative instinct, but I do wonder about what it produces.  

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Brain Freeze

Back in front of my PC after my weekly trip to the shop. Oddly calm in the morning the last couple of days. I think it’s because I’m slipping back into the lockdown peace, no stress, nowhere to go, nobody to see, just my own peaceful life. Won’t last, of course it won’t, it can’t, at some point the world will wake up and I’ll be forced to deal with it again, but not now. Can’t believe it’s only a week since I took the van out, it feels like ages ago.

The sun is shining at present. I didn’t mow the grass when I said I would – maybe I will today, if it stays sunny, though it must still be wet underfoot.

I’ve not been remembering my dreams recently. When I wake up, I know that I’ve been dreaming and now I’m awake, but the content of the dream is completely gone from my awareness. It’s like watching something on the telly, and you know you haven’t been asleep, but you haven’t got a clue what just happened, or what was said, and you have to rewind the last few minutes to find out. Of course, that also happens when I’m listening to the radio, or reading, or even in the middle of a conversation (though in that case there’s no rewind button), and as I now know, that’s all part and parcel of dyspraxia. But I’m sure I used to remember my dreams.

Incidentally, although for me the lack of short term memory had always seemed to be the key aspect of dyspraxia, from which all else follows, it’s only recently that I’ve started to think it might be the other way round. Starting from the premise that it’s due to faulty message processing in the brain, and that that makes it hard to focus on more than one thing at a time, this leads to the phenomenon of ‘absent-mindedness’, whereby I have no recollection of where I put my glasses, because when I put them down no part of my brain was processing the information : ‘I am putting my glasses on the bookshelf/back of the toilet/behind the fruit basket/they just fell on the floor’ and so doesn’t leave an imprint on my memory.  

Sounds like a good theory – it definitely reflects my personal experience, anyway. I expect somebody somewhere has thought of that before, but as I mentioned yesterday (I think), my PhD supervisor pointed out years ago that I struggle to accept things unless I can understand them from first principles. What I don’t think he understood at the time was that it wasn’t due to bloody-mindedness so much as that my brain couldn’t hold and process that information if I didn’t have the right pegs to hang it onto. Which sounds quite paradoxical, because although I can have enough flashes of insight to have achieved a PhD, there are times when my brain freezes and I’m incapable of absorbing what I’m being told.  

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Chasing Rainbows? (to be continued – perhaps)

I keep hinting that there are ‘deeper’ things I want to write about, but that I don’t have time because the trivial everyday things take up my word count, and then I’m done and can leave whatever it is for another day. Except this morning I’m staring at the blank screen and empty Sunday-morning street and not sure how to set foot on this morning’s path, or where it’s going to take me, if anywhere at all.

Thursday’s therapy session was a bit like that. I hadn’t got any major rants to read out, or insights from the week, or anything at all that I could think of to say – not that it had been a perfectly blissful week, but in that moment I wasn’t tapping into anything in particular, so it descended almost into (very expensive) chit-chat. Sometimes it’s like that, but it never means the darkness has gone away for good, and I don’t suppose there’ll ever come a time when it will. There’s still the ongoing issue over housework, with the therapist (who of course has never stepped inside my house) obviously assuming that I’m exaggerating, and falling into the same pattern of people who don’t want to hear the truth as I see it. At one point, as I was trying to explain, she said: ‘that doesn’t sound like dyspraxia so much as you can’t be arsed to do it’ to which my reaction was: yes of course that’s what I’m saying, I can’t be arsed, I’m lazy and don’t take responsibility, how can you possibly not know that when I’ve told you a million times? I didn’t put it in quite those words, but my heart did sink a little to think she really wasn’t getting me at all. When we Skype I sit on the sofa and all she sees is a blank wall behind me, I was going to try doing it in the study last week but remembered at the last minute that there’s no webcam on the PC so that’s no good, maybe I’ll bring the laptop up here next time.

Well, so I did find something to write about which isn’t about causality, creativity, liminality, fate and destiny. Or Women Who Run With the Wolves. This week I read her analysis of the story about the Crescent Moon Bear, which is a version of the Grail story, that the point of the quest is not about the ostensible object, but the lessons you learn from undergoing the quest itself. This is hardly an original thought, but it is an interesting one to reflect upon. When I came back from my original travels, I felt I hadn’t learnt anything at all, that nothing had changed, that I couldn’t run away from myself; and the only lesson when I came back from Prague was there no way on earth I could ever be a teacher. Or maybe the lesson is: you can keep chasing rainbows, but make sure you’re enjoying the chase?

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Here We Go Round Again

So far this week: last yoga class before lockdown; last tai chi class before lockdown; last trip out in the van before lockdown. I mentioned last week about my yoga teacher being homeless and having to cancel classes – the next day she sent a text to say that someone had offered her a lift, then came the lockdown announcement, so there was a class on Monday evening, and ditto the tai chi yesterday morning, after which I picked up my camper van from the garage and drove to Queen Elizabeth Country Park on the A3 near Petersfield, and had a walk among the trees and a picnic. I love taking the van there, because there are car parks spread among the trees, often empty (on weekdays when I usually go), so although you can’t actually camp, you can get some of the feeling for a few hours.

The weather has turned dry and sunny but noticeably colder than it was, and today looks to be about the same, with a clear blue sky. I really should get out and do some tidying up in the garden, I tried cutting the hedge on Monday but the trimmer kept cutting out. Because it stopped and later started again, it had to be a loose wire. I took apart the connector that joins it where I cut through the cable in the spring, unscrewed the little screwy things inside, couldn’t see anything obviously loose, then got into a horrible dyspraxic muddle trying to put it back together and gave up for the day.

I read some more of ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, this time about creative blocks. The author suggests the usual things: keep trying, don’t self-edit, do a little every day, expect to fail, but keep going anyway. This is what I’ve been doing forever. Back to the old question of whether it matters that it never gets me anywhere? Apparently, it doesn’t. Either one day a miracle will happen and I’ll suddenly start writing something worthwhile, or I’ll be gone and someone will come along and wipe my hard drive and that will be that.

Last week I read the poem about the ‘Wild Thing’ to my therapist, and she said I should try to get it published. I haven’t done anything about it. Strictly speaking, I think posting it on here counts as publication, which disqualifies it from most competitions anyway.

I’ve been thinking about Daniel Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’. I think this definitely counts as a ‘plague year’, but I don’t think this journal of mine is in the same class.

My current yoga teacher once said that destiny is what has to happen, but fate is what you make happen (or words to that effect). She is not having a great year, even worse than most of us. But she has faith in the fundamental goodness of the world, and I envy her for that. Today, I fear for the fate of us all.

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Second of the Month

My determination this morning took me as far as Sainsbury’s Local (which is not very far, but does mean I have to cross the road – however, the city council kindly installed a zebra crossing last year, so it’s a lot easier than it used to be.) I thought it was raining, but I needed milk so made myself go anyway, and the rain stopped.

It’s the second today, and the second and the seventeenth are important days with regard to the weather blanket, because they are days for starting new rows (because there are sixteen squares in a row, and obviously each day’s square can’t be done till the next day at the earliest, because it’s done on the basis of actual conditions, not forecasts). The first row for each month starts with a square indicating the name of the month, followed by 15 days (or 14 and one indicating the year for February), and the second row has 16 day squares, or 15 and a filler square at the end for a 30 day month (or the other half of the year, 14 days and a filler square or 15 days if it’s a leap year.) The other thing that happens at the ends of the rows is that I add the next bit of the border to the new one and the one immediately before (which was completed the day before, because the dates run left to right for the first half of the month and right to left for the second).

That might sound confusing, but it’s really simple in practice, and it means that today I need to do a square for yesterday and one saying ‘Nov’ to start the next row (I do them in that order for reasons which are a bit too technical to go into here), and then extend the border over the end of the previous row and the beginning of the new one.

To anybody who doesn’t at least know me on Facebook the above will sound like complete gobbledegook, but hopefully the illustration will help.

Before I went to Sainsbury’s I filled a jug with cold water to fill up the coffee maker then knocked it all over the counter, and had to move the spice rack out of the way, which meant that quite a few of the jars fell out, though fortunately nothing smashed and no lids came off.

Shit Happens – the First Noble Truth of Buddhism.

‘When the demon is at your door/In the morning it won’t be there no more/Any major dude will tell you.’ Steely Dan, Any Major Dude. I guess the Buddha was one of the most Major of Major Dudes.

Cause and effect – everything happens for a reason – or a complex of reasons, in the sense of the set conditions which cause it, but not in the sense that it has a purpose. Purpose implies a guiding consciousness – and on the question of an overall consciousness/purpose for everything, the jury’s still out.   

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#notwriting Thursday

Late today for a complex of reasons. But I’m here nevertheless.

Thinking about – oh, what have I been thinking about already this morning? The weather? Light persistent drizzle. Motivation? For writing, extremely low; for housework even lower; though I could spend the morning listening to the radio and knitting or sorting out my accounts– either of those seems quite appealing at the moment. Two lines from Bob Marley’s Redemption Song: ‘Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/None but ourselves can free our minds’

I’ve done my morning exercises, had a shower and washed my hair, cooked and eaten a bowl of porridge – although usually I do my writing before breakfast, it felt as though time was running late, so had breakfast deciding whether to write or not. Seems bizarre, the amount of effort that goes into writing about how I can’t write – except, that it isn’t any effort, not usually. Writing that requires effort is something that I stay well clear of. Writing just what comes into my head is easy – and, arguably, pointless – but I will keep doing it anyway. Sometimes it leads my mind down interesting new paths, though I’ve long given up the idea that it will lead me into writing a novel.

The disconnect between mind and fingers continues: I just caught myself typing ‘so they’ when my mind was thinking ‘though I’ve’… It’s quite disturbing when you think about it. Normal typoes caused by pressing the wrong keys are to be expected, but this is something else, like ‘typoes’ created in my brain outside of conscious control. ‘So’ rhymes with ‘though’, and ‘they’ starts with the same sound as ‘though’… it sounds bizarre, but I can kind of see who it could happen – even more bizarre, I’ve just noticed I typed ‘who’ instead of ‘how’ (though of course that is an anagram, so not so bizarre, except for the coincidence that I did it while thinking about how I do that).

I need to train myself out of looking at the keyboard and into looking at the screen when I’m typing – I’ve never been a ‘proper’ touch typist, I taught myself from a book forty years ago, though I’ve certainly had a lot of practice in that time. At least it’s usually possible to interpret my typing, which is more than can be said for my handwriting.

Just had a text from my yoga teacher to say that she’s cancelling classes for the foreseeable future, not due to Covid, but because she has had to move out of her flat and can’t get transport from her temporary place. Although in some ways it’s a relief because I don’t always feel like I want to go, I feel bad for her, and will miss her. However grim I feel, her classes always lift my spirits. Even when I’m thinking that some of the things she gets us to do are just daft, somehow, for her, I can suspend my disbelief and chant along with the rest of them.

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Running With Wolves

The deeper I get into the book I’ve been reading, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the more I relate it to my life, the more I can see how broken and bent my life has been. I know how melodramatic this sounds, I can hear the voices telling me all that stuff: how lucky I am to have had such a (materially) comfortable life; that I should stop whining and practise gratitude; that I should stop reading books that make me unhappy; that I should stop thinking so much and simply be.

I was never cut out to be a nice, good, well behaved girl, but I tried, I really did. Some of my struggles in that regard were clearly related to my dyspraxia, interpreted as clumsiness, untidiness, laziness, carelessness, not listening, not paying attention, all those traits of the ‘difficult’ child. I wasn’t deliberately ‘naughty’, in fact I tried very hard to avoid it, which still holds to this day – needing to know the ‘rules’ so I can stay on the right side of them always, never causing trouble, never making waves – except that doesn’t always work, isn’t always possible, there were/are/will always be times when through carelessness etc I overstep the mark, or get trapped in a situation where to please someone upsets someone else and so I keep falling over my own feet (metaphorically as well as literally) and bringing down judgement on myself, which is why, as you must know by now, it’s easier for everyone if I just keep away from other people as much as I can.

The book, written about thirty years ago, is a Jungian analysis, illustrated by myths and fairy tales from all cultures, about how girls and women are socialised into conforming to culturally required feminine norms and roles. The author’s main thesis is that by trying to live up to those norms and roles, many women suppress their creative spirit, or ‘wild nature’. I gave up on it the first time I tried to read it, two years ago, because her writing style irritated me and it seemed related to New Age ‘Goddess’ cults, which feel a bit whacky to me. Now I’ve persevered I’m more impressed by the psychology behind it, and anyway, it was recommended by my therapist, and I have great respect for her academic credentials.

And, as you can probably guess from that description, the idea of the ‘wild nature’, the alternative female archetype and alter ego of the creative spirit, whose suppression can cause great harm and distress in women’s lives, struck a mighty chord for me. Hence the posts over the last few days about the Wild Thing who lives caged inside of me: self-destructive, resentful and raging as any caged beast has the right to be, but only ‘evil’ if seen from a specific, limited perspective.

I sat down to write almost in tears because I didn’t think I could find the words to express this. But it happened anyway.

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Christmas Jumper

It was raining earlier, then the sun came out, now the clouds have returned and the sind wounds (of course I meant ‘wind sounds’, but left that in because a typing spoonerism is pretty weird!) – the WIND SOUNDS a bit rough. Lots to do indoors today – more stuff to do on the website, but at least it’s going okay, and the client is happy.

The knitted jumper’s growing slowly, it seems to be taking ages to get to the point where the sleeves can be separated from the body. I’m working it from the neck down on a circular needle – bit technical there, but what it means is that it should be possible to do the whole thing in one piece without having to sew it together or (my deepest horror), join the sleeves on at the end. I’ve done it that way with crochet a few times (some successful, others not, but with a better record than I’ve had with doing the pieces separately and joining them). I found the method (it’s not exactly a ‘pattern’ because it doesn’t give exact numbers of stitches for size and shape) in a book about knitting all kinds of ‘sweaters’ (it’s American). You start with the neck hole, increase for the shoulders, then keep increasing till it comes down to the bottom of the armholes before starting on the sleeves, and so on. The crucial thing is that you have to keep trying it on – which knitters will understand is a bit tricky when it’s all on a circular needle which is smaller than the circumference of your body. Also it’s complicated by the fact that it’s for my daughter, who like me is broad across the back (and not lacking out front either), but not quite as big as me- there again it’s a Christmas jumper so doesn’t need to be snug, so I’m trying it on myself and aiming to make it so I can get into it, but a little too tight for comfort.

The last three years I’ve made Christmas jumpers for the grandchildren, and made sure to make them with plenty of growing room. (My original plan was that they could then be ‘passed down’ when grown out of, but I can’t see that happening.) So this year it’s my daughter’s turn.

You may well ask why this year I’ve decided to go for this top-down method rather than sticking with the pattern I’ve used before, and I asked myself that question quite a lot when I embarked on this a few weeks ago. But I think if I can master this technique I’m going to find it a lot more interesting and enjoyable – in fact I am finding it just that – and might become inspired to make more jumpers this way and develop my own designs… in fact I’ve already got a few ideas.

Another way of using up all that yarn I keep buying – and it’s raining again. Might as well hunker down.