Category: blogging

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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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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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Tangled

Every morning (mostly) I sit down with a blank screen and the faint hope that by the end of 500 words I will have said something worthwhile. Admittedly, five hundred words isn’t much, though some days it’s a struggle to fill it. Sometimes something occurs to me just at the end, which is why the title (always written afterwards) often refers to the final paragraph. Maybe I should carry on beyond 500 words? I tried that two years ago, and I don’t recall it being any more productive. I have a file (Word table) containing extracts taken from these posts that I think might be worth expanding, and the dates when they were posted, but I never look at it. Maybe that’s a project for one day, but I’m guessing there’ll be a lot of repetition and few surprises.

I’ve been thinking about the word ‘should’, which is anathema to my therapist, and most other therapists, coaches and others of that ilk I’ve come across. A couple of weeks ago she asked me whose standard I’m trying to emulate – but when I ask: ‘what should I do?’ I’m asking for help, not to be set a goal. There are many things which, if I did them regularly would I’m sure help make my life less chaotic and more satisfying, but, in the phrase she used last week, I ‘can’t be arsed’. But if she, or anybody else, tried to tell me to do them, I would feel patronised and insulted and do anything to avoid it.  

Half way through, and I gave in and looked at what I wrote yesterday. Ah yes, the quest of the Crescent Moon Bear, and what did you learn from the journey? I enjoy reading her analysis of the stories but don’t find her suggestions of how to apply the lessons to your own life very helpful in a practical sense. This is also true of every self-help book I’ve ever read. I remember my PhD supervisor commenting that I have to think things through from first principles – I didn’t know then what he meant, but I think it’s because I can’t understand an argument unless my head can get inside it and see where it’s coming from, but once I can do that, it seems obvious and I don’t know why everybody else can’t see it as well. It’s like the time I spent last night (about two hours) extracting one single thread from the tangle of the border threads for my blanket. I thought I had them all separated only last week, but somehow just by taking it out of the bag each day, attaching a new square and putting it back again, I now have a hopeless mess. I honestly can’t understand how it happens – presumably it’s dyspraxia-related but I don’t see how.

My thoughts and words don’t want to play the game today either. But putting things down and coming back to them later, trite though it sounds, does work sometimes.

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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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Wild Thing

In my therapy session yesterday I read out the post I wrote on Wednesday, about love and relationships and at the end, in answer to the question of why I’m alone, she said:

‘Because you’re not prepared to compromise on who you are.’

Of course! It came like a lightning bolt: I’d rather have my solitude than suppress the difficult part of my nature. I’m not a ‘loveable’ person – I’m really not. Turn the mirror around. Why do even I find it so hard to love myself? Why have I spent a lifetime berating myself for failing to live up to the image of a ‘good’, pretty, well-behaved girl? Why have I always been so careless of the feelings of men who wanted me (my first husband adored me, and I despised him for it) and wept over the ones who didn’t?

Writing out her comment now, I can see how it could be taken for a criticism (though I know that’s not how she meant it). ‘Compromise’, after all, is usually considered to be a Good Thing – and so it is, in most circumstances, but it can also be seen as a betrayal of a deeper integrity –  ‘You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em’.

I’ve been folding for so much of my life, ‘settling for what I could get’. Striving for the rewards due to a ‘good-girldom’ that was never going to be within my grasp, however hard I tried, and hating myself for that failure.

And now I’m alone with the Wild Thing – which has just reminded me of a poem I wrote a while back.

Wild Thing

Bind my wounds.
I will rip the bandage
Roll in the dirt
Claw at the scabs
to uncover my flesh
Gleaming
Festering
Bleeding.

Full moon casts shadows
through my window.
I am a wild beast.
If you try to help me
you will suffer for kindness.
Feel my claws, teeth, scales,
Anger
Pain.

Will you leave me
or will you hold me
Feel me writhe
in your grasp?

Will you judge me?
I will show you what I am.
Ignore me
I will scream till you hear
Till I feel your contempt.
Till I see your sneers.
Then I will know.
I will test you
beyond endurance.

Are you brave enough
to hold me still?
Are you strong enough
to love me?

© Linda Rushby July 2014

No one really wants the wild thing. They might think they do, but they don’t want to live with the claws and the beak. They want to cage it with rules and take away its true nature, but when they’ve done that, they find that what is left is not worth having. There is no gold left, only dross.

Linda Rushby from the blog ‘Melinda Solo’, April 2013

I can’t change the Wild Thing into something she’s not, but there may be other ways of taming her. She needs to be recognised for herself, with compassion, not judgement.

And who will do that for her, if not me?

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Order and Chaos

In the last week I have: walked to the beach twice; had breakfast out twice; had a cream tea out once; had a flu jab; walked to the garage to drop off the van keys (for MOT); been to a real live tai chi lesson at the community centre (just restarted after the teacher’s quarantine); resolved the initial issues and produced a reasonable stab at a first attempt on the website, to show to client; ditto the Christmas jumper (except the ‘client’ can’t see it because it’s going to be a surprise); phoned my sister; as well as writing every day (last Thursday’s effort handwritten in a notebook on the beach) and did at least some of my exercise and meditation routine every day (which reminded me to go and look in the spare room and check that I’d blown the candle out, which I had).

Also I notice that I haven’t been moaning about not being ‘motivated’, although I must admit the house is even more chaotic than usual. Earlier I filled the plastic water jug for the coffee pot while I was trying to tidy up around the sink, then moments later knocked it over and half the water went over the counter. I managed to mop that up and make sure it wasn’t too close to any of the electrical stuff, then turned round and knocked it again, with the rest of the water going over the floor. However, this is not to say that that’s in any way unusual, just that my feet and my dressing gown got wet.

Years ago, I remember a friend telling me that her cat disapproved of her standards of house-keeping, and kept giving her disapproving looks. I laughed at the time, and thought ‘crazy cat lady!’, but now understand exactly what she means. I feel so guilty sometimes watching my cat trying to pick her way around piles of junk on the floor – often knitting yarn, or books (or clothes – mostly in the bedroom) but also random other things which have fallen or been dropped or knocked off the furniture and not picked up, whereas I just step over it without even noticing it’s there. Also she is terrified of sudden movements and loud noises, which must make living with me a nightmare, as I blunder my way around the place.

All thoughts of trying to impose any kind of order on my life and my living space seem to have gone out of the (smeary, blurry, fly-specked) window. Having ‘projects’ to do somehow gives me licence to ignore that stuff – and go to the beach, or eat scones in a quiet café.

And yet… in the mornings, I feed my cat, do my exercises and meditation, write my blog. Every day (mostly) – and have done consistently for months. Yet making ‘to do’ lists and sticking with them is beyond me – I keep trying, but it all falls apart.

Sun shining this morning. Skype therapy at 2.00. That’s today.  

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Wherever That River Goes…

No post yesterday, because I got up and took a flask of coffee to the beach, arriving a few minutes  late for sunrise (but there was low cloud over the sea anyway) and writing in a notebook, which I might or might not copy onto here, but today I’ve got other stuff in my head so will go ahead with that.

One of the songs from my youth that listening to Amazon music has reintroduced me to is ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’ by the Byrds, and now it’s stuck in my head. It starts like this:

‘The river flows, it flows to the sea,
wherever that river goes,
that’s where I want to be.
Flow, river flow,
let your waters wash down,
take me from this road
to some other town.

All (s)he wanted was to be free
and that’s the way it turned out to be…’

‘The Ballad of Easy Rider,’ Roger McGuinn & Bob Dylan

Notice how I subtly changed the gender in that second verse? It’s true, all I wanted was to be free, and that is ‘the way it turned out to be’, though not quite the way I might have expected (or even hoped for.) But I’m still very grateful for the way it is – despite the warning from another song of the same era:

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,
nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free…’

‘Me and Bobby McGee’, Kriss Krisstofferson

…a warning that kept me stuck in a sad but ‘safe’ situation for many years, which has brought another song to mind…

‘How often does it happen that we live our lives in chains
and never even know we have the key?’

‘Already Gone’, The Eagles

But that’s enough soft West coast country-rock from the late 1960s and early 70s for today.

Going to the sea yesterday morning did its magic of lifting my mood. I sat on my usual bench behind the beach café, writing in my notebook, and two people passing by said: ‘you’ve got a good spot there!’, and later on my way home I sat in the Rose Garden and read for a while, and another stranger said the same thing. But when I got home and started trying to tackle a project I’ve started, I had a massive setback which threw me into despair about how useless I am and what a charlatan because people have expectations of me and really I don’t have a clue what I’m doing and am scrabbling all the time to keep going, and everything is ten times harder for me and takes ten times longer than any normal competent person but nobody sees it and I hate myself and I hate being me.

I talked to my therapist in the afternoon about it, this massive fear I have of cocking everything up. She talked about adjusting to not being ‘needed’ any more, but I don’t want to be needed, I don’t want anyone to depend on me, I can’t stand the stress. I want to be free of all that. I want to run away again.

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Decisions

After I finished writing yesterday, I thought about how often I mention Monday in the titles of my Monday posts – I can’t be sure, but it feels like it happens that way more than any other day, or has done recently, at least. Years ago, in my major blogging days, I would sometimes use the day of the week as a title when I couldn’t think of anything else, and that was always a bad sign. Monday, specifically, has a bad reputation of course, as the first day of the conventional working week. But after I’d written yesterday, I worked out that it’s seventeen years since the last time I had that kind of Monday to Friday job, so why should it be an issue? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, I have no expectation of finding an answer).

Tuesday is significant in two ways, one because it’s bin preparation day (they’re supposed to be out by bedtime for early morning collection) and the other because of Tuesday morning tai chi lessons at the community centre, except they only restarted after lockdown at the beginning of September, I went to the first one and then was in Cyprus for the second, and the teacher then went to Spain  for two weeks and has been self-isolating since she got back. So it should be starting next week – assuming things don’t go back into lockdown, which who knows, given the way things are going.

There is something else on Tuesdays, which is Zoom meditation in the evenings, which I haven’t done for a while because I don’t much like the person who usually leads it. But there will be Zoom tai chi tomorrow – I missed it last week when I was at my daughter’s.

I made some progress on both my projects yesterday – some. I’m trying to do the website on WordPress, because I don’t want to host it myself. When I was trying to do the website thing as a business, I used to set all the sites up as sub-folders on my hosting, but earlier this year I let go of the last one on there (the owner having passed away). It’s quite expensive to pay for hosting, and getting more so – and I don’t get much traffic on my own site, in fact this blog is the only thing which is really still ‘live’, so I keep questioning whether it’s worth continuing. I paid last year for two years’ hosting, so am now into the final year, and I need to make some decisions, which is not my favourite activity. It is a lot of money, as I said, but on the other hand I can afford it – just it seems daft to keep paying for something which I don’t really make use of – and if I do stop it at some point in the future, my client will be left having to find hosting from somewhere else (or rather I’ll have to do that for her).  

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Log Cabin

Very late this morning – although I’ve been awake for two and a half hours already. I decided to start doing my half hour yoga etc in the mornings again, and had a shower and washed my hair, and just generally time passed as it so often does.

Routines, as I’m sure I’ve said before, are both constraining and liberating. I half thought last week that I wouldn’t restart these two morning routines – exercise and blogging – but that’s because I was in a pretty shitty mood after returning from Cyprus. It’s so easy to slip down into chaos – especially for someone like me. Spontaneity can be exhilarating, but it can also be terrifying. Sometimes the chaos reaches a point where the only way I can deal with it is by ignoring it, and so it grows exponentially until it reaches a crisis and I fall apart emotionally. I was getting close to that point last week. But yesterday I wrote my blog; tidied the kitchen; loaded, ran and emptied the dishwasher; hoovered the stairs and landing – never really know what brings me back from the brink. I might say: ‘a decent night’s sleep’ but that wasn’t the case. Taking the van out on Friday? Doing that one, big(ish) stressful thing and then putting it to one side? Putting everything else into perspective? Maybe.

When I was learning to drive, the instructor told me that the greatest pleasure in life comes from doing something you really don’t want to do, and then afterwards, knowing that you’ve done it. Over forty years later, I think that’s still one of the wisest pieces of advice I’ve ever heard.

I’ve started a new crochet project – while still finishing off the previous one (both cardigans). I started following a pattern for what’s called a ‘log cabin’ design, starting with a small square, then every few rows rotating the work and picking up stitches along the edge of the existing work so that you have a rectangle that keeps growing – like a spiral growing out from the centre, but with straight edges. I’m using a ‘cake’ type yarn with large blocks of colour, and it looks pretty good. But I don’t like the shape of the pattern in the book – which makes a sleeveless waistcoat, which I’m not that keen on. So I’m trying to think of a way of adapting it to make a cardi with sleeves. This is the sort of thing I like to do – trying out something new and seeing how it works out.

Every so often I think I’ll give up on crochet, because it’s too repetitive and I feel like I’ve exhausted the possibilities. Then I get an idea like this and get interested again. Admittedly, I have cupboards full of projects that I’ve never finished, and garments that I’ve never worn. But I keep going back to it. And today I’m looking forward to sitting in the sunshine and trying again.

Maybe there’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.