Category: blogging

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Splurging

Do I want to write today? Some of the stress I was under earlier in the week has been alleviated, I slept a bit better last night – 71% according to the sleep cycle app, but then it was 79% two nights ago, so doesn’t necessarily correlate with a good mood in the morning. I don’t know what those percentages are based on – is it percentage of a ‘normal’ night’s sleep – eight hours, maybe? When I first installed the app, it spent the first few days saying it was calibrating, so maybe it relates to how much sleep I had in those first few nights? Or is it a kind of index which also takes into account factors like frequency of waking in the night or proportion of deep to light sleep? Whatever, it’s never 100%, and very rarely over 90, so 79% is pretty good.

In checking my sleep, I got distracted onto Twitter and came across this quote:

“You can’t say, I won’t write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.”

Dorothy C. Fontana.

Hmmm – that’ll be me, then. No surprises there. I retweeted it anyway.

Is there any other activity/artform where you create so much ‘stuff’ just to throw it all away again? Another tweet from the same person’s feed:

‘To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over….”

John Hersey.

That’s not quite what I meant – I was thinking not of the early drafts that become something in the end, but what I do: writing for its own sake that never does and never will go on to become ‘something’ – not about perfection, but just ‘splurging’.

Incidentally, after I’d written the word ‘stuff’, I tried to think of a better word for the products of ‘creative’ effort, and I thought of ‘material’ – which reminded me that my Mum – who was trained as a seamstress– used to sometimes call fabric/material ‘stuff’ – oh the wonders of language!

Where have I got to? Not very far is the answer, but then I very rarely do.

I wrote about Tara Brach a couple of days ago. One thing I struggle with in her teachings is the idea that to manage your emotions you need to identify where they manifest physically in your body and focus on that. But emotions occur in the brain, surely? I’ve had this problem with other meditation teachers – I once raised it with the leader of a meditation group and he was really dismissive: ‘oh, so you think it’s all in your head, do you?’ in a tone that implied I was being deliberately obtuse. But although there are conventional physical reactions to some emotions – mostly concerned with changing the heartbeat or breath – isn’t saying that love comes ‘from the heart’ metaphorical? To be continued (maybe).

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Another Morning

Been thinking that maybe I should reorganise my morning routine. If I did the writing before the exercise, that would be more in keeping with Dorothea Brande’s original instructions. I could get up an hour earlier and write, instead of lying in bed trying/hoping to get back to sleep. I resolve to do it, and then, when the time comes… I could move the ‘gentle alarm’ on the Sleep Cycle app forward from 7-7.30 to 6.30-7.00 – the half hour is because it’s supposed to detect whereabouts your sleep is, and go off when you’re in the most appropriate sleep phase for waking (until it comes to the end of the period, when it goes off anyway). It’s fairly immaterial, given that I almost never hear it because I’ve already stopped the app before then – except for the extremely rare occasions when I HAVE managed to get back to sleep.

Whatever, it’s only going to get harder as we move inexorably from the light half of the year into the dark.

Had a day out yesterday, with my camper van, which only got back on the road after lockdown last week. Another new battery, another stern warning from the garage that I need to use it regularly. The new (refurbished) battery they fitted last year was so tightly connected that I couldn’t disconnect it over winter, so when I tried it in March they said they would come and recharge it, but it wasn’t a priority either for them or for me in the following months, so although they’ve had the keys all that time, I hadn’t been chasing them about it.

Well, it’s going now, and last week I took it out for a picnic in the Queen Elizabeth Country Park, off the A3 heading for London, and my favourite go-to place for a significant non-overnight jaunt. Yesterday I went in the other direction, to the New Forest, which I’ve never done as a day out before, always camped, even though it’s only an hour’s drive. I had a vision of a memory from the last time I was there, this time last year, of the empty moors covered with purple flowering heather, seen from the open-top tour bus. I had another memory too, from a few years earlier, when I drove my old Micra back from Dorset to Bedford over two days with an overnight stop in Salisbury, of walking on the same moors in early summer.

I should write more about this. Why am I reluctant to write about happy things? Perhaps because I’m afraid I can’t do them justice? Or because, when you try to describe something like that, you – I – never feel I can capture the essence of what made it special? Like trying to take photographs and then being disappointed with all of them. Writing words and being disappointed with all of them. I got lost, I found somewhere to stop, sat on a tree stump and looked at the view.

Maybe I’ll try tomorrow.

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Spontaneity vs Inspiration

I was talking yesterday about why I write in the morning, following the advice from Dorothea Brande’s book ‘Becoming a Writer’, but how that’s also usually my unhappiest time, as I try to sort out in my head what I need to do for the day.

When I first tried to follow the advice, in the late 1970s early 80s, I was trying to write a fantasy novel, of the then conventional swords-and-sorcery genre, which was hopeless, because it inevitably had to involve a certain amount of fighting and war craft, which I couldn’t get my head round at all. In fact, I didn’t even like reading about that stuff, even though I loved the Tolkien books, I would skip all the fighting parts and just read the adventuring. This was in the days before the genre had opened up with more female characters and writers, such as Ursula le Guin, Julian May, Anne McCaffrey and Marian Zimmer Bradley. I didn’t see how it was possible to have fantasy books outside that patriarchal paradigm, or how I could write within it, so I really was on a hiding to nothing.

Be that as it may, I tried, and I tried in the mornings, and then I discovered that if I sat down to write for a specific purpose – such as to continue my novel – I was paralysed. All I could write was what was in my head – such as what I’m writing now, and write most mornings, about my life, my thoughts and feelings. I was going to say ‘write spontaneously’ but that seems odd, in that the daily writing is quite regimented – but there again, it is spontaneous in the sense that I don’t always know what I’m going to say until I start saying it.

Now I’m confusing myself. Because the other kind of writing – the way I write most of my poems – is the stuff that comes into my head at any time of day, and I need to capture it – so that by the time I sit down at the computer, it’s already there, and I’m just ‘taking dictation’ – so is that spontaneous or is it the other? Because that is what I think of as being ‘inspired’ writing, and I have no idea where that comes from or how to make it happen – it’s outside my control except… for the times when it isn’t. What about all those poems I wrote in April, for NaPoWriMo? They were ‘inspired’ somehow, so how did I make that happen?

There was also a period in 2005-6, immediately before and around the time when I started both a creative writing course and blogging, when I WAS extending my novel (not the original one from twenty years earlier, but a more feminist one) by writing 500 words daily, developing the plot in classic ‘seat of the pants’ fashion. Why did that come to an end? Because my writing energy was diverted into assignments for the course and blogging, perhaps?

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Mornings

As you probably know, I wake most days around five o’clock, and very rarely go back to sleep again after that, although I usually lie in bed for a couple of hours brooding (or reading, listening to podcasts, looking at stuff on my phone – you know how it goes) before getting up – usually around seven – and doing a half hour routine of yoga/tai chi/meditation. So over the last few months I’ve been able to notice the changes in the timing of sunrise. It always comes as a bit of a shock how much the length of daylight has reduced by the end of August, but it’s hardly surprising when you remember we’re only three weeks away from the Autumn Equinox.

Every morning I have this sense of wishing the day would go away and just leave me alone, even though I haven’t had a regular get-up-and-out-of-the-house job (even a part-time one) for over eight years. Life is still there to be dealt with, whether you have somewhere to be by a certain time or not.

I used to have this idea that one day I would find my ‘place’ in the world and when that happened I would wake every morning looking forward to the day ahead. Although I now feel that I am in the best ‘place’ I’ve ever been (or am likely to be), I’ve had to accept that (along with many other things) starting each day full of enthusiasm and positivity is just not in my power.

Why have I started writing like this today? I don’t know, except that maybe I’m not quite so deep in the usual existential despair (or ‘gloom and doom’ as some would colloquially call it) that I can’t step back a little and consider it analytically for once. Is it down to lack of sleep? Probably to some extent, but that begs the more fundamental question of how I can get my body (or rather brain) to sleep any more than it always has, a question for which I’ve never found an answer. A more interesting thought is that this probably explains why so many of these posts tend to be so dark, and the question begged by that is: why try and write at this time of day, when I’m nearly always in a bad mood?

That goes back to advice I read – probably 40 years ago now – in ‘Becoming a Writer’, by Dorothea Brande, a classic from the days before the world became swamped by books of writing advice. The one thing I still remember from this book was to write first thing in the morning, before your conscious brain has a chance to elbow out the subconscious completely. Over the years, I’ve striven to follow that rule, although it’s sometimes led me down some strange alleyways.

And I think it might lead me somewhere now… but I’m nearly at the end of my quota. So I’m going to leave that for now and let it stew till tomorrow.    

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My Two Penn’orth

Chatting on the Dyspraxic Adults Facebook page yesterday evening, I was asked if I was sending my experiences to the All Party Parliamentary Group on dyspraxia. The website says: ‘The inquiry would welcome evidence in particular from: People with lived experience of dyspraxia…’

Seems like a brilliant idea but… the deadline is next Friday. Well, that’s ok, I suppose – I wouldn’t come up with anything better in 6 months than I can in a week, but…

Where to start? Some of the stuff that I’ve already posted on here, I suppose. My experiences and feelings about my life and myself; my efforts to find help/counselling/self help over the last thirty-odd years (and the massive failure of those attempts); the chance that my current therapist had a previous client who was diagnosed as dyspraxic, and the similarity of our tales of woe (short term-memory, time management, untidiness, general chaos etc) prompted her to suggest that I look into it; reading about it on the web and a huge light bulb finally going on in my head; getting the contact details for her previous client’s assessor and getting a formal diagnosis.

I had a rummage through old blogs from early 2014 and found this:

When I was a child and teenager, just the idea that I might have a condition that needed treatment would never have entered anyone’s head, I was just shy, moody and difficult and I needed to get over myself and get on with it. I was 35 when I first went to counselling, and even then my Dad was very sceptical…

I don’t think I’m particularly ‘depressed’ in the sense of having a treatable condition. I just have a personality that people sometimes find disturbing or alienating, but I am who I am and I can’t help that, I’ve been like it since early childhood and my adult experiences have reinforced it. However I have also found ways of getting by – coping strategies – that seem to mask my deep feelings, and people who see only the superficial side of my personality are surprised to discover my underlying inadequacies and insecurity.

I used to think that it was my external circumstances that brought me down, not having a satisfying relationship or job or any deep satisfaction in my life, but I’ve done things to try and change that and I still feel the same – maybe because I still don’t have any of the things I just listed. It’s probably those flaws in my personality that prevent me from being able to have any of those things. I’m aware that all this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I can’t see any way round that.

Counselling seems to end up as regular dumping sessions going around in the same old circles and eventually the counsellors suggest that as I don’t seem to be making any progress we might as well stop. I think I must be the client from hell…

Linda Rushby 24 January 2014

Seems like that could be quite a good start

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Decisions…

I listened to that TED programme about decision making again yesterday. It takes me several goes before I take in what I’m hearing – same with reading, watching telly etc. This has always been the case, but I’ve always taken it for granted. Interesting to learn that it is typical of dyspraxia, and not just because I’m slow and stupid and don’t pay attention, which is what I’ve always believed. Or rather, maybe I am all those things, but there’s an underlying reason for it.

The format of the programme is that they interview people who have made TED talks about whatever the theme is that they’re talking about. One of the contributors yesterday was talking about how ‘hard’ choices are not always ‘big’ choices, and ‘small’ choices are not always ‘easy’. Their definition of a hard choice is where there isn’t a clear distinction between whether one option is better or worse than the other(s) – it may be that they’re all better on some criteria, but not on others. I recognise this problem very well – every day so much of my emotional and mental energy gets sapped by chewing over trivial decisions, because I can’t stop myself going round in circles trying to make comparisons between different factors. When I was a student in the 1970s, the focus was on ‘rational’ decision making, assigning probabilities and utilities to various outcomes and devising models, like cost-benefit analysis, to establish optimal courses of action. I’m glad to see that the field has moved on since then.

Another speaker talked about the importance of ‘committing’ to your choices. If I understand correctly, this is about coming up with a satisfactory explanation for why you made that choice rather than another – satisfactory to yourself, that is. This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, but evidently it makes a real difference to the subjects’ later attitude to the choices that they’ve made.

Just writing that now makes me think that there could be huge ramifications from this, in the ways individuals’ beliefs are formed and solidified. For example, what might it say about people who voted for Trump, or Brexit, and then find themselves having to live with the consequences? It also says something to me about the importance of narrative, or story – the stories we tell ourselves. And what about uncertainty? And unintended consequences? Because of course we can’t always predict the outcomes of our choices, or the likelihood of ‘success’ (however that is defined). And never forget the old cliché about ‘for want of a nail…’, or the more modern version, ‘the butterfly effect’ – what did I say a few weeks ago about banal events that turn out to be surprisingly significant, and momentous events that turn out to be surprisingly banal?

Well, this post started out feeling quite trivial, maybe even flippant, but in the writing it has triggered something in my thoughts, both about how my mind works – how I can never settle on a conclusion – and how the world works generally.

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Going Through the Motions

Going Through the Motions

Get up and do what you always do,
even though your head is full
of all the times it hasn’t worked before;
of all the reasons why it doesn’t work;
of all the many ways it might go wrong;
of all the problems you can’t imagine
until they happen.

You want to run away and hide,
but you’ve tried that before,
and it never worked
so why should it now?

This is life,
this is how it works.
Stumble on,
from one day to the next
and maybe you’ll
get away with it
for one more day.

Linda Rushby 18 August 2020

There was a post on the FB dyspraxia group asking how many members write, and what we write. I started thinking about poems I’ve written down the years which relate to my dyspraxia (even when I didn’t know that’s what it was). They tend to be the ones I don’t share much, because I don’t expect people I know to understand them or like the fact that I’ve written them about myself. The two I first thought of were ‘Cahos’, from 2005 (oh, look at that typo again – I may make that the actual title of the poem from now on) and ‘The Awkward One’ (2017, I think).

I saw the post at bedtime, and started going through my Google drive from my phone looking for the two I’ve mentioned and to see how many more I could find (a very bad idea when I was supposed to be going to sleep). And then when I got up and was doing my morning routine, I came up with the one above.

I could probably fill a whole book, but I doubt it would be very popular. From one point of view, these poems are seething with self-pity, self-loathing and shame – which is why I often keep them to myself. On the other hand, they are also searingly honest, full of pain, sadness, regret, frustration and barely suppressed anger. Both of those descriptions sum up my underlying emotional landscape a lot of the time.

The anger in particular WAS COMING OUT A LOT IN MY THERAPY SESSIONS towards the end of last year (oops, must’ve hit the caps lock without noticing, but that also seems quite appropriate!) I suppose my current task is to learn how to deal with it without turning it onto myself – incredibly hard and stressful, but I am trying.

One way of doing that is to have routines and stick to them even when I really don’t feel like it. Yesterday I skipped my weekly yoga-in-the-park session because I convinced myself it would rain – but then it didn’t. And I felt bad for making that an excuse for my lack of commitment. So I’m trying to deal with that.

I heard a podcast of the TED Radio Show on BBC R4Extra yesterday, about choice and making decisions. I need to listen to it again, then maybe I’ll have something to say about it.

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Along the Way

Back again.

This does feel like a chore. I seem to have slipped back into that demotivated state where I really don’t want to do anything. Maybe it’s the heat – doesn’t help, that’s for sure. That’s quite an odd phrase for me to use: ‘for sure’. Slipping back thirty-odd years into Dallas-speak – maybe it’s the heat – though it’s nowhere near as hot as it was there, but then nobody went outdoors at this time of year, they stayed inside and froze in the air-conditioning.

This morning, doing my exercises in the spare room with the window open, I felt stifled. Usually I have a high tolerance for heat, but this is getting even me down.

Taoism – must’ve been in a pretentious mood the day I mentioned it. How about Existentialism? Let’s throw that into the mix.

My yoga teacher said (a while ago now, must be, because we were in the Community Centre at the time, not the park), that the difference between fate and destiny is that Destiny is the true purpose of your life, what you should be doing if you allow everything to happen as intended (by whom? The Universe, or God, or whoever). But Fate is what happens to you anyway if you’re not following your Destiny. I liked that, I thought it was a nice distinction, even though I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘True Purpose’ to the Universe that underlies everything that happens. Why should that be? I suppose, to my ‘left brain’ (if we want to go back to that cliché) it’s quite clever, because it allows an ‘out’, as positive-thinking based philosophies often do: ‘Oh well, things didn’t turn out the way you wanted or expected, but that’s because you didn’t want it deeply enough, or you didn’t believe in it enough, or because the Universe has a different plan for you, which you can’t see right now, but one day you’ll see why it happened this way.’

Looking back over life, or history, it’s easy to see the Way that brought us here, the turning points, the (sometimes) tiny events that can trigger enormous consequences. We look back, and we construct a pattern (because that’s what humans do), and we can see that, well, that had to happen for this to be the way things are now. But we can’t know what would have happened if that point hadn’t turned, or had turned in a different direction – we can speculate, perhaps, but we can never know.

The example that just popped into my head wasn’t ‘tiny’ at the time – in fact, I’ve always thought of it as a tragedy, until just recently: the fact that my grandmother was widowed with five children at the age of forty – but if she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have moved from Manchester to Cleethorpes, and my parents would never have met – pretty fundamental, from my point of view (and my children’s and grandchildren’s).

More along this thought path another day, perhaps.

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#amwriting, #notwriting – What is the point?

I was quite surprised earlier this week to discover that I was attempting to write 500 words daily as far back as April 2005 – six months before I even started blogging – and possibly even earlier than that (I haven’t gone digging any further back).

Having said that, I just checked the oldest of the clutch of backup CDs that I dug out the other day – dated 2 November 2004 – on which I found a folder called ‘Journal’, containing another folder called ‘October’. I opened the file from 1 October and the first para was as follows:

“Friday, 01 October 2004 There was an interview on Radio 4 last night with Grahame Greene’s biographer, apparently GG used to set himself targets of writing 500 words at a session, don’t suppose what he wrote was drivel, though.”

Somehow the use of the word ‘drivel’ suggests to me that I’d already been writing that journal for some time – I’m not sure any of it’s been preserved for posterity – though there are earlier paper journals lying around. I remember buying A4 lined Pukka Pads from a cheap stationers in Bedford which has long since gone out of business. But I definitely started writing daily at the beginning of 2000.

Well, all that was what I wrote on Saturday, until I got a phone call from a friend asking for help with uploading the current Southsea Storytellers group anthology (‘Flights and Fancies’) to Kindle. As usual, there were a few annoyances where what appeared ok in MS Word didn’t look so good when uploaded, but I went to see him and we managed to sort them out between us (apart from the placing of images on the page, which never works, even in professionally published books). Always another learning opportunity.

When I got back at lunchtime, I didn’t feel like resuming this post, and yesterday I decided to go out for breakfast before going to writing group (which used to be my habit on Sunday mornings). The place where we now meet, by the beach, is different from where we used to, and a cafe en route, which just happens to be one of my favourites, only reopened last week – seemed like a good excuse to skip blogging.

This morning I didn’t want to write about anything at all, but as I’d already got a couple of hundred words from Saturday, I thought I could add to that, and now I’ve done another two hundred justifying why I’ve missed the last two days, I’m on the home straight.

Does this idea of setting a quota every day help at all? I really don’t know. I can feel myself moving towards not writing anything again. Some mornings it just feels so stressful, but it’s not usually so bad once I get started – like everything in life. But once again it raises the perennial question of whether there is any point or value in writing like this, and I honestly just don’t know the answer to that.  

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Tell Me the Old, Old Story

I think I surfaced just about bang on sunrise this morning: 5:40. I went to the window and saw the pink glow creeping over the house roofs, then left the gap in the curtains and went back to bed, watching the colour briefly suffusing the wall. At least it’s sunny – well, it was for most of yesterday too – the rain didn’t last long.

Am I feeling any more sunny this morning? Maybe. Yesterday did not turn out to be a good day. I spent most of the morning digging through old laptops, archived files and a set of data CDs and DVDs which I burnt as part of a back-up system around 2005 and 2006 (amazed myself by finding them, although I knew I’d seen them somewhere recently – well, in the last three years at least). I was looking for photos – a specific photo, in fact – of my cat from October 2005, when we first got her, because yesterday was her fifteenth birthday and I wanted to make a post about it on Facebook, with then-and-now pictures. I did it partly because I suspect she won’t be around to see another birthday, and I am preparing myself for the inevitable letting go, but also because her entry into my life was such a bizarre turning point – and yesterday I not only found the background to her name, which I’d saved in one of those fifteen-year-old files, but my journal entry for the morning of the day we brought her home – before I knew what a shit-storm I was initiating. And that photograph (on one of the back-up CDs), which featured, ten days later, in the first blog post I ever wrote, on a blog called ‘Husband or Cat?’ on a platform which no longer exists.

I could tell that story again. Should I? There are people who know it already – at least one of whom might even be reading this – in essence, at least, even if not in detail. But the details are still there, still documented, still accessible. It’s an odd story, full of drama, and passion, in its way, with a beginning far too implausible for fiction, and an ending… how did it end? Well, I guess – at least, as I’ve said before about all the world-churning choices I’ve made in the last fifteen years, if I hadn’t done what I did, I would never have known how things would turn out if I did, now would I?

I suppose that’s what fiction’s for – to explore the other side of the ‘what if’ – but I don’t have the energy or inspiration for fiction. Maybe that’s why I was compelled to make the choices I did – because it was the only way of finding out? When I think of the dreams and expectations I started with, it’s true that none of them quite worked out as I thought they would, but they shaped my life nonetheless.

I was going to write about writing advice – and Taoism. Another time, maybe.