Category: blogging

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Monday Morning

Back here again. Why? Because half the time I swear I’ve given up for good and then one morning I think I might try again. Just this once. On the understanding that it’s the same old nonsense and, basically, a complete waste of my time writing and yours (whoever you are) for reading it.

But we both still have a chance. You can stop right here – or I could, in which case you wouldn’t have the chance either way, because obviously I wouldn’t bother to post this. But I probably won’t – stop, that is. Though with another potential 400 words… Who knows?

It’s nine o’clock now (I went to the Co-op before starting) and it’s Monday. Does that mean I can play music without worrying about disturbing the neighbours? There again, they might work shifts, for all I know.

Okay, now I’m playing Roxy Music’s ‘Flesh and Blood’, that being the first cassette I pulled out of the shoebox at random that I haven’t already transferred to the PC. Still haven’t done anything about replacing the stylus on my turntable.

Reached the second track, ‘Oh Yeah’, and the sound quality is pretty awful. I have the original album somewhere, so if I get my finger out and do something about that stylus, I can play that. But I still feel a bit wary about playing these old albums – they’ve been kept for all these years and moved from place to place, and maybe it’s all been a waste of time because they’re ruined anyway.

Next track, ‘Same Old Scene’, isn’t much better.

How do I manage to do anything? Repetition, routine, and constant self-bullying. I bullied myself into going to the Co-op this morning. I bullied myself into putting the shopping away when I got back, and starting a ‘to-do’ list. The weight of the things I don’t do is always in my head, because I’m always thinking about them, except the times when I let myself off and sit in the sun or listen to the radio and/or crochet. Or else I’m thinking about other things, worse things, that I’ve read or heard or people have said or done to me that make me angry or sad or hopeless.

I think constantly about these things, but never do anything – worse, the thinking itself is completely aimless and futile, it’s not even as if by thinking I ever produce a coherent plan of action which I then proceed to complete. Except – well, I did start making that to-do list. If I completed some of those things, I suppose I’d be happier. But a more reliable way of becoming happier is by quietening the thinking – and the way to do that is by doing things that make me happy directly – like sitting in the sun, listening to the radio, and/or crocheting – all of which I may do later after I’ve had breakfast.

The second side of the album sounds better than the first one did.

Think it’s time for breakfast.

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No Answers

What am I doing? If I censor myself to write only what I think people want to read, can I write at all?

Round and round in the same old circles. I sit and stare at the colourful icons across the bottom of the screen.

I feel as though I could go back to sleep. Maybe I could – it’s nine o’clock now, so I’ve been awake for about four hours. But if I went and laid my head down on the pillow – which I can’t anyway, because my hair’s wet – no, I won’t, I’d just spend another frustrating hour or so lying on the bed wanting to sleep and then feel like I’d wasted the morning.

Earlier, when I was doing my yoga/tai chi/sitting practice, I had a line from a song stuck in my head: ‘and I, I have no answers…’ I had no idea where it was from, or who, or how it went on from there (except that I knew there was some awkward phrasing in the next line). So I’ve just googled it – which didn’t help much, because do you know how many songs include the phrase: ‘no answers’? My search threw up a link to a web page listing songs with that phrase in the lyrics – 12,414 of them. But while scrolling through them, I had a flash of memory which told me it was called ‘A Thousand Roads’ and it’s by David Crosby. Then I remembered when I discovered it, which was about ten years ago, because it was when I was living in my flat in Bedford – and I remembered blogging about it then. I still couldn’t remember that awkward next line, so went back to Google, and it’s: ‘I’ve got no patented path to set you free’ – it was the ‘patented path’ bit that didn’t sound right when sung – iffy meter, stress in the wrong place.

Well, that has taken up most of today’s quota, I’ve managed to skate away from the angst again. Who can I share my angst with? No one. No one wants to deal with my angst, ever (unless I pay them). I’m stuck with it, first thing in the morning, every morning – well, most mornings.

I want to play that David Crosby song – on Youtube, because I haven’t got it anywhere. But yesterday I was playing music while I wrote, because all week I’ve been digitising my old cassettes and transferring them to the PC – and while I’m doing that I have the volume turned on so I know when it finishes, and also because I want to hear these songs I haven’t heard for years. But then someone in the equivalent room next door started playing music, and it occurred to me that they could probably hear mine too, and not everybody is up and about at this time in the morning, especially at the weekend, and I don’t want to piss off my neighbours.

Once again, I’ve managed to fill 500 words with non-contentious rubbish.

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Control

I finished yesterday’s post with a rhetorical question – which I intended to continue today – I remember that, but I can’t remember what it was. Excuse me while I have a quick check…

…

‘Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many ideas about how my life should have been (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?’

Ah right, yes, that is what I was going to write about. It’s been in my head quite a lot and I thought I had an answer…

The main one, I think, is that that is the only one of the four which is still within my control. I could argue over whether any of them are realistically feasible, but I’m not going there today, beyond saying that all of them rely on huge amounts of luck, but also, more significantly, on other people – potential lovers, potential employers, potential clients. One thing I have learnt to accept in life is that any situation where I have to persuade or convince anyone else is stressful, unlikely to end well for me and hence best avoided.

But I can write. I can even ‘publish’ – even if it’s only posting these daily 500 word mini-essays about this, that and nothing in particular, it’s still publication in the sense of putting it into a public space where anyone with access to the internet can potentially read it. I can even go further, I can gather my words together and dump them into e-books, or have them printed into paperbacks which I can put on my shelves with my name on the spines. The technologies and processes are all at my fingertips.

A couple of years ago I met a life coach who suggested I visualise writing a best-seller, then plan the steps to get there. I don’t really know why I reacted the way I did, but I got very angry – she was trying to help me, but setting extremely unrealistic aspirations just seems frustrating and depressing, not motivating, as far as I’m concerned. I suppose it’s the tired old chestnut about the glass of water again – the significance of the gap seems overwhelming compared to that of the contents.

What I really long for is that buzz of excitement from creating a world in my head, finding out what’s going to happen next, bringing it all together. There really is nothing in the world quite like it – except the buzz of intellectual discovery, the moment when the ideas interconnect and click together and suddenly some small part of the world makes sense in a way it didn’t before – I’ve felt that too, but not for many years.

So, all I can do is to keep going, doing what I can, not being distracted by what I can’t. Letting go of expectations, and letting the words take control.

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More Stuff About Writing

I didn’t post on here yesterday, but I wrote a very short piece about my first love, inspired by hearing Donovan’s ‘Catch the Wind’ on Amazon music the previous evening, and I posted it, with a link to the song, on the blog for my regular writers’ group, with an automatic link to their Facebook page, which I then shared on my timeline and another FB writers’ group. It seemed appropriate because it was sort of a short story, or at least fast fiction (though it wasn’t fiction – is there such a thing as ‘fast memoir’? There is now.)

I can’t seem to get my head round how to link the WordPress blogs together, though they’re both set up to share on FB and Twitter. I think it might be something to do with this blog, like my other two (yes, there are three altogether, though I don’t write to the other two any more) being self-hosted. I also have a WordPress.com blog, from about ten years ago, that has hardly anything on it, because I realised I could (in theory) get a better Google ranking by having it on my domain name. But my WordPress.com identity is still out there, though under my married name.

Three members of the writers’ group are registered on the group blog, but only two of us ever post to it, though when I set it up I sent an email invitation to all the members. I guess they don’t know what to do with it – probably not helped by the fact that I set it up immediately before the lockdown, so we didn’t have a meeting at which I could give a demo. We don’t use the Facebook page very much either, although we have two collections of stories and poems under our collective belt (‘Southsea Soup’ and ‘Of Life and Love’), and a third, ‘Flights and Fancies’, coming out imminently. (I’m currently proof reading, but have already managed to knock a cup of coffee over my copy).

Sometimes I think it might be fun to get a bit more pro-active with all of this, but then…

IF I do start writing properly (and I’m not saying I will, that depends on what sort of inspiration comes to me, if any), it will probably be more memoir to start with – specifically, ‘The Long Way Back’, the first half of which is largely done, and the first draft of the rest, except – guess what? – I don’t know how to end it.

A friend commented (on Facebook) about my previous post that she has two novels that will never be finished, but she doesn’t ‘beat herself up’ about it. So why do I? Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many idealised dreams about how my life ‘should be’ (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?

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Thinking, Writing, Writing, Thinking

What I write here is whatever pops into my head, and that’s all I can write.

How many times have I said that? Yeah, I know, a lot, I keep droning on about it. What am I doing wrong? I used to think that as long as I kept writing every day, something miraculous would happen , and I’d find a way of being able to write ‘properly’, to think up stories, to go back to my novel and finish it. But it doesn’t work, so why am I still doing this?

‘Oh, you have to write through all that shit’ people tell me. That’s easy for them – maybe they only have a small amount of shit to get through. For me, it seems there is no getting to the other side.

‘Write another story like that one’ someone said to me yesterday, referring to ‘Eagle Flight’, which has just gone into ‘Flights and Fancies’, the upcoming Southsea Storytellers anthology. And yes, it’s a good story, I agree, one that I wrote about twelve years ago. But how did I write it? Where did it come from?

The answer to that is that it was inspired by an object (a soapstone eagle) which was used for an exercise in a creative writing class, and worked up into a story for an end of term assessment. If I dig around I might be able to find the tutor’s comments, but obviously in those days they were all handwritten on the hard copy.

Just before the lockdown started, I went to another creative writing course, with similar exercises to stimulate writing. I went to the four sessions and brought the material home and haven’t looked at it since. A friend invited me to join a writing group on Facebook which has regular prompts, and I’ve done nothing for that either, bar sharing a couple of poems.

I don’t engage with any of this any more, and I haven’t for years. Why do I still hang on to this tiny, frayed thread of an idea that I might ever be ‘A Writer’? Why do I even want to? I am very late writing this morning, and I almost didn’t bother at all. It’s stressful. I’m stressed enough, worrying about parcel deliveries and my sick cat, how can I get medicine down her to help her appetite when she won’t eat anyway? Worrying about so many things, most of them not so important in the scheme of things but they still need to be dealt with, they require action, and action requires thought and decisions and plans and comparisons of the best way to do them and then energy to get on and do whatever it is.

And I want to run away, not necessarily to another geographical place, but into an emotional place where I can be and let other things be and not have to think about making up stories or whether I can write or not or if it’s worth trying.

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Zoom Singing

I wasn’t going to write. I lay in bed telling myself that I didn’t have to write today. But here I am.

I didn’t write yesterday about the choir meeting on Friday. There were 43 participants and some of those were couples, so probably just under fifty people (about half the full choir) logged in I’m sure lots of people enjoyed it, but for me the singing part was truly awful. Because the way it works is that you can’t hear the other people singing, everyone is on mute apart from the musical director, so all you can hear is his instructions and the keyboard, and you sing your part along with that. For a start, I hadn’t realised that there was a link to the sheet music and audio files in the email, so I wasn’t prepared. The music was shared on the screen, but I couldn’t see it well enough to read without having to scroll round it all the time. We did two songs: ‘Panis Angelicus’ and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, both of which I know (though I didn’t know the alto part for Over the Rainbow). I had got the music for ‘Panis Angelicus’ because we were rehearsing it for the Easter concert when lockdown started, so I was able to follow that, and I have sung it before, but as soon as I opened my mouth all that came out was a horrible scratchy squeak. Horrible. It was like being before an audition panel, except that no one could hear me – which is strange, if you think about it, because if no one can hear why would that make me nervous? The thing is, I can’t read music, so I’m dependent on picking up on the voices of the other people singing the same notes, whether that’s the whole choir or just the other ladies in the alto section. Even ‘Over the Rainbow’ – which I used to sing to my kids when they were little, so you’d think I’d know it – was a struggle, because if I sing it by myself it doesn’t matter if I’m in the wrong key, and anyway, as I said, I didn’t know the alto part.

Well, that’s what I should have written about yesterday, only I didn’t feel like it, and today… Today I was originally going to write about anger, how angry I am with everything, with the state of the country, with the state of the world, with everything, with myself. I’d be angry with God if I believed in him/her/it, but of course I don’t, so that’s someone I can’t blame.

On Facebook yesterday I saw a Wordsearch, and the instructions were to share the first three words you noticed because that says something about you. The first two I saw were: ‘One’, and ‘Lesson – I was intrigued to find out what this ‘one lesson’ was – and then I saw ‘Strength’. Oh great. So is that a lesson I’ve learned, or one I need to learn?

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Trying Not Trying

After I’d submitted my post yesterday, I realised I wasn’t happy with what I’d posted. At some point I’d slipped into the idea that my self-reflection (or wallowing, as it can also be called) was a kind of addiction. But this buys into my brother’s idea that I get a kick out of being miserable, and want to bring everyone down to my own level, as though unhappiness is a choice that I make and that I can stop any time I like – well, okay that does make it sound addictive, I can see where that idea came from. But it’s not quite what I meant, and I don’t want to be misunderstood, and I want to apologise to anybody who has to deal with the consequences of a chemical addiction, either their own or somebody close to them, and I’m sorry for any hurt or offence I may have caused by that analogy.

I know when I had the thought that triggered that post, the evening before, it made a different kind of sense, and it seemed very clear (as they always do), but now I just can’t think what it could have been.

Now I’m sitting here and I thought everything would come, but it isn’t. Staring out of the window at the early morning street, which seems no more or less busy than it has at any time in the last four months while I’ve been doing this regularly.

I sat on the bed this morning as I always do when I’m getting up, and noticed that although I was only inches away from the mirror, I wasn’t looking at it. I’ve said a lot about that mirror recently, but, as I realise now, I don’t actually look at it. Mostly I look at the floor, or I don’t look anywhere. Looking at my own reflection is a conscious choice, and mostly I choose not to. I remember sitting and looking at myself one morning – I think it was at the therapist’s suggestion, it feels like a long time ago, when we were still meeting face to face, but I also remember writing about it – I think the idea was to encourage compassion for myself, but what I remember was that it made me cry uncontrollably – not because I didn’t like the way I looked (although of course I don’t) but because of the misery and the pointlessness and emptiness in my eyes. I haven’t tried it again since, and I didn’t try it this morning.

Does accepting myself mean accepting all my failures? Does redefining ‘failure’ as ‘a learning experience’ make any sense if there’s nothing new to learn, or nothing that you can see and implement other than: ‘stop trying’? I’ve tried to make myself a ‘better’ person and it highlighted my faults and made me stressed and anxious and even more self-hating than I already was. Now I’ve stopped trying I’m probably becoming a worse person, but I’m trying not to care so much.

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Little Failures

Years ago, I was thinking of the things I wanted to exclude from my life – as if I could wish them away – and came to the conclusion that they boiled down to: loneliness and fear. Since then, I have come to appreciate solitude, and recognise that for me, fear (like hell) is mostly about other people. These last three months of lockdown have thrown that into a clear perspective for me. Now I have to start thinking about how I negotiate going out and interacting in the future – returning to the ‘real’ world. I’m in no hurry, though I have been to one socially-distanced outdoor yoga class (I found an excuse not to return last week), and I’ve been semi-invited to coffee at an outdoor café with members of a group I used to meet regularly. Maybe I’ll go – if the weather’s okay. I don’t know yet, it’s a couple of days away.

Looks sunny this morning, but I won’t be rushing to the beach – even in a normal summer, I avoid it at weekends. Be nice if I can sit in the garden though.

I wrote yesterday about the big things that have been missing from my life: professional career, satisfactory relationship; financial independence and writing…That last one is weird, I don’t know how to explain it, because clearly at the moment I am ‘writing’ every day, and if I say ‘writing success’, it will sound as though I mean mega sales, but that’s not what it’s about. Nor is it just ‘completing a book’, because I’ve done that, and got as far as self-publishing – which impresses some friends who don’t realise how easy it is. More sales would help, of course, but probably wouldn’t encourage pride in what I’ve written.

Well, as often happens, my writing is taking a different turn from what I’d planned this morning. I was going to set aside the big failures – the ones I have to live with and let go – and talk about the little ones that constantly trip me up – the daily ones that grind me down, and are probably responsible for my inability to achieve any of the big ones. But now I’ve started to write my mind has gone into a fog of wordlessness about all that shit. Although I’m slowly coming to recognise them more and more clearly, I still can’t see a way of explaining them without being misunderstood. And that’s part of the problem – my inability to explain myself in ways that make sense to anyone else. That’s one of the ‘little failures’ that I’m talking about. What else? Inability to make decisions; fear of expressing opinions that other people might disagree with; forgetfulness (the big one); inability to absorb instructions and implement them; conversely, inability to give instructions to others; untidiness and inability to self-organise; lousy time management; procrastination; lack of motivation, lack of empathy; all that stuff. In other words: dyspraxia.  

Inability to see any value, or take any pride, in anything I do.

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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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Remembering Cannes

No romantic poetic thoughts about the French Riviera last night. When I was in Cannes in 2012, I remember it struck me as tacky, over-privileged, overcrowded, superficial, artificial. I spent a lot of time there in McDonald’s, home-from-home of the American teenager, using the free wifi to work out my onward plans and arrangements. Maybe I should have gone to Nice, as a friend recommended, for the flower market and the Matisse (or is it Cezanne?) museum, but for some reason I thought Cannes would be more ‘classy’ – when it was just more expensive.

But I must have done something other than sit in McD’s getting stressed over Google, surely? There was the flea market, I remember that. I walked up a hill to a chapel with a view, a posing pigeon, a sexy photographer, a statue of an oddly grinning Madonna and child, and a museum which was closed for lunch, so I ate chocolate and drank water in the garden instead. How do I remember all this? Because I wrote it down at the time for my blog, then used it (or at least re-read it) when I was editing ‘Single to Sirkeci’. I even have a photo of the statue somewhere, which is why I remember her odd expression. Also one of the posing seagull – it wasn’t a pigeon, see, my memory’s not that good – although my alliteration is admirable. I ate crepes on the promenade, had a fabulous Provenҫal seafood dinner on my last night there (onward travel arrangements and accommodation having been confirmed) and swam in the sea. It was the vernal equinox – or thereabouts.

By the summer solstice, I hadn’t quite made it to Norway, as planned, but was in Berlin, in freezing cold and driving rain, sheltering in the national art museums, poring over an exhibition of Goya’s engravings of horror and war. And eight years ago today, where was I then? From the ‘memories’ of Lübeck and Flensburg that popped up on Facebook a few days ago, I guess I would have reached Copenhagen by now. Yes, I am lucky to have those memories, lucky that I wrote them down, and I should probably finish off that book with the later ones.

What was I thinking about when I woke up? Trying to remember what I’d been dreaming about, whatever that was. Then the usual probably. Or remembering Cannes, which would explain why I wrote about it just now.

Life is a story that we tell ourselves, over and over, and maybe it changes with each retelling, because how would you know? I seem to remember writing, somewhere on my travels, about how life distracts from writing and writing distracts from life, how they feed on one another and interfere with one another in an incestuous, abusive relationship – or maybe that’s not how I put it, maybe that’s what I thought just now.

One thing I know for sure, we can never know the ending of our life-story until it’s too late.