Category: writing

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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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Dyspraxia and Social Anxiety

Words churning through my head… they are always there, a continuous monologue/narrative – sometimes a dialogue, even a full-blown row. Is that dyspraxia related or something else? It is there when I wake in the early hours, it keeps me awake, I am exhausted but can’t sleep. It is there in the daytime, it churns around and around, I can’t focus, I can’t settle, I can’t concentrate because I am exhausted because I don’t sleep at night.

Is this dyspraxia? I know dyspraxia is responsible for the time I waste looking for the glasses/phone/keys/wallet/cup of coffee or whatever that I put down somewhere 30 seconds ago. That’s exhausting too. Dyspraxia means I have to read everything at least twice, three times, or more before it starts to sink in. It means I often don’t take in what’s been said to me without that being repeated, too, and often I just forget anyway, which means I panic when someone does speak to me and I can’t think what to say in reply, so even if dyspraxia is not directly related to social anxiety, it exacerbates it.

Sometimes I struggle to know what to say, then think of it too late, or I think of something I could say and I want to say it there and then, and I say too much then get angry with myself. When I’m in a group sometimes I’ll think of something to say but can’t get a word in edgeways, or when it comes to my turn I’ve forgotten it or thought better of it and someone says: ‘I think Linda has something to say’ but I just say ‘it’s ok, it doesn’t matter, it wasn’t important’ even if it was. Once someone who had been facilitating a group I was in said to me: ‘promise me that the next time someone interrupts you, you won’t apologise’. If I know I’m right about something (factually) and I say it I expect people to accept it, and if they don’t I get frustrated. I hate arguments, I won’t say anything which I think the other people will disagree with.

I apologise constantly, which ironically most people find very irritating. Usually when something goes wrong, even if I’m not completely responsible, I can trace it back to some contributing factor that’s down to me, and so I apologise for that. It’s easy to assume I’m responsible, because I do so many stupid, clumsy or thoughtless things. Apologising is my way of trying to compensate for all those things I do that inconvenience others, but it often doesn’t deflect anger, but rather makes it worse – this used to happen a lot with my parents. If my apologies are not accepted I feel trapped, because I don’t know what else to do, so I get frustrated, ashamed and angry – and I always turn anger onto myself. I can forgive other people but never myself, because I’m not in control of their behaviour, but I feel that I should be able to control my own.

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The Next Fifty Years in 500 Words

I can’t use anything of what I wrote yesterday. I was trying to explain how I became who I am – as far as I understand it. But what’s the point of that? It’s only the pattern I’ve imposed on my memories from the context of where I am now.

How can I untangle how I feel about myself and the life I’ve lived and what part of that is down to dyspraxia and what is just who I am? Dyspraxia is all the frustrating, annoying, depressing, heart-sinking little stupid things that happen all day, every day. I have always known I was worthless. This is not new because I have suddenly discovered an explanation for it – it was always there.

I could carry on describing the last fifty years – university; struggling to find a job, failing interview after interview; rushing into marriage because someone asked me and I thought this was the only chance I would have to avoid going back and living with my parents; marriage broke down within two years; more shame, more guilt, more failure, all piled on  top of who I was, because of who I was; getting a job and working at it for nine years; marrying again and giving up my job at the age of 30 to become an ‘ex-pat wife’, not knowing that that would be the last full-time permanent job I would ever have; babies and post-natal depression and loneliness and coming home; getting a chance to do a PhD and thinking this would transform my life, then afterwards finding that at the age of 43 with a 13 year gap on my CV, still no one wanted to employ me despite my qualifications; more failed applications and interviews and a string of part-time admin jobs; breakdown of my second marriage, feeling trapped because I couldn’t earn enough to support myself so I felt obliged to stay; finally leaving to live on my own at the age of 54, happy to be living on my own at last, but still financially dependent on my ex – as I still am, living on a share of his pension – more guilt, more shame. After three years trying to create a new life, trying to find more permanent work, doing more training (web design), trying to write, trying to start a design/publishing business, I used money from the divorce settlement to go travelling across Europe, planning to write a book about it and support myself. Came back with even less chance of ever getting another job – did a TEFL course in Prague but couldn’t find teaching work without experience (and anyway I was a terrible teacher because of my lack of social skills and inability to explain myself). Used my share of the proceeds from the sale of the marital home to buy a house on the south coast and retire on my ex husband’s pension, where I am now, looking back over a lifetime of repeated failure, depression and self-loathing, and failing to write.

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Early Years

This is the opening I’ve written for my submission to the APPG inquiry into dyspraxia. I know it will need editing – and the post is longer than usual, because I’ve included a poem.

I was born in 1954, and at the time of writing I am 66. I was diagnosed with dyspraxia less than two years ago, in October 2018, and am still coming to terms with understanding it and how it may have affected my personality and experience of life.

I am the youngest of three children, with a sister (six years older) and a brother (four). I’m sure my parents loved me and did their best for me as they saw it, I don’t think I was ever abused, physically or sexually, but I struggle to find any happy recollections of my childhood. I felt as though my parents and siblings belonged to a closed world of ‘big people’, a perfect family unit of four, but that somehow I was the odd one out, a spare part, surplus to requirements.

I was a shy and timid child, and found it hard to make friends. I was always small for my age and late in reaching puberty. All this made me ripe for bullying – not so much the physical kinds, but the verbal, psychological kind, mostly from other girls, but also from my brother and his friends (unlike me, he was charming and popular, and still is), occasionally my father, and later my brother-in-law. If I complained, I was told: ‘you’ve got no sense of humour’, ‘it’s only a bit of fun’ or ‘don’t take any notice and they’ll give up’. Somehow, it wasn’t the teasing that was a problem – it was my response to it.

Maybe none of this is directly related to dyspraxia, but it is part of the emotional landscape of my childhood. More significantly I was untidy, forgetful, clumsy, ‘cack-handed’ and constantly in trouble at home for all those reasons. I learned to be ashamed at a very early age, and it was constantly being reinforced. Sometimes it felt very unfair, and I became resentful and sulky, for which I was criticised even more. Two years ago, my brother gave me a present – a tee shirt with the slogan: ‘The third child is always the difficult one’. Oh how we laughed.

I was academically bright, always in the top stream, and in 1965 I passed the 11-plus and followed my siblings to the local grammar school. However, although I enjoyed learning, I don’t think I ever really ‘shone’ at school – maybe because due to my shyness I didn’t engage in class. I don’t remember any teachers taking a particular interest in me or encouraging me, even though (perhaps because) I rarely did anything to cause trouble. I was terrible at practical subjects and sport, but I got on with my academic work quietly, if a little slowly, and slipped under the radar. I was always a ‘good’ girl – except at home, where I was evidently nothing but a trial to my parents.

Here’s a poem about that time which I wrote a couple of years ago:

The Awkward One

I never learned to smile.
I never learned to play the happy fool,
to put them at their ease,
to read their minds.

So I became
the awkward one,
the difficult one.
I learned to be alone.
I never learned to make a friend,
I never learned the way
to make them love me.

I hated mirrors, and cameras,
I hated the plain, sulky face
they showed me.
I knew that face,
with its curtain of straggly hair,
and that skinny body,
would never be loved.

I never learned to turn on the charm.
I had no charm.
I never learned to play the game.
I turned inside myself,
became invisible,
played my own game.

© Linda Rushby 25 March 2017
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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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Foxes in the Night

Two nights ago I went to bed leaving the side door open – not by accident, but because I didn’t know where my cat was, and I suspected she might still be outside (this was the last night before the heatwave broke). There’s no way for anyone to get to the side door without going through multiple gardens and over connecting fences and walls, so I wasn’t unduly worried about security. I usually try to get her to stay in at night, but I’d been out in the dark garden for a few minutes calling her name, and I just wanted to get to bed, so for once I left the door open.

Not long after I’d dropped off, I woke up to sounds of scuffling and unearthly screeching. I went back down again and this time found her on one of the kitchen chairs, so I closed the door, happy to know she was safe, and went back to bed.

I slept again, and the next time I woke, Miko was sitting on the bed and staring at the window, and the foxy scuffling noises were much louder and closer. I went over to the window and watched a shape or shapes in the shadows under the wall at the end of the garden, running back and forth and calling. Then it came out onto the middle of the lawn, where the light was a bit better and I could see it more clearly, running a few steps, rolling over on the ground, jumping up and running again, and so on. It all looked very weird, and I wondered if there was something wrong with it – could it have been poisoned? Then I remembered my daughter’s dog once fishing some cat poo out of the litter tray and rolling in it all over the front room carpet – the behaviour looked very similar.

I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I read some more of the book I mentioned, the one where someone is killed 50% in, far enough for them to appear alive again at 60%. This didn’t surprise me – though I had thought they’d stay dead for a bit longer – maybe till 75-80%. That’s an advantage of a first-person narrator – you can show their grief because at that point they genuinely believe the person is dead, and hence make it appear more convincing.

I’m still enjoying it, although there are a few odd time inconsistencies – like the post lady turning up just before dark. The detailed references to various parts of London which I’m not familiar with sound quite convincing, but the casual mentions of frost and snow, as though they’re normal in winter, make me wonder whether the author has actually lived in London during the last thirty years.

I keep thinking about plots which are written to that formula which I’ve heard about a lot of times this year, and I’m reminded of a book I read earlier, just before lockdown.

Maybe I’ll finish reading it today.