Second poem from yesterday, as mentioned last night on Facebook – written yesterday evening just before I went to bed (I’d had a night cap of Becherovka with my hot chocolate, and was quite merry).
One day I’ll leave this house, walk to the bus stop, catch a train to the city, or anywhere else, under the sea, and into the sunrise.
Or go like a snail, with my home on my back, to the forest, or the marshes, or into the sunset. To friends, and memories, and new beginnings, talking and laughing and dancing and singing.
But today I am here, and here is my home.
Linda Rushby 19 June 2020
What follows is a few lines I jotted into my notebook after I got into bed – they’d popped into my head as I was getting ready for bed, and sort of follow on, but are a bit different. It was actually after midnight at the time, so I added today’s date.
While there are: Books left to read. Words left to write. Waves to listen to. Gulls to fly over me. Songs left to sing. Wine left to drink. Places to return to. New ones to find. I am glad to be here.
The northern hemisphere summer solstice, as you probably know, is usually on the 21st June, but fluctuates because the convention that Earth’s orbit around the sun takes 365 times as long as each rotation is an approximation – the real figure is closer to 365.24, but with the addition of an extra day every four years, it’s a pretty good approximation to keep things consistent within the average human lifetime – though it does go adrift over the centuries, hence the introduction in the Gregorian calendar of another fix to remove a day from three centuries in four – an improvement adopted by the English less than three centuries ago, years after the rest of Europe, and then only with much grumbling, propagation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and rioting in the streets. Plus ҫa change.
There I go again. Nobody likes a smart-arse. But the point is… when I’m doing the Cassandra smart-arse thing, it’s not that I’m trying to show off – well, maybe it is, but only because in the normal run of things, I feel there is so little I can show off about. In the normal run of life I am so chaotic, clumsy, awkward, forgetful, messy, slow, disorganised… dyspraxic. That’s who I am, it’s who I’ve been all my life, and (though I’m not a big fan of putting labels on people) it’s a relief to have a word for it.
When I started seeing my therapist, I told her all this and she began by trying to find a more positive word than ‘chaotic’ (though the one she came up with: ‘ditsy’ – didn’t strike me as an improvement). Like most people I’ve tried to speak to about this, she was making the assumption that it was just a story I was told as a child, and that I’ve been repeating to myself ever since, it’s not who I really am.
One day, after I’d been seeing her for a couple of months, she suddenly said: ‘What you’re saying reminds me of another client I used to see – I think you might be dyspraxic.’ So I looked it up and read the characteristics associated with dyspraxia – and saw myself laid out, even down to strange apparently random things like: not being able to read my own handwriting; lacking confidence in my appearance because I can’t do hair, make-up and have no dress-sense; took years to learn how to ride a bike…
I find it difficult to explain this to people. It sounds like excuses, doesn’t it? I think that’s probably been the problem all my life – I am so conscious of my shortcomings because surely, with a little more effort, I could find ways round them? So I try and fail and get frustrated and hate myself.
Maybe I should come back to this another day. Because what I started to write about was the Cassandra thing, because sometimes it feels as though a head full of useless knowledge is about the only thing that I’m good for.
Out of the corner of my eye I see a shadow. Somewhere in my inner ear I hear a whisper.
Echoes from that long ago, another life, one of the many.
Fears and expectations of the world that was to come, the world that came and went away.
Now here I sit, surrounded by familiar things – this place will also be a memory one day, a passing dream of future, past and present intertwined into the here and now.
The thread that passes through, that binds them all the common centre where they intersect: myself alone.
I was going to try sitting with my anger again this morning, then I got lured into Facebook by two private messages. You get into these conversations and then… you don’t know how to bring them to an end.
Then because I had the browser open to answer the messages, I started looking at the ‘highlights’ which Firefox puts on the page when you open a tab, and some of them look really quite interesting, so today I’ve already opened three… I must stop, I really must, or I won’t be able to write anything.
Well, what can I say, does it matter if I do or don’t write anything? Yes, some days it’s good, some days it’s not. It may be helping with the therapeutic self-understanding process, but it isn’t stimulating me into making progress on any of my three suspended writing projects, or to start anything new. Just more of the same.
It rained in the night, but the sun is starting to come through the clouds now. The outside table and chairs will be damp. What time will it be by the time I’ve finished this and had breakfast? I have no idea. What will I do with the rest of the day? Ditto.
I wonder how I’d be now if I’d carried on taking antidepressants? I started in 2001 – almost twenty years ago – and took them till the end of 2004, though I never felt they helped in any way, didn’t even improve my sleeping (which was why I started taking them). I kept going back to the GP and saying they didn’t help and he told me to take more, till I was taking four a day. I was taking them all the way through the two-year research contract I had from 2001 to 2003, last full time job I ever had, and when the contract ran out I knew there was no future for me in academia, though I kept on applying for jobs for a couple of years more.
In the summer of 2004 I went to see a hypnotherapist, she said she could solve my problems in six sessions. I did feel somewhat better and started to wean myself off the pointless pills. In that time I ducked out of auditioning for ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, and she said that was good because I was ‘learning to say no’, but actually it was because I made the choice not to put myself through the stress and humiliation. Then later when I turned up to help backstage the producer asked why I wasn’t singing, made me promise to audition for the next show, ‘Titanic’, which I did, opened my mouth in front of the panel and what came out was so pathetic that the musical director got cross and made me start again. Completely humiliated – as expected.
So I weaned myself off the antidepressants, and didn’t notice any different, finished at the end of December 2004, joined a meditation group in January 2005
What will I write about today? Therapy day. What will I talk about? I have two blog posts to read out, at least.
Is anything shifting inside my mind? If it is, it’s probably due to the lockdown, which has given me peace and space to be by myself. But it can’t last forever. How will I cope when I have to start engaging with the world again? Well, I have some control over that. When I first moved here I felt I needed to get out and make contact with other people. Now that seems less important. When I was a child I was told that shyness and introspection are things to be conquered, but these days I can see my self-containment as a gift. Am I getting any better at managing my response to and interactions with other people when they do happen? I suspect not, but I’m more comfortable about avoiding them, and less concerned about ‘missing out’. I can look back on memories of happy times with friends without feeling an urgent desire to repeat them – which is a good thing, I see that now. I can have my own happy times,
Trying to explain how I feel about that at this moment, I’m grasping for the right words. Contentment, maybe? No, too mealy-mouthed. Maturity, a feeling that I am on a mountain top, where I can look back and see my life and the things I’ve done, experiences I’ve had and people I have known laid out below me – no that sounds arrogant, which isn’t at all what I mean. Enormous peace that I can be who I am. Gratitude to all those people who have loved me and whom I have loved, forgiveness of those who’ve hurt me and of myself for hurting others, and knowledge that I no longer have to seek after love, but can be whole and by myself. Non-attachment, not detachment.
Well, what a wonderful epiphany for a Thursday morning – one which won’t last, I realise that. But it is there, and might return. I want to sit with this, be bathed in it, but also to keep writing, to complete this task, this daily commitment to myself, if for no other reason than that I can then get dressed and have my breakfast.
I’ve just expanded the sentence about being on a mountain top, and it’s brought back to me a quotation I first read almost fifty years ago, when I was a student and I have to admit I got it from the cover of a Strawbs album, but I think it was originally from Lao Tzu (a name which would have meant nothing to me then). I will have to look it up…
For once Google let me down, but I did manage to find the album on my shelf and scan it in – and lo and behold, it’s from the Buddha. Doesn’t quite say what I wanted though.
Sometimes I break my routine. This morning I skipped my morning practice because I went to Tesco and it was already quite late before I was ready to go so I didn’t want to delay it by another half hour.
On the way back I noticed lots of people had put their green bins out. Green (recycling) bins are emptied alternate weeks, and I was sure it was last week, not this. I keep a card with the dates on by the calendar in the kitchen, but I couldn’t find it in any of the racks, noticeboards or heaps of mail that hang around that area for months on end.
When I came into the study (Miko was on the landing outside waiting for me), I saw the truck in the road outside, and ran back down the stairs, picking up the empty cat food boxes, milk jugs and other recyclable junk lying around in the kitchen, took it out to the bin and wheeled it onto the pavement. That reminds me, I don’t think I took the actual recycling bin, just the overflow, so had better go and check that now. I looked in the neighbour’s bin, and that hadn’t been emptied yet. I now think the truck I saw might just have been the normal truck going through on its way to the next area, because it had been here by the time I got back from Tesco.
Went down and checked the kitchen bin and I hadn’t emptied it, so did so. When I put my wheelie bins out I always leave them with the handles pointing towards the road. Glancing down the street, I noticed (as I have before) that most people seem to leave them the other way round, with the handles up against the wall and the lid opening towards the road. I used to do that, but what happens is the bin men grab the handles to pull them to the truck, so having the handles towards the back must make it harder for them – and it’s also easier for me to just push it to the wall and not have to turn it round. In case you’re wondering why I know so much about it, it’s because I’m usually sitting at my desk looking down on the street at this time in the morning. Actually, it’s more noticeable in the winter, because at this time of year they start bang on seven. The other advantage of leaving the bins the other way is that I like to think it deters people walking past from just dropping unwrapped rubbish into it if it’s left out at night.
There you go, I always say I write a lot about rubbish – today it’s literally true.
I’ve done a lot of delving into the past and the emotional substrata this week. Today I feel quite subdued, I have something to do that I don’t want to. I will get that done then sit in the sunshine.
Yesterday I wrote but didn’t post. Because… I’m not sure why, now. Except I was full of anger.
I still don’t really know how to write about this. But I don’t think that my previous approaches to dealing with the sadness and frustration of various times in my life by trying to forget them and/or blaming myself has been very helpful in the long run. I think I am slowly moving away from the shame/self-blame cycle, but that has unleashed a lot of anger and resentment, as I try to find and understand reasons for why that became my default way of dealing with difficult emotions.
By coincidence, on my Facebook ‘Memory’ feed this morning, up popped a photo of my family which I scanned and posted two years ago, but which was taken when I was twenty, at my niece’s christening: Mum and Dad, my brother and sister and their spouses, my nephew (still not quite two at that time) and the baby, and me. Of course, we are all happy and smiling, as everybody does for family photos (apart from my brother-in-law, who’s just that sort of bloke). I remember the dress I was wearing that day, pale green printed with a pattern of tiny cream roses, very pretty and totally unlike anything else I wore at the time (or do now). I remember buying it with Mum from C&A in Hull (pre-Humber Bridge days, so we must have gone round the long way, because I’m sure we didn’t take the ferry – those were the days, when a shopping trip to Hull was a day out because there were exciting shops like C&A which we didn’t have in Scunny.) Dad must have driven (because Mum never learned how), no doubt under sufferance and with a lot of bickering. But he would have done it because he loved us, even though I don’t ever remember that word being used until decades later, when life and time were drifting away from them both.
That dress later became my interview dress, when I was trying to find my way through to the next stage of my life. I don’t suppose there’s a decent photograph of it anywhere, which is a shame. There I am, just a face, hiding at the back between my brother and brother-in-law, and it seems significant that I was the odd one then, as I am now (though with two broken marriages in between) while both my siblings are still with the same partners, almost fifty years later. ‘Between’ boyfriends, as I usually was, smiling for the camera, but lonely, sad and scared of the future, about to embark on a summer full of heartbreak and a desperate search for love and stability which would precipitate me into my disastrous first marriage.
I weep now for that pretty girl, full of misery and shame rather than hope for the life to come, and quite unable to talk to any of those other people, her ‘nearest and dearest’.
Wrote this yesterday. Didn’t share it – chickened out. I’m sharing it now.
Rejoice, rejoice, We have no choice But to carry on.
Stephen Stills, 1970
Will I be doing my bit to support the economy by going shopping today? Probably not. I’ll stay at home and carry on doing what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months, thank you very much.
This morning I am lost for words, a strange experience for me. Poised on a knife edge between opening myself up and expressing my honest feelings and thinking of something else, less contentious to write about – at the same time as watching on YouTube – really watching for once, not just playing music as a background – Fleetwood Mack performing ‘The Chain’ live, witnessing the rage flashing and crackling around and between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, feeling it entering and reflecting my pre-existing mood of pent-up furious chaotic self-destructive energy.
Why? Why this morning, why today?
‘Where [am I] going now my love? Where will [I] be tomorrow? Will [it] bring me happiness? Will [it] bring me sorrow?
Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams What you do with what you see…
Stephen Stills
Woke up with my usual mixture of shame, self-hatred and despair, but instead of taking the path of trying to calm it down and hush it up, I decided to go the other way and face it all head on, and this is where it gets me. For once I can feel all that anger in my body, not just think it in my head.
This was happening in my therapy sessions towards the end of last year, when we were still meeting in person. Every week I would come into the room with whatever was in my mind, but before the end of the session I would be screaming and grinding my teeth and smacking my fists against the arms of the chair to stop myself from smacking them into the side of my head.
It would be easy to put this down to the repressed frustration and anger of a child whose voice was never heard; whose questions were met with impatience if not downright anger; whose feelings were never acknowledged without disapproval; who learnt that those feelings of sadness and loneliness and inability to mix with other children or interact with adults were her own fault, a wilful failure to play the ‘happy little girl’; who lived in a world of confusion, constantly trying to anticipate what was wanted of her, never knowing when she might unwittingly overstep some implicit boundary and suffer the consequences.
Maybe that is a true story, maybe not. I honestly don’t know. In last week’s therapy session, I said that I’m sure there must have been happy times in my childhood, but I can’t remember them, which to me feels very shameful, my failing that I should be so unfair on my parents, but the therapist’s reaction was that it was very sad.
After sixty years, after multiple attempts to resolve these questions, can I ever find a way out?
I rounded off my post yesterday by saying flippantly: I guess the real lesson is: don’t get caught up in stuff on Facebook. But for once I’m really glad I did just that, because it’s opened up a whole area that I can write about.
People (specifically at the moment my therapist, but in the past my brother) have asked me why I’m so open on my blog, why I share so much of myself on social media, why I don’t just write a diary and keep it private. I’ve thought about that myself, because of course it can be risky, the sorts of risks I’m not prepared to take in face-to-face conversation (maybe not equipped to, because I can never think fast enough to be able to speak my responses). Yes, sometimes I get irritated, often frustrated that meanings which seem clear when they leave my brain don’t enter someone else’s in the same way, and depressed when there’s no response at all. But occasionally there’s a spark of something that maybe leads somewhere else, to something interesting. Nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without some risk.
We always assume that other people think the same way we do because we can’t imagine any other way. I only started thinking about the visual/verbal thing when I shared an early draft of Single to Sirkeci with a couple of artist friends. One commented: ‘You don’t paint pictures in the reader’s head’. I was upset because I thought, well, I’ve only got what I wrote at the time, if I didn’t describe the places I saw when I saw them how am I supposed to do anything about that now? I got round the problem by looking at my photos and describing what I saw in them, but it opened up a whole conversation about visual memory, and how can you describe something you saw two years ago? I can’t even tell you what colour the door of the house opposite is painted, even though I see it every day (it’s black with two glass panels and a silver coloured knocker, if you’re interested – I just checked through the window).
Returning to the Facebook discussion, something that amazed me was people talking about imagining scents and tastes. How is that even possible? I’ve thought about describing scents and I can’t find any words – other than very basic ones like ‘sweet’ and ‘pungent’ – which don’t compare them to other scents – how would you describe the scent of a rose to anyone who had never smelt one? (‘Sweet and flowery’? How does it differ from lilac?) Or coffee, fresh bread, smoke, shit… you might describe a scent as being ‘like’ any of those things, but you can’t really create them in the mind of someone who’s never smelt them. As I sit here I can sort of conjure up the scent of, say, coffee, but only with an effort.
Mmm, coffee – maybe something is reminding me that it must be time for breakfast.
Things in my head today, I don’t know if I want to share them or not – not because they’re angry or shameful thoughts that potential readers might be offended or shocked by, just because they’re so incoherent, not sure if I can knock them into any sort of shape.
In the last few days I have seen one post on Facebook asking if people ‘hear voices in their heads’ when they think, and another two where you look at images and depending on what you see tells you if you’re predominantly ‘right brain’ or ‘left brain’ To deal with the right/left tests and get that out of the way, the first one told me I was ‘left’ brained and the second that I was ‘right’ – which says more about the kind of tests that get posted on FB than anything important to do with my brain.
The discussion on thinking styles was more interesting, but in the end I stepped away, even though this is something I have given a lot of thought to in recent years, because I could feel myself getting frustrated and irritated. One friend made a very good point about it illustrating how little we are able to understand what goes on in other people’s heads. It’s a few years now since the conversation I had when I told a friend that I don’t ‘see’ things in my head (unless I make a deliberate effort to do so), but that my mind is full of words, a constant narrative. I’d always assumed that that was what ‘thinking’; meant, that it’s about the words and concepts in your head, but he spoke to me as though it was a kind of disability, an affliction that marked me out from the rest of the world.
In the FB exchange there were some contributors who, like me that day, were just shocked at the idea that anyone could think any other way than with words. Others started talking about having multiple voices, ‘hearing’ accents, even linking it to schizophrenia, although to me it’s not about ‘hearing’, it’s not a voice, it’s just more like a voice-over or continuous narrative.
Someone else was sceptical because, she said, the internal narrative couldn’t be ‘continuous’, it’s always possible to stop thinking. I thought about my years of meditation – I won’t say I’ve never had any moments of a completely empty mind – but it takes effort and practice and even then it’s incredibly difficult and frustrating. The same person said she wondered if verbalisers (I hate inventing labels, but don’t know how best to express it) can feel any pleasure in reading fiction if they can’t picture the characters – I wanted to scream, because fiction is all about the story, and what are the building blocks of stories if not words? It made me think perhaps this is why I prefer radio to the telly, and reading to Youtube.
I guess the real lesson is: don’t get caught up in stuff on Facebook.
