No post yesterday, because I got up and took a flask of coffee to the beach, arriving a few minutes late for sunrise (but there was low cloud over the sea anyway) and writing in a notebook, which I might or might not copy onto here, but today I’ve got other stuff in my head so will go ahead with that.
One of the songs from my youth that listening to Amazon music has reintroduced me to is ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’ by the Byrds, and now it’s stuck in my head. It starts like this:
‘The river flows, it flows to the sea,
wherever that river goes,
that’s where I want to be.
Flow, river flow,
let your waters wash down,
take me from this road
to some other town.All (s)he wanted was to be free
‘The Ballad of Easy Rider,’ Roger McGuinn & Bob Dylan
and that’s the way it turned out to be…’
Notice how I subtly changed the gender in that second verse? It’s true, all I wanted was to be free, and that is ‘the way it turned out to be’, though not quite the way I might have expected (or even hoped for.) But I’m still very grateful for the way it is – despite the warning from another song of the same era:
‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,
‘Me and Bobby McGee’, Kriss Krisstofferson
nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free…’
…a warning that kept me stuck in a sad but ‘safe’ situation for many years, which has brought another song to mind…
‘How often does it happen that we live our lives in chains
‘Already Gone’, The Eagles
and never even know we have the key?’
But that’s enough soft West coast country-rock from the late 1960s and early 70s for today.
Going to the sea yesterday morning did its magic of lifting my mood. I sat on my usual bench behind the beach café, writing in my notebook, and two people passing by said: ‘you’ve got a good spot there!’, and later on my way home I sat in the Rose Garden and read for a while, and another stranger said the same thing. But when I got home and started trying to tackle a project I’ve started, I had a massive setback which threw me into despair about how useless I am and what a charlatan because people have expectations of me and really I don’t have a clue what I’m doing and am scrabbling all the time to keep going, and everything is ten times harder for me and takes ten times longer than any normal competent person but nobody sees it and I hate myself and I hate being me.
I talked to my therapist in the afternoon about it, this massive fear I have of cocking everything up. She talked about adjusting to not being ‘needed’ any more, but I don’t want to be needed, I don’t want anyone to depend on me, I can’t stand the stress. I want to be free of all that. I want to run away again.