Category: life

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Here We Go Round Again

So far this week: last yoga class before lockdown; last tai chi class before lockdown; last trip out in the van before lockdown. I mentioned last week about my yoga teacher being homeless and having to cancel classes – the next day she sent a text to say that someone had offered her a lift, then came the lockdown announcement, so there was a class on Monday evening, and ditto the tai chi yesterday morning, after which I picked up my camper van from the garage and drove to Queen Elizabeth Country Park on the A3 near Petersfield, and had a walk among the trees and a picnic. I love taking the van there, because there are car parks spread among the trees, often empty (on weekdays when I usually go), so although you can’t actually camp, you can get some of the feeling for a few hours.

The weather has turned dry and sunny but noticeably colder than it was, and today looks to be about the same, with a clear blue sky. I really should get out and do some tidying up in the garden, I tried cutting the hedge on Monday but the trimmer kept cutting out. Because it stopped and later started again, it had to be a loose wire. I took apart the connector that joins it where I cut through the cable in the spring, unscrewed the little screwy things inside, couldn’t see anything obviously loose, then got into a horrible dyspraxic muddle trying to put it back together and gave up for the day.

I read some more of ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, this time about creative blocks. The author suggests the usual things: keep trying, don’t self-edit, do a little every day, expect to fail, but keep going anyway. This is what I’ve been doing forever. Back to the old question of whether it matters that it never gets me anywhere? Apparently, it doesn’t. Either one day a miracle will happen and I’ll suddenly start writing something worthwhile, or I’ll be gone and someone will come along and wipe my hard drive and that will be that.

Last week I read the poem about the ‘Wild Thing’ to my therapist, and she said I should try to get it published. I haven’t done anything about it. Strictly speaking, I think posting it on here counts as publication, which disqualifies it from most competitions anyway.

I’ve been thinking about Daniel Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’. I think this definitely counts as a ‘plague year’, but I don’t think this journal of mine is in the same class.

My current yoga teacher once said that destiny is what has to happen, but fate is what you make happen (or words to that effect). She is not having a great year, even worse than most of us. But she has faith in the fundamental goodness of the world, and I envy her for that. Today, I fear for the fate of us all.

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Tuesday plans

Reached the third of the month, and I haven’t yet mentioned NaNoWriMo. That’s because I haven’t got any plans to do anything about it. Two years ago I wrote 50k words, last year I read them and couldn’t see that there was anything I could do with them. Maybe this year I will think about The Long Way Back again – I think the last time I looked at it was in spring 2018. But one big ongoing project has been finished and gone this year. Maybe I could start thinking about it again. We’ll see.

I spent some time yesterday on the weather blanket, as I said I would. Every month (in the middle, not the beginning) I add a colour to the border – in two weeks time it will be the tenth and last. Quite a lot of my time yesterday was spent in untangling the previous nine. The only way I can see of avoiding that in the future would be to leave the border and do it all at the end, which would be massively tedious and probably mean that it wouldn’t be finished till about March. I have some plastic bobbins which are supposed to help, but only a few large ones. I will try to be more systematic about it next year.

The camper van went in for its MOT yesterday, and miraculously it passed on the first go (for the second year running). It was due in June, but was covered by the six months extension, which would have got it to January, but I wanted to avoid that because the tax is due then, and car insurance and MOT in March/April, so I decided to spread it out. The garage called me at about 5, and I didn’t really want to go and collect it then because that would have meant trying to reverse it into the garage in the dark (a nightmare) so I asked them to keep it for me till today. As the sun is shining – and the sky clear for the first time in ages – I am going to attempt to take it out for a picnic. I wasn’t sure if my season ticket for parking at the country park had been renewed or not, it was due in September but the direct debit didn’t go out. However I just had a rummage among my emails and found that they’ve extended it to the end of the year because of the closure for the first lockdown.

I will make sure I take a cup this time, and my coat. But I can’t stay too long, because I need to make sure I’m back before dark. I need to make sure I take it out at least once a month over winter, so it doesn’t end up in the same state as this spring and last. All this seems as good a reason as any to take it out today, before the next lockdown starts. A good sort of day.

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Second of the Month

My determination this morning took me as far as Sainsbury’s Local (which is not very far, but does mean I have to cross the road – however, the city council kindly installed a zebra crossing last year, so it’s a lot easier than it used to be.) I thought it was raining, but I needed milk so made myself go anyway, and the rain stopped.

It’s the second today, and the second and the seventeenth are important days with regard to the weather blanket, because they are days for starting new rows (because there are sixteen squares in a row, and obviously each day’s square can’t be done till the next day at the earliest, because it’s done on the basis of actual conditions, not forecasts). The first row for each month starts with a square indicating the name of the month, followed by 15 days (or 14 and one indicating the year for February), and the second row has 16 day squares, or 15 and a filler square at the end for a 30 day month (or the other half of the year, 14 days and a filler square or 15 days if it’s a leap year.) The other thing that happens at the ends of the rows is that I add the next bit of the border to the new one and the one immediately before (which was completed the day before, because the dates run left to right for the first half of the month and right to left for the second).

That might sound confusing, but it’s really simple in practice, and it means that today I need to do a square for yesterday and one saying ‘Nov’ to start the next row (I do them in that order for reasons which are a bit too technical to go into here), and then extend the border over the end of the previous row and the beginning of the new one.

To anybody who doesn’t at least know me on Facebook the above will sound like complete gobbledegook, but hopefully the illustration will help.

Before I went to Sainsbury’s I filled a jug with cold water to fill up the coffee maker then knocked it all over the counter, and had to move the spice rack out of the way, which meant that quite a few of the jars fell out, though fortunately nothing smashed and no lids came off.

Shit Happens – the First Noble Truth of Buddhism.

‘When the demon is at your door/In the morning it won’t be there no more/Any major dude will tell you.’ Steely Dan, Any Major Dude. I guess the Buddha was one of the most Major of Major Dudes.

Cause and effect – everything happens for a reason – or a complex of reasons, in the sense of the set conditions which cause it, but not in the sense that it has a purpose. Purpose implies a guiding consciousness – and on the question of an overall consciousness/purpose for everything, the jury’s still out.   

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Trying

I haven’t written for the last couple of days because I’ve been out. On Friday I went to Chichester, to an art exhibition which I’d been meaning to go to and when I finally got round to checking the gallery website on Wednesday I found out it finished today, so I booked a ticket for Friday. It was quite a grey and drizzly day, and apart from the exhibition I spent most of it sitting in a café, but at least I went, and had a damp walk round the Bishop’s Palace Gardens and took some photos.

Yesterday I did something I’ve been thinking about doing for ages, and psyching myself up for most of last week. A new book shop has opened since the summer, round the corner from the café where I used to go for breakfast on Sundays before the writers group meetings. The ‘psyching myself up’ part was to take my books and ask if they would stock them. I’ve been putting it off, so I thought I’d bribe myself by going out for breakfast first. On Wednesday I decided I would definitely go on Thursday, but when I woke up it was raining, and carrying a bag full of paperback books through the rain didn’t seem like such a good idea, and was enough of an excuse to back out of it.

But yesterday morning when I got up it was dry and bright, so despite the news about the lockdown, which was a perfectly good excuse, I steeled myself to do it. Passing the shop on the way to the café, I saw that they opened at ten. I got to the café about ten past nine, but although there were plenty of tables at that point, they were fully booked from 9:30 so couldn’t offer me a table. I walked around to find another café for breakfast, the first one I had in mind had a queue outside, so I kept going to an area where there are lots of cafes, and found a new one I hadn’t tried before. The service was a bit slow, but the food was good, I was quite happy till I looked out the window and realised it was pouring with rain. I checked the bus app to see if I could get a bus back to the book shop – there was one which would take me part of the way – or I could just get the normal one, going the other way, and go home. But it had become a mission, so I waited at the bus stop for about ten minutes, while two passed going the other way, then I gave up and walked through the rain back to the shop.

The lady in the shop was very nice, and we chatted for ages, but she didn’t want my books, especially with the news about the lockdown. Maybe some time in the future, whenever that might be. But at least I tried.

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#notwriting Thursday

Late today for a complex of reasons. But I’m here nevertheless.

Thinking about – oh, what have I been thinking about already this morning? The weather? Light persistent drizzle. Motivation? For writing, extremely low; for housework even lower; though I could spend the morning listening to the radio and knitting or sorting out my accounts– either of those seems quite appealing at the moment. Two lines from Bob Marley’s Redemption Song: ‘Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/None but ourselves can free our minds’

I’ve done my morning exercises, had a shower and washed my hair, cooked and eaten a bowl of porridge – although usually I do my writing before breakfast, it felt as though time was running late, so had breakfast deciding whether to write or not. Seems bizarre, the amount of effort that goes into writing about how I can’t write – except, that it isn’t any effort, not usually. Writing that requires effort is something that I stay well clear of. Writing just what comes into my head is easy – and, arguably, pointless – but I will keep doing it anyway. Sometimes it leads my mind down interesting new paths, though I’ve long given up the idea that it will lead me into writing a novel.

The disconnect between mind and fingers continues: I just caught myself typing ‘so they’ when my mind was thinking ‘though I’ve’… It’s quite disturbing when you think about it. Normal typoes caused by pressing the wrong keys are to be expected, but this is something else, like ‘typoes’ created in my brain outside of conscious control. ‘So’ rhymes with ‘though’, and ‘they’ starts with the same sound as ‘though’… it sounds bizarre, but I can kind of see who it could happen – even more bizarre, I’ve just noticed I typed ‘who’ instead of ‘how’ (though of course that is an anagram, so not so bizarre, except for the coincidence that I did it while thinking about how I do that).

I need to train myself out of looking at the keyboard and into looking at the screen when I’m typing – I’ve never been a ‘proper’ touch typist, I taught myself from a book forty years ago, though I’ve certainly had a lot of practice in that time. At least it’s usually possible to interpret my typing, which is more than can be said for my handwriting.

Just had a text from my yoga teacher to say that she’s cancelling classes for the foreseeable future, not due to Covid, but because she has had to move out of her flat and can’t get transport from her temporary place. Although in some ways it’s a relief because I don’t always feel like I want to go, I feel bad for her, and will miss her. However grim I feel, her classes always lift my spirits. Even when I’m thinking that some of the things she gets us to do are just daft, somehow, for her, I can suspend my disbelief and chant along with the rest of them.

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Wednesday

Where do the words come from? Same old question. I’m not sure any will come at all today, I will just burble on about the daily battle with my cat for space on the desk to put the keyboard – I’ve made a lovely empty space to the right of the monitor, from where she can watch the street, or leap at the odd bluebottle battering itself against the glass. I found a silhouette of a bluebottle on the living room carpet the other day, spread out with its wings either side, like a cartoon character which has just been hit by a falling 50 ton weight. How did it get that way? I don’t remember smashing any recently, and I don’t think it would have come from the bottom of my shoe, so I suspect she has had a rare hunting success, though how such soft paws can apply such force is a mystery.

There’s a camper van parked directly across the street, a big beast, about three times the size of mine, parked across the fronts of two houses, and with a door halfway down the side. Thinking about it, maybe it’s only twice the size of mine, twice the length, anyway, though it might be wider… no, not even that, because it fits behind the dotted parking lines. I guess if you take off the cab, the living space is more than twice as big anyway. It seems to have been there a while – can’t remember when I first saw it. Maybe the owner is leaving it there for the winter. They’d have to be a resident of this parking zone to get a resident’s parking permit for it – you have to send a copy of the log book with the address on to get one (or possibly not now it’s all online). When I moved into this house there were no parking restrictions on this street, but since then the zoning system has been extended. I don’t have a permit for my van because I rent a garage for it from a friend who lives in a neighbouring road. The first winter I had it, when I was living in the flat, I kept it out on the street and it was broken into and my folding bike was stolen. It was very upsetting at the time. Bad things happen.

Speaking of which, I just moved my hand and accidentally whacked my cat in the face, so she has now slunk off to ‘her’ chair, a spare office chair which I keep next to the desk for her.

The website’s done (fingers crossed) and is waiting to be signed off and invoiced. And I have finally decided that the jumper is big enough to separate the sleeves. I hate wearing anything that’s too tight under the armpits (not that I’ll be wearing this one). It’s now on three circular needles (body and sleeves) with four balls of wool – looking forward to spending more time untangling than knitting.

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Running With Wolves

The deeper I get into the book I’ve been reading, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the more I relate it to my life, the more I can see how broken and bent my life has been. I know how melodramatic this sounds, I can hear the voices telling me all that stuff: how lucky I am to have had such a (materially) comfortable life; that I should stop whining and practise gratitude; that I should stop reading books that make me unhappy; that I should stop thinking so much and simply be.

I was never cut out to be a nice, good, well behaved girl, but I tried, I really did. Some of my struggles in that regard were clearly related to my dyspraxia, interpreted as clumsiness, untidiness, laziness, carelessness, not listening, not paying attention, all those traits of the ‘difficult’ child. I wasn’t deliberately ‘naughty’, in fact I tried very hard to avoid it, which still holds to this day – needing to know the ‘rules’ so I can stay on the right side of them always, never causing trouble, never making waves – except that doesn’t always work, isn’t always possible, there were/are/will always be times when through carelessness etc I overstep the mark, or get trapped in a situation where to please someone upsets someone else and so I keep falling over my own feet (metaphorically as well as literally) and bringing down judgement on myself, which is why, as you must know by now, it’s easier for everyone if I just keep away from other people as much as I can.

The book, written about thirty years ago, is a Jungian analysis, illustrated by myths and fairy tales from all cultures, about how girls and women are socialised into conforming to culturally required feminine norms and roles. The author’s main thesis is that by trying to live up to those norms and roles, many women suppress their creative spirit, or ‘wild nature’. I gave up on it the first time I tried to read it, two years ago, because her writing style irritated me and it seemed related to New Age ‘Goddess’ cults, which feel a bit whacky to me. Now I’ve persevered I’m more impressed by the psychology behind it, and anyway, it was recommended by my therapist, and I have great respect for her academic credentials.

And, as you can probably guess from that description, the idea of the ‘wild nature’, the alternative female archetype and alter ego of the creative spirit, whose suppression can cause great harm and distress in women’s lives, struck a mighty chord for me. Hence the posts over the last few days about the Wild Thing who lives caged inside of me: self-destructive, resentful and raging as any caged beast has the right to be, but only ‘evil’ if seen from a specific, limited perspective.

I sat down to write almost in tears because I didn’t think I could find the words to express this. But it happened anyway.

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In My Head

Daylight when I was doing my exercises this morning. A temporary respite – the dark will soon catch up again.

The level of chaos in my house and in my life has been creeping up again. Every room is infected by it. But I am busy, I have things to do, so I have excuses not to do anything about it.

Because no one comes into my house from outside – and I’m not expecting anybody for the foreseeable future – there is nobody to judge me – and I am working very hard on not judging myself.

A couple of days ago I didn’t have a photo to post on Facebook, so I took one of the chaos on the living room floor, and the cat behind it with a look that said: ‘how do I get round this?’ Then I made it my cover photo, thinking: ‘this will let people see who I really am. They’re my friends, they’ll accept me, they won’t judge’. Then a comment from one friend showed that she assumed it was the cat who had made the mess. How can you respond to that?

I am trying to untangle the threads of my identity, in the hope that I can learn to live at peace with myself. I am trying to embrace the Wild Thing, not fear and judge her and lock her away. Yes, I am chronically untidy and disorganised, and I understand now that there is a reason for that, although that doesn’t necessarily make the consequences of that chaos any easier to live with. I also know that I should make more effort to deal with it, but at the same time I know I ‘shouldn’t’ keep ‘should’-ing myself all the time. I hear the voice that says: ‘how can you learn to improve if you’re not constantly judging yourself?’ and the one that says: ‘how can you learn to love yourself if you’re always listening to your inner critic?’ and the one that says: ‘stuff this for a game of soldiers, do what makes you happy’ along with all the rest, they go round and round each other, and the little one in the corner just sits and cries and wishes she was anywhere else but in my head.

I ask: ‘This is who I am, do you think that’s okay? Can you let go of who you want me to be and accept this version of who I am?’ I get two kinds of feedback when I try and talk about dyspraxia – one that this isn’t the ‘real me’. It’s just another stick I’ve found to beat myself with; and the other that it’s just an excuse for being untidy, disorganised, lazy etc and I’m not trying hard enough to get myself sorted. The latter is what I’ve lived with all my life, and internalised at an early age: of course I can sort this chaos out if I keep at it and stop whining – the gremlin voice, the inner critic voice.

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Christmas Jumper

It was raining earlier, then the sun came out, now the clouds have returned and the sind wounds (of course I meant ‘wind sounds’, but left that in because a typing spoonerism is pretty weird!) – the WIND SOUNDS a bit rough. Lots to do indoors today – more stuff to do on the website, but at least it’s going okay, and the client is happy.

The knitted jumper’s growing slowly, it seems to be taking ages to get to the point where the sleeves can be separated from the body. I’m working it from the neck down on a circular needle – bit technical there, but what it means is that it should be possible to do the whole thing in one piece without having to sew it together or (my deepest horror), join the sleeves on at the end. I’ve done it that way with crochet a few times (some successful, others not, but with a better record than I’ve had with doing the pieces separately and joining them). I found the method (it’s not exactly a ‘pattern’ because it doesn’t give exact numbers of stitches for size and shape) in a book about knitting all kinds of ‘sweaters’ (it’s American). You start with the neck hole, increase for the shoulders, then keep increasing till it comes down to the bottom of the armholes before starting on the sleeves, and so on. The crucial thing is that you have to keep trying it on – which knitters will understand is a bit tricky when it’s all on a circular needle which is smaller than the circumference of your body. Also it’s complicated by the fact that it’s for my daughter, who like me is broad across the back (and not lacking out front either), but not quite as big as me- there again it’s a Christmas jumper so doesn’t need to be snug, so I’m trying it on myself and aiming to make it so I can get into it, but a little too tight for comfort.

The last three years I’ve made Christmas jumpers for the grandchildren, and made sure to make them with plenty of growing room. (My original plan was that they could then be ‘passed down’ when grown out of, but I can’t see that happening.) So this year it’s my daughter’s turn.

You may well ask why this year I’ve decided to go for this top-down method rather than sticking with the pattern I’ve used before, and I asked myself that question quite a lot when I embarked on this a few weeks ago. But I think if I can master this technique I’m going to find it a lot more interesting and enjoyable – in fact I am finding it just that – and might become inspired to make more jumpers this way and develop my own designs… in fact I’ve already got a few ideas.

Another way of using up all that yarn I keep buying – and it’s raining again. Might as well hunker down.

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Wild Thing

In my therapy session yesterday I read out the post I wrote on Wednesday, about love and relationships and at the end, in answer to the question of why I’m alone, she said:

‘Because you’re not prepared to compromise on who you are.’

Of course! It came like a lightning bolt: I’d rather have my solitude than suppress the difficult part of my nature. I’m not a ‘loveable’ person – I’m really not. Turn the mirror around. Why do even I find it so hard to love myself? Why have I spent a lifetime berating myself for failing to live up to the image of a ‘good’, pretty, well-behaved girl? Why have I always been so careless of the feelings of men who wanted me (my first husband adored me, and I despised him for it) and wept over the ones who didn’t?

Writing out her comment now, I can see how it could be taken for a criticism (though I know that’s not how she meant it). ‘Compromise’, after all, is usually considered to be a Good Thing – and so it is, in most circumstances, but it can also be seen as a betrayal of a deeper integrity –  ‘You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em’.

I’ve been folding for so much of my life, ‘settling for what I could get’. Striving for the rewards due to a ‘good-girldom’ that was never going to be within my grasp, however hard I tried, and hating myself for that failure.

And now I’m alone with the Wild Thing – which has just reminded me of a poem I wrote a while back.

Wild Thing

Bind my wounds.
I will rip the bandage
Roll in the dirt
Claw at the scabs
to uncover my flesh
Gleaming
Festering
Bleeding.

Full moon casts shadows
through my window.
I am a wild beast.
If you try to help me
you will suffer for kindness.
Feel my claws, teeth, scales,
Anger
Pain.

Will you leave me
or will you hold me
Feel me writhe
in your grasp?

Will you judge me?
I will show you what I am.
Ignore me
I will scream till you hear
Till I feel your contempt.
Till I see your sneers.
Then I will know.
I will test you
beyond endurance.

Are you brave enough
to hold me still?
Are you strong enough
to love me?

© Linda Rushby July 2014

No one really wants the wild thing. They might think they do, but they don’t want to live with the claws and the beak. They want to cage it with rules and take away its true nature, but when they’ve done that, they find that what is left is not worth having. There is no gold left, only dross.

Linda Rushby from the blog ‘Melinda Solo’, April 2013

I can’t change the Wild Thing into something she’s not, but there may be other ways of taming her. She needs to be recognised for herself, with compassion, not judgement.

And who will do that for her, if not me?