Category: life

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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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More About Mirrors

I sat on the edge of the bed facing the mirror this morning, as I do every morning, inside my thoughts. I’ve forgotten what I was thinking about, nothing too grim today, just general. I’d had quite a vivid dream, though now I can’t remember what that was about, either.

Yesterday I read to my therapist what I wrote two days ago. She was impressed by the idea of smashing my head into the mirror and breaking both it and myself.

‘That sounds as though the mirror is the life you wish you’d had’ she said, which seems to make sense because of the frustration of the gap between what is there and here. She went on to talk about a theory from someone whose name meant nothing to me, about the image we have of ourselves and how we negotiate our inability to reach it. That sounds banal – of course we all must feel that way – but I expect there’s more to it than that. I pointed out that there’s a physical mirror on the wardrobe by my bed, so inevitably I see my reflection when I get up, but there again, I often use mirrors as a metaphor for my life and relationship with myself.

‘You keep saying the same things’ she went on ‘but every time you say it in a slightly different way, and today it’s smashing the mirror that’s significant.’

Before I went travelling, I was seeing a hypnotherapist (the third time I’d tried that), who in our sessions told me to imagine myself going into a room where there’s a mirror and the image inside it is the woman I want to be, with all the qualities other people see in me that I can’t find in myself. Then I was supposed to enter into the mirror and merge with that person, because ‘she is you’. She made me an audio file, which I used to play every night in bed, till I started screaming back at it: ‘but that’s not really me, can’t you see that?’

There’s a postcard on my desk, propped up in front of the monitor. It turned up a couple of days ago, tucked inside a book. I’ve been staring at it because I couldn’t remember how it got there, or where it came from. It’s a painting by Paul Nash, titled: ‘Landscape From a Dream’, and on the back I’ve written: ‘My book is the story of my journey, the reasons why I went, the places I went to, the things I saw and did, the feelings I had about them’ and addressed it to myself at the old house, which dates it to 2014 after I came back from Prague, when I was failing to write S2S.

I rummaged in the heap on my desk and found the book – called: ‘Show Your Work!’ – it started to make more sense, because I remembered writing the card in the Tate café.

And then I noticed the mirror.

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#amnotwriting

Awake at four thirty, I thought I would listen to a radio play, because that sometimes sends me back to sleep, or at least passes the time. I picked ‘Marian and George’, about how Mary Anne Evans in her mid-30s met the love of her life, ran away with him to Europe, and started writing novels as George Eliot.

And that kicked me in the teeth in two ways, because her lover, George Henry Lewes, was a writer whose work I came across when I was doing my PhD, at roughly the age she was when she met him, a philosopher whose words clicked something open in my brain and showed me a little of the pattern of the universe, and now after thirty years I can’t even remember what it was that he said that was so inspirational.

I sat on the bed and screamed at myself in the mirror, because wasn’t I going to write something wonderful that would inspire people, or at least entertain them, and whatever happened to that? Whose fault was it? And why? It wasn’t the brain or the intelligence or the thirst for knowledge or even the writing ability that was lacking, it was, and is, the guts, the determination, the ideas, the twin abilities to sit down and start and to sit down and finish. Not only can I not start that work of genius that will make readers gasp in awe, I can’t finish a silly little fantasy novel that I’ve been picking over for thirty years. Not only can I not be George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, I can’t even be Barbara Cartland or JK Rowling.

This is what tears me apart and makes me hate myself with such deep loathing that I want to smash my skull into that mirror and shatter them both. And now I’m 66 and what chance is there that I will ever rise above, get beyond that failure? To write something and know it was good but for it never to be recognised by the world would be bad enough, but not even to write anything that I can look at with pride, or to finish anything at all, that is not just disappointing it’s deeply shameful, a betrayal of myself and the dreams I’ve had for sixty years, from the moment I knew what books were, and realised that they were made by people, that there were people who could bring these wonderful objects into the world, and wouldn’t it be exciting to be one of those people?

But if I could wind back time for sixty years – or thirty – how would things turn out differently? How could they? Because I would still be me – all the chaotic, lazy, self-doubting aspects of my personality would be there in me, just as they are now, waiting to trip me up. A lifetime of trying to correct them has been as much of a failure as my intellectual and literary pursuits. How could it not?

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Poorly cat

Just dropped Miko at the vet’s. It’s all social distanced, I’m not allowed in so the procedure is: I ring the bell; someone comes and unlocks the outside porch door then goes back behind the second door; I open the door and put her basket down in the porch, then close the outer door again and they come back through the inner door into the porch and pick her up from there. I have no problem at all with any of that, I think it’s perfectly sensible and reassuring.

When she had her six month check-up in January, she had lost weight from the previous one last summer. I wasn’t too concerned, the same thing happened last year and I put it down to the fact that I was away for a fortnight over Christmas and New Year, and she has a habit of going on hunger strike when her routine is disturbed, even though she’s used to the friend who comes and feeds her.

They recommended I bring her in after three months for a free weigh-in with the nurse, and gave me an appointment for April. That, of course, was delayed and eventually cancelled. The vet rang me for a chat, she asked if I had or could borrow any bathroom scales so I could weigh her myself, which I don’t. Then she said they aren’t doing nurse appointments at the moment, but I could have a socially distanced appointment with the vet, and to call if I had any concerns, stressing that they have a duty of care towards Miko, but I was sure she was fine and that it could wait till her 6 month check in July – I knew I would have to pay in full for the vet appointment, whereas the nurse appointments and 6 month check are included in my care plan, but that wasn’t the main reason, it was more just because I didn’t want the hassle.

But last week, in the hot weather, she more or less stopped eating altogether. She’s always been very picky about her food, very rarely clearing her bowl. Her normal routine is two pouches of wet food a day, one in the morning and one evening, and a bowl of biscuits always available. But a few weeks ago when the weather got warm I began spacing her feeds out a bit more, so that she was having half a pouch four times a day. Then it got so that I would put the fresh food in her bowl, she’d come running and eat a mouthful or two, then leave the rest.

I called the vet on Friday and they had an appointment free that afternoon, so I took her in to be weighed and she has lost 500g since January – and a quarter of her weight since last summer.

They booked her in for a senior health check this morning, including blood and urine tests. I was going to write about how I’m feeling. Maybe tomorrow.

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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.

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Rising and Retiring

While the cassette recorder is on my desk, there’s even less space than usual for Miko to squeeze into. Which makes typing even more than usually awkward. At least I have my reading glasses today.

Yesterday evening I was writing an email to an old friend and listening to music, and I got to thinking about the south of France, the scents of flowers and herbs, and the little shops in out of the way towns selling unbranded local soaps and colognes; the paintings of Van Gogh (partly because of the jigsaw I was doing earlier that morning when it was pouring with rain here); the woods around the retreat centre in Limousin where I stayed six years ago. I started putting together bits and pieces for a poem, including kittens playing in a pile of nets in the harbour at Sorrento (different country, I know, but same sea). Then into the music stream popped a young Joan Baez singing ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ and I thought ‘oh, how appropriate!’ but I’d already sent the email by then.

Why is it that I often feel quite peaceful and comfortable with the world in the evenings, but then almost always feel miserable when I wake up? No, it’s not related to alcohol consumption – I’ve thought of that. Someone once told me that what you think when you wake up relates to what you were thinking when you fell asleep, so make sure you’re always thinking happy thoughts before you drop off, but this is clearly nonsense. How can you know exactly the point you will be falling asleep before it happens, let alone control your thoughts in preparation? What would happen if you were lying there thinking: ‘Right, am I asleep yet? No? Better think of something happy then. How long can I keep this up for? How long do I need to keep it up for? Has it happened yet? How long am I going to have to keep up these happy thoughts? What if I drop off just when I’m getting frustrated or stressed?’ etc etc. You’d never actually fall asleep – unless this is just because, as I keep forgetting, my brain is weird and doesn’t act in the same way as normal people who can control that stuff?

I’ve been told: ‘You’re obviously not a morning person’, but that’s not true, I’m better if I get up in the mornings, I hate lying in late and losing half the day. But it’s like everything else, I have to motivate myself to do it, the activity, the process of getting out of bed, it’s not even that I particularly dislike it when I do it. Sometimes I even talk myself through it: ‘right, duvet off, one foot on the floor, sit on the bed, second foot on the floor, brace yourself with hands on the mattress, push down and straighten legs’. It’s the gap between thought and action that stretches out and out, as though thinking is a substitute for doing. 

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Old Songs

Can’t find my reading glasses. I had them in bed, because I was reading for a while, I remember that. Now I can’t find them anywhere around the bed, or in the kitchen, or the spare room where I did my exercise. Not even in my dressing gown pocket, because I didn’t wear my dressing gown this morning. I can write okay with my varifocals as long as I don’t have to look at the screen – I just stare down at the keyboard.

I’ve thought once or twice recently about writing – proper writing, not this daily drivel. If nothing else, I suppose, I should finish off ‘The Long Way Back’. The first part – the return journey from Istanbul – is written and edited, and it feels as though I’ve cheated those kind people who have gone to the trouble of reading ‘Single to Sirkeci’ to leave it all dangling. My idea was to pad that out with an account of trying to piece my life together afterwards, hopefully coming to a positive conclusion and some lessons learnt. And so far I’ve edited enough material together to get me to May 2013, when I left for Prague. At one point I even thought I might turn it into three books, with a Prague instalment as well. But so many years have passed now – another three even since I published S2S – and so little changes, I’ve ‘learned’ so few life lessons from those experiences, my heart sinks at the thought. When I tried reading the blog posts from the Prague times, and realised how depressing that all was, it wasn’t something I wanted to revisit.

What about the famous thirty-years-in-progress fantasy novel? Or rather, fifteen years, from 1990 to 2005, because I haven’t touched it since then. It ground to a halt in October 2005, when I started a creative writing course and, coincidentally, started blogging, though I’ve never been able to fathom which (or possibly both) of those circumstances was responsible for the stasis.

But if this daily writing doesn’t help, then what’s it for? A question without an answer.

Old songs. My pre-bedtime wind-down habit of listening to Amazon Music through the telly has led me back into the past so that now I’m returning to songs of thirty, forty, fifty years ago. Vinyl albums in tattered cardboard sleeves stand in no particular order on my IKEA cube units, a shoebox with the marker-penned legend: ‘Cassettes Study’ by my side on the floor. The USB turntable and cassette player – both presents at different times from my ex-husband, the latter, from the final, fateful Christmas – spent many years stashed away in boxes, but earlier this week I ordered a new stylus cartridge for the turntable, and finally connected the cassette player up to my PC. The sound quality is pretty uneven, especially after thirty years of listening to CDs, but the songs and lyrics are the same.

So today I’m uploading Jon and Vangelis: ‘Somehow I’ll find my way home.’

One day.

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Everything in the Garden

How am I to deal with the mornings? Exercising first thing is supposed to get the endorphins going. I keep trying, but I’m not convinced that’s working for me any more. I went out into the garden to water the plants but got depressed at how scraggy and tired everything looks, how little colour there is (except for the red valerian – which isn’t really valerian, but I can never remember its real name, and it spreads everywhere).

Every day I struggle to find something decent to take pictures of – I committed myself at the start of the year to posting a photo on Facebook for every day of the year, but as I don’t go anywhere it has become a chore to find anything, especially as I can’t see anything on my phone when I’m outdoors, so have to keep pointing and clicking then half the time come back in and find I’ve completely missed the intended subject or chopped it in half. So I’m posting a lot of pictures of my cat, who can be relied on to be photogenic, and as far as the garden goes, sometimes I’m able to get close up to individual flowers before they give up and die (quite often they are weeds anyway) and no long shots of the garden to show how little interest it holds.

The hydrangea is the next thing which has flowers currently in bud, opening one floret at a time. I’ve also got another hydrangea which doesn’t do so well, the last two years it hasn’t flowered at all, and apparently gives up and dies around mid-July, though it has dragged itself back to life in late spring both years. The lavender has no flower buds at all that I can see – I pruned it last year to stop it getting over-straggly, I did it immediately after the flowers died, which I thought was what you’re supposed to do so it doesn’t affect the next year’s flowers, but that doesn’t seem to have worked. The sedums are in bud though, so I suppose I have those to look forward to. I think there used to be some day lilies in one of the beds, but can’t see any signs of flower buds yet, just a confused lot of leaves which I can’t identify. Last year I let the red valerian have its head – because it’s colourful, at least – and it has pretty much taken over everything, along with the weedy white cranes-bill geraniums which sprout up all over the ‘lawn’ (in between the buttercups) and pretty much everywhere else.

I have thought about having the ‘patio’ properly paved, but it’s quite interesting seeing the range of weeds that push up through the gravel. I forgot to mention the fennel, something else that appears everywhere. And the white snapdragons that I found (in the gravel) when I hacked back some of the valerian – I took some pictures, none were good enough to share, and they haven’t flowered since.

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Parallels

Staring at the screen trying to think of something ‘nice’ to say. Growing sense of discomfort all week, not just because of the heat – which even I have to admit tipped over into ‘hot’ yesterday – might even be in the red today (thirty plus), if the forecasts are correct.  

Looking back, I often put forward my travelling times in 2012 and 2013 (counting my sojourn in Prague as a continuation) as a happy time of my life, but it wasn’t always idyllic. Partly that was because of the irritations and frustrations of planning and organisation: finding accommodation; co-ordinating with friends and family I was hoping to visit; deciding routes; booking tickets; etc etc. There was also a degree of guilt over the pointlessness, self-indulgence and irresponsibility of what I was doing (although the blog posts I wrote at the time did lead – eventually – to the completion of ‘Single to Sirkeci’, and there’s still potential in there for another book – or two). The third source of stress was the knowledge that the life I was living would have to end at some time and I would be forced to return to the life I’d run away from – or some hazily understood and recognised version of it.

Perhaps you can see where this train of thought is going. There are clearly parallels between the feelings I had then, and the ones I’m having now. Daily life has its irritations and frustrations – though not quite as dramatic as working out where I’m going to be sleeping tomorrow night, and where travelling to after that. I’m certainly feeling guilt over the way I spend my days, the worthlessness of my life and the activities (or inactivity) I engage in, although that seems more forgivable now I’m officially ‘retired’, ie I’m no longer obliged to look for paid work in order to pay the bills (I do feel guilt over that in itself, but I’ve learned to come to terms with it). The third point, of course, is uneasiness about what happens next, moving back into a life of having to engage with the external world more directly after this period of quiet, solitude and reflection, of pleasing myself.

I look inside myself to see if I’m any better prepared than I was when I came back in 2012, or from Prague in early 2014. Every morning I check myself and think: nope, I’m still me, no sign of any miraculous transformation yet. I poke around in the past and I think I’m gaining a better understanding of who I am and the factors that made me, but still can’t find any way of unravelling the threads and exorcising the demons.

I didn’t want to write anything this morning. One of those mornings when it didn’t seem possible to find anything ‘nice’ to say. However, as I approach my quota, I’m not too dissatisfied with what I have written.

Over three months of this ‘lockdown diary’, I must have written about 45,000 words. Maybe there’s something in there worth saving.

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Same Old Same Old

Every day starts the same, same old stuff to get out of bed to.

Same old effort to justify myself to myself, to occupy myself – my time, hands, part of my brain that doesn’t need to be taxed too much. Just ‘do’ it, whatever ‘it’ is, get on with it. Going through the same old pointless motions. Trying to manage the thoughts in my head. Trying to drag out words from the back of my brain, words that never add up to anything, words that no one wants to read. Piling them up inside my computer, words upon sentences upon paragraphs and on and on, words that might last forever out in cyberspace but will never be consigned to ink on paper.

Trying not to think.

But when there is something else to do, something else I need to do, or feel I ‘should’ do, it’s even worse. Then I panic, because I don’t want to be dragged out into the world.

What a sorry specimen I am.

Yesterday I knew to expect a parcel delivery. But I ate breakfast in the garden anyway. And when I came inside there was a note through the door from UPS saying they were sorry they’d missed me, but the parcel is now at Costcutter on Such-and-such street, and if I don’t collect it within ten days it will be returned to the sender. Bugger.

It’s a big heavy parcel, too. So I’ll have to take the car – I had a similar one last year and tried walking with it, and wished I hadn’t. But the car hasn’t moved since I got it back from its MOT right at the start of lockdown, in late March. What if it doesn’t start? Then I’ll have to call the guys from the garage. When can I pick up the parcel? Not till tomorrow (ie, today now). I couldn’t spend 24 hours worrying about whether or not the car would start. So I had to drive it somewhere.

That took effort. But it did start. Which was a relief, because what if it hadn’t, and I had to go through the same conversation with the garage guys that I have every spring about the van (which as far as I know is still immobile. I spoke to them about the MOT a couple of weeks ago, and they confirmed that it doesn’t need to be done now till December, but although there are two sets of keys, and they have one from when I asked them to get it going pre-lockdown, and I have the other, I can’t get into it because they have the only one for the garage.)

But the car started. And I drove it about the back streets for a while, but all the roads are a mess because they’re laying 5g cables everywhere. So today I will have to think of a different route to go and collect my parcel.

And for this I’m getting wound up. I am a wreck.