Category: life

Posted on

Socially-Distanced Yoga

After I finished blogging yesterday, I got a text from my yoga teacher to say that she was holding a socially-distanced class in the park in the evening and would I be interested? So I answered yes, and then spent the whole day stressing over the fact that I’d committed myself to going out and interacting with other people.

I went early, thinking I could go to the seafront to take pictures or take something in the park, because I’m rapidly running out of anything photogenic in my garden for my daily Facebook photo post, but I saw them all sitting around when I got there and couldn’t think of a way to avoid joining the group. We sat around for quite a while chatting because we were waiting for the last two people – as it turned out they hadn’t been able to find places to park. I was surprised at how busy the park was, and I presume the beach (two minutes walk further on) must have been the same. There were seven of us in the end: the teacher, her daughter, me and four others, two of whom I knew by sight, but I wasn’t sure about the last two, though presumably I’ve met them before. I don’t know any of them very well, and I didn’t say very much.

I thought it might just be a short session, but no, it was the full hour and a half, including lying down at the end. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it – though I felt a bit awkward during the chanting (given that there were other people around, although we were in quite a secluded part of the park). I’d dressed in my usual leggings, tee shirt and sweatshirt, thinking it would be colder later when I had to walk home, I felt a bit overdressed at first by comparison with some of the others, but it did cool down before the end so I was grateful for that.

I went telling myself that I always come back from the sessions in normal times with a smile on my face, the five-minutes-just-round-the-corner community centre sessions. I didn’t feeling exactly elated walking back from the park, but thinking about it now, I’m glad I did it and I guess I’ll go again.

I was very unsettled all day yesterday, I suppose partly in anticipation. Today all I have to anticipate is taking the bins out and Zoom meditation for an hour at seven. I need to go to the health food shop to see if they have whole wheat flour – my last loaf had to be all white because that’s all I could get in Tesco. And I thought I’d go and check if the florist is open, as they sell garden plants too – in normal times – and my sad garden needs something to brighten it up. But who knows how many of those small shops will be opening again?

So maybe I’ll go out today – or maybe not.

Posted on

Hang it all.

I wait in the darkness
hoping for an answer.

Linda Rushby 22 June 2020

…popped into my head. Actually, it went through a couple of edits before I wrote it out. The first version of the second line was ‘trying to find an answer’, but that felt a bit unbalanced, so it became ‘Searching for an answer’ then I asked myself: am I really ‘searching’? So it became ‘hoping’, or it could have been ‘waiting’, both much more passive.

Don’t even know why I thought that in the first place, because the last thing I can remember thinking about was hanging pictures, which has been in my mind a lot recently because a large part of the mess in the study is piles of the things, which haven’t been put up in the three and a half years I’ve lived here and they’re all around me when I’m writing (incidentally, that reminds me of something I thought earlier about using the passive voice as a way of absolving yourself of responsibility, like saying to the cat: ‘your water hasn’t been changed, has it?’ instead of ‘I haven’t changed your water’, which was an actual conversation I had when I was feeding her this morning).

And may I say that anyone who is now thinking: ‘Poor old bat, this lockdown thing really has sent her loopy’ doesn’t know me at all well, because that is exactly the kind of thing I have always done, lockdown or not.

So, as I was saying, although I’ve lived here three and a half years I still haven’t put pictures on the walls, except in the kitchen, where there were already quite a few picture hooks when I moved in. That’s the clue – the lack of picture hooks, and my inability to put them up – inability, not laziness, because for some reason I have lost that skill with the hammer which I must have had at one time, because I put up loads of picture hooks in my flat in Bedford, but now all that happens when I try is that I beat the hooks flat or knock bits of plaster off, or, of course, painfully smash my digits. I put this down mostly to the walls being too hard, but dyspraxia and failing eyesight probably come into it too.

When I was in my last (rented) flat, I bought some Velcro stuff that’s supposedly made for hanging pictures, but never used it because I thought that would probably make just as much mess on the walls (if not more) than knocking nails in. Yesterday I found it, in only the fourth desk drawer I looked in (amazing!) But looking at it now, I can’t believe it would be strong enough – certainly not for the biggest of my black and white Paris photos in the chunky black frames.

Maybe I’ll have a rummage, and see what I’ve got. Some are framed cross stitch and tapestries, which I’d happily consign to the loft. But I must have some things worth hanging.

Posted on

Jigsaws

Said a painter called Vincent Van Gogh,
‘My surname sounds just like a cough!
It causes such trouble,
because foreigners struggle,
and some of them don’t even know.’

Linda Rushby, 21 June 2020

Well, I’ve got that off my chest.

Very late this morning. I woke about the usual time but haven’t been able to get anything in gear so far.

Lay in bed thinking; ‘Why do I bother to do anything?’ Exercise, meditation, shower, blog… nothing particularly unpleasant about any of them, all likely to make me feel better, if anything, but I couldn’t be arsed. Who knows, let alone cares, if I don’t do those things? Only me. I am in sole control of how I start my Sunday morning – any morning – the only obligations are the ones I left off the list: feed cat and open the door to let her out, and even if I missed those for once, there wouldn’t be any sanctions, but I would feel pretty mean.

The sun is shining – once those things are completed (and I’m currently on the last one), I can sit outside and eat breakfast, and then the day is my own. Any day is my own. What shall I do with this one?

I need a new project – all the ones currently on the go are beginning to bore me. Maybe this passion for crochet is waning, and I need to find a new one. Current best guess is jigsaws – I started one on Friday. Some weeks ago, when lockdown was well bedded in and I was responding by frivolous online shopping, I ordered three jigsaws from ads on Facebook, none of which have yet turned up. Having cleared the kitchen table of the card-making/paper-crafting stuff which had been there since the beginning of March, I thought that maybe if I started doing one of the many jigsaws I’ve acquired in the past and never done, that would speed them on their way. I chose the most recent one, which is of Van Gogh’s painting of the café terrace at night – which is what inspired me to pen the limerick above,

Of course, I could also put my energies into something practical and useful, like tidying the study. I started on that yesterday – emptied a whole box of old photos and albums and stuck them on a shelf, then put the box in the recycling bin – which sounds good, but I only put that particular box in here last week some time, prior to that it had spent some time in the hall, after I took it out of the Chinese cabinet in the front room so I could clear away some of the bags of yarn and half finished crochet projects. Okay, slow progress, but it is progress.

Yesterday I ordered a replacement stylus for my turntable. When that comes, I can start playing my old records again, maybe transfer them to the PC. There’s a project. Hope they’re not too damaged.

I could even sort them into alphabetical order.

Posted on

One Day

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.

Linda Rushby 20 June 2020
Posted on

Happy Solstice

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.  

Posted on

Pointless Pills

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

Posted on

Non-attachment

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.

I expect Lao Tzu would have said it better.    

Posted on

Bin Day

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.

Posted on

Happy Families

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’.

Posted on

The Chain

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?