time – Page 13 – Linda Rushby

9 July 2020

Trying Not Trying

After I’d submitted my post yesterday, I realised I wasn’t happy with what I’d posted. At some point I’d slipped into the idea that my self-reflection (or wallowing, as it can also be called) was a kind of addiction. But this buys into my brother’s idea that I get a kick out of being miserable, and want to bring everyone down to my own level, as though unhappiness is a choice that I make and that I can stop any time I like – well, okay that does make it sound addictive, I can see where that idea came from. But it’s not quite what I meant, and I don’t want to be misunderstood, and I want to apologise to anybody who has to deal with the consequences of a chemical addiction, either their own or somebody close to them, and I’m sorry for any hurt or offence I may have caused by that analogy.

I know when I had the thought that triggered that post, the evening before, it made a different kind of sense, and it seemed very clear (as they always do), but now I just can’t think what it could have been.

Now I’m sitting here and I thought everything would come, but it isn’t. Staring out of the window at the early morning street, which seems no more or less busy than it has at any time in the last four months while I’ve been doing this regularly.

I sat on the bed this morning as I always do when I’m getting up, and noticed that although I was only inches away from the mirror, I wasn’t looking at it. I’ve said a lot about that mirror recently, but, as I realise now, I don’t actually look at it. Mostly I look at the floor, or I don’t look anywhere. Looking at my own reflection is a conscious choice, and mostly I choose not to. I remember sitting and looking at myself one morning – I think it was at the therapist’s suggestion, it feels like a long time ago, when we were still meeting face to face, but I also remember writing about it – I think the idea was to encourage compassion for myself, but what I remember was that it made me cry uncontrollably – not because I didn’t like the way I looked (although of course I don’t) but because of the misery and the pointlessness and emptiness in my eyes. I haven’t tried it again since, and I didn’t try it this morning.

Does accepting myself mean accepting all my failures? Does redefining ‘failure’ as ‘a learning experience’ make any sense if there’s nothing new to learn, or nothing that you can see and implement other than: ‘stop trying’? I’ve tried to make myself a ‘better’ person and it highlighted my faults and made me stressed and anxious and even more self-hating than I already was. Now I’ve stopped trying I’m probably becoming a worse person, but I’m trying not to care so much.

29 June 2020

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.

28 June 2020

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.

26 June 2020

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.

24 June 2020

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.

23 June 2020

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.

21 June 2020

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.

20 June 2020

Happy Solstice

The northern hemisphere summer solstice, as you probably know, is usually on the 21^st 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.

17 June 2020

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.

12 June 2020

Sleeping (or not)

Today I think I will plan on doing nothing – which is not the same as not planning to do anything, which is what I usually do. If it’s warm enough, I will sit in the garden – not sure about that at present, earlier it seemed nice and sunny, but has clouded over again. Yesterday I was cold most of the day – my therapist even commented on it, as she sat in her house on the Isle of Wight in a sleeveless summer top, and I huddled inside my cardigan in my living room. By the bay window, which is west facing, it can get warm in the afternoons, but the light is too bright for a good Skype picture, so I do it sitting on the sofa by the fireplace, at the opposite end of the room.

It’s not freezing cold, obviously, just a subtle discomfort – for example, since I sat down to write this, I’ve taken my cardi off once and just put it back on again. Also when talking (or thinking) about deep emotional stuff, it’s comforting to pull those two sides over at the front, like wrapping myself in a blanket. Maybe that’s why I prefer cardis to pullovers, or maybe it’s just for the convenience of taking them off and on.

Normally I’d say I’m quite insensitive to changes in temperature (or noise, light and other external conditions, but that’s a topic for another day), but this week I’ve been noticing it more than usual, and I’ve started wondering if it’s related to tiredness. I’ve noticed myself a couple of times almost dozing off in the day time, and always in the evening. I also got restless legs syndrome yesterday for the first time in ages.

I try not to get obsessed about sleep (or lack of it) but this morning I thought I’d check my sleep app, which confirmed that I’ve been waking up at half past four every morning (except Wednesday, when I slept in till quarter past five), and not properly getting to sleep till gone midnight. Long term, I know it’s not good for my energy levels, or my moods. I’ve stopped actively ‘watching’ telly after ten in the evening, but I listen to music through it, and wonder if that’s just as bad. In theory, my bedtime is eleven, but I get engrossed in crocheting and keep staying up to hear the next song.

My relationship with sleep has been messed up for most of my life, as you may already know if you’ve known me a long time. It is what it is, and worrying about it doesn’t help.

This morning I listened to the last three episodes of a serial that’s been downloaded on my phone for a long while. Sometimes listening to the radio sends me back to sleep, but not this time.

I need to call the garage today as they haven’t got back to me about the van. Otherwise, I think I’ll have a quiet day.