Category: acceptance

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Every Day is New Again

Today is different. Every day is. Feeling quite good, which is noteworthy because so unusual. Wish I could tell you why, what makes today different from the norm, but I have no idea. I didn’t get any more sleep than usual – fell asleep around 12.20 (according to the app) and awake 4.30, so if anything slightly less. Don’t have to go anywhere today (except possibly yoga this evening if the ground isn’t too wet), so nothing to feel apprehensive about. I had a go at making a birthday card for my granddaughter yesterday, which has been lurking at the back of my mind for a while as something that needed doing – that probably helps.

Remembering the REM song, ‘Every Day is Yours to Win’:

‘Every day is new again
every day is yours to win,
that’s how heroes are made…’

I don’t anticipate being a hero today, or any time soon, but inclined to look for the good bits this morning – maybe I can have breakfast in the garden?

Still no idea what I’m going to write about. Yesterday I wrote about dyspraxia, which I’ve tentatively started on a couple of times before. Yesterday I went into more detail. It’s hard to explain because I’m still trying to get my head around it myself – and quite honestly, it doesn’t seem very well understood scientifically as yet, compared to dyslexia and dyscalculia, which have been studied for much longer. And (naturally), I’m not very good at explaining it to other people. When I try to talk about it, mostly they seem to think it’s snowflakey, self-justificatory nonsense and just an excuse for continuing to be lazy, scatty, disorganised and inconsiderate of others – or alternatively, that I’m being unnecessarily ‘hard’ on myself, and I’m really not any of those things, and I should stop ‘worrying’ about it. This is where writing comes in, because it’s so much easier to explain things when I have time to think and compose what I want to say without being face to face with somebody interrupting and asking questions and throwing me off-track (which usually results in me feeling tongue-tied, stupid and frustrated).

Now I’m staring at the screen wondering if I want to go on, and if so how, and looking again at that Paul Nash postcard, the one of the bird looking into a mirror on a cliff top. What you can’t see from my photo (because of the poor light in here) is that in the mirror there is the reflection of another bird, this one flying away in the distance.

I like art which shows the impossible, or what appears to be impossible, or at least unexpected. I’m not a fan of Dali (possibly coloured by what I know of his politics), but I quite like surrealism in general. I like pictures that get you thinking and seeing things in other ways. The literary equivalent is magical realism – I like that too, set in the ‘real world’ but with impossible bits.

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Control

I finished yesterday’s post with a rhetorical question – which I intended to continue today – I remember that, but I can’t remember what it was. Excuse me while I have a quick check…

…

‘Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many ideas about how my life should have been (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?’

Ah right, yes, that is what I was going to write about. It’s been in my head quite a lot and I thought I had an answer…

The main one, I think, is that that is the only one of the four which is still within my control. I could argue over whether any of them are realistically feasible, but I’m not going there today, beyond saying that all of them rely on huge amounts of luck, but also, more significantly, on other people – potential lovers, potential employers, potential clients. One thing I have learnt to accept in life is that any situation where I have to persuade or convince anyone else is stressful, unlikely to end well for me and hence best avoided.

But I can write. I can even ‘publish’ – even if it’s only posting these daily 500 word mini-essays about this, that and nothing in particular, it’s still publication in the sense of putting it into a public space where anyone with access to the internet can potentially read it. I can even go further, I can gather my words together and dump them into e-books, or have them printed into paperbacks which I can put on my shelves with my name on the spines. The technologies and processes are all at my fingertips.

A couple of years ago I met a life coach who suggested I visualise writing a best-seller, then plan the steps to get there. I don’t really know why I reacted the way I did, but I got very angry – she was trying to help me, but setting extremely unrealistic aspirations just seems frustrating and depressing, not motivating, as far as I’m concerned. I suppose it’s the tired old chestnut about the glass of water again – the significance of the gap seems overwhelming compared to that of the contents.

What I really long for is that buzz of excitement from creating a world in my head, finding out what’s going to happen next, bringing it all together. There really is nothing in the world quite like it – except the buzz of intellectual discovery, the moment when the ideas interconnect and click together and suddenly some small part of the world makes sense in a way it didn’t before – I’ve felt that too, but not for many years.

So, all I can do is to keep going, doing what I can, not being distracted by what I can’t. Letting go of expectations, and letting the words take control.

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Zoom Singing

I wasn’t going to write. I lay in bed telling myself that I didn’t have to write today. But here I am.

I didn’t write yesterday about the choir meeting on Friday. There were 43 participants and some of those were couples, so probably just under fifty people (about half the full choir) logged in I’m sure lots of people enjoyed it, but for me the singing part was truly awful. Because the way it works is that you can’t hear the other people singing, everyone is on mute apart from the musical director, so all you can hear is his instructions and the keyboard, and you sing your part along with that. For a start, I hadn’t realised that there was a link to the sheet music and audio files in the email, so I wasn’t prepared. The music was shared on the screen, but I couldn’t see it well enough to read without having to scroll round it all the time. We did two songs: ‘Panis Angelicus’ and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, both of which I know (though I didn’t know the alto part for Over the Rainbow). I had got the music for ‘Panis Angelicus’ because we were rehearsing it for the Easter concert when lockdown started, so I was able to follow that, and I have sung it before, but as soon as I opened my mouth all that came out was a horrible scratchy squeak. Horrible. It was like being before an audition panel, except that no one could hear me – which is strange, if you think about it, because if no one can hear why would that make me nervous? The thing is, I can’t read music, so I’m dependent on picking up on the voices of the other people singing the same notes, whether that’s the whole choir or just the other ladies in the alto section. Even ‘Over the Rainbow’ – which I used to sing to my kids when they were little, so you’d think I’d know it – was a struggle, because if I sing it by myself it doesn’t matter if I’m in the wrong key, and anyway, as I said, I didn’t know the alto part.

Well, that’s what I should have written about yesterday, only I didn’t feel like it, and today… Today I was originally going to write about anger, how angry I am with everything, with the state of the country, with the state of the world, with everything, with myself. I’d be angry with God if I believed in him/her/it, but of course I don’t, so that’s someone I can’t blame.

On Facebook yesterday I saw a Wordsearch, and the instructions were to share the first three words you noticed because that says something about you. The first two I saw were: ‘One’, and ‘Lesson – I was intrigued to find out what this ‘one lesson’ was – and then I saw ‘Strength’. Oh great. So is that a lesson I’ve learned, or one I need to learn?

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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.

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Advice From Very Successful People

Yesterday I started writing about creativity, but I got distracted and gave up. So I’ll try and pick up the threads of what I was saying.

Trying to make things is risky. Friends sometimes describe me as ‘creative’, but I don’t really think of myself that way – I may be a ‘tryer’, but I give up too easily – or, if I persist to the end, I’m inevitably disappointed. And no, that doesn’t make me a ‘perfectionist’, I have an extremely high tolerance for things that are a long way from perfection.

To be honest, I never really know how to judge the things I make, whether that’s a poem, my PhD thesis or a crochet shawl. I don’t trust my judgement on external things, other people, what clothes suit me… (actually, that’s not quite true, because I do have very strong opinions on some things, but I hate arguing so I only express them to people and in contexts where I feel safe that they’ll agree with me). But when it comes to aesthetic judgements… well, the same applies, because I don’t want to admit to liking something if other people around me aren’t going to agree, but it also goes deeper because sometimes I just don’t know (or care) what I think.   

I don’t really feel like writing this morning. I’m a bit late because I’ve already been to Sainsbury’s, but I haven’t had breakfast yet. I want to sit in the garden but I’m not going to because DHL are supposed to be delivering a parcel, and I don’t want to miss it and have to go to Costcutter to pick it up like I did a couple of weeks ago. But here in the study I am right at the front of the house so will be able to hear if anyone knocks. So I might as well persevere. I haven’t had a text with an estimated delivery time, just that it will be today.

I just tried to check the ‘tracker’ from my phone. And – as you do – got sucked into reading an article with the headline: ‘Steve Jobs Said One Thing Separates Successful People From Everyone Else (and Will Make All the Difference In Your Life)’. The answer, of course, was predictably summed up as: ‘Trust yourself.’

Oh yes, that good old self-belief.

‘Trust that you’ll figure out how to react and how to respond to roadblocks and challenges. Trust that you will become a little wiser for the experience. Trust that you’ll grow more skilled, more experienced, and more connected.

Try enough things, learn from every success and every setback, and in time you’ll have all the skills, knowledge and experience you need.’

There’s a reason why you only hear this advice from mega-billionaires – because the people who try all those things, trust themselves, try to learn the lessons of their failures, keep going and still get nowhere, those people don’t want to talk about it. Or if they do, why would anyone listen?

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Little Failures

Years ago, I was thinking of the things I wanted to exclude from my life – as if I could wish them away – and came to the conclusion that they boiled down to: loneliness and fear. Since then, I have come to appreciate solitude, and recognise that for me, fear (like hell) is mostly about other people. These last three months of lockdown have thrown that into a clear perspective for me. Now I have to start thinking about how I negotiate going out and interacting in the future – returning to the ‘real’ world. I’m in no hurry, though I have been to one socially-distanced outdoor yoga class (I found an excuse not to return last week), and I’ve been semi-invited to coffee at an outdoor café with members of a group I used to meet regularly. Maybe I’ll go – if the weather’s okay. I don’t know yet, it’s a couple of days away.

Looks sunny this morning, but I won’t be rushing to the beach – even in a normal summer, I avoid it at weekends. Be nice if I can sit in the garden though.

I wrote yesterday about the big things that have been missing from my life: professional career, satisfactory relationship; financial independence and writing…That last one is weird, I don’t know how to explain it, because clearly at the moment I am ‘writing’ every day, and if I say ‘writing success’, it will sound as though I mean mega sales, but that’s not what it’s about. Nor is it just ‘completing a book’, because I’ve done that, and got as far as self-publishing – which impresses some friends who don’t realise how easy it is. More sales would help, of course, but probably wouldn’t encourage pride in what I’ve written.

Well, as often happens, my writing is taking a different turn from what I’d planned this morning. I was going to set aside the big failures – the ones I have to live with and let go – and talk about the little ones that constantly trip me up – the daily ones that grind me down, and are probably responsible for my inability to achieve any of the big ones. But now I’ve started to write my mind has gone into a fog of wordlessness about all that shit. Although I’m slowly coming to recognise them more and more clearly, I still can’t see a way of explaining them without being misunderstood. And that’s part of the problem – my inability to explain myself in ways that make sense to anyone else. That’s one of the ‘little failures’ that I’m talking about. What else? Inability to make decisions; fear of expressing opinions that other people might disagree with; forgetfulness (the big one); inability to absorb instructions and implement them; conversely, inability to give instructions to others; untidiness and inability to self-organise; lousy time management; procrastination; lack of motivation, lack of empathy; all that stuff. In other words: dyspraxia.  

Inability to see any value, or take any pride, in anything I do.

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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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Dreams

I’ve had a poem kicking around my head since the weekend. Every so often a new line or few lines will pop into my head and perhaps I’ll jot it down – though when I checked last night, there wasn’t so much of it as I’d thought.

It’s had a couple of working titles: first ‘Plaisir d’Amour’, and then ‘Riviera Reverie’ – though strictly speaking it’s become more about the Camargue and Languedoc, and I’m not sure which bits of the French Mediterranean coast count as ‘Riviera’. The current first line is: ‘Picture a landscape in Van Gogh colours’. I keep picking away at it like a jigsaw, like the partially done jigsaw of a Van Gogh painting on my kitchen table.

Poems don’t usually work like that. They pop up mostly complete, or if it’s just a couple of lines, they disappear again quite quickly, they don’t hang around for a matter of days.

Just had an oddly surreal experience. A van drove past my window with ‘Books2vessels’ on the side and back. Obviously, the ‘Books’ part grabbed my attention, but it had gone out of my line of vision before I had a chance to look properly, so I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d seen. I googled it, and yes, that is the name, it is a registered company based in Southampton (so not unreasonable to be driving through Southsea), but all I can find out about it is the Companies House details, which don’t say what it actually does. Maybe it’s a library or bookseller that specialises in supplying books to people on boats? Maybe even – given that it’s in Southampton, cruise ships? How intriguing.

I was thinking a few days ago about dreams – not the sort that come in sleep, but idealised plans, goals and wishes for the future. One of those things I’ve written about before. What dreams do I have now? Most of my past dreams have come true, but not with the outcomes I’d imagined. For years I dreamed of finding a soul-mate, or at least a lover, but I realised in the end that dreams which depend on other people for their success are very difficult to manage. When I look back on my ‘successful’ dreams – eg leaving my husband; travelling; doing a PhD; moving to Southsea – sometimes I can feel despair that the underlying wish of them all – that I should become a better person, more content to be myself and take pride in who I am – has so spectacularly failed. But if I think – what was the point? the answer is that if I hadn’t tried – if I’d stayed with my husband, for example – I would always wonder about how different my life might have been.

Now it’s become clear that that underlying wish is impossible – that I am who I am and can’t change, can’t become a better person, can’t learn to love and/or have pride or respect for myself – what would be the point of striving for more dreams?  

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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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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