Category: anxiety

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Superficial Stuff

Yesterday I received my first Christmas card of the season through the post, and it was from the friend I mentioned a couple of days ago (hers is always the first). There wasn’t a long letter this time, just a handwritten note in the card to say her Mum died in May. Luckily I hadn’t already sent my round robin letters, so I can write a personal note to her. It’s a worry when you don’t have any contact from one year’s end to the next and don’t know what might have happened in between.

I don’t have to go anywhere today, and although the sun is shining I doubt I’ll be tempted out of my burrow. Yesterday after my trip to the hospital in the morning, I made the mistake of going into the Range on the way back to see what Christmassy paper, cutting dies and stamps they had. Unfortunately, this hobby is really about buying stuff – which looks amazing and inspiring in the shop and then disappears into the cupboards when I get home. And then there was the depressing socially distanced queuing. Most of my shopping this year has been online. I had to buy a winter flowering shrub (skimmia), two boxes of coconut Lindors and a kilo of Fox’s biscuits to cheer myself up.

In the afternoon, I completed the interiors of three of the cards I made the exteriors for at the weekend (which means I now have a total of four usable cards), but got stuck on the remaining two because I thought I’d got a second sheet of the matching paper for the front, to do the internal decorations with, but couldn’t find it anywhere. After I’d spent an hour going through the mess on the table, it was getting near dinner time, so I left it, with a plan to start some new ones today with different paper in hope that the other will turn up, or if not I’ll think of something else to go on the inside.

This is why I have to allow so much time to do these things. Ten days from today to the last second-class posting date. Also I need to re-order some teas, coffees and hot chocolates from the Whittard’s website, because an order that I thought I’d sent over a week ago never turned up – when I checked, the order wasn’t registered, although I remembered doing it on the ‘Black Friday’ weekend, so I must have just put it all in the basket without confirming it.

Just had a text from someone I’d arranged to see next Monday in Bedford and hadn’t told her I won’t be going. Still haven’t rung up the steam train people to cancel the booking so I can get my money back (in the form of vouchers to go next year). At least I contacted the catsitter yesterday and rearranged that.

Not very deep today, am I? This is why my head is always in a mess.

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Rabbit in the Headlights

Later this morning, I’ll be going to the hospital for my annual mammogram, postponed from last month because of the lockdown. I don’t want to go – not that it’s that painful (though it’s never comfortable), but I don’t want to go to the hospital, or anywhere really – just as I didn’t particularly want to take the van out last week, but this time I really have no choice.

The card-making didn’t go so well yesterday, partly because I was, like Friday afternoon, trying something different (for the inside of the cards), and I only completed one. So I’m still not ready to send off my letters, which feels a bit as though time’s running out.

Thinking about all this yesterday after I’d posted – and when I was getting frustrated with how I was going to do it, and panicking a little in case I did anything that would ruin anything I’d done so far – it struck me that there is a distinct ‘first world problem’ side to all this. It’s all so trivial, isn’t it, on the global scale? Yet it feels so important to me. It feels – at risk of sounding melodramatic – like an act of courage, something I’ve had to psych myself up for, and have to keep motivating myself to continue. Now, not that long ago I would have been berating myself for that, feeling stupid, frustrated and angry with myself for making such a big deal over it. I’m trying not to do that, though several times over the last few days I’ve been struck by panic about it all. I honestly know how ridiculous and irrational all this sounds. This is a side of me that nobody knows about (unless they read this blog, and even then they probably won’t take it seriously). These are the sort of battles that I have with myself all the time, to ‘get over myself’, in that weird phrase that just popped into my head.

This is the rabbit-in-the-headlights me that somehow – not sure how – I manage to hide from other people a lot of the time. Life is easier if I don’t set her challenges, and there are enough challenges in everyday life to try to protect her from (though fewer during lockdown). I can never get rid of her – I’ll never ‘grow out’ of her if it hasn’t happened by now. She is the essence of me, and I’m not sure whether referring to ‘her’ in the third person is such a good idea, but there again, it does convey the point that ‘I’ don’t have a lot of control over her – I can threaten her and bully her but doing that always has consequences for me, because I’m the one who feels the pain (even more so when I get angry with her). But there are things which she/I now can deal with and enjoy only because I/she have persisted in making her/myself do them.

Little battles can be as difficult as big ones. I have to keep trying.

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Creative Chaos

My head’s a bit of a mess today. I’m trying to focus.

Prompted by my efforts with the card making (which continued yesterday) I’ve been thinking about creativity, a topic I’ve been planning to tackle for a while. In fact the post which I wrote on Monday (but didn’t share) was about how difficult it is for me to see any value in anything I make. I was coming to the end of the Christmas jumper I’ve been knitting for my daughter, when I read a Facebook post by a lady who runs a local craft shop. She’d shared some photographs from a 1980s knitting pattern magazine, showing celebrities wearing jumpers with silly slogans and daft pictures – rather like the one I’ve just made, in fact. The comments were so mocking, and in a nasty ‘What were they thinking?’ way, not a gentle way, that I immediately felt ashamed and embarrassed by my efforts. What was I thinking? More to the point, what will my daughter think? God knows. But it’s done now, I said I would make her one and I did, I made up my own pattern and didn’t consult her so that it will be a surprise. If she hates it – openly or secretly – I still enjoyed making it.

That’s why this is the first time I’ve made cards for anybody other than my nearest and dearest – because what if they think they’re just naff? (Actually, two years ago, when the lino-printing classes were still running, I made some Christmas cards, but never sent any of them for exactly that reason.) Well, I suppose with these people I never see, it doesn’t matter what they might think, because who really cares that much about Christmas cards anyway? What really matters is that I enjoy the process. And that links in with what I was saying a while back about the quest and the prize, the journey and the destination, the process and the outcome.

So yesterday, I did some more, and because the one I’d done on Friday wasn’t too bad, I stuck with the same design, finishing the exteriors of six cards, although I also need to do more inside them. I made a conscious effort not to get stressed but just to enjoy it – even when I still kept losing things and making mistakes. There are lots of little bits and things to get lost, and lots of little steps that have to be done in the right order, and that is exactly the kind of thing which does make me stressed, because it’s hard for me to hold a plan in my head and remember what I need to do next – which is why it always takes me so long. But I took my time, tried not to give myself a hard time, and got into a rhythm.

Practice, repetition and routine is good. Anything creative is risky. What I do may be crap – there again, it might get better if I keep trying.

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Do It Again

I move something off the desk, balance it on top of another box of stuff, there’s a crash and the whole lot scatters on the floor. I moan, don’t I? I go on about how hopeless I am, but I never bloody do anything about it. Mea maxima culpa. What else can I say?

I’ve now made a start on both the projects I was talking about the other day: the website and the jumper. I had to give up the idea of using WordPress for the website because the client doesn’t like the free domain (appended with a nine digit number), but equally doesn’t want to have to pay for hosting for just a couple of pages. The websites I used to manage I hung off my own hosting, but I don’t want to commit to doing that long term, and anyway, it’s so long ago that I’m not sure how I did it, and it has undoubtedly all changed since then, and I don’t want to have to go there. But I bought the domain name she wanted for five years in advance, and then discovered that I still couldn’t attach it to a free WordPress site. So now I’m trying to do what she wants using Blogger, which I haven’t used for over ten years, and never liked very much, and I’m still not sure I’ll be able to use this domain I’ve paid for.

And this was all supposed to be something very quick and simple, just a couple of pages and a contact form, that I could knock up quickly for her on the cheap, a Blue Peter website made with cornflake packets and loo roll middles and stuck together with sticky-backed plastic, I can do it for you, no probs, couple of hundred quid. Should have told her to do it on Facebook.

So I’m learning how to use Blogger on the hoof (or ‘winging’ it, depending on which anatomical metaphor seems more appropriate, horse or bird related). Which reminds me why I started using WordPress in the first place.

But I have to have something to do – otherwise, I could be walking on the beach, or crocheting and listening to the radio, or untangling yarn, or weeding the garden, or mopping the kitchen floor, or tidying the study. ( Or even writing a book? Get real!)

On the dyspraxia forum, people talk about ‘super powers’ (I think that must be a life-coaching thing), and one that often comes up is persistence, sticking at things, not giving up – apparently that’s something dyspraxics are good at, like original thinking, creativity and sense of humour. But I’m always giving up, like Mark Twain giving up smoking – it’s easy, I’ve done it thousands of times. Everything is a disaster, I give up in despair, get up the next morning and try again, with a kind of brute doggedness, again and again and again. ‘Try again, fail again, fail better’ (Samuel Beckett). Beat yourself up about it, and do it again.

‘Do It Again’, Steely Dan

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Wherever That River Goes…

No post yesterday, because I got up and took a flask of coffee to the beach, arriving a few minutes  late for sunrise (but there was low cloud over the sea anyway) and writing in a notebook, which I might or might not copy onto here, but today I’ve got other stuff in my head so will go ahead with that.

One of the songs from my youth that listening to Amazon music has reintroduced me to is ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’ by the Byrds, and now it’s stuck in my head. It starts like this:

‘The river flows, it flows to the sea,
wherever that river goes,
that’s where I want to be.
Flow, river flow,
let your waters wash down,
take me from this road
to some other town.

All (s)he wanted was to be free
and that’s the way it turned out to be…’

‘The Ballad of Easy Rider,’ Roger McGuinn & Bob Dylan

Notice how I subtly changed the gender in that second verse? It’s true, all I wanted was to be free, and that is ‘the way it turned out to be’, though not quite the way I might have expected (or even hoped for.) But I’m still very grateful for the way it is – despite the warning from another song of the same era:

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,
nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free…’

‘Me and Bobby McGee’, Kriss Krisstofferson

…a warning that kept me stuck in a sad but ‘safe’ situation for many years, which has brought another song to mind…

‘How often does it happen that we live our lives in chains
and never even know we have the key?’

‘Already Gone’, The Eagles

But that’s enough soft West coast country-rock from the late 1960s and early 70s for today.

Going to the sea yesterday morning did its magic of lifting my mood. I sat on my usual bench behind the beach café, writing in my notebook, and two people passing by said: ‘you’ve got a good spot there!’, and later on my way home I sat in the Rose Garden and read for a while, and another stranger said the same thing. But when I got home and started trying to tackle a project I’ve started, I had a massive setback which threw me into despair about how useless I am and what a charlatan because people have expectations of me and really I don’t have a clue what I’m doing and am scrabbling all the time to keep going, and everything is ten times harder for me and takes ten times longer than any normal competent person but nobody sees it and I hate myself and I hate being me.

I talked to my therapist in the afternoon about it, this massive fear I have of cocking everything up. She talked about adjusting to not being ‘needed’ any more, but I don’t want to be needed, I don’t want anyone to depend on me, I can’t stand the stress. I want to be free of all that. I want to run away again.

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Gloomy Monday

I am here again – today, anyway, though it remains to be seen whether I will post this or just rant to myself. I went to stay at my daughter’s for the early part of last week, after my infusion at the hospital – quite a last minute decision, to do with me going to see their new house before she goes back to work full time, and not knowing when we might be able to meet again. I came back on Wednesday and came down with a cold Wednesday evening, which I’m now over except for an embarrassing cough, a nasal whine and a cloud of gloom that I’m struggling to get out from under.

Aha, autumn, increasing darkness, getting colder, and nothing to look forward to in the next six months but more of the same. Yes to all of that, but also commitments; an Xmas jumper promised to one person and a website to another, both of them started over the weekend, neither of them particularly well.  

One of the joys of combined singledom and retirement is not having regular commitments to do things for other people. Although it has been said to me that the best way to make yourself happy is to make other people happy, for me it just creates so much stress and worry beforehand, and the outcome is so uncertain – what if they don’t like what I’ve done when I’ve done it? What if it all turns out to be crap? For example, if I’m crocheting something for myself and I hate it when it’s finished, I can either unravel it or shove it into the back of the wardrobe and never have to look at it again (which is what mostly happens with the things I make). But if I’m doing something for someone else, I have a certain responsibility, and they have certain expectations which I have to meet. And what would happen if I fail to meet those expectations? Another failure to throw on the ever-growing pile, but with the added sense of shame and guilt of knowing that my failure is not just a private one but visible to others.  And even if they say they like it, how can I ever know that they’re being honest and not just trying to spare my feelings?

A crowd of starlings just flew past my window and over the roof – or the roof of the next house down the terrace perhaps. There’s a word for it – isn’t it ‘murmuration’? Or is that when they all get together and make a noise?

Yesterday was sunny but chilly. I stayed indoors, though I know there’s lots that needs doing in the garden to stop it descending further into an ugly green mess. Will the weeds die back in the winter? There’s no guarantee of that. Today it’s grey and gloomy, which is a good enough excuse to stay in. Already been to Sainsbury’s, and committed to going to yoga this evening. That’ll be enough.

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The Lottery

Yesterday afternoon was my weekly Skype therapy session, and, not knowing what to talk about, I told the therapist about the stress and worry over the test appointments earlier this week.

‘It seems you’re worrying about the processes and administration more than what it’s all about, which is the opposite of what most people would do’ she said.

By ‘what it’s all about’, of course, she meant cancer – but honestly, what’s that to worry about? If that sounds flippant, we’re not talking here about any particular risk. The infusion I’m going for on Saturday (tests permitting, and I’m still waiting for the result) isn’t even directly related to cancer, but to reducing the risk of side effects from the medication I’m taking to reduce the risk of the cancer coming back/happening again. And whether at some point I’ll get cancer again, or osteoporosis, or both or neither is not something I think about on a daily basis – although I do, of course, keep taking the prescribed tablets and a calcium supplement. That’s part of my routine. And going for the infusion, although uncomfortable and annoying, is also routine – this is the fifth time I’ve done it, and that followed after six sessions of chemo, which were much nastier and lasted longer but were basically the same process, in the same ward at the same hospital. So I know what I’m doing, I just have to turn up at the usual place for 10:30 on Saturday, with my Kindle to read while I’m waiting (there’s always lots of waiting) and after that it’s out of my hands.

This harks back to something I’ve said before: that getting through cancer (in my experience) is not about being ‘brave’ or emotionally strong or staying positive, it’s about doing what you’re told, turning up for the treatments, taking the meds, trusting in the expertise of the medical staff, accepting any help that’s offered. In the end, it’s a lottery, but you can buy as many tickets as you can lay your hands on to improve your chances of getting through. Even so, you could be knocked down by a car any day on your way to the local shop, so why torture yourself by worrying about death when there are so many other ways to do it?

The therapist’s response was to say: ‘There are two types of people in the world…’ and I thought she was going to say something profound, but instead it was just: ‘…those who blame themselves for everything that goes wrong and those who never blame themselves, and we know which you are,’ which we’ve talked about so many times, and didn’t seem terribly relevant or helpful in this context. I was thinking more of Chekov: ‘Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out’, which was sent to me on a card years ago by a friend who never saw her fiftieth birthday because she died of breast cancer six months before.

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State of Alert

I seem to have been dreaming much more vividly the last few nights – vividly to remember them when I woke up, but not now. And in the shower I was thinking about thinking – the constant, ‘stream of consciousness thinking’, the ‘catastrophic’ thinking as someone recently called it, though it’s not always dark, it’s where everything comes from, including all my writing, especially poetry. But no poetry today. And I think I’ll just write about what happened yesterday.

I mentioned on Tuesday that I had to get blood tests (which is normal) and a Covid test prior (within 72 hours for the latter) to my 6-monthly infusion on Saturday. I rang up both the relevant hospital departments and got the Covid for 14:05 yesterday and the bloods for 13:45. The lady in haematology told me sternly: ‘don’t come in more than 5 minutes before your appointment!’ Then on Wednesday afternoon I got an automatic text from a 5-digit number asking me to rate my ‘recent experience of our outpatients department’. This threw me. I ignored it, but started to wonder whether it had been triggered by my appointment – maybe they’d made it for Wednesday and not Thursday? It wasn’t worth the trauma of trying to call the hospital back (which is a nightmare for anyone, not just a phone-phobic like me) so I decided to leave it and turn up anyway.

Because my time management is so poor, I have a habit of allowing too much time to get to appointments, and arriving far too early, to make up for all those times when the reverse has happened. Plus I wasn’t at all convinced that 20 minutes between appointments would give me enough time. I knew where I had to go for the blood test, and where it was in relation to the car park, but not for the Covid, except that it was on the same site – I’d just been told: ‘turn left into Nightingale Rd, follow it round and you’ll see it on you left.’ I knew where Nightingale Rd was, but I didn’t know how long I would have to follow it round for.

Too many times I’ve set off with great confidence for somewhere, assuming that I’ve understood the directions, and got horribly lost. As it happened, that wasn’t the way it worked out yesterday – also the blood people were expecting me and saw me when I arrived at 13:40 and all was well. But it so easily could have not been.

This is the ocean in which my thoughts swim – in a constant state of alert. Stress was worrying away at me all Wednesday evening and yesterday morning – the poem I posted was a reaction to trying to deal with it. In situations like that, I try to think of the worst case, and really all it meant was that I’d have to make another appointment for the blood tests, either today or tomorrow.

It worked out – but there’s no guarantee that the next time will.

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Another Monday

Yesterday I had a horrible day. I spent most of it crocheting, but for once it didn’t make me feel happy, just guilty because I knew I was just doing it to fill the time and avoid all the more important things I probably should be doing to sort out the house. Also I had some phone calls to make, which I always dread (I did one, to the vet, but not another, to cancel something which is costing me money and I need to stop it). And I was expecting a ‘phone consultation’ with the breast cancer nurse, about my next 6 monthly infusion at the hospital. The one in April was cancelled, and if that had gone ahead this should be the last one, but I asked her and apparently it’s based on number (six times), not time (three years), so I’ll have to have another one next spring as well. Anyway, this one is on Saturday, and I knew about it because I’ve had the appointment letter since April.

I always have to get blood tests beforehand, and usually there’s a walk-in service at the hospital. But what I hadn’t realised until I spoke to the nurse is that now I have to make an appointment. Also she asked if I’d arranged a covid test, but I knew nothing about it being required. She said it should have been mentioned in the letter, and I wondered if it had been, because I hadn’t reread it, but when I said the letter came in April she said ‘well it wouldn’t have been then’ in that sort of fussy way that some people have that makes everything sound as though it’s your fault and you should have known. She’s not the same nurse I met when I was having the original treatment in 2017, and I didn’t recognise her name, but I know the drill now, or thought I did, till this year. She gave me a number to call to book a test at the hospital for Wednesday, and also suggested I call the blood-test centre and get the appointment there close to the same time, so I wouldn’t have to make two trips to the hospital. So I made those two phone calls and got both tests sorted for tomorrow.

If you’re thinking either: ‘That doesn’t sound too bad’ or ‘Poor you, that sounds horrible’, I should say that my bad mood was not related to having to make these extra appointments (though they didn’t help), but I’d been feeling it all morning as well. So much so that I was trying to find excuses to get out of going to yoga in the evening, but I made myself do it, and felt much better for doing so, which I knew I would, but still… It did help, and now I’ve made a commitment with the teacher that I will definitely go next week and she has put me on the list, so I can’t back out.

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Rabbit in the Headlights

Today I am in freefall. I know I’m losing my grip on life, I can feel time whooshing past me ever faster and I am so paralysed… I can’t move, I can’t function. I know this is a difficult time, I know the reasons behind this stress this week, but how do I deal with it? I am sitting here writing, rabbit in the headlights syndrome. I haven’t done my morning tai chi/yoga since Thursday, or blogged since Friday, though yesterday I wrote but didn’t post. I remember being in bed looking at the clock at 5:50 thinking – I’ll get up now – then finding myself sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the wardrobe, glancing at theclock it it was 7.05 and what had I done in that hour? I couldn’t remember – not asleep, just lying in bed, thoughts churning, maybe looking at my phone, everything pulling away from me, leaving me behind, sitting on the edge of the bed, panicking.

Someone on the dyspraxia Facebook group yesterday evening posted a question about ‘imposter syndrome’, other members’ experience of it, and its relation to dyspraxia. My feeling is that it’s probably not directly caused by dyspraxia, but like many things it can be a consequence of the things that are. It relates to what I was saying the other week about lack of control – when I manage to do something ‘right’, it feels like luck, or a fluke, because I can’t see any way of making sure it always happens that way again, but when I do something ‘wrong’ I can see exactly how my actions have contributed to it, though I can’t see how to stop myself doing them again. So past experience of getting something ‘right’ isn’t helpful in making me believe that I can do something else ‘right’, because it’s in the past, and there’s no guarantee that I can do it again, or that my past success wasn’t just down to some external conditions which won’t apply the next time.

Confidence and self esteem are supposed to grow through small incremental steps, through trying things and learning and taking pride in achievements, however small. There are plenty of things I have learned to do by practice and repetition – like driving a car, or cooking Bolognese sauce (though last time I forgot the bacon) or the first 28 movements of the tai chi form – but none of that is a guarantee that I won’t make a catastrophic mess of any one of those at some future attempt (though I admit that ‘driving’ is the only one with the potential to be truly catastrophic), and it’s not much of a help in learning something new, or applying old skills in new settings.

This is why other people’s beliefs and expectations about me become such a burden. I feel as though everything I’ve ever done is built on sand, however irrational that may appear from the outside. Every new challenge is a new opportunity for disaster.