Category: disappointment

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Creative Spirit

I was going to walk down to the knitting shop today, but… looking out the window, I don’t think I’ll bother. This is a bit much even for me with my oh-we-often-get-snow-flurries-at-the-beginning-of-April smugness – not that we’ve got actual snow here, just freezing rain, but still, it’s a bit much. I wasn’t planning to buy more yarn (still working my way through the stash) but could do with a 5.5mm circular needle to replace the one I’ve been using, which is on the verge of breaking, but over the weekend I’ve started two more top-down jumpers (one knitted, one crochet) to go with the two I’ve got that I can’t make progress on (one because of the needle breaking and the other because of lack of the right yarn). Three of them are knitted, the latest one (started Saturday evening, pulled down and restarted yesterday) is an experiment to see if it’s possible to use the same general top-down approach but with crochet, and if it works will use up a load of yarn which I’ve had for about a year and have tried to start various projects which I’ve later abandoned.

Do I want/need/will I wear all these jumpers? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

I was going to write about creativity – I half started yesterday, at the end of ranting about something, I can’t remember what. If I’m making something, or thinking about something to try – it doesn’t much matter what – I can sort of keep my head above water – as long as I keep my expectations low, and don’t think that what I make will be wonderful when it’s finished, of course, but when it’s done, it can be pushed to the back of a cupboard and forgotten about – or, in the case of writing, in the back of some folder on my hard drive, or shared on Facebook, or even better, Twitter, where I have 200 ‘followers’ but none who ever respond to anything I share (that’s an exaggeration, I’ve had two ‘likes’ in the last two years, both from people I used to know personally but haven’t seen in years).

For most of my life I haven’t considered myself at all ‘creative’ – except for this half-arsed idea that I might have been a ‘writer’ if I’d ever worked at it, but even then I was always conscious that I didn’t have the guts, talent or chutzpah to stick at it and make it work as a career. When I read ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ last year, I came across the idea of the ‘creative spirit’ which is crushed out of young children if they don’t get the chance to use it. This resonated with me, as I thought about my fear of judgement, of what I make never being good enough, of the ludicrous hubris of ever thinking I was ‘good enough’ at anything, the ‘who do you think you are?’ arrogance of that whole idea, and the ridicule that followed from it.

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Everything in the Garden…

I’ve already been to the Co-op today. I managed to avoid going all last week, because I stocked up the week before when I was having visitors for the weekend. And by using up supplies of longlife and evaporated milk, and Elmlea (which I’d bought to put on trifle – for my visitors – till I went to the shops again and managed to get real fresh cream); taking dinners from the freezer backlog of all those ‘chef’s surprise’ slow-cooker meals which have been building up; and a take away curry delivery on Saturday, I held out without needing to go until today. Saturday’s dinner in the slow cooker will be belly pork with cannellini beans, celery, red pepper, carrots and maybe sweet potatoes cooked in cider, because too many of the ‘chef’s surprises’ seem to have sauces based on tinned tomatoes, and I fancied a more radical change.

I have been getting discouraged about a lot of things lately – mainly the garden. My Facebook memories keep showing all the lovely things which were in flower at this time last year. Someone said to me the other day that my garden is ‘blooming’, but he was judging it from Facebook, where I have posted pictures of every single flower I’ve seen so far – sometimes several pictures of the same one, over a number of days, as I’m still trying to post a photo every day. The actual total of flowers so far has been: one yellow and three white daffodils on the forecourt, and in the back garden one blue hyacinth and a handful of mini daffodils; two hellebores (one single and, more recently, one double flower), a few blossoms on the rosemary which were only visible if you looked very carefully and a couple of yellow celandines under the camellia (which I only just remembered). The rest is a desert of weeds, rotting planks and general junk currently in transit between the sheds. Is this disaster down to the hot, dry summer last year, or a total lack of interest and attention? I assume most likely a combination of the two.

It’s the curse of social media. However honest I try to be about my general worthlessness and self loathing, it seems that people want to keep seeing me in a more positive light. Which is very frustrating – but on the other hand, if they could see me more clearly, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anyway. And then I’d feel even worse.

I honestly don’t know how to shake off these feelings, and more and more it seems that there isn’t any escape. The effort required feels overwhelming, but so is the effort to pretend to be what I’m not: brave, positive, upbeat, hopeful, happy etc. Feelings always take control over intentions to change, to find a better way to be.

I almost didn’t write today. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t throw all this out into the void. But I usually feel better afterwards

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The Long Way Back

Yesterday was the anniversary of one of my most vividly-remembered days described in ‘Single to Sirkeci’, when I arrived at Port Camargue. Earlier in the week I was remembering Prague, and it all set me thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’, and whether I’m ever going to finish it. I’ve been thinking about it for years – or, more accurately, I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. At first I used to start each year with the resolution that: ‘this is the year I’ll finish and publish it!’, but gradually I got over that, and recently I have been trying to learn to let it go, along with all my other failures.

I spent about six months, from autumn 2017 to spring 2018, trying to make something of it. It started with the ‘rump’ of around forty thousand words describing the return half of the journey from Istanbul back to England, which I’d chopped from the sixth draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’. Prior to deciding to split the manuscript, I’d spent a couple of years on the herculean task of trying to edit the 200k word first draft down by half, and after brushing off multiple suggestions of chopping it into two books, and stalling at 140k, I gave in to the inevitable.

When I published ‘S2S’ in early 2017, the plan for ‘The Long Way Back’ was to combine the material I had on the return journey with a briefer description of what had happened after my return; my time in Prague; my moving to Southsea; and some reflections on lessons learned from the ‘life journey’ (if I could think of any) – I even wrote an introduction and blurb to that effect, which I must dig out some time when I need a good laugh at the ironies of over-ambition.

Giving myself six months to deal with cancer and chemo, I started in September 2017 to go through blog posts from the time between returning ‘home’ at the start of August 2012, and departing for Prague in May 2013. Rather than the planned précis, I found myself editing a tale of disappointment, depression and yearning, as I struggled to come to terms with life – while, in the present, also struggling to come to terms with moving on from cancer. This resulted in a further fourteen thousand words to add to the forty, and I hadn’t even started on Prague – which, when I went back to it, was also a saga of depression and disappointment, although alleviated in places just by the fact of being in Prague. Then there was the year after, living back with my ex (working title: ‘Madwoman in the Attic’), mystery illness, moving to Southsea – and then what?

For a while I toyed with the idea of turning Prague into a third volume, and spent some time trying to find three–syllable words starting with either ‘B’ or ‘R’ to make a catchy title: ‘Bohemian Something-or-other’ but with no luck.

Then I just stopped. I just stopped writing.

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Tired

Why can cats sleep for so much of the time and I sleep for so little?

Why do I lie in bed for so long in the mornings even though I don’t get back to sleep and I know that lying awake in bed for two hours isn’t going to make me happier, in fact quite the reverse?

Yesterday morning I made up my mind that this morning I wouldn’t lie in bed, but would get up and go to the beach to watch the sunrise, and I could have done it, I was awake in plenty of time and it wasn’t raining, but still I didn’t, I just lay there thinking about it and then got up just before seven and did the usual stuff and felt angry with myself. Well, I did listen to half an hour of radio, but even after that, I still had plenty of time to get up and go if I’d made myself do it.

They say two hours of deep sleep is the minimum you need to stay healthy, and I’ve been getting an average of 90 minutes over the two years I’ve been able to monitor it My fit-bit broke towards the end of last year, and I’ve lost all that historical data, but I got a new one this month which shows my average overall sleep for the last few weeks is six and a half hours, including an hour and a half of deep sleep, which is about the same as it was before.

I am tired – permanently tired – is all I’m trying to say, but I think most people who know me understand that already, I’ve moaned enough about it down the years. I’m tired and I look through tired eyes, and I have no energy or enthusiasm to do anything at all, but I hate myself for sitting and doing nothing and I wonder, if this is the endgame of my life, what then? Of course, there’s no reason to assume that this is the ‘endgame’, but I can’t see the future, I don’t know what it holds or what it potentially could hold, or how I could influence it in any way, or how I would even want it to be if it’s not going to be more of the same. All that running away has brought me here – I don’t mean geographically (I’m happy with that) but psycho-emotionally, I am the same person I kept running away from. Geographically I think I’ve found as good a place as I could have hoped for, but on those other terms I am as stuck as ever I was. All those things that were going to make me a different person, change my feelings about myself and allow me to grasp my destiny – children, PhD, leaving my husband, travelling across Europe, writing a book, moving to the south coast – haven’t made a scrap of difference to the sense that I’m as much a disaster as I always was.

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Awake, Alone, Aware

I wake alone, aware…

Sounds quite poetic, doesn’t it? Because of the similarities of the words? It would be even better if that was ‘awake’ – how would I work that into it?

‘I lie awake, alone and aware…’ yes, that works, – or, if it’s a poem, even just : ‘Awake, alone, aware…’

What was I aware of? How did that thought continue? Aware that… this is how it is. This is life – my life. And it’s another morning.

Still in bed, I read, via a friend’s Facebook post, an article in the Guardian about women who choose to be single, to live alone and forego marriage and children, defying the outdated concept of spinsterdom. But of course, the lives of today’s single women, even those who’ve never had a live-in relationship or children, are expected to be very different from those of the stereotypical ‘spinster’ – changes in social conditions and mores have utterly transformed that. A spinster in the Victorian (and also most of the twentieth century) mode could be presumed to remain eternally virgin, whereas modern single women are assumed to have (or have had) active sex lives just as single men are.

The article was focussing on women for whom the single, childless life has been a deliberate choice – something else that has massively changed over the last fifty to sixty years, as women’s opportunities for employment and self-determination have improved out of all recognition. But I’d guess that the majority of women living alone are like me – divorced, with marriage or cohabitation in the past, and maybe grown-up children who don’t live with them anymore.

Did I choose the life I’m living now? I don’t want to revisit the territory I explored last Sunday, but – no, not really – or only in part. Fifteen ten, maybe even as recently as five years ago, this was not the kind of life I was hoping for in my sixties, but it is what it is. The longer I am alone, the more I appreciate the advantages, and given my experiences of living in relationships, I think on balance this suits me better than that did. As the song goes: ‘you can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometimes/you just might find you get what you need’.

So, what is it about waking up alone? What was/am I aware of?

That sometimes we choose our lives, and sometimes they choose us, I suppose. That life is far more complex than we like to think; the future is far more unpredictable than we like to acknowledge, and that our choices are both more circumscribed and yet at the same time more potentially disruptive than we can ever understand. The forces which constrain our choices are not just the physical laws of the universe and chance (which can’t be circumvented) or the man-made laws of behaviour (which can be, but not without consequences) and of interaction with other self-determining beings.

I’ll stop there because I’ve confused myself.

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Wishes and Banishments

Some years ago – when I was living in the flat in Bedford, between leaving Ex-Hubby and going to Europe – I gave some thought to what I wanted to banish from my life. I was quite cautious when making my choice, aware that wishes have to be thought through very, very carefully or they will almost certainly backfire, and I didn’t tell anyone, because I’m also aware that to do that is to jinx the process, but after ten years I guess it’s quite safe to share. It was a fairly long list, but I boiled it all down to two things: fear and loneliness. Note that I wasn’t wishing ‘for’ a lover, knowing that they often bring more trouble and heartache than they’re worth, but ‘against’ loneliness, and realising that if I could learn to manage that, it wouldn’t matter whether or not I was ‘with’ someone.

Where have I got to, roughly a decade later? I think I’ve handled the loneliness pretty well, not perhaps in the way I hoped for at the time, but that’s why I was cautious and non-specific. And as for fear, I’ve come to acknowledge that it too is just an inevitable part of life. What am I most afraid of? Disappointment, failure, rejection… which is odd, because I’m so used to all those things, shouldn’t that make me less afraid of them?

I don’t know where my mind is going this morning. I thought of this as a topic to write about a few days ago – probably when I was writing about love – and I thought I’d tackle it today because I couldn’t think of anything else.

I don’t think I’m afraid of death. There have been a very few occasions – mostly in 2017 – when I’ve gone to bed thinking that I might never wake up, and that is a very visceral fear – but if it comes to me again, I hope I will be able to see how irrational it is. My life will come to an end one day, that’s inevitable – why should I worry about what I might or might not do between now and then? I’ve got the rest of my life to sort that out, and if I don’t, well… it’s not going to be my problem anymore, is it?

Where am I now, in my life, staring at this screen, thinking about going downstairs and getting breakfast? I took some sunrise pictures outside my back door this morning when I got up. I found a photo of myself as a little girl a couple of days ago when I was looking for photos of snow in Dallas. That day I also put together the bits of my tapestry frame – a present from Ex-Hubby before he was even Hubby, about forty years ago. There’s an uncompleted tapestry on it – not quite that old, probably mid 1990s. Will I start it again, maybe even finish it? Will I take that off the frame and start something new?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6mw4GaPYQ
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Boring, Boring, Boring

Yesterday I experienced something I haven’t been aware of in a long time: boredom. I finished bringing my financial spreadsheet up to date, but didn’t feel as satisfied as I expected. The afternoon plays on Radio 4 and 4 Extra respectively were: the first episode of a three-part adaptation of ‘Tess of the Durbervilles’ (well done, but hard to avoid the sense of impending doom) and a thirty-year-old drama about a divorced sixty-something woman with breast cancer who is reunited with an old admirer, has a mastectomy and moves to Australia (either breast cancer treatment has improved a lot since the early 1990s, or the writer didn’t have much idea of what he was writing about – no chemo or radiotherapy, just straight to the knife).

Ironically, I also listened to a programme on boredom, but I didn’t take much of it in.

I’m getting bored with the jumper I’ve been knitting, the one I pulled down because it didn’t fit, and I haven’t quite caught up to where it was before. I’m not looking forward to doing the sleeves, which are going to be fiddly, but I want to get it done so I can wear it at least once before the weather gets too warm. If current trends continue, it may be even smaller by next winter (think about it).

Which reminds me, on this morning’s weather forecast they said that it will get a lot warmer, maybe as high as 17o  this week, which would be white and green within a week!

I saw a picture on a Facebook crochet group last week of a blanket with an amazing spiral pattern. There was no pattern attached, and I couldn’t work out from the photo how it was done, so I Googled it, and found a simple technique for making a four-colour spiral – not quite the same, but still interesting. I made a start with four colours of cotton yarn leftover from last year’s weather blanket (I have changed to using a different, lighter yarn this year), and it’s given me the spark of an idea.

I also saw a cartoon on Facebook yesterday titled something like: ‘The Mind/Body problem’, showing a man sitting on a sofa, with a thought bubble coming from his head saying ‘Get up!’ and one from his body saying ‘Nope!’ or words to that effect – exactly summing up my mood, but I can’t remember where it came from.

But for this morning I have some editing – which will be interesting and, being a commission for someone else, takes priority over housework, decluttering, study-tidying or any of those other multitudes of Jobs That Needs Doing.

I keep thinking of things I could do, hobbies that I could take up or restart, projects that I would enjoy getting stuck into, most of which I already have the materials and equipment for, or could easily get hold of online. Books to read, jigsaws to do, projects to complete, all at my fingertips, but can I be bothered?

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Looking for Love

Recently I realised that this year marks ten years since the last time I fell ‘in lurve’. It started in February, and was finished at the end of July, when the other party’s (supposedly) estranged wife decided she wanted him back, and he went.

A friend had tried to warn me quite early on (towards the end of April, when I was beginning to believe I’d finally met a man who genuinely cared about me) not to ‘…get involved in someone else’s train wreck…’, but of course, I was the fool who went rushing in. I’d been on my own for two years, I was tired of chatting to men online, meeting them once and convincing myself that they were really nice, interesting guys who were worth getting to know, only to find that they disappeared without a word or made it obvious that all they wanted from me was sex. Yes, I knew that he was jumping straight into a new relationship, and that that was dangerous, but I’d had my time in the wilderness, and I was sure that if I just gave him time and space to see how well we fitted together…

Well, if I ever meet that woman, I will thank her from the bottom of my heart, because if we’d stayed together, I wouldn’t have caught the Eurostar nine years ago today and gone travelling, never have lived in Prague, never have moved to Southsea… Of course, at that time, I wasn’t expecting it to be the last romantic relationship of my life. I thought maybe I’d been trying too hard, I should stop looking for love, I should just give up and wait for it to happen naturally – I was a free spirit, I would take my pleasure wherever it came my way, I would live the Bohemian life I’d always dreamt of, and some day, I’d fall in love again.

I won’t say I can count the number of times men have ‘come on’ to me in those years on the fingers of one hand – I can count them on my thumbs. The first was the old boy on the bus in Rome (‘Single to Sirkeci’, p165). The other was in my first summer in Southsea, one Friday afternoon in a pub overlooking the harbour, as I was settling myself with a pint of cider, and waiting for my fish and chips, when a creepy middle-aged man plonked himself down at my table with the words: ‘I don’t mind sharing if you don’t!’. (In case you’re wondering, there were plenty of empty tables, and I removed myself to one straight away).

For a few years, I still hankered after the fantasy of finding love – or at least, occasional male company. I used to wonder: what’s so awful about me that no one wants me? Is it my looks, personality, intellect, expectations too high, or too low? Is it just bad luck – or maybe good luck – that I’m the way I am?

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Dichotomy and Transitions

Thinking of what to write today, and how to carry on with the thread of the last few days, it occurred to me that the two examples I gave as people noticing a ‘transition’ from ‘Belinda’ to Melinda’ were from my twenties and thirties. Not only that, but it might seem that both refer to a single period of change – which isn’t correct, because the conversation where I was warned ‘not to go back into my shell’ happened long before my first meeting with the other person, so I’d obviously slipped right back into my shell by that time – just as I did between the networking and the travelling.

Which might sound as though I see ‘Belinda’ in a negative light, and ‘coming out of my shell’ as progress, when actually I’m coming to recognise that both of them are so integral to my personality that I need to embrace them both.

The other thought that struck me was that these days, and for the last several years, the issues I have are largely concerned with ‘transitions’ in the other direction, when people who think they know ‘me’ are surprised by encountering Belinda – the ‘this isn’t like you! This isn’t who you are at all!’ reaction that I get when I share my self doubt, fear and sense of inadequacy. Though now I come to think of it, that’s not recent at all – it’s been an undercurrent that’s been there for decades, at least as far back as my mid-thirties.

It seems that a pattern is now starting to form: timid Belinda dominated in my childhood, when Melinda, or the Wild Spirit described in ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’ (incidentally, I think the author should have made more effort to find a synonym for ‘Run’ which starts with a W) was systematically crushed and squeezed out on the grounds that A) ‘good girls’ didn’t behave that way; and B) her aspirations weren’t realistic for such a mousy little nonentity (here I can’t help thinking of Janis Ian’s song: ‘I learned the truth at seventeen/That love was meant for beauty queens…’).

Melinda (and I’m annoyed with myself that I’ve slipped back into using that dichotomy, but it is very convenient) crept out cautiously when I slipped out from under the parental yoke and ran away to the comparative freedom of university, where ‘A’ was no longer being so closely monitored, though I was still often stymied by ‘B’. Then I got married and started work, and found myself staring down the barrel of adult life…

I’ve just got into my stride, and the word limit is looming. And I still haven’t answered the question I asked two days ago: ‘Do I control my thoughts, or do my thoughts control me?’ I think the answer is quite clear – it’s my thoughts which are in charge, and there isn’t a great deal I can do to bring them into line, any more than I can give precedence to either Belinda or Melinda.

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Still Holding That Thought?

Yesterday morning, I posed a question, started to explain what I meant and got distracted into another part of my past. I will try to answer before the end of these 500 words, but as I don’t know what I’m going to say till it happens, maybe I won’t.

I started thinking afterwards though: I mentioned (if not yesterday then recently) that I don’t like meeting new people and making small talk, but presumably I must have got over that to some extent when I was going to the networking meetings – yet I went from there to travelling alone, where I became the Invisible Woman. How did that happen?

There’s quite a simple explanation really, and one I’ve thought about a lot over the years. When I first started blogging, I described it as two different personalities, and gave them different names: Belinda and Melinda (later to be extended by the addition of Cassandra and, ultimately, Cat By-Herself). But that led me down some strange paths, to the idea that I could somehow do away with Belinda and become Melinda permanently – Bel symbolizing all the things I disliked about myself, and Mel some kind of happy-crappy life-and-soul fantasy me. Part of the thinking behind that was the times when people have commented that I’ve ‘changed’ dramatically when they got to know me better – telling me that I’ve become a ‘completely different person’ and that I mustn’t ‘go back into my shell’. What they were seeing was just that I had grown used to them, to the setting in which I interacted with them, and was more relaxed – which is clearly what happened with the networking group. It’s not the case that anything has changed within ‘me’, just that this is a process I always follow with new people. I meet someone, I don’t know them, they don’t know me, I don’t know if they’re going to like me, I don’t know if I’m going to like them, it takes time to negotiate all that to the point where I can be comfortable. It’s a scary process, and one which I’d really rather avoid. I don’t have a problem with being somewhere I don’t know anyone as long as I can stay the anonymous ‘Invisible Woman’ and don’t have to worry about whether or not they are going to accept me.

Also, I implied that nothing came out of the networking group for me, but that’s not strictly true. One week the speaker had just finished writing his autobiography, and was looking for an editor. I spoke up, said I could help him with that, had a chat with him, talked about self-publishing (about which he knew nothing and I knew very little more, but, I thought, enough to sound convincing) and he promised to send me some of his first draft. That was the first germination of the idea of Damson Tree Publishing, even though he never got back to me, and when I contacted him he’d employed someone else.