Category: frustration

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Process and Outcome (and losing a poem)

It’s a cliché to say that the quest is more important than the prize, the journey matters more than the destination. This is the meaning of the story of the Crescent Moon Bear, (retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estés), with the added subtlety that it is the hardships the protagonist experiences through the journey that give her the skills she needs to keep going and deal with her challenges (which are still there when she returns home).

In the process of trying to re-evaluate my life in order to better understand who I am and how I got here, this strikes a chord. There were things I was going to say. But earlier I remembered a poem that I thought I would dig out and now I can’t find it. This is the second time this has happened to me in the last few months and it is worrying. I have so many poems and they can be anywhere – well, I think there are a certain number of places where I would have saved them, but I’ve looked in all those and still no luck. Emily Dickinson wrote hers on paper, and shoved them in a drawer where her sister found them after she’d gone, but who’s going to bother trawling through my computer for mine?

I’ve gone through my assorted ‘poetry’ or ‘poems’ folders, but no sign of it – I can’t remember a title for it, which doesn’t help. I remember that I wrote it in my flat on Beach Road, which narrows the date down to between May 2015 and October 2016. And there’s no 2016 sub-folder in my Blog folder on Google Drive, so does that mean I didn’t write any blog posts in 2016? Of course, I would have been using my old laptop then, so it could be on there. But it was unfinished at the time, and then I’m sure I’ve gone back to it in the last couple of years and tweaked the last bit, so that implies it would be somewhere I’ve accessed more recently.

Well that’s blown out of my mind what I wanted to say. Process and outcome. My PhD is a classic example of a hugely significant process with an outcome that no one was interested in – not only if we assume that the ‘outcome’ was the thesis, but if we take ‘an academic career’ as the outcome I was striving for – well, that never happened either. I used to say that the process of doing a PhD is like having your brain extracted, tied in knots, and put back again so you can never see things in the same way ever again. Maybe that was just my experience.

If I think back to the time before, from the point when one of my OU tutors asked whether I’d ever considered a career in research, my aim was always to ‘do’ a PhD, rather than to ‘have’ a PhD – which reminds me of another poem, which hopefully I can locate…

I had a dream.
And then what?
I made it real.
And then what?
Dreams in daylight
turn to dust.
And then what?
How long does it take
to make a new dream?
And then what?

Linda Rushby 22 June 2012
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Tangled Again

I wrote yesterday, but when I tried to upload it, I found that there was no wifi. I restarted the router, tried to get on from the laptop, switched the telly on and even the Tivo wasn’t connected. Went looking for the contact details for Virgin Media, funny how they never give you a phone number, or if there’s a letter or document somewhere that has that information, I couldn’t find it. It was down all morning, came back up just before one o’clock. I’d texted a friend who lives a few streets away who also uses Virgin, he replied mid-afternoon, when mine was back, to say that it had been up and down all day.

So I never posted what I’d written, but might do later.

Horrible weather yesterday. That does sometimes seem to correspond with the wifi being crap, I don’t know if it’s related, or if so how, it’s just an anecdotal correlation.

When I wasn’t fretting about the wifi not working, I was fretting about my knitting. I have one knitting project (jumper) and one crochet project (weather blanket) and they both have multiple colours of yarn which are permanently tangled, so that it feels some days I spend more time untangling yarn than I do crafting. Sometimes it can be quite a soothing thing to do, but mostly it’s a frustrating chore. I don’t know what I do to make it happen and I don’t know what I can do to stop it happening, except not use so many different colours – and I don’t want to do that, which would be very boring.

For the Christmas jumper, I’ve currently got two additional balls of white on the back (for snowflakes), two on the one sleeve that I’ve started (for candy canes) and seven on the front. You may ask why I make it so complicated, but the point is that it’s a pictorial design, and unlike cross stitch or tapestry, where you can work on one area at a time, everything that appears on one row has to be done at the same time.

I’m also having doubts about what the recipient (my daughter) will think of it. Is what I’m doing completely bonkers? On the current bit of the front, there’s a gingerbread man flanked by two candy canes and two cup cakes – okay, I admit, that IS a bonkers idea. I’ve adapted it from a cross stitch pattern and a jumper a friend of mine had last year, with the slogan: ‘Calories don’t count at Christmas’. Over the last three years I’ve made jumpers for the grandkids, and my daughter kept saying: ‘when are you going to do one for me?’ but I do wonder how she’ll react.

I always have this when I make things for other people. Will they like it, will they wear it? Personally, I wouldn’t be seen dead in half the things I make. I’m following my creative instinct, but I do wonder about what it produces.  

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Tangled

Every morning (mostly) I sit down with a blank screen and the faint hope that by the end of 500 words I will have said something worthwhile. Admittedly, five hundred words isn’t much, though some days it’s a struggle to fill it. Sometimes something occurs to me just at the end, which is why the title (always written afterwards) often refers to the final paragraph. Maybe I should carry on beyond 500 words? I tried that two years ago, and I don’t recall it being any more productive. I have a file (Word table) containing extracts taken from these posts that I think might be worth expanding, and the dates when they were posted, but I never look at it. Maybe that’s a project for one day, but I’m guessing there’ll be a lot of repetition and few surprises.

I’ve been thinking about the word ‘should’, which is anathema to my therapist, and most other therapists, coaches and others of that ilk I’ve come across. A couple of weeks ago she asked me whose standard I’m trying to emulate – but when I ask: ‘what should I do?’ I’m asking for help, not to be set a goal. There are many things which, if I did them regularly would I’m sure help make my life less chaotic and more satisfying, but, in the phrase she used last week, I ‘can’t be arsed’. But if she, or anybody else, tried to tell me to do them, I would feel patronised and insulted and do anything to avoid it.  

Half way through, and I gave in and looked at what I wrote yesterday. Ah yes, the quest of the Crescent Moon Bear, and what did you learn from the journey? I enjoy reading her analysis of the stories but don’t find her suggestions of how to apply the lessons to your own life very helpful in a practical sense. This is also true of every self-help book I’ve ever read. I remember my PhD supervisor commenting that I have to think things through from first principles – I didn’t know then what he meant, but I think it’s because I can’t understand an argument unless my head can get inside it and see where it’s coming from, but once I can do that, it seems obvious and I don’t know why everybody else can’t see it as well. It’s like the time I spent last night (about two hours) extracting one single thread from the tangle of the border threads for my blanket. I thought I had them all separated only last week, but somehow just by taking it out of the bag each day, attaching a new square and putting it back again, I now have a hopeless mess. I honestly can’t understand how it happens – presumably it’s dyspraxia-related but I don’t see how.

My thoughts and words don’t want to play the game today either. But putting things down and coming back to them later, trite though it sounds, does work sometimes.

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Chasing Rainbows? (to be continued – perhaps)

I keep hinting that there are ‘deeper’ things I want to write about, but that I don’t have time because the trivial everyday things take up my word count, and then I’m done and can leave whatever it is for another day. Except this morning I’m staring at the blank screen and empty Sunday-morning street and not sure how to set foot on this morning’s path, or where it’s going to take me, if anywhere at all.

Thursday’s therapy session was a bit like that. I hadn’t got any major rants to read out, or insights from the week, or anything at all that I could think of to say – not that it had been a perfectly blissful week, but in that moment I wasn’t tapping into anything in particular, so it descended almost into (very expensive) chit-chat. Sometimes it’s like that, but it never means the darkness has gone away for good, and I don’t suppose there’ll ever come a time when it will. There’s still the ongoing issue over housework, with the therapist (who of course has never stepped inside my house) obviously assuming that I’m exaggerating, and falling into the same pattern of people who don’t want to hear the truth as I see it. At one point, as I was trying to explain, she said: ‘that doesn’t sound like dyspraxia so much as you can’t be arsed to do it’ to which my reaction was: yes of course that’s what I’m saying, I can’t be arsed, I’m lazy and don’t take responsibility, how can you possibly not know that when I’ve told you a million times? I didn’t put it in quite those words, but my heart did sink a little to think she really wasn’t getting me at all. When we Skype I sit on the sofa and all she sees is a blank wall behind me, I was going to try doing it in the study last week but remembered at the last minute that there’s no webcam on the PC so that’s no good, maybe I’ll bring the laptop up here next time.

Well, so I did find something to write about which isn’t about causality, creativity, liminality, fate and destiny. Or Women Who Run With the Wolves. This week I read her analysis of the story about the Crescent Moon Bear, which is a version of the Grail story, that the point of the quest is not about the ostensible object, but the lessons you learn from undergoing the quest itself. This is hardly an original thought, but it is an interesting one to reflect upon. When I came back from my original travels, I felt I hadn’t learnt anything at all, that nothing had changed, that I couldn’t run away from myself; and the only lesson when I came back from Prague was there no way on earth I could ever be a teacher. Or maybe the lesson is: you can keep chasing rainbows, but make sure you’re enjoying the chase?

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In My Head

Daylight when I was doing my exercises this morning. A temporary respite – the dark will soon catch up again.

The level of chaos in my house and in my life has been creeping up again. Every room is infected by it. But I am busy, I have things to do, so I have excuses not to do anything about it.

Because no one comes into my house from outside – and I’m not expecting anybody for the foreseeable future – there is nobody to judge me – and I am working very hard on not judging myself.

A couple of days ago I didn’t have a photo to post on Facebook, so I took one of the chaos on the living room floor, and the cat behind it with a look that said: ‘how do I get round this?’ Then I made it my cover photo, thinking: ‘this will let people see who I really am. They’re my friends, they’ll accept me, they won’t judge’. Then a comment from one friend showed that she assumed it was the cat who had made the mess. How can you respond to that?

I am trying to untangle the threads of my identity, in the hope that I can learn to live at peace with myself. I am trying to embrace the Wild Thing, not fear and judge her and lock her away. Yes, I am chronically untidy and disorganised, and I understand now that there is a reason for that, although that doesn’t necessarily make the consequences of that chaos any easier to live with. I also know that I should make more effort to deal with it, but at the same time I know I ‘shouldn’t’ keep ‘should’-ing myself all the time. I hear the voice that says: ‘how can you learn to improve if you’re not constantly judging yourself?’ and the one that says: ‘how can you learn to love yourself if you’re always listening to your inner critic?’ and the one that says: ‘stuff this for a game of soldiers, do what makes you happy’ along with all the rest, they go round and round each other, and the little one in the corner just sits and cries and wishes she was anywhere else but in my head.

I ask: ‘This is who I am, do you think that’s okay? Can you let go of who you want me to be and accept this version of who I am?’ I get two kinds of feedback when I try and talk about dyspraxia – one that this isn’t the ‘real me’. It’s just another stick I’ve found to beat myself with; and the other that it’s just an excuse for being untidy, disorganised, lazy etc and I’m not trying hard enough to get myself sorted. The latter is what I’ve lived with all my life, and internalised at an early age: of course I can sort this chaos out if I keep at it and stop whining – the gremlin voice, the inner critic voice.

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Lurve and Marriage

How could anyone in their right mind pretend to ‘like’ autumn? Who wants to be reminded of death, darkness, cold, and the knowledge that for the next half of the year that’s what’s to be expected?

Well, admittedly, death, darkness and cold are inevitable parts of life, and we all have to face up to them and accept that that’s how it is, but do we have to embrace them?

Try to believe that you’re not alone, thrown here by chance into this god-forsaken century on this god-forsaken planet. That there is goodness and beauty and hope in this life, sunshine and stories and singing and, in the foreseeable future, springtime again.

I’ve been reading about ‘love’ this morning, and suddenly all the bitterness and disappointment and despair that I have managed to rationalise away has come back in that old familiar rage of: ‘Why me? What’s so awful about me that I don’t deserve/am not capable of being loved?’

So I cry and shout and stop just short of smacking my head, then I will sit with it, face up to it, observe it for what it is, composed of chewing over old disappointments and rejections, sexual frustration and hopeless fantasies, envy and jealousy, shame and self-blame and simple loneliness. All this will pass just as winter will pass, or night. I will have breakfast and get involved with what needs to be done (back to the website) and remind myself of the many reasons why I prefer living alone.

After all, ‘romantic love’ is a social construct, composed of sex, companionship, physical affection (ie non-sexual touching), shared child-rearing, practical support, emotional support, interest in each other’s interests… I have found all of those in various relationships at one time or another, but never all of them rolled into one. I can see it might be unrealistic, to hope to find them all at once, but what is the minimum to settle for? Is it asking too much to hope for more than one or two at a time? By the end of my marriage, I would say that’s about what was left (companionship and practical support, and both of those were pretty lukewarm). For some couples, it seems there’s a fundamental loyalty that underpins all of those and keeps the relationship going when those other criteria have become irrelevant, something I’ve observed in my parents’ and siblings’ marriages, maybe it’s just inertia and lack of imagination, or maybe it’s True Love, who knows? (I wouldn’t, because I’ve never experienced it, and maybe that’s because I’ve never met ‘The Right One’, or more likely because of a fundamental flaw in my personality).

Well there you go, I’ve written and rationalised my way out of my rage again.

I heard the rain in the night, gently, the sort of rain that patters on the roof and makes you feel glad to be safe indoors. It’s been threatening for a couple of days, and now it’s here. Time to hunker down.

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Failing Better?

I just inserted the date at the top of my Word document – as I aways do – and noticed that today is my Mum’s birthday – she would have been 108 now, but she died before the old century did, at the age of 86. I might call my sister later.

I can’t seem to get started today. Realised yesterday that it’s only a couple of weeks till NaNoWriMo. I did the 50k words challenge in 2018, and last November I tried reading it through just in case there was anything in it. Basically, it’s just as if I’d been writing three of these blog posts a day for a month, not even a sniff of a novel, just same old same old. So this year I’m not going to bother. Am I going to set myself any kind of writing challenge at all? After all I managed the poems for NaPoWriMo. Some days I think I should – maybe read through what I’ve got of ‘The Long Way Back’, I don’t know.

There are a few issues over ‘The Long Way Back’ (the follow-up to ‘Single to Sirkeci’). Partly it’s because I stopped in the middle of the journey, and didn’t include the return, in order to make it a more manageable size – but that part of the book is already written, so I could just combine that with the first part and maybe release the whole thing just to Kindle. Because the second part on its own would make quite a short book (about 40k words), I had the idea of writing about what happened after I came back and tagging that on the end – but when I started editing the blogs from that time it all seemed too downbeat, then there was the Prague bit, and I wondered if it would make two additional books, then there’s the question of: where do I stop, because life is still going on (even if it isn’t quite so interesting these days). But the longer I put off starting on it the more pointless it all seems, especially given that the original book hasn’t exactly sold very well.

It all becomes a long circular argument about – what and whom am I writing for? what other things could I be doing with my time? will I ever get back to my 30 year old lapsed novel, will I ever get an idea for another novel? will I ever have any ideas for short stories to contribute to the anthologies of my writers’ group? (who have stopped meeting again since the weather has turned and the Covid restrictions have tightened up).

Maybe these 500 word missives are as much as I can cope with these days. I said yesterday (I think it was) that I keep trying, keep trying to ‘fail better’. But how can I tell whether the voice in my head that stops me from setting off down that particular road is aiming to sabotage me or to save me from myself?

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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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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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Van Outing

After breakfast yesterday I decided that, despite what I’d said about self-isolation, I would take my van out for a run (one of those semi-commitments I’d made that I was talking about not wanting to face up to). The only brief encounters I had with other people was when I went into Sainsbury’s en route to the garage where I keep the van and bought picnic ingredients (wearing a scarf over my nose and mouth, naturally).

The guys at the garage (not the one where I keep it but the one where they fix it) had made me promise solemnly that I would take it out regularly and keep it running, now that they’ve not only replaced the battery (yet again) but fixed up a butterfly nut to make it easy to disconnect the battery every time I leave it. The problem last winter was that the previous new battery they’d installed was too tight for me to disconnect (even using a spanner) so I’d left it standing from November to January, and then, after they’d charged it, only took it out for a 10 mile drive up and down the seafront (I thought that would be enough but apparently it wasn’t), and it was dead again by the time I tried again in March. After that, we all know what happened, and I don’t think I should really be held responsible for that, but six months without being touched at all left the battery completely useless, so they had to replace it again.

Going out in the van is one of those things that you’d think should be a real pleasure, but I still have to psych myself up to do it. It’s not that I’m nervous about driving it as I used to be (except when it comes to reversing and parking), it’s just like everything else, it always feels like it’s going to be a hassle and I’d rather just stay at home.

But it’s been on my mind that I need to take it out more regularly, so, as yesterday was bright and sunny – after a couple of rainy days – I thought I’d take it over to my favourite park on the South Downs, about twenty miles away. The pleasure of it is to park up, go for a walk, brew up a cup of tea or coffee, get out the camping chair and have a picnic. It’s not as if I couldn’t just do that in the car with hot water in a flask, but it feels like camping even if I then turn round and come home.

So that’s what I did – except that although I had tea bags, water, milk and camping stove, I’d taken all the cups out last time to put through the dishwasher and forgot to take one with me. It was windier and colder than I thought, and I hadn’t taken a coat, so didn’t feel like a walk. So I sat in the van and ate my sandwiches.