Category: frustration

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Blame Game

By chance this morning, looking for something to read on my Kindle, I found a book I’d forgotten I had, by Tara Brach. In fact, I was apparently 25% of the way through reading it. She’s an American meditation/self help guru who was recommended to me by someone I met at a mindfulness retreat a few years ago. I watched/listened to a few of her videos on Youtube, and downloaded this book.

I needed something to read on the loo, so I read on from the point where it ‘opened’. It was an anecdote about Christmas dinner with her family, where every individual was being annoying for one reason or another. In a huff (she didn’t put it like that), she went out for a walk on her own in the snow, reflecting on this, and realised that while she was blaming them she was really angry with herself.

I finished on the loo and went to the kitchen, where the radio was playing Thought for the Day. The speaker was also talking about deflecting our own blame onto other people, and how we should face up to it and take responsibility (maybe not in those exact words). And I thought, well, that’s what I do all the time, isn’t it? I always take the blame onto myself, and like apologising, somehow it can make people even more irritated with me, and I with myself. What am I doing wrong?

My late mother-in-law used to say: ‘Everybody makes mistakes, but I try not to make the same mistake twice’, the implication being that you can’t be blamed for the first time, but you should learn not to repeat whatever it was that you did. Because if you do repeat it, you become culpable for failing to learn the lesson the first time.

I’ve taken a lifetime of blame, but I just keep on and on making the same mistakes. I’ve tried to learn the lessons, take responsibility, be a ‘better’ person – but there are aspects of myself which will never change no matter what I try to do – and I am trying to explore and accept them, because I’m tired of fighting against myself. It’s easy to get frustrated and irritated with the chaos of my life, but as long as it’s just me on my own dealing with the consequences, it’s not so bad as when it affects someone else, or there are witnesses, and I have to deal with their reactions, and my own reactions to them.

Yet at the same time I have this compulsion to ‘come out’, to explain myself, to be understood and accepted for who I am. Judge me if you must, but please try to judge me on my own terms, not by comparing me to the person you believe or want me to be (or think I ‘should’ be).

Perhaps all our perceptions are illusory, but my self-knowledge is based on a lifetime’s study, and – I think – deserves to be heard.

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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.

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Another Morning

Been thinking that maybe I should reorganise my morning routine. If I did the writing before the exercise, that would be more in keeping with Dorothea Brande’s original instructions. I could get up an hour earlier and write, instead of lying in bed trying/hoping to get back to sleep. I resolve to do it, and then, when the time comes… I could move the ‘gentle alarm’ on the Sleep Cycle app forward from 7-7.30 to 6.30-7.00 – the half hour is because it’s supposed to detect whereabouts your sleep is, and go off when you’re in the most appropriate sleep phase for waking (until it comes to the end of the period, when it goes off anyway). It’s fairly immaterial, given that I almost never hear it because I’ve already stopped the app before then – except for the extremely rare occasions when I HAVE managed to get back to sleep.

Whatever, it’s only going to get harder as we move inexorably from the light half of the year into the dark.

Had a day out yesterday, with my camper van, which only got back on the road after lockdown last week. Another new battery, another stern warning from the garage that I need to use it regularly. The new (refurbished) battery they fitted last year was so tightly connected that I couldn’t disconnect it over winter, so when I tried it in March they said they would come and recharge it, but it wasn’t a priority either for them or for me in the following months, so although they’ve had the keys all that time, I hadn’t been chasing them about it.

Well, it’s going now, and last week I took it out for a picnic in the Queen Elizabeth Country Park, off the A3 heading for London, and my favourite go-to place for a significant non-overnight jaunt. Yesterday I went in the other direction, to the New Forest, which I’ve never done as a day out before, always camped, even though it’s only an hour’s drive. I had a vision of a memory from the last time I was there, this time last year, of the empty moors covered with purple flowering heather, seen from the open-top tour bus. I had another memory too, from a few years earlier, when I drove my old Micra back from Dorset to Bedford over two days with an overnight stop in Salisbury, of walking on the same moors in early summer.

I should write more about this. Why am I reluctant to write about happy things? Perhaps because I’m afraid I can’t do them justice? Or because, when you try to describe something like that, you – I – never feel I can capture the essence of what made it special? Like trying to take photographs and then being disappointed with all of them. Writing words and being disappointed with all of them. I got lost, I found somewhere to stop, sat on a tree stump and looked at the view.

Maybe I’ll try tomorrow.

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Dyspraxia and Social Anxiety

Words churning through my head… they are always there, a continuous monologue/narrative – sometimes a dialogue, even a full-blown row. Is that dyspraxia related or something else? It is there when I wake in the early hours, it keeps me awake, I am exhausted but can’t sleep. It is there in the daytime, it churns around and around, I can’t focus, I can’t settle, I can’t concentrate because I am exhausted because I don’t sleep at night.

Is this dyspraxia? I know dyspraxia is responsible for the time I waste looking for the glasses/phone/keys/wallet/cup of coffee or whatever that I put down somewhere 30 seconds ago. That’s exhausting too. Dyspraxia means I have to read everything at least twice, three times, or more before it starts to sink in. It means I often don’t take in what’s been said to me without that being repeated, too, and often I just forget anyway, which means I panic when someone does speak to me and I can’t think what to say in reply, so even if dyspraxia is not directly related to social anxiety, it exacerbates it.

Sometimes I struggle to know what to say, then think of it too late, or I think of something I could say and I want to say it there and then, and I say too much then get angry with myself. When I’m in a group sometimes I’ll think of something to say but can’t get a word in edgeways, or when it comes to my turn I’ve forgotten it or thought better of it and someone says: ‘I think Linda has something to say’ but I just say ‘it’s ok, it doesn’t matter, it wasn’t important’ even if it was. Once someone who had been facilitating a group I was in said to me: ‘promise me that the next time someone interrupts you, you won’t apologise’. If I know I’m right about something (factually) and I say it I expect people to accept it, and if they don’t I get frustrated. I hate arguments, I won’t say anything which I think the other people will disagree with.

I apologise constantly, which ironically most people find very irritating. Usually when something goes wrong, even if I’m not completely responsible, I can trace it back to some contributing factor that’s down to me, and so I apologise for that. It’s easy to assume I’m responsible, because I do so many stupid, clumsy or thoughtless things. Apologising is my way of trying to compensate for all those things I do that inconvenience others, but it often doesn’t deflect anger, but rather makes it worse – this used to happen a lot with my parents. If my apologies are not accepted I feel trapped, because I don’t know what else to do, so I get frustrated, ashamed and angry – and I always turn anger onto myself. I can forgive other people but never myself, because I’m not in control of their behaviour, but I feel that I should be able to control my own.

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The Next Fifty Years in 500 Words

I can’t use anything of what I wrote yesterday. I was trying to explain how I became who I am – as far as I understand it. But what’s the point of that? It’s only the pattern I’ve imposed on my memories from the context of where I am now.

How can I untangle how I feel about myself and the life I’ve lived and what part of that is down to dyspraxia and what is just who I am? Dyspraxia is all the frustrating, annoying, depressing, heart-sinking little stupid things that happen all day, every day. I have always known I was worthless. This is not new because I have suddenly discovered an explanation for it – it was always there.

I could carry on describing the last fifty years – university; struggling to find a job, failing interview after interview; rushing into marriage because someone asked me and I thought this was the only chance I would have to avoid going back and living with my parents; marriage broke down within two years; more shame, more guilt, more failure, all piled on  top of who I was, because of who I was; getting a job and working at it for nine years; marrying again and giving up my job at the age of 30 to become an ‘ex-pat wife’, not knowing that that would be the last full-time permanent job I would ever have; babies and post-natal depression and loneliness and coming home; getting a chance to do a PhD and thinking this would transform my life, then afterwards finding that at the age of 43 with a 13 year gap on my CV, still no one wanted to employ me despite my qualifications; more failed applications and interviews and a string of part-time admin jobs; breakdown of my second marriage, feeling trapped because I couldn’t earn enough to support myself so I felt obliged to stay; finally leaving to live on my own at the age of 54, happy to be living on my own at last, but still financially dependent on my ex – as I still am, living on a share of his pension – more guilt, more shame. After three years trying to create a new life, trying to find more permanent work, doing more training (web design), trying to write, trying to start a design/publishing business, I used money from the divorce settlement to go travelling across Europe, planning to write a book about it and support myself. Came back with even less chance of ever getting another job – did a TEFL course in Prague but couldn’t find teaching work without experience (and anyway I was a terrible teacher because of my lack of social skills and inability to explain myself). Used my share of the proceeds from the sale of the marital home to buy a house on the south coast and retire on my ex husband’s pension, where I am now, looking back over a lifetime of repeated failure, depression and self-loathing, and failing to write.

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Going Through the Motions

Going Through the Motions

Get up and do what you always do,
even though your head is full
of all the times it hasn’t worked before;
of all the reasons why it doesn’t work;
of all the many ways it might go wrong;
of all the problems you can’t imagine
until they happen.

You want to run away and hide,
but you’ve tried that before,
and it never worked
so why should it now?

This is life,
this is how it works.
Stumble on,
from one day to the next
and maybe you’ll
get away with it
for one more day.

Linda Rushby 18 August 2020

There was a post on the FB dyspraxia group asking how many members write, and what we write. I started thinking about poems I’ve written down the years which relate to my dyspraxia (even when I didn’t know that’s what it was). They tend to be the ones I don’t share much, because I don’t expect people I know to understand them or like the fact that I’ve written them about myself. The two I first thought of were ‘Cahos’, from 2005 (oh, look at that typo again – I may make that the actual title of the poem from now on) and ‘The Awkward One’ (2017, I think).

I saw the post at bedtime, and started going through my Google drive from my phone looking for the two I’ve mentioned and to see how many more I could find (a very bad idea when I was supposed to be going to sleep). And then when I got up and was doing my morning routine, I came up with the one above.

I could probably fill a whole book, but I doubt it would be very popular. From one point of view, these poems are seething with self-pity, self-loathing and shame – which is why I often keep them to myself. On the other hand, they are also searingly honest, full of pain, sadness, regret, frustration and barely suppressed anger. Both of those descriptions sum up my underlying emotional landscape a lot of the time.

The anger in particular WAS COMING OUT A LOT IN MY THERAPY SESSIONS towards the end of last year (oops, must’ve hit the caps lock without noticing, but that also seems quite appropriate!) I suppose my current task is to learn how to deal with it without turning it onto myself – incredibly hard and stressful, but I am trying.

One way of doing that is to have routines and stick to them even when I really don’t feel like it. Yesterday I skipped my weekly yoga-in-the-park session because I convinced myself it would rain – but then it didn’t. And I felt bad for making that an excuse for my lack of commitment. So I’m trying to deal with that.

I heard a podcast of the TED Radio Show on BBC R4Extra yesterday, about choice and making decisions. I need to listen to it again, then maybe I’ll have something to say about it.

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Imminent Cahos (accidental typo, but I left it because it seesm appropriate – and there I go again!)

I mentioned that I’ve joined a Facebook group for dyspraxic adults. Yesterday I got involved in a hilarious thread about having to brush your teeth before you get dressed so you don’t get toothpaste down your top. There were 34 likes, loves and laughs (so far) to the original post, and pages of comments. Honestly (I have to keep saying this) I always assumed it was just me. A couple of people said: doesn’t everyone do this? But I know for sure, because the person I’ve lived with longest (my ex) somehow managed to brush his teeth with his mouth closed – I tried it a couple of times, but couldn’t master it. I used to assume it was because I habitually breathe through my mouth, due to all the rhinitis allergies I’ve had down the years (I was always that child with the permanently runny nose).

Someone asked: ‘Does your dyspraxia affect your daily life?’ to which the answer can only be: ‘Yes, massively!’ The most obvious effect is that my main source of exercise is wandering from room to room and up and down stairs because, as my Dad would say: ’you don’t let your head save your legs!’ (as if it was that easy – presumably it was, for him). I know many people see the constant back-and-forth of trying to find things and remember what you’re supposed to be doing and why you’re there as a huge joke, but it can be exhausting and beyond frustrating – after sixty-odd years, the humour has worn mighty thin. More than one person has dropped hints about early onset dementia to which I can only say: extremely early, considering I’ve been like it forever, but at least if it does come I’ll be well-prepared.

The short term memory thing, though very significant is only part of it, of course. Time- and spatial-organisation and management is another, and planning and sequencing activities down to minute detail is related to that. I’ve often felt (before I ever heard of dyspraxia) that I have problems managing boundaries – temporal, spatial, interpersonal, probably loads of other categories my left brain hasn’t yet thought of. It’s most obvious with time, I think – when I start doing something, it takes as long as it takes – it’s why I can’t handle deadlines, or keep appointments – both of which are sources of friction with the external world and other people – and hence sources of shame and self-recrimination, leading to stress and further inability to cope.

But by comparison with many of the younger people in the group I’m so fortunate – I possess the two great blessings of financial security and self sufficiency. Many of the posts are concerned with finding and keeping work, getting help, negotiating relationships and living with other people. One young woman said in a post yesterday: ‘How can I explain … that we don’t KNOW how we adapt our lives because it’s just normal to us?’

We never lose that sense of imminent chaos. But we adapt.

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No Pressure…

Wisdom of a lifetime, accumulated from what I’ve read, been told and learned from experience:

  • I think too much;
  • I never think;
  • I feel too much;
  • I am selfish and don’t have enough consideration for other people;
  • I care too much about other people’s feelings and what they think about me;
  • My expectations of life are ‘through the roof’;
  • I don’t expect enough from life – I should dream more, decide what I want and go for it;
  • I need to get out more and meet people;
  • I am happier on my own and should keep away from other people because being with them makes me stressed and frustrated;
  • I need an occupation that will give purpose to my life and focus my energies;
  • I need to do less and stop running myself ragged all the time;
  • I need to try harder;
  • I shouldn’t have to try at all;
  • I need to write every day – doesn’t matter what about;
  • I need to be focussed in my writing and finish what I’ve started;
  • I need to tidy up after myself, because how can I focus and be comfortable when I’m surrounded by chaos?
  • I need to stop beating myself up about the chaos and learn to be happy as I am;
  • I need to organise myself, make lists, set goals and get some structure into my life;
  • I need to take each day as it comes and be spontaneous;
  • I need to sort myself out;
  • I need to be less self-centred;
  • I need to be more self-disciplined, to stop floundering about and getting nowhere;
  • I need to stop being so hard on myself.
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Coping (Barely)

Yesterday evening I felt overwhelmed by the futility of everything, and started weeping uncontrollably – which is unusual, because that’s how I normally feel in the morning. By the evening, it’s usually much better.

On Thursday, the therapist asked whether the dyspraxia assessment I had two years ago had come up with any advice or strategies which might make life easier. I couldn’t remember. I said I would look at the report, but when I started looking for it I couldn’t find it – because although I’d saved it in a folder in my documents, I’d done it under the name of the consultancy that did it, and I couldn’t remember what that was.

I went into my accounts for 2018, and found the name of the consultancy with the payment. I then searched on that, but Microsoft Search showed me links on the web, not in my files. So I tried again by searching for it in my emails (miraculously, although it could have been under any of four email addresses I use, it was in the first one I tried). I found the pdf attachment of the report, but it was password protected, I had to read another email to get the password, then I kept getting it wrong, but finally got into it. (It was after all this that I found that there was actually a folder under the consultancy name in my documents folder, plus a word document with the password in, but now I know it’s all there I will change the folder title to include ‘dyspraxia’ to make it easier to find next time).

The answer to the therapist’s question about advice was: ‘If Linda requires support whilst working as a self-employed writer and publisher she could consider workplace skills training with a specialist dyspraxia/dyslexia tutor’ but nothing about coping with daily life. Also, if I ever take any more exams, I should be entitled to extra time for completing them.

Under ‘Implications for work and study’, the consultant says: ‘Because of Linda’s difficulty processing information, she is likely to have problems: assimilating information when reading (thereby needing additional time to do so); formulating her thoughts, fluently and quickly…; with handwritten tasks (eg copying information); with memory (eg remembering instructions, sequencing, retrieving information and planning ahead); multi-tasking (eg dealing with multiple pieces of information/documentation)… with personal organisation; with co-ordination; and working within time constraints… she will require more time to learn and undertake complex tasks.’ (But no mention of cat food in the coffee pot, or where I put my glasses thirty seconds ago.)

Well, tell me something I don’t know already – but at least it’s reassuring to know there’s a reason why I’m so chaotic, even if there’s nothing I can do about it. Except, of course, to be a ‘good person’ – to become self-disciplined despite all my instincts and inclinations, organise my life and myself and keep on top of everything all the time – but somehow without being self-critical and beating myself up.

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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.