Category: anger

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Zoom Singing

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

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

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

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

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Addictions

Yesterday evening I remembered something else the counsellor said last week, which was that the image of me smashing the mirror and thereby myself made her think of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. My first thought was: no, that’s not right because it’s not my idealised image that I want to destroy, it’s the ‘real’ me, but then I realised that it’s the portrait which is the raddled and depraved monster that Dorian has truly become, and that he destroys to achieve the peace of self-destruction.

Can I find peace without destroying myself in the process – if peace is what I want? I sometimes – when I’m striving for the positive – feel grateful that I’ve managed to avoid becoming addicted to drink, drugs or risky sex – (though I also suspect that my life would have been more enjoyable with more of that, especially the sex). The fact that I didn’t go that way wasn’t down to lack of inclination or innate moral sense so much as lack of imagination when it came to the possibilities, not knowing how to go about getting that sort of a life, and assuming that it wasn’t for the likes of me, that I was just too boring. So I tried to become Mrs Sensible, although the irony was that I was equally shit at that; not bohemian enough to make it as a Bohemian, but miles away from being bourgeois enough to be convincing or content as a bourgeois wife. Then I searched for solace in the life of the mind, and thought I’d found my true calling at last – except that the intellectuals weren’t ready to budge up and let me in, either.

Somewhere in all that mess I managed to spend twenty years raising two children – for which I’m grateful every day, because if I hadn’t I would now be truly alone. Not that emotional support in old age is the best motivation for having children, any more than financial security is a good reason for marriage – but sometimes life has a way of subverting your best intentions and aspirations by providing (you just might find) the things that you need.  

So I didn’t become (as a kind friend once predicted) an alcoholic, or hooked on anti-depressants, or any other kind of prescription or non-prescription substances. But am I addicted to self-analysis, to rumination, to trying to tease out what exactly feels so wrong? I can see there’s a strong argument for that, and also that all the self hate, anger, frustration, disappointment, is just as dangerous and self-destructive as any other kind of addiction. But like any addict, I don’t really have a choice – if there was ever a time when I could have chosen another path, it is too far back in the past to unravel and retrace the steps that brought me here.

Where does ‘trusting myself’ fit into all this? What about trying new things, learning from failure, acquiring wisdom, moving on?

It’s raining. And I need my breakfast.

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Happy Families

Yesterday I wrote but didn’t post. Because… I’m not sure why, now. Except I was full of anger.

I still don’t really know how to write about this. But I don’t think that my previous approaches to dealing with the sadness and frustration of various times in my life by trying to forget them and/or blaming myself has been very helpful in the long run. I think I am slowly moving away from the shame/self-blame cycle, but that has unleashed a lot of anger and resentment, as I try to find and understand reasons for why that became my default way of dealing with difficult emotions.

By coincidence, on my Facebook ‘Memory’ feed this morning, up popped a photo of my family which I scanned and posted two years ago, but which was taken when I was twenty, at my niece’s christening: Mum and Dad, my brother and sister and their spouses, my nephew (still not quite two at that time) and the baby, and me. Of course, we are all happy and smiling, as everybody does for family photos (apart from my brother-in-law, who’s just that sort of bloke). I remember the dress I was wearing that day, pale green printed with a pattern of tiny cream roses, very pretty and totally unlike anything else I wore at the time (or do now). I remember buying it with Mum from C&A in Hull (pre-Humber Bridge days, so we must have gone round the long way, because I’m sure we didn’t take the ferry – those were the days, when a shopping trip to Hull was a day out because there were exciting shops like C&A which we didn’t have in Scunny.) Dad must have driven (because Mum never learned how), no doubt under sufferance and with a lot of bickering. But he would have done it because he loved us, even though I don’t ever remember that word being used until decades later, when life and time were drifting away from them both.

That dress later became my interview dress, when I was trying to find my way through to the next stage of my life. I don’t suppose there’s a decent photograph of it anywhere, which is a shame. There I am, just a face, hiding at the back between my brother and brother-in-law, and it seems significant that I was the odd one then, as I am now (though with two broken marriages in between) while both my siblings are still with the same partners, almost fifty years later. ‘Between’ boyfriends, as I usually was, smiling for the camera, but lonely, sad and scared of the future, about to embark on a summer full of heartbreak and a desperate search for love and stability which would precipitate me into my disastrous first marriage.

I weep now for that pretty girl, full of misery and shame rather than hope for the life to come, and quite unable to talk to any of those other people, her ‘nearest and dearest’.

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The Chain

Wrote this yesterday. Didn’t share it – chickened out. I’m sharing it now.

Rejoice, rejoice,
We have no choice
But to carry on.

Stephen Stills, 1970

Will I be doing my bit to support the economy by going shopping today? Probably not. I’ll stay at home and carry on doing what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months, thank you very much.

This morning I am lost for words, a strange experience for me. Poised on a knife edge between opening myself up and expressing my honest feelings and thinking of something else, less contentious to write about – at the same time as watching on YouTube – really watching for once, not just playing music as a background – Fleetwood Mack performing ‘The Chain’ live, witnessing the rage flashing and crackling around and between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, feeling it entering and reflecting my pre-existing mood of pent-up furious chaotic self-destructive energy.

Why? Why this morning, why today?

‘Where [am I] going now my love?
Where will [I] be tomorrow?
Will [it] bring me happiness?
Will [it] bring me sorrow?

Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams
What you do with what you see…

Stephen Stills

Woke up with my usual mixture of shame, self-hatred and despair, but instead of taking the path of trying to calm it down and hush it up, I decided to go the other way and face it all head on, and this is where it gets me. For once I can feel all that anger in my body, not just think it in my head.

This was happening in my therapy sessions towards the end of last year, when we were still meeting in person. Every week I would come into the room with whatever was in my mind, but before the end of the session I would be screaming and grinding my teeth and smacking my fists against the arms of the chair to stop myself from smacking them into the side of my head.

It would be easy to put this down to the repressed frustration and anger of a child whose voice was never heard; whose questions were met with impatience if not downright anger; whose feelings were never acknowledged without disapproval; who learnt that those feelings of sadness and loneliness and inability to mix with other children or interact with adults were her own fault, a wilful failure to play the ‘happy little girl’; who lived in a world of confusion, constantly trying to anticipate what was wanted of her, never knowing when she might unwittingly overstep some implicit boundary and suffer the consequences.

Maybe that is a true story, maybe not. I honestly don’t know. In last week’s therapy session, I said that I’m sure there must have been happy times in my childhood, but I can’t remember them, which to me feels very shameful, my failing that I should be so unfair on my parents, but the therapist’s reaction was that it was very sad.

After sixty years, after multiple attempts to resolve these questions, can I ever find a way out?  

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Big stuff, small stuff

I wrote a post yesterday (limited to 500 words and everything) but decided not to share it. Second time I’ve done that recently.

How do I feel about that today? Well, without going into too much detail, I did it because I wrote about my Thursday therapy session, in which – because I didn’t know what to say, I showed her the photo of my son and myself when he was a baby, and then I told her in detail about the pregnancy; preceding troubles with conception and miscarriage; the isolation I felt living in Dallas; about giving up my career and being out of the job market from 30 to 43; my sense of inadequacy as a mother and conviction that my son would grow up to hate me – I’ve been through this before on here. I cried, and she said she felt close to tears when I was telling her.

I wrote about all that intense unhappiness and hopelessness, about the cycle of self-pity leading to anger with myself, and anger leading to shame, and shame leading to more self-pity, and I didn’t want to share it yesterday, probably because I was right in the middle of it at the time.

There have been other times of such intense unhappiness in my life – that wasn’t the first or the last. I’m not suggesting I’m in any way special in that, it’s just the human condition. Perhaps I’m worse than other people at dealing with them? My therapist has spoken in the past about my lack of resilience, which I take to mean my low tolerance to unkind remarks, criticism, perceived rejection, my own failings (which are legion) etc. All these apparently minor irritations and frustrations can plunge me into that cycle of anger, shame, and self-hatred simply because I know they are minor, I know the healthy thing to do is to rise above and laugh them off, yet I can’t, and so everything becomes my fault, I take on all the blame because the fault lies in my inability to accept these things like any mature person would do.

I could feel the anger rising as I wrote that last sentence, all that shame and frustration and self-loathing, I can feel it now. Probably why I didn’t post what I wrote yesterday.

But what do I do with the big stuff? Somehow I hide it away, I don’t want to talk about it, because it would be unbearable and I’d never be able to come out from under it, and you have to live, don’t you? I think back to all the shit I went through in the second half of 2011, all the things I don’t want to talk about now, but at the time it felt like a perfect storm, and what did I do? I ran away. I ran and I kept running, as I’ve said before, till a couple of years ago.

And now I will go and eat my breakfast in the sunshine.

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The Way of the World

First, here is an update on some issues you may have been wondering about:

Coffee Pot: Gave it a thorough clean, paying particular attention to the threads where the two halves connect, and it seems to be okay.

Hedge trimmer: Used the fuse from the room heater, and it now works, so on Sunday I cut the edge next to the gate.

‘Walnut’ poem: Went through all the files in both my ‘blog’ folders, but still haven’t located it – though did find another (pretty rubbish) poem. I’d completely forgotten Now wondering if I should go through old notebooks in case I hand-wrote it, but that seems very unlikely given that I have this memory of someone commenting on it on Facebook.

Dodecagram: Now converted into an octagon with somewhat wobbly sides – I gave up at that point yesterday, but thought of something else to try when I woke up, so now eager to get back to it.

Other than that: how am I feeling? Well – trying not to let my anger at the current political situation overwhelm all good things, let me put it that way.

Except… Around twenty five years ago I was working with a man who was very charming, not physically attractive, but he told a good tale, very persuasive, good listener, GSOH – yes, I’ll admit that I was a little in love with him. But as we grew closer, I discovered one fundamental flaw in his character – he could say something with the utmost sincerity, conviction and plausibility, then a few days later say the exact opposite with equal sincerity etc etc. If I picked him up on it, he would laugh it off, smooth talk his way out, make me question my own memory of what he’d said previously, or just dismiss it as unimportant.  Now, I’ve said before that honesty is in some ways my downfall, I can’t tell a lie to save my life. In fact I once said to him that I wished I could bullshit the way he did – it was something I genuinely admired, the way he could always find an answer for everything , always steer the conversation to his own advantage. But somewhat to my surprise he was deeply offended.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that he always said whatever came into his head at the time he said it, whatever suited his advantage at that particular moment, and he honestly didn’t realise that he was contradicting himself, or that to do so was in any way morally wrong.

You can see where this is heading. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently. It angers, frightens and depresses me that these days that sort of plausible deceit is just the way of the world, prevalent among our leaders, large sections of the popular media, almost a prerequisite for gaining any kind of power. Just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, they can’t get away with it any more, it does, and they do.

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Corrections and Clarifications

The anger came back this morning, in the I-should-get-out-of-bed-but-not-yet time. I suppose it may have been partly triggered by the new uncertainty caused by images of commuters on trains and station platforms. However, as always, it was turned against myself. How can I keep writing about my real feelings and put it on show? How can I come on here and share my true thoughts, take that risk of being seen for who I am, all that self-pity and negativity and doubt? I’ll stop, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll give up again as I always do with everything.

But I got up and did my half hour practice, and when I went downstairs and made coffee I realised how valuable that is, that it actually does help – or something does. Routine and discipline, you see – it makes life possible. Which I guess includes this as well. Here I am at my keyboard with Miko on the desk beside me, supervising the street outside, both of us listening to a sudden outburst of gulls. Blue sky and sunshine, and I can’t really tell whether there are more people and traffic, though I can see that there are at least six empty parking places across the road whereas they’ve been full for the last few weeks, but I guess the consolation is that at least six drivers aren’t taking the bus.

I didn’t speak to my daughter yesterday, but I assume she for one hasn’t gone back to work. She’s not waitressing any more, but she still works in the leisure/hospitality business, her job involves visiting pubs, so I’m guessing she’s reprieved until they reopen. Anyway, she has two children at home.

I am still in my cosy bubble, for as long as it takes. I may never come out. I still feel that life is less stressful like this, but I keep panicking that eventually I will have to engage with the world again, and wonder what exactly that will mean. It’s like when I was travelling and would every so often get a reminder that, at some point, I would have to come back and face up to life again.

Just remembered that I have some corrections and clarifications for my quote from the Joni Mitchell song yesterday (I finally looked it up). The song is Barangrill and the corrections are: it’s three waitresses (not two); they’re talking about Singapore SLINGS (which makes so much more sense than ‘sleeves’, a mistake I’ve been making for almost 50 years), and there’s ‘not one ANXIOUS voice’ (I think I said ‘angry’).

So there you go, I’m not perfect (as if I ever claimed to be).

Oh my goodness, I just glanced through the window, (checking for swifts) and saw a plane flying over – it looks like a commercial airliner, rather than anything naval/military. Strange how something so familiar can disappear without being missed until suddenly it’s there again.

Check out Barangrill, if you like Joni. I hadn’t heard it in years.