Category: self-analysis

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Singing at a Distance

A few days ago I got an email from the committee of the Friday night choir I’ve been attending (on and off) since I moved here, saying that they are planning a Zoom rehearsal for tonight. I’ve used Zoom, for tai chi and occasionally for meditation (I prefer the Sunday evening meditation sessions, which are by Crowdcast, which means my picture doesn’t appear, the interaction is all through ‘chat’ and as no one can see me, I can carry on crocheting through the talking part). Even with the tai chi, though I’ve been doing that every week (except once when I honestly forgot) and do speak occasionally, it never seems to put me up on the main screen (thank goodness). I don’t know why this is, whether there is something technical to do with my laptop, or my speech isn’t loud or clear enough, or whether even the technology can recognise that it’s better not to put my face up onto people’s screens.

I don’t really understand how the choir thing is going to work. Of course, I sing a lot by myself when I’m by myself, but that doesn’t have to be in tune. At choir, I usually rely on the ladies around me to get it right, and hope I can blend in. The email said that the Musical Director has ‘some ideas of things we can do’. Knowing him, I’m sure he’ll make it fun. We have the music we were rehearsing for the Easter concert (which was cancelled, obviously). We were also supposed to be doing a concert at the Guildhall last month, but we never even started rehearsing that. I haven’t looked at any of it for four months, of course, but I know where it is.

The thing is… I’ve really appreciated having Friday evenings to myself, not having to think about going out and interacting – more so in that I have to go by car, and finding somewhere to park is a nightmare – not just at the rehearsal hall, but also around here when I used to get back at about quarter to ten. There’ve been Friday evenings when I’ve spent half an hour driving around looking for a spot, and ended up parking so far away that I then had a twenty minute walk to get home (though that has improved a bit since the residents’ parking permits were introduced eighteen months ago, although they’re not in operation by that time of the evening).

Choir is one of those things that has caused me massive amounts of stress – especially around concerts – but that I keep bullying myself into going to because – well, mostly I enjoy it once I get there, but also I feel I have to go out and interact with people. And actually, it is quite non-threatening, because chatting isn’t compulsory, in fact most of the time it’s frowned upon. And they are a very nice bunch – those I know enough to actually speak to.

We’ll see how it goes.

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Trying Not Trying

After I’d submitted my post yesterday, I realised I wasn’t happy with what I’d posted. At some point I’d slipped into the idea that my self-reflection (or wallowing, as it can also be called) was a kind of addiction. But this buys into my brother’s idea that I get a kick out of being miserable, and want to bring everyone down to my own level, as though unhappiness is a choice that I make and that I can stop any time I like – well, okay that does make it sound addictive, I can see where that idea came from. But it’s not quite what I meant, and I don’t want to be misunderstood, and I want to apologise to anybody who has to deal with the consequences of a chemical addiction, either their own or somebody close to them, and I’m sorry for any hurt or offence I may have caused by that analogy.

I know when I had the thought that triggered that post, the evening before, it made a different kind of sense, and it seemed very clear (as they always do), but now I just can’t think what it could have been.

Now I’m sitting here and I thought everything would come, but it isn’t. Staring out of the window at the early morning street, which seems no more or less busy than it has at any time in the last four months while I’ve been doing this regularly.

I sat on the bed this morning as I always do when I’m getting up, and noticed that although I was only inches away from the mirror, I wasn’t looking at it. I’ve said a lot about that mirror recently, but, as I realise now, I don’t actually look at it. Mostly I look at the floor, or I don’t look anywhere. Looking at my own reflection is a conscious choice, and mostly I choose not to. I remember sitting and looking at myself one morning – I think it was at the therapist’s suggestion, it feels like a long time ago, when we were still meeting face to face, but I also remember writing about it – I think the idea was to encourage compassion for myself, but what I remember was that it made me cry uncontrollably – not because I didn’t like the way I looked (although of course I don’t) but because of the misery and the pointlessness and emptiness in my eyes. I haven’t tried it again since, and I didn’t try it this morning.

Does accepting myself mean accepting all my failures? Does redefining ‘failure’ as ‘a learning experience’ make any sense if there’s nothing new to learn, or nothing that you can see and implement other than: ‘stop trying’? I’ve tried to make myself a ‘better’ person and it highlighted my faults and made me stressed and anxious and even more self-hating than I already was. Now I’ve stopped trying I’m probably becoming a worse person, but I’m trying not to care so much.

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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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Advice From Very Successful People

Yesterday I started writing about creativity, but I got distracted and gave up. So I’ll try and pick up the threads of what I was saying.

Trying to make things is risky. Friends sometimes describe me as ‘creative’, but I don’t really think of myself that way – I may be a ‘tryer’, but I give up too easily – or, if I persist to the end, I’m inevitably disappointed. And no, that doesn’t make me a ‘perfectionist’, I have an extremely high tolerance for things that are a long way from perfection.

To be honest, I never really know how to judge the things I make, whether that’s a poem, my PhD thesis or a crochet shawl. I don’t trust my judgement on external things, other people, what clothes suit me… (actually, that’s not quite true, because I do have very strong opinions on some things, but I hate arguing so I only express them to people and in contexts where I feel safe that they’ll agree with me). But when it comes to aesthetic judgements… well, the same applies, because I don’t want to admit to liking something if other people around me aren’t going to agree, but it also goes deeper because sometimes I just don’t know (or care) what I think.   

I don’t really feel like writing this morning. I’m a bit late because I’ve already been to Sainsbury’s, but I haven’t had breakfast yet. I want to sit in the garden but I’m not going to because DHL are supposed to be delivering a parcel, and I don’t want to miss it and have to go to Costcutter to pick it up like I did a couple of weeks ago. But here in the study I am right at the front of the house so will be able to hear if anyone knocks. So I might as well persevere. I haven’t had a text with an estimated delivery time, just that it will be today.

I just tried to check the ‘tracker’ from my phone. And – as you do – got sucked into reading an article with the headline: ‘Steve Jobs Said One Thing Separates Successful People From Everyone Else (and Will Make All the Difference In Your Life)’. The answer, of course, was predictably summed up as: ‘Trust yourself.’

Oh yes, that good old self-belief.

‘Trust that you’ll figure out how to react and how to respond to roadblocks and challenges. Trust that you will become a little wiser for the experience. Trust that you’ll grow more skilled, more experienced, and more connected.

Try enough things, learn from every success and every setback, and in time you’ll have all the skills, knowledge and experience you need.’

There’s a reason why you only hear this advice from mega-billionaires – because the people who try all those things, trust themselves, try to learn the lessons of their failures, keep going and still get nowhere, those people don’t want to talk about it. Or if they do, why would anyone listen?

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Still #notwriting

I’m going to change tack today. Sort of. Thinking about making things – including stories – and the relationship between the process of making, the end result, and assessment of that result. I’ve been quite careful with the words in that sentence. I deliberately used ‘making’ instead of ‘creating’, and deleted ‘judgement’ to replace it with ‘assessment’. Even ‘end result’, which feels much more neutral than ‘product’ or ‘artwork’. Because there is a minefield here, in the language.

Yesterday I spent some time listening to (I don’t bother trying to watch things on my phone when it’s the words that are significant) assorted TED talks sent to me by a friend who tries to encourage me. The first one was by Alain de Bouton, about redefining ‘success’, which personally I didn’t think said anything new, though he is quite entertaining (I could see why my friend sent it, but to me it says she’s just missed the point of who I am). Then there were talks about ‘creativity’, including one by a writer of an extremely successful book about the capriciousness of inspiration, how can you ever know how anything you make will turn out, and, if you’ve hit the spot once, how can you ever be sure you can do it again?

This friend is always sending me stuff like this. She thinks I’m ‘creative’, but I’m never comfortable with that word. It sounds much too pretentious – like calling yourself an ‘artist’ or a ‘writer’. Every time I tell someone I’m a ‘writer’ I cringe inside, wondering where the conversation is going to go next – the same way I do when I tell people I have a PhD. ‘Poet’ is easier, because then they tend to be less impressed; they jump straight to the idea that I’m either a crackpot or a charlatan, and they either laugh it off or give me a wide berth (or both).

And now… I have ground to a halt. I am in front of the computer with tears rolling down my face. I have, unexpectedly, cracked through the armour and reached the soft place of grief, where I might say to the therapist ‘I suppose it’s a bit sad really’ and she says ‘It’s tragic’, and I take on board the pretentious, egotistical, over the top melodrama of the word and nod my head, speechless because I can’t talk through the pain. THAT is what I mean by ‘failure’. My inability to love, defend, stand up for the things I make.

I can’t write any more today. I give up.

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Little Failures

Years ago, I was thinking of the things I wanted to exclude from my life – as if I could wish them away – and came to the conclusion that they boiled down to: loneliness and fear. Since then, I have come to appreciate solitude, and recognise that for me, fear (like hell) is mostly about other people. These last three months of lockdown have thrown that into a clear perspective for me. Now I have to start thinking about how I negotiate going out and interacting in the future – returning to the ‘real’ world. I’m in no hurry, though I have been to one socially-distanced outdoor yoga class (I found an excuse not to return last week), and I’ve been semi-invited to coffee at an outdoor café with members of a group I used to meet regularly. Maybe I’ll go – if the weather’s okay. I don’t know yet, it’s a couple of days away.

Looks sunny this morning, but I won’t be rushing to the beach – even in a normal summer, I avoid it at weekends. Be nice if I can sit in the garden though.

I wrote yesterday about the big things that have been missing from my life: professional career, satisfactory relationship; financial independence and writing…That last one is weird, I don’t know how to explain it, because clearly at the moment I am ‘writing’ every day, and if I say ‘writing success’, it will sound as though I mean mega sales, but that’s not what it’s about. Nor is it just ‘completing a book’, because I’ve done that, and got as far as self-publishing – which impresses some friends who don’t realise how easy it is. More sales would help, of course, but probably wouldn’t encourage pride in what I’ve written.

Well, as often happens, my writing is taking a different turn from what I’d planned this morning. I was going to set aside the big failures – the ones I have to live with and let go – and talk about the little ones that constantly trip me up – the daily ones that grind me down, and are probably responsible for my inability to achieve any of the big ones. But now I’ve started to write my mind has gone into a fog of wordlessness about all that shit. Although I’m slowly coming to recognise them more and more clearly, I still can’t see a way of explaining them without being misunderstood. And that’s part of the problem – my inability to explain myself in ways that make sense to anyone else. That’s one of the ‘little failures’ that I’m talking about. What else? Inability to make decisions; fear of expressing opinions that other people might disagree with; forgetfulness (the big one); inability to absorb instructions and implement them; conversely, inability to give instructions to others; untidiness and inability to self-organise; lousy time management; procrastination; lack of motivation, lack of empathy; all that stuff. In other words: dyspraxia.  

Inability to see any value, or take any pride, in anything I do.

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Aspiration and Achievement

Woke up with odd fragments from a dream in my head this morning. I was standing on steps leading up, and there was water below me. The woman in front pointed out I was still holding my phone so I tried to throw it back to the ground, but it fell in the water. I asked her (it might have been my daughter) if she could dive, and she dived straight into the pool and got it for me. Now, those steps must have been to a diving board or a water slide, so why was I on them when I’m terrified of both those things? Then later I was on similar steps going up a hillside but they ran out and I had to go the rest of the way just on the hill itself.

Returning to my therapy session, the therapist asked what she called ‘the death question’ – if you knew you were facing death what would your reaction be? I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant but I had an answer – two, in fact. When I had cancer in 2017 I decided that the best thing to do was focus on doing the little things that made me happy each day – like: listening to the radio, knitting and crochet, reading etc – more or less the same things I’ve been doing for the last three months.

Then I remembered the feelings I had at the end of 2011, when everything significant in my life seemed to have fallen apart or be falling apart. There was a lot of nonsense around about the Mayan prophecies and the end of the world, and though I didn’t take it seriously, I thought: what would I do if I knew the world was going to end next year? And that gave me the impetus to go travelling.

These two things might seem quite different: focussing on the everyday versus making a huge leap into the unknown – but in the details they were very similar. The happiest memories I have of my travels are of those little everyday moments: sitting in cafes; looking through train windows; finding my way around unfamiliar places; walking through parks; reading my Kindle or writing on my laptop; su doku. Doing and going where I wanted, not having to deal with other people or think about their needs or what I ‘should’ be doing; being free; being myself.

Why does my mind keep being drawn back to those big gaps in my life: career, relationship, financial self-sufficiency, writing? I can’t rectify the first three now, it’s too late, I have tried to accept them and be glad that I can cope so well without them. The last one is the one that still nags at me.

There are two ways of dealing with that gap between aspiration and achievement: lower expectations and/or take steps to get closer to the goal. I am a past master of lowering expectations, but not so good at finding ways of making progress.

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More About Mirrors

I sat on the edge of the bed facing the mirror this morning, as I do every morning, inside my thoughts. I’ve forgotten what I was thinking about, nothing too grim today, just general. I’d had quite a vivid dream, though now I can’t remember what that was about, either.

Yesterday I read to my therapist what I wrote two days ago. She was impressed by the idea of smashing my head into the mirror and breaking both it and myself.

‘That sounds as though the mirror is the life you wish you’d had’ she said, which seems to make sense because of the frustration of the gap between what is there and here. She went on to talk about a theory from someone whose name meant nothing to me, about the image we have of ourselves and how we negotiate our inability to reach it. That sounds banal – of course we all must feel that way – but I expect there’s more to it than that. I pointed out that there’s a physical mirror on the wardrobe by my bed, so inevitably I see my reflection when I get up, but there again, I often use mirrors as a metaphor for my life and relationship with myself.

‘You keep saying the same things’ she went on ‘but every time you say it in a slightly different way, and today it’s smashing the mirror that’s significant.’

Before I went travelling, I was seeing a hypnotherapist (the third time I’d tried that), who in our sessions told me to imagine myself going into a room where there’s a mirror and the image inside it is the woman I want to be, with all the qualities other people see in me that I can’t find in myself. Then I was supposed to enter into the mirror and merge with that person, because ‘she is you’. She made me an audio file, which I used to play every night in bed, till I started screaming back at it: ‘but that’s not really me, can’t you see that?’

There’s a postcard on my desk, propped up in front of the monitor. It turned up a couple of days ago, tucked inside a book. I’ve been staring at it because I couldn’t remember how it got there, or where it came from. It’s a painting by Paul Nash, titled: ‘Landscape From a Dream’, and on the back I’ve written: ‘My book is the story of my journey, the reasons why I went, the places I went to, the things I saw and did, the feelings I had about them’ and addressed it to myself at the old house, which dates it to 2014 after I came back from Prague, when I was failing to write S2S.

I rummaged in the heap on my desk and found the book – called: ‘Show Your Work!’ – it started to make more sense, because I remembered writing the card in the Tate café.

And then I noticed the mirror.

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Dreams

I’ve had a poem kicking around my head since the weekend. Every so often a new line or few lines will pop into my head and perhaps I’ll jot it down – though when I checked last night, there wasn’t so much of it as I’d thought.

It’s had a couple of working titles: first ‘Plaisir d’Amour’, and then ‘Riviera Reverie’ – though strictly speaking it’s become more about the Camargue and Languedoc, and I’m not sure which bits of the French Mediterranean coast count as ‘Riviera’. The current first line is: ‘Picture a landscape in Van Gogh colours’. I keep picking away at it like a jigsaw, like the partially done jigsaw of a Van Gogh painting on my kitchen table.

Poems don’t usually work like that. They pop up mostly complete, or if it’s just a couple of lines, they disappear again quite quickly, they don’t hang around for a matter of days.

Just had an oddly surreal experience. A van drove past my window with ‘Books2vessels’ on the side and back. Obviously, the ‘Books’ part grabbed my attention, but it had gone out of my line of vision before I had a chance to look properly, so I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d seen. I googled it, and yes, that is the name, it is a registered company based in Southampton (so not unreasonable to be driving through Southsea), but all I can find out about it is the Companies House details, which don’t say what it actually does. Maybe it’s a library or bookseller that specialises in supplying books to people on boats? Maybe even – given that it’s in Southampton, cruise ships? How intriguing.

I was thinking a few days ago about dreams – not the sort that come in sleep, but idealised plans, goals and wishes for the future. One of those things I’ve written about before. What dreams do I have now? Most of my past dreams have come true, but not with the outcomes I’d imagined. For years I dreamed of finding a soul-mate, or at least a lover, but I realised in the end that dreams which depend on other people for their success are very difficult to manage. When I look back on my ‘successful’ dreams – eg leaving my husband; travelling; doing a PhD; moving to Southsea – sometimes I can feel despair that the underlying wish of them all – that I should become a better person, more content to be myself and take pride in who I am – has so spectacularly failed. But if I think – what was the point? the answer is that if I hadn’t tried – if I’d stayed with my husband, for example – I would always wonder about how different my life might have been.

Now it’s become clear that that underlying wish is impossible – that I am who I am and can’t change, can’t become a better person, can’t learn to love and/or have pride or respect for myself – what would be the point of striving for more dreams?  

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#amnotwriting

Awake at four thirty, I thought I would listen to a radio play, because that sometimes sends me back to sleep, or at least passes the time. I picked ‘Marian and George’, about how Mary Anne Evans in her mid-30s met the love of her life, ran away with him to Europe, and started writing novels as George Eliot.

And that kicked me in the teeth in two ways, because her lover, George Henry Lewes, was a writer whose work I came across when I was doing my PhD, at roughly the age she was when she met him, a philosopher whose words clicked something open in my brain and showed me a little of the pattern of the universe, and now after thirty years I can’t even remember what it was that he said that was so inspirational.

I sat on the bed and screamed at myself in the mirror, because wasn’t I going to write something wonderful that would inspire people, or at least entertain them, and whatever happened to that? Whose fault was it? And why? It wasn’t the brain or the intelligence or the thirst for knowledge or even the writing ability that was lacking, it was, and is, the guts, the determination, the ideas, the twin abilities to sit down and start and to sit down and finish. Not only can I not start that work of genius that will make readers gasp in awe, I can’t finish a silly little fantasy novel that I’ve been picking over for thirty years. Not only can I not be George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, I can’t even be Barbara Cartland or JK Rowling.

This is what tears me apart and makes me hate myself with such deep loathing that I want to smash my skull into that mirror and shatter them both. And now I’m 66 and what chance is there that I will ever rise above, get beyond that failure? To write something and know it was good but for it never to be recognised by the world would be bad enough, but not even to write anything that I can look at with pride, or to finish anything at all, that is not just disappointing it’s deeply shameful, a betrayal of myself and the dreams I’ve had for sixty years, from the moment I knew what books were, and realised that they were made by people, that there were people who could bring these wonderful objects into the world, and wouldn’t it be exciting to be one of those people?

But if I could wind back time for sixty years – or thirty – how would things turn out differently? How could they? Because I would still be me – all the chaotic, lazy, self-doubting aspects of my personality would be there in me, just as they are now, waiting to trip me up. A lifetime of trying to correct them has been as much of a failure as my intellectual and literary pursuits. How could it not?