Category: self-analysis

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Mirror, Mirror

I was going to start writing this morning by saying: ‘Suddenly, nothing makes sense.’ But I realised that’s not true, there’s nothing ‘sudden’ about it. Individually, nationally, as a culture, as a species, we’ve been heading for disaster for – how long? God knows – ever, I suppose. Just when it feels as though things can’t get any worse… no, I’m not going to end that sentence.

Most mornings I coax myself out of bed by thinking of some joy-giving activity I can do in the day to come. Yesterday I didn’t find much joy in anything. So how about today?

There’s a mirror on my wardrobe door, facing the window, in front of which is a dressing table, with another mirror, and between the two is my bed. I lay in bed this morning, with my back to the window, looking at an image of the edge of the dressing table mirror and the curtain behind, and trying to work out which side of the mirror and curtain it was. I finally convinced myself that it was the same edge and bit of curtain that appeared a little to the right in the dressing table mirror, but somehow this seemed all wrong. Shouldn’t it be the other side? Of course it shouldn’t, because it was a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, so it ended up the same as the original reflection of the curtain, but it still disturbed me.

I’ve written before about life feeling like a hall of mirrors, or a labyrinth. It’s a bit of a cliche, but this morning for a moment I felt how disorienting that experience can be.

It made me think of crossing the road in a country where they drive on the other side – although reason tells you that the traffic on the side nearest will be coming from the opposite direction to where you’d expect it from, sometimes your brain just can’t handle it, and you have to think really hard about which way you normally look so you can look to the other one. When we first moved back from the US, I was very nervous about driving in Milton Keynes, because on the wide dual carriageways I panicked that I would turn into the wrong lane. It may, of course, just be me – possibly related to dyspraxia, though I don’t usually have problems with telling right from left.

And here I am struggling to write with a cat in front of the computer and a mouse which isn’t working and a brain full of mush. I’m used to working without a mouse on the laptop, but on the PC I’m really struggling – again, it’s something I can usually do without thinking about it. Having to sit with the keyboard on my lap or to one side because the cat’s in the way doesn’t help.

I have to wrap a present, write a card and take a parcel to the Post Office this morning. Those are my tasks.  

Happy Monday.

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Spitting into the Wind

Yesterday there was something in my head that I wanted to say, but I ended up saying something completely different, and thought I would save it for today. Then this morning I couldn’t remember what it was and started thinking on different lines. Then I got an inkling of that thing from yesterday, but not sure now if I want to say either of them.

In fact, I’ve just made the classic mistake of looking something up before continuing, and having wandered into and down the rabbit hole of Google and Wikipedia, I am even more confused. But I have discovered that although for years and years I have believed that Newton’s three laws were the same as the three laws of thermodynamics – they’re not. Bugger. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially if you only know the names and not what they actually mean.

However, on the subject of universal laws…

All living things must die, and everything must change (that’s where the three laws come in, but unfortunately not Newton, so I can’t use the quote: ‘God said let Newton be! And all was light’ which is by Alexander Pope, and the reason I was poking around the rabbit hole in the first place, because I couldn’t remember who said it).  

All living things must die. Everything must change. A flame only burns until it runs out of fuel (that’s what set me thinking about the three laws). And – spoiler alert – anyone who is listening to the current Quandary Phase of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Radio 4 extra should look away now – the Great God’s message to his creation is: ‘We apologise for the inconvenience’.

Any universal truth is fundamentally banal. (Who said that? Me. I don’t claim it to be original, but if I’ve stolen it I don’t know where from.)

It may be argued that true happiness means accepting the impermanence of all things and deciding that life is still worth living. On the other hand, maybe the route to true happiness is to stop thinking about all that bollox, be excellent to each other and party on dudes. Perhaps this is a fundamental difference between two types of people (the Cassandras and the Melindas) – or maybe (more likely, I’d say), there is a spectrum between the two, and we all find our own place.

Which has brought me back to the thing I was thinking about yesterday – or the bit I can remember – that for me, euphoria (Melinda) can’t be separated from existential despair (Cassandra). It’s over thirty years since I first sought professional help to ‘fix’ my psycho-emotional shortcomings, and the paradox is that any attempts to convince me that I’m ‘fine as I am’ miss the point that if I really was ‘fine’, I wouldn’t need to be convinced, I’d already know it. And if I’m not, any amount of wishing away that sense of ‘unfineness’ without accepting it as fundamental part of myself, is spitting into the wind.

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Chilli for Dinner

I had chilli for dinner.
The chilli was good.
I felt like a winner,
I knew that I should.

So I try and I try
and I fall down that hole,
and I cry and I cry
through this crack in my soul.

Linda Rushby 6 June 2020

Those first two lines popped into my head as I was making coffee (probably because the pan I cooked chilli in yesterday was still sitting on the stove). It came to me like a song, so I thought I’d write some more and that’s what happened. That’s what always happens when I write in rhyme. I think it needs some blues guitar behind it – or better still, to be buried in a deep, deep hole and quietly forgotten.

But the coffee’s good, and I’m drinking it from my ‘Enjoy the little things’ mug. (You can see the state of my desk hasn’t improved any). Miko is purring, the sun is shining, a (somewhat chilly) summer’s day lies ahead of me like a blank page from a posy hipster notebook, creamy white and unlined, waiting to be scrawled over and desecrated by a rubbish biro.

I have been trying to unravel why I am who I am, looking for a way to ‘fix’ myself before time runs out and I walk into that wall. How long might that be? Who knows? Could be today, could be another thirty years – neither of those is very likely, but neither is impossible.

I was thinking the other day about the old adage ‘…be careful what you wish for because it might come true…’ and all those cautionary ‘three wishes’ stories where the last wish has to be to undo the first two. I mean, how about being in a beautiful place and saying: ‘I wish I could stay here for the rest of my life’ and then a coconut falls from a tree, lands on your head and kills you instantly, or you try to be cunning and say: ‘I wish I could stay here for at least twenty years’ and you get arrested on a trumped up charge (or for a real crime) or grabbed by some psycho, and are imprisoned for twenty years? (Bugger, I’ve just given away the closest I’ve come to thinking of a plot for a short story in four years.)

Hmm, that’s not what I was going to write about at all. But on the same theme, when I moved in here I decided (and who doesn’t immediately after a big house move?) that this was the house where I’ll spend the rest of my life. Lately I’ve realised that that may not be possible – not because of any particular current concerns, but because who knows what might happen? But I think I’d like this to be the house I will live in for longer than any other in my life, which would be more than eighteen years (the time I lived with my parents) so that’s fifteen more years from now. That seems doable.

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Light Bulb Moment

Back from Tesco and realised that I haven’t written yet and need to do that before breakfast.

In case you’re wondering why shopping day has moved from Tuesday to Friday, last week there were no four pint bottles of semi-skimmed, so I got a six instead, which didn’t run out till yesterday.

Although I wasn’t late waking up (around 5.30), the day seems to have slipped somehow – not helped by me sitting and staring at the screen.

Yesterday I was talking about my parents, and the apparent contradiction between love and tolerance for mankind in general but severe judgement and criticism of individuals, and inability or unwillingness to see things from someone else’s perspective – lack of empathy, I suppose you could call it. Here’s a really trivial example that popped into my head a while back when I was trying to remember my childhood. Like many of the generation who lived through the war, my parents were keen on saving electricity (for financial reasons, not environmental). So at certain times of year, while we were eating our breakfast in semi-gloom, comments would be made about our neighbours in the house behind, on the lines of: ‘They’ve got that light glaring out again! That house is lit up like a Christmas tree! They must be made of money!’ etc. Since I’ve been living in my present house, (where the kitchen is at the back and faces east, but is also quite long, so that the kitchen end can be quite dark, though the sun may be coming into the dining area) I’ve been reminded of those conversations. Yes, the back room of my childhood home faced south, so the neighbours in a comparable house in the next street ate their meals in a room that faced north – but for some reason it was okay for my parents to pass moral judgements on them for having the lights on.

Well, yes, I did say it was very trivial, but I also think it’s quite illuminating (sorry about that!) When it occurred to me, it was a bit of a light-bulb moment (really, I just can’t help myself!) For a start, what gave my Mum and Dad the right to make these moral judgements? And even if that was okay, there was a reason why the neighbours’ experience was different from ours, so weren’t they entitled to behave the way they did?

I often feel that much of the unhappiness in my life has come from this sense that there is a set of ‘rules’ that sometimes I break consciously (and live with a morbid fear of being ‘found out’ and ‘punished’ for), but often I don’t even know what they are, or where the boundaries are drawn, so at any moment I might overstep them without even realising it and bring all that judgement crashing down on myself. And if I am ‘caught out’, what might the punishment be?

Where could that sense of shame and fear possibly have come from?

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Human Relations

I opened the kitchen door for Miko, and she stood on the steps, sniffing the air for a couple of minutes, had a drink from her outside water bowl, then turned and came back in. I left the door open for her while I went upstairs for my morning practice, but when I returned she was curled up in her bed. I went to shut the door, and realised it was raining, very faint and light, but definitely there. And a good thing too. My improvised water butt (an obsolete plastic dustbin) is almost empty of the collected autumn and winter rains, and I’ve been anticipating a hosepipe ban (not that I use one anyway.) I checked the camping chair that’s been on the lawn and there were spots visible on it already, so I folded it up and put it in what’s still left of the shed.

Why do I try to share my feelings, when I know no one likes to read about them? Maybe it’s because I can’t talk about them – although I’ve had someone to talk to regularly for two years now, it’s still quite difficult. It’s hard to get beyond the banal – some days that’s true of writing too, but in general it’s easier and much less stressful to write than to speak, to engage with an unpredictable human being, to have to think about their responses and respond in turn. Easier to be honest in writing, when you don’t have to be constantly on guard for the pitfalls of conversation.

I’ve spent most of my life hiding behind masks, trying to pretend to be someone I’m not, or rather, letting other people make their own assumptions about what kind of person I am, and not bothering to correct them, trusting that I won’t get caught out too often. There again, ‘hiding behind masks’ is just a rather glib metaphor, because for most of the time I don’t know myself what it is that I’m trying to hide, or what I’m pretending to be, for that matter.

I want to think of something to say in the next 150 words, not necessarily something profound, not even particularly interesting, just something… what? Have to stop and think about that. Honest, maybe? Today I’ve done my morning practice before I sat down to write, unlike the last two days, so this isn’t unmediated early-rising stuff.

Human relationships baffle me. They say no one is taught to be a parent, but is anyone ever taught how to interact with other people? I’m sure I never was, or only on the level of: be polite; don’t say that; if you can’t think of anything nice to say, say nothing. I more or less picked up the Golden Rule: ‘treat others as you’d like to be treated’ and I try to stick to it, though it’s occurred to me in recent years that the way I’d like to be treated may not be what other people want, and vice versa.

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Because

I will write this now and not give myself a chance to change my mind. I will write this now because I want to capture these feelings. I will write this now without exercise, meditation or coffee because those might make me feel better, and I want to explain how I feel right now, not how I feel when I’m looking through a positive filter of exercise, meditation and coffee . If I don’t catch it now I will never be able to explain. I will write it now before I have the chance to slip into the mask, the ‘yeah, I’m fine, it’s a beautiful day!’

I told myself last night that if I was awake early I would get up and walk to the beach. I woke before 5.00. I could have done it, but I didn’t. It’s now 6.15. I am at the computer. I am dressed and I have fed my cat, but not watered the plants because that too would probably take me away from these feelings.

I am afraid. I don’t want this. I want to stay in my bubble. I don’t want to have to go out and interact. I don’t want to be with people. I like not having to do those things. I can be happy here.

I want to stay in a safe place where I don’t have to think about what a shambles my life has been. I don’t want to read about how happy people are with their plans. I don’t want to make plans. I don’t want to feel guilty about wasting the summer by sitting in my garden.

It’s not just because I’ve been reading stories about racism and police brutality in the US; or how our daily death-rate is greater than the combined total of other European countries with comparable data, and yet restrictions are being lifted and we’ll soon be ‘back to normal’; or about the shamelessness, incompetence and venality of those in power in this country; (though none of that helps). It’s not just because I’ve been reading about friends who are getting on with their writing, promoting their books, have completed books to promote (though none of that helps either).

It’s because I am me, it’s because my failure has all been down to my lack of determination, lack of persistence, lack of ‘resilience’ maybe, if that’s the current word of choice. Why am I am I so shit in all those areas? Because I am me. Why do I f*ck up everything? Because I am so shit in all those areas. Why is that? Because of my personality, because of who I am. Why is that? Because I was never, ever going to get anywhere with all that negative baggage. Why can’t I change that? Because it wouldn’t be true. Why do I hate myself so much? Because I know it is all down to who I am. And why can’t I change and become a better person? Because, because, because.

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Let There Be Light

The light switch in my downstairs shower room and toilet has an intermittent fault. When I say intermittent, I don’t just  mean sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t, I mean it stops working and stays not working for indeterminate periods, and then one day, unpredictably, it will start working again. A friend (the same one who helps with the hedge-cutting and feeds the cat when I’m away) once took it apart and put it back together again and it started working, but he admitted he didn’t know what he’d done. It’s the sort of job that’s not really worth calling a professional electrician for, but it is annoying.

It was still working at half term when the family came, but it stopped again soon after, round about the start of lockdown. There’s no window, but there are frosted glass panels in the door, so some light comes in from the hall, good enough to get by, but really not good enough to clean. A bottle of nail varnish fell out of the bathroom cabinet one day and the top came off, so the hand-basin now has turquoise stripes (and I can’t have turquoise toenails, which is a source of great sorrow). Also I worry about the hygiene implications.

I have thought about attempting the taking-it-to-bits approach – after all, I salvaged the hedge trimmer, but I can’t quite face the palaver of it all, especially as I’m not sure I’ve got a decent torch. Even if I could find one, standing on the stepladder holding a torch would be enough of a challenge, never mind trying to wield a screwdriver (or whatever) in the other hand; and with my eyesight, I probably wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing anyway.

So this morning I was sitting on the loo in the gloom muttering to myself: ‘must remember to take the basket of washing out of the kitchen when I go back upstairs, don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget’ and thinking about my yoga teacher saying: ‘always have a place for everything and you’ll know where to look’ and me replying: ‘…I do, but the problem is not knowing where to look, but remembering to put things in the right place at the time I put them down’. In 2011 I did a Businesslink course on Self Organisation, talking about time management and list making and prioritising etc, and I broke down and confessed to the tutor that I just can’t do that stuff. She replied: ‘Maybe you should think about trying to get a job instead of starting a business’ and my heart sank as I thought: ‘If I could find anyone who would give me a job I wouldn’t be doing this.’

Well, after my exercise session I went for a shower, pulled on the switch without thinking and heard a snap. I expected it to come away in my hand, but when I noticed it hadn’t, I pulled again and the light came on.

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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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Happy Days (Part 2)

In some ways these last few days have been quite idyllic. Wake up in sunshine, morning routine, breakfast in the garden – with su doku – blends effortlessly into sitting in the garden and crocheting, which blends into an afternoon of listening to the radio and crocheting, preparing dinner, eating dinner (sometimes in the garden), and watching telly for a couple of hours and crocheting, then listening to music and crocheting till it’s time for bed. Okay, yesterday I went to the shop, but that’s become more of a regular variation on the routine, rather than a major disruption.

These are the kind of summer days it’s easy to fantasise about in the winter, or on any cold, rainy or generally stressful days at any time of year, so I’m deliberately appreciating them and not taking them for granted.

The obsession with crochet could, of course, be something else, like reading, writing, su doku, gardening, cooking, weaving, cross-stitching, tapestry, jigsaws, drawing, painting, decorating, tidying… Why don’t I pour my heart and soul into any of those? It can be done, but at the moment I don’t feel drawn in any of those directions.

Is it because I find it easy? But that’s just practice. It doesn’t always work out. I’ve learnt to let it go, pull it down and try again, put it on one side and try something else, or shove it to the back of the cupboard and forget about it.

I guess that’s what I do with my writing as well – shove it to the back of the electronic cupboard and forget about it. And this morning it’s not working at all. The words don’t want to come. I am looking at specks of dust on my computer, looking out the window at the street (which still seems remarkably empty). Wandering round my head to see if I can pick up any scraps of thought that might be worth recording.

Emptying your head of thoughts is not a bad thing – I spend ten minutes every morning trying to do just that.

I’ve just remembered a moment from last night, just before midnight. I’d been sitting up too late crocheting and listening to music, and when I went into the kitchen, I remembered I’d left the door open for Miko, and she was still outside, so I stepped out into the garden. Despite the neighbours’ fairy lights and the still-illuminated windows, there was mystery out there, no moon (it’s too new) but a few stars in the stillness of the night air. I called her name, and heard her scraping the gravel before I saw her. It could have been any animal sound, but she came to me and jumped up into the patch of light on the steps and ran into the house. I thought of owls (though I hear none here in the town) and night and summer, and the cool air and the mysterious life of cats, and thought about a poem but it didn’t come.  

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Happy Days

I promise no politics today, not even by implication.

I’ve just been to Sainsbury’s. It was open this week (see last week), but there are orange barricades all along the edge of the pavement. There is a small gap, and it doesn’t go round the corner, so it’s open at the junction. Presumably there’s some highway work planned, but it does seem perverse that pedestrians are being funnelled along a narrow strip of pavement. The other shops on that stretch of road (barbers etc) are closed anyway, but it must be affecting that branch of Sainsbury’s.

I mentioned a while back that I’d lost my credit card, the one that gives me 1% cashback in the supermarkets. I eventually got round to ordering a replacement, and it came a few days ago, but after last week’s trip to Tesco where I spent over £50, and worked out on the way home that having to use the other card (which gives me 0.5% on everything) had cost me 28p. Today I had my new card, signed it before I left the house, then remembered in the shop that I needed to activate it online before first use. I tried doing it via the phone app, standing in a quiet aisle (they’re all quiet at 8.30 in the morning, but occasionally you see another person), but it didn’t give me that option, so I tried using the card anyway, and it was rejected. This time it cost me 18p. Sounds petty, but I bet it’s added up over the last month or however long it’s been. If you average those two shops to about £46 (which is actually a bit higher than usual, because sometimes I can do contactless), that’s 23p/shop, or over 6 weeks, or £1.38.

First world problems.

Yesterday, after blogging, I had breakfast outside in the sun, stayed outside and crocheted. When even I felt it was getting a bit uncomfortable in the sun, I got my camping chair and put it in the shade by the fence. I stopped for a while and did a bit of weeding, then went back to sitting, crocheting, and listening to the neighbours’ music coming from their kitchen. Then in the afternoon I sat indoors and listened to 4 extra and carried on with my crochet till I’d turned my octagon into a square, and at about 5 o’clock I went and cooked my dinner. I could even tell you what that was, but I won’t.

It was a good day. I also did a load of washing. I wonder why I write about these minutiae of my life, of no conceivable interest to anyone. Maybe one day I’ll write a novel and this will all be useful atmosphere – or maybe not. I have a sort of idea for how I could write a novel that would incorporate some stuff from my blog, but don’t know how I’d end it.

Sometimes my thoughts lead to interesting stuff, but not today, it appears.