Category: self-analysis

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Gremlins

Here I am again. Today I feel overwhelmed with the pointlessness of it all. I suppose a week isn’t that long. I said last Friday that I would keep doing it ‘for as long as it takes. As long as what takes? I guess if I don’t identify a ‘goal’, how will I know if I’ve achieved it? And a week is nothing. In the grand scheme of things.

There are things I have to do today – nothing that awful, just stuff beyond sitting in the sunshine, listening to the radio or crafting. Or writing blogs. So the gremlin on my shoulder says: ‘why bother? Who’s keeping tabs on you? Nobody but you. Tell that bitch to go and…’

‘Okay, okay’ I say. ‘I get the point. No need to share that sort of language on my blog.’

I’d forgotten about the gremlin. I was flicking through ‘Single to Sirkeci’ the other day – can’t remember why, it was something to do with checking the layout related to another book I’m designing for a third party. And the gremlin caught my eye. I seem to remember it came in quite early on but I dropped it and don’t refer to it much later in the book. Shame, because it’s quite a good idea. Every time I want to write about what I really feel, my deep, dark, nasty feelings, I should just say: ‘the gremlin says…’ or turn it into a bit of dialogue.

But reading back what I’ve just written, I realise the gremlin has two aspects. The one I mentioned above is the one that says: ‘f*ck it, f*ck them all’ (but without the asterisks). The cynical, vicious, nihilistic one. Then there’s its alter ego, the judgemental one: ‘just get on with it, set those goals, do those chores, you worthless piece of crap. Enough with the whining self-pity, you know why nobody loves you? It’s because you don’t deserve it, you have to earn love, you don’t do that by moaning about how miserable you are.’ Ooooh, I think I prefer the first one.

‘Celebrate your achievements’ says some non-gremlin – or maybe just a more subtle, and hence more powerful, gremlin. ‘You’ve blogged every day for a week, and you’ve nearly done it again, so you have 4000 words – at that rate, you’ll have a novel by the end of May!’ Or maybe not.

‘You’re “pantsing” again’ says Gremlin 2. ‘It’s a week since you did that online meeting, and you downloaded the handouts and have you filled in the table yet? Of course not, you’re an incurable “pantser”, and that’s why everything you write is – well – pants! You go through the motions, you go to the workshops, and still you don’t get your finger out and do anything worthwhile. Do you seriously think that writing this bullshit every day is achieving anything? You’re just deluding yourself…’

‘… except you’re not really, are you?’ pipes up Gremlin 1. ‘You know perfectly well you might as well give up.’

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Fifteen percent

If you’re reading this and find it interesting, I have a request – please, if you can spare the time, go back and read at least from the start of this week, because I suspect my ramblings don’t make much sense if you don’t know the context, and, although I do admittedly repeat myself quite a lot, I am also trying to build on and make allusions to what I’ve said before.

Of course, this writing is mostly for myself, and I don’t anticipate anyone else reading it, or even understand why anyone would want to. It’s an exercise in trying to understand and hopefully learn to accept, maybe even love, myself, though god knows my efforts to do so over the last fifteen years don’t seem to have got me very far. In the past I’ve defined faith as: ‘continuing to believe in something against all evidence to the contrary’, and I’ve taken a leap of faith (it is leap year, after all) in throwing my thoughts out into the void, where theoretically they are accessible by all, although in practice only a handful of people ever bother to read them (which is just as well really, I’m not sure I want people I bump into every day – well, not at the moment, obviously, but any normal day – to be aware of all this stuff – which begs the question – why do it at all? And that’s a whole other can of worms for a whole other day).

What I’m saying is, if you do read this, I hope it’s not just because you like my quirky way with words, but that you understand that behind the words is a person who at times is genuinely struggling to get through life. I’m not saying this to ask for pity, or advice, just maybe a little respect (just a little bit!)

I’m limiting the length of my posts to 500 words a day, whereas I used to write 500 minimum. That’s an arbitrary limit I’ve set myself because I don’t want to end up going down rabbit holes and spending hours over the thing – and also because, I just thought it would be interesting to do it that way. It does mean that I won’t always reach a resolution – or even get to the point – on any one day, which is all the more reason to go back and see where these thoughts have come from and to follow where they’re going.

I’ll end the way I intended to start, with a comment from an email I received from an old friend last night: ‘…you don’t half think a lot. You think more than anyone I know. Please my dear Linda, give your mind a rest sometimes. Be calm, be still.’

I do try to be calm and still, but I’ve never understood how it’s possible to silence that constant inner narrative, until recently I assumed that everybody’s mind worked that way, but I’ve been told it’s approximately fifteen percent.

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Going out (or not)

I need to sort out this morning routine a bit better. Yoga, let cat out, make coffee, feed cat, take meds… this blogging gets pushed further and further back. Factor in shower, getting dressed and breakfast and it gets even worse.

This doesn’t look like a street in lockdown. Yesterday I told myself it was quieter than usual, but today I’m not so sure. Or maybe I just caught the rush hour. It’s gone quiet again now.

I left yesterday’s post to be continued, because I strayed off the point. What was that? Ah yes, my hermit tendency, the desire to hunker down, hide away, not have to engage with anybody from the outside. So you might think this situation is ideal for me, that I’m perfectly adapted? Ah, but the problem with that is that I know it’s not healthy. I fall into these patterns of dark thoughts, of the kind I sometimes share on here.

Sometimes I fight it by curling up, listening to the radio (telly is just for evenings, as far as I’m concerned, and there’s always loads of good stuff to listen to on BBC Sounds), su doku, crafts. Actually, crafts can be a bit of a two-edged sword – if it’s something I’m confident with, like crochet or knitting or cross stitch, it’s usually fine, but other things, like card making, lino printing and drawing, or (perish the thought) trying something new, I get so frustrated by my inadequacy and disappointed by the results (and don’t tell me that the results ‘don’t matter as long as you’re enjoying yourself’, because what’s to enjoy when you know you’re just making crap?) And if it’s inherently messy (or I make it messy by pulling everything out and leaving it over the table) it’s doubly depressing because I can’t be arsed to put it away and I can’t be arsed to try and I don’t know what to do and I ask myself, what’s the point?

So, what do I do instead? Despite my inherent reluctance, I force myself to go out and ‘do stuff’, maybe even ‘be with people’. However, even when it’s as non-threatening as going for a walk, I still have to psych myself up, bully myself into going, worry about what I need to take, look for things that I need that I can’t find (like phone, keys, wallet), tell myself a million times it’s not worth the effort and I’ll just skip it this once. Despite the fact that I know, once I get out there, I’ll probably feel better than staying at home (though not always, or maybe that’s just another excuse).

Which is why I join things, set myself up with routines, week after week, to go places and do things at certain times on certain days. And if there isn’t a specific activity, sometimes I make myself go out, find a cafe, sit with my su doku or kindle or whatever and watch the world go by. Not any more.

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Lockdown

So Britain is officially locked down today – for a minimum of three weeks, after which, who knows? My car is booked in for its MOT today (due in two weeks, but I was expecting to be on holiday from Friday week and wanted it done before then). But now I won’t be using it anyway.

Still seeing people walking and cycling in the streets – about half a dozen since I first sat here, about 10 minutes ago. Admittedly, the instructions don’t really seem that clear – and how are they going to be enforced? Feeling a little guilty now that I went for a walk on Sunday, though I don’t think I got that close to anyone, I keep thinking: should I have stepped onto the grass in the Rose Garden to pass that extended family who were on the path?

In all the stuff I’ve read about self-isolation and social distancing over the last couple of weeks, my first thought has been: welcome to my life – I’ve tried to resist saying it because it sounds whingey (see yesterday’s post).

All my life, I’ve never been the sort of person who needed to be ‘…where the people are…’ – unless there are so many of them that I’m not forced to engage, and can pass between them unnoticed, anonymous and invisible. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so happy when I’m travelling. Ever since childhood – for as long as I can remember – ‘friendship’ has always been a bit of an awkward concept for me – if you think I’m your friend, then I guess I must be, but I’ll always wait for you to make the first move – I don’t go out and ‘make friends’, I have to know that I’m liked by somebody else before I can decide whether there’s any point in me trying to be sociable with them That sounds arrogant, but it’s not really, quite the opposite – it’s because I assume that I am invisible and no one is going to take any notice of me, so why try and set myself up for rejection? There have been times in my life when I’ve lived without friends at all, or only ones that have imposed themselves on me – though most of those were when I was married.

I have now wandered away from what I was intending to say, though it is related. My normal inclination is to stay home and not risk going out and encountering anyone. Seriously, the converse of the anonymity of travel for me is the anonymity of staying put – that probably sounds a bit nonsensical, but I know what I mean. Being alone in my house, I am safe from having to interact with people, and from the possibility of being judged. The oddity of this is that when I do have to interact with people, I sometimes end up being happier than I would be on my own – partly from the relief that I’ve done it and it wasn’t that bad… tbc

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Cycle of Emotions

Are human emotions just illusions that conceal the deep heart of everything? Or are they the deep heart of ourselves?

I think: if I didn’t fight it every moment of every day, I would cry every moment of every day.

This morning I did something I’ve been thinking about for a while, restarting my morning routine of 10 minutes yoga followed by 10 minutes meditation. And the above two paragraphs are the thoughts that came into my head at the end of that time. Which some might say is an indication that yoga and meditation in the morning are not a good idea for me.

Yoga, meditation and writing 500 words first thing in the morning are very old habits, tried many times, discarded many times. In the quiet street outside my window I spot the occasional vehicle, the occasional jogger. Sunlight illuminates the top storeys of the red brick houses opposite; the bottom storeys shadowed by the terrace that includes the house where I sit at my computer.

The bucket has brought up some odd thoughts from the ‘writing well’ this morning, not at all what I was expecting to write about when I sat down, or planned yesterday evening when I thought about writing this morning. Maybe I’m getting back into the swing of this.

I don’t want this blog to turn into a whine-fest. That’s what I was thinking yesterday, when I walked by the sea. I can’t let it degenerate into a mire of self-pity, it’s too public for that. And I freely acknowledge that on most scales that mean anything in this everyday world, I have far less cause for self-pity than many people – most, even. Maybe I could even offer it out as something that might help others, a way of showing them: this isolation isn’t so bad, this lack of structure and excess of choice over how to fill the time, can be survived, can be dealt with and got through – look at me, welcome to my life. All those good, strong, positive people out there who are putting their efforts into making this situation better for others – that may sound sarcastic, but it’s not intended as such, I admire people like that, I really do, but I’m not brave enough to count myself among them. And if I tried, I’d only f*ck up whatever I tried to do – that’s my lame, selfish, mealy-mouthed excuse.

Self pity or self compassion? How do you tell the difference between the two? The former evolves rapidly into its close correlatives, self-disgust and shame. Ah yes, shame, the driving force of my vicious emotional circle – I am ashamed of myself for not being a better person, and that makes me angry and frustrated with myself, and that makes me unhappy which makes me sorry for myself which makes me more ashamed which makes…

Is this cycle of emotions an illusion that distances me from the deep heart of everything? Or is it the deep heart of myself?

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500 Words

Sun shining today. Will I venture out for a walk? Or to do some gardening? Hmmm. The eternal conflict between what I ‘should’ be doing (what would ultimately be better and more positive for my wellbeing in a general sense) and what I ‘feel like’ doing (back to the su doku again). Living alone gives me enormous freedom to ignore many of the ‘shoulds’ without suffering under anybody’s judgement except my own – until such time comes as I’m forced to interact with the outside world, or even (god forbid) allow anybody from outside into my home.

What am I saying here? What am I trying to say? I decided that writing 500 words a day would be a Good Thing for me. So I am trying. Because I know I can do it. This is what I always say (I’ve said it many times, in many ways, to many people), I know I can do it, because I’ve done it in the past, but nothing good has ever come out of it – well, wait, is that strictly true? If I look back fifteen years, I could argue that it has changed my life fundamentally in startling ways – but never in the way I once hoped for, ie turning me into a professional novelist.

So much of the advice I’ve received down the years has stressed the need to write, write, write regularly, write often and write at great length. Write spontaneously, do a brain dump, draw up all the rubbish from your writing well and that’s how you make yourself ready to write the Good Stuff. But, congenitally lazy as I am, all I ever want to do is keep writing the easy stuff. I don’t have the self belief, tenacity, staying power – let’s face it, guts – to face the difficult stuff, the hard work. And however much of this easy, spontaneous stuff – this drivel – I write, it’s not going to miraculously open the way into the source of ideas that I need.

I don’t think like a novelist – or a short story writer, come to that. Sometimes I think like a poet. Mostly I think like a confused woman approaching the end of life with the sense that I’ve never worked out what I should be doing, never made use of whatever talents I might have had to make a difference to myself or others or the wider world, amid the consciousness that I am now running out of time and options, and without the energy, enthusiasm or motivation to follow any of those options even if they were pointed out to me.

That isn’t quite 500 words. Do I keep going for the last fifty or so? It’s just an arbitrary challenge I’ve set myself. I can say I’ve done it, but like the 50k words I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2018, it’s worthless because there is nothing there – well, nothing I haven’t said or thought or written a million times before. That’s the story of my life.

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The Examined Life

Socrates is often quoted as saying: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, but what if you’ve examined your life to the nth degree and realised that it’s STILL not worth living?

Actually, although this reflection has come to me quite independently through my own experience of life, it’s not exactly original. Just this morning I was delighted to find this version from the great Kurt Vonnegut:

‘Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?’

(Notice that he attributes it to Plato, and it variously seems to be attributed to both of them by different people, but given that what we know of Socrates mostly came down to us through Plato, I guess that’s not too surprising).

A similar version which I like is from Ruby Wax, who said: ‘Self knowledge isn’t always happy news’. Well, you could argue that that’s slightly different because it’s about knowledge of the ‘self’ rather than the ‘life’. But I guess self-knowledge is what one hopes to gain through examining life, so in that sense they’re directly comparable. And it’s that sense of an examined life implying an examined self that interests me. Is it the events of life which construct the self, or is it the nature of the self which determines choices and actions and hence the way life works out? A bit of both, probably.

Why am I doing this? When I woke up it seemed like a good idea. But I don’t know. Been wondering for a long time about whether it’s worth trying to write again. In my heart of hearts I know it’s all pretty futile. What else would I rather be doing? Right now? Listening to the radio and crocheting or weaving? Playing freecell or Killer su doku? Walking on the seafront? Eating breakfast? All pretty futile, apart from breakfast. Washing up, hoovering, sorting out washing? Clearly, I don’t want to do any of those, and am an expert at procrastination when it comes to all of them, in fact I carry it to such an extreme that I prefer not to have friends so that no one comes into my house and sees what a shit-hole it is. (Actually there are other reasons why I don’t have friends, but that is quite a significant one.)

So, examining self/examining life. Begs the question of to what extent there is a single ‘self’ to examine. Clearly, the ‘self’ that I know (and hate) is quite different from the person that other people perceive me to be, which is frustrating at times, but on the other hand, is probably the only reason anyone has anything to do with me at all – if they knew the me I know, why would they bother? If I could get away from myself I would – in fact, I have tried in different ways at many different times, but it never works. One of the repeated motifs that has appeared though my examination of my last 60 years of life, the impulse to run away and keep running, which is continually thwarted when I realise that nothing inside has changed, and being in a different place is only superficially preferable to what went before. Now I have reached a place where I really feel I have nowhere else to go – that’s wisdom, I guess. No point in wishing for anything better, looking to the future and hoping for a change. When I moved here I was reminded of the Eagles’ song The Last Resort: ‘There is no more new frontier/We have got to build it here’. I came to the end of the country, with nothing beyond but sea (and the Isle of Wight, of course, let’s not forget that). My last dream, my last throw of the dice, and here I am.

Yesterday I saw my shrink and read her this poem, which I wrote in 2017:

The Awkward One

I never learned to smile.
I never learned to play the happy fool,
to put them at their ease,
to read their minds.

So I became
the awkward one,
the difficult one.
I learned to be alone.
I never learned to make a friend,
I never learned the way
to make them love me.

I hated mirrors, and cameras,
I hated the plain, sulky face
they showed me.
I knew that face,
with its curtain of straggly hair,
and that skinny body,
would never be loved.

I never learned to turn on the charm.
I had no charm.
I never learned to play the game.
I turned inside myself,
became invisible,
played my own game.

Afterwards, she said: ‘that last line is quite hopeful. You played your own game.’

Really? I suppose I felt I had to put something positive at the end, but I’m not saying that’s how it was. I didn’t choose to be that way (except maybe in some very deep self-hating, self-punishing way), I’m sure that as a child and teenager I would rather have been accepted by others, liked even. It was just an adaptation to the reality of not being the sort of girl anyone wanted to be with. I did say to her ‘it’s a kind of sour grapes’ and the more I thought about it, the more that seems to be true – ‘Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going down the garden to eat worms’. When you have no one to play with you have to make up your own games or do nothing at all (of course, what I did a lot of the time was the classic lonely-child thing of retreating into books). As I said to myself when I was alone in Paris in February 2012: ‘I’m still the woman nobody wants’, and that is just as true now as it was then and as it was 50 or 60 years ago.

Ah well. The examined life. Maybe I could start a new blog with that as the title. And what am I going to do  with this? Where should I put it? Somewhere where there’s a possibility of it being read? Or where there’s a theoretical possibility, but I know no one will bother?

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Chasing Happiness

Saturday, 05 January 2019   2:30 AM

Already this year I am feeling besieged by the happiness gurus. For example, yesterday I read this:

‘If it doesn’t make you happy, something needs to change.’

Why? What? What needs to change? How can you predict what is going to ‘make you happy’?  And how are you supposed to change it? What to? How can you ever predict the consequences of what you do (long term, in their entirety)?

Why does everything have to ‘make you happy’ anyway? How does that work? Never do anything that stretches you, or scares you, or that might take you somewhere you weren’t expecting? What sort of life is that? Life is full of risk – you either jump into it or you don’t. And if you don’t want to right now – well, that can be okay too, but not necessarily forever.

Happiness is a chimera – in both senses. It is both an impossible quarry and a composite, an impossible composite of disparate elements that really shouldn’t (oh dear, we don’t say ‘should’ and ‘shoudn’t’ do we?) be together – that don’t make sense together. And what about the word ‘disparate’? I’ve been picked on in the past for using it, but fuck that, I’m writing this and it’s absolutely the word I want to use right there – if you don’t like it, go and get a fucking dictionary. Pretentious, moi??? I’m not using it to impress or intimidate you but because it says what I want to say better than any other word I can think of.

And in the end, that’s the point, isn’t it? Who’s writing this anyway? Maybe what makes me ‘happy’ is using the exact words I want to use, and I know what I’m saying and how I want to say it, so why the fuck not?

Probably I should take some of the ‘fucks’ out of this – probably I will, whether I ‘should’ or not. Everyone plays around with words in their own way. Why shouldn’t I?

That word ‘quarry’, for example – it also has two meanings – both the thing being pursued (the chimera of happiness, in this case) and a source, a place from which things are extracted. What am I extracting here? (Apart from the Michael – or the urine). Meaning, of course. I’m digging in the quarry of the English language to pull out meaning, and that is my raison d’être’ (maybe bits of other languages too). It’s what I do, and though I say it as shouldn’t (oh, there go the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ again!), may I say I do it brilliantly. I do it in the only way I can, and as only I can, and it would be very gratifying if someone (anyone) would read this and say: ‘that’s amazing, that’s fabulous, I just love the way you play with words’. But even though I know that’s a pretty hopeless quest (and a hopeless quarry) I will continue to do it even if I’m the only one who reads it, because it is the process of doing so that MAKES ME HAPPY! and…

What was the question again?


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Procrastination

How do I change? How can I ever either become the person I wish to be, or come to terms with being who I am?

That immediately begs the question: who is the person I wish to be? What is she like, and how will I know when I have become her? The problem with asking that question is that it encourages the creation of an impossible standard. If you ask me who I wish to be, I might say: beautiful, successful; confident, 25 years old etc and then we’re getting into realms of fantasy straight away. What I really want is to be not-me. Once I would have said: what I want from life is to feel loved – not just to be loved, but to feel loved by someone whom I also love – that kind of mutual relationship which creates a ‘couple’. But is that right? Once I would have said that what I wanted was the opportunity for a series of relationships.

Oh, I don’t know. I went down and had breakfast in between and now I’ve lost the thread.

Back to the question: what is wrong with being me? Maybe that wasn’t exactly the question, but it’s a question.

No answer to that. I went off and did something else then just came back to Word to look at C’s Dad’s book and there it is.

Am I going to write any more of this today?

Stink of cat pee in this room. Someone to clean carpet? It’s the hall carpet. What to do. Just get rid of it? Or find someone who can clean it. Or put it up in loft. Go into loft and check leak. Where is the water coming from?

No, I don’t want to do any of those things.

What is wrong with being me? Procrastination. Well, that’s something I can do something about, right?

If I can’t become someone else, what is the point?

Chaos. Procrastination is part of that. Dyspraxia? I have finally sent email to dyspraxia people, after two months – hooray! Must mean that there’s something I want to do even less, ie C’s work, although she is keen to pay me for it, am I keen to do?

What is so awful about me? I give up. No, I don’t mean I give up on the question, I mean that is one of the things that’s wrong with me. I give up on everything. I have no self-discipline. I am lazy. I run away. These seem like things that it ought to be easier to do something about than the chaos. Given the (possibility of) dyspraxia.

Why do I hate myself so much? Why not? Why wouldn’t I hate myself, given that I know all my faults and I can’t escape from them? I am stuck here with them. I have to do this work and I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything that I have to use my brain for. I am afraid of failure.

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Conditional love

I had a lot to say yesterday but stopped at 500 words. Then I kept on thinking. But what was I thinking about?

Yesterday I called my True Self a bitch – which may be a little unfair. She’s just… I didn’t really hear from her much last night. I woke about half four, got up and had the last of my antibiotics and a drink of water, played a programme on iPlayer, dozed off at some point then woke up before the end and tried to rewind but couldn’t get the touch screen on my phone to respond properly (common problem),finally managed to get it back further than I wanted to then played to the end and by this time it was getting on for 7, so got up and sorted out a few things in the bedroom then had breakfast, hung the washing out, came on here and faffed about some more.

I started thinking about despair yesterday. It was very strong yesterday morning. Where does it come from and why? What is the shape of it? Absence of love. Inability to accept love because it is directed at the lover’s perception of who I am, not the true me. The true me is loved by no one, including me. All love is conditional on conforming to the lover’s idea of who I should be.

The sense that when I’m giving of myself, the truest I can be, the ideas, feelings, thoughts inside me, everything  I have to offer is not wanted, not understood, rejected, ignored, discarded. Valueless. If no one else can see and value who I am, how can I?  I am lost, I am nothing.

When I was young I hoped one day that someone would understand me, see me for who I am. I can only be myself, after all, I can’t be anyone else. So love me for who I am. But who ever wants to do that? Instead they would rather tell me the person they love is me. But then what happens when they see the true me? When they realise I can’t live up to their idea? They get angry and tell me to stop being like this, they want me to be like that. Love is conditional on my ability to live up to what they want. This is the crux of everything.

I have tried for so long. And I get angry and frustrated and afraid and lonely. Because who am I really? Who am I if I can’t be who you want me to be? I can only be myself.

So, I will be myself. I will do everything I can to be myself. People will not like this. They will try to ‘help’ me, to ‘encourage’ me, but they won’t succeed. I will be myself and I will write about my true feelings. I can’t write short stories or novels or funny little snippets. I will write about myself and they won’t read it, but that’s fine.