Category: self-analysis

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Madwoman in the Attic

If I was going to write, how would I start?

I had the beginning of a poem earlier when I was watering the plants, if I can remember what it was:

If you could see me as I am…? Something like that.

But it’s gone now. Bugger.

Anyway, no one sees me as I am. That’s the point. The old chestnut.

If I keep picking and picking and picking away at this, will it ever lead on to something else, some kind of breakthrough or revelation?

Wish I could remember that effing poem. It’s gone now. It had a good rhythm to it, and some internal rhymes. Something about: ‘…where the broken rivers run…’ I remember thinking – how can a river break? But it didn’t matter because it fitted. Bloody obscurity for its own sake, that’s what it was. And ‘through the cracks between the pavement…’

About the real me who is inescapable and always torments me but no one can ever see it/her.

You see, the myth is that when you find your True Self, everything will make sense and you’ll find peace. Except my True Self is a bitch. The more I get to know her the worse it all gets. She’s the one who makes me cry in the night with despair, but I can’t stop her or ignore her or get away from her because she’s me.

And if I say: ‘I will accept myself as I am’ that means accepting her. If I can’t root her out I can never find peace. But the more I dig away at her, the deeper the wound she leaves. So what does it mean to accept her?

Accepting loneliness. Accepting anger. Letting go of the dream of ‘love’, but without resentment.

The path of acceptance feels like the path of papering over the cracks. Or perhaps a better metaphor, filling in the cracks in the pavement with wet mud, which dries out and crumbles or washes away in the rain. I remember doing that as a child, over and over again. It never worked, but I kept on playing at it. Till I got bored and gave up. Which, of course, is what I always do.

Can I escape into meditation? How deep into that despair do you have to go to find a place where you can rest in emptiness?

The woman who cries in the night is trapped – labyrinth, hall of mirrors, which is the correct metaphor? Or that one from the Cat Stevens song when you end up back where you started?

Whatever, she is in a trap: she cries for love, but when she cries no one can love her. So she cries for the knowledge that she will never find the love she craves. Because love is always partial and conditional: ‘We will love you on condition that you stay happy and don’t give in to despair.’

So the despair has to be hidden away. The Madwoman in the Attic. She’s still there.

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Emails

I am going back to my ‘secret’ blog, had enough of telling people how I feel. This will have to do.

I didn’t write yesterday. Instead I spent an hour and a half deleting and/or opening over 3,500 emails which hadn’t been opened on my yahoo account. The oldest were from September 2017, which I guess was the last time I had a purge. Which I suppose means that I average about 400 a month that I don’t bother to open – 100 a week, or 14 a day, which sounds about right because I counted how many I got yesterday and it was 15.

I keep unsubscribing from lists, but there are always some where you want to keep getting them because every so often there’s a good offer or something. Like Travelzoo. I bought a special spa deal which I have to take before the end of July but haven’t fixed it up yet.

Mornings are always hard. It’s the time when the self-hate and desperation are really at their peak. I don’t know why that is. I was told by Michael from the School of Philosophy group in Peterborough that whatever you’re thinking/feeling when you fall asleep at night is what you wake up thinking/feeling, so be careful what you think about before you go to sleep. What a load of bollox! If you were trying to control what you were thinking about before you went to sleep, how would you ever get to sleep? And then if/when you wake up in the middle of the night, presumably you again have to control your thoughts before the precise moment you fall back to sleep – whenever that may be! Maybe it works for him, but it certainly doesn’t for me.

I read or heard something recently saying that it helps depressed people if they make a to do list for the next day before they go to sleep – or maybe that’s insomniacs? Whatever, both those apply to me anyway.

My to-do for today: wait in for delivery of yarn that is finally coming (yay!) two weeks after the order – it came yesterday when I was out at lino printing but I didn’t know because the email saying it would arrive between 10 and 12 came at 10.17 and then it was delivered (or not) at 10.39, and I didn’t read either of them till after lino finished at 12.00. It said redelivery would be tried today, but I don’t know if I’ll get an email today and if so how helpful it will be.

Now I’ve got the yahoo sorted out I will have a go at the gmail, which is not so bad, only a couple of hundred. Then I should go into Thunderbird and sort out the damson-tree ones, which are mostly forwarded to gmail. But there is always tons and tons of spam on those. I can’t have them on Outlook because it doesn’t like the servers. But forwarding them to gmail means they’re always duplicated.

Bugger. Word’s wordcount includes numbers, but the one on WordPress doesn’t.

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Bank holiday

It is a beautiful morning. Looking to set the record as the hottest May Day Bank Holiday ever. I will go out, but I will do some jobs first. Including writing this.

Woke at 6, read for a while, did my yoga and meditation. Have to clear all my stuff out of the van, but I can’t do that till tomorrow when the garage opens and I can get my keys. Although I guess I could call Darren’s mobile and get them from him. Really I should have got them on Friday afternoon but didn’t think about it till it was so late I couldn’t be bothered.

What am I doing? Who am I? Why am I obsessed with people seeing me as I see myself? I don’t know. Obsessed with demonstrating that I am who I am, not who they want me to be, or I might want me to be. Chaotic, lazy, irresponsible, unattractive, selfish, self-obsessed, clumsy, incompetent, disorganised. Why can’t I just be? If other people can’t accept me for who I am, how can I accept myself? I’ve tried to change, honestly I have tried so many times to live up to their unrealistic expectations, tried to believe it was possible to become that better person, brave, strong, hard-working, competent, attractive etc etc etc, all those things I’m not. I’ve really tried, but now I’ve had enough, enough of that stress, that pressure. I want to let it all go and just be who I am without feeling I have to justify myself, without having to be ashamed of myself constantly, always afraid of being found out, of failing, of disappointing them – I mean, I’m used to being disappointed by me, I’ve learnt to lower my expectations of myself, I know who I am.

Trying to be better, trying to be successful, trying to be kinder, more generous, more sociable, more conscientious, not letting everything slide like this. I’ve had enough of all that, it just makes me miserable knowing that everything I try is futile.

I want to be free. What does that mean? Free of any expectation, free of any commitments. What would I do? Is that really what I want? Would I be alone, scared, lonely? All those things, but aren’t they the main conditions of my existence? To be alone, scared and lonely? At least I wouldn’t have to pretend, wouldn’t have to push myself to do the things I don’t want to do, to take care of myself.

There is no answer to that. We all have to take care of our own needs to some extent. Otherwise, life would become… what? Where am I going with this? How have I got to this point? I need a coffee. I will go downstairs and make coffee.

So, coffee made, I need to write another fifty words. What is the answer? There isn’t one, clearly, there never has been and I just can’t change. How do I get round that? How do I cut through these feelings and move on? It’s no good just asking questions if there aren’t any answers.

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End of the road?

Why does my computer say it’s ‘running a virus’ scan and refusing to show me my word count for this document in Word? I mean, I’ve hardly written anything, but as I’ve done the thing of copying and pasting my horoscope into the document, I want to know how many words that is, so I can subtract them from the total and see whether I’ve written 500 or not – only now I’ve written so much that if it shows the word count it will include what I’ve just written as well…

Aha, so that was 91. It’s still not showing me the overall word count though.

I’ve had a stressful 24 hours because yesterday I had to go to the garage to find out why my camper van failed the MOT and it’s not great. They wouldn’t even give me an estimate of how much it will cost and to be honest I just want rid of it. It’s sad, but realistically it’s not like I’ve used it much. I didn’t go away with it at all last year, other than out for days at the country park, well there was a reason for that, but with going to visit the kids such a lot I can’t see myself going away in it this year either. So I just have to say: it was a nice idea, but it just didn’t work out, cut my losses and let it go.

My son in law originally said he’d like it to go fishing with when I didn’t want it any more, but this is not a great time because they’re focussing all their time and money on the house at the moment, and also they’ve just bought a trailer tent, so don’t want a van as well cluttering up the drive. I wondered about SORNing it till he wants it, but who knows how long that would be, and I don’t want to keep paying rent for a garage for it every month.

I was thinking, if I walk to the seafront I can get some exercise, sunshine, fresh air and maybe fish and chips, but it’s just started raining so maybe not.

Keep watching the stupid Yoda/Seagull Song bad lip-reading video that someone posted on Facebook, it just makes me laugh, it’s so silly. Shared it with Geoff, who I used to work with at Granada over 30 years ago, because I knew it would make him laugh too.

I just don’t want to write. Didn’t do my yoga/meditation this morning because I came on the computer and started looking up the Romahome Owners Club site to advertise it on there. There is a guy who’s interested in it, it’s a bit of a story but two years ago, when I was living in Beach Road, it got broken into and this man put a note through my door saying he also had one and his had also been damaged and did I want to chat about finding spares etc. Anyway, it turns out I still had the note (amazing!) and I rang him this morning and it sounds like he might be interested. I told him I wanted £500 because honestly I don’t know what it will cost to MOT it and I just want rid. He said he would go to the garage this afternoon and have a look at it so I’m waiting to hear.

I think it might have stopped raining, so if I’ve done 500 words I might go out after all.

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Why I’ll never make it as a writer (or anything else for that matter)

I really don’t like Oscar Cainer. He writes this twaddle that really doesn’t mean anything, it’s so mealy-mouthed. Not a patch on his late Uncle Jonathan.

What has happened the last few days and what is my excuse for not writing? Today… slept in late, did my half hour of yoga and meditation, had breakfast… now it’s lunchtime and I’ve done bugger all. Every day the same.

It’s a nice day too. A friend came round to mow my lawn for me yesterday afternoon, and I thought: the garden’s a mess, now the fence is up I should get on with it and sort it out, but oh well… take the laptop and go to the Coffee Cup? That was sort of the plan. I really should go to the sea this afternoon instead of sitting around here, or if I’m going to stay in I should get on with some jobs.

You see, they say: ‘…don’t get caught up with all the “shoulds”…’, but seriously, if you keep on ignoring the ‘shoulds’ then everything goes to pot. Well, what would make me happy? Should (there I go again) I do something that will make me ‘happy’, and if so, what? I do neither. I sit here ruminating (that’s a good word. My therapist used it a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to describe these thinking patterns, and I thought: yes that’s it! Of course I’ve heard it before, but not used it lately, and now I’ve sort of latched on to it).

I rang the lady who does the kundalini yoga and meditation at the community centre – it’s literally just round the corner – been going to check it out for months and putting it off. She sounded really friendly and happy that I was interested. It might turn out to be a bit new-age and hippy-dippy, how do I feel about that? Well, I’m conflicted, aren’t I?

This came up with the therapist. When I was looking after the dogs, I went to see her in Guildford, where she works some of the time. I was sitting where I could see out of the window and I kept seeing magpies, so then I had to explain about why I say ‘Good morning sir, how’s your wife?’ when I see them. She was intrigued by this, and at the end of the session (and again since) she commented that I seem to be almost desperate to find something to believe in. Which is a not-unreasonable observation. But… and there I go, reading my horoscope every day and having tarot readings, while simultaneously thinking: ‘this is all such a load of bollocks!!!’

Yesterday I had reading group in the morning, that’s why I didn’t write then, I ran out of time. Haven’t even been posting my daily haiku, but that’s partly because the memory stick is in the laptop which is downstairs and I’m up here in the study. Sorry, just realised I wrote: ‘reading’ group, not ‘writing’ group, that’s really strange, I wonder why? But yesterday afternoon, after getting home and before Richard came to cut the grass, I set up a Twitter account for the group (and Instagram, though no idea what I’m going to do with that), and did a few things to the Facebook page, but now that has died a death again, I mean, I can’t get any enthusiasm for doing it.

I followed something from Twitter about ‘Nine Daily Habits You Should Get Rid of to Become a Better Writer’ and of course  I do them all – well, maybe not all (I don’t do 6), but 1, 2, 4, 8 and 9 are pretty much intrinsic to my personality and lifestyle – so clearly there is no hope for me.

1.       Not sticking to the writing plan – PLAN??? Moi? You must be joking.

2.       Giving in to procrastination and self-criticism – Ermmm… enough said.

3.      Thinking over some paragraphs or dialogues when you are not writing –  when they come to me I can’t always wait, I sort them out in my head and write later;

4.     Writing without enough sleep – definitely – it’s unavoidable, that’s how I live;

5.    Giving someone to read your unfinished book – I did that once and it set me back 4 years – these days I read bits out at group but I think that’s helpful;

6.    Limiting yourself with one place for writing – no, I do vary that;

7.    Dividing your time to 2 or more storylines at once – oh god, yes – currently there’s sorting out the sequel to ‘Single To Sirkeci’; maybe doing something about Prague; trying (not very hard) to think of stories for the two groups; and the great novel which is still on the back burner, where it’s been for about twelve years (or arguably twenty five);

8.    Isolating yourself from family and friends- ditto 4;

9.    Having bad nutrition and drinking too much coffee or energy drinks – also ditto 4.

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Trying

Why is it that I don’t want to write about happy things? I have just come back from four days on a narrow boat with Simon and Dina and the dogs, the sun shone, the river flowed, the scenery was pretty, on the first night there were owls hooting and I read and crocheted and watched the ripples and the ducks and laughed. But I come back and don’t want to write about it, can’t think of what to say about lying in my bunk with the gentle motion of the moored boat and the lapping of the water. I can still feel the motion even now, even sitting in meditation this morning, trying to be clear, trying to be focused, but the world moving underneath me such that I started to feel queasy, even though all is as it should be and the sun is shining, and I was planning to listen to Saturday Live in an hour but maybe I should forget it all and walk to the sea, but it will be crowded, a sunny Saturday, or maybe not, maybe it’s early enough to just be me out there, perhaps I should just do that, just walk and be there and have breakfast (I haven’t had breakfast) spend the day in the garden, because there’s so much that needs to be done, or in the house, in a way it would be easier if it was raining like the forecast said, easy not to go out, just to stay here and do what needs to be done. But the sun is a temptation, and this isn’t getting on with any of those things, isn’t getting anything done.

And I’m not writing about what I’ve been thinking about, finding myself and understanding myself and accepting myself and loving myself. How about just being myself? Laughing at myself, I read a blog post from 2013 recently about the bloke at the ‘School of Philosophy’ group in Peterborough, saying ‘why can’t you learn to laugh at yourself?’ That’s important, that’s one of the ways I’ve tried to do this in the past, to see my incompetence and stupidity as a kind of joke, I felt that when I was a student, that I was just someone who was here to be laughed at, in my late teens and early twenties, that’s how I felt about myself, I remember that now, but it wasn’t a happy thing, I wasn’t glad to be that way, I despised myself just as I despise myself now.

Because what happened when I was away? I did so many stupid things, made so many mistakes. I know for a fact that I’m more forgetful than most people, that’s a given, but I have this strong sense that I am also more incompetent, clumsy, awkward, not good at understanding what’s required of me and even worse at doing it, so that I must be a nightmare to have to deal with and this is why I’m so useless and worthless.

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Wet Sunday

No blogging this morning. I am now at Simon’s, ready for our narrow boat adventure tomorrow. It was a rainy, nasty drive, with road works on theA3 – or rather, no evidence of any actual work going on today, but one lane was closed either side of the roundabout that goes to Selbourne, and that was enough to mess the traffic up.

Southsea Soup meeting this morning, a new lady called Claire who seems to know a lot about marketing and is full of ideas, like giving people money to buy copies and then getting them to write reviews on Amazon. To me it seems that the flaw is that we have bought the books ourselves, but I kind of see what she’s getting at about the reviews.

It feels like it’s been quite a long day already – well, admittedly it is five thirty – almost dinner time.

Think I did okay with the packing, the only thing I’ve thought of (so far) that I haven’t brought is the Destination Portsmouth game. I even charged up the mini-wifi and found the card with the password on it. I got a sales call from Virgin yesterday asking if I wanted to buy one, and when I said I’d already got one she asked how much I was paying and I said £10.99 per month, she gave up and sounded quite sad because evidently she couldn’t compete with that. The stupid thing of course is that I’ve been paying that for almost three years and I never use it. So I thought, this would be an ideal opportunity. Even if we run out of data and have to pay more, well, I’ve been paying all that time for nothing, so it seems like I might as well use it.

I didn’t really think I was going to be able to find the password, I’d convinced myself it was a lost cause, but there was the box with the card in on the unit in the study, and I tested it and confirmed it worked.

I didn’t do much packing and preparation till the last minute again, I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to get started on this top-down crochet jumper (third attempt). I will crack that eventually. But as I found last week, it seems that leaving things to the last minute is actually less stressful than spreading the stress over several days – which is not what I would have predicted.

Reading the Why Buddhism Works book, this morning (when I couldn’t sleep) there was something really interesting about the relationship between feelings and thought. I will have to read that further.

I came up with a haiku before leaving home as well. I’ve actually got a few in hand now – two or three, anyway. One is quite dark so not sure whether I am going to share that one.

I mentioned at the Soup meeting about putting more on the Facebook page, like the idea I stole of getting people to add lines to a limerick. Trevor was quite scathing and said that no one had responded much to things he and Steve had put on there. I said that’s why we need to get some traffic, and he said, but nobody responds so there’s no point, and at least Claire and Freya backed me up. I mentioned about opening a twitter account and again he wasn’t enthusiastic but Freya was and she said Instagram as well, so as she uses Instagram a lot (being an artist, unlike me) I’ll do that as well. See if we can get some social media buzz going. And write some more stories as well, of course. That’s another matter.

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Sitting on a cushion on the floor

New blog day 2 – aha!!! Not sure why I said that but I had to start somewhere.

Got up okay this morning, did my yoga although I got stressed out at the start because I was trying to light incense sticks which kept snapping (or rather, an incense stick which snapped in half, then I tried lighting the halves, then I got another one and lit it and every time I tried putting it in the holder it snapped again so I ended up with about five pieces and I’m running out of matches and the windowsill in the meditation room/spare bedroom is a mess of ash and dead matches and snapped bits of incense stick because I never clean it up, excuse being that I never remember to put a clean bag in the bin…) Well, that’s how my life is, even when I’m specifically trying to bring serenity into it.

In the end I sat for the extra ten minutes at the end of the audio file because my mind was such a mess during the yoga and the sitting, though when it’s like that I’m not sure whether sitting for longer actually adds anything to what happened in the first place. It’s hard for me to distinguish ‘meditation’ from ‘sitting and thinking about crap’, although I’m pretty sure that most of what I do is the latter, and that can happen at any time, not just when I’m sitting in my meditation room on a cushion on the floor. So is it worth persisting even when you feel that way? Most of what I read and know about meditation implies that it is, and that that happens to everybody, but I think: ‘well, they don’t know exactly HOW crap my mind is, and I’m probably much crapper than them, they just don’t realise…’

I think that’s why I give up such a lot. But there again, I give up on everything – and probably for the same reasons.

I think I’ve got to a good place in terms of letting go of the idea that happiness is to be found ‘out there’ – in material things, external circumstances, other people etc etc. I don’t do the: ‘I’ll be happy when/if…’ thing any more, but there again, I don’t think I’ve taken that seriously for years. But… my therapist, B, talks about being kind to myself, doing the things that make me happy – and how is that not looking to external things? Maybe it’s a matter of degree – a world cruise vs popping to the café for a cream tea to improve my mood for an hour or so, something like that. Are café-sitting, cream teas and crochet forms of addiction? The contentment they induce doesn’t always last that long, but at least they’re relatively cheap, non-damaging and easy to reproduce. And I’ve yet to start escalating on to a harder version of any of them (interesting to contemplate what that might be).

Side-tracked again. What was I going to move onto? The idea that happiness is found in getting to know ‘one’s true self’. Ah, that’s a lovely can of worms for another time.