Category: stress management

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Round Robin

I didn’t post on here yesterday, but I did write my annual letter, sent to a handful of people from years ago whom I’m still in touch with enough to send Christmas cards and write to once a year. I don’t really know if the recipients are pleased to get it or resent being sent a computer-written and printed ‘round robin’ style letter. I used to edit each one for the specific person it was going to, but as the years pass and the interval since I saw them all in person grows longer, I think – well, at least this is better than nothing. At least they know I’m still alive. One person sends me a similar letter, one sends me a handwritten letter, most just a card with maybe a few words or just the usual greetings.

The handwritten letter is from the longest-standing friendship of them all, a friend from school, who went to teacher training college in London for three years in the 1970s and returned afterwards to the village she’d left, married the brother of a girl we were at school with, and taught at the village school all her working life. The last time I saw her was at her silver wedding anniversary party in the village hall in 2004, and before that, her 21st birthday party. In the quarter-century in between, we’d lost touch, until my Mum, one day in the 1980s, had a phone call from her asking ‘are you the Mrs Rushby who used to live in…?’ and passed on my address.

The letter I wrote yesterday turned out to be a little longer (600 words) than these daily offerings, about how I’ve been, and what I’ve been up to (not a lot, apart from the wedding) and my plans for Christmas – which changed anyway in the course of writing because I got a message from my daughter saying that my granddaughter is now quarantined till the 16th because a child in her class has tested positive for Covid, so I won’t be going to see them next weekend. And as usual it’s a computer-produced letter, but I decided yesterday morning that I would make Christmas cards this year, using the vast array of card-making equipment (die-cutting machine, metal dies, stamps, inks, sheets of patterned card and paper, scissors, glue, stickers etc etc etc) which I’ve acquired over the last two years.

I won’t go into the background story of how I started that particular hobby (not today anyway), but I will say that although it’s fun some of the time, I also find it unbelievably stressful. This is partly because there is absolutely no way for me to avoid creating a massive mess with all the stuff, and also (and related) that it takes me ages to make anything because I am constantly looking for the thing that I had in my hand only ten minutes earlier.

Yesterday I started with a determination NOT to get stressed, to keep it simple, and tidy.

I will try again today.

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Thresholds

After I’d finished writing yesterday, I looked up the dictionary definition of ‘liminal’ and found that it refers not just to borders, but specifically to thresholds, which pleases me, because of the ambiguity between the two – what I described yesterday as the ‘hazy, scary…’ nature of boundaries, their combination of both limiting aspects but also potential for discovery, change and new experiences.

It also made me think of a picture by William Blake, the frontispiece for his epic poem ‘Jerusalem’, which shows Los (his name for the embodiment of the poetic imagination) about to step through an archway, carrying a lantern into darkness.

About six this morning, as I was lying in bed and thinking, the word ‘edgy’ popped into my head, and I started to think about its implications – that combination of nervousness and excitement. When applied to people, it can imply a kind of fearfulness, a risk of tipping over into a chaotic and destructive state – most likely self-destructive, but not necessarily just that (does self-destruction ever not have repercussions for others beside the self?) But when ‘edgy’ is applied to actions, ideas, art, it implies courage, and is more likely to be complimentary, or at least ambivalent.

This whole idea of edges, boundaries, borders, liminality, the relationships between risk, fear, courage, change, uncertainty, danger, transformation , creativity, loss, immobility (in no particular order) has been haunting me recently as I try to deal with my ‘stuckness’ and lack of motivation and inspiration, not to mention my fear of not being able to find ways of dealing with the obstacles I keep coming up against.

Speaking of which, I think (only think) I may have got round the large ones with the website project, and that it shouldn’t (‘shouldn’t’) require too much more work. Having said that, I went out yesterday morning to walk on the beach and have breakfast out (instead of putting in the work) and realised how much that improved my mood. And then when I got home my broadband was down, so I abandoned websiting and spent the afternoon trying to sort out the design for the jumper, filling in the design on squared paper and then realising it would be far too big, so having to produce a smaller pattern which I think is going to work, but anyway it will all require a lot of time and effort (knitting doesn’t count as ‘work’) to put into practice.

Tai chi this morning, and I’ve just had a phone call from the GP’s surgery offering me a flu jab appointment at 2:15. I had to cancel the last one because I had a cold, so don’t want to miss it. And afterwards I might go and do some café-sitting and reading, or walking if the weather stays nice (which it looks as though it might).  Those things are important and I need to do more of them. But I’ll have a couple of hours between tai chi and lunch to do some website work.

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Wherever That River Goes…

No post yesterday, because I got up and took a flask of coffee to the beach, arriving a few minutes  late for sunrise (but there was low cloud over the sea anyway) and writing in a notebook, which I might or might not copy onto here, but today I’ve got other stuff in my head so will go ahead with that.

One of the songs from my youth that listening to Amazon music has reintroduced me to is ‘The Ballad of Easy Rider’ by the Byrds, and now it’s stuck in my head. It starts like this:

‘The river flows, it flows to the sea,
wherever that river goes,
that’s where I want to be.
Flow, river flow,
let your waters wash down,
take me from this road
to some other town.

All (s)he wanted was to be free
and that’s the way it turned out to be…’

‘The Ballad of Easy Rider,’ Roger McGuinn & Bob Dylan

Notice how I subtly changed the gender in that second verse? It’s true, all I wanted was to be free, and that is ‘the way it turned out to be’, though not quite the way I might have expected (or even hoped for.) But I’m still very grateful for the way it is – despite the warning from another song of the same era:

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,
nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free…’

‘Me and Bobby McGee’, Kriss Krisstofferson

…a warning that kept me stuck in a sad but ‘safe’ situation for many years, which has brought another song to mind…

‘How often does it happen that we live our lives in chains
and never even know we have the key?’

‘Already Gone’, The Eagles

But that’s enough soft West coast country-rock from the late 1960s and early 70s for today.

Going to the sea yesterday morning did its magic of lifting my mood. I sat on my usual bench behind the beach café, writing in my notebook, and two people passing by said: ‘you’ve got a good spot there!’, and later on my way home I sat in the Rose Garden and read for a while, and another stranger said the same thing. But when I got home and started trying to tackle a project I’ve started, I had a massive setback which threw me into despair about how useless I am and what a charlatan because people have expectations of me and really I don’t have a clue what I’m doing and am scrabbling all the time to keep going, and everything is ten times harder for me and takes ten times longer than any normal competent person but nobody sees it and I hate myself and I hate being me.

I talked to my therapist in the afternoon about it, this massive fear I have of cocking everything up. She talked about adjusting to not being ‘needed’ any more, but I don’t want to be needed, I don’t want anyone to depend on me, I can’t stand the stress. I want to be free of all that. I want to run away again.

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Decisions

After I finished writing yesterday, I thought about how often I mention Monday in the titles of my Monday posts – I can’t be sure, but it feels like it happens that way more than any other day, or has done recently, at least. Years ago, in my major blogging days, I would sometimes use the day of the week as a title when I couldn’t think of anything else, and that was always a bad sign. Monday, specifically, has a bad reputation of course, as the first day of the conventional working week. But after I’d written yesterday, I worked out that it’s seventeen years since the last time I had that kind of Monday to Friday job, so why should it be an issue? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, I have no expectation of finding an answer).

Tuesday is significant in two ways, one because it’s bin preparation day (they’re supposed to be out by bedtime for early morning collection) and the other because of Tuesday morning tai chi lessons at the community centre, except they only restarted after lockdown at the beginning of September, I went to the first one and then was in Cyprus for the second, and the teacher then went to Spain  for two weeks and has been self-isolating since she got back. So it should be starting next week – assuming things don’t go back into lockdown, which who knows, given the way things are going.

There is something else on Tuesdays, which is Zoom meditation in the evenings, which I haven’t done for a while because I don’t much like the person who usually leads it. But there will be Zoom tai chi tomorrow – I missed it last week when I was at my daughter’s.

I made some progress on both my projects yesterday – some. I’m trying to do the website on WordPress, because I don’t want to host it myself. When I was trying to do the website thing as a business, I used to set all the sites up as sub-folders on my hosting, but earlier this year I let go of the last one on there (the owner having passed away). It’s quite expensive to pay for hosting, and getting more so – and I don’t get much traffic on my own site, in fact this blog is the only thing which is really still ‘live’, so I keep questioning whether it’s worth continuing. I paid last year for two years’ hosting, so am now into the final year, and I need to make some decisions, which is not my favourite activity. It is a lot of money, as I said, but on the other hand I can afford it – just it seems daft to keep paying for something which I don’t really make use of – and if I do stop it at some point in the future, my client will be left having to find hosting from somewhere else (or rather I’ll have to do that for her).  

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The Lottery

Yesterday afternoon was my weekly Skype therapy session, and, not knowing what to talk about, I told the therapist about the stress and worry over the test appointments earlier this week.

‘It seems you’re worrying about the processes and administration more than what it’s all about, which is the opposite of what most people would do’ she said.

By ‘what it’s all about’, of course, she meant cancer – but honestly, what’s that to worry about? If that sounds flippant, we’re not talking here about any particular risk. The infusion I’m going for on Saturday (tests permitting, and I’m still waiting for the result) isn’t even directly related to cancer, but to reducing the risk of side effects from the medication I’m taking to reduce the risk of the cancer coming back/happening again. And whether at some point I’ll get cancer again, or osteoporosis, or both or neither is not something I think about on a daily basis – although I do, of course, keep taking the prescribed tablets and a calcium supplement. That’s part of my routine. And going for the infusion, although uncomfortable and annoying, is also routine – this is the fifth time I’ve done it, and that followed after six sessions of chemo, which were much nastier and lasted longer but were basically the same process, in the same ward at the same hospital. So I know what I’m doing, I just have to turn up at the usual place for 10:30 on Saturday, with my Kindle to read while I’m waiting (there’s always lots of waiting) and after that it’s out of my hands.

This harks back to something I’ve said before: that getting through cancer (in my experience) is not about being ‘brave’ or emotionally strong or staying positive, it’s about doing what you’re told, turning up for the treatments, taking the meds, trusting in the expertise of the medical staff, accepting any help that’s offered. In the end, it’s a lottery, but you can buy as many tickets as you can lay your hands on to improve your chances of getting through. Even so, you could be knocked down by a car any day on your way to the local shop, so why torture yourself by worrying about death when there are so many other ways to do it?

The therapist’s response was to say: ‘There are two types of people in the world…’ and I thought she was going to say something profound, but instead it was just: ‘…those who blame themselves for everything that goes wrong and those who never blame themselves, and we know which you are,’ which we’ve talked about so many times, and didn’t seem terribly relevant or helpful in this context. I was thinking more of Chekov: ‘Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out’, which was sent to me on a card years ago by a friend who never saw her fiftieth birthday because she died of breast cancer six months before.

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State of Alert

I seem to have been dreaming much more vividly the last few nights – vividly to remember them when I woke up, but not now. And in the shower I was thinking about thinking – the constant, ‘stream of consciousness thinking’, the ‘catastrophic’ thinking as someone recently called it, though it’s not always dark, it’s where everything comes from, including all my writing, especially poetry. But no poetry today. And I think I’ll just write about what happened yesterday.

I mentioned on Tuesday that I had to get blood tests (which is normal) and a Covid test prior (within 72 hours for the latter) to my 6-monthly infusion on Saturday. I rang up both the relevant hospital departments and got the Covid for 14:05 yesterday and the bloods for 13:45. The lady in haematology told me sternly: ‘don’t come in more than 5 minutes before your appointment!’ Then on Wednesday afternoon I got an automatic text from a 5-digit number asking me to rate my ‘recent experience of our outpatients department’. This threw me. I ignored it, but started to wonder whether it had been triggered by my appointment – maybe they’d made it for Wednesday and not Thursday? It wasn’t worth the trauma of trying to call the hospital back (which is a nightmare for anyone, not just a phone-phobic like me) so I decided to leave it and turn up anyway.

Because my time management is so poor, I have a habit of allowing too much time to get to appointments, and arriving far too early, to make up for all those times when the reverse has happened. Plus I wasn’t at all convinced that 20 minutes between appointments would give me enough time. I knew where I had to go for the blood test, and where it was in relation to the car park, but not for the Covid, except that it was on the same site – I’d just been told: ‘turn left into Nightingale Rd, follow it round and you’ll see it on you left.’ I knew where Nightingale Rd was, but I didn’t know how long I would have to follow it round for.

Too many times I’ve set off with great confidence for somewhere, assuming that I’ve understood the directions, and got horribly lost. As it happened, that wasn’t the way it worked out yesterday – also the blood people were expecting me and saw me when I arrived at 13:40 and all was well. But it so easily could have not been.

This is the ocean in which my thoughts swim – in a constant state of alert. Stress was worrying away at me all Wednesday evening and yesterday morning – the poem I posted was a reaction to trying to deal with it. In situations like that, I try to think of the worst case, and really all it meant was that I’d have to make another appointment for the blood tests, either today or tomorrow.

It worked out – but there’s no guarantee that the next time will.

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Log Cabin

Very late this morning – although I’ve been awake for two and a half hours already. I decided to start doing my half hour yoga etc in the mornings again, and had a shower and washed my hair, and just generally time passed as it so often does.

Routines, as I’m sure I’ve said before, are both constraining and liberating. I half thought last week that I wouldn’t restart these two morning routines – exercise and blogging – but that’s because I was in a pretty shitty mood after returning from Cyprus. It’s so easy to slip down into chaos – especially for someone like me. Spontaneity can be exhilarating, but it can also be terrifying. Sometimes the chaos reaches a point where the only way I can deal with it is by ignoring it, and so it grows exponentially until it reaches a crisis and I fall apart emotionally. I was getting close to that point last week. But yesterday I wrote my blog; tidied the kitchen; loaded, ran and emptied the dishwasher; hoovered the stairs and landing – never really know what brings me back from the brink. I might say: ‘a decent night’s sleep’ but that wasn’t the case. Taking the van out on Friday? Doing that one, big(ish) stressful thing and then putting it to one side? Putting everything else into perspective? Maybe.

When I was learning to drive, the instructor told me that the greatest pleasure in life comes from doing something you really don’t want to do, and then afterwards, knowing that you’ve done it. Over forty years later, I think that’s still one of the wisest pieces of advice I’ve ever heard.

I’ve started a new crochet project – while still finishing off the previous one (both cardigans). I started following a pattern for what’s called a ‘log cabin’ design, starting with a small square, then every few rows rotating the work and picking up stitches along the edge of the existing work so that you have a rectangle that keeps growing – like a spiral growing out from the centre, but with straight edges. I’m using a ‘cake’ type yarn with large blocks of colour, and it looks pretty good. But I don’t like the shape of the pattern in the book – which makes a sleeveless waistcoat, which I’m not that keen on. So I’m trying to think of a way of adapting it to make a cardi with sleeves. This is the sort of thing I like to do – trying out something new and seeing how it works out.

Every so often I think I’ll give up on crochet, because it’s too repetitive and I feel like I’ve exhausted the possibilities. Then I get an idea like this and get interested again. Admittedly, I have cupboards full of projects that I’ve never finished, and garments that I’ve never worn. But I keep going back to it. And today I’m looking forward to sitting in the sunshine and trying again.

Maybe there’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.

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Blame Game

By chance this morning, looking for something to read on my Kindle, I found a book I’d forgotten I had, by Tara Brach. In fact, I was apparently 25% of the way through reading it. She’s an American meditation/self help guru who was recommended to me by someone I met at a mindfulness retreat a few years ago. I watched/listened to a few of her videos on Youtube, and downloaded this book.

I needed something to read on the loo, so I read on from the point where it ‘opened’. It was an anecdote about Christmas dinner with her family, where every individual was being annoying for one reason or another. In a huff (she didn’t put it like that), she went out for a walk on her own in the snow, reflecting on this, and realised that while she was blaming them she was really angry with herself.

I finished on the loo and went to the kitchen, where the radio was playing Thought for the Day. The speaker was also talking about deflecting our own blame onto other people, and how we should face up to it and take responsibility (maybe not in those exact words). And I thought, well, that’s what I do all the time, isn’t it? I always take the blame onto myself, and like apologising, somehow it can make people even more irritated with me, and I with myself. What am I doing wrong?

My late mother-in-law used to say: ‘Everybody makes mistakes, but I try not to make the same mistake twice’, the implication being that you can’t be blamed for the first time, but you should learn not to repeat whatever it was that you did. Because if you do repeat it, you become culpable for failing to learn the lesson the first time.

I’ve taken a lifetime of blame, but I just keep on and on making the same mistakes. I’ve tried to learn the lessons, take responsibility, be a ‘better’ person – but there are aspects of myself which will never change no matter what I try to do – and I am trying to explore and accept them, because I’m tired of fighting against myself. It’s easy to get frustrated and irritated with the chaos of my life, but as long as it’s just me on my own dealing with the consequences, it’s not so bad as when it affects someone else, or there are witnesses, and I have to deal with their reactions, and my own reactions to them.

Yet at the same time I have this compulsion to ‘come out’, to explain myself, to be understood and accepted for who I am. Judge me if you must, but please try to judge me on my own terms, not by comparing me to the person you believe or want me to be (or think I ‘should’ be).

Perhaps all our perceptions are illusory, but my self-knowledge is based on a lifetime’s study, and – I think – deserves to be heard.

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Rabbit in the Headlights

Today I am in freefall. I know I’m losing my grip on life, I can feel time whooshing past me ever faster and I am so paralysed… I can’t move, I can’t function. I know this is a difficult time, I know the reasons behind this stress this week, but how do I deal with it? I am sitting here writing, rabbit in the headlights syndrome. I haven’t done my morning tai chi/yoga since Thursday, or blogged since Friday, though yesterday I wrote but didn’t post. I remember being in bed looking at the clock at 5:50 thinking – I’ll get up now – then finding myself sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the wardrobe, glancing at theclock it it was 7.05 and what had I done in that hour? I couldn’t remember – not asleep, just lying in bed, thoughts churning, maybe looking at my phone, everything pulling away from me, leaving me behind, sitting on the edge of the bed, panicking.

Someone on the dyspraxia Facebook group yesterday evening posted a question about ‘imposter syndrome’, other members’ experience of it, and its relation to dyspraxia. My feeling is that it’s probably not directly caused by dyspraxia, but like many things it can be a consequence of the things that are. It relates to what I was saying the other week about lack of control – when I manage to do something ‘right’, it feels like luck, or a fluke, because I can’t see any way of making sure it always happens that way again, but when I do something ‘wrong’ I can see exactly how my actions have contributed to it, though I can’t see how to stop myself doing them again. So past experience of getting something ‘right’ isn’t helpful in making me believe that I can do something else ‘right’, because it’s in the past, and there’s no guarantee that I can do it again, or that my past success wasn’t just down to some external conditions which won’t apply the next time.

Confidence and self esteem are supposed to grow through small incremental steps, through trying things and learning and taking pride in achievements, however small. There are plenty of things I have learned to do by practice and repetition – like driving a car, or cooking Bolognese sauce (though last time I forgot the bacon) or the first 28 movements of the tai chi form – but none of that is a guarantee that I won’t make a catastrophic mess of any one of those at some future attempt (though I admit that ‘driving’ is the only one with the potential to be truly catastrophic), and it’s not much of a help in learning something new, or applying old skills in new settings.

This is why other people’s beliefs and expectations about me become such a burden. I feel as though everything I’ve ever done is built on sand, however irrational that may appear from the outside. Every new challenge is a new opportunity for disaster.

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Coping (Barely)

Yesterday evening I felt overwhelmed by the futility of everything, and started weeping uncontrollably – which is unusual, because that’s how I normally feel in the morning. By the evening, it’s usually much better.

On Thursday, the therapist asked whether the dyspraxia assessment I had two years ago had come up with any advice or strategies which might make life easier. I couldn’t remember. I said I would look at the report, but when I started looking for it I couldn’t find it – because although I’d saved it in a folder in my documents, I’d done it under the name of the consultancy that did it, and I couldn’t remember what that was.

I went into my accounts for 2018, and found the name of the consultancy with the payment. I then searched on that, but Microsoft Search showed me links on the web, not in my files. So I tried again by searching for it in my emails (miraculously, although it could have been under any of four email addresses I use, it was in the first one I tried). I found the pdf attachment of the report, but it was password protected, I had to read another email to get the password, then I kept getting it wrong, but finally got into it. (It was after all this that I found that there was actually a folder under the consultancy name in my documents folder, plus a word document with the password in, but now I know it’s all there I will change the folder title to include ‘dyspraxia’ to make it easier to find next time).

The answer to the therapist’s question about advice was: ‘If Linda requires support whilst working as a self-employed writer and publisher she could consider workplace skills training with a specialist dyspraxia/dyslexia tutor’ but nothing about coping with daily life. Also, if I ever take any more exams, I should be entitled to extra time for completing them.

Under ‘Implications for work and study’, the consultant says: ‘Because of Linda’s difficulty processing information, she is likely to have problems: assimilating information when reading (thereby needing additional time to do so); formulating her thoughts, fluently and quickly…; with handwritten tasks (eg copying information); with memory (eg remembering instructions, sequencing, retrieving information and planning ahead); multi-tasking (eg dealing with multiple pieces of information/documentation)… with personal organisation; with co-ordination; and working within time constraints… she will require more time to learn and undertake complex tasks.’ (But no mention of cat food in the coffee pot, or where I put my glasses thirty seconds ago.)

Well, tell me something I don’t know already – but at least it’s reassuring to know there’s a reason why I’m so chaotic, even if there’s nothing I can do about it. Except, of course, to be a ‘good person’ – to become self-disciplined despite all my instincts and inclinations, organise my life and myself and keep on top of everything all the time – but somehow without being self-critical and beating myself up.