Category: creativity

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Rabbit in the Headlights

Later this morning, I’ll be going to the hospital for my annual mammogram, postponed from last month because of the lockdown. I don’t want to go – not that it’s that painful (though it’s never comfortable), but I don’t want to go to the hospital, or anywhere really – just as I didn’t particularly want to take the van out last week, but this time I really have no choice.

The card-making didn’t go so well yesterday, partly because I was, like Friday afternoon, trying something different (for the inside of the cards), and I only completed one. So I’m still not ready to send off my letters, which feels a bit as though time’s running out.

Thinking about all this yesterday after I’d posted – and when I was getting frustrated with how I was going to do it, and panicking a little in case I did anything that would ruin anything I’d done so far – it struck me that there is a distinct ‘first world problem’ side to all this. It’s all so trivial, isn’t it, on the global scale? Yet it feels so important to me. It feels – at risk of sounding melodramatic – like an act of courage, something I’ve had to psych myself up for, and have to keep motivating myself to continue. Now, not that long ago I would have been berating myself for that, feeling stupid, frustrated and angry with myself for making such a big deal over it. I’m trying not to do that, though several times over the last few days I’ve been struck by panic about it all. I honestly know how ridiculous and irrational all this sounds. This is a side of me that nobody knows about (unless they read this blog, and even then they probably won’t take it seriously). These are the sort of battles that I have with myself all the time, to ‘get over myself’, in that weird phrase that just popped into my head.

This is the rabbit-in-the-headlights me that somehow – not sure how – I manage to hide from other people a lot of the time. Life is easier if I don’t set her challenges, and there are enough challenges in everyday life to try to protect her from (though fewer during lockdown). I can never get rid of her – I’ll never ‘grow out’ of her if it hasn’t happened by now. She is the essence of me, and I’m not sure whether referring to ‘her’ in the third person is such a good idea, but there again, it does convey the point that ‘I’ don’t have a lot of control over her – I can threaten her and bully her but doing that always has consequences for me, because I’m the one who feels the pain (even more so when I get angry with her). But there are things which she/I now can deal with and enjoy only because I/she have persisted in making her/myself do them.

Little battles can be as difficult as big ones. I have to keep trying.

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Creative Chaos

My head’s a bit of a mess today. I’m trying to focus.

Prompted by my efforts with the card making (which continued yesterday) I’ve been thinking about creativity, a topic I’ve been planning to tackle for a while. In fact the post which I wrote on Monday (but didn’t share) was about how difficult it is for me to see any value in anything I make. I was coming to the end of the Christmas jumper I’ve been knitting for my daughter, when I read a Facebook post by a lady who runs a local craft shop. She’d shared some photographs from a 1980s knitting pattern magazine, showing celebrities wearing jumpers with silly slogans and daft pictures – rather like the one I’ve just made, in fact. The comments were so mocking, and in a nasty ‘What were they thinking?’ way, not a gentle way, that I immediately felt ashamed and embarrassed by my efforts. What was I thinking? More to the point, what will my daughter think? God knows. But it’s done now, I said I would make her one and I did, I made up my own pattern and didn’t consult her so that it will be a surprise. If she hates it – openly or secretly – I still enjoyed making it.

That’s why this is the first time I’ve made cards for anybody other than my nearest and dearest – because what if they think they’re just naff? (Actually, two years ago, when the lino-printing classes were still running, I made some Christmas cards, but never sent any of them for exactly that reason.) Well, I suppose with these people I never see, it doesn’t matter what they might think, because who really cares that much about Christmas cards anyway? What really matters is that I enjoy the process. And that links in with what I was saying a while back about the quest and the prize, the journey and the destination, the process and the outcome.

So yesterday, I did some more, and because the one I’d done on Friday wasn’t too bad, I stuck with the same design, finishing the exteriors of six cards, although I also need to do more inside them. I made a conscious effort not to get stressed but just to enjoy it – even when I still kept losing things and making mistakes. There are lots of little bits and things to get lost, and lots of little steps that have to be done in the right order, and that is exactly the kind of thing which does make me stressed, because it’s hard for me to hold a plan in my head and remember what I need to do next – which is why it always takes me so long. But I took my time, tried not to give myself a hard time, and got into a rhythm.

Practice, repetition and routine is good. Anything creative is risky. What I do may be crap – there again, it might get better if I keep trying.

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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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Not Writing, but Blogging

Where does this stuff come from? I sit down with a vague idea and the words come out in a completely different direction – like starting from a conversation about the role of fate and chance in an individual life and going off on one about Isaac Asimov and the fates of galaxies (not to mention Planet Earth).

Lately much of my time is being taken up with obsessing over getting this jumper finished – so much so that I haven’t even touched the weather blanket for a week. And a fair amount of that time, of course, is taken up with untangling wool, although yesterday I felt as though there was a better balance, and that I made reasonable progress (admittedly it was a less complicated part of the design). In fact it even feels as though I may be approaching the end – although I still have to do the sleeves, which always take longer than expected. I’ve made a start on one of them (when the body got too stressful) and I’ve decided to incorporate small candy canes into the pattern to relieve the boredom.

I still have moments (or even hours) of panic that she’s not going to like it. But then I think – too late to go back now, I might as well just keep on the way I’m going, knowing that whatever my daughter’s opinion, I’ll be embarrassed by it when it’s done. She asked for it, I tell myself, and she knows well enough it will probably turn out to be a mess.

But I’ve decided to stop worrying about the quality of the things I make (which goes for my writing too, which is why I’m still writing this blog). Also I heard on the radio the other day that only ten of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime, but almost 1800 were discovered by her sister after her death. What does it matter?

This takes me back again to ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the idea of the poetic imagination, or Wild Spirit, (or whatever you want to call it) being stolen or given away or strangled at birth. Looking back over my life – which I still haven’t delved into in depth – has shown me how much I’ve repressed, denied, pushed away, belittled that side of myself, while simultaneously longing for it. So I’ve decided just to do what I can without thinking too much about it or expecting anything from it. Lockdown helps, of course – as it did in the spring: I feel a lot less stressed and more content when I don’t have to go out and interact with other people. That’s something else Dickinson is famous for – it’s said she rarely left her bedroom –at least I have a whole house to myself.

Despite longing for the life of a wild bohemian, I never had the nerve or the opportunities. I’ve always been more Emily Dickinson than Bloomsbury – and at least it requires a lot less energy.  

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Tangled Again

I wrote yesterday, but when I tried to upload it, I found that there was no wifi. I restarted the router, tried to get on from the laptop, switched the telly on and even the Tivo wasn’t connected. Went looking for the contact details for Virgin Media, funny how they never give you a phone number, or if there’s a letter or document somewhere that has that information, I couldn’t find it. It was down all morning, came back up just before one o’clock. I’d texted a friend who lives a few streets away who also uses Virgin, he replied mid-afternoon, when mine was back, to say that it had been up and down all day.

So I never posted what I’d written, but might do later.

Horrible weather yesterday. That does sometimes seem to correspond with the wifi being crap, I don’t know if it’s related, or if so how, it’s just an anecdotal correlation.

When I wasn’t fretting about the wifi not working, I was fretting about my knitting. I have one knitting project (jumper) and one crochet project (weather blanket) and they both have multiple colours of yarn which are permanently tangled, so that it feels some days I spend more time untangling yarn than I do crafting. Sometimes it can be quite a soothing thing to do, but mostly it’s a frustrating chore. I don’t know what I do to make it happen and I don’t know what I can do to stop it happening, except not use so many different colours – and I don’t want to do that, which would be very boring.

For the Christmas jumper, I’ve currently got two additional balls of white on the back (for snowflakes), two on the one sleeve that I’ve started (for candy canes) and seven on the front. You may ask why I make it so complicated, but the point is that it’s a pictorial design, and unlike cross stitch or tapestry, where you can work on one area at a time, everything that appears on one row has to be done at the same time.

I’m also having doubts about what the recipient (my daughter) will think of it. Is what I’m doing completely bonkers? On the current bit of the front, there’s a gingerbread man flanked by two candy canes and two cup cakes – okay, I admit, that IS a bonkers idea. I’ve adapted it from a cross stitch pattern and a jumper a friend of mine had last year, with the slogan: ‘Calories don’t count at Christmas’. Over the last three years I’ve made jumpers for the grandkids, and my daughter kept saying: ‘when are you going to do one for me?’ but I do wonder how she’ll react.

I always have this when I make things for other people. Will they like it, will they wear it? Personally, I wouldn’t be seen dead in half the things I make. I’m following my creative instinct, but I do wonder about what it produces.  

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Running With Wolves

The deeper I get into the book I’ve been reading, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the more I relate it to my life, the more I can see how broken and bent my life has been. I know how melodramatic this sounds, I can hear the voices telling me all that stuff: how lucky I am to have had such a (materially) comfortable life; that I should stop whining and practise gratitude; that I should stop reading books that make me unhappy; that I should stop thinking so much and simply be.

I was never cut out to be a nice, good, well behaved girl, but I tried, I really did. Some of my struggles in that regard were clearly related to my dyspraxia, interpreted as clumsiness, untidiness, laziness, carelessness, not listening, not paying attention, all those traits of the ‘difficult’ child. I wasn’t deliberately ‘naughty’, in fact I tried very hard to avoid it, which still holds to this day – needing to know the ‘rules’ so I can stay on the right side of them always, never causing trouble, never making waves – except that doesn’t always work, isn’t always possible, there were/are/will always be times when through carelessness etc I overstep the mark, or get trapped in a situation where to please someone upsets someone else and so I keep falling over my own feet (metaphorically as well as literally) and bringing down judgement on myself, which is why, as you must know by now, it’s easier for everyone if I just keep away from other people as much as I can.

The book, written about thirty years ago, is a Jungian analysis, illustrated by myths and fairy tales from all cultures, about how girls and women are socialised into conforming to culturally required feminine norms and roles. The author’s main thesis is that by trying to live up to those norms and roles, many women suppress their creative spirit, or ‘wild nature’. I gave up on it the first time I tried to read it, two years ago, because her writing style irritated me and it seemed related to New Age ‘Goddess’ cults, which feel a bit whacky to me. Now I’ve persevered I’m more impressed by the psychology behind it, and anyway, it was recommended by my therapist, and I have great respect for her academic credentials.

And, as you can probably guess from that description, the idea of the ‘wild nature’, the alternative female archetype and alter ego of the creative spirit, whose suppression can cause great harm and distress in women’s lives, struck a mighty chord for me. Hence the posts over the last few days about the Wild Thing who lives caged inside of me: self-destructive, resentful and raging as any caged beast has the right to be, but only ‘evil’ if seen from a specific, limited perspective.

I sat down to write almost in tears because I didn’t think I could find the words to express this. But it happened anyway.

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Christmas Jumper

It was raining earlier, then the sun came out, now the clouds have returned and the sind wounds (of course I meant ‘wind sounds’, but left that in because a typing spoonerism is pretty weird!) – the WIND SOUNDS a bit rough. Lots to do indoors today – more stuff to do on the website, but at least it’s going okay, and the client is happy.

The knitted jumper’s growing slowly, it seems to be taking ages to get to the point where the sleeves can be separated from the body. I’m working it from the neck down on a circular needle – bit technical there, but what it means is that it should be possible to do the whole thing in one piece without having to sew it together or (my deepest horror), join the sleeves on at the end. I’ve done it that way with crochet a few times (some successful, others not, but with a better record than I’ve had with doing the pieces separately and joining them). I found the method (it’s not exactly a ‘pattern’ because it doesn’t give exact numbers of stitches for size and shape) in a book about knitting all kinds of ‘sweaters’ (it’s American). You start with the neck hole, increase for the shoulders, then keep increasing till it comes down to the bottom of the armholes before starting on the sleeves, and so on. The crucial thing is that you have to keep trying it on – which knitters will understand is a bit tricky when it’s all on a circular needle which is smaller than the circumference of your body. Also it’s complicated by the fact that it’s for my daughter, who like me is broad across the back (and not lacking out front either), but not quite as big as me- there again it’s a Christmas jumper so doesn’t need to be snug, so I’m trying it on myself and aiming to make it so I can get into it, but a little too tight for comfort.

The last three years I’ve made Christmas jumpers for the grandchildren, and made sure to make them with plenty of growing room. (My original plan was that they could then be ‘passed down’ when grown out of, but I can’t see that happening.) So this year it’s my daughter’s turn.

You may well ask why this year I’ve decided to go for this top-down method rather than sticking with the pattern I’ve used before, and I asked myself that question quite a lot when I embarked on this a few weeks ago. But I think if I can master this technique I’m going to find it a lot more interesting and enjoyable – in fact I am finding it just that – and might become inspired to make more jumpers this way and develop my own designs… in fact I’ve already got a few ideas.

Another way of using up all that yarn I keep buying – and it’s raining again. Might as well hunker down.

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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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Splurging

Do I want to write today? Some of the stress I was under earlier in the week has been alleviated, I slept a bit better last night – 71% according to the sleep cycle app, but then it was 79% two nights ago, so doesn’t necessarily correlate with a good mood in the morning. I don’t know what those percentages are based on – is it percentage of a ‘normal’ night’s sleep – eight hours, maybe? When I first installed the app, it spent the first few days saying it was calibrating, so maybe it relates to how much sleep I had in those first few nights? Or is it a kind of index which also takes into account factors like frequency of waking in the night or proportion of deep to light sleep? Whatever, it’s never 100%, and very rarely over 90, so 79% is pretty good.

In checking my sleep, I got distracted onto Twitter and came across this quote:

“You can’t say, I won’t write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.”

Dorothy C. Fontana.

Hmmm – that’ll be me, then. No surprises there. I retweeted it anyway.

Is there any other activity/artform where you create so much ‘stuff’ just to throw it all away again? Another tweet from the same person’s feed:

‘To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over….”

John Hersey.

That’s not quite what I meant – I was thinking not of the early drafts that become something in the end, but what I do: writing for its own sake that never does and never will go on to become ‘something’ – not about perfection, but just ‘splurging’.

Incidentally, after I’d written the word ‘stuff’, I tried to think of a better word for the products of ‘creative’ effort, and I thought of ‘material’ – which reminded me that my Mum – who was trained as a seamstress– used to sometimes call fabric/material ‘stuff’ – oh the wonders of language!

Where have I got to? Not very far is the answer, but then I very rarely do.

I wrote about Tara Brach a couple of days ago. One thing I struggle with in her teachings is the idea that to manage your emotions you need to identify where they manifest physically in your body and focus on that. But emotions occur in the brain, surely? I’ve had this problem with other meditation teachers – I once raised it with the leader of a meditation group and he was really dismissive: ‘oh, so you think it’s all in your head, do you?’ in a tone that implied I was being deliberately obtuse. But although there are conventional physical reactions to some emotions – mostly concerned with changing the heartbeat or breath – isn’t saying that love comes ‘from the heart’ metaphorical? To be continued (maybe).

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Control

I finished yesterday’s post with a rhetorical question – which I intended to continue today – I remember that, but I can’t remember what it was. Excuse me while I have a quick check…

…

‘Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many ideas about how my life should have been (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?’

Ah right, yes, that is what I was going to write about. It’s been in my head quite a lot and I thought I had an answer…

The main one, I think, is that that is the only one of the four which is still within my control. I could argue over whether any of them are realistically feasible, but I’m not going there today, beyond saying that all of them rely on huge amounts of luck, but also, more significantly, on other people – potential lovers, potential employers, potential clients. One thing I have learnt to accept in life is that any situation where I have to persuade or convince anyone else is stressful, unlikely to end well for me and hence best avoided.

But I can write. I can even ‘publish’ – even if it’s only posting these daily 500 word mini-essays about this, that and nothing in particular, it’s still publication in the sense of putting it into a public space where anyone with access to the internet can potentially read it. I can even go further, I can gather my words together and dump them into e-books, or have them printed into paperbacks which I can put on my shelves with my name on the spines. The technologies and processes are all at my fingertips.

A couple of years ago I met a life coach who suggested I visualise writing a best-seller, then plan the steps to get there. I don’t really know why I reacted the way I did, but I got very angry – she was trying to help me, but setting extremely unrealistic aspirations just seems frustrating and depressing, not motivating, as far as I’m concerned. I suppose it’s the tired old chestnut about the glass of water again – the significance of the gap seems overwhelming compared to that of the contents.

What I really long for is that buzz of excitement from creating a world in my head, finding out what’s going to happen next, bringing it all together. There really is nothing in the world quite like it – except the buzz of intellectual discovery, the moment when the ideas interconnect and click together and suddenly some small part of the world makes sense in a way it didn’t before – I’ve felt that too, but not for many years.

So, all I can do is to keep going, doing what I can, not being distracted by what I can’t. Letting go of expectations, and letting the words take control.