Category: life stories

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Dream Thingy

Where did that dream come from, of travelling alone across Europe and writing as I went? I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, pulling together many threads from different parts of my life, even back as far as my Dad’s wild ‘holiday’ ideas of semi-spontaneously piling us all into the car and driving off to some remote (for us) region, finding a bed-and-breakfast when we got there. And of course there’s that recurring leitmotif, of Running Away in search of an ill-defined ‘different life’.

After I left my husband in 2009, I had equally ill-defined hopes and expectations of finding a new job/career and becoming financially self-sufficient; starting a new relationship (either with a ‘soul-mate’, or perhaps a series of lovers who would all remain good friends until the inevitable time when the ‘soul-mate’ would enter my life); and, naturally, writing novels. Travelling was bound up in that, because it was only when I was travelling on my own (which I was doing increasingly from the mid to late 1990s onwards) that any of those things began to feel remotely possible. The irony that none of them have happened, despite my efforts to create the conditions in which they might, has dominated the decade just past.

In 2010-11, in between job-hunting, temping, and part-time admin jobs, I tried to start a business selling my graphic and web design skills to other small business owners. I soon found out I was just as incapable of attracting potential clients as potential employers or lovers, but I got involved in a small business networking circuit, through which I made some contacts and met some nice people (as well as picking up a habit of getting up early and going out for delicious but dangerously unhealthy breakfasts).

One of these nice people was a lady who described herself as a life coach, who asked me what my ‘dreams’ were, to which I answered that I didn’t have ‘dreams’ any more, because experience had taught me that dreams never turn out the way you think they will. This was slightly disingenuous, because despite everything, I still had those underlying dreams of getting a decent job, finding a lover, writing a novel etc but I sensed this wasn’t the kind of dreams she could help me with. So when she’d explained to me that I needed a dream, or dreams, that that was what my life was lacking and why I felt so aimless and lost, I blurted out that I wanted to travel across Europe and live by the sea – and maybe I mentioned writing, too.

The next stage was to construct one of those dream thingies, where you cut out images from magazines and what-not and stick them onto a big sheet of paper – except that this was 2011 and I did it virtually by finding images online and downloading them into a folder. I think I’ve probably still got that folder somewhere, might even be able to find it (or not).

PS I didn’t find it, but did find a random poem from around that time (or a bit later), which is equally appropriate today, although, bizarrely, it must have been written in Bedford (I seem to remember I was walking home from the swimming baths when it came to me):

A new day, and seagulls calling,
grey-white and lost against the clouds.
Water in air, mingling elements,
and I, pedestrian, earthbound.

Linda Rushby 9 November 2011
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Dreams and Achievements

In the process of digging out the poem I shared a couple of days ago (titled ‘I Had a Dream’ and posted when I was in Berlin in 2012, about my fears and dread of having to come back to England with nothing resolved and no plans for what to do next), I read the comments in response to it from other bloggers. This was one:

hmm, sounds a bit pessimistic. Maybe it depends on how well formed our dreams are when we go after them, how high our expectations are. If we do not know why we have the dream, then when we go after it we do not know what to do when we “achieve” it, and do we even recognise achievement?

no idea really, not sure I have consciously gone after a dream.

22 June 2012

I was irritated when I read it, thinking that the poster didn’t seem to have much empathy, and wondering what kind of life it is if you never ‘… consciously go after a dream…’ I probably felt much the same at the time, because I hadn’t bothered to reply. But reading it again now, what did she say?

  1. How well formed was my dream? To go travelling across Europe, overland (no flying), visiting various places, staying with friends in some of them and ‘…hopefully making new ones along the way…’ (which, not surprisingly, never happened).
  2. Why did I have the dream? A whole complex mess of reasons I suppose, but fundamentally because I was unhappy with the person I was and the life I was living, and thought that by this massive act of ‘running away’ I would ‘…turn my life around…’ – a phrase I initially included in the blurb to Single to Sirkeci but later removed because it didn’t work out the way I hoped. And what way was that? By finding a new man, or a new place, or a new purpose in my life.
  3. Did I know what to do when I’d ‘achieved’ it? No
  4. Did I even recognise it as an achievement? No.

So, it pains me to admit it, but I can’t really argue with the things she said. I couldn’t explain why I had that particular dream; initially it wasn’t very ‘well formed’, although it became clearer once I’d started to ‘make it real’; I didn’t know what I’d achieved or what to do afterwards – although the same person later gave me a great phrase when I was closer to returning, and she said I would be ready to ‘…hit the ground running…’ and my reaction was ‘…or like a lead balloon…’ so that ‘Hitting the Ground’ became a title for the blog I wrote after my return.

But I did enjoy the experience – sometimes. And I did write the book – eventually (but only published the first part). Travelling and writing about it – or staying in the same place and writing about it. That’s what I’m still doing.

And hoping. That’s what’s important.

PS The featured image is a screenshot of what came up on Firefox when I opened it to post this. I recognised it instantly, because I’ve been there and taken multiple versions of the same view: it’s the Old Bridge (Stari Most) in Mostar, Bosnia/Herzegovina, which I would never have visited if I hadn’t followed my ‘dream’.

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Process and Outcome (and losing a poem)

It’s a cliché to say that the quest is more important than the prize, the journey matters more than the destination. This is the meaning of the story of the Crescent Moon Bear, (retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estés), with the added subtlety that it is the hardships the protagonist experiences through the journey that give her the skills she needs to keep going and deal with her challenges (which are still there when she returns home).

In the process of trying to re-evaluate my life in order to better understand who I am and how I got here, this strikes a chord. There were things I was going to say. But earlier I remembered a poem that I thought I would dig out and now I can’t find it. This is the second time this has happened to me in the last few months and it is worrying. I have so many poems and they can be anywhere – well, I think there are a certain number of places where I would have saved them, but I’ve looked in all those and still no luck. Emily Dickinson wrote hers on paper, and shoved them in a drawer where her sister found them after she’d gone, but who’s going to bother trawling through my computer for mine?

I’ve gone through my assorted ‘poetry’ or ‘poems’ folders, but no sign of it – I can’t remember a title for it, which doesn’t help. I remember that I wrote it in my flat on Beach Road, which narrows the date down to between May 2015 and October 2016. And there’s no 2016 sub-folder in my Blog folder on Google Drive, so does that mean I didn’t write any blog posts in 2016? Of course, I would have been using my old laptop then, so it could be on there. But it was unfinished at the time, and then I’m sure I’ve gone back to it in the last couple of years and tweaked the last bit, so that implies it would be somewhere I’ve accessed more recently.

Well that’s blown out of my mind what I wanted to say. Process and outcome. My PhD is a classic example of a hugely significant process with an outcome that no one was interested in – not only if we assume that the ‘outcome’ was the thesis, but if we take ‘an academic career’ as the outcome I was striving for – well, that never happened either. I used to say that the process of doing a PhD is like having your brain extracted, tied in knots, and put back again so you can never see things in the same way ever again. Maybe that was just my experience.

If I think back to the time before, from the point when one of my OU tutors asked whether I’d ever considered a career in research, my aim was always to ‘do’ a PhD, rather than to ‘have’ a PhD – which reminds me of another poem, which hopefully I can locate…

I had a dream.
And then what?
I made it real.
And then what?
Dreams in daylight
turn to dust.
And then what?
How long does it take
to make a new dream?
And then what?

Linda Rushby 22 June 2012
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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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Foundation and Pandemic

No dreams to report today.

I have to go out today and tomorrow: this morning, to take Miko to the vet’s for a checkup and blood test to monitor how she’s getting on; and tomorrow I’m going for a mammogram at the hospital. I don’t mind too much – we are both getting older and creaky, and it’s good to know someone is looking out for our health. Miko is less than thrilled, as she can’t have breakfast because of the blood test – I wish I’d got an earlier appointment than 10:30, I didn’t think about it till it was too late to change – must remember next time. The vet is checking her quarterly at the moment, though it seems to have gone fast since the last time.

Yesterday I started talking about fate. My yoga teacher once said that Destiny is what is supposed to happen and Fate is what happens due to our actions, which sounds as though it makes sense, but doesn’t really when you start to think about it. Is Destiny what’s going to happen, or isn’t it? If it can be changed, by individual actions or collective, then in what sense was it ‘predestined’? I’ve been described by people as a ‘gloom and doomer’, particularly with regard to climate change, but I’ve never claimed that it was inevitable, just that trends in the scientific understanding and a knowledge of human behaviour have made it increasingly so over the three (nearly four) decades I’ve been observing it.

When I was an undergraduate, almost half a century ago, I read the ‘Foundation’ trilogy by Isaac Asimov, in which an interplanetary federation developed computer systems powerful enough to model all physical, social and economic trends and predict the future of the galaxy. In the story, the ability to plan for and control the threads of destiny was disrupted, initially by a mutant human who developed psychic abilities and took over supreme power, and although he eventually got his comeuppance (I forget how), events were never returned to their original trajectories. Since then, a lifetime of experience and observation has convinced me that it doesn’t take a mutant dictator to throw Destiny into confusion, just the usual work-in-progress of individuals and groups interacting and living and doing what people do without understanding, or caring about, the outcomes of their collective actions – all conspiracies collapse under the weight of sheer unadulterated human cock-up.

For years, scientists have been warning that we were overdue for a global pandemic – it could have been ebola, it could have been SARS, or bird flu, or swine flu – it wasn’t any of those, but the stories popped up every couple of years in the news, and were forgotten by most members of the public, (apart from geeky doomer-types still harbouring the soul of an over-excitable 18 year old statistics student). Medical and population trends continued to predict it was bound to happen – sooner or later.

Welcome to sooner – and funnily enough, no-one was prepared for it.

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Trains of Thought

This morning I have quite a vivid memory of dreaming, which is awkward because I already had an idea of what I wanted to write about, which I’ll have to try and retain for another time.

I was at Bedford station, waiting for a train to London, only it wasn’t exactly the Bedford station I know, because it was much bigger, and a lot of renovation and construction was going on, in particular there was a large restaurant/lounge, as opposed to the ATM kiosk where I used to grab a Café Maya or chai latte in passing, or the Starbucks which is now in the place of the old newsagent. I had a special ticket which entitled me to a free drink and cake in the restaurant, but I realised I hadn’t got my rail card, and wondered if I should go ‘home’ (my old flat was only 15 minutes walk away) to get it. I got talking to an old friend, then I realised it was getting late, and I didn’t know what I was going to do in London, or whether I’d have time to do whatever it was, and if there was even any point in going anyway.

Running out of time requires no deep explanation, and train journeys are also very familiar. I always associate them with running away, and when the Eurostar terminal moved to St Pancras, I was very excited about the fact that I could go from Bedford to Brussels or Paris with only one change of train – and from there, of course, all the way to Istanbul or anywhere in Europe or Asia. At the station in Sofia, waiting on a very wet day (kind of like today) I saw on the timetable, and heard on the announcements, that there was a direct train to St Petersburg, and checking the ferry timetables in Istanbul, I discovered I could get one to Odessa (but not to Constanta in Romania, which is what I was hoping for).

But the thoughts I had yesterday, after I’d finished writing, were about fate, and destiny, and Taoism, and can I remember what that was, am I fated never to get to the end of that thought, or even to the point? I believed in fate when I was young, I remember a conversation in which I said this, and someone said: ‘I don’t because I could never have predicted that I’d end up doing this’. But that was the exact point that made me believe, because of the small chances that can have such a strong impact on life. However, I didn’t know how to explain myself, and since then I have come to believe the opposite, that fate and destiny are illusions, things aren’t set in stone, because we can never know what the alternative choices would have led to. Even if we can untangle all the chances, choices, causes and effects that led to a specific event, we still can’t say ‘this had to happen’.

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Fail Better

Dropping the bucket down in to the well and seeing what comes up, as I do most days, a bit of this, some of that, maybe the odd scrap of inspiration, quite a lot of repetition. My online avatar, theoretically accessible to thousands, in practice viewed by very few – is it, as online personas supposedly are, pure fabrication, or is it truer to who I am than the perceptions of those who think they know me in Real Life? I show and tell so much on here that I would struggle to explain face to face, but realised many years ago that this is a safe space where few venture to look.

In trying to look at myself and my life with attention but without judgement, in trying to discover and welcome my Wild Thing, I look back over all the times I have run away, and the people, situations and commitments I have run away from. According to Clarissa Pinkola Estés, there is not one single descent into the underworld, the wild forests of the psyche, one lesson to be uncovered, learnt and brought to light, but layers beneath layers.

From all my runnings away, I have never returned voluntarily. Although once or twice it might seem that I chose to turn back (thinking specifically of returning from the USA to the house my husband and I had left four years earlier), the situation I returned to was always different from the one I left (or at least, I was different – in that case, I was now a mother with two small children, and no longer a professional career woman) and in each case it was only a matter of time before I ran away again (except arguably the most recent, but of course it could still happen – only time will tell).

What am I trying to say? That reading Pinkola Estés’ book is leading me to reflect on all those times I have leapt into the unknown, the choices I made (which were largely my own, though some also involved my husband), and see them as… well, maybe answering the call of the Wild Woman?

Last week, I read a piece where she suggested drawing up a time-line of life-events and at the time I dismissed the idea, but then I wrote about my first running-away – in fact the first two – going away to university and then accepting the first (actually, the only) man who asked me to marry him.

I have a tendency to look back on my life as a string of failures: failed marriages, failed (or abandoned) careers, dreams that were fulfilled but then turned to dust and ashes. But perhaps there were lessons learnt, things gained which weren’t recognised because they weren’t what I thought I was looking for? Most of those runnings-away were thrilling, at least in the early days, even though I eventually came to the conclusion that wherever I went, I could never ‘run away from myself’.

Fail again. Fail better.

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Dreams and Explorations

I mentioned a few days ago that I haven’t been remembering my dreams. Yesterday I tried to remember as soon as I woke up, and retained a few things, which I didn’t write down and now they’ve gone, but today I did the same and am going to write what I can remember.

The main theme was that I was visiting an old, strange house, near the sea – not here, but somewhere with cliffs and a rough grey sea, a dangerous sea. The house appeared to belong to my ex husband (although part of it was rented out to some other people), slightly ironic because I was always the one who wanted to live near the sea, and he was never interested. Rough seas and old, strange houses have cropped up in my dreams from way, way back, though I can’t remember them ever occurring together before. Exploring an old house signifies exploring your own psyche, and I’ve certainly been doing a lot of that. I don’t know about rough seas, but I wasn’t on the sea or threatened by it, just watching it from the beach, and also from the house.

One specific incident in the dream that I remember was that I got stuck in an automatic door leaving a supermarket, and couldn’t move to go either in or out. I could see my ex, who was loading shopping into the back of a car in the car park, and I kept calling his name to get him to come and help me, but he couldn’t hear me because he was busy with the shopping. I don’t think you have to dig too deeply to find a message in that. Another man came up behind me from inside the shop and I suppose he freed me. Also, later I was in the house and washing up at the sink, when a strange man came up behind me, put his arms round me and kissed the back of my neck (or was it the side of my face?)

Thinking again about the stuck-in-the-door incident, I don’t actually remember the second man freeing me, just talking to me. So it could be that I managed to free myself – which would be a better reflection of what happened in my life.

Yesterday in my therapy session I read what I wrote on Wednesday about my childhood – though she’s heard the story before, of course. I’m still reading my way through ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’. She recommended it – two years ago, when I didn’t read it – because of the part about transitioning into the third stage of life, as the Crone or Wise Woman. But it’s leading me to re-evaluate the whole course of my life – which is why I wrote about my childhood expectations of what life as a woman would be like. Often I read things in it which bring me up short – about being lost, wandering, not knowing what you’re looking for – and finding a new self.

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The Way It Was Then

When I was very young, all I wanted to do when I grew up was to be a writer. However, if anyone asked me, I would say I wanted to work with animals (mainly because I’d rather spend my time with them than with other people). I never told anyone about the writing idea, because I knew that writers were very special and talented, and I was far too dull and not at all special, and besides, there was another girl in my class who wanted to be a writer, and she wasn’t the sort of girl I could ever compete with. Also I knew that the main goal of a girl’s life was supposed to be to find a man, get married and have children (although I never really liked children, didn’t even play with dolls), or, if she couldn’t find a man who was interested in her (which seemed the most likely scenario for me), she had to stay at home and look after her elderly parents, and most likely become a teacher (a horrifying prospect). At least marriage and children (if achievable) offered some likelihood of financial security and time to write (when the children started school).

Before you ask, no, this wasn’t the Victorian era, it was the 1960s, but when I looked at my mother, and my aunts, and the neighbours, and my teachers, there didn’t seem much evidence of women breaking free of those stereotypes. The pattern was: you worked until you were married (or, if hubby was particularly enlightened, till the babies came along), then you gave it up, and maybe when the children were older you got a part-time job in a shop, or the Birds Eye factory, or the biscuit factory, or cleaning offices, for ‘pin money’.

As I grew older, I discovered there was a route out of this: university. If I did well enough in my exams (which I would), I could leave home and go away to a place where there would be lots of young people, in a new, exciting town, probably in the sophisticated, even decadent, South, where no one knew me as the pathetic little nobody I truly was, and even I might stand a chance of finding a boyfriend (boys outnumbered girls three to one in universities at that time), and best of all, I could go with my parents’ blessing, and as long as I kept my nose clean in the holidays, they wouldn’t have a clue what I got up to, they might even be proud of me, and at the end of three years I could get married, and maybe a job, and never have to go back again.

Funnily enough, that is more or less how the plan worked out. I met someone in the second summer vacation, when I’d managed to wangle a job in Reading so that I didn’t have to go home, he asked me to marry him, I said yes, and that was that. Sort of.

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Lurve and Marriage

How could anyone in their right mind pretend to ‘like’ autumn? Who wants to be reminded of death, darkness, cold, and the knowledge that for the next half of the year that’s what’s to be expected?

Well, admittedly, death, darkness and cold are inevitable parts of life, and we all have to face up to them and accept that that’s how it is, but do we have to embrace them?

Try to believe that you’re not alone, thrown here by chance into this god-forsaken century on this god-forsaken planet. That there is goodness and beauty and hope in this life, sunshine and stories and singing and, in the foreseeable future, springtime again.

I’ve been reading about ‘love’ this morning, and suddenly all the bitterness and disappointment and despair that I have managed to rationalise away has come back in that old familiar rage of: ‘Why me? What’s so awful about me that I don’t deserve/am not capable of being loved?’

So I cry and shout and stop just short of smacking my head, then I will sit with it, face up to it, observe it for what it is, composed of chewing over old disappointments and rejections, sexual frustration and hopeless fantasies, envy and jealousy, shame and self-blame and simple loneliness. All this will pass just as winter will pass, or night. I will have breakfast and get involved with what needs to be done (back to the website) and remind myself of the many reasons why I prefer living alone.

After all, ‘romantic love’ is a social construct, composed of sex, companionship, physical affection (ie non-sexual touching), shared child-rearing, practical support, emotional support, interest in each other’s interests… I have found all of those in various relationships at one time or another, but never all of them rolled into one. I can see it might be unrealistic, to hope to find them all at once, but what is the minimum to settle for? Is it asking too much to hope for more than one or two at a time? By the end of my marriage, I would say that’s about what was left (companionship and practical support, and both of those were pretty lukewarm). For some couples, it seems there’s a fundamental loyalty that underpins all of those and keeps the relationship going when those other criteria have become irrelevant, something I’ve observed in my parents’ and siblings’ marriages, maybe it’s just inertia and lack of imagination, or maybe it’s True Love, who knows? (I wouldn’t, because I’ve never experienced it, and maybe that’s because I’ve never met ‘The Right One’, or more likely because of a fundamental flaw in my personality).

Well there you go, I’ve written and rationalised my way out of my rage again.

I heard the rain in the night, gently, the sort of rain that patters on the roof and makes you feel glad to be safe indoors. It’s been threatening for a couple of days, and now it’s here. Time to hunker down.