Whether or not I manage to complete NaNoWriMo, I tend to stay away from blogging in November. Either I'm too busy writing, or I can't get the novel to work and writing in general becomes imbued with pressure and guilt and worry. It's been the case for the last few years that I've written a lot less in Writing Month than any of the months surrounding it, and - spoiler - that was the case again this year.
I thought it would be different this time. I had pages full of characters, plot points, set pieces and stupid puns. If I got stuck on one thread, I had at least three others to dip into instead. I started November with more than enough prep notes to spin into 50,000 words, and yet what happened was exactly the same as last year - I wrote just enough words on the first two days, several thousand on day three, and then nothing. I panicked for the next two weeks, assuring myself it could still be done if I really applied myself, there are always those nutters who write the entire novel on the first day, I couldn't give up on it yet. But I did. At the end of the month I had about seven thousand words I don't care about and will probably never look at again in my life, and I have to wonder if maybe NaNoWriMo isn't the best way for me to get stuff done anymore. Maybe in my current state of creative block, setting myself ridiculous deadlines to finish whole novels isn't such a good idea. Maybe there's a better way to get fiction happening again.
This conversation keeps happening between my boyfriend and me:
HIM: You know, if every time you said "I might write about that" you actually wrote about it, you'd have quite a lot of stuff.
ME: But it would all be ridiculous.
HIM: What's your point?
It keeps crossing my mind that a definitive life change point like this would seem to present an opportunity for me to start carving out an identity as a Person Who Writes. I wouldn't expect it to pay any bills for some time, but when I think about what I really want to do with my life, it always comes back to that. I've imagined having all kinds of jobs, but if I think about any of them for more than a few seconds I find that I'm imagining writing about the job instead of doing it. Writing is my destiny, as my drunk father told me a few months ago over a bottle of Glenlivet, and perhaps I don't need to create the definitive example of my skills before I start sharing it with other people (that half dozen or so pages of Actually Really Good Writing I came up with six years ago has got a lot to answer for). There certainly seems to be a subset of people who are amused by hearing the nonsense I come up with, and that might be enough to start off with. When I can come up with a name for it, there will be yet another blog, probably not on Blogger, devoted to non-personal writing. It's time I stop hiding this part of myself in case it isn't good enough.
So now I've said it in public, I'm committed to it.
Sunday, 13 December 2015
Wednesday, 28 October 2015
phase one
Phase one of my PLAN has been completed. I quit my job.
I wrote at the beginning of the year that things needed to change. I think I had visions of myself calmly and confidently taking charge of everything, making difficult decisions in a cool, considered way, and leaving my problems further and further behind, despite the fact that I was obviously already getting ill. None of that happened, and instead I got the two things I didn't want - my health collapsing, and things with work reaching crisis point. It's been a lot to handle. But the main drive behind that post, and many posts before and since, was to not end the year still doing this shitty job I hate. Same destination, slightly unpleasant detour on the journey.
I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen next, but I'm convinced this is the right thing to do. It was never the ideal job for me, but once it had served its purpose of getting me out of my last job and into London, I never quite had the impetus to look for something else. It was stable, undemanding, vaguely unsatisfying. My motivation, when I had it, went to learning new things and acquiring myself a social life. But over the last couple of years, the rut became gradually less and less comfortable until it went entirely to shit earlier this year and made me very ill. I'm not leaving on quite the "goodbye everyone, I have to go and be a millionaire on the Cote d'Azure" note that my unrealistic brain liked to picture; I'm not even leaving because I found something better. But it's not about finding something better first. It's about this not being good enough. Life has taught me that lesson over and over again, and I really ought to start listening to it.
Things are going to be tough. I've been with the same company all my working life. I have no experience of job hunting or interviews or what people want you to say in a CV. I am really bad at not having any money. But I have to remind myself that I'm also really bad at not having my own space, but I managed to be homeless for two months. I beat myself up at the time for not doing enough, for being too fussy (I mean, come on, if you really wanted somewhere to live you would have taken the £160-a-week-plus-bills room in the drug den), and when I did find somewhere it wasn't exactly plain sailing, but I was right to go with my instinct. I'm still living with two of the girls I moved in with two years ago and it's the best living arrangement I've ever had.
Phase two is undefined. Phase three will be profit.
I wrote at the beginning of the year that things needed to change. I think I had visions of myself calmly and confidently taking charge of everything, making difficult decisions in a cool, considered way, and leaving my problems further and further behind, despite the fact that I was obviously already getting ill. None of that happened, and instead I got the two things I didn't want - my health collapsing, and things with work reaching crisis point. It's been a lot to handle. But the main drive behind that post, and many posts before and since, was to not end the year still doing this shitty job I hate. Same destination, slightly unpleasant detour on the journey.
I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen next, but I'm convinced this is the right thing to do. It was never the ideal job for me, but once it had served its purpose of getting me out of my last job and into London, I never quite had the impetus to look for something else. It was stable, undemanding, vaguely unsatisfying. My motivation, when I had it, went to learning new things and acquiring myself a social life. But over the last couple of years, the rut became gradually less and less comfortable until it went entirely to shit earlier this year and made me very ill. I'm not leaving on quite the "goodbye everyone, I have to go and be a millionaire on the Cote d'Azure" note that my unrealistic brain liked to picture; I'm not even leaving because I found something better. But it's not about finding something better first. It's about this not being good enough. Life has taught me that lesson over and over again, and I really ought to start listening to it.
Things are going to be tough. I've been with the same company all my working life. I have no experience of job hunting or interviews or what people want you to say in a CV. I am really bad at not having any money. But I have to remind myself that I'm also really bad at not having my own space, but I managed to be homeless for two months. I beat myself up at the time for not doing enough, for being too fussy (I mean, come on, if you really wanted somewhere to live you would have taken the £160-a-week-plus-bills room in the drug den), and when I did find somewhere it wasn't exactly plain sailing, but I was right to go with my instinct. I'm still living with two of the girls I moved in with two years ago and it's the best living arrangement I've ever had.
Phase two is undefined. Phase three will be profit.
Tuesday, 13 October 2015
things I've managed to do during this period of depression
Mostly kept to a vaguely diurnal schedule
Got up for a Tuesday morning appointment every week
Learnt how to make actually wearable clothes through a combination of classes, Youtube videos and repeatedly fucking things up
Gone on holiday, twice
Gone to all five parts of an enormous wedding and actually enjoyed myself
Spent quality time with the other people living in the same house as me
Started re-learning Italian and have (currently) a thirty-five day continuous streak going
Gone to at least half a dozen dance events
Taken photos
Seen some of the people I like whilst also not seeing the people I don't like
Responded to shitty behaviour of employer like an adult who knows what she's talking about
Written
Sorted out basic household stuff
Supported boyfriend also going through a difficult time
Supported friend going through a worse time than possibly everyone else I know put together, as much as she'd let me
Thrown out quite a lot of clutter
Come up with a PLAN to extricate myself from a crappy situation
Read two books and a play
Seen films, gone to the theatre, had cocktails, met new people, gone for dinners, been to birthday parties and generally had THINGS in my life
(I've written this out because I spend so much time wondering how I can fix everything that I forget what I've actually done. I keep thinking about the plans I skipped out on and comparing my social life to what it was a couple of years ago, glossing over all the stuff I actually have done and the fact that while things may have changed, that's not necessarily either my fault or a bad thing. Maybe things had to become uncomfortable in order to push me out of my shitty job, and maybe from a few steps back it's easier to see a group dynamic I don't really want to be a part of. If I've got any hope of getting better any time soon it won't be through obsessively trying to fix everything to be the way it used to be.)
Monday, 5 October 2015
books
Back when I was a baby Jen, I read anything and everything within my reach. Magazines, letters, cereal boxes, books far out of my age range on both sides. Six words or sixty thousand words, it didn't matter to me as long as I was reading something.
I read ALL of the books. I read four Little Women books, about twelve Anne of Green Gables books, a couple of Nancy Drews. I read three What Katy Did books and spent several years trying to find the other two, with no success. I read Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis, I read Enid Blyton (everything except the Famous Five, and I have no idea why that is), I read Roald Dahl, I read Judy Blume, and I read an embarrassing amount of Sweet Valley High because once I'd read one, I wanted to know everything that ever happened to them. It didn't matter that they weren't written very well; I could make them better with a little twist of the mind.
I read Kipling. I read the Bible (and was deeply uncomfortable with God from that point on). I attempted to read my mother's copy of The Hobbit but decided after twenty minutes of trying very hard that this clearly wasn't a book that was meant to be read. I read about the history, lifestyles and myths of the ancient Greeks in the library then came home and washed it down with something gleefully childish, full of rainbows and squirrels.
It used to be my second favourite thing in the world, just behind making up stories of my own. And yet I realised recently that I've barely read a book in years beyond constant revisiting of my worn out Pratchetts. There are maybe half a dozen novels in my room, more than one unread, and I haven't been at all moved to pick them up.
Occasionally a curiosity sparks in me and I do read something, but I can remember them all, well-spaced out in my mind. The first half of my life was a torrent of books, and in the 20 minutes I've been writing this I've remembered at least two dozen books I'd completely forgotten having read. The last few years, however, I can remember every book I read, and the sense of accomplishment when I finished each one. There. I read a book. An actual book. I got pickier, not wanting to read anything that might disappoint me. I loved reading mostly in theory, sure that there could be no greater feeling than reading that one life-altering book, but just as sure that book would not be out there for the finding. Then I got writer's block, and reading only served to remind me of what I couldn't do anymore. This isn't even very good, the book would say to me, and yet you can't do any better.
A few days ago it occurred to me that not reading anything was at the very least feeding into my still ongoing writer's block. My brain gets stuck on a very narrow, specific way of creating plot and characters and narrative, and I'm not feeding it anything to show a different way of doing things. I haven't been able to get past a couple of thousand words in my last two years of NaNoWriMo, and my lack of ability to get a story out is more painful than I'd like to admit. My PLAN commands me to produce a story this November. I won't be at work, and by then I'll have told them that I don't intend to come back. To end November with a long-overdue novel and an even longer-overdue P45 would be the best indicator of a new start that I could get.
With that in mind, I rediscovered Project Gutenberg and opened up Vanity Fair, based on having seen an off-hand mention of Becky Sharp on Twitter the day before. I started reading it on Friday evening and by Sunday night I was finished. This morning I read A Doll's House, which has been on my list for years. I'm hoping to have a novel open in a tab pretty much constantly all month, though as yet I have absolutely no idea what I'm hoping to read and am on the lookout for recommendations. Maybe if I can read, I can write again.
P.S. Project Gutenberg has the two books I searched for in vain as a child, so later on this month Baby Jen is getting a much-delayed treat.
I read ALL of the books. I read four Little Women books, about twelve Anne of Green Gables books, a couple of Nancy Drews. I read three What Katy Did books and spent several years trying to find the other two, with no success. I read Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis, I read Enid Blyton (everything except the Famous Five, and I have no idea why that is), I read Roald Dahl, I read Judy Blume, and I read an embarrassing amount of Sweet Valley High because once I'd read one, I wanted to know everything that ever happened to them. It didn't matter that they weren't written very well; I could make them better with a little twist of the mind.
I read Kipling. I read the Bible (and was deeply uncomfortable with God from that point on). I attempted to read my mother's copy of The Hobbit but decided after twenty minutes of trying very hard that this clearly wasn't a book that was meant to be read. I read about the history, lifestyles and myths of the ancient Greeks in the library then came home and washed it down with something gleefully childish, full of rainbows and squirrels.
It used to be my second favourite thing in the world, just behind making up stories of my own. And yet I realised recently that I've barely read a book in years beyond constant revisiting of my worn out Pratchetts. There are maybe half a dozen novels in my room, more than one unread, and I haven't been at all moved to pick them up.
Occasionally a curiosity sparks in me and I do read something, but I can remember them all, well-spaced out in my mind. The first half of my life was a torrent of books, and in the 20 minutes I've been writing this I've remembered at least two dozen books I'd completely forgotten having read. The last few years, however, I can remember every book I read, and the sense of accomplishment when I finished each one. There. I read a book. An actual book. I got pickier, not wanting to read anything that might disappoint me. I loved reading mostly in theory, sure that there could be no greater feeling than reading that one life-altering book, but just as sure that book would not be out there for the finding. Then I got writer's block, and reading only served to remind me of what I couldn't do anymore. This isn't even very good, the book would say to me, and yet you can't do any better.
A few days ago it occurred to me that not reading anything was at the very least feeding into my still ongoing writer's block. My brain gets stuck on a very narrow, specific way of creating plot and characters and narrative, and I'm not feeding it anything to show a different way of doing things. I haven't been able to get past a couple of thousand words in my last two years of NaNoWriMo, and my lack of ability to get a story out is more painful than I'd like to admit. My PLAN commands me to produce a story this November. I won't be at work, and by then I'll have told them that I don't intend to come back. To end November with a long-overdue novel and an even longer-overdue P45 would be the best indicator of a new start that I could get.
With that in mind, I rediscovered Project Gutenberg and opened up Vanity Fair, based on having seen an off-hand mention of Becky Sharp on Twitter the day before. I started reading it on Friday evening and by Sunday night I was finished. This morning I read A Doll's House, which has been on my list for years. I'm hoping to have a novel open in a tab pretty much constantly all month, though as yet I have absolutely no idea what I'm hoping to read and am on the lookout for recommendations. Maybe if I can read, I can write again.
P.S. Project Gutenberg has the two books I searched for in vain as a child, so later on this month Baby Jen is getting a much-delayed treat.
Thursday, 1 October 2015
drugs
Yesterday I saw a psychiatrist. I almost didn't see the psychiatrist, for a series of rather convoluted reasons involving being told the appointment would be cancelled, getting a reminder text the day before telling me I had an appointment with the "locum physiotherapist", me calling to cancel said physiotherapy appointment and them telling me there was no doctor by the name on the record working there anyway, then getting a phone call at quarter past ten from a psychiatrist wondering where I was.
ME: Oh, God, I'm sorry, they told me you were a locum physiotherapist and no doctor by that name was working there and the letter said they'd cancelled it and...
HIM: Hmm. Can you come in now?
(Apparently psychiatrists aren't really interested in reasons.)
He asked me questions about my symptoms and I cried, because that's what I do at the moment. He asked me questions to screen for other mental health problems and I had some little fights with myself.
HIM: Do you ever hear voices?
ME: No.
BRAIN: Do I count as a voice?
ME: No.
BRAIN: Are you sure?
ME: Yes.
BRAIN: Hey, I thought of a thing!
ME: Look, either help me interact with this human asking me deeply personal questions or shut up.
BRAIN: Fine, you're on your own. I'm going to watch him try to make facial expressions instead.
He was an interesting psychiatrist. He'd clearly heard of empathy, and had done a bit of training in it, but it wasn't a natural talent of his. He attempted a variety of faces, including "oh, that's awful", "I acknowledge and understand that this is upsetting for you", "oh, that's awful in a very different way", "hey, I worked out where you're from because you used the word 'gorge'" and "don't worry, everything will be alright", all of which he managed perfectly well with the bottom half of his face.
He wanted to talk about drugs. He wasn't sure that he believed my side effects, but was happy to try me with something fancier.
HIM: We keep this one up our sleeves for when the more common antidepressants don't work. The initial dose is 75mg...
ME: ...I was freaking out about going up to 30mg on the last one.
HIM: But we can go up to about 220.
ME: Oh, that's alright then. (?)
The thing is, I'm not really sure that I want drugs. Drugs have worked for me in the past when I've really wanted to be happy with the situation I'm in, and that's not the case right now. I'm not happy, and to kick my expectations and dreams far down enough to let me be happy in that dull-as-shit job with its complete lack of prospects, stimulation or genuine people would feel like failure, a commitment to mediocrity I'm not prepared to make. This isn't the place for me anymore, and I promised myself that this year would be the year I made difficult but correct decisions for my own happiness. It might come at the price of my financial security, but hey, I managed two months without a fucking home.
Right now I feel displaced, like an outsider. I don't feel I have anywhere that's mine. I used to feel that my job (admittedly, not this job) was mine, that I had an attachment to the company. I used to have two groups of dance people that I felt were mine, but now one of them has almost completely dispersed and the other has moved on without me, to a place of rehearsing and performing and teaching and competing which is almost the exact opposite of what I want but makes me feel sad and left out nonetheless. I went to a dance last week after several months of not, an event I went to almost every month for two years, full of people I know and some I love, and I felt less at home than I did the first time I walked into a social, when there was not one familiar face in the room. You can't fix that with drugs.
I haven't decided what to do yet. I'm wary of doing too much research into the drug itself because everything has all the side effects in the world, so I think it comes down to: am I willing to refuse a possible solution on the strength of a gut feeling?
Wednesday, 23 September 2015
one hundred
Hi there, and welcome to my 100th post! I feel like I should have prepared something, possibly the blog equivalent of slightly burned cake with sprinkles on it.
I'm not even sure how to start writing again. Over the last few months I've written and deleted the beginnings of about a dozen draft posts that I got a few sentences into and gave up on. As soon as I got to a point where I wasn't a hundred per cent sure what word would come next and I'd have to stop and make a choice, it was like someone chucked a black cloth over the birdcage of my brain (yeah, you hear that? You're a BIRDCAGE) and everything would just... stop working.
ME: It's OK, we can skip over that word and come back to it later.
BRAIN: No. Done now.
ME: But I want to write.
BRAIN: WE ARE DONE. Now are you going to back away from the blog or do I have to send in the Wave of Inexplicable Hopelessness?
ME: But...
BRAIN: UNLEASHING THE WAVE
ME: Everything is useless.
BRAIN: That's better.
I will get over this. But not the way my brain is telling I will; i.e. by staying completely silent until PERFECTION happens. It will happen by posting things like this, because I promised myself I would write and I have. It will happen by showing myself every day that, yes, I can write, and yes, I can share it. It will happen by looking back over several dozen entries and seeing my voice getting stronger, watching my writing come back to life. And where my writing goes, the rest of me will follow.
I'm not even sure how to start writing again. Over the last few months I've written and deleted the beginnings of about a dozen draft posts that I got a few sentences into and gave up on. As soon as I got to a point where I wasn't a hundred per cent sure what word would come next and I'd have to stop and make a choice, it was like someone chucked a black cloth over the birdcage of my brain (yeah, you hear that? You're a BIRDCAGE) and everything would just... stop working.
ME: It's OK, we can skip over that word and come back to it later.
BRAIN: No. Done now.
ME: But I want to write.
BRAIN: WE ARE DONE. Now are you going to back away from the blog or do I have to send in the Wave of Inexplicable Hopelessness?
ME: But...
BRAIN: UNLEASHING THE WAVE
ME: Everything is useless.
BRAIN: That's better.
I will get over this. But not the way my brain is telling I will; i.e. by staying completely silent until PERFECTION happens. It will happen by posting things like this, because I promised myself I would write and I have. It will happen by showing myself every day that, yes, I can write, and yes, I can share it. It will happen by looking back over several dozen entries and seeing my voice getting stronger, watching my writing come back to life. And where my writing goes, the rest of me will follow.
Tuesday, 22 September 2015
PLAN
So, this is what's been happening since the last time I wrote a proper post:
- I have been on long-term sick leave for four months
- I have tried three different types of anti-depressant, none of which have worked
- I have basically subsisted entirely on cereal, brownies and cheese
- I have cut out most of my regular activities because seeing people is terrifying
- I have, on occasion, refused to go down the stairs in my own house because of non-specific terror
- I have been completely unable to write because all the words look wrong
- I have got quite sick of all the above but not felt able to do anything about it
- I have not been having very much fun at all, really
However, over the last few days my brain has seized on to something it's calling my PLAN, very definitely in capital letters but also not standing for anything (Paving Laid for Achieving Newness? Preliminary Lists of Ambitious Notions? Pugs, Limes, Ardbeg, and Netflix? STOP IT JEN this is not a useful way to spend an afternoon). It's quite excited about it and I'm worried it will run out of steam before we get to the important bits. I'm trying to keep it going by eating actual food and not sleeping during the day and possibly coming into contact with other humans, i.e. the exact opposite of what I've been doing since May, because I really want PLAN to work and I want to have the wherewithal and motivation to make it happen.
Boiled down to its essence, PLAN is as follows:
This year: quit job.
Next year: get another.
PLAN is a bit scary. No, PLAN is a lot scary. I've written before about my fear of not being able to get another job, and I've been there for, frankly, years longer than I should have been because it was comfortable and I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted and the money was OK and who else would want you, anyway. But they're not compelling arguments anymore - it's no longer comfortable, sick pay isn't a thing forever. I'm still not sure exactly what I want, but my sights have shifted from "something better" to "something else".
The goal of PLAN is not to find the interesting, highly-paid, conveniently located, work-life balance respectful, wonderful people-filled Unicorn Career of my dreams. It's not even to find a great job, or a good job, or lots of new friends, or an incredible latent talent of some kind that I've managed not to discover up to this point. At its core, PLAN is to get me to a place where I'm comfortable existing in the world again; eating and sleeping on a normal schedule, doing things I enjoy, spending time with people I like, without panic and tension and fear invading it all and sucking all the fun out of life. I will possibly write a bit more about the fear thing, because I think I might make daily blogging a thing again for a while. Either that or I'll just write out a list of all the terrible "how fear feels" metaphors my brain comes up with while trying to write the first sentence.
My doctor's appointment is made. My social life has been scheduled for the rest of the month. All I have to do until October is eat, sleep, write, sew (oh yeah, I do that now) and remain calm in the face of other humans. Here goes.
- I have been on long-term sick leave for four months
- I have tried three different types of anti-depressant, none of which have worked
- I have basically subsisted entirely on cereal, brownies and cheese
- I have cut out most of my regular activities because seeing people is terrifying
- I have, on occasion, refused to go down the stairs in my own house because of non-specific terror
- I have been completely unable to write because all the words look wrong
- I have got quite sick of all the above but not felt able to do anything about it
- I have not been having very much fun at all, really
However, over the last few days my brain has seized on to something it's calling my PLAN, very definitely in capital letters but also not standing for anything (Paving Laid for Achieving Newness? Preliminary Lists of Ambitious Notions? Pugs, Limes, Ardbeg, and Netflix? STOP IT JEN this is not a useful way to spend an afternoon). It's quite excited about it and I'm worried it will run out of steam before we get to the important bits. I'm trying to keep it going by eating actual food and not sleeping during the day and possibly coming into contact with other humans, i.e. the exact opposite of what I've been doing since May, because I really want PLAN to work and I want to have the wherewithal and motivation to make it happen.
Boiled down to its essence, PLAN is as follows:
This year: quit job.
Next year: get another.
PLAN is a bit scary. No, PLAN is a lot scary. I've written before about my fear of not being able to get another job, and I've been there for, frankly, years longer than I should have been because it was comfortable and I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted and the money was OK and who else would want you, anyway. But they're not compelling arguments anymore - it's no longer comfortable, sick pay isn't a thing forever. I'm still not sure exactly what I want, but my sights have shifted from "something better" to "something else".
The goal of PLAN is not to find the interesting, highly-paid, conveniently located, work-life balance respectful, wonderful people-filled Unicorn Career of my dreams. It's not even to find a great job, or a good job, or lots of new friends, or an incredible latent talent of some kind that I've managed not to discover up to this point. At its core, PLAN is to get me to a place where I'm comfortable existing in the world again; eating and sleeping on a normal schedule, doing things I enjoy, spending time with people I like, without panic and tension and fear invading it all and sucking all the fun out of life. I will possibly write a bit more about the fear thing, because I think I might make daily blogging a thing again for a while. Either that or I'll just write out a list of all the terrible "how fear feels" metaphors my brain comes up with while trying to write the first sentence.
My doctor's appointment is made. My social life has been scheduled for the rest of the month. All I have to do until October is eat, sleep, write, sew (oh yeah, I do that now) and remain calm in the face of other humans. Here goes.
Friday, 11 September 2015
a short play
Cast
ME, a depressive
BRAIN, an asshole
[Bedroom, 9pm]
BRAIN: I'm tired.
ME: It's only nine.
BRAIN: I said, I'm TIRED.
ME: I'm not going to bed now.
BRAIN: I can't stay awake.
ME: Yeah, right up until I turn the light off, when you suddenly remember a graphic newspaper article from when I was twelve or that time someone shouted at me in the street or when you thought of some really creative ways for people I love to get hurt and for it to be my fault.
BRAIN: Well, we need to be prepared for all the ways people you love might get hurt and it might be your fault. Then it won't be a surprise.
[song interlude]
BRAIN: I'm TIRED.
ME: You've got to wait.
[Bedroom, 11.30pm]
ME: OK, this is more like bedtime. We can...
BRAIN: We should empty the washing machine.
ME: O...K...
BRAIN: It's important.
ME: Remember when you wouldn't let me do any washing for weeks because downstairs was too far away and I still had three pairs of clean pants?
BRAIN: IMPORTANT. WASHING MACHINE.
ME: Fine.
BRAIN: And hang it all up.
ME: Yes.
[washing machine is emptied, contents are hung on clothes horse]
BRAIN: While we're up, this room's a bit of a state.
ME: What, now?
BRAIN: NOW. It's a mess.
ME: Yes, it's a mess. It's always a mess. You look at it and you CAN'T and it's AWFUL and you have to lie down.
BRAIN: This sounds like excuse-making. You're always doing that.
ME: Alright, fine. I'll put a couple of things away.
[an hour later]
BRAIN: This cupboard needs reorganising.
ME: You have got to be kidding.
BRAIN: IMPORTANT. CUPBOARD.
ME: It's 12.30am and the cupboard is fine.
BRAIN: I'm on a roll. Stop complaining. You're always complaining about things that need to be done.
ME: Remember when you wouldn't let me eat because moving was too hard and you might accidentally see some other humans?
BRAIN: You're fine. Stop living in the past.
ME: Uh...
BRAIN: ORGANISE THIS CUPBOARD FULL OF FABRICS AT ONCE.
[organisation happens]
BRAIN: Now for writing.
ME: What?
BRAIN: You should write! You keep saying that!
ME: ...you haven't let me write for over three months.
BRAIN: So you'd better jump on it, hadn't you?
[writing]
ME: Does this mean you're going to let me dance again too?
BRAIN: Let's not go nuts.
ME: But...
BRAIN: I don't like moving. And there are people.
ME: I like people.
BRAIN: Yeah, but let's face it, you're no fun anymore.
ME: Whose fault is that?
BRAIN: This would be a lot easier if you just accept the fact that nobody cares if you're there or not and that moving around is rubbish.
ME: I'd rather not.
BRAIN: Maybe you should clean the carpet.
ME: Maybe you should shut up.
BRAIN: Maybe YOU should shut up. Ever think about that?
ME: Yes.
BRAIN: Good.
[writing finishes]
ME: Now is it bedtime?
BRAIN: You need to make a spreadsheet.
ME: A spreadsheet?
BRAIN: IMPORTANT.
ME: Can't we do that in the morning?
BRAIN: Well, sure, if that's a risk you want to take.
ME: Fine.
[The next morning, 10am]
ME: So, did you want to vacuum the carpet?
BRAIN: I'm TIRED. I was up LATE.
ME: Whose fault is that?
BRAIN: I can't do ANYTHING. Not one thing. Bring me the internet.
ME: But...
BRAIN: IMPORTANT. INTERNET.
ME: I remember when you used to be nice.
BRAIN: Stop living in the past and bring me the internet before I start imagining that you've been locked in a room with your ex for science and all you can do is scream obscenities at him because of all the things he did that I'm about to remind you of.
ME: Yes, yes, alright.
BRAIN: Youtube is soothing.
ME: The room is still kind of a mess.
BRAIN: You made me do THINGS. I'm not doing THINGS again for WEEKS. Remember when we stayed awake every night and watched five hundred videos of improv sketches in a row? Wasn't that great?
ME: It really wasn't.
BRAIN: Those were the days.
[Youtube]
ME: Can we go for a walk?
BRAIN: Ask me again in a week.
ME, a depressive
BRAIN, an asshole
[Bedroom, 9pm]
BRAIN: I'm tired.
ME: It's only nine.
BRAIN: I said, I'm TIRED.
ME: I'm not going to bed now.
BRAIN: I can't stay awake.
ME: Yeah, right up until I turn the light off, when you suddenly remember a graphic newspaper article from when I was twelve or that time someone shouted at me in the street or when you thought of some really creative ways for people I love to get hurt and for it to be my fault.
BRAIN: Well, we need to be prepared for all the ways people you love might get hurt and it might be your fault. Then it won't be a surprise.
[song interlude]
BRAIN: I'm TIRED.
ME: You've got to wait.
[Bedroom, 11.30pm]
ME: OK, this is more like bedtime. We can...
BRAIN: We should empty the washing machine.
ME: O...K...
BRAIN: It's important.
ME: Remember when you wouldn't let me do any washing for weeks because downstairs was too far away and I still had three pairs of clean pants?
BRAIN: IMPORTANT. WASHING MACHINE.
ME: Fine.
BRAIN: And hang it all up.
ME: Yes.
[washing machine is emptied, contents are hung on clothes horse]
BRAIN: While we're up, this room's a bit of a state.
ME: What, now?
BRAIN: NOW. It's a mess.
ME: Yes, it's a mess. It's always a mess. You look at it and you CAN'T and it's AWFUL and you have to lie down.
BRAIN: This sounds like excuse-making. You're always doing that.
ME: Alright, fine. I'll put a couple of things away.
[an hour later]
BRAIN: This cupboard needs reorganising.
ME: You have got to be kidding.
BRAIN: IMPORTANT. CUPBOARD.
ME: It's 12.30am and the cupboard is fine.
BRAIN: I'm on a roll. Stop complaining. You're always complaining about things that need to be done.
ME: Remember when you wouldn't let me eat because moving was too hard and you might accidentally see some other humans?
BRAIN: You're fine. Stop living in the past.
ME: Uh...
BRAIN: ORGANISE THIS CUPBOARD FULL OF FABRICS AT ONCE.
[organisation happens]
BRAIN: Now for writing.
ME: What?
BRAIN: You should write! You keep saying that!
ME: ...you haven't let me write for over three months.
BRAIN: So you'd better jump on it, hadn't you?
[writing]
ME: Does this mean you're going to let me dance again too?
BRAIN: Let's not go nuts.
ME: But...
BRAIN: I don't like moving. And there are people.
ME: I like people.
BRAIN: Yeah, but let's face it, you're no fun anymore.
ME: Whose fault is that?
BRAIN: This would be a lot easier if you just accept the fact that nobody cares if you're there or not and that moving around is rubbish.
ME: I'd rather not.
BRAIN: Maybe you should clean the carpet.
ME: Maybe you should shut up.
BRAIN: Maybe YOU should shut up. Ever think about that?
ME: Yes.
BRAIN: Good.
[writing finishes]
ME: Now is it bedtime?
BRAIN: You need to make a spreadsheet.
ME: A spreadsheet?
BRAIN: IMPORTANT.
ME: Can't we do that in the morning?
BRAIN: Well, sure, if that's a risk you want to take.
ME: Fine.
[The next morning, 10am]
ME: So, did you want to vacuum the carpet?
BRAIN: I'm TIRED. I was up LATE.
ME: Whose fault is that?
BRAIN: I can't do ANYTHING. Not one thing. Bring me the internet.
ME: But...
BRAIN: IMPORTANT. INTERNET.
ME: I remember when you used to be nice.
BRAIN: Stop living in the past and bring me the internet before I start imagining that you've been locked in a room with your ex for science and all you can do is scream obscenities at him because of all the things he did that I'm about to remind you of.
ME: Yes, yes, alright.
BRAIN: Youtube is soothing.
ME: The room is still kind of a mess.
BRAIN: You made me do THINGS. I'm not doing THINGS again for WEEKS. Remember when we stayed awake every night and watched five hundred videos of improv sketches in a row? Wasn't that great?
ME: It really wasn't.
BRAIN: Those were the days.
[Youtube]
ME: Can we go for a walk?
BRAIN: Ask me again in a week.
Friday, 29 May 2015
scenes from my father
This, as faithfully as I can transcribe it, is what just happened to me.
[I am visiting my parents. We are discussing railways]
Dad: But once it's up and running, people will start moving to Swindon because it's an easier commute to London.
Me: Nobody's going to move to Swindon, Dad.
Dad: You never know. It might undergo a revolution of sorts. If you think back to the mid-nineties when the White Stripes brought stripped-back garage rock into stadia...
[I completely lose it and spend the next five straight minutes laughing my head off]
Mum: There you go, she laughed more than I did!
Dad: I read that phrase in an article about two months ago and I thought it was wonderful. I thought, "I must remember that phrase and say it in front of Jen." I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget.
Me: [continues giggling helplessly]
Dad: I've been trying to work out how to drop it into conversation for the last two hours.
Mum: He's been quite excited about it. He practised on me.
Dad: I just went out to the kitchen to look up the phrase so I'd have it right. I've been wanting to say that in front of you for two months.
[He disappears out to the kitchen and returns with his phone, which has a note on it reading "Mid nineties White Stripes brought stripped back garage rock into stadia"]
Dad: See?
Me: Oh my God, you wrote it on your phone.
Dad: I didn't want to forget it. Such a wonderful phrase.
Me: You compared the White Stripes to Swindon.
Dad: [nods, very pleased with himself]
Me: Do you know who the White Stripes are?
Dad: No! Not a clue! I just thought it was a wonderful phrase.
Mum: Oh, come on. You know about Jack Stripe.
Me: Jack Stripe?
Mum: ...that was the wrong one, wasn't it.
[I collapse into giggles for another five minutes while Mum does an impression of Meg White on the drums.]
Dad: I'm so pleased about this.
Mum: You've made him very happy.
[I am visiting my parents. We are discussing railways]
Dad: But once it's up and running, people will start moving to Swindon because it's an easier commute to London.
Me: Nobody's going to move to Swindon, Dad.
Dad: You never know. It might undergo a revolution of sorts. If you think back to the mid-nineties when the White Stripes brought stripped-back garage rock into stadia...
[I completely lose it and spend the next five straight minutes laughing my head off]
Mum: There you go, she laughed more than I did!
Dad: I read that phrase in an article about two months ago and I thought it was wonderful. I thought, "I must remember that phrase and say it in front of Jen." I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget.
Me: [continues giggling helplessly]
Dad: I've been trying to work out how to drop it into conversation for the last two hours.
Mum: He's been quite excited about it. He practised on me.
Dad: I just went out to the kitchen to look up the phrase so I'd have it right. I've been wanting to say that in front of you for two months.
[He disappears out to the kitchen and returns with his phone, which has a note on it reading "Mid nineties White Stripes brought stripped back garage rock into stadia"]
Dad: See?
Me: Oh my God, you wrote it on your phone.
Dad: I didn't want to forget it. Such a wonderful phrase.
Me: You compared the White Stripes to Swindon.
Dad: [nods, very pleased with himself]
Me: Do you know who the White Stripes are?
Dad: No! Not a clue! I just thought it was a wonderful phrase.
Mum: Oh, come on. You know about Jack Stripe.
Me: Jack Stripe?
Mum: ...that was the wrong one, wasn't it.
[I collapse into giggles for another five minutes while Mum does an impression of Meg White on the drums.]
Dad: I'm so pleased about this.
Mum: You've made him very happy.
Sunday, 24 May 2015
help, or a difficult post
Every year since I was sixteen, I've made ten New Year's Resolutions. At the beginning of the year I write them down, and at the end of the year I go back and see how well I did. For over ten years I posted them in my OpenDiary - last year's resolutions with short commentary on how many I kept and what I did, and a fresh ten for the coming year. Now that OpenDiary has gone I put them all in a Word document, and it's a tradition so deeply ingrained in me that I forget it's actually a pretty weird thing to do.
For 2015, resolution number seven was "I will ask for help when I need it."
I thought this was a great resolution, and actually quite insightful in terms of things that would make a real difference to my life. I'm terrified of asking for help. I'm terrified that I'm being an imposition, or being annoying. If I can just learn to ask for help, I thought, I'll be less anxious, more secure, life will run that bit more smoothly, I can get things sorted as soon as I start to see a problem rather than letting it run itself up into a catastrophe. This is a Good Resolution.
It wasn't until Tuesday, when I found myself sobbing hysterically in my therapist's office for nearly an hour after the session was over that I realised there was a deeper layer to it. A conversation about my problems at work, my being completely taken aback by how upset I was about work, and the realisation that the session was nearly over and I was now going to have to walk my blotchy and red-faced self right into work were all feeding into each other and I just couldn't stop crying. My therapist, who had never seen me do this before, was rather concerned. I was struggling to speak, but between us we managed to establish that I did not feel up to going to work, but also had a meeting to take and didn't feel like I could call in sick. He suggested that obviously there was someone else who could take the meeting, it was no big deal at all, did I really think I'd be able to work in the state I was in? My brain acknowledged that this was not a question, this was therapist-speak for Holy shit, dude, GO HOME, and helpfully switched its narrative from you can't seriously be thinking about calling in sick because you're crying to now you have to call your manager and that's terrifying.
It sounds stupid to write down. The same brain that conjured up images of every single person in my office sitting around talking about how rubbish I was for calling in sick is now berating me for being so stupid as to be scared of that. But that's what happened, that's what I thought, and my upset got worse and worse until I was choking on my own tears. I knew what I needed; I needed him to make the phone call. You can't ask him that, said my brain, shocked. He's here to help you learn to deal with your own life by yourself. He's not going to enable your stupid behaviour by making the phone call for you. He thinks you should damn well be able to make it yourself. If he offers, fine, but you can't ask him for something so unreasonable.
He did, eventually, offer, and it was only when I heard him leave a voicemail that included the words "my professional opinion" that any part of me registered that this man was a mental health professional watching a patient have some kind of breakdown and of course he could make a phone call to my employer. It fought with the part still insisting that I was overreacting and/or deliberately and manipulatively trying to get out of work and not take responsibility for it. I went into work the next day, which was a very bad move, and the day after that I got an emergency doctor's appointment, a sick note, and some fancy new drugs.
This is not depression as I know it. Depression as I've experienced it in the past is a complete lack of motivation, days on end in bed, awake on the internet all night and asleep for most of the day, hoping to be able to stay asleep until the week, the month, the year is over. Depression is not speaking to people, depression is not being able to feed myself, depression is taking three or four days to force myself to leave the house. That's not what's happening now. Up until this week I was diligently going to work every day. I'm going out with friends, on courses, to dinners. I've almost completed my first self-made skirt. Yesterday I bought general housing supplies, ordered some chocolates for my mother, and went to a friend's party. That would have felt like a goddamn miracle to any previous incarnation of Depressed Jen. But my brain is being nasty to me, keeping me worried and scared and guilty and upset. I feel bad that I haven't cleaned the bathroom. I feel bad that I don't go home as often as my family would like. I feel bad that I left the party early last night even though the host told me she wanted me to stay. Everything makes me feel like a bad person, or a useless person.
I ended my worst period of depression by breaking up a relationship. That relationship took away the things that interested and excited me piece by piece, while keeping both eyes fixed on me to make sure I didn't find anything else to fill my mind. That relationship made time stretch out so far it exhausted me, but berated me for being so exhausted by doing nothing. That relationship told me I wasn't good enough, would never be good enough, that I was a pain nobody else would put up with. To this day, ending it has been the best thing I've ever done.
Now my relationship with my partner is healthy, encouraging and supportive, and he wants me to get better, which is so unfamiliar to me that it sometimes still confuses the fuck out of me after nearly a year together. But I see shades of that former boyfriend in the relationship I have with my job, and that's the one that needs to end. I've been aware of this for a little while, though not with quite so much urgency as this week, and I've mentioned it to people before. They say, "That's a great idea. Get a new job if you're not happy! It'll do you good to change things up a bit."
The thing is, I don't know how. Apart from Saturday work during my A levels, I've never worked for another company. I've been here seven years. I came in at the suggestion of a friend, doing admin grunt work, and through promotion and pay rises and moving to a different city, I'm up to twice my original salary (which still isn't a lot, mind you). I don't know how you get a job at this level or higher. Every job I've applied for has been on application form, so I've never needed a CV. I've never done an interview that wasn't civil service competency-based. I've been working my way into a company, not a profession, so I don't know what I want to do or what sort of thing I could reasonably expect to get. I don't know how the real world of job-hunting works. I need help, but I don't want to ask for it, for several reasons:
1. I don't really know what I'm asking for
2. I don't know what or how much is OK to ask for
3. Part of me is convinced that at age 30, this is not the kind of thing I should need help with
This last one is a real sticking point for me. 30-year-olds should know how to get jobs. The kind of 30-year-old who needs help getting a job is a really pathetic 30-year-old.
I'm not at my best right now. I'm sick, I'm exhausted, I'm upset, I'm taking a brand new anti-depressant, and I'm terrified of going back to work (also, terrified of getting fired and having no money and not being able to live in this city anymore). It's not unreasonable to think I would need help. And yet I judge myself, because asking for help is just an excuse to be lazy, or sure you can ask for help but you really shouldn't need this kind of help, or what the hell are people going to think of you asking for stupid things like that, or this is something you should be strong enough to do yourself. I give myself lists of things I've been able to do by myself as proof that my need for help isn't actually real.
I probably do need really stupid help. I probably need someone to sit and go through job websites with me. I need from-scratch CV help. I need people to tell me what I'm good at. Since I'm not only trying to do a thing I'm unfamiliar with but trying to do it when I'm not well, I probably need a lot more than that. I need people to understand I'm having a shitty time. I need hugs and stupid conversations and reassurance that the world won't end if I miss a few parties. I need to be occupied but not overwhelmed. I need to put my mental health first for a while, and I need to acknowledge what a bastard hard thing that is to do.
This was long, and sad, and tough to write. I judge myself for how depressing my blog is sometimes, and how it's not the fun storytime I started off with, but this is where I am right now. Stuff about sunshine and puffins, I hope, coming soon.
Wednesday, 20 May 2015
"Jenny"
This morning I got to work and ran straight to the loos to change out of the Tights That Like To Roll Down To Mid-Thigh (which keep managing to avoid purges, probably because they don’t have any holes in). When I came out of the cubicle, one of my co-workers was standing at the sink. She did what she always does – looked up briefly, registered that it was me, narrowed her eyes slightly, then pretended she hadn’t seen me at all and stalked out. She’s been doing this for years now, ever since this happened:
Three years ago
[I am walking from the photocopier back to my desk. I vaguely hear someone say ‘Jenny’ and assume they must be on the phone. As I sit down, co-worker approaches]
Co-worker: Jenny! I was calling you!
Me: Huh?
Co-worker: I was calling! Jenny!
Me: Oh, God, I’m sorry. I don’t answer to Jenny, I didn’t realise you were talking to me. What can I do for you?
Co-worker: [eyes narrow, voice turns to ice] Oh.
She asked me her question, I sent her the thing she was looking for, and we’ve had no interaction since. Beyond the very brief glares, she ignores me absolutely. In the early days I tried smiling at her, which she would respond to with a slightly longer glare, a small toss of the head and an offended sweep straight past me. I can find no other explanation for this other than that she was mortally insulted by my refusing to answer to ‘Jenny’.
I am not a Jenny. I’m just not. I’m no more a Jenny than I am a Susanne or a Patricia. Some Jennifers are Jenny and that’s great, but I’m not one of them. It sounds like a completely different name to me; like someone is trying to get my attention by yelling, “Hey! Desdemona!” It just isn’t my name. But because it’s a commonly accepted nickname, people use it. They know other Jennifers who go by Jenny, they personally prefer Jenny as a name, they thought they heard someone else call me that once, so they assume it's fine to call me that. It is NOT fine to call me that.
I started seriously objecting to Jenny when I was thirteen years old. It suddenly sounded weird and wrong and a bit like the addresser was mocking me. I didn’t take it up with the teachers, but all my friends were instructed, in the strongest possible terms, not to call me that anymore. Mostly it worked, eventually. Some of the schoolfriends I've stayed in touch with still do it occasionally.
Friend: You’re going to have to let us off calling you Jenny! We’ve known you too long, we can’t change now!
Me: We’ve known each other since we were eleven. I was alright with Jenny for two years and have been objecting to it for the seventeen years since. I think you’ve probably had enough time to get used to it.
Friend: Alright, alright. Jeez.
This is the worst thing. Worse than when the director of my dance school pulled me up on stage without warning and announced to several hundred people that I was the shyest person he’d ever taught (Why would anyone think this was a good idea? WHY would you do that, Scott? WHY?), and I didn’t realise he was calling me up for about three minutes because he was calling for “Jenny” and I had to spend the next three months retraining everyone not to call me that. Anyway. Worse than that. The worst thing is when people get annoyed or offended at being asked not to call me by a nickname I hate, or mock me for overreacting.
Acquaintance at party: Hi, Jenny!
Me: [having already drunk an entire bottle of wine] Argh, please don’t call me that. It’s Jen.
Acquaintance: Awww, but why? Jenny is lovely!
Me: Sure, but I don’t feel like it’s my name and I don’t like being called that.
Acquaintance: Awwwww.
Me: Please just call me Jen.
Acquaintance: [edging away from me and looking annoyed] OK.
Of course, the more this happens, the more it gets on my nerves. The more people imply I shouldn’t get upset about what they choose to call me, the more likely I am to go on a five-minute rant when I correct them. The more people I upset by correcting them on my name, the more likely I am to write long rambling blog posts about how My Name Is Not Jenny and Never Will Be, Stop Calling Me That and start plotting ways to surreptitiously circulate said angry blog post to the widest possible audience.
There is a special place in my heart for people who apologise and correct themselves when I ask them not to call me Jenny, people who correct others who call me Jenny, and people who say “I don’t know why anyone would call you that, you’re clearly not a Jenny.”
Boyfriend Back In Pre-Boyfriend Days: The funniest thing was, you didn’t even realise he was calling you for ages because he called you Jenny!
Me: I really, really hate being called Jenny.
Pre-Boyfriend Boyfriend: I was wondering for a minute whether to start calling you Jenny as a really annoying joke.
Me: I warn you, I have absolutely no sense of humour about this whatsoever.
Boyfriend Who Wasn’t My Boyfriend Yet: I can see that. I already decided it was a stupid idea. I don't think I even could call you Jenny, that just isn't who you are. You're Jen.
Me: [phew, and also yay]
A special place in Hell for people who correct me on my own name, and the most special place for this particular guy:
Nice Co-Worker: [introducing new employee round the office] And this is Jennifer.
New Guy: [to my co-worker] Jenny. [to me] Hi, Jenny.
Me: Jennifer. Hi.
New Guy: Nice to meet you, Jenny.
Message to that guy: I judged your entire worth as a human being based on this fifteen-second introduction, and I was right to do it.
Three years ago
[I am walking from the photocopier back to my desk. I vaguely hear someone say ‘Jenny’ and assume they must be on the phone. As I sit down, co-worker approaches]
Co-worker: Jenny! I was calling you!
Me: Huh?
Co-worker: I was calling! Jenny!
Me: Oh, God, I’m sorry. I don’t answer to Jenny, I didn’t realise you were talking to me. What can I do for you?
Co-worker: [eyes narrow, voice turns to ice] Oh.
She asked me her question, I sent her the thing she was looking for, and we’ve had no interaction since. Beyond the very brief glares, she ignores me absolutely. In the early days I tried smiling at her, which she would respond to with a slightly longer glare, a small toss of the head and an offended sweep straight past me. I can find no other explanation for this other than that she was mortally insulted by my refusing to answer to ‘Jenny’.
I am not a Jenny. I’m just not. I’m no more a Jenny than I am a Susanne or a Patricia. Some Jennifers are Jenny and that’s great, but I’m not one of them. It sounds like a completely different name to me; like someone is trying to get my attention by yelling, “Hey! Desdemona!” It just isn’t my name. But because it’s a commonly accepted nickname, people use it. They know other Jennifers who go by Jenny, they personally prefer Jenny as a name, they thought they heard someone else call me that once, so they assume it's fine to call me that. It is NOT fine to call me that.
I started seriously objecting to Jenny when I was thirteen years old. It suddenly sounded weird and wrong and a bit like the addresser was mocking me. I didn’t take it up with the teachers, but all my friends were instructed, in the strongest possible terms, not to call me that anymore. Mostly it worked, eventually. Some of the schoolfriends I've stayed in touch with still do it occasionally.
Friend: You’re going to have to let us off calling you Jenny! We’ve known you too long, we can’t change now!
Me: We’ve known each other since we were eleven. I was alright with Jenny for two years and have been objecting to it for the seventeen years since. I think you’ve probably had enough time to get used to it.
Friend: Alright, alright. Jeez.
This is the worst thing. Worse than when the director of my dance school pulled me up on stage without warning and announced to several hundred people that I was the shyest person he’d ever taught (Why would anyone think this was a good idea? WHY would you do that, Scott? WHY?), and I didn’t realise he was calling me up for about three minutes because he was calling for “Jenny” and I had to spend the next three months retraining everyone not to call me that. Anyway. Worse than that. The worst thing is when people get annoyed or offended at being asked not to call me by a nickname I hate, or mock me for overreacting.
Acquaintance at party: Hi, Jenny!
Me: [having already drunk an entire bottle of wine] Argh, please don’t call me that. It’s Jen.
Acquaintance: Awww, but why? Jenny is lovely!
Me: Sure, but I don’t feel like it’s my name and I don’t like being called that.
Acquaintance: Awwwww.
Me: Please just call me Jen.
Acquaintance: [edging away from me and looking annoyed] OK.
Of course, the more this happens, the more it gets on my nerves. The more people imply I shouldn’t get upset about what they choose to call me, the more likely I am to go on a five-minute rant when I correct them. The more people I upset by correcting them on my name, the more likely I am to write long rambling blog posts about how My Name Is Not Jenny and Never Will Be, Stop Calling Me That and start plotting ways to surreptitiously circulate said angry blog post to the widest possible audience.
There is a special place in my heart for people who apologise and correct themselves when I ask them not to call me Jenny, people who correct others who call me Jenny, and people who say “I don’t know why anyone would call you that, you’re clearly not a Jenny.”
Boyfriend Back In Pre-Boyfriend Days: The funniest thing was, you didn’t even realise he was calling you for ages because he called you Jenny!
Me: I really, really hate being called Jenny.
Pre-Boyfriend Boyfriend: I was wondering for a minute whether to start calling you Jenny as a really annoying joke.
Me: I warn you, I have absolutely no sense of humour about this whatsoever.
Boyfriend Who Wasn’t My Boyfriend Yet: I can see that. I already decided it was a stupid idea. I don't think I even could call you Jenny, that just isn't who you are. You're Jen.
Me: [phew, and also yay]
A special place in Hell for people who correct me on my own name, and the most special place for this particular guy:
Nice Co-Worker: [introducing new employee round the office] And this is Jennifer.
New Guy: [to my co-worker] Jenny. [to me] Hi, Jenny.
Me: Jennifer. Hi.
New Guy: Nice to meet you, Jenny.
Message to that guy: I judged your entire worth as a human being based on this fifteen-second introduction, and I was right to do it.
Saturday, 16 May 2015
fringe
I would like the record to reflect the following:
This morning I cut my own fringe, and the result was not disastrous.
The reason for my cutting my own fringe was a gradually but noticeably mounting hate for my hair combined with lack of resources or motivation to go and get it professionally cut. Obviously poor reasoning and decision-making, and yet somehow, disaster did not befall me.
I had an engagement tonight that I couldn't get out of with an "I've fucked up my hair" excuse, which normally would guarantee that I would a) fuck up my hair and b) be in a ton of photos with fucked-up hair, but neither of these things happened.
I have never attempted to cut my own fringe before in my life, and I'm not sure I've ever managed to get something right the first time before, and yet my fringe looks like a fringe that might reasonably be expected to sit on the forehead of a normal person.
When I went out tonight, I got multiple compliments on my excellent new fringe before I informed anyone I'd cut it myself.
Practical tests have since revealed that, despite what my brain immediately thought, the sudden discovery of a fringe-cutting talent has not made me any better at sewing in zips. I'm not sure why that is.
Wednesday, 13 May 2015
things my teenage self somehow got away with at school
[I didn't realise there was quite as much as this when I started, and it makes me look like kind of an awful person. I would like to point out that I was quiet and smart and did fairly well at things and didn't start trouble, and also that I was undergoing some serious emotional upheaval, and also that there are just some things about me that are awful. Sorry]
Claiming my little brother had mistaken my history project for scrap paper and scribbled all over it, getting lots of sympathy and an excuse to miss the deadline, then never bothering to actually do the project at all
Spending about 20% of classes hurriedly doing the homework for my next class
Skipping out on mandatory school lunches every day for a year by hiding really ineffectually in a classroom, and only getting caught once
Being breathtakingly rude to my RE teacher (who, to be fair, was a bit creepy and seemed to like it)
Going to classes for an optional extra GCSE for a year, not even pretending to be working on a project, then going up to the teacher two weeks before the deadline and telling her I was dropping out because it was all too much for me
Bringing obviously inappropriate reading material into school all the time
Answering the phone and pretending to be my mother when my physics teacher called to complain about my lack of interest in homework. He didn't twig and spent the next few weeks smirking smugly at me, possibly imagining the dressing down I must have received
Wearing extremely non-regulation bright purple tights
Telling my tutor I had a nonspecific appointment (that I would definitely provide a note for at some stage, honest) in order to go shopping with my cousin all afternoon
Convincing an absent-minded teacher that he must have lost my homework
Keeping a copy of a "please excuse Jennifer from PE" note in my schoolbag, which I would periodically trace onto a fresh piece of paper and hand in when I didn't feel like doing PE that day
Once I got to sixth form and didn't have to wear uniform anymore, wearing a T-shirt with quite prominent swear words
Accidentally wearing said T-shirt on the first day of Prospective Students week when we were all supposed to wear suits and somehow not getting spoken to by anyone about it
Being accused of doing a thing I definitely did by a teacher who presented me with hard evidence that I'd done it, but by refusing to acknowledge what she was saying and just repeating "I wouldn't do that" over and over, getting her to walk away saying "well, I should hope not" and never speak of the incident again. I still can't believe that one worked.
Claiming my little brother had mistaken my history project for scrap paper and scribbled all over it, getting lots of sympathy and an excuse to miss the deadline, then never bothering to actually do the project at all
Spending about 20% of classes hurriedly doing the homework for my next class
Skipping out on mandatory school lunches every day for a year by hiding really ineffectually in a classroom, and only getting caught once
Being breathtakingly rude to my RE teacher (who, to be fair, was a bit creepy and seemed to like it)
Going to classes for an optional extra GCSE for a year, not even pretending to be working on a project, then going up to the teacher two weeks before the deadline and telling her I was dropping out because it was all too much for me
Bringing obviously inappropriate reading material into school all the time
Answering the phone and pretending to be my mother when my physics teacher called to complain about my lack of interest in homework. He didn't twig and spent the next few weeks smirking smugly at me, possibly imagining the dressing down I must have received
Wearing extremely non-regulation bright purple tights
Telling my tutor I had a nonspecific appointment (that I would definitely provide a note for at some stage, honest) in order to go shopping with my cousin all afternoon
Convincing an absent-minded teacher that he must have lost my homework
Keeping a copy of a "please excuse Jennifer from PE" note in my schoolbag, which I would periodically trace onto a fresh piece of paper and hand in when I didn't feel like doing PE that day
Once I got to sixth form and didn't have to wear uniform anymore, wearing a T-shirt with quite prominent swear words
Accidentally wearing said T-shirt on the first day of Prospective Students week when we were all supposed to wear suits and somehow not getting spoken to by anyone about it
Being accused of doing a thing I definitely did by a teacher who presented me with hard evidence that I'd done it, but by refusing to acknowledge what she was saying and just repeating "I wouldn't do that" over and over, getting her to walk away saying "well, I should hope not" and never speak of the incident again. I still can't believe that one worked.
Tuesday, 12 May 2015
the critical voice, part three
This morning I sat down opposite my therapist and said, “How do I stop trying to fix things?”
“What things are you trying to fix?” he asked, in his quiet Irish therapist voice.
“ALL the things,” I said. “Literally everything that crosses my mind; personal, local, global, minor, major, implausible, imaginary. Anything that’s a problem, I want to fix immediately, and my brain gets very upset with me if I can’t.”
He wanted examples. Therapists like examples.
I told him I was upset with the election result and worried about what might happen under a majority Conservative government. I was worried about the NHS, about my friends on disability benefits, and especially about the Human Rights Act. My brain responded to these entirely rational concerns with how can we fix this? I told it that I was in no position to personally fix it. I could not convince the Conservative party that they held horrible, damaging views, nor change the views of an increasingly right-wing nation, nor completely overhaul the political system to fairer and more compassionate ends. I could, of course, sign petitions and attend protests and, if I wanted to screw up my mental health entirely, return to political blogging. But this wasn’t what my brain wanted. My brain wanted me to fix it, personally. If not entirely by myself, then at least as the Leader of People Fixing Things. And it wanted results immediately, before the Tories actually managed to do any damage.
I told my brain that, see, this was exactly what I’d been telling it. It had proved that its expectations of me were way, way too high and completely unrealistic. Personally fixing the politics of an entire country? That’s ridiculous, brain. Surely you can see that. My brain sighed and said that’s a lame excuse and you know it. Everyone is sitting around like you, saying they can’t do anything, and that’s why it never gets done. Overhauling a country probably isn’t that hard if you know the right things to say. I asked my brain if it remembered what attempting to get involved in activism did to the state of my mental health last time. My brain said I can’t imagine why you’d think your personal mental health is so much more important than the fate of an entire country.
My therapist handed me a sheet entitled “Unhelpful Thinking Patterns” that he thought I might recognise some of. My brain scanned it and immediately scolded me for being so rubbish as to have all of them. I suggested that perhaps this might be its own fault, and it pointed at the sheet and said see that bit about shifting blame for things that are your fault?
I explained that for about six months now I’d been identifying problems in my life and trying to come up with ways to fix them. I’d come up with genuine problems, identify good and sensible ways to start turning things around, and then my brain would be pleased and start imagining wildly unrealistic consequences to my tiny starter actions.
PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Unhappy with weight gain
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Feel sad and gross all the time
SOLUTION: Start small by replacing chocolate with fruit at lunchtime
EXPECTED RESULT: Somehow lose half a stone in a week; happiness to follow immediately thereafter
PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Job dissatisfaction
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Boredom, more unoccupied time to exacerbate anxiety problems
SOLUTION: Begin thinking about different career fields
EXPECTED RESULT: Get ideal job immediately by stumbling over it in the street or some such, all problems suddenly fixed
If the expected unrealistic consequence was not instantly achieved, my brain got upset and discouraged and gave me unpleasant thoughts. It got to the point where this happened:
PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Trying to fix everything
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Frustration, exhaustion, reduced ability to actually do anything
SOLUTION: Stop trying to fix things
EXPECTED RESULT: Attempting to fix things turns out to be root cause of all problems; everything stops being difficult within the next three days
When I told him the last one my therapist did that very, very slightly surprised face that therapists who think they know what’s coming make when they hear something they really weren’t expecting. I’ve seen him do it once before, when we did an instant visualisation exercise:
Therapist: What did you see when I said ‘Roses’?
Me: I saw an illustrated rose garden in the style of an Alice in Wonderland book I used to have, except instead of actual roses it was my friend Rose, hundreds of her, on stems.
Therapist: ...you have a busy mind.
He might not have heard, “Hey, I could stop trying to fix things! That’ll fix things!” before, but he assured me that the urge to fix things was common, as was having a critical voice with completely unrealistic expectations. Be kind to yourself, he said. The primitive part of your brain sends up a fear signal, then your conscious mind starts working overtime to make it stop. It’s completely normal human behaviour. But we can work on it.
Good, I thought.
PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Completely unrealistic expectations
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Small achievements overlooked, progress stalled
SOLUTION: Place some distance in front of the thought that throws up the problem, say thank you and tell it you’ll get back to it later, this is not the time to be crafting solutions
EXPECTED RESULT: Perfectly calm and ordered brain within the hour
ARGH.
“What things are you trying to fix?” he asked, in his quiet Irish therapist voice.
“ALL the things,” I said. “Literally everything that crosses my mind; personal, local, global, minor, major, implausible, imaginary. Anything that’s a problem, I want to fix immediately, and my brain gets very upset with me if I can’t.”
He wanted examples. Therapists like examples.
I told him I was upset with the election result and worried about what might happen under a majority Conservative government. I was worried about the NHS, about my friends on disability benefits, and especially about the Human Rights Act. My brain responded to these entirely rational concerns with how can we fix this? I told it that I was in no position to personally fix it. I could not convince the Conservative party that they held horrible, damaging views, nor change the views of an increasingly right-wing nation, nor completely overhaul the political system to fairer and more compassionate ends. I could, of course, sign petitions and attend protests and, if I wanted to screw up my mental health entirely, return to political blogging. But this wasn’t what my brain wanted. My brain wanted me to fix it, personally. If not entirely by myself, then at least as the Leader of People Fixing Things. And it wanted results immediately, before the Tories actually managed to do any damage.
I told my brain that, see, this was exactly what I’d been telling it. It had proved that its expectations of me were way, way too high and completely unrealistic. Personally fixing the politics of an entire country? That’s ridiculous, brain. Surely you can see that. My brain sighed and said that’s a lame excuse and you know it. Everyone is sitting around like you, saying they can’t do anything, and that’s why it never gets done. Overhauling a country probably isn’t that hard if you know the right things to say. I asked my brain if it remembered what attempting to get involved in activism did to the state of my mental health last time. My brain said I can’t imagine why you’d think your personal mental health is so much more important than the fate of an entire country.
My therapist handed me a sheet entitled “Unhelpful Thinking Patterns” that he thought I might recognise some of. My brain scanned it and immediately scolded me for being so rubbish as to have all of them. I suggested that perhaps this might be its own fault, and it pointed at the sheet and said see that bit about shifting blame for things that are your fault?
I explained that for about six months now I’d been identifying problems in my life and trying to come up with ways to fix them. I’d come up with genuine problems, identify good and sensible ways to start turning things around, and then my brain would be pleased and start imagining wildly unrealistic consequences to my tiny starter actions.
PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Unhappy with weight gain
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Feel sad and gross all the time
SOLUTION: Start small by replacing chocolate with fruit at lunchtime
EXPECTED RESULT: Somehow lose half a stone in a week; happiness to follow immediately thereafter
PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Job dissatisfaction
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Boredom, more unoccupied time to exacerbate anxiety problems
SOLUTION: Begin thinking about different career fields
EXPECTED RESULT: Get ideal job immediately by stumbling over it in the street or some such, all problems suddenly fixed
If the expected unrealistic consequence was not instantly achieved, my brain got upset and discouraged and gave me unpleasant thoughts. It got to the point where this happened:
PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Trying to fix everything
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Frustration, exhaustion, reduced ability to actually do anything
SOLUTION: Stop trying to fix things
EXPECTED RESULT: Attempting to fix things turns out to be root cause of all problems; everything stops being difficult within the next three days
When I told him the last one my therapist did that very, very slightly surprised face that therapists who think they know what’s coming make when they hear something they really weren’t expecting. I’ve seen him do it once before, when we did an instant visualisation exercise:
Therapist: What did you see when I said ‘Roses’?
Me: I saw an illustrated rose garden in the style of an Alice in Wonderland book I used to have, except instead of actual roses it was my friend Rose, hundreds of her, on stems.
Therapist: ...you have a busy mind.
He might not have heard, “Hey, I could stop trying to fix things! That’ll fix things!” before, but he assured me that the urge to fix things was common, as was having a critical voice with completely unrealistic expectations. Be kind to yourself, he said. The primitive part of your brain sends up a fear signal, then your conscious mind starts working overtime to make it stop. It’s completely normal human behaviour. But we can work on it.
Good, I thought.
PROBLEM IDENTIFIED: Completely unrealistic expectations
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES: Small achievements overlooked, progress stalled
SOLUTION: Place some distance in front of the thought that throws up the problem, say thank you and tell it you’ll get back to it later, this is not the time to be crafting solutions
EXPECTED RESULT: Perfectly calm and ordered brain within the hour
ARGH.
Tuesday, 5 May 2015
fifty-two
On Saturday, I took the fifty-second and final image in a year-long project I've been trying to complete for almost as long as I've been into photography as a hobby. And by "almost as long", I mean I took the first photo for my first attempt two weeks after I took the shot that got me into photography. I've failed at it five times in seven years, usually at either week three or week ten. But in May last year, I made an agreement with myself that I was going to try again, and I was going to get the damned thing done this time. And I did.
Now that it's done, I have complicated feelings about it, in no small part because it's a self-portrait project and since I first attempted it in 2008, self-portraits have morphed into "selfies" and are an easy shorthand for vapidity and self-absorption. I have several thoughts on this, but we'll get to that another time. It's not made me feel ashamed of doing this, though it has made me extremely reticent about sharing or celebrating it. I've also finished this project at a time when my self-esteem is somewhat wonky, and my sense of achievement has been overshadowed somewhat by a little voice saying one photo a week? Really? How is that anything to be proud of? Anyone could take one photo a week. You didn't even put any effort into half those shots. No wonder you don't want to share it.
I'm writing this post in part to say, shut up, voice. It's not about how difficult it is to take a photo, it's about keeping something up for a whole year. It's about completing something I failed at multiple times before this one. It's about getting back into something I used to love after taking no photos for a year and a half. It's also about learning things, and here, for you the lovely reader, are some of the things I've learnt (for reference purposes, here is my completed album. I was going to post individual photos and talk about them, but then I'd have a big unwieldy post full of pictures of my face, and I don't want that. So have a look if you like, or make up photos in your own mind).
Firstly, the voice is right about one thing; I didn't put any effort into quite a few of those shots. "Crap, it's Sunday night and I don't have a picture yet" was the motivator behind at least a quarter of them. In practice, though, "no effort" doesn't mean "worthless". Out of the dozen last-minute Sunday night shots that I remember being last-minute Sunday night shots, I dislike three of them, and two of them I dislike because I think they could have been good (one was taken in shitty lighting and the other showcases my shitty Photoshopping). Even the one I just thought was shitty got a compliment from a friend who said he liked it. My least favourite shots are the ones I took for other reasons and wasn't planning to use for the project. #27 (the T-shirt) and #49 (the dress which I MADE) are photos I already had on my camera and used instead of taking a last-minute Sunday night shot, and I dislike them both. Lesson: take the last-minute no-effort shot anyway.
Shot #6 (of my hair) should have been consigned to the "repurposed photos I dislike" pile, but it's actually one of my favourites. I cropped the original photo, of me dressed up as a really half-assed ladybird for a club night, down to about one-sixth of its size and edited the crap out of it. Lesson: editing is a powerful thing.
I took self-portraits in Nice, Florence and Brussels. I took them on multiple different forms of public transport. I took them at work, at dance events, in public bathrooms, down random streets in the City, in a tree in Cheltenham, by a castle in Southend. More than half of them, however, I took in my bedroom. I felt a bit bad about this at the time, but being able to do a bunch of different things with one (quite restrictive) environment is actually a really useful skill. I do, however, still wish I got better lighting in here. Lesson: work with what you have, but shitty lighting is not your friend.
Compositionally, my favourite images are #5 (on the sofa) and #22 (with the bruised knuckles), neither of which I liked that much at the time because I thought my face and/or hair looked bad. Lesson: staring at your own face to edit an image does weird things to your perception and it doesn't hurt to put them away for a while and come back later.
Three of the photos are accidents. #11 (the shadow), #24 (under the duvet) and #44 (the one taken upwards from waist height) were not the photos I was trying to take at the time, and I have absolutely no idea what I did to make #24 come out like that, but I really like all of them. Lesson: embrace mistakes.
When I look back at the whole set, my favourites - not necessarily from a photographic point of view, but the ones I most like to look at - are the ones that take me back to a specific memory or feeling from the last year. Moving house and having a room full of junk, various people painting flowers on my face or bruises on my knuckles, that time I spent New Year's Day on the beach in the sunshine in the south of France and everyone hated me... these are the things I'm most pleased to have photographic memories of. Lesson: get the camera out when interesting stuff happens.
Other things I learned, in no particular order:
I need an off-camera flash and a tripod.
Most photoshoots (which is a pretty grandiose word for what I was doing most of the time) are salvageable.
The smallest thing can serve as a good focal point.
Jumping shots are HAAAARD.
If you post a picture of your legs in stockings on Flickr, it will get several hundred views within the first twelve hours.
A blank background wall is a godsend.
When in doubt: hands and feet.
I don't know how much I love any of these fifty-two photos from an artistic standpoint, but the project as a whole has done exactly what I wanted it to do; got me taking photos again, reminded me of why I love photography, and made me better at it. Self-portraits are difficult to separate from self-image and judge on merit alone, but my normal photography has got noticeably better, I think, since I've been doing the project. I've got used to having a camera in my hand, light makes more instinctive sense to me now, and I've stopped editing blue/orange washes on everything. Clear progress, and a worthwhile outcome.
I don't want to get out of the habit of taking pictures now that the project's done. For the next month, I'm taking a photo a day; not of me, and not for sharing. Just a month's worth of "here's what happened in May" for my own amusement. After that I'd like to start another project. I'm considering a series of portraits, or going back to the photography technique documentation thing that I did when I first started, or something based around lighting and the off-camera flash that I am totally going to buy as soon as I have some spare cash. That's likely, right? Spare cash?
Thursday, 30 April 2015
overshare
Writing about personal blogs yesterday reminded me of a little story I'd like to share with you on this lovely Thursday morning.
About ten years ago, I moved into a new flat. The girl already living there was someone I was friendly with but didn't know that well, and for my first weekend in the flat, she was away. The internet was set up but there was no WiFi (I am just THAT OLD) and my room was quite a long way away from the router. My new flatmate told me that while I waited for my super-extra-long cable to show up, I was welcome to use her computer. This I accepted gratefully (because my internet addiction was and is shameless) and about five minutes after getting my stuff set up, I went into her room to check my emails. I say emails, I mean diary sites. The internet basically was online journals to me in the mid-2000s. As it turned out, my new flatmate and I had that in common. Her homepage was her LiveJournal. Hey, I thought, LiveJournal! I have a LiveJournal! We should be LiveJournal buddies!
I read a couple of entries. Standard stuff about her day, her plans for the weekend, my moving in, grumbles about her course. Her writing had a voice - not the one I would have expected from knowing her personally, but that made it more interesting if anything. She clearly had an audience that she was writing to. I was enjoying myself, so I read a bit more of it. I thought it was the kind of journal that I'd probably go some way back into, once we were LiveJournal friends.
In amongst her daily happenings, she grumbled about a guy. I knew about this guy, because she grumbled about him all the time, from the very first conversation I had with her. He was not her boyfriend. Very definitely, deliberately and specifically not her boyfriend. There was a photo of him Blu-Tacked to her monitor. I knew all the stories she told, all the incidents she mentioned, up until the one where she talked about going to visit him. Here is a short dramatisation:
BRAIN: Oh, hey, that's why she wasn't in class that time. I didn't know he lived there. This all sounds a bit awkward and sad and... aww, they kissed! That's quite sw - HEY too much information here! I didn't need to -
[HAND moves mouse to the Close button and attempts to click. BRAIN intervenes]
BRAIN: Hang on, not yet. Wow, this is... specific. And surprisingly - YIKES, Flatmate, you did what now?
[HAND and BRAIN engage in a short wrestling match for control of the mouse]
BRAIN: I can't read this!
HAND: So let me get rid of it!
BRAIN: I CAN'T it's like it's got my soul in a headlock.
HAND: I'm shutting this down NOW.
BRAIN: But what happened when they got down off the - JESUS CHRIST
HAND: Release control of the mouse, Brain.
[BRAIN releases the mouse and HAND changes the screen]
BRAIN: I need to go and think about... things... that aren't.... things.
I should clarify at this stage that 30-year-old Jen wouldn't have thought the things in that journal were as horrific as 20-year-old Jen thought they were, though she'd still much rather not have had the guy's photo staring her in the face while she read them. I went about my own internet business, thinking, "Holy crap, Flatmate sure does like to overshare."
Completely forgetting that I'd been logged in to her journal as her.
When I got internet on my own computer and went to add her as a friend, I found no sign of any such entry, and I was slow enough to spend the first five minutes convinced that she'd had regrets about the overshare and deleted it. All the detail aside, it read like a public entry, but then of course it did. All of my private diary entries read like public ones, because that's how I write in that medium. I still refer to an imaginary reader as "you" and apologise for repeating myself and get sheepish when I write intimate stuff. I would hate for someone to read my private writing, and I really don't think I'd have read hers if I'd realised, but at the time I was barely aware that private LiveJournal entries were a thing and I really thought she was just monumentally indiscreet.
So, sorry, former flatmate. I accidentally read your private sex stuff and couldn't think about anything else whenever I looked at you for the whole time we were living together. And I sort of wish I hadn't remembered it now. Oops.
About ten years ago, I moved into a new flat. The girl already living there was someone I was friendly with but didn't know that well, and for my first weekend in the flat, she was away. The internet was set up but there was no WiFi (I am just THAT OLD) and my room was quite a long way away from the router. My new flatmate told me that while I waited for my super-extra-long cable to show up, I was welcome to use her computer. This I accepted gratefully (because my internet addiction was and is shameless) and about five minutes after getting my stuff set up, I went into her room to check my emails. I say emails, I mean diary sites. The internet basically was online journals to me in the mid-2000s. As it turned out, my new flatmate and I had that in common. Her homepage was her LiveJournal. Hey, I thought, LiveJournal! I have a LiveJournal! We should be LiveJournal buddies!
I read a couple of entries. Standard stuff about her day, her plans for the weekend, my moving in, grumbles about her course. Her writing had a voice - not the one I would have expected from knowing her personally, but that made it more interesting if anything. She clearly had an audience that she was writing to. I was enjoying myself, so I read a bit more of it. I thought it was the kind of journal that I'd probably go some way back into, once we were LiveJournal friends.
In amongst her daily happenings, she grumbled about a guy. I knew about this guy, because she grumbled about him all the time, from the very first conversation I had with her. He was not her boyfriend. Very definitely, deliberately and specifically not her boyfriend. There was a photo of him Blu-Tacked to her monitor. I knew all the stories she told, all the incidents she mentioned, up until the one where she talked about going to visit him. Here is a short dramatisation:
BRAIN: Oh, hey, that's why she wasn't in class that time. I didn't know he lived there. This all sounds a bit awkward and sad and... aww, they kissed! That's quite sw - HEY too much information here! I didn't need to -
[HAND moves mouse to the Close button and attempts to click. BRAIN intervenes]
BRAIN: Hang on, not yet. Wow, this is... specific. And surprisingly - YIKES, Flatmate, you did what now?
[HAND and BRAIN engage in a short wrestling match for control of the mouse]
BRAIN: I can't read this!
HAND: So let me get rid of it!
BRAIN: I CAN'T it's like it's got my soul in a headlock.
HAND: I'm shutting this down NOW.
BRAIN: But what happened when they got down off the - JESUS CHRIST
HAND: Release control of the mouse, Brain.
[BRAIN releases the mouse and HAND changes the screen]
BRAIN: I need to go and think about... things... that aren't.... things.
I should clarify at this stage that 30-year-old Jen wouldn't have thought the things in that journal were as horrific as 20-year-old Jen thought they were, though she'd still much rather not have had the guy's photo staring her in the face while she read them. I went about my own internet business, thinking, "Holy crap, Flatmate sure does like to overshare."
Completely forgetting that I'd been logged in to her journal as her.
When I got internet on my own computer and went to add her as a friend, I found no sign of any such entry, and I was slow enough to spend the first five minutes convinced that she'd had regrets about the overshare and deleted it. All the detail aside, it read like a public entry, but then of course it did. All of my private diary entries read like public ones, because that's how I write in that medium. I still refer to an imaginary reader as "you" and apologise for repeating myself and get sheepish when I write intimate stuff. I would hate for someone to read my private writing, and I really don't think I'd have read hers if I'd realised, but at the time I was barely aware that private LiveJournal entries were a thing and I really thought she was just monumentally indiscreet.
So, sorry, former flatmate. I accidentally read your private sex stuff and couldn't think about anything else whenever I looked at you for the whole time we were living together. And I sort of wish I hadn't remembered it now. Oops.
Wednesday, 29 April 2015
blogs
I started blogging publicly again for three reasons. Firstly, I like writing. I'm much better at writing than I am at talking, and probably better at writing than thinking, to be honest. Secondly, I wanted to get rid of the fear of people reading what I write. It's a nothingy little personal blog, and it's never going to have much of a readership, but it's here and people can read it (and occasionally they do, and even more occasionally someone says something nice about it, and then my world gets a little bit brighter). Thirdly, I like these blogs. I like silly personal blogs that don't really have an audience to cater to and post about whatever the author wants to post about. I've read hundreds of things which say that nobody cares, nobody's interested in your dull day or your personal feelings, write about bigger things your audience can relate to. Well, I care. I'm interested in your dull day and your personal feelings, provided you can type legibly. I'm interested in the thing you do that I also do, the thing you do that I wouldn't do for a roomful of puppies, diamonds and ice cream, the thing that really pisses you off for no real reason. I'm interested in the happy things, the sad things, the weird things, the mundane things. Fuck trying to be relevant to the wider community, tell me about the time you went food shopping and you found a really weird-looking potato.
I read other people's personal blogs. If you're a Facebook friend of mine who likes to link to their blog posts, I've read yours. Certainly the posts you've linked, and probably back a bit further too. They're not all on my regular reading list, but the ones with an interesting voice - which is certainly more than half of them, to my mind - I go back to time and time again. You write about your fun-filled adventurous life? I read it. You write about your struggles with mental health and/or bereavement? I read it, and probably cry. You write about parenting a child I've never met? I read it. I know all about babywearing and extended breastfeeding and reusable nappies and different rates of child development and what horrendous things giving birth can do to a body, and I find it fascinating despite having all the maternal instinct of a fairy cake.
I also read the blogs of dance teachers I know, or know of. My dancer friends (and occasionally the teachers themselves, if I'm friends with them) will post links, and I read them all, because I love dance and I love other people's perspectives on dance. I often wonder if I should stop doing this, because I hate them all. OK, I don't hate them all. Quite a few of them are written by very professional people running a very professional blog on their very professional website, which don't colour my opinion on the authors as dance teachers at all. This is probably the best way to approach it unless you're an exceptional writer who has exactly the right instincts for this sort of thing. But I like personal stuff. I want to read opinions! ...riiiiight up until I read them, and then I hate them all.
Dance teachers are just people; people who look very pretty when they move and are good at teaching other people how to look pretty when they move. There's no reason to expect them to be able to present themselves well through the medium of the written word, or to want to take a critical eye to the state of their local scene and their own approaches. But I can't shake my unfair expectations. I want to read a dance teacher's personal opinion and feel like I would be encouraged, safe, and free in their scene. I want to read posts that express potentially controversial views while still being mindful of their authority and position. I want to read perspectives I haven't heard before, phrased eloquently and tactfully. I want to read staunch advocacy for scene safety and consent culture that includes concrete actions they've taken to embed this in scenes where they have responsibility. I'd also quite like them to be funny, because I like funny. Most of all I want to read what they write and be inspired to learn from them and dance with them.
It's a lot to ask. Too much. I'll never find a dance teacher who runs this kind of blog, and that's OK. In fact, it's probably for the best, since the combination of dancing and writing would probably be too much for me and I'd start following them to every festival they taught at like some kind of horrendous fangirl. But all the dance-teacher blogs I've read that express personal opinions, I hate. I hate them to the extent that I will actively avoid being taught by these people, and in some cases, actively avoid dancing with them. I don't want to learn from someone who will proclaim that nobody gets to call themselves a dancer unless they're Pina Bausch. I don't want my scene leader to be a drama llama. I don't want teachers who are so determined to be contrary, or so determined to oppose someone else's opinions on everything, that they write post after post of rude shit about perfectly well-accepted styles or choices that affect them in no way whatsoever. And I really, really don't want teachers who openly dismiss sexual assault, place the 'traditional' on a pedestal, and urge the cutting of slack for men while expressing disgust at women who complain (yes, I am going to link that post every time I write about dance, because it's either that or have a paraphrase of the exact same sentiment in every single post).
It makes me sad, because now there are several amazing dancers I'll never feel comfortable dancing with. There are teachers whose lessons would just depress and discourage me after reading their thoughts on their students. There are scenes I wouldn't feel safe dancing in anymore. What's worse, these isolated opinions make me more wary of other teachers, whose thoughts I haven't read and whose views I haven't heard. Why would they be any different just because they don't write about it? I become convinced that it's easier to just not dance with teachers, because they'll be judging my technique and that's no fun, and maybe I should just dance with people who I know for a fact enjoy a dork-dance interlude.
Part of me thinks I should just avoid reading this stuff anymore. Stop reading and just start dancing. After all, they're all just people, and a lot of people have fucking terrible opinions on things. If I don't know someone's a judgemental arsehole, I can just dance with them and walk away none the wiser, right? I have more dance and less bad feeling in my life, everyone wins.
Except, if my dance teacher believes "men are the leads, women are the follows, that's the traditional way; I know people can do the other role, but let's not be pedantic about this" I want to know that. If I'm giving money to someone who is paying lip service to an inclusivity they don't really subscribe to, I want to know that. If I'm dancing in a place where the scene leaders protect creeps (and gropers, and people who have punched multiple people in the face) from repercussions, I definitely want to know that. I want to support safe, inclusive environments run by safe, inclusive teachers, and if that's not where I am, I need to have the knowledge to protect myself.
On a less dramatic level, I want to know about the people teaching me. The way this scene is set up - its size, its dance style, the devotion of its members - you have to like and respect your teachers. You have to buy into their philosophy, you have to trust what they're telling you, you have to understand where they're coming from, and you have to want to share a whisky with them afterwards. Otherwise, what's the point?
So I'm going to keep reading. Sometimes it will make me cross, but I want to know. And maybe if I read widely enough, I'll come across dancers - maybe not teachers, but dancers - who write about dance in a way that inspires me. And if not? I'll read whatever they want to write about. Hair, depression, ferrets, anything. I'm listening.
I read other people's personal blogs. If you're a Facebook friend of mine who likes to link to their blog posts, I've read yours. Certainly the posts you've linked, and probably back a bit further too. They're not all on my regular reading list, but the ones with an interesting voice - which is certainly more than half of them, to my mind - I go back to time and time again. You write about your fun-filled adventurous life? I read it. You write about your struggles with mental health and/or bereavement? I read it, and probably cry. You write about parenting a child I've never met? I read it. I know all about babywearing and extended breastfeeding and reusable nappies and different rates of child development and what horrendous things giving birth can do to a body, and I find it fascinating despite having all the maternal instinct of a fairy cake.
I also read the blogs of dance teachers I know, or know of. My dancer friends (and occasionally the teachers themselves, if I'm friends with them) will post links, and I read them all, because I love dance and I love other people's perspectives on dance. I often wonder if I should stop doing this, because I hate them all. OK, I don't hate them all. Quite a few of them are written by very professional people running a very professional blog on their very professional website, which don't colour my opinion on the authors as dance teachers at all. This is probably the best way to approach it unless you're an exceptional writer who has exactly the right instincts for this sort of thing. But I like personal stuff. I want to read opinions! ...riiiiight up until I read them, and then I hate them all.
Dance teachers are just people; people who look very pretty when they move and are good at teaching other people how to look pretty when they move. There's no reason to expect them to be able to present themselves well through the medium of the written word, or to want to take a critical eye to the state of their local scene and their own approaches. But I can't shake my unfair expectations. I want to read a dance teacher's personal opinion and feel like I would be encouraged, safe, and free in their scene. I want to read posts that express potentially controversial views while still being mindful of their authority and position. I want to read perspectives I haven't heard before, phrased eloquently and tactfully. I want to read staunch advocacy for scene safety and consent culture that includes concrete actions they've taken to embed this in scenes where they have responsibility. I'd also quite like them to be funny, because I like funny. Most of all I want to read what they write and be inspired to learn from them and dance with them.
It's a lot to ask. Too much. I'll never find a dance teacher who runs this kind of blog, and that's OK. In fact, it's probably for the best, since the combination of dancing and writing would probably be too much for me and I'd start following them to every festival they taught at like some kind of horrendous fangirl. But all the dance-teacher blogs I've read that express personal opinions, I hate. I hate them to the extent that I will actively avoid being taught by these people, and in some cases, actively avoid dancing with them. I don't want to learn from someone who will proclaim that nobody gets to call themselves a dancer unless they're Pina Bausch. I don't want my scene leader to be a drama llama. I don't want teachers who are so determined to be contrary, or so determined to oppose someone else's opinions on everything, that they write post after post of rude shit about perfectly well-accepted styles or choices that affect them in no way whatsoever. And I really, really don't want teachers who openly dismiss sexual assault, place the 'traditional' on a pedestal, and urge the cutting of slack for men while expressing disgust at women who complain (yes, I am going to link that post every time I write about dance, because it's either that or have a paraphrase of the exact same sentiment in every single post).
It makes me sad, because now there are several amazing dancers I'll never feel comfortable dancing with. There are teachers whose lessons would just depress and discourage me after reading their thoughts on their students. There are scenes I wouldn't feel safe dancing in anymore. What's worse, these isolated opinions make me more wary of other teachers, whose thoughts I haven't read and whose views I haven't heard. Why would they be any different just because they don't write about it? I become convinced that it's easier to just not dance with teachers, because they'll be judging my technique and that's no fun, and maybe I should just dance with people who I know for a fact enjoy a dork-dance interlude.
Part of me thinks I should just avoid reading this stuff anymore. Stop reading and just start dancing. After all, they're all just people, and a lot of people have fucking terrible opinions on things. If I don't know someone's a judgemental arsehole, I can just dance with them and walk away none the wiser, right? I have more dance and less bad feeling in my life, everyone wins.
Except, if my dance teacher believes "men are the leads, women are the follows, that's the traditional way; I know people can do the other role, but let's not be pedantic about this" I want to know that. If I'm giving money to someone who is paying lip service to an inclusivity they don't really subscribe to, I want to know that. If I'm dancing in a place where the scene leaders protect creeps (and gropers, and people who have punched multiple people in the face) from repercussions, I definitely want to know that. I want to support safe, inclusive environments run by safe, inclusive teachers, and if that's not where I am, I need to have the knowledge to protect myself.
On a less dramatic level, I want to know about the people teaching me. The way this scene is set up - its size, its dance style, the devotion of its members - you have to like and respect your teachers. You have to buy into their philosophy, you have to trust what they're telling you, you have to understand where they're coming from, and you have to want to share a whisky with them afterwards. Otherwise, what's the point?
So I'm going to keep reading. Sometimes it will make me cross, but I want to know. And maybe if I read widely enough, I'll come across dancers - maybe not teachers, but dancers - who write about dance in a way that inspires me. And if not? I'll read whatever they want to write about. Hair, depression, ferrets, anything. I'm listening.
Tuesday, 21 April 2015
politics
[A silent interaction between me and the Facebook settings following the sharing of the UKIP manifesto by someone I am unable to defriend]
I don't want to see this
This post will be hidden from your Newsfeed.
Thanks.
See less from Nigel Farage?
I didn't know you could do that. Yes please
Hide everything from Nigel Farage?
Yes please
You will no longer see any posts from Nigel Farage.
Thank you.
[continue browsing]
VOTE UKIP
dammit
I don't want to see this
This post will be hidden from your Newsfeed.
Thanks.
See less from Nigel Farage?
I didn't know you could do that. Yes please
Hide everything from Nigel Farage?
Yes please
You will no longer see any posts from Nigel Farage.
Thank you.
[continue browsing]
VOTE UKIP
dammit
Saturday, 18 April 2015
less
About a month ago I posted this list of all the things I'd done in the first two and a half months of the year. It's a lot of stuff. The last point is actually about 20 different things - posh dinners, cocktail nights, comedy gigs, operas, cinema trips, nights in the pub, blues dance socials, and a mystery birthday surprise where they locked a bunch of us in a room and we had to logic our way out again. It's almost all been great fun, but for someone battling anxiety and Joyous Recurring Fainting Disease, it's a LOT of stuff. Too much stuff?
...yes.
When I first noticed I was struggling and started thinking about how to fix it, I did the logical thing: thought back to last time I had a mental health problem. How did I fix it then? I went to therapy, I took up blues, I started going out socially. It revolutionised my life, and I was like a different person. Which is the point. When I started getting therapy back then, my entire social life consisted of going to a dance class once a week. I never saw any of those people outside of class, and I would have something to do at the weekend maybe once every two months. My mother would call me and ask, hopefully, what I'd been up to, and I'd feel like it was a victory if I could tell her we'd walked to the supermarket rather than getting our shopping delivered. Of course it was revolutionary when I started dancing blues and getting invited to socials; I'd basically done nothing and met no new people for years.
I'm not that person anymore. My last free weekend was in January and I don't have another one until June. Between now and my next free weekend I'm going to several dinners, birthday parties and dance socials, as well as my usual classes, an opera, a treasure hunt, a hen night, a visit home and a holiday to Morocco. I booked a few days off work to give myself a break, then realised I was still going to be busy on four out of five of those days. Going away already clashes with four other things I'd quite like to do. If I commit myself to a regular course or class on a weeknight, I immediately find something else I really want to do on that night.
Replacing the anxiety with New Things seemed like a good plan. It worked before. My head was so full of dance that I had no space to worry. But two free weekends in six months? Scheduling myself three, four, five nights a week? I'm exhausted. I'd set myself up a plan of acrobatics Monday, blues Tuesday, possibly blues or solo dance or balboa Wednesday, kickboxing Thursday. When the acrobatics course ended would switch to kickboxing Monday, blues Tuesday, possibly blues/solo/balboa Wednesday, balboa or ballet Thursday. That is a fucking insane plan. Heavy exercise four nights a week every week when I'm in somewhat crappy health to begin with? Of course, what then happens is that I'm too exhausted to go to one or more of my planned activities, and I lie in bed instead feeling crappy and unproductive and like I'm not doing enough. Which is exactly what I may or may not be doing right now.
It's difficult to cut things out, or cut things back. People remember aloud how things used to be, they make "hmmm" noises, they talk about how much fun all the things I'm doing are, and why would I ever want to give them up if I'm not... you know, getting sad again? I worry about it too, more than I should. Those were bad days; I don't want to repeat them. Sometimes my worry about that makes me sign up for yet more things to try and stave it off, as if this last one will be the one that pushes the anxiety out. What actually happens is that the anxiety just relocates itself to time I'm supposed to be sleeping, and then I get even more exhausted.
The fact is that as much as I love the people in my life, as much as I'm thrilled and grateful that they invite me to things and want to talk to me and spend time with me, as much as I love meeting a new person and discovering that we click, I am still super introverted. I can't appreciate the People Time if I don't get the Me Time, and right now I am getting zero guilt-free Me Time. The only time I spend with myself is time when I've flaked out of doing something, and then I spend the whole evening feeling shitty about the fact that I flaked. I need to do less. I need to have time for me. I need to do what I used to do; just walk to a field or a wood or a common and sit for a while, reading or listening to music or just thinking, losing track of the time and leaving when I felt like it, be that twenty minutes or four hours later.
I was on a train the other day, travelling through Somerset countryside, and I saw an old man standing on a bridge. He had a camera with him, resting on the bridge wall next to him, but he wasn't taking photos, just leaning on the wall and staring off. The sky was blue and there was nobody else in sight, except the people whizzing by on the railway, barely even there. It's been a long time since I wanted to be somebody else as much as I wanted to be that old West Country man on a railway bridge, watching the time pass by and knowing that it didn't matter.
...yes.
When I first noticed I was struggling and started thinking about how to fix it, I did the logical thing: thought back to last time I had a mental health problem. How did I fix it then? I went to therapy, I took up blues, I started going out socially. It revolutionised my life, and I was like a different person. Which is the point. When I started getting therapy back then, my entire social life consisted of going to a dance class once a week. I never saw any of those people outside of class, and I would have something to do at the weekend maybe once every two months. My mother would call me and ask, hopefully, what I'd been up to, and I'd feel like it was a victory if I could tell her we'd walked to the supermarket rather than getting our shopping delivered. Of course it was revolutionary when I started dancing blues and getting invited to socials; I'd basically done nothing and met no new people for years.
I'm not that person anymore. My last free weekend was in January and I don't have another one until June. Between now and my next free weekend I'm going to several dinners, birthday parties and dance socials, as well as my usual classes, an opera, a treasure hunt, a hen night, a visit home and a holiday to Morocco. I booked a few days off work to give myself a break, then realised I was still going to be busy on four out of five of those days. Going away already clashes with four other things I'd quite like to do. If I commit myself to a regular course or class on a weeknight, I immediately find something else I really want to do on that night.
Replacing the anxiety with New Things seemed like a good plan. It worked before. My head was so full of dance that I had no space to worry. But two free weekends in six months? Scheduling myself three, four, five nights a week? I'm exhausted. I'd set myself up a plan of acrobatics Monday, blues Tuesday, possibly blues or solo dance or balboa Wednesday, kickboxing Thursday. When the acrobatics course ended would switch to kickboxing Monday, blues Tuesday, possibly blues/solo/balboa Wednesday, balboa or ballet Thursday. That is a fucking insane plan. Heavy exercise four nights a week every week when I'm in somewhat crappy health to begin with? Of course, what then happens is that I'm too exhausted to go to one or more of my planned activities, and I lie in bed instead feeling crappy and unproductive and like I'm not doing enough. Which is exactly what I may or may not be doing right now.
It's difficult to cut things out, or cut things back. People remember aloud how things used to be, they make "hmmm" noises, they talk about how much fun all the things I'm doing are, and why would I ever want to give them up if I'm not... you know, getting sad again? I worry about it too, more than I should. Those were bad days; I don't want to repeat them. Sometimes my worry about that makes me sign up for yet more things to try and stave it off, as if this last one will be the one that pushes the anxiety out. What actually happens is that the anxiety just relocates itself to time I'm supposed to be sleeping, and then I get even more exhausted.
The fact is that as much as I love the people in my life, as much as I'm thrilled and grateful that they invite me to things and want to talk to me and spend time with me, as much as I love meeting a new person and discovering that we click, I am still super introverted. I can't appreciate the People Time if I don't get the Me Time, and right now I am getting zero guilt-free Me Time. The only time I spend with myself is time when I've flaked out of doing something, and then I spend the whole evening feeling shitty about the fact that I flaked. I need to do less. I need to have time for me. I need to do what I used to do; just walk to a field or a wood or a common and sit for a while, reading or listening to music or just thinking, losing track of the time and leaving when I felt like it, be that twenty minutes or four hours later.
I was on a train the other day, travelling through Somerset countryside, and I saw an old man standing on a bridge. He had a camera with him, resting on the bridge wall next to him, but he wasn't taking photos, just leaning on the wall and staring off. The sky was blue and there was nobody else in sight, except the people whizzing by on the railway, barely even there. It's been a long time since I wanted to be somebody else as much as I wanted to be that old West Country man on a railway bridge, watching the time pass by and knowing that it didn't matter.
Friday, 17 April 2015
on boundaries
I went dancing on Sunday. A lot of the regulars were out of the country, but it was a good crowd, I met several lovely new people, and was delighted to dance with almost everyone there. I say almost; there was one guy I prefer not to dance with (two if you count Mr Spine Trumpet, which now that we've built up a long and beautiful tradition of not dancing together, I do not). There's something about the way he behaves when we dance that makes me uncomfortable. It's not overtly creepy - he's not gropey and when he does say something it's far to the ambiguous side of being inappropriate, but I don't like it, and I see shades of the same thing when I happen to make eye contact with him off the dance floor. Usually dancing with one specific person isn't hard to avoid, but it was a quiet night, and when I turned to the bar to take a sip of my drink, out of the corner of my eye I could see him standing in front of me, slightly too close, and silent. Waiting for me to turn around and suddenly be staring him in the chest. I would be slightly startled, look up towards his face, where he would be smirking, and still silent. He wouldn't ask me to dance; he would assume that the dance contract was affirmed as soon as we made eye contact.
I hate this. People whose faces I recognise but whose names I don't know asking me to dance by suddenly looming over me in silence? Nope. Nope nope nope. So what did I do? Completely ignored the fact that he was there, turned back towards the bar and poured myself a glass of water. He melted away again. Was this the best way to handle things? Probably not. But it was the best I could do in the moment.
The reason I started overthinking this minor interaction? I was reading this post at Captain Awkward, about a creepy guy using creepy pick-up artist techniques, and thinking "Wow, that's creepy, using horrible strategies like that to get around someone's boundaries". Several people in the comments (I actually recommend both the post and all the comments, because that site is made of unicorns) said, "Well done for getting away now. It would have been so much worse if you'd actually ended up dating him." It would, wouldn't it? Imagine dating a guy who...
HOLY SHIT I TOTALLY DID
I'd forgotten. My memories of the guy when he was my friend were all good ones. More than once, when we were still dating and afterwards, I thought to myself, "It was so great being friends with him. It's a shame he changed so much after we started dating." But reading that letter, reading about a guy commenting on her body language and how guarded she was, reading the comments about PUA techniques, I suddenly remembered that he did that all the time when we were friends.
"You're standing there with your arms folded. That's a very defensive gesture. What makes you so defensive?"
"You're turning your body away from me. Why is that? Makes it seem like you're nervous. What have you got to be nervous about?"
"How come you're looking away? Are you scared? Look at me."
People analysing me has always made me massively uncomfortable, and when folding my arms EVEN MORE didn't help, I tried standing differently to get him to shut up. Which he did not. "Hey, you've got your arms down today, you're more open. That's good."
Then I remembered an exchange that happened shortly before we started going out.
Him: Those guys over there were asking if you and I were a couple.
Me: ...OK.
Him: I told them you'd probably scratch their eyes out if they said that in front of you.
Me: ...uh...
Him: I mean, no offense, you're very attractive and all, but... [pulls face] no.
Me: ...OK.
I remembered going home and writing in my DeadJournal (yes, DeadJournal. Teen Goth Jen had a DeadJournal, the existence of which I'd also completely forgotten up to this point) about what he'd said, and how I'd had a slight feeling of "oh, charming" but mostly a massive sense of relief because he'd said he wasn't attracted to me and I wasn't attracted to him either and it was great that everything was clear now and I didn't have to worry about the weird vibes anymore. Then we started dating shortly afterwards because he was smart and funny and that was what was important, right?
DUDE, YOU WERE FUCKING NEGGING ME.
(I asked him about that exchange a few times when we were dating. He would either flat-out deny it happened or embark on a long melodramatic display of What An Awful Person I Must Be To Say Things You Interpreted In Such A Way.)
I tell these two largely unrelated stories because remembering the second one made me feel (after I'd got over the minor urge to go and find him and yell WHAT THE SHIT WAS UP WITH THE FUCKING NEGGING OF THE SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL, DUDE) a hell of a lot better about the first one. That second story just wouldn't happen now. I wouldn't stay friends with a guy who gave me updates on my own body language every time he saw me and offered his various opinions and approval on the way my shoulders were facing. I would sit far, far away from that guy, and he would call me a stuck-up bitch to his friends, and everybody would be much better off. It wasn't until I started dancing that I realised I was even allowed to have boundaries, much less that I could enforce them, and though my methods aren't perfect yet, the knowledge that I have the power to get away from situations and people that make me uncomfortable does a lot for my peace of mind.
I deleted multiple versions of a paragraph justifying why I ignored Mr Loom-and-Smirk, because that's not the point of this story and I've written about such things previously (please see here for my feelings on creepy dance guys and women's socialisation to be silent, and here for my feelings on being told to "cut him some slack"). I don't want to set myself a benchmark of behaving perfectly in every situation because that's not fair; in an ideal situation I would have behaved differently, but then so would he. We all have imperfect ways of handling things and that has to be OK. Having this idea of The Perfect Human What I Am Going To Become in my head is immensely damaging and I'm trying my best to get rid of it. Dismantle unreasonable perfectionism, build comfortable boundaries - this is my plan for the next eight hundred years (or however bloody long it takes to do these things).
I have grown as a human this week. Or rather, the space around me has grown, making me a slightly more comfortable human. I think that's probably better.
I hate this. People whose faces I recognise but whose names I don't know asking me to dance by suddenly looming over me in silence? Nope. Nope nope nope. So what did I do? Completely ignored the fact that he was there, turned back towards the bar and poured myself a glass of water. He melted away again. Was this the best way to handle things? Probably not. But it was the best I could do in the moment.
The reason I started overthinking this minor interaction? I was reading this post at Captain Awkward, about a creepy guy using creepy pick-up artist techniques, and thinking "Wow, that's creepy, using horrible strategies like that to get around someone's boundaries". Several people in the comments (I actually recommend both the post and all the comments, because that site is made of unicorns) said, "Well done for getting away now. It would have been so much worse if you'd actually ended up dating him." It would, wouldn't it? Imagine dating a guy who...
HOLY SHIT I TOTALLY DID
I'd forgotten. My memories of the guy when he was my friend were all good ones. More than once, when we were still dating and afterwards, I thought to myself, "It was so great being friends with him. It's a shame he changed so much after we started dating." But reading that letter, reading about a guy commenting on her body language and how guarded she was, reading the comments about PUA techniques, I suddenly remembered that he did that all the time when we were friends.
"You're standing there with your arms folded. That's a very defensive gesture. What makes you so defensive?"
"You're turning your body away from me. Why is that? Makes it seem like you're nervous. What have you got to be nervous about?"
"How come you're looking away? Are you scared? Look at me."
People analysing me has always made me massively uncomfortable, and when folding my arms EVEN MORE didn't help, I tried standing differently to get him to shut up. Which he did not. "Hey, you've got your arms down today, you're more open. That's good."
Then I remembered an exchange that happened shortly before we started going out.
Him: Those guys over there were asking if you and I were a couple.
Me: ...OK.
Him: I told them you'd probably scratch their eyes out if they said that in front of you.
Me: ...uh...
Him: I mean, no offense, you're very attractive and all, but... [pulls face] no.
Me: ...OK.
I remembered going home and writing in my DeadJournal (yes, DeadJournal. Teen Goth Jen had a DeadJournal, the existence of which I'd also completely forgotten up to this point) about what he'd said, and how I'd had a slight feeling of "oh, charming" but mostly a massive sense of relief because he'd said he wasn't attracted to me and I wasn't attracted to him either and it was great that everything was clear now and I didn't have to worry about the weird vibes anymore. Then we started dating shortly afterwards because he was smart and funny and that was what was important, right?
DUDE, YOU WERE FUCKING NEGGING ME.
(I asked him about that exchange a few times when we were dating. He would either flat-out deny it happened or embark on a long melodramatic display of What An Awful Person I Must Be To Say Things You Interpreted In Such A Way.)
I tell these two largely unrelated stories because remembering the second one made me feel (after I'd got over the minor urge to go and find him and yell WHAT THE SHIT WAS UP WITH THE FUCKING NEGGING OF THE SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL, DUDE) a hell of a lot better about the first one. That second story just wouldn't happen now. I wouldn't stay friends with a guy who gave me updates on my own body language every time he saw me and offered his various opinions and approval on the way my shoulders were facing. I would sit far, far away from that guy, and he would call me a stuck-up bitch to his friends, and everybody would be much better off. It wasn't until I started dancing that I realised I was even allowed to have boundaries, much less that I could enforce them, and though my methods aren't perfect yet, the knowledge that I have the power to get away from situations and people that make me uncomfortable does a lot for my peace of mind.
I deleted multiple versions of a paragraph justifying why I ignored Mr Loom-and-Smirk, because that's not the point of this story and I've written about such things previously (please see here for my feelings on creepy dance guys and women's socialisation to be silent, and here for my feelings on being told to "cut him some slack"). I don't want to set myself a benchmark of behaving perfectly in every situation because that's not fair; in an ideal situation I would have behaved differently, but then so would he. We all have imperfect ways of handling things and that has to be OK. Having this idea of The Perfect Human What I Am Going To Become in my head is immensely damaging and I'm trying my best to get rid of it. Dismantle unreasonable perfectionism, build comfortable boundaries - this is my plan for the next eight hundred years (or however bloody long it takes to do these things).
I have grown as a human this week. Or rather, the space around me has grown, making me a slightly more comfortable human. I think that's probably better.
Thursday, 16 April 2015
technology
Many years ago in the past...
[I am having dinner with my father]
Me: Speaking of birthdays, Mum said she wants an iPod this year.
Dad: She wants a... what?
Me: An iPod.
Dad: Oh! An iPod. Not an iPhone or an iPad.
Me: No, just the iPod.
Dad: ...you know what's good? This Dongle.
Me: Huh?
Dad: That's technology, isn't it?
Skipping forward to last Tuesday...
Dad: While you're home, I wonder if you could help me with some technology business.
Me: Sure, what's not working?
Dad: Well. For our birthday, we ended up with a thing called a Hudl.
Me: Oh, I hear they're good.
Dad: Yes. For the email and such. However, what it doesn't have is this thing called WiFi.
Me: Uh huh.
Dad: So. One has bought... a WiFi machine. But one doesn't know quite what one is meant to do with it.
Me: [helpless giggling]
Dad: What does it do?
Me: It's like a Dongle you don't have to plug in.
Dad: OH! It's like a Dongle! And they've made it wireless? Well. That's jolly good then.
Things I love about this:
1. My father, who took the best part of a decade to learn to send a text message by himself, knows all about Dongle.
2. My father knows absolutely nothing about any piece of technology that isn't Dongle.
3. My father lapses into the royal 'we' when unsure of himself.
4. Once I'd got the mobile WiFi working, I set him up on Twitter and made him follow Beyoncé.*
Then my mother came home.
Mum: While you're home, could you take a look at my new tablet?
Me: What's wrong with it?
Mum: Little things appear in the top left corner, and I swipe down, and it starts doing things.
Me: What things?
Mum: I don't know! Things!
Me: Oh, it's just trying to install a system update.
Mum: What?? What does that do? Do I want that? Help.
I do love that I, as someone who has been known to accidentally turn everything blue when using a laptop, still get to go back to my parents' and become the All-Knowing Technology Wizard. Especially when I don't even have a tablet. When both my parents have a piece of technology that I don't have, it makes me feel hopelessly out of date and like I should maybe get one too, but honestly I have no idea what I'd do with it. It just seems like a really big smartphone that can't call anyone. But maybe I just don't understand technology either.
*Text from father two days later: "And it appears that something called Roxie Rocks is following me."
[I am having dinner with my father]
Me: Speaking of birthdays, Mum said she wants an iPod this year.
Dad: She wants a... what?
Me: An iPod.
Dad: Oh! An iPod. Not an iPhone or an iPad.
Me: No, just the iPod.
Dad: ...you know what's good? This Dongle.
Me: Huh?
Dad: That's technology, isn't it?
Skipping forward to last Tuesday...
Dad: While you're home, I wonder if you could help me with some technology business.
Me: Sure, what's not working?
Dad: Well. For our birthday, we ended up with a thing called a Hudl.
Me: Oh, I hear they're good.
Dad: Yes. For the email and such. However, what it doesn't have is this thing called WiFi.
Me: Uh huh.
Dad: So. One has bought... a WiFi machine. But one doesn't know quite what one is meant to do with it.
Me: [helpless giggling]
Dad: What does it do?
Me: It's like a Dongle you don't have to plug in.
Dad: OH! It's like a Dongle! And they've made it wireless? Well. That's jolly good then.
Things I love about this:
1. My father, who took the best part of a decade to learn to send a text message by himself, knows all about Dongle.
2. My father knows absolutely nothing about any piece of technology that isn't Dongle.
3. My father lapses into the royal 'we' when unsure of himself.
4. Once I'd got the mobile WiFi working, I set him up on Twitter and made him follow Beyoncé.*
Then my mother came home.
Mum: While you're home, could you take a look at my new tablet?
Me: What's wrong with it?
Mum: Little things appear in the top left corner, and I swipe down, and it starts doing things.
Me: What things?
Mum: I don't know! Things!
Me: Oh, it's just trying to install a system update.
Mum: What?? What does that do? Do I want that? Help.
I do love that I, as someone who has been known to accidentally turn everything blue when using a laptop, still get to go back to my parents' and become the All-Knowing Technology Wizard. Especially when I don't even have a tablet. When both my parents have a piece of technology that I don't have, it makes me feel hopelessly out of date and like I should maybe get one too, but honestly I have no idea what I'd do with it. It just seems like a really big smartphone that can't call anyone. But maybe I just don't understand technology either.
*Text from father two days later: "And it appears that something called Roxie Rocks is following me."
Friday, 10 April 2015
vague
When I decided to do a daily blogging challenge again, I made very few rules for myself. Length of post doesn't matter. Inherent social value of post doesn't matter. Chance that post will make me look like the enormous dork I am doesn't matter. Essentially I have three rules:
Do not allow blog to be taken over by posts on social politics, since that way lies anger and sadness.
Do not write unnecessarily revealing posts about people I'm still in touch with.
Do not be vague.
Vague writing is one of the traps I fall into most easily, especially when I feel under pressure to write something NOW because of blogging challenges or NaNoWriMo. I don't have an idea in my head, no story to tell or point to make, so I just start writing anything in the hopes that the story or point will just make itself apparent before I get to the end. I do this even though I have hundreds of pages of evidence that it doesn't work.
I have two entire novels made of nothing but Vague. In 2010 I started writing with the image of a searchlight down a dark street and a woman with a nail through her foot. I wrote 60,000 words, coming up with two main characters I quite liked, an immediate setting I really liked, a world with a lot of gaps in, and a plot that... well, I never managed to identify the plot. There were people in robes having secret meetings, who started out knowing everything then turned out to know nothing, but then maybe they were just pretending to be know-nothing-know-it-alls, but then maybe the leader knew things and nobody else did, but then maybe she didn't actually know things but thought she did. At no point did I work out what this knowledge they did or didn't have was. I couldn't think of what it might be, so I wrote in another layer of vague mystery to give myself more time. The more layers of vagueness I added, the more difficult it was to think of specifics that fit what was already on the page, so I panicked and added another layer of vague. (I did a similar thing the following year and ended up turning what started out as a small-time family drama into two people with one face and one guy with four faces, all for absolutely no discernible reason.)
Vague blog posts are too short to keep building up layers of mystery, so I just come up with an opening sentence that sounds more meaningful than it is, then either ride a metaphor just past its logical conclusion, or write about something I'm feeling in an obtuse enough way that it doesn't really resemble what I'm feeling anymore. I might address these posts to a non-specific "you", thus implying a universal truth or at least something I intended a wider audience to relate to, even though I know that making something more vague doesn't make it more relatable. I know that non-specific posts about how it can be quite painful to care about somebody aren't actually any more interesting or worthwhile than posts about what happened to me today or that guy I saw on the tube, but it's still a struggle to convince myself not to write that.
Part of me is hung up on the idea of being deep, having a blog full of Serious Thoughts that people will read and say "my, what a lot of extremely relevant and universally applicable Serious Thoughts you have". The Serious Deep Thoughts I've stopped myself writing and posting are often a lot more shallow than the posts I've written about absurd landlords, and they're certainly less interesting to read, but try explaining that to the tiny embarrassing voice in my head that wants to be known as a Thinker.
Voice: Don't be so trivial. Write about great loss!
Me: I have no thoughts about great loss. Except "it's bad".
Voice. Make something up.
Me: Um. It's bad... like a vulture? Or a puffin that's taken a drastically wrong turn in life?
Voice: ...puffins?
Me: I panicked and went to puffins.
Voice: Step away from the blog and don't come back until you're feeling less daft.
And then I don't write, because I don't have any thoughts on your life. I don't know what you've been through. All I can think about is that time I went to a free music festival and put a curse on Toploader because they were being rude to the autograph hunters (and because they released THE WORST FUCKING SONG IN THE WORLD EVER I will accept no dissent on this matter) that my schoolfriends to this day believe actually worked, but nobody wants to hear that story.
I think this time, with a lot of conscious effort, I'm avoiding this pretty well. (So far.) But if you do see a bunch of empty words about feelings I may or may not have had relating to an unspecific happening, feel free to give me a kick up the blog.
Do not allow blog to be taken over by posts on social politics, since that way lies anger and sadness.
Do not write unnecessarily revealing posts about people I'm still in touch with.
Do not be vague.
Vague writing is one of the traps I fall into most easily, especially when I feel under pressure to write something NOW because of blogging challenges or NaNoWriMo. I don't have an idea in my head, no story to tell or point to make, so I just start writing anything in the hopes that the story or point will just make itself apparent before I get to the end. I do this even though I have hundreds of pages of evidence that it doesn't work.
I have two entire novels made of nothing but Vague. In 2010 I started writing with the image of a searchlight down a dark street and a woman with a nail through her foot. I wrote 60,000 words, coming up with two main characters I quite liked, an immediate setting I really liked, a world with a lot of gaps in, and a plot that... well, I never managed to identify the plot. There were people in robes having secret meetings, who started out knowing everything then turned out to know nothing, but then maybe they were just pretending to be know-nothing-know-it-alls, but then maybe the leader knew things and nobody else did, but then maybe she didn't actually know things but thought she did. At no point did I work out what this knowledge they did or didn't have was. I couldn't think of what it might be, so I wrote in another layer of vague mystery to give myself more time. The more layers of vagueness I added, the more difficult it was to think of specifics that fit what was already on the page, so I panicked and added another layer of vague. (I did a similar thing the following year and ended up turning what started out as a small-time family drama into two people with one face and one guy with four faces, all for absolutely no discernible reason.)
Vague blog posts are too short to keep building up layers of mystery, so I just come up with an opening sentence that sounds more meaningful than it is, then either ride a metaphor just past its logical conclusion, or write about something I'm feeling in an obtuse enough way that it doesn't really resemble what I'm feeling anymore. I might address these posts to a non-specific "you", thus implying a universal truth or at least something I intended a wider audience to relate to, even though I know that making something more vague doesn't make it more relatable. I know that non-specific posts about how it can be quite painful to care about somebody aren't actually any more interesting or worthwhile than posts about what happened to me today or that guy I saw on the tube, but it's still a struggle to convince myself not to write that.
Part of me is hung up on the idea of being deep, having a blog full of Serious Thoughts that people will read and say "my, what a lot of extremely relevant and universally applicable Serious Thoughts you have". The Serious Deep Thoughts I've stopped myself writing and posting are often a lot more shallow than the posts I've written about absurd landlords, and they're certainly less interesting to read, but try explaining that to the tiny embarrassing voice in my head that wants to be known as a Thinker.
Voice: Don't be so trivial. Write about great loss!
Me: I have no thoughts about great loss. Except "it's bad".
Voice. Make something up.
Me: Um. It's bad... like a vulture? Or a puffin that's taken a drastically wrong turn in life?
Voice: ...puffins?
Me: I panicked and went to puffins.
Voice: Step away from the blog and don't come back until you're feeling less daft.
And then I don't write, because I don't have any thoughts on your life. I don't know what you've been through. All I can think about is that time I went to a free music festival and put a curse on Toploader because they were being rude to the autograph hunters (and because they released THE WORST FUCKING SONG IN THE WORLD EVER I will accept no dissent on this matter) that my schoolfriends to this day believe actually worked, but nobody wants to hear that story.
I think this time, with a lot of conscious effort, I'm avoiding this pretty well. (So far.) But if you do see a bunch of empty words about feelings I may or may not have had relating to an unspecific happening, feel free to give me a kick up the blog.
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
the critical voice, part two
The other day I sat down at my computer and Googled, "How to have fewer thoughts."
Google: Umm. I can do, "How to have fewer negative thoughts", if you want?
Me: I appreciate the sentiment, but that's not really what I want.
Google: Sure it is. That's what everyone wants.
Me: Fewer negative thoughts would be great, but what I want is to think less in general.
Google: I don't get it.
Me: There's too much stuff in my brain and I want to get some of it out. I don't want to turn negative thoughts in positive thoughts, I want to turn thoughts into lack of thoughts.
Google: If you don't want inspirational blogs on the power of positive thinking and some pictures of trees at sunset, I can't help you.
Me: Well, thanks anyway.
Google: I AM WATCHING YOU.
There have certainly been times in my life when "fewer negative thoughts" would have been the best thing for my quality of life, but right now that's not exactly my problem. My critical voice likes to morph and change with me, to make sure it's always at optimum levels of unhelpfulness. When I'm depressed, it sighs and tells me there's just no point, no point to going out or standing up or opening the curtains or operating on a normal human sleep schedule because it's not like I'd accomplish anything by doing so, is it? When I'm anxious, it lists all the things that could go wrong because I don't do things properly or understand human beings, or just because I have rotten luck and so why wouldn't my entire family die in a car accident on their way down to see me? When I'm happy, it doesn't have much to say so it just spins round and round really fast like an excitable kid to make me feel a bit dizzy if I stop doing things. Right now, when I am anxious but in the throes of getting a grip, it wants to fix everything. EVERYTHING.
Hey there, money issues? Let's make a complicated spreadsheet! Concerned about weight? Let's make a diet plan! Not feeling great about living arrangements? Detailed rental accommodation home improvements! Feeling sluggish? Sign up for every single exercise class you can find! Hate your job? Get a new one! Bored? Learn everything! Confused? Sit down and try and untangle that boxful of matted chain necklaces you call a mind while I throw new ones into the mix every 40 seconds because necklaces are shiny and fun!
Most of this stuff, in an of itself, is constructive and useful and a good idea. I don't think any of the things I've done or tried to do in the name of fixing myself are bad ideas. Sorting out my snacking at work and researching job opportunities and making a budget plan and signing up for kickboxing and acrobatics classes and seeking therapy and seeing an osteopath and making a commitment to write daily and trying to work through my mental blocks are all, individually, good and positive steps.
The problem is that I'm trying to do it all at once, and it's exhausting. My critical voice says that all of these things are just a tiny change and it's just one hour out of my week, just one more thing to remember, come on, what are you complaining about? But it's just a tiny change over and over again, forty or fifty times a day, and every thought I have spawns three or four more thoughts about what I can do to fix that thought I just had. So I'm doing an exhausting amount of stuff, but because it's just a tiny change I can't actually see any difference in any of the problems I'm having. I haven't sorted my finances or lost any weight or made my bedroom pretty or felt any healthier or got a new job or untangled my mind.
What I have done is mostly cleared my overdraft and got a tiny savings account and stopped hoarding snacks in my desk drawer and done a thorough clear-out of my bedroom and sorted out my back and shoulders and made cushions and learned to alter my clothes and started proper exercising multiple times a week and been abroad a bunch of times and seen shows and eaten bastard expensive dinners and laughed with my friends until I cried, but none of that seems to count because it hasn't solved the problems I went in to solve (magically have a bunch of disposable income every month! Be three stone lighter! Acquire an interesting and flexible and well-paid job! BE EXCELLENT AT EVERYTHING!), and also because it hasn't created any space in my mind. Everything is trying to get through the door at once, much like that thing on The Simpsons where Mr Burns has every disease ever.
"So, what you're saying is, I'm indestructible?"
"Oh my, no. In fact, even a slight breeze could..."
"Indestructible."
Except that it's the opposite of that, because I want the things to be able to get through the door, and the fact that everything's squished itself in there at once means I'm not really able to progress with anything. Critical voice response to this is:
OK, good. Spotted a problem. How do we fix this? By picking one thing and REALLY trying to make that happen. While just making one tiny change to everything else. I mean, it's ALL important and you can't just LEAVE it to focus on this one thing, can you?
And this is why I need fewer thoughts.
Google: Umm. I can do, "How to have fewer negative thoughts", if you want?
Me: I appreciate the sentiment, but that's not really what I want.
Google: Sure it is. That's what everyone wants.
Me: Fewer negative thoughts would be great, but what I want is to think less in general.
Google: I don't get it.
Me: There's too much stuff in my brain and I want to get some of it out. I don't want to turn negative thoughts in positive thoughts, I want to turn thoughts into lack of thoughts.
Google: If you don't want inspirational blogs on the power of positive thinking and some pictures of trees at sunset, I can't help you.
Me: Well, thanks anyway.
Google: I AM WATCHING YOU.
There have certainly been times in my life when "fewer negative thoughts" would have been the best thing for my quality of life, but right now that's not exactly my problem. My critical voice likes to morph and change with me, to make sure it's always at optimum levels of unhelpfulness. When I'm depressed, it sighs and tells me there's just no point, no point to going out or standing up or opening the curtains or operating on a normal human sleep schedule because it's not like I'd accomplish anything by doing so, is it? When I'm anxious, it lists all the things that could go wrong because I don't do things properly or understand human beings, or just because I have rotten luck and so why wouldn't my entire family die in a car accident on their way down to see me? When I'm happy, it doesn't have much to say so it just spins round and round really fast like an excitable kid to make me feel a bit dizzy if I stop doing things. Right now, when I am anxious but in the throes of getting a grip, it wants to fix everything. EVERYTHING.
Hey there, money issues? Let's make a complicated spreadsheet! Concerned about weight? Let's make a diet plan! Not feeling great about living arrangements? Detailed rental accommodation home improvements! Feeling sluggish? Sign up for every single exercise class you can find! Hate your job? Get a new one! Bored? Learn everything! Confused? Sit down and try and untangle that boxful of matted chain necklaces you call a mind while I throw new ones into the mix every 40 seconds because necklaces are shiny and fun!
Most of this stuff, in an of itself, is constructive and useful and a good idea. I don't think any of the things I've done or tried to do in the name of fixing myself are bad ideas. Sorting out my snacking at work and researching job opportunities and making a budget plan and signing up for kickboxing and acrobatics classes and seeking therapy and seeing an osteopath and making a commitment to write daily and trying to work through my mental blocks are all, individually, good and positive steps.
The problem is that I'm trying to do it all at once, and it's exhausting. My critical voice says that all of these things are just a tiny change and it's just one hour out of my week, just one more thing to remember, come on, what are you complaining about? But it's just a tiny change over and over again, forty or fifty times a day, and every thought I have spawns three or four more thoughts about what I can do to fix that thought I just had. So I'm doing an exhausting amount of stuff, but because it's just a tiny change I can't actually see any difference in any of the problems I'm having. I haven't sorted my finances or lost any weight or made my bedroom pretty or felt any healthier or got a new job or untangled my mind.
What I have done is mostly cleared my overdraft and got a tiny savings account and stopped hoarding snacks in my desk drawer and done a thorough clear-out of my bedroom and sorted out my back and shoulders and made cushions and learned to alter my clothes and started proper exercising multiple times a week and been abroad a bunch of times and seen shows and eaten bastard expensive dinners and laughed with my friends until I cried, but none of that seems to count because it hasn't solved the problems I went in to solve (magically have a bunch of disposable income every month! Be three stone lighter! Acquire an interesting and flexible and well-paid job! BE EXCELLENT AT EVERYTHING!), and also because it hasn't created any space in my mind. Everything is trying to get through the door at once, much like that thing on The Simpsons where Mr Burns has every disease ever.
"So, what you're saying is, I'm indestructible?"
"Oh my, no. In fact, even a slight breeze could..."
"Indestructible."
Except that it's the opposite of that, because I want the things to be able to get through the door, and the fact that everything's squished itself in there at once means I'm not really able to progress with anything. Critical voice response to this is:
OK, good. Spotted a problem. How do we fix this? By picking one thing and REALLY trying to make that happen. While just making one tiny change to everything else. I mean, it's ALL important and you can't just LEAVE it to focus on this one thing, can you?
And this is why I need fewer thoughts.
Monday, 6 April 2015
stamps
[at the supermarket]
Me: Can I get stamps here?
Cashier: [blank stare] ...stamps?
Me: Yeah.
Cashier: Huh?
Me: [waving birthday card helplessly] Stamps. To send this.
Cashier: Um. Ah. George! GEORGE!
George: What?
Cashier: Do we have stamps?
George: Stamps? What stamps?
Me: [waving birthday card] Stamps?
[a moment later]
George: Oh, stamps! Postage stamps!
Me: Yes!
George: You can get them at the kiosk.
Me: Thanks.
Cashier: I thought you wanted to stamp a smiley face in the card.
Me: I just want to post it.
Cashier: Post?
[Exit Jen, feeling very, very old]
Me: Can I get stamps here?
Cashier: [blank stare] ...stamps?
Me: Yeah.
Cashier: Huh?
Me: [waving birthday card helplessly] Stamps. To send this.
Cashier: Um. Ah. George! GEORGE!
George: What?
Cashier: Do we have stamps?
George: Stamps? What stamps?
Me: [waving birthday card] Stamps?
[a moment later]
George: Oh, stamps! Postage stamps!
Me: Yes!
George: You can get them at the kiosk.
Me: Thanks.
Cashier: I thought you wanted to stamp a smiley face in the card.
Me: I just want to post it.
Cashier: Post?
[Exit Jen, feeling very, very old]
Sunday, 5 April 2015
connection
My internet is extremely sporadic, so I'm rushing to write a post before it dies again.
I've made progress today, I think. Things are tidier and I have a better sense of what I'm doing, at least in the short term. (Now I can't think of what else to say about this that's short and stands a chance of me beating out internet death. Those two lines clearly aren't a post in and of themselves, but if I start writing about lists and priorities and meditation and health and support then I run the risk of taking several hours, thereby missing both the short window of working internet and my daily blogging deadline.)
(I might be feeling like I'm making progress, but I have as yet not discovered how not to be incredibly neurotic about everything.)
I've made progress today, I think. Things are tidier and I have a better sense of what I'm doing, at least in the short term. (Now I can't think of what else to say about this that's short and stands a chance of me beating out internet death. Those two lines clearly aren't a post in and of themselves, but if I start writing about lists and priorities and meditation and health and support then I run the risk of taking several hours, thereby missing both the short window of working internet and my daily blogging deadline.)
(I might be feeling like I'm making progress, but I have as yet not discovered how not to be incredibly neurotic about everything.)
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