with no face

Story time!

When I was four or five, we had an infestation of slugs in our back garden. My parents were trying to grow some vegetables, and to keep the slugs away from the plants they decided to put out shallow dishes full of beer. Of course, that's not what they told me.

"Why are you putting beer in the garden?" I asked.
"It's for the Tomato Man," said my father instantly, in the same genial tone he uses for ninety-eight per cent of everything he ever says. "The Tomato Man and his Four Hippopotami."
"Why are you leaving him beer?"
"Because otherwise he won't make the tomatoes grow. We have to leave beer for the hippopotami."
"But if there are four hippopotami, why are there only three dishes?"
"One hippo has to keep watch."

This all sounds ridiculous and adorable, except that the more I thought about this story the more terrified I was. I would lie in bed at night, listening for them. My immediate reference for hippos was a set of brightly-coloured ones that had been strung across my pram when I was smaller and had now been passed down to my baby brother. I pictured three hippos, each in a different jaunty primary colour, drinking beer from the dishes in the garden under the cover of night, while the fourth one stared unblinkingly up at my window, waiting for any sign of movement. And if he saw anything, I imagined, he would alert the Tomato Man.

(This sounds SO RIDICULOUS. But this is what it was like being Baby Jen.)

Some nights I couldn't sleep for thoughts of what might be on the other side of my window if I ever dared to pull the curtain back before the sun came up. I'd decided what he looked like; a large tomato head with vines for body, arms, and legs, large flat leaves for hands and feet. I would picture it over and over again (with the same horrified fascination as Supposedly Adult Jen reading the Wikipedia pages of films too frightening to actually watch and then feeling sick for weeks). I could see myself tripping over to the window and pulling back the curtain. The slightest twitch would have alerted the hippo on watch, and by the time the curtain was fully drawn he'd be there, huge tomato head millimetres from the glass, staring at me with his featureless face.

I have been known to judge potential friendships in large part over whether they understand the terror of being stared at by a man with no face. I've now moved past this as an appropriate test, but it's still interesting to ask people. Is the stare in the eyes, or in the intent? If it's in the eyes, then you have nothing to fear from the goddamn Tomato Man, but if it's in the intent? You are never getting away from that stare. He can't blink, he can't turn his attention elsewhere. You can't distract him. You can't break his gaze, because it isn't there. I've been afraid of being watched since then, but fear of being watched by a person, a monster, whatever, has never been more intense for me than the fear of being stared at by something with no face at all. Yes, I'm still aware it was a tomato.

I kept this completely to myself for years, because to say something aloud gives it power. I got so used to keeping it quiet that it stayed a secret long after he lost his grip on me. It must have been at least a decade if not more before I told my dad about my childhood fear of the Tomato Man.

"What?!" he said, in the exact same tone as he'd told the story in the first place. "It was just some nonsense about tomatoes and hippos!"
"You know about my imagination, Dad."
"Well, yes, but hippos and tomatoes?"
"Anything can be scary."
"I didn't mean to scare you! I was talking nonsense."
"Man with no face, Dad. You conjured up a staring man with no face."
"...good grief."

visible

I've done that thing where I haven't written for so long that any attempt at a new post takes on a disproportionate level of importance, and I continue not to write because I can't think of anything inspired enough to restart with. This is silly, and so I'm going to do daily blogging again for the next month.

This year's been okay, so far. I've danced, I've seen shows, I've made clothes. I spent New Year in Sicily, though that's really not as much of a brag as it sounds. My friend had a baby and I managed to persuade her not to name him Oakley. I'm taking a burlesque course and seem to have agreed to do a performance at the end. I'm signed up with a temping agency, I'm going to Paris next month, and in August I'm moving in with my boyfriend. Life's alright.

It's going to be an odd year. So far I've spent quite a lot of it being angry. I know, I just said that life was alright, and it is. But I've been angry, and being angry on my own behalf is something I'm completely unused to. When I've been mistreated in the past I've always responded with sadness, or fear, or a compulsion to rationalise the other person's actions until it looks like everything is fine, and this hot feeling of how fucking dare you is new and weird, and it has to be said, not entirely unpleasant.

I'm angry at the extended family members who are treating me like a pariah. I'm angry at the friend who abandoned me and is now sulking and pouting as though he's the one that's been hard done by. Having spent my whole life reacting to bad behaviour by assuming I'd caused it and trying to disappear, it's a very sharp kind of relief to know without any hint of a question that this is not my fault, this is your fault. I've been lacking that kind of certainty for a long time, and while I've got no interest in staying angry forever, right now it's giving me back some of the energy I lost last year and I'm grateful for it. Not that I know what to do with it, mind you. I'm still working on getting my activity levels back up to normal, so all my restlessness is getting channelled into sewing; I've made ten garments in two weeks. Which is bonkers. I need to slow down, but I think I'm worried about directing that energy to the places it really belongs.

If step one is realising that this is not okay, then step two is telling people that this is not okay. I've made it my business to be as unobtrusive as possible, to not fight and not complain and not start drama, and the idea of stepping out of that is terrifying. I have an astonishing imagination, and yet I can't hear myself saying "that thing you did was incredibly rude" or "you've been acting like a massive knob and you owe me an apology" or "you are a fucking adult who won't speak to me because I don't want to run around in a circle trying to steal hats off people's heads and that is pathetic" (I have some very specific complaints) without adding something into the scenario to make it clear that it's not real. Like everyone is wearing snakes or it's all taking place inside an orange. I can't imagine any version of me inviting conflict and demanding to be noticed like that. But at the same time, if all the anger stays on the inside, it's going to do me no good whatsoever. I've always wanted to be seen, but I've never wanted to be looked at. One way or the other, that needs to change this year.

under construction

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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?