I had an email from an old friend this week, in response to one of mine, in which she said she was sorry to hear I was ‘down’ again. Which confused me, because I certainly hadn’t been particularly ‘down’ (if anything, I thought I’d been quite ‘up’ lately), I don’t really know what I’d said to give her that impression, except that I was moaning a bit about Christmas and about feeling de-motivated – all pretty normal stuff.
That set me wondering about what I would define as ‘normal’. The default setting on my emotional thermostat seems to hover around a kind of mild pissed-offness. This does occasionally slip into something which would be more recognisably ‘depression’, and it doesn’t make me incapable of flashes of humour, enjoyment, sometimes even joy, but my standard reaction to the morning alarm is more ‘Crap, another day’ rather than ‘Oh goody, wonder what today will bring!’
I don’t think this is related to external circumstances, and nor is it a conscious choice, it’s just an ingrained part of who I am, of my personality. And as such, I’m not sure that it’s amenable to change. Past attempts at trying to change it just seem to have led to frustration, irritation and sometimes (yes, the ‘g’ word) guilt. I THINK I’ve escaped from the guilt-trap (well, I haven’t fallen into it lately, though of course that doesn’t mean it will never come back), and I THINK I haven’t been beating myself up so much lately (but, ditto). So maybe some kind of change is possible after all. I guess I’m accepting myself more, and recognising that this is who I am ie, feeling vaguely pissed-off and frustrated most of the time. I’m sure it must be very nice to wake up every day and think ‘Oh goody, etc’, but it just doesn’t seem to be for me.
When Lifetraveller was talking a while ago about the time when she ‘couldn’t stop smiling’, I thought, ‘I can’t remember a time when I felt like that’, which is not strictly true, but I can only ever remember feeling like that when I was in love, and that doesn’t last, and you really can’t spend life serially falling in love (and besides, there’s an awful lot of crap that comes along with that as well). And it’s a very adolescent attitude. Better to not even think about it. But I digress.
Maybe this is why I get so angry with the ‘Happy Crappy’ Pollyanna types who try to cheer me up. Yes, I know they mean well. But it seems as though they are trying to make me deny a fundamental part of who I am, and, ironically, putting pressure on me to feel guilty and bad about myself. This is me, OK? Take me for who I am, or get the hell off my back.
And you’ll never know how much courage it is taking not to apologise for saying that…

Those of you who have read some of the earlier postings on this blog may recall brief mentions of a character referred to as the EMBM (Erstwhile Male Best Mate). This guy was a fellow student when I was doing my PhD, and I think I can say without undue immodesty that I was generally considered the brilliant, original thinker, but he had the balls – literally and metaphorically – and was good at the bullshit and self promotion, so consequently he was the one who got the job and moved on. The last communication I had from him was 7 years ago, when he accused me (without justification) of plagiarism, and threatened to sue.
So what did I find in my inbox today? He had evidently found his way to my ‘day job’ website, and had ostensibly got in touch to ask if I could let him have electronic copies of 3 conference papers we wrote jointly when we were both students, but also to tell me all about his brilliant career, past disagreements water under the bridge, let’s keep in touch, etc etc
I tell myself that life is not a competition, that I’m lucky with the life I have, with the freedom it gives me to think and write and do the research I want to do without being beholden to anybody. But there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Why should that arsehole have a Proper Job and a Proper Career when I haven’t’.
How do I respond to his email? I have NO intention of re-initiating an acquaintance with him, even if, at one time, I would have given anything to see his name in my inbox or hear his voice on the phone. Is this my Gloria Gaynor moment? In a way it’s good that he was the one who contacted me. I wonder why he did that? ‘I bet he’s sinking/If he’s trying to get in touch with me’ (‘You wear it well’, Rod Stewart).
Given that I have no intention of letting him sneak back into my life, do I tell him exactly what I think of him: ‘You were a lying, self-deluding arsehole 10 years ago, and I have no reason to believe that you’ve changed that much’ – just tell him that I don’t have the papers (they’re probably on a floppy somewhere, but I can’t be arsed to go looking for them because they’re honestly not worth it), or just ignore his email and don’t bother replying? And would any of those reactions just be childish?
Am I wrong to hold a grudge? The last time I heard from him (in 1999) was coincidentally the last time I was in counselling, I was still pretty hung up about him, and the counsellor then said: ‘You have to ask yourself whether having any contact with him is likely to bring more happiness or misery in the long run’ or words to that effect.
So, I’m not going to let him back into my life, though admittedly I’m curious as to what he’s doing and why he’s contacted me after all this time. My life is busy and full – too full. I don’t have time for this, and I’m too strong to get drawn back down again. ‘Surviving is the best revenge’.

I thought of you..

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2450216,00.html

(For some reason, these links never work properly for me - sorry, you'll have to cut and paste to the browser)

Why do I feel so desolate this morning? Happiness is a chimera, whatever you think it is, it’s not. Life is just about getting on with it, day after day, one thing after another.
I don’t know why I feel so bad this morning, where this has come from. I haven’t felt quite this bad for a while, it just seems to have come out of the blue but here I am in tears again. Not just the grudging, day-in day-out little shit that you just have to keep putting up with it, but a real wave of misery.
I'm frustrated because I can’t find the photo paper that I bought last week. Now, I know how ridiculous and trivial that sounds, and I also know that anyone who knows me well would just laugh (like Hubby did when I told him) because, hey, how do you expect to find ANYTHING in that chaos, of course you’re going to keep losing stuff because you’re a disorganised idiot. But there are only a limited number of places where it’s likely to be and I’ve looked in all of them and it’s not there. It's not like there's piles and piles of junk everywhere, that it could be hidden in, like there normally is, because I actually tidied up quite a bit yesterday, so it's got to be SOMEWHERE ELSE, I just don't know where.
Now, why should that make me feel so crap? Because I can see where it’s leading – down the road of – if you weren’t so incompetent and disorganised and if you just kept on top of things and put them away in the right places this kind of stuff wouldn’t happen, but hey, that’s how you are, you’re a useless idiot and a waste of space and you’re not fit to be on this planet, what the hell have you done with your life, what have you got to show for the last 50 years? F*ck all.
The counsellor on Thursday was saying, maybe I don’t really want to be ‘happy’, whatever that means, because I would just have to change so much, I wouldn’t be me any more if I gave up my cynicism and my scepticism, and maybe she’s right, maybe that kind of ‘happiness’ requires a certain kind of blinkering, of refusing to notice the realities of a shitty world, a degree of self-deception and dishonesty that I’m just not capable of. But I’m kind of trapped in this box of mirrors, thinking that life shouldn’t have to be like this, but not capable of seeing how to break out of it. There’s a Cat Stevens song, I can’t remember what it’s called, or even what album it’s on, but the last lines go something like: ‘Life is a maze of doors and they all open from the side you’re on. Just keep on pushing hard, and try as you may, you’re gonna wind up where you started from’.
So now it’s time for all you ‘Happy Fascists’ out there to come back and tell me to put it all in perspective and count my blessings, and think myself lucky I don’t have any REAL problems and blah blah blah and throw all that guilt shit over me as well.

Why on EARTH have I suddenly got ads about G*d and Baby J*s*s appearing at the top of my blog???

Weird!!!!

What brought that on??

Yes, Ruth, he's trying REALLY hard to show how much he loves you - but - be honest - do you give a ****????

And what are the omens saying????

AAAAARRRGGGHHH!!!!!!!

(Too much like a year ago for comfort.... and I have had 2 (proper, ie lots of gin), martinis!!!)

PS Except, of course, I didn't have the lovely Sam waiting for me....

PPS Although admittedly, I didn't have 3 under 16 brats holding me back...

PPPS And what is this about the special 'top'? Some way of restoring the self esteem of post-mastectomy subjects????

PPPPS Sorry, that was bitchy, but I still have both of mine and I wish I was generating that amount of attention...

PPPPPS Sorry sorry, that really IS the gin talking!!!!

Another good night, with lots of dreams. I remember waking up and looking at the clock at 4 something, then going straight back to sleep, and when I looked at the clock again, it was 6:13.
It’s tempting to say ‘it won’t last’. How can I turn that around, to say, ‘enjoy it while you can’? The counsellor on Thursday asked, do I ever think ‘It won’t last’ about the bad times? And of course I don’t, not really. ‘This too must pass’. Where does that line come from? It sounds like an oracle.
The secret of life, the ‘ultimate answer’, has to be something like that. Like the great god’s message to his creation : ‘We apologise for the inconvenience’ (‘So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish’, Douglas Adams). Or the four noble truths. Something so simple and banal, on one level, that it’s overlooked, that it has to keep being reiterated. That we start again, every day that we move forward from this point, that we keep trying.
We all want to have a clever answer, something which will help us to bypass all that stuff, a magic bullet. But maybe this is it. Just that you get up every morning and get on with it. And if you’ve tried it a million times before and it hasn’t worked, but you know in your heart it’s the right thing, you try again.
AH, BUT – (there’s always an ‘ah but’) – how do you know it’s the ‘right thing’? Maybe you ARE just bashing your head against a wall, trying and trying and trying and never getting anywhere. All you have to follow is your instinct. Joseph Campbell said: ‘Follow your bliss’. But that could mean anything. Where is the Tao? It is here and nowhere.
All this is just patterns our human consciousness tries to impose on a random universe. Except that the universe is not entirely random of course, and neither is human consciousness. There are patterns, but patterns which are never laid down in stone. As in Godel’s theorem, there cannot exist a set which has no exceptions, including this one. (I’m paraphrasing there, and have probably got it completely wrong, it’s a long time since I read this stuff). All generalisations are false, including this one. All systems contain their own contradictions.
Enough philosophising. It’s a beautiful morning, and the cats want feeding.

A year last weekend since I was in Rome (and strolling round the Colosseum at midnight with the Crazy Frog… sigh…)
Which means it’s a year on Wednesday since we got the kitten.
I’m still here… and so is she.
A year of intense emotions, intense work, intense writing (but minimal publication), decisions deferred (or taken by default.)
The cracks have been polyfillaed, papered, given a lick of paint.
Progress??? One step forward, two steps back.
Regrets??? Don’t ask.
Life goes on.

Third session of counselling this morning.
I arrived feeling tired and discouraged and fed up. The sleeping seems to be one step forward and two back still – awake at 4:30 again today. Yesterday evening after the Board of Governors subcommittee meeting, I was putting the Parish Council minutes on the notice board outside school, and one of the Governors came up to me and said: ‘How many of these jobs do you do? You must really enjoy it! What was your doctorate in?’ At which point I groaned. I didn’t want to get into THAT conversation again. Her answer: ‘Why do you say that?’ – she was genuinely interested and friendly, but I was tired and I wanted to go home and I couldn’t even begin to explain to this confident woman with a sensible career what I was doing with my life… Maybe another time, when I feel stronger.
Anyway, that didn’t come up in the counselling, that was just a bit of the background to why I was feeling fed up this morning.
So, I went in feeling fed up, and feeling that whatever I do and however I try I never quite Get There, only I don’t even know where There is, and I’ve had half a century, and where has it got me? It’s like when I get to the end of the day or the end of the week and I think, well, I’ve been constantly busy, but what have I got to show for it? And I still feel like that, except I feel like that about the last 50 years.
Then she asked me about expectations and what are my expectations from life and from myself, and about when I was a child, was there pressure to succeed? And I thought, well, I seem to remember pressure being put on my sister (the eldest), but by the time it came to my turn, it was as though it didn’t really matter what happened or what I did, nobody really cared, I was just a spare part (which is something we’ve talked about before). And she asked whether I thought my sister had been successful on her own terms, and I thought, yes, I think she has. Then she said that some people would think that raising two children was quite an achievement, and I thought, well, I didn’t do that on my own did I, I don’t really feel able to judge how successful my contribution has been.
So we talked about my life, and how I seem to have achieved all the things I wanted, one by one, but that none of them ever actually made me feel happy in the end, none of them fill that psychic hole. So I’m still thrashing around in the dark.
Then we started talking about my novels (or novel and a half), and she asked me to explain what they’re about (which I don’t really like doing). But she made me realise – which I have sort of noticed before – the parallels with my life. And here I am half way through the second one, knowing where my heroine has to go, but not sure how to get her there, she is wandering around aimlessly, just as I am wandering aimlessly, hoping that it will be resolved one day…
And now seems an appropriate time to quote two things which I noted in my journal this morning.
Today’s entry for ‘365 Tao’ contains the following:
‘… commitment needs something else in order to be perpetuated. It needs discipline. This is the perseverance to keep on when things are tough. Adversity is life’s way of testing and perfecting a person. Without that, we would never develop character…. If you want to be special… you have to be able to stick to things even when they are difficult. Commitment and discipline – these are two of the most precious words for those who would seek Tao’ (Deng Ming-Dao, ‘365 Tao’, p 271).
Yesterday evening I was reading a book I borrowed from the ‘book box’ at creative writing on Monday, called ‘Writing the Bones: Freeing the writer within’ by Natalie Goldberg. This is what I read:
‘Discipline has always been a cruel word [no comments, please, Suzee ] I always think of it as beating my lazy part into submission, and that never works. The dictator and the resister continue to fight… If those characters in you want to fight, let them fight. Meanwhile, the sane part of you should quietly get up, go over to your notebook, and begin to write from a deeper, more peaceful place… you might have to give them five or ten minutes of voice in your notebook. Let them carry on in writing. It is amazing that when you give those voices writing space, their complaining quickly gets boring and you get sick of them’ (Natalie Goldberg, ‘Writing Down the Bones’, p23).
So everything is telling me the same thing: persistence, commitment, discipline, even if you can’t see where you’re going just keep going, put one foot in front of the other. The same thing came up at meditation the other week, the session leader saying that most people don’t have to try for as long as I have before they see some progress. Same from the sleep therapist when I saw her on Monday. But sometimes it takes longer. Kizlode said it too – maybe I wasn’t ready for the counselling I had before, and maybe I am now – or maybe not, but I won’t know unless I try. How long do I have to try? As long as it takes. How long is a piece of string?

Now I want to describe my second counselling session.
I went along, prepared to say some of the things I thought about after last week – in particular, that I wasn’t sure this was right for me, that I hadn’t done a lot of research into what was available but had gone to Relate because I knew about it.
She started to laugh and said: ‘This is exactly what you told me last week about what happens with your relationships’ – and I realised she was dead right, I grab whatever seems to be easily available, then fret afterwards that I didn’t make the right choice, that I was too hasty, that there might be ‘something better’ out there that I’m missing out on…
Then we got on to talking about what we could do. She said she could help me to look at and think about my relationships because, of course, that is what Relate is all about, but that through that we could also look at my relationship with myself, which is at the crux of everything.
She also said a couple of other really perceptive things (why should that surprise me? That’s her job after all!) We talked about how I always look for the ‘aaah, but…’. In everything I do, there is always an ‘aaaah, but’. But this doesn’t only apply to my personal life, it’s the basis of my whole intellectual approach, looking at uncertainty and causality and the multitudinous ways things find of going wrong. Murphy’s Law is my credo, and the back-of-a-fag-packet summary of my PhD thesis is: ‘Shit happens, but nobody does anything about it till it hits the fan’. I'd never actually made that connection between the personal and the intellectual until she asked me about it.
In the course of this, she asked what impact I thought this attitude to the inherent uncertainty of life might have on my relationships, and when I thought about it like that, it made me realise that it would probably make it very difficult for me to trust people…
So, there was other good stuff in there, and it was a generally very positive session. And I’m going back again on Thursday

I have started going to counselling again, after several failed attempts in the past (hmm, I probably shouldn't have used that word, 'failed', should I? There again, I shouldn't use the word 'shouldn't', either).
Anyway..
this is what I wrote after the first session:
I just came back from my first counseling session with my new counsellor, Jackie. My first reaction is… I’m not sure. I’m put off by her accent – she sounds uneducated – now how snobbish is that? She must be reasonably intelligent and qualified, or she wouldn’t be a counsellor. I don’t know what to think. I made a start, I told her quite a lot about myself and where I think the problem’s coming from (as far as I can tell). She didn’t say much. But she did get me to start thinking about my childhood, which, yes, I knew I needed to do.
She asked if there had ever been a time I could remember when I could say I was ‘happy’. Well, who can say? When I start thinking about that, the instant reaction is to say ‘no’, but that it probably just looking from here.
She asked stuff about the start of my relationship with Hubby, and we got on to my first marriage and how things happened from that, some of the stuff we covered in the joint sessions we went to a few months ago (different counsellor).
She also got me thinking about when I first went away to university, and I realised, yes, I was happy then, for a while, happy as I now am when I go away to conferences.
She commented on the way I said, ‘oh, but it only lasted for a term’. Well, I can remember getting seriously miserable around the Christmas time, and when I went back, boy trouble, as usual. And I know some of the way I was feeling from a diary note from that time that I came across recently. When I re-read it , I was struck by how similar in many ways my feelings still are.
But, what am I going to do? I need to make the decision, I shouldn’t just keep going because I feel obliged to, if I don’t think she’s the right person for me to see. It’s too expensive to do that. She did say that maybe the other counsellors I’ve had haven’t really given me what I wanted (which is true), and that maybe I wasn't ready then.
She will be there next week, but not the following week. I’ll go back again next week (I’ve paid already) and maybe make the decision then. Maybe I’ll talk through some of these issues with her then (without telling her that she seems ‘uneducated’).

I notice that in the email notifications of comments on my previous blogs, the title appears as 'Why I dont blog (much)'. I was mortified to think I might have missed out the apostrophe from "don't", but not to worry, it's obviously just a quirk of the way those emails are composed.
Phew!!!

Reading Trolly’s manifesto http://bloggerel.blog.co.uk/2006/09/20/blogging_a_personal_manifesto~1143967

 and also catching up with other people’s blogs after an interval of a week or so, set me off thinking about why my relationship with blogland is so intermittent.

I started this as a way of getting back at my husband when I was angry and confused and in a lot of (psychical) pain.  Prior to that, of course, I have written forever, and written a daily journal pretty much consistently for about the last 5-10 years (and intermittently before that), but not one I have ever felt inclined to share with anyone else.  So, I stuck all this pain and confusion in this weird, semi-public space, and discovered that people were replying to what I’d said – which I really hadn’t anticipated.  In some ways this was quite exciting, but in others a bit disturbing.  Some of those original blog friends of mine have since sunk below the horizon, but new ones pop up every now and again.

Sometimes the responses are helpful and enjoyable, and encourage me to find out more about the senders, and try to establish a ‘relationship’ of some kind with them.  Others, even from people I’ve previously considered ‘friends’, have been less than helpful, have struck a nerve and driven me deeper inside myself.  On the whole then, pretty much like ‘real’ friendships, but speeded up and more intense.

Sometimes blogland can seem very cosy and a bit cliquey and makes me feel that I’m standing on the fringes of this group of people who all know each other and are constantly sharing in jokes that I don’t understand, so that I feel very much on the outside looking in.  This, too, reflects the way I often feel in social situations.  Mostly I am still the kid who no one ever wants to play with - in the immortal words of Janis Ian: ‘Those whose names are never called/When choosing sides for basketball’.

(Just read back that para and realised that I had used the phrase ‘on the fringes’ three times, so had to do a bit of editing there!)

Sometimes people do seem to want me to play, and for a while I feel like I am one of the ‘cool kids’, but then I worry that I will be found out, there are days when I just don’t know what to say, I don’t know how to respond to those other people, that they will think I am thoughtless and shallow if I don’t say SOMETHING, but that all I can think of to say is thoughtless and shallow anyway, or I just even don’t bother checking what other people have been saying, because real life is complicated enough and I just don’t have time for this.  And I think, maybe I am just too selfish and self-centred and not really considerate enough of other people’s feelings, so I don’t really deserve to be part of ‘the gang’, and then, as Lady Lucy would say, the whole ‘guilt trip’ kicks in.

As I said, I write constantly, I always start the day with writing 500 words in my journal (that’s a hand-written page in my A4 diary, which has very narrow lines, or 2 A4 pages in the old ringbound ‘Pukka pads’ I used to use, or 4 pages of the A5 ringbound notebook I take on holiday, or 1 page in Word, single spaced, 12 point Times New Roman).  Since I’ve been on this sleep regime where I get up at 5:30, writing in my diary is the first thing I do, so I had already written 500 words before I actually came on line this morning and started this particular rant.  Then I have been trying to start my working day – assuming I don’t have to go out anywhere -by writing (on the computer this time) 500 words of my novel – at one time, I used to be able to do this quite easily, and built up quite a lot of text over a time, though other things took over my life, and now I’ve tried to restart and am finding it much harder.

For a while, I tried putting my daily journal onto this blog – but I gave up on this for two reasons: first, because actually sitting and typing it all in was just taking up too much time, for a while I was running on a backlog and typing up a whole week’s worth of entries on Sunday, but it just got ridiculous, and I had too much else to do.  The main reason though, is that those entries are SO personal and introspective, and so filled with my deep feelings about myself (self loathing, guilt, despair etc etc) that I found the responses I was getting back were just exacerbating those feelings.  I felt trapped inside a hall of mirrors of my own misery; of people telling me I wasn’t entitled to be miserable, which made me feel guilty for being miserable, and then of being told that I wasn’t entitled to feel guilty either, which made me feel guiltier still for feeling guilty…

So, here I am.  Why am I doing this?  God knows I have enough other things to do.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

‘What makes women happy?’
Headline on the front of the Sunday Times magazine.
Search me, mate, if you ever find out let me know, I’ve been wondering that myself.
Finding baby fish in my pond last week made me happy (fleetingly). I bet they didn’t put that in the article.
Thing is, little happinesses like that (there’s a French expression for them that someone told me once, but it escapes me) are all very well in the general run of things, but they’re no defence against the Big Miseries.
And anyway, how can you possibly generalise? You can no more generalise about what makes ‘women’ happy than about what makes ‘people’ happy. We are all different, after all, what makes you happy won’t necessarily work for me (and you probably don’t even have or want a pond, never mind baby fish).
Then I read the article – 7 articles, in fact. And most of them were crap.
But Ariel Leve hit the nail right on the head:

‘…more than anything else, women want to be heard and understood. What makes women happy isn’t when a man pays for dinner, it’s when a man pays attention. Attention is the invisible currency. It is the only thing that can buy a woman’s happiness and devotion.
Ask a successful lothario: what is the skill that matters the most? Most likely he’ll say it’s the power to make a woman feel special. A woman feels desired when she feels she is being listened to. Is that too much to ask? Often it is. And if you have to ask, it’s too late. Whenever people talk about the reformed lothario Warren Beatty, they mention that he has the ability to make the woman he’s talking to feel as if she is the only one in the room. There is indeed something to be said about that when it happens. I’ve experienced it a few times, and it’s intoxicating.
Attention, for it to count, has to be genuine. Because, if they can, men will fake attention the way women fake orgasms: to get it over with. The difference is, we can tell.’

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2337690_3,00.html

Susan Greenfield didn’t have any answers, but she had been reading my mind:
‘Wouldn’t life be simple if footwear was the panacea, a generic prize that instantly ensured that warm glow inside? But to try to generalise a formula is as crazy for women in particular as it is for humans in general. The question to ask is not what makes us happy, but what are the different means by which we women get there?’

http://www.wordspy.com/words/protirement.asp
I am approaching the end of my third year of post-employment at the end of this month.
After spending five years when my kids were small struggling with a PhD, I then found that no one wanted to employ me –(not that I regret doing it, I did it because it was what I had to do for me, but I really wasn’t expecting to be turfed out of academia on my ear at the end of it). A couple of years of temping, short term admin jobs, bits and pieces and constantly applying for jobs culminated in me getting a 2 year fixed term research contract (via a ‘friend of a friend’), but when the funding ran out, I was out on my other ear. In the middle of the panic over having to start the whole wretched business of searching, applications, interviews all over again, I suddenly decided ‘I don’t need all this sh*t’. And I don’t need the office politics, the commuting, the nine-to-five, the childcare hassles (less of an issue when they get older, but they still need transporting from A to B ), the you-name-it.
Downsides: money, obviously, though I’m lucky in that we seem to get by – partly because, admittedly, Hubby’s income is good enough for the basics, and partly because I’ve weaned myself off that idiotic ‘shop-till-you drop’ culture (I’ve already got ‘way too much stuff’ as my friend Bev puts it, why the hell would I want more?) Lack of independence – which became a major issue last year when our relationship was shaky. Isolation – that was a problem at first, but I’ve got more self-sufficient, and the Internet is a great way of making and keeping friends. Lack of recognition – that’s probably the worst, though at least I’m still getting out to conferences and getting stuff published.
Boredom??? Chance would be a fine thing! I now have 3 part time jobs, lots of voluntary stuff, and I’m still trying to squeeze in the research and writing. (oh, and the housework and gardening, in theory, though they have gone to rack and ruin over the last few months). Which is where it starts to fall apart. As I realised earlier this year, I’d got myself into a position where I was still getting stressed out over all the stuff I had to do. But at least I have recognised it and can start to do something about it.
I’ve been criticised in the past for using the word ‘unemployable’ to describe myself (see description of blog) – on the lines of ‘with an attitude like that, you’ll never get a job’. But it’s not about lack of confidence – I know what I can do, what I’m good at – it’s about recognising the reality that employers don’t want to take a chance on someone who hasn’t got the right ‘track record’. Breaking back into the job market is bloody hard – if I were an employer presented with my CV, I wouldn’t look twice. So, I’m having to find my own way of living my life and making sense out of it. It ain’t easy. And I’m constantly bumping up against other people’s expectations.
But I’m starting to think that maybe I’m not the only one.

Last week I met someone who kept telling me to stop apologising and being self-deprecating. Now, I can try (it is incredibly difficult, but I can at least TRY), to bite my tongue every time I do something stupid, or thoughtless, or inconveniencing to another person (although usually what happens is that I automatically apologise, then have to apologise for apologising). Well, I can try to do that, but the point is that it does not change the way I feel – the guilt doesn’t go away just because I don’t express it. And what if they actually were bothered by what I’d said or done and I didn’t apologise – that would be awful.

To London, for the Royal Geographical Society conference.
I hate packing. Get out my Presentation Skirt, and notice that the hem has come down at the back. Pull out the other Smart Black Business Skirt – I don’t like that one so much because it’s a funny length (mid-calf), but it will do. Luckily, a little voice says ‘try it on’. OK, the zip must be done up – no it isn’t - JEEESSSUSS – no way THAT’S going over my hips. So, how bad does that hem look? Hmm, this one doesn’t want to do up either… OK, it’s done, look in the mirror…. Surely I can’t have put THAT much on in 6 weeks? Looks like it’s the black trousers, then…

Woke up at 3:30, did the yoyo thing for a couple of hours (get up, read for half an hour, back to bed, try to get to sleep for half an hour, get up, watch telly for half an hour, back to bed...) till the alarm went off at 5:30, after that, of course, I felt I COULD have gone back to sleep, but at my last visit to the clinic I was told not to let myself do that as we are trying to train my brain to sleep to a regular pattern.
So, came on to check my emails and found I had 32 new messages, ALL of which were spam!!!
Was trying to decide whether I am getting the full 6 and a half hours sleep half the time, think it's probably only about a third.
well, it has to get better.... doesn't it?

Just in case there are any fans of Melinda out there who haven't caught on yet, she now has a new blog,
http://www.melinda-in-surreality.blog.co.uk/
the password for the previous one having been lost forever in the darkest reaches of cyberspace...

‘Those who follow Tao strive for perfection, but they are wary about being called prophets. That is a limited role. Being a prophet represents a great trap baited with the temptation of self-importance. The ultimate aim of following Tao is to transcend identity. Those who call themselves prophets or even masters maximize their identities.
It is far better not to be a prophet, and to eschew the responsibilities, limitations and temptations. It is far better to be obscure and to be thought stupid.’ (365 Tao, no 233).

I’m of the generation who were brought up to think that modesty is a virtue, and that anyone who goes around blowing their own trumpet will (and deserves to) get shot down in flames. It is very hard for me to say anything boastful about myself, I feel awkward doing it, I feel it’s morally wrong (whether or not it’s factually correct), and I know that someone will respond by trying to make me feel small, because that is what happens to people who puff themselves up. So I hate to put myself forward as some sort of ‘expert’, even in circumstances where I think I might know better than others. ‘It is far better to be obscure and to be thought stupid’.
And then I constantly get criticised for being self-deprecating and not assertive enough. I just can’t win.
I know the answer is not to care what other people think. But I’m also of the generation who were raised to believe you should always put other people’s feelings and wants before your own. And that is not something which can be easily transcended, not without a huge backlash of guilt and self-disgust. And then I get criticised for being on ‘a guilt trip’, and accused of some kind of perverted, inverted egomania. I am trapped within who I am, damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

What the HELL has happened to The Archers???
I’m all for gritty realism, but…
First we had Alistair’s gambling addiction; then Tom getting on the wrong side of the country show mafia; then Robert losing his job; then Adam and Ian falling out over Ian’s plan to have a baby with Mads; then Ed coming back as a drunk and a crack addict…
And don’t you just know that these ‘tests’ Ian has to have are going to show up something seriously nasty??? (or, at least, they’ll string us along for a few weeks making us think they will - but it'll all work out in the end).
And now Sam is trying it on with RUTH of all people????
Now, I live in a small village, and I know the rural idyll is not all it’s cracked up to be, but honestly…

The paper I am writing for the conference I am going to in Oxford is due in next week, and I only really got started on the research this week. Writing an 8 page paper and a 20 minute presentation doesn’t take much, but you have to generate about 20 times as much material to be able to whittle it down and find something worthwhile to say. If I took a leaf from my ex-boss’s book, I could just recycle one I’d prepared earlier, but I have too much integrity for that (which is probably why he’s a prof and I’m not – OK, I’ll put the claws away now!)
I always have this feeling that what I have to say isn’t particularly clever or interesting or original, because if it was worth saying, surely someone else would have said it by now? Being out on my own, and not part of the research community, not having people to bounce my ideas off, I find it hard to gauge whether there is any value in what I’m doing. Sometimes I think, am I any different from the idiots who rant away on blogs? (present company excepted !). Well, yes, I know I am, I have read very widely and thought very deeply, I have had stuff published in some reputable journals and I have the respect of some seriously intelligent and thoughtful people, who probably wish I would stop wasting my time and get on with it. But there is always that fear of the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ moment, the thought that I will be standing up there trying to explain myself and I will get back that big ‘so what?’ Granted, it hasn’t happened very often, and even when it has, it hasn’t killed me. But it’s the feeling that I’m a fraud and a charlatan, and one of these days somebody will notice. It’s hard to shake off.
I have to learn to take what I do more seriously. If I only scribble away at it for a few weeks a year when I want to write a paper as an excuse to go to a conference, it is hard to keep up the momentum, and the faith. But it is equally hard to keep up the motivation when there are so many other things competing for my time, as there have been these last few months. And the only way I can ever get any one thing done is by ignoring all the others.

I have spent a lot of the last week fighting my dragon in private. Some of the comments I’d been getting were making me angry and frustrated that I couldn’t express myself better and explain my feelings in ways that people could understand. In the end I thought perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to share my feelings so indiscriminately.
But then I thought about the kind and caring people out there who have made comments which have really helped. Why is it always the hard and hurtful comments that stick in my mind? So I thought that maybe I would just pick myself up and try again. Because sometimes just keeping on trying for the sake of it is the only way to get through things. Maybe if I leave the dragon alone for a while it will give me some peace. I have exhausted myself with fighting it over the last few weeks. I know this doesn’t mean it will go away, it’s not ‘sorted’, but I’m just going to try and let it go for a while.
Quote from my ‘Tao’ book, day 153:
‘It is a… mistake to lose self-esteem simply because you have some flaws. Looking at your shortcomings and taking steps to eliminate them should be viewed as a dispassionate project. You are not worthless because you undertake to rise above your faults. That description is only for those who never attempt to perfect themselves. We all have a perfect core, a special self inside. That purity is perfect and holy; therefore, no one I worse than another.
‘We are all on this planet simply to reach back into that pure self. When we reach that spirit, there are no flaws and there is no blame’.

Have just spent half an hour looking up the story of Vortigern’s tower on Wikipedia, and I suspect that my memory from Mary Stewart’s ‘The Crystal Cave’ is a little faulty, but I’ll give you the gist because that’s what set me off on this line of thinking.
Vortigern tried to build a tower at Dinas Emrys (‘Fort of Ambrosius’) in North Wales, but it kept collapsing overnight. His advisors told him that he needed the blood of a boy with no father to mix with the mortar in order for the tower to stand. They brought to him the boy wizard (no not that one), Aurelius Ambrosianus (aka Merlin, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, and M Stewart), who told him instead to dig under the foundations of the fort, where the workmen found a pool, at the bottom of which were two dragons, whose fighting caused the tower to collapse.
Last night it occurred to me that Vortigern’s tower was a good metaphor for my psyche/soul/personality, whatever you want to call it. However hard I try to build it up, down at the bottom of the pool there is a dragon which refuses to give me any peace.
I may appear on the surface to be coping well, to be getting on with life, ignoring what’s going on down there, but the dragon, though it may be asleep, never actually goes away, and night after night it comes back to do battle.
I believe ‘The Hobbit’ has some comments to make about dragons, though I can’t be arsed to look them up after the struggle to check out Vortigern. I never really took to ‘The Hobbit’, probably because I read it at just the wrong time, in my late teens, when it struck me as too much of a kids’ book - a few years earlier or later and no doubt I would have loved it.
Anyway, I digress. Dragons are tricky beasts, and I guess the dilemma with them is this: is it better to leave them alone while they’re asleep, and just hope they won’t wake up, or to fight them and try to destroy them, given that in order to fight them, you have to wake them up and bring them out into the open?
John Bunyan (a good old Bedford boy, BTW) would probably name my dragon ‘Dragon Self-doubt’ – a catchier moniker than ‘Dragon Negative-Mental-Attitude’, IMHO. However, his advice for dealing with it would probably involve me putting my faith in the Lord – not something that Cassandra or I am comfortable with
My dragon is capable of sleeping for long, long, periods, and sometimes I manage to kid myself that it’s gone away altogether – but it never actually does. Even when it’s quiescent, it still affects my self-esteem and assertiveness. Occasionally people will notice and say things like: ‘You should stick up for yourself more’, or ‘Promise me that next time someone interrupts you, you won’t apologise’, or ‘I don’t like the way you begin you profile with the word “failed”’, or ‘If you describe yourself as “unemployable”, you will be’. I’m sure they’re all very well-meaning, but what happens is that they wake the dragon. While it’s asleep, it only really affects myself, it might make me miserable, and stop me living a truly satisfying life, but hey, I say to myself, who has a really happy and satisfying life anyway, what makes me so special that I should be entitled to happiness?
But when people notice and say to me: ‘but why aren’t you happy, you deserve happiness?’, I start to wonder if maybe I could be happy, as in long-term, everyday satisfaction with my life that doesn’t evaporate at 2:00AM every night; as in waking up every morning looking forward to what the day will bring…

Then up leaps the dragon, and I have to fight it again and again, and it wears me down, night after night it comes back and I can’t escape.
So, it would probably be better if I could get rid of the dragon permanently, but I don’t know how to do that. Nothing I’ve tried has ever worked for long.
It may, though, be weakening slightly compared to how it used to be. For example, I haven’t seriously considered suicide for a long time, and I don’t think I despise and loathe myself quite as much as I used to; these days I tend more to get angry and frustrated with myself, which I think is an improvement. But at this rate of change I don’t think I have enough time left to get rid of it for good. So maybe I’ll try to go back to ignoring it, or at least stop inflicting it on other people. As long as people can accept that this is how I am, and not expect me to suddenly turn into Pollyanna.