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.