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?