Woke at 4:30 then went back to sleep until the alarm went off. Again. There again, I didn’t get to bed till midnight. PC meeting last night. I was late getting there, and I’m the only one with a key for the village hall, so they were all standing outside in the drizzle. I’d made up my mind I wasn’t going to apologise for anything last night, or be self deprecating, so I didn’t. There is one woman who makes such a fuss of me because I work so hard and I’m so stressed. She always tells me not to apologise, but she wasn’t there last night. I hope she’s OK. She rang up a couple of weeks ago saying she was going to resign. I hope she doesn’t, apparently she hasn’t said anything to the chair so I guess she isn’t.
I feel bad about other people’s misery because I feel so helpless to do anything about it, in fact I’m sure I make it worse. I thought about this in London, I think I wrote something in my notebook. About how the things I do and say have the potential to hurt people, who don’t deserve to be hurt. How for years I’ve tried to absorb and neutralise everybody else’s unhappiness, always to try to put other people’s feelings before my own, though I don’t think I’ve done a very good job of that either, still I keep trying. And what does that mean? I thought about this when I was walking through Kensington Gardens, and looking at the plane trees, with their mottled bark, every colour from silver to green. They absorb all the pollutants from the air and then excrete them out to the bark and shed it so that it comes of in patches and leaves this mottled effect. I try to absorb it all, because others’ feelings must always take priority, and yet it doesn’t seem to work that way, I make myself miserable but I make other people miserable too, and I can’t see a way out of it all.
This has got me a long way from the PC meeting. I ended up doing the preparation at the last minute, putting the correspondence file together and hoping I hadn’t forgotten anything – well, of course I had, I knew I would. But trying to stay calm and make sure the most important things were done. Because I was trying to focus on the magazine. But actually I wasn’t focussing at all yesterday morning, I was just allowing myself to get distracted as usual. My mind runs off into byways of its own and doesn’t concentrate on the matter at hand.
Even though I haven’t actually stopped completely at all over the summer, apart from the times when I’ve been away for a few days, and I don’t feel as though I’ve ever had a complete rest, I realise now that things have started up again how much worse it can be when everything is happening again.