Linc Part I

Despite having a dog when I was younger since dog-sitting Lincoln I’ve been on a massive learning curve. Before Linc I had no idea it was possible for a dog to suffer with abandonment issues ... for those of you who are sniggering and thinking I am one of those people who attribute human tendencies and attributes – neurosis included – to their pets I am one such person but not this time. Stop scoffing ‘Yeah right of course love’ and read on for a moment, I promise you will be laughing (at my expense admittedly but you will be laughing) by the end of this post.

Lincoln – named after Lincoln Burrows from the series Prison Break, although I think you already know this from a previous blog – is a 2 year old golden Labrador and weighs as much as me (more I’m hope otherwise I feel fat and feeble). When we go for a walk it is more a case of him taking me for a walk, not only does he pull me along the street like he is making a bid for freedom but he has this ‘thing’ about having to be in front of you. I’m not just talking about a pace or two I mean a whole foot out in front. I’m almost inclined to believe that thinks he is showing me the way to the field where I walk him 3 times a day... I said almost. I know you’re saying that’s ridiculous but you should try running to get ahead of him. This thing about trying to get out in front of him soon turns into a sprint with me looking like a twat. Here’s what I mean; he’s pulling me along to the point my arm feels like it is being ripped off at the shoulder, my pockets are stuffed with balls he will never retrieve when I throw – he’ll chase them but clearly I am the one who threw them so it must only be right that I get to ‘fetch’ them myself – all while I desperately try not to fall flat on my face grazing whatever appendage happens to hit the pavement and break my fall first. You’d think I learn and give it up wouldn’t you?...clearly not because I do it every time I look after him. I’m pretty sure there is a village somewhere out there calling for their idiot (me) to come home.

The other day I decided I’d give him a bit of a change from walking around the field, I reasoned that it must get pretty boring for him going to the same places, sniffing the same tuffs of grass, peeing on the same fences etc. I decided I’d take him to the local shop with me. That would be my first mistake. Linc, as I learned, not only has to be out in front of you, but also will purposely (yes purposely) walk in a crooked line to block any of your attempts to get along side him or in front of him. The result? Me looking like a drunk in charge of a dog weaving my way up the road to buy what can only be assumed is more cheap alcohol. So attractive.

By the time we reach the shop I’m a little frustrated and amused at the same time. My arm hurts, my hands are freezing, my nose is running and the little car park is rammed with mother’s having parked pretty much wherever they felt like it to pick their kids up from school. It beats me why they can’t walk there and back, most of them live on the same private housing estate where I do and it isn’t far but ... well, I can only assume it must be that ‘massive’ hill we so clearly have to walk up... Just as Linc and I are turning up so does another person with their Alsatian, knowing Linc has the tendency to rub other dogs up the wrong way I quite superiorly advised ‘Don’t be stupid and tie them up together, that’s just asking for trouble’. I know, I know, head up own ass springs to my mind too. My cheeks are still tinged twenty shades of Dulux red at the mere memory of it. Being the kind hearted man he was he let me go in the shop first and that was when all pandemonium began to break loose.

The moment I stepped out of sight and through the door Linc began to bark and howl like his life depended on it. Obviously it was just my luck that the shop was full of afore mentioned mothers buying the much needed provisions for the arduous journey of that hill for their offspring. I dutifully ignored their frowns and looks of disgust because I was doing the right thing by not buying into Linc’s temper tantrum. I picked up my Pappadoms and joined the long cue still ignoring Linc. I was just about to pay when people started shrieking, kids started crying and utter chaos ensued. Innocently I turned to see what was going on... you already know where I am going with this don’t you, pity somewhere hadn’t forewarned me. You guessed it Linc had, true to his name sake and the series, broke free, more than that he had come looking for me in the shop. I was mortified. Needless to say I did the only thing I could do; apologise profusely and made a hasty exit dragging Linc, as much as I could, behind me. If that wasn’t soul destroying enough the kind gentleman who had let me go in the shop before him was laughing so hard I thought he was going to forget to breath. To nail the final nail in the coffin of my being taken down a peg or two Linc picked up a dirty and discarded plastic bottle of Coke and wouldn’t be parted from it. Obviously I scolded him all the way down the hill. I didn’t care that I looked like I was talking to myself (in addition to be drunk) I was giving him a piece of my mind. Once we reached the front door Linc promptly dropped the offending plastic Coke bottle on the door mat and sauntered through the door. Nice.

The moral of the story is... pride and animals do not mix. That aside, I have him again this weekend and I’m wondering what adventure he will take me on this time.

To all hopeful and aspiring writers...

I’ve stumbled across one or two websites I thought might be of use. I haven’t used them myself so I can’t vouch for how useful they will be but surely they are worth taking a look and making that decision for yourself.

To cut a long ramble short they are websites were you can post your stories, regardless of genre, and receive feedback. From my own point of view feedback is always good especially when it comes to ideas/plots etc.

I know taking that step to put your work out there can be a hard decision to make and the very thought of doing so is scary. But ask yourself this – how is posting your stories on line for others to help you realise their full potential, to help you gage public interest any different to keeping a blog with your personal thoughts and feelings? Is the sense of exposure not the same?

I’m not a quotable authority and nor am I endorsing sites I merely thought I might mention them to others who might be thinking about how to get their writing out there. This is purely my own opinion but... NOTHING VENTURED, NOTHING GAINED.

So here goes... and please feel free to mention any others that people can think of or know of.

http://www.webook.com
http://www.critters.org

The Monkey on your back

I’m not entirely sure I can do this subject justice and if I shouldn’t just leave it well alone... But here goes...

Those of you who know me (and those who have read my previous blogs) will know I’ve often referred to having gone through a difficult time in the last few years. That said, as frank as I’ve been in my writing I have avoided or skirted around the one word and topic that never fails to silence everyone in the room and make most shuffle uncomfortably in their seats...DEPRESSION. Those who feel unwilling to go any further now is your cue to leave my page... go on I won’t be offended. I won’t even be surprised.

Now I’ve opened up this topic I don’t know where to begin. I’ve been begging and wishing for people to see me, to really see me and to listen to me (albeit to myself) and now that I’ve got the chance ... I am somewhat lost. I don’t know what to do with the attention. After some thought I’m going to start with the hardest thing I have to admit...

I have often gone to bed at night wishing and hoping that I wouldn’t wake in the morning. There, I’ve said it. I didn’t want to wake up in the morning and have to try to make it through another day feeling all the awful things that I did. After a while though I feared the night as much I feared the mornings. Sleep was the one place that I could hide in, that I could seek refuge in and where I didn’t have to have all the thoughts I was having. That was until the nightmares and lucid dreams came. Then there was no place to hide and no sanctuary.

It’s hard to pick out one thing as the worst thing in suffering with depression. Is it the nightmares? Is the being unable to stop crying (when I start this can and does last for days)? Is it the all consuming sense of isolation? Is it the panic attacks? Is it crippling fear and doubt? Is it the aching body? Is it the inability to make sense of it and yourself? Is it the desire to sleep and never to wake? Is it the being unable to love and be loved? Is it the need to run far away yet feeling you have nowhere to go and no one to turn to? Is it being told ‘to pull yourself together and to just get on with it’? Is it being told ‘to stop wallowing in it’? Is it being advised ‘to try to get out more and to do some exercise’? Is it the deep sadness that won’t leave you? Is it the belief you are going mad? Is it being dismissed by everyone as being a drama queen? Is it not being able to think about anything else? Is the feeling of being entirely overwhelmed by everything? Is it the loss of your voice? Is it the paranoia? Is it the mask you wear in an attempt to safe guard and hide yourself? Is it the emptiness? Is it the lack of trust in yourself and every thought or feeling you have? Is it the pushing people away?

I don’t know; they all hurt immeasurably. Oh that’s right I forgot to mention the hurt. I forgot to say how much that one seems to stay with you as a constant companion while the others ebb and flow, replacing each other.

I think one of the saddest things about depression is that you start measuring days in terms of being a good day and a bad day. A good day is when you are able to get out of bed and go through the motions of living. A bad day is when you are unable to stop crying – even in public – and it doesn’t make you feel better like you’ve always been told a good cry will. A good day is when you are able to feel reasonable rather than emotional. A good day is when you don’t feel like a disappointing failure. Ironically a really good day is when you don’t measure the day in terms whether it is a good or bad day – when it is just a day.

The best day, the kind that you aspire to having, is one that is full of hope.

How do I feel now? Like there might be just that. And, that is the key; to have hope and to know that it is out there. One day you will start to feel it. One day things will start to get better and the first step is to say that to yourself, to say ‘Things won’t always be like this and I won’t always feel like this.’

Spring Cleaning

We all go through difficult periods in our lives. We experience things which test our resolve and shake the foundations of our world with epic proportion. As painful as such experiences are they are an essential part of life and spiritual growth, and admittedly while I do not find any comfort in that at present I will respectfully bow my head and accede there is truth in it. I find it hard to believe people suffer only for the sake of suffering and for no other purpose; some things just hurt too much and wreak too much debilitating devastation for there to be no lesson to be learnt from it. My mum as often told me ‘Things always happen for a reason’ and I believe I am coming round to this way of thinking, however slowly.

When I was younger if something was on my mind and I had a problem which needed to be solved – it was usually something internal that I needed to work out for myself – I would change things around in my bedroom. I would in effect spring clean my room in an attempt to spring clean myself spiritually. Some how by moving all of my furniture in to the hall way, usually involving a great deal of pushing and shoving and sheer stubborn determination to move it (I have never gone in for small pieces, the bigger, sturdier, heavier and older it was the more secure I felt) I could physically sort through all my belongings and see what I was going to keep and what I was ready to let go of. Regardless of the weather I would tie back my curtains, throw open the windows and prop open my bedroom door so that the wind could blow and carry away with it the cobwebs of my unneeded past.

I am sure mum loved coming up the stairs to find the top landing almost impassable and being more or less unable to get to the bathroom or to her bedroom. She would not say anything to me, no words of reprimand for the mess I was creating or the dust I was disturbing (I have always had dust fairies living with me, they keep me company and make leaving messages to surprised readers fun). She would survey the piles of clothes, cosmetics, cuddly toys, the mounds of books and folders from school and college and my various bags all heaped in barring disarray and carefully pick her way around it all. She would not even raise an enquiring eyebrow because she knew it was some thing I had to unravel and reorganise by myself. She knew that maybe after a few days when I had straightened things out for myself and in my own mind, there was every possibility I would go to her to talk it over, explaining and learning from it all.

It would take me hours, a whole day to go through everything I owned and to decide whether to keep it. Often what would happen is that I had stumble across an item - a letter, a toy, a top, a card, a near empty bottle of perfume, a photo – that would unleash a memory. It would prompt me to take a few moments to relive that moment or moments and I would be assailed by all that accompanied it; the tears, the laughter, the touches, the conversations ... all bittersweet. Holding it in my hand I could feel the physical and emotional weight of it, I could feel the impression it left on me inside. The heavier it felt within me the more inclined I was to set it aside to bury again for a little bit longer. Somehow I would just know that I was not quite ready to deal with it all yet but that it was only a matter of time until I could. I am not sure what made me know this or be so sure of it, instincts maybe, but I would know it somewhere inside myself. The more demanding the memory and the feelings evoked, the more difficult to fulfil or cope with, the more burdensome or oppressive it was the more I understood that the time was not right and I was not ready to let go of it yet , a longer spell was needed before I could.

Gradually as I worked through the physical trappings and markers of my life everything would be arranged into neat piles; things to stay and be displayed, things to buried in that Pandora’s box in the bottom of a cupboard or wardrobe for another time, things to be donated to others, things to be thrown away and let go of. Next would follow the herculean task of designating the things that I chose to keep with me a place, a home for them to reside for a period of time. Some items I would want to see on a regular basis as a reminder of my life so far, of love, of pain and understanding, of experiences shared and growth, of happiness and sadness, of humility, of pride and lastly but perhaps more importantly of hope. Other things I really would need to put in a box, securing the lid as tightly as I could before hiding it away underneath my hanging clothes in a dark corner. The memories and the hurt encased by four sides and a lid of cardboard were just too raw, too full of anguish, of sorrow and searing hurt that went too deep to be faced with on a daily basis. I guess then growing up I had not yet learnt the sadistic habit of surrounding myself with my hurt so that I could regularly reopen wounds just as they were healing.

The disarray and havoc I unleashed for a whole day on the top of our house was a part of my own journey. It was a part of me stamping my own identity on those four walls, of choosing what to display to others and thinking of what it might say about me and if I was ready to reveal that much. It was about taking stock of the things that were happening in my life and around me and making up my own mind about them. It was about determining my own feelings through how I dealt with things and how I reacted to them. While sorting through my belongings afforded me the chance to rearrange the physical trappings of my life and to make way for new things it was, more importantly, a way of doing the same mentally and emotionally. My hands and my mind would be busy feeling the weight of objects at the same time as my heart would be feeling the weight of the emotion that tied me to it. My heart was in the process of spring cleaning my soul and ridding me of things that prevented me from being able to continue to grow. I could not move on and progress until I had freed myself of the burdens of memories and feelings that kept me rooted in a place that I longer fitted in.

In short, those four walls became a reflection of my life so far, of the path I had trod and the pitfalls along the way, but more poignantly it reflected how I had been shaped. Ultimately those walls became a reflection of the new me. Rearranging my belongings was not merely a part of me growing up, or of getting to know myself, but of coming to terms with the knowledge life has a way of letting you know there are experiences that you need to go through and that there are lessons to be learnt. It is a bittersweet thing to concede that there is a measure of knowledge in life that can only be acquired by living through something alone, through accepting understanding can not come through the advice and words of another.

By the end of the day when I changed my bed linen, bathed and crept into the comfort of my bed surrounded by my new outlook and reflection, I would feel unburdened, purged if you will. A contentedness would suffuse my inner world and hope would return to nest until I had a need to go through the process again.

I think – for I am not sure given that it is always three steps forward one back on this journey – that I have begun to spring clean. Tentatively, I say that I believe I am beginning to immerge from my chrysalis, changed and having metamorphosed into a new version of myself. I no longer have as many physical things and belongings to go through as I did, perhaps that is why I find it so much harder to purge now. Perhaps I am not sure because I have yet to learn how to go through the whole process emotionally. Perhaps because I have nothing to physically discard I can not let go of the emotions, perhaps moving forward is a matter of learning how. I don’t know for certain. This could be yet another time in which I take three steps forward with one to be taken backwards lurking somewhere on the horizon, but I know that I long for spring. I long for the scent of freshness, for the faint promise of warmth and summer behind the bracing wind wafting through my open windows. I long for the fleeting appearance of the sun in the sky while the birds chirrup. I long for the crocuses and daffodils to remind all with the brightness of their blooms of easier climes to come.

Bad Day

Today is not a good day.

I’m in an awful mood and it won’t go away, in fact it is getting worse with each thing I attempt to distract myself with.

In response to my husband’s predictable advice to exercise I have – for over an hour – and it has done nothing to make me feel better. Perhaps this has everything to do with my Wii Fit telling me I have put on weight (stupid machine) but I don’t think so. I would usually make some kind of sardonic and deprecating joke out of the situation and my mood – including the putting on weight part - but I don’t even have my habitual fiery sarcasm to fall back today.

I feel frustrated and angry at being misunderstood and I’m tired of having to spell things out to people. If I can manage to see exactly what it is a person needs and when they need why the hell can’t the favour be returned? Are they that stupid and that self involved that they can’t see anyone else’s need beyond their own?!

I think today I will follow another piece of my mum’s advice: “If you have nothing nice to say it is better to say nothing at all” Yes I know you’re probably thinking I should just calmly talk to the person (or persons) in question and get it off my chest. Equally I know stewing on something like this is not healthy but I really am too angry to even attempt communication. It becomes a vicious circle: I’m angry that they haven’t recognised that I need something and known what it was without me having to tell them and then having to ask for it. I don’t understand how they can be so blind when I feel like I am wearing my heart on my sleeve. It hurts and I’m fed up with it. I’m too angry to rationally discuss this or to express myself without giving in to my desire to lash out verbally – that I know won’t get me anywhere and will just make things worse – which would probably not really be very enlightening since I believe it would mostly consist of profanities.

So I’m going to keep my mouth shut, hunker down and hope this awful day is over soon.

Forgiveness and Love

Forgiveness and love are complicated things. I would say they are intricately linked in ways I can’t even begin to fathom and find infinitely painful to examine at present. But like a true sadist I find that I can’t distract myself from its topic. I can’t leave this one alone; indeed I haven’t been able to leave this one alone to heal for a long time. Just when it seems that wounds are healing over, renewing themselves and becoming something other than gaping and all encompassing, I start ‘picking’ at it, re-examining it and fussing over it. I want to know why it happened, how it happened. Essentially it comes down to a need to know what I did wrong in order to end up with it in the first place.

Why is it that I find it easier to forgive family members who have hurt me than I do others? Perhaps it has everything to do with my mum’s words “You don’t hurt you sister, you love her” that I seem to unstintingly apply that mantra to most – but not all - things in my life.

Perhaps I forgive family that much quicker (although I can’t say it is ever easier) because I have to love them. You can do nothing but love them. There is, with family, a tie which can’t (not ever really) be severed. They are, at least in theory and are meant to be, the one constant thing in your life. No matter what you do they are meant to love you and to forgive you and vice versa. The reality is that it is never that easy.

The question I find myself wrestling with, and for some time now, is how you let go of hurt and love someone again? How do you get back to that place of trust and love that you were in before with them? What do you do if for so long it has been doubted that you can or will? How do you get back to looking at them with the kind of love that you did before?

The process of self-analysis is often misleading. I’ve found through personal experience that looking closely at things more often than not presents a distorted picture, distorted because my emotions at the time are undeniably so intimately connected and bound up in things that I’m not able to see clearly, I’m not able to be reasonable. I panic. My fears take over and I’m lost. Doubt insidiously works its way in to the chinks of my self-analysis and becomes all pervading. So, I ask, doubt aside, how do you recover from the kind of hurt that has wreaked a kind of devastation that has marked all other aspects of your life? How do you deal with the kind of hurt that has tainted and tarnished what feels like everything with such sadness you feel you might not ever smile (the kind that reaches and touches you inside) again? How do you heal from such a hurt? How do you stop the ashes of its rupture from influencing everything else? How do you look to the future knowing it is going to happen again and accept it willingly in the name of love? Is such a thing possible?

I look down the road of my future and I know, without really knowing how, that its going to happen again. It’s happened before, I’ve been here before. And while it is a comfort to know that I got over it, its a small comfort. Last time it didn’t take this long to work out, nor did it hurt this much and I can’t say that I knew then that it would something I would face again. I do take a measure of comfort in knowing I’ve begun the healing process but it all still hurts monstrously. Some days it is still so unbearable. It is crippling and debilitating in ways that I can’t describe, in a way that renders me speechless beyond tears.

No one ever anticipates just how devastating it can be to need someone, to really need them in ways that you’ve never experienced before, and to be let down. Reaching out to someone when you are at your most vulnerable, when you are crippled by the need for support and understanding, to find yourself totally alone is crushing. It isn’t just about trust, it isn’t just about disappointment, or hurt, or confusion, or fear, or even anger if you can muster your wits enough to experience that one. It’s all of those things, but its being assailed and assaulted by ALL of them at one and the same time. There’s no drawing your breath, there’s no gathering yourself together, there’s no picking yourself up off the floor. There’s nothing, just an aching and raw need to slip over the edge into oblivion. There is only the desire to freefall into its embrace.

I fell and there was no one there to catch me. The people I needed to be there for me wasn’t. I don’t need people very often – experience has taught me it is best not to – but every once in a while my guard comes down and I do. I allow myself to. It hurt. Really hurt. There wasn’t any anger about being let down, not then and not even now really. Just the hurt, isolated and alone like me. The hurt didn’t come from finding out that the person wasn’t the person that I thought they were - I didn’t have my wits about me enough to think that profoundl. It was more basic, more primal than that. It was about feeling vulnerable, feeling like a child and feeling abandoned.

I know the intent to hurt me was never there. It wasn’t something they consciously decided to do, but that doesn’t lessen the pain or the hurt. It doesn’t stop me pushing them away because right now I can’t love them the way I should no matter how much I want to. I want to be able to feel about them they way that I used to. I want to be able to look at them and to see their flaws without feeling the hurt and sadness that comes along with them. I want for them to be what they always were for me; everything.

How do you get back or move on so you can find that place again?

Oversensitive

Staring at this page it has occurred to me that I’ve been attempting to keep it blank, to stem my thoughts and feelings – like that was ever going to be feasible, got to love hindsight. I’ve been hiding, or at least attempting to at any rate, from all the things that are worrying me in the vain hope that they would (miraculously) resolve themselves without any input from me. But I didn’t come here to talk of hiding, I’m thinking about sensitivity. At what point does being a sensitive person become being an over sensitive one with poor self-esteem? What comes first – the low self esteem or the being over sensitive? And more to the point who decides which one you are and why do they get to be the one to decide?

Taking time to think about it, I’m now pondering the possibility whether all this doesn’t really come down to a battle for who is right and who is wrong? I’m reasonable enough (at the present moment) to see that when I’m being unreasonable there is always a right and a wrong. Hhm food for thought.

I can readily admit that I am a sensitive person, especially when it comes to my loved ones – they always know precisely what to say to hurt me while I try not to show it – not much of a surprise. Let’s see... what to unpack first why loved ones always hurt you more than anyone else or why I feel the need to hide it. Well, neither one is at the heart of my thoughts ... in a true narcissistic fashion I’m thinking just about myself. I’m looking at myself, looking at how I respond to different things and different people and I’ve discovered my world is an internal world because that is where everything happens for me. Insightful but not particularly helpful at this stage in figuring out when I went from a sensitive person to an over sensitive person. What does it say that I feel this migration from one thing to another as a loss? What does it say that I feel that it is a negative thing?

I don’t know when it happened but some time over the last couple of years I made the transition from a sensitive person to an oversensitive one. I went from a person who was able to utilise the anger she felt when I someone said something hurtful to her to get over it, to a person that feels constantly criticised and as though I am being found lacking in some way.

In my lifetime I haven’t often (can’t say never because there have been a few occasions that I have verbally lashed out) responded in kind when I’ve been ... how to should I phrase this... character assassinated (it’ll do for the time being). It was usually my older sister, the middle one, saying the hurtful things to me and mum had always said “You don’t hurt your sister, you’re meant to love her” Arguably it would seem I was either the only one listening to her when she said such things or my sister just didn’t think they applied to her, which would after a fashion make those things one and the same thing – you make up you’re own mind.

Basically I’ve gone from a person who would only take so much from anyone before I’d retaliate to someone who still doesn’t show how hurt she is but feels it keenly, more keenly than I’ve ever done before and never retaliates now. I no longer stand up for myself; I don’t see the point because it feels like a futile exercise.

I don’t like being called oversensitive (ironically it hurts and feels belittling) it makes me angry and defensive. It makes me feel like whoever is calling me it is doing so deliberately; because they know it is going to hurt me and they know it is going to make me defensive. It feels dismissive and reductive; like the person is just dismissing everything said, reducing it down and therefore diminishing the validity of what has been said. It feels like the equivalent of a person shouting louder than you just so their voice will drown out yours. And yes it hurts. It hurts that they aren’t prepared to even go through the motions of listening, it hurts that they aren’t sympathetic. Worse it makes me feel angry that they are, in part, right, I am being oversensitive and they have no idea how I wish this was otherwise. I can admit they are right because surely if it wasn’t then it wouldn’t hurt as much as it did when they said it?

Having recently (more than once) been told I am being oversensitive has made me think about all of this. It has made me wonder when I made the transition and how I get back. I’m not foolish enough to believe that there can be a complete going back, but I do believe a measure of it can be achieved and I want it. I want to go back to being sensitive but balanced, to feeling anger and momentary retaliation before I let it all go. I don’t want to hang on to every hurt and mis-justice the way that I seem to be doing now. I don’t know if that is possible and if it is how I achieve that.

So, once again, I’m stuck in this no man’s land of half realisations, its the proverbial two steps forward one step back.