Wound

I can do this - I can. I definitely can. I can explain how I feel not what I think. I'm a writer, right?

I feel outraged that I am not allowed to be as successful as him, career-wise. That was not the deal, was it? That I would walk three steps behind, forever, just because I started there? Didn't he choose me because I was bright and smart, full of potential? Why wouldn't I be allowed to catch up? Why wouldn't I be allowed to overtake, even?

I feel astonished that this would even be an issue. I was spoiled by spending my student years and early career with men my age who did not have an issue with equality. Or do I just feel naive for not realising this is how the world works? 

I feel sad, and stupid, that I held myself back. Because let's be honest here. He didn't actively stop me. I realised it was an issue and I stopped myself. If you asked him, he'd say he was there urging me on, supporting me all the way. Indeed that's what he says to everyone. And doesn't that make him look like a great guy? All this is going in the background, under the surface. I decided to hold myself in check, because it made things easier for me. It's the same sort of feeling as letting your dad win at mini-golf, just so that the family order isn't thrown out of kilter.

I feel angry with myself for doing this. And ashamed, actually. What a pathetic thing to do. I don't deserve to call myself a feminist. 

And I'm confused too. Why would I do that to myself? Do I really think it's important never to come first? And do I even have any sense of "winning" at life? I don't think I did, to start with. I think it comes from him. He language, woven in the weft, spun into the every everyday phrase of it, is of fighting, contest, competition, war. I never had this in my vocabulary. I played in orchestras, not tennis matches. I was made of collaboration, harmony, the belief that the most fun you could have it is to join with other people and make a perfect symphony. Someone who worked for us once said "he was born in the wrong century. He's wasted on this day and age. He should have lived in the days of Crusades, or pistols-at-dawn". How true. 

It was five years ago, more now, that a woman said this to me. That's another problem with all this Thinking. Not only does it seem to take up so much space there's not much room left for Feeling; it also seems like a weak alternative to Action.  I could have gone five years ago - and my god I'd have saved myself some trouble. 

In attempting to connect with how I feel, I have been rereading my diaries, and this blog. It made me cry. I am sorry for myself. I am sorry that I have put myself through this when I perhaps could have been gone 5 years already. I see how sad and lonely I have been, and I do see that I got in touch with my feelings, and wrote about them, and that I was walking the days like a great big open wound. 

I started to feel better when I stopped feeling.  I am afraid to experience what I might actually feel like with the boxes opened, barriers lowered again. This last year I have dragged myself back by my fingernails, inch by bloody inch, from the precipice edge of despair. I'm not going back there. I can't. I can't bear it. 

I still don't want to be settled for. And I would still one day, like to be the leading lady in my own life, and to be The Very Thing. 

Blaze

I am furious. 

I worked for 20 years to make a good life for the family.  All those moments I missed with the girls growing up, so that I could secure their future. All those hours I worked, so that I could pay off the mortgage. All that time I put into...

Hey, you know what? 

I have made a good life for the family. The girls will soon be at college, and I despite all the obstacles thrown in my way, it looks like they will finish school without having to move.  How lucky I was, after all, to grow up poor. I knew how to cut back, make do, and I have got through the worst of the recession without having to sell the house or forgo the private education. I have got them on the right track towards the futures they think they want at the moment, and they are doing pretty well, all things considered. 

Sure I've missed some moments, but I have a good relationship with the girls.  We're close, the love is there, strong and pure. They are good people - I am proud of them. Maybe they will make it through ok. 

I've lost myself in all of this - but I reckon I can find myself again.  I was so full of energy and ideas, there was so much life in me. Perhaps that's still there, like the sun behind the clouds, like the moon below the horizon. 

Maybe I haven't done such a bad job after all. 

Monilophyte

Okay, okay. I admit that was probably not a helpful image, the one I invoked in my last post. I can see how evoking that situation when I'm trying to unravel my feelings probably isn't going to help me.  Here's a nicer one - a fresh green fern. This could be me - small, hard and tightly wound, about to uncurl gently into a fan of soft fronds. Why not?

However the whole "feelings" business is still making me feel distinctly uncomfortable. I tried to come out of my shell, be more authentically Me, say what I thought, behave in a way that allowed me to be myself rather than someone who other people thought I ought to be. I wanted to get my life back to a place where I did not feel so alienated and detached from it. And now look what's happened. 

I was looking back over this blog and it made me cry. I started writing it five years ago, when I had so much hope that I could make things better for myself, even perhaps by the very act of writing.  It builds early to some touching optimism, then plummets fast to the greyness of depression, interspersed with some desperate but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to talk myself up.  It feels like a catalogue of failure: resolutions not acted upon, plans not delivered, aims not achieved, dreams that turned into a nightmare. 

Are things getting better? 

Well I guess they must be, relatively speaking. This time last year I was approaching a desperate rock-bottom. Now I longer feel that I want to disappear into oblivion. I think I am slowly rediscovering a direction, and formulated a medium-term plan. 

So how do I feel? How do I feel? How do I feel? I'm trying, really I am.  I feel sad that I got married for practical reasons, because my head told me to, even though my heart (and my friends) were screaming that it was a mistake, that I was selling myself short. And I feel angry with myself that I missed my cue to walk out of this particular doll's house when I had an open door three years ago. I feel ashamed that I am not showing my girls by example how to insist that a partner will treat you with consideration, kindness and respect. 

I am not The Very Thing. For anyone. That makes me feel like Nothing.  I want to be loved, and to make someone smile when I walk in the room.  I feel that I'm the inverse of this, that I'm on the flip-side of life. Spreading my misery like a disease to the people I get close to, and being too hard to love. 

Gauntlet

Here is my challenge. I am to get out of my head and into my heart.  I am to focus on what I feel rather than what I think.

This is hard, hard stuff. I am only really comfortable in the cool calm ambience of intellectual distance. Having to get down into the visceral stuff, the guts and gore of it, the awful, dreadful screaming, panicking mess of it feels scary. It feels like it might all be out of control. 

I did a project once for London Underground. They were looking at their process for what happens when someone slips down beside a train as it's pulling out of the station (or pulling in if they try to jump in front and mis-time it).  The person slips down and gets wedged, usually at the top of the hips or around the trunk (any higher and it's a straight one-under, a straightforward case of crowd control and haz-cleaning). 

When a person slips down the side, the train pulls the bottom of their body around faster than the top. Its like wringing out the bottom of a flannel. In these situations, it's common for the person to be alive and conscious. The twisting acts as a natural tourniquet, and they don't actually feel much pain. They think perhaps they are going to be ok. 

But when the train moves away, the tourniquet is released and they will definitely die, as all their main arteries are torn. Everything just drains out. There isn't really anything that can be done to save them. 

However there is quite a window of time, maybe even half an hour, when a family member could be brought to talk to them, when the situation can be assessed, when they are lucid and can discuss what might happen next. Should they be told? Should the family member be told? Should they be knocked out with morphine before the train is moved, even if they say they prefer not to be? 

Anyhow. My situation feels like this. Like I have been in a train wreck. That somehow I am managing to hold myself together, but that if I am untwisted everything will hurt too much and all the life will gush out of open wounds and I will just soak away.  

I will try and untwist, and see what happens. Logically speaking, I'm pretty sure I won't actually die.  Just need to convince myself to unwind gradually.  Little by little. 

Maybe a different image would be more helpful.  That might be a good place to start.

Unresolved

Do  you know what? I'm not even going to start with the whole Resolutions thing this year. Just another set of things to fail at. And all my Januaries are all the same - you know the drill. Write a novel. Publish a poetry collection. Fit into size 12 jeans. Learn to play Lullaby of Birdland. Blah blah blah.

This year I'm not going there. I'm just going to take it as it comes, see how it goes. All these plans and goals are just ways to beat myself up - and I clearly don't give a crap about them really, deep down, otherwise I'd have done them all by now. 

I am going to think smaller. Not a poverty of aspiration but more like a miniaturist. Do little things properly. Drink good coffee slowly out of a good cup. Brush my daughter's hair. Look out the window of the train. 

I am going to get stronger. I need to support my daughters, and to do that I need to stand firm myself. That means be healthy, eat right, get fresh air, try to sleep. 

I am going to write. I'm not even going to say what. Anything. Everything. I do know that writing makes me feel better. 

I am going to reconnect with myself. This is homework from my counsellor. Who the heck am I? Actually I think I already know the answer to that. I am my Collected Works. I am here. in these blog posts over the last 5 years. In my poems. In all the words I have churned and cranked out for work.  I am write here.