End of the golden weather

Cicadas thrust their consonant-stealing calls into the air, cramming it up to the tops of trees. I try not to listen too hard, it’s maddening, there’s no space for thought between all those fragments of sound, layered endlessly and endlessly and endlessly.

The sun is there. It’s hot still if I let its gaze fall on me, but I’m not where it can see me, and the air is pleasant like the sea I swam in the day before yesterday; neither bath-water warm and cloying, or too cold, the chill that hooks little claws into the skin after I’m wet. It snicked my breath in a half hearted gasp before I went in (the sea the day before yesterday), but I had decided, and when I was in, I could have stayed in, leaning back and watching the water greenly distort the shape of my legs floating out in front of me (good legs; they take me places). I love the feeling of it on the soles of my feet. Especially that, because the beaches here are mostly broken shell that resist human weight, jabbing and stabbing upward, and usually I wear rubber-bottomed beach shoes, indiscriminate barriers between my soft feet and the outside world. But at the long, pale curve of beach where we were, the sea has ground the shells finer than elsewhere, or deposited sand to bury the shells, and there is less to offend the feet. So I made myself light, and then the sea took me up, no more significant than another bit of flotsam. – The sea’s secret, whispered in the waves that only creep on the sand: even you, o man, cannot bend me. We sigh with it, an outgoing breath as the body relinquishes its taut core; we have met with the unconquerable.

It’s been a long and hot summer. I loved and hated it. I love (love) always knowing the sun will be there. Maybe it’s my god, secretly, and I am a heretic against my winter birth. The sun makes everything alright, always, likes hugs in childhood it makes me feel safe. When I was a child I didn’t always feel safe, but the sun almost always was shining. Now it unsettles me when it disappears for weeks. I cannot rely on it in this place, and I long to be where it can be depended on again. So I loved this summer. Even the hate I said I felt wasn’t really hate, only a protest of the body labouring in the unblinking heat, shrinking into shrinking shade.

The cicadas are summer’s die-hards. Into summer they are born, and they resist the death of it. Raucous, inconsiderately consuming life while it’s theirs, I will sigh when their time is up, because summer’s time will be up too. Is up already, the calendar dictates, and the season already bends to it; this morning there was fog on the glass.  But the cicadas and the sun and I conspire. Better know there’s life in her yet.

We’ve lost something – it’s called perspective

My husband sent me this link today – it’s a photograph taken of the Milky Way in the southern hemisphere skies, and it’s incredible. It got me thinking – this is something that can be seen with the naked eye, but isn’t usually because of light pollution. It’s awesome, it’s massive, it puts things in perspective. Is it any wonder our ancestors, who for tens of thousands of years would have seen this sight every time they looked at the night sky, were spiritually aware – look what they saw every night. Something bigger than themselves. And it’s no wonder we think we’re gods striding the earth – pretty much all we see is what we’ve made. It’s hard to comprehend the impact we’ve had on how we see our world. As we’ve seen less of the awesome view above us, so our vision has shrunk, until all it seems to encompass is our navels.

Resources for sending the demon packing

And another very brief post from me today – since I wrote the other day about the demon Anxiety, I’ve come across a fabulous resource – Anxiety BC. It’s a website which is packed with all the info you need to understand the psychology and physiology of anxiety.

Here’s a couple of choice quotes:

“Most people do not recognize their anxiety for what it is, and instead think there is something “wrong” with them. Some people are preoccupied with the symptoms of anxiety (e.g. stomach aches, increased heart rate, shortness of breath, etc.).”

The Facts!
Myth:Reading, thinking, and learning about anxiety will make you even MORE anxious.
Fact: If you do not know what you are dealing with, how do you manage it? Having accurate information about anxiety can reduce confusion, fear, and shame. Anxiety is a common and normal experience, and it CAN be managed successfully!

Which I completely agree with – the first impulse can be to run and hide, but this knowledge is the key – and WILL help you see off the demon.

(Find more here.)

The website has info for adult sufferers, but also for parents of anxious kids. And there’s also this little book for kids which I’ve ordered but hasn’t arrived yet – From Worrier to Warrior: A Guide to Conquering Your Fears. I’ll review it once we’ve used it.

So there we go, onwards and upwards – or less politely, kick ass.

CG

 

 

 

 

The Demon Returns – and is Seen Off

In the last week or so, I hit a writer’s block of sorts. I had thought writer’s block was a dearth of words (and ideas), but that’s not what I experienced; I just couldn’t get into the creative headspace in the time available. It was partly that my time that week was especially broken up, and its hard to be creative in bits. But also, the demon Anxiety returned.

I could shut up about it, but I feel that would make me the good little bitch again, and screw that. I would imagine that most people who the demon visits feel the same as myself; you don’t want to talk about it. So we don’t communicate. I know this is how it was for me, from my earliest childhood experiences. I lived in a big black hole for years as a child, and not even my parents knew, because I never told them. I couldn’t, because the threat of anxiety is that if you talk, things will get worse, way worse. Like an abuser. Creepy.

So I’m breaking the rules. The demon has been hanging around in the shadows for a few weeks I guess, and last night he leapt on me as the sun went down. I was backed into a corner and so I called on my old friend Jesus (though we hadn’t spoken in a while). My religious/spiritual journey has been long and winding, and is still a work in progress, as is everyone’s. But more recently, I had lost not just my religion, but my faith also. Last night I had nothing left I to pull out of the hat; I’ve taken my supplements, and was doing CBT techniques, but I was drowning. I’d had a conversation earlier in the day with my mother in which I’d queried the validity of calling on Jesus , as suggested by an auntie to another over-thinker who’d been a friend of my cousin, who killed himself earlier this year on account of the demons. I challenged it at the time, but that evening I had nothing to lose, and I’ll say my bacon was saved, and leave it at that.

Today life is good, better than it’s been for a while. The trees in my garden and the ones I can see over the road make me happy. There’s a world of leafy green out there. The sun is setting, but the starkness of the winter-bare branches of the liquid ambar against the silver sky raises my spirits.

There are labels for people like me, one of them being “highly sensitive”. Labels are complicated – they have their place; for one thing, I’ve appreciated their Google-ability. But for whatever reason, I’m reluctant to take on another label, or be defined by it. However, I am very sensitive, and that explains a lot. I wondered for years how a person with no trauma or abuse history could end up in such a black place at 8 years old. My family were no more dysfunctional than the next family, which is to say they were not perfect, but it was a loving home. Things were complicated by my lack of social ability. It was like every situation stood alone; I wasn’t able to bring any previous understanding, sparse as that was to begin with, to bear on any given subsequent circumstance. That sort of thinking does have advantages – if every situation is new and fresh, then there’s always a new way to approach it, and that means thinking outside the box, that is, creative thinking. But a child like that who has no support will be very vulnerable, and I was, and every blow to my self-esteem was felt way more deeply than it warranted.

I recently heard of a lesser known Romantic poet, John Clare (lesser known to me anyway, even with an English literature major), who went mad enough to spend the latter part of his life in an asylum when the common lands in the English countryside were fenced in during the Agricultural Revolution. That’s how I heard it, anyway. Of course there was a preamble to his eventual madness – but you could say it was as simple as his sensitivity. Why not? What makes a person mad? Psychologists label brain chemistry and wiring, but they’re just describing a thing that is, with or without whatever words they use to describe it. Sometimes I’m so aware of how barbaric some of our medical, and especially psychiatric, knowledge and practice still are.

In any case, I think the world does conspire to make sensitive people crazy, and I can understand how someone who had found healing for a troubled mind in wandering the countryside freely would be affected so profoundly by a restriction to that saving liberty in his lifetime.

I think if you were to ask any sensitive type, almost every one would say that nature is soothing and healing, and living in an environment where nature is subdivided and caged and fenced off is a strain. We take the way we live today for granted as if it were ever thus, but obviously it wasn’t. In fact, for most of our history, the land on which we’ve lived has been open and unowned. We don’t tend to think much about it, because it was a long time ago in relation to an individual lifespan, but hunter-gathering is still our most long-running way of life as a species. A profession older than prostitution. I’m not saying that nomadic iteration of society was perfect, but it’s what our species is adapted to. We haven’t had long enough in evolutionary terms to have adapted to living in close quarters and away from the land. So it stands to reason that the most sensitive of us will suffer, and the more we struggle, the more demand on our serotonin, until it’s depleted, which then leads to depression and anxiety, and a host of other problems.

The approach we are taking in our family, which is stuffed with sensitive, over-thinking types, is that it’s not if or when, we will have to take care of ourselves always, taking a multi-pronged approach to mental well being; understanding the psychology and physiology of anxiety (edit: here‘s a great resource for exactly this), cognitive behavioural therapy techniques, diet, supplements, exercise, recreation, spirituality, are all going to have to be part of our long-term plan.

I’ve suspected for a while that an emotionally sensitive person is likely to be sensitive system-wide, in other words, gut, skin and brain will be sensitive as well. It’s my experience and it seems logical. Something to think about, anyway.

And I tell myself, to put things in perspective so this latest experience doesn’t set up neural pathways of distress, that anxiety feels like shit, but it’s a feeling not a reality, and it’s temporary; when you’re in it, it feels like you always have been and always will be, but that’s an illusion.

And now I’m off to read our nightly installment of Lord of the Rings to my family. It’s cosy, the curtains are drawn and the lights are warm; the night is banished. The kids are still munching dinner, the youngest making those disgusting slurping and chewing noises bad mannered children with negligent parents make. I’ll exhort her to modify her eating habits (again), and then we’ll be off to Middle Earth.

Evicting Mrs Pauley

Writing 101, Day Eighteen: Hone Your Point of View
Craft a story from the perspective of a twelve-year-old observing it all.

They’re sending Mrs Pauley away. The police is there, with Mr Johns, dressed in his suit and tie like it’s a wedding. He’s the landlord. He owns a lot of the houses on this road, like ours too. So I know him. I know what he’s like when rent is late. He’s there on the step next day, no waiting, frown on and hand out. It’s not like the people here wants to cheat him, but mostly they works at the factory, and sometimes there’s trouble, and it closed for a few days, and then there’s no pay. And then rent is late. Like Mrs Pauley’s.

But Mrs Pauley, I don’t think she gonna be able to pay rent ever again. Mr Pauley, he was the one who worked at the factory, and he’s dead. Died from a heart attack three months back, just collapsed there at his machine. He’s just lucky he never fell into it, that’s all. That would have been a worse way to go than he did. And a worse corpse for his wife to bury. When I grow, I want to get out of this town; I don’t want to work in that place. There’s too many accidents, and one way I don’t want to die is in a machine, or later on, all mangled and crying out for the end.

But anyway, Mr Pauley went an easier way. It’s his wife it’s gonna drag on for. I don’t know where they’re sending her, for sending her is what it is. She don’t want to leave. She been in that house across the way from us with her family all my life, and much, much longer. All her boys was born there in that house and I hardly remember the older ones. Steve, the youngest, he only left last year for the city. He got away; all her boys did. I think she made sure they did, though it made her cry when they left. She can’t go to Steve; he don’t have a place of his own yet, she says. She says Robert’s wife doesn’t want her with them, only because there’s no room or money with all their own little ones too. Nobody can blame them, neither does Mrs Pauley. I guess she’ll go to one of the others, but she hasn’t heard from any of them yet.

Mrs Pauley is crying now as she brings her brown suitcase out to the car (black like the hearse that took her husband) that’s waiting to send her away; the tears run silent down her face and drop in big drops onto her chest. Her face is puffy and pink in the wrong places; no more cheerful smiles like she used to have on, when her kitchen smelled like a bakery and she’d have a biscuit for good kids who done her some favour, back when Mr Pauley would come whistling back from factory. I think I’ll always remember those biscuits of hers, better than me own mum’s, though I’ll never say. After Mr Pauley died, she stopped smiling, but she had no time for tears then. Then she had to work real hard, baking and baking, and trying to sell to the markets where they sells to the people who got money for treats. I guess baking makes a person smile less when you got to do so much of it. That and worry over rent. And after all the baking and selling and worrying, it still weren’t enough to pay Mr Johns. I don’t know why he need the money so bad, seems like he got enough, with his new clothes and his big car, shinier than the police one. He look like he got enough to eat too, and more than enough.

But Mrs Pauley been crying probably a week straight, since Mr Johns said she gotta go. Our neighbours is standing on their stoops and in the street, watching. They don’t say nothing, even the little ones like my sister Ginny, leaning into my folded legs; we all know there’s nothing to say. The police is there, and Mrs Pauley hasn’t paid her rent. It ain’t fair, and we all knows it, but we got no voice in this world. Voices are for people like Mr Johns, who owns their own places, and other people’s too. So we just watch. And Mrs Pauley cries, but she don’t say nothing either.

 

Lost, Found… Discarded, Part 3/3

I’ve lived here for many years, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how long any more – time isn’t the same once you’re dead. I don’t completely remember how I even came to be here, I just feel a connection with the place, so I stay. The family who live here, they don’t know I also do. Probably just as well, they’d think it was spooky to have a silent, unseen watcher amongst them. So it’s best they don’t know, although the boy caught a glimpse of me once; a mistake on my behalf. I hoped they would think he had imagined it, the way children do…they seemed to have forgotten that incident anyway.

I don’t want to worry them. It’s not as creepy as it may sound, hanging around them like this, it’s only that I’m lonely. I enjoy being around the living, being near the warmth of their everyday. I vaguely recall the emotions they seem to feel so sharply. I suppose you could say it makes me feel more alive, being near the force of them.

It’s winter now, and there’s a fire in the grate. The woman is sitting before it, looking into the flames. She has a name, but it never stays in my mind. Names….they don’t mean too much to me now either. I think they mean something when the lives of the people who carry them have a continuity to you. To me, though, the existence of individuals drifts in and out of my consciousness, much as they drift in and out of rooms.

The fire would be hot on her face, she is sitting so near. I can’t feel its heat, but I still watch the writhing flames. They appear more alive than me, but it’s an illusion born of movement only. How ironic. Now, though, they’re eating letters the woman is feeding them. This is curious. I remember letters. Usually they are kept if important, and discarded if not. To burn one is symbolic, the giving of a memory, or a promise, to the flame as if it were a funeral pyre. The woman opens a letter and reads it, while others burn. I am interested enough now to wonder what she is thinking. There was a man who lived here once also. I don’t remember when I last saw him, but he was with her when they first came here. There was emotion like a tumult in those days. It blew like a wind through the rooms of this house. Oh yes, I felt almost alive then. But not happy…

She crumples the last letter, the one she has read, and she puts it into the mouth of the fire without another pause, and we watch it burn.

 

Legitimate Fears & Phobophobia

Fear. There’s a topic for you. I know a bit about it myself. Most of us will at some point. Life is a dangerous undertaking, if you’ll excuse the pun in advance. You can tell by the fact that none of us get out alive. Ha.

People say there’s nothing to fear but fear itself, but I’ve always thought the fear of fear was a perfectly legitimate fear. Apparently other people think so too, because it has its own phobia – phobophobia.

There are all kinds of ‘legitimate’ fears – the fear of violence, the fear of bunjee jumping….the fear of clowns…..but sometimes a person can be anxious about some incredibly irregular shit too. Like catching buses, phoning strangers, and Dutch people. Ok I made that last one up. But I’ve had my fair share of being scared, both legitimately and illogically. It never stopped me. I rode long-haul buses, and my first job was cold-calling complete strangers for market research. Worst job ever. I must have lasted a month. Though I stopped short of bunjee jumping, I have done abseiling, and caving, and abseiling while in a cave. I once volunteered to help fundraise for a national well-child charity. I don’t think I did the charity any favours; I was epically crap at it. But I did it to push through the jolly jitters… It didn’t work. So much for exposure therapy.

I’m not scared any more. I think eventually my adrenal system just went, meh, whatever. Or maybe it’s because I got pissed off with being scared. Doesn’t matter, the net effect is, I’m no longer easily scared, and that’s a powerful position to be in – more so I think than if I’d never been afraid, because I know what fear is and can stare the bastard down.

How things have changed

When our time is almost gone.

This post by fellow blogger Michelle highlights how life and our expectations of it have changed in a lifetime – she says “I am humbled by the thought of oranges and apples treasured as precious.” Something like what I tell my kids at times. Imagine a different life…..

And she makes a good point – ” “Make do and mend,” a slogan from an almost forgotten era needs to be revived if we are going to become a more sustainable and inclusive society.” I feel like some of us are between two cycles of make do and mend – my parents are old enough to have a lot of that mentality still, and I feel their influence, and looking forward, can see our current way of living is not sustainable, so here we go again…

Lost & Found, Part 2/3

{Writing 101, Day 13}

A week or so ago, I wrote about the loss of a marriage. There were black dogs and big sticks and everything. Great story.

But this post is not about loss and gloom, no. It’s about what I found when I was finally brave enough to stand alone. It took me a very long time to gather the courage to step out on my own. One of the (many) things which mobilised me in the end was that I was losing myself, becoming someone I didn’t like and didn’t want to be, someone angry and defensive. My own family became so used to me being prickly that my brother once gave me a cactus as a birthday gift. But I remembered, even if they didn’t, that I hadn’t always been like that.

Saving myself was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a lot of things that scared me. So I gave my husband the freedom he clearly coveted. But I had two young children, and our future was a blank.

All that.

I wasn’t sure I wanted another relationship. Ever. The idea of being just me and the kids and a whole lot of books held a lot of appeal. But even though I wasn’t looking, I did meet someone. I could wax all soppy about him, but suffice it to say he’s all that.

He really is. And who am I to say no to all of that?

He’s had to have a lot of patience while I unwound, but he’s that kind of person. And he believes in me. He’s the reason I have the confidence to put my thoughts and writing up to public scrutiny, and why my children are psychologically healthy and grounded. For a lot of reasons, he’s my hero.

I once made a mosaic heart, with a pattern built from pieces of china. It’s a fitting metaphor of our life together – we’ve built a family out of the broken bits of our previous lives, but it’s not just a Frankenstein monster of make-do – it’s a piece of art.

 

I had a home in Africa

Writing 101: Where you lived when you were twelve

I turned 12 in a country a world away from where I grew up. My family had been spending a sabbatical year in the US, New England mostly. It had been a year of travel and immense and varied landscapes, of being popular at school for the first time (an experience the reality of which never truly sunk in enough to be enjoyed) on account of being “foreign”, and having an “exotic” accent, and eating with both a knife and fork.

In Connecticut we’d lived in a house with a lake in the back garden, a wooden house, with a fireplace that actually worked. There was a real forest over the road, and in winter there was snow and ice, and in autumn, trees which turned brilliant colours and dropped their leaves, changing the landscape entirely. It was utterly different from Africa. The year our family spent in the US for years afterwards delineated our lives into things that happened either before or after.

When we returned to Africa a few months after my twelfth birthday, we returned to the house where I had been born. I’d continue to live there until I left to be married.

It was a beautiful house, really, thinking back – it had leaded light windows, high ceilings and solid walls, pitched rooves and a bricked exterior grown over with a small-leafed creeper. It was double-storeyed, with the bedrooms up a turning flight of stairs that had, like the rest of the house, parquet wooden floors with loose parts which rattled in sequence a few minutes after someone had walked over them. It wasn’t eery, though; the house was too full of noise and family. Ghosts would have been disgruntled by the lack of attention and left for more hauntable pastures.

My mother always said the house was too small for us, though. I suppose she meant there were too few bedrooms, since there were 6 of us and three bedrooms. It didn’t seem small to me, and in any case, I loved that house growing up just for being what it was; the place we’d always lived.

Being the only girl child, I had the privilege of being the only one with a bedroom to myself. I hated it. My brothers and I, when we’d shared a room in our younger years, had spent many whispered hours after lights-out playing games with torchlight on the ceilings, and besides which, I didn’t care to be left alone with the anxiety. I got used to it eventually, though. It was a tiny room, but it had the best view in the house.

We were situated on a ridgeline, and the back of the house on the top floor, where only the bathroom and my bedroom were, looked out across an undeveloped landscape of valleys and hills. Later on, squatter settlements sprung up there in the bush, and the regular calls of the muezzins drifting over from the mosques were interspersed with the sound of automatic gunfire stuttering up from the valley. But before that, I’d look out from my window, especially on moonlit nights (because the moon also laid claim to that valley) and think of Mowgli and his jungle.

It wasn’t that far-fetched a fantasy. As youngsters it was drummed  into us to look out for mambas and boomslangs and black widow spiders. I remember one time a king cobra was discovered in our hedge by a very jumpy gardener. Gangs of vervet monkeys regularly raided our suburban gardens for fruit – one bite of each before it was dropped to the ground; homeowners hated the buggers. Once, I attempted to see off a monkey in the avocado tree with a shooing and (ineffectual) waving of the arms. The cheeky blighter, affronted, came chattering angrily down the branch towards me, her reprimand more persuasive than mine, because I went scuttling back into the kitchen and shut the door.

There was a night when a man was killed outside the gates of that house. I heard the shot, a clap which made me jump, but I couldn’t place the sound, so I went on with my business and would have forgotten about it, except that the adults hastened out as the sirens came, frowning and looking grim. I followed them, pulled by a horrified curiousity, expecting to be scolded and sent back inside by my mother. At first, she, distracted, didn’t notice me padding alongside her in the dark, but when she did I received the anticipated flea in my ear and slunk back in, secretly relieved.

There was another time, years later, when I was alone in the big house with its iron bars on every downstairs window, when I spied out of the window a squad of policemen armed with automatic weapons advancing through the garden. I was happy to see them, actually. I’d had a man knock on the door ostensibly looking for work, and hadn’t seen him leave the property though I’d been watching, so I was panicking slightly, as I’d been trained. Turned out, a neighbour had been nosy enough to see the stranger arrive and not leave, and suspicious enough to call an emergency. Life was steeped in bloody horror stories in those days of violence and paranoia. We kept living like strangers and conquerors in the land, locked up behind walls and burglar guards against the barbarian hordes. Bravado isn’t lack of fear. I guess that’s why you need a squad of armed men to deal with a lone intruder. That incident was pretty much a non-event, though. No sign of the man was found, and the sergeant looked either disappointed or annoyed to have been called out for nothing, I wasn’t sure which.

When I left that house in the autumn of ’94 to begin a dysfunctional family life of my own, it was also in the throes of our international move. Within 6 months, the family had relocated across the world to New Zealand. In the commotion of immigration the sadness of not only leaving home but saying goodbye to it forever, barely registered. In the years since, StreetView has allowed me to walk down those familiar roads again, even though I’ve never been back. The technological magic of the warlock Google. The property has changed now from a family home to something more fortress-like. There’s a sense of disconnect, the distortion of a memory – but it’s an acceptable loss. Life goes on. But there’s no house that will ever stand in the gap left by a childhood home. Isn’t that just how things are?