Pushing through (self-imposed) barriers

This weekend I got up and went to a gym class. 

It was so hard it made me cry. 

It made me hate myself, my body, my life. Not for the first time this year I felt like there was no hope. No point. I should just give up. 

I came home afterwards and got into bed, and cuddled my new soft toy Noah the whale. I stayed in bed lying there, listening to the same piece of music on repeat, and did nothing. Did some thinking and some dozing, but mostly I just lay there. 
And when I got up to eat, I told my sister how I felt. I didn't feel much better, my mindset wasn't suddenly "oh what a wonderful world we live in." It was more a grim acceptance. This is life. We are lucky enough to have been given it, and it is ours to do with what we will. My body is damaged and I must do what I can with it. 

That grim reality both fuels and quenches the fire of life within me. It tells me that "this is my life, I can do anything in it, I can be anything." And it also whispers softly, "No. All you are and all you ever will be is a speck of dust in this wide universe."

I felt similar tug-of-rope feelings in the month after my granddad died. "Life is precious", it shouted. "You might die any day so live the days you have with all that you can give them."
"No", it whispered. "Everyone dies in the end, that is the only guarantee in this world. Everything you do is futile."

So these imaginary voices tussle and so I get no further. 

I have aspirations of grandeur. That I will contribute to this world in a way that I will be remembered for. Somewhere, I and my achievements will be noted down. 

Not everyone can go down in the history books. But surely we can all be remembered by someone, for something.

I need to refocus my attention and energy on things I can make a difference to. To the lives of my family and friends, to the local area, the bits of volunteering I can do. And doing my job to the best of my ability.

But that leaves me with no answer regarding my body. It's damaged; is it beyond repair?

I guess I have to keep trying. And I'll note down my achievements so that somewhere, they're written down.

Can we do it all again?

What do you do when it's all done?
What do you do when there nothing left to organise, or plan?
When they have been commemorated or celebrated and cremated and then...
What's left?
When you're not building up to the funeral of someone you love, and worrying about whether it's going to be done right. 

Then what do you focus on?

Suddenly you're back in the real world: the world you rediscover the day after they die, because the day they die the world stops.
But the world keeps on spinning as if they never left and the next day you find it's business as usual, except you have an event to organise. 

And when the date comes and goes, and the event is over, then the really real world comes back. 
And it's actually business as usual.
And suddenly business as usual seems so fruitless and pointless and you're inconsolable and inconsolably angry for no reason and you're feel like you're stuck in a dead end which wasn't signposted as a dead end so surely there's another way out.
But you can't find it. You don't find it. Things are "normal" but they're not.

You're so irreparably changed that suddenly you can't stop thinking about the next one. 
Wondering who will be next and how that event will go and how they would want it.
And whether you'll do them proud.
As if they could ever be proud of you for accurately planning and executing their funeral.
As if your choice of flowers, or words, or music, affects how they feel about you.
It doesn't: it's all for you, about them. 
It's not about doing them "justice". 
It's not about saying goodbye to them in the appropriate manner.
It's about doing whatever you need to do, to say what needs to be said or what you want to say.
It's about realising that life is short, even if it's 80 years long, and if you don't say it now it may remain forever unsaid or unheard. 
And if it is too late for them to hear, saying it anyway, to people that will hear and will listen and will understand. 
Because then you've heard it said aloud. And you know it to be true. 
And since anyone so loved is gone but not forgotten, you have still said it to them, and they have still heard. 
They hear you because they still live in you. When you breathe, laugh, smile. Cry. 

They are a part of you in a way you cannot alter.
They always will be.

I love you, tomorrow/You're only a day away

I feel I want to fold in on myself. 
Fold myself up until I'm small enough to slip into someone's pocket.
And stay there, warm and safe. In the dark, with only a crumpled receipt and some spare change to keep me company.

Unless, of course, the pocket has a hole in it.
If that is the case, I might think I'm safe and warm in the pocket, and once my eyes have adjusted to the gloom, I'll go exploring.

And that's when the floor will give way and I'll fall through it, and be trapped in the lining with no way out.
Unlike the pocket, the lining isn't comforting.
The lining is that feeling when you're in a maze, and you're actually trying to find the middle, or the way out, without cheating, but you can't and you're trapped and you start to wonder if this is where you'll be for the rest of your life. If you'll ever see the outside world again.

Like the hole that you might disappear into, when someone you love dies it leaves a hole in your life.
A rip in the fabric of space, and time.
A rip in the fabric of you.
Suddenly, you are the pocket, and the hole is where your granddad used to be. And whenever you go anywhere near it you get the sense of emptiness, of a never-ending gloom. 

Tomorrow is going to be awful. There are no two ways about it. I am going to be crying or on the verge of tears from the moment I wake up. There'll be moments throughout the day when I think that maybe the tears have dried up, and then they'll spring afresh in the wells of my eyes and come streaming down my face and it'll be all I can manage not to let out a heaving sob.

I want to fold in on myself. I want to save the memories of my granddad that are inside me and if I fold myself up and shut down from the outside world they will be safe. And warm. Protected inside. 

I don't want to lose them like we've lost him. Because now the memories I keep of him only live in my head. They are gone from his. 
He is gone.

When he was in the care home, he said, "I'm ready to die tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes."

Tomorrow came for him, and now tomorrow comes for us.

It's Been A While

I haven't written in this blog for a while. A whole month in fact. Sometimes, a week won't go by that I don't have some thought I want to put down in here. But my Head Aches blog/vlog has been taking priority.

I want to explore that concept of priority. It's hard to know what are your priorities, and the difference between what they are and what they should be. Most of us feel strong obligations to one thing or another: work, family, money. My strongest obligation at the moment is family, particularly my grandparents. With my grandad now in a care home, I need to be around to go and see him, and also to take my nan to see him on occasion. My sister only gets the opportunity to see them at the weekends, and if I was working full-time I would be in the same position. 

I'm struggling with not working. The thing is I'm not not working, I'm just not in my usual environment of a full-time 9-7/8/9 job in TV. I'm having to work off my own initiative to work for my friend on her business, on a film project. I have to sit myself down and say "Right, today I need to get this done" or "Ok this afternoon I'm going to get that finished."  It's not easy, and the house can be full of distractions like the washing up or the hoovering. Often I go and sit in my local library to be free of distraction. But I am going to have to learn how to work from home.

Much as I miss working in TV, and I miss the money, I want to be volunteering like I do each week - something that working in TV would not allow. I want to be around for my grandparents, because we don't know how long my grandad has got, and my nana is now alone in her house. For a woman that does not want to make her own family, I am curiously devoted to the one I already have.

When I got home in May, I felt like I'd made the wrong decision coming home, and my plan was to get back to work and save up enough to get away and out of the country again to somewhere else by the New Year. And then my mother told me my grandad had cancer. Lots of cancer. Cancer that will kill him (though won't technically won't kill him). Terminal, aggressive, untreatable cancer. They started chemo in order to give him more time. But only a few sessions in they said it was too aggressive and chemo would make no difference.
There was no more bargaining for time. This is it. 

And so he sits in his care home, in pain, uncomfortable, but being given more care and attention than we could if he were at home. He says he's ready to die tomorrow, but tomorrow doesn't come.

But I'm not ready.

Having a family is so selfish. You create people who are bound to you by blood and more often than not care about you like no other in the world. And sometimes your kids die before you and that's tragic, no parent should have to bury their child. But why should the children have to bury the parents? Is it part of growing up? An inevitable part of the human experience - the loss of a loved one. An experience that cannot be ignored, that cannot be got around. Unless you are an orphan hermit perhaps.

And I can easily empathise with people, fictional or otherwise. Watching the beginning of season 7 of Castle I was crying even though I knew what was going to happen. But the heartbreak of Beckett's face - it cut through to my own heart.

I'm not ready for this loss. How can I possibly become ready?

Second Half

It's July. We're officially in the second half of 2014. How the hell did that happen?! I am sure the older I get, the faster time flies. When there's not enough time to get stuff done this is no good thing. But when you are counting down the months, or weeks, or days til something or someone special, days flying by is no bad thing.  

But the second half is a good time to take stock of how life is going this year, 6 months into it. Although, 5 months of this first half I spent abroad, exploring new places and meeting new people. And feeling like I didn't fit in. 

Melbourne, Australia's culture capital, invented White Night last year. The second celebration of art, music, film, visual projection, had the streets filled. Jammed. Like standing on the pavement wondering why no one is moving, having your ankles rammed by pushchairs, your toes trodden on, making small penguin steps. Instead of feeling as if I was a part of the crowds - after all, I was traveling and seeking new experiences and culture and that's exactly what White Night gave it's public - I was caught by surprise at just how uncomfortable I am with the world we live in.  

When were we taught that we were all the mattered? As a species, how can we advocate looking out for  number one? How can we let councils erect anti-homeless spikes in doorways? How can we sit there in our cars, watching a homeless couple raid bins? Is it because we are in the safety of our cars? The physical barrier protects us. 

Is it because we are taught that the world is that way, it always will be that way. 

I call bullshit on that.  

This is the society that we chose to be. We are responsible for this. We invented the fast food that does damage to our insides. We invented the drugs, legal and otherwise that people use because sometimes they need more to life. Or sometimes less. We invented banking, and more to the point, money. Did we create the greed that comes with it?  

In these crowds of people at White Night, I felt like I was swimming in consumerism. I felt like I could not and would not engage with them. These are not my people, this is not my world. I don't want any part of it. I want out. Stop the world; I want to get off. 

There is guilt in me. That while I'm in constant pain, there are those that are in worse, with no chance or respite. While I worry about cash flow, I'm not worried enough that I have to choose between eating and heating. 

My problems are minuscule, negligible. 

And I have to recognise that the problems of this world do not lie on my shoulders alone.  They are everybody's problems.  

We are all human beings trying to get by.  

Lately I've been losing sleep, dreaming about the things that we could be. 

We, the people. We, humans. 

We have so much potential. Why are we wasting it? In the second half of this year, I will strive to stop wasting my potential.

Fighting Fears

Throughout September and October last year, I was having frequent attacks of nausea. Once a week on average, sometimes with vomiting. There was no rhyme nor reason to it. When I spoke to my GP, he said it was because I was eating dinner so late. 

But it wasn't. By that point I wasn't even eating dinner that late frequently, not like I had done in the months before. I still don't know exactly what it was, but I have a theory.

My theory is that nausea was me panicking about leaving for Australia. I was scared. I had no idea what my life had in store for me. I had no idea what Australia would be like, whether I'd cope. Cope with the weather, the insects. Cope with the hostels. Cope on my own. 

Before I went to university I had a few panic attacks. Like the nausea there was no pattern. I had one attack within the first few weeks of uni - because I was scared of one of my flat mates! - but they stopped just as abruptly as they'd started. Just like the nausea.

By late October the nausea stopped. I haven't had any bouts of it here. I'm two months in. I'm still afraid, fearful every time I got to a new place. But despite all the fear, I'm still doing this. I was so petrified I cried as the plane left Heathrow for Tokyo. I cried once in Cairns because I felt so hopeless at talking to people. I cry whenever I say goodbye to my mum on the phone because I don't know when I'll next to her again. What if I don't get the chance? What if something terrible happens? It would be bad enough at home but while I'm on the other side of the world?! Urgh! I'm tearing up as I'm writing this, which is dangerous as I'm walking as I write. Which is dangerous in itself without the tears.

I'm typing this on my phone as I walk along the Manly Scenic Walkway. It's a 10km walk from Manly to The Spit, and I tried to do it two days ago but actually got lost and went the wrong way and never made it. In fact I got lost down a pathway that led me into the bush and as I walked along an increasingly rocky path, jumping at any twig that moved because I thought it was a snake, I was scared. It was hot, and I was running out of water. I just kept saying to myself that it had to lead somewhere. I just had to keep pressing on. And it did lead somewhere - to the edge of the cliff. So then there was nothing to do but go back. 

Sometimes in life we just keep pressing forward regardless. And sometimes we have to go back. And everything, even, especially our mistakes, are things we can learn from. Every day we do nothing, every day we do something, every day of work and every day off. Life is an adventure. Not just in the people we meet and the places we go and the things we do. Life is an adventure of learning about ourselves. Right now, in my adventure, I'm learning about who I am. 

I turned my dream into a reality, as one of my friends put it. 

But when the dream becomes a reality, the fear does too.  



P.S. Here is a map of the scenic walk, from the manlyaustralia.com.au website, arrows for start & end points added by me.

And then here is me with The Spit bridge behind me. I probably should could have run this through photoshop, but meh. This is what I look like after 2 hours of WALKING MOFOS. Suck it. 

And here is the map to prove that I was actually at the end. Ta da!

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Changes can happen overnight, instantaneously or gradually. But we all change, all the time, and when we comment that someone hasn't changed, we're wrong. That person will have changed, perhaps not in a ground-shifting life-altering way that irrevocably changes who they are, but they will have changed in little ways, by small degrees.

I have changed so much in the last 12 months. Trek is the obvious catalyst to a new perspective of my life. Before Trek, I would never have planned a year abroad in Australia. I cried when I went away on Trek, when my mum and nan came to wave me off. I'm tearful thinking about it now. And that was only for a month.

A year is very different to a month. (No shit, Sherlock)
A year alone is very, very different to a month with a best friend and a random group of people you have to spend everyday with.

34 days left to go, and I'm scared. So scared. I'm terrified because I'm going into the unknown. Fearful of the things I'll find, or won't find. Scared that what I'm leaving won't still be here when I come back. I think the stupid craziness my brain has been dealing me the last week or so is down to me desperately feeling the need to make more roots here.

But the fear isn't stopping me from going. My excitement, my expectations, my desperation to explore, the bubbles of curiosity are carrying me ever closer.

A lot can change in a year. I've changed a lot in a year. I'm not expecting to come back in a year, or however long I go for, and everything be as it was when I departed.

I think that's one of biggest evolutions you can go through. Understanding that things change, and that it's okay. Accepting it, and embracing your own changes.

Evolving Forwards, Not Stuck Behind.

I might be a grown-up but I'm still growing up

I can be quite an excitable person. Although I do not get excited about Christmas or birthdays, I get squealy over new film or TV releases, epic wins such as same-sex marriage, and kittens. (If you don't get squealy over kittens, I suggest you have your heart examined, although the same might be said of my lack of googliness over babies.)

I'm vaguely aware that my behaviour is not always very... grown up. I have the advantage (?) of being short and I think (without any scientific evidence to back me up whatsoever) that short people are allowed to be less grown up for longer. My evidence for this is that my sister is tall and she has always been quite grown up. Usually she looks after me, even though I am the elder sister.

Growing up is not just about making it through education or work, and taking on "grown up" responsibilities like a mortgage or kids. It's about negotiating your way through friendships and relationships and just life in general, and not necessarily coming out unscathed. It's about learning how to handle successes, defeats and experiences.

For me, growing up is watching your childhood home be packed into boxes and seeing my mother prepare for a new life in another county, and not feeling bitter or abandoned but feeling proud and content to say goodbye. I never liked that house anyway; it was haunted. (I kid, I kid...)

For me, growing up is working out who to make an effort with, and when to recognise that you have drifted apart from someone that at one point would have been your everything, and to let it go. Growing up is recognising the loss, and being okay with it.

As someone still growing up, I'm still figuring out whose opinion should matter to me. Once upon a time I would have cared what everyone thought. And when you made a mistake, you thought everyone was looking, and judging you. But I suppose life is a bit like being a learner driver. When you stall in your car, you might think that everybody is staring and laughing and pointing and you feel mortified. But everybody has stalled before, both in life and in their car*. It's easy to falter in new situations, or even familiar ones. You can stall at the bottom or the top of a hill. What's important is that you get going again. Forget the people you think are paying attention to your mistake. They are probably too wrapped up in trying not to stall themselves.

I learn every day more about who I am, and who in my life I care about and whose opinions matter to me. I can respect your opinion, and yet not let it affect me. And I am still working out my opinions.

Although... if your opinion is that women shouldn't be in power/flying planes/doing anything except getting their tits out, cleaning the kitchen and making you a sammich, then I will declare your opinion stupid and I do not have to listen to it.

Come back when you've got something far less sexist to say.


*this metaphor really only works for those who can drive. But the idea of stalling - essentially a false start, being unable to get the right balance of power and clutch - is applicable to everyone.

Also, here is my breaded cat, running with the sandwich/cat theme. 

Nom nom nom.