What is it about the criticism of others that holds so much weight for us long into our adult years, when we are big? My father was super critical and super cold when I was a child, but I think that even if I'd had the world's most loving and supportive dad, I'd still suffer from the plague of hypersensitivity. It's a drag, especially when another part of you is opinionated and is a writer putting your words out there to be criticised.
In recent weeks I've written two pieces for Independent Australia. One was about Bernie Sanders and the Iowa Caucus, which starts off the presidential election race. The more I read about that part of the election process, the quirkier it seemed, and kinda haphazard too. The second piece was about a TV show here in Australia, Q&A, and the frustration watching it causes for those of us who like our topics discussed from multi angles and in depth. It's also about the debate around free speech, and how we are unable to have any kind of a conversation about what that entails, because the instant reactionary accusations is that people concerned about it must be racist, misogynistic, etc, etc. This aggravates me no end. I'm sick of our public square being dominated by binary oppositions, by offence. Fuck your offence, it counts for nothing. Truly. Get past it, or else develop some emotional intelligence to enable thoughtful consideration, tolerance of opposing views, and paradox.
But just please don't yell and attack me while I'm in the process of yelling at you about this. Because I will crumple like a truck-hit bumper bar and will nervously break down into a million pieces that will be unable to be repaired, unlike your car when the truck reversed into it on your birthday. But you digress. And you have also changed tenses somehow from I to the royal you.
So will I crumple down into a sodden blob when you criticise me, like a wet paper bag in the rain? Will your differing opinion change my thoughtfully-concluded one? Well, maybe it will add another facet of understanding to it, but ultimately it probably won't. My viewpoint will stay where it was before you criticised it. But I will feel your criticism in my super-sensy solar plexus. But so what? What happens then? I feel uncomfortable, the sky remains in its place, the little chickens a few doors down keep clucking.
(The frustration that people will misunderstand where you're coming from, will take your words and not consider them but just react to them from within their technologically-allotted eight-second attention span is another matter entirely, and any criticism that comes from there is easily dismissed as not worth your attention if people aren't going to bother bestowing theirs in you to begin with).
But isn't it weird how in order to protect ourselves from possible future discomfort we feel discomfort by bracing ourselves against it? As if resistance of that kind ever achieved anything except extra aortic plaque. Standing free in the flow and rolling with the changes is easier, is an exhilarating ride when we stop dragging our nails along the sides.
.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Ahhh, and up she rises with seaweed entangled around her ankles after three weeks of bronchitis. The wonderful thing about having had something like that is you have a renewed appreciation - for breathing in clear and slow with no jagged edges. Of not coughing up phlegm. Of feeling the return of creativity and a lessening of fatigue (it's extra weird having CFS and something like bronchitis because the boundaries blur, but my fatigue levels had lifted enough before getting the bronchitis that having it made me feel like I wanted to stab myself with kitchen knives in abject frustration).
I have finally set myself up a writer website, my professional shingle which details my published bits and bobs to date and contact details. It feels quite good to do this, being something that I've been meaning to do for ages (like my tax - oops, just remembered again!)
I'm wondering - do I wish to blog over there? I'm in two minds about it. If I do, it will be more writing-focussed than here, where I just spurt whatever (and the last few years that's been rather black squiddy depressed ink-type spurting). It's set up as a static site at the moment but I'm wondering about whether to start blogging there because (a) I'm barely blogging here and (b) there are so many writers blogging about writing that do we really need another one?
To be honest, I feel a bit disappointed by a lot of writers-blogging-about-writing websites. I think because there's so much emphasis on the marketing maxim of give them something to takeaway, make yourself useful or else the eyeballs will flick elsewhere that that translates out into how-to articles. Now, I'm a fan of how-to articles. I read them regularly. But a lot of them are kind of ... well, depersonalised. They are all lovely and shiny and you presume the person on the other end of them never has any writing hassles at all with anything. Because they are set up on a writer's own site, where they're getting clients appraising their shingle and asking them to write for them, sometimes the excess gloss of professionalism tends to feel a little too thick, especially on content marketing-type websites.
I'm really not interested in writing how-to query articles (I'm so bad at querying that at the moment I could only write how-to-query-badly articles - which, now I think of it, could be kind of interesting). I'm not interested in writing how-to-write-short-stories articles because I don't think I'll get my head around that mysterious space until I'm about 75. That kind of blogging is not for me; it makes me feel about as deflated as an octogenarian whose Viagra script has run out.
So I've been thinking - if I do blog there, I would like to blog about the inside moves that go with writing. How it feels. But not a purgative dwelling on the feels, the sort that feels kind of self-indulgent, just like a big vomit for the benefit of the person who's heaving. Not like that, but still coming from the inside. What I'm interested in is the subjective experience of writing. Of the emotional issues that go along with it and how to manage those in an emotionally intelligent way. Or something.
I like the idea too of writing a blog that is about what I do to fill my creative well so that I have a lot to dip into when I write. Using creativity as a means of expression. I get out of the loop regularly on extracurricular creativity, though, because it takes up so much energy that it goes on the backburner, and I'm scared that if I set something like that up it would become a millstone if my health goes worse. Plus I'm an amateur at lots of creative practices, but still, that could be an asset, I guess. And it would encourage me to sculpt again, which I miss terribly, and which I feel a natural aptitude and talent for which I want to explore further. But even now I realise that in trying to describe a well-filling-type blog, I haven't even begun to describe what I'm trying to get at, at all.
So much of what I wish to write about these days is hazy, blurry on the edges to myself. I feel like I get a glimpse of it, of the container I could put everything I'm thinking of in so that it becomes more conscious, less fuzzy. But then just as I feel I've got a grasp of it, it dissipates and falls through my fingers until two hours later or the next day or whatever I'll be thinking about something and it will ping and I will go, "That. That's it." I think it's the same thing that I would like to achieve with Liminal if I ever end up getting it off the ground, with a weekly writing meditation group that I would like to run some day, maybe. If I was to categorise it into philosophy it would be in the realm of phenomenology. It's something about living in our bodies and our subjective experiences of them being important, giving us meaning, in an age where the subjective is viewed with abject suspicion.
Something like that.
Ultimately, I feel like what I try to do when I write is pan out to the big picture, to connect things together in an interdisciplinary approach in a world that is fragmented and so super-specialised. I feel in some ways that that's all I've ever been doing here.
It is very odd to keep feeling like you're stumbling forward with something you can't articulate. Does any of this make sense to you (if you've read this far)? Does what I'm trying to do feel more cohesive to you, make sense, than it does to me? If so, I would certainly like your feedback!
I have finally set myself up a writer website, my professional shingle which details my published bits and bobs to date and contact details. It feels quite good to do this, being something that I've been meaning to do for ages (like my tax - oops, just remembered again!)
I'm wondering - do I wish to blog over there? I'm in two minds about it. If I do, it will be more writing-focussed than here, where I just spurt whatever (and the last few years that's been rather black squiddy depressed ink-type spurting). It's set up as a static site at the moment but I'm wondering about whether to start blogging there because (a) I'm barely blogging here and (b) there are so many writers blogging about writing that do we really need another one?
To be honest, I feel a bit disappointed by a lot of writers-blogging-about-writing websites. I think because there's so much emphasis on the marketing maxim of give them something to takeaway, make yourself useful or else the eyeballs will flick elsewhere that that translates out into how-to articles. Now, I'm a fan of how-to articles. I read them regularly. But a lot of them are kind of ... well, depersonalised. They are all lovely and shiny and you presume the person on the other end of them never has any writing hassles at all with anything. Because they are set up on a writer's own site, where they're getting clients appraising their shingle and asking them to write for them, sometimes the excess gloss of professionalism tends to feel a little too thick, especially on content marketing-type websites.
I'm really not interested in writing how-to query articles (I'm so bad at querying that at the moment I could only write how-to-query-badly articles - which, now I think of it, could be kind of interesting). I'm not interested in writing how-to-write-short-stories articles because I don't think I'll get my head around that mysterious space until I'm about 75. That kind of blogging is not for me; it makes me feel about as deflated as an octogenarian whose Viagra script has run out.
So I've been thinking - if I do blog there, I would like to blog about the inside moves that go with writing. How it feels. But not a purgative dwelling on the feels, the sort that feels kind of self-indulgent, just like a big vomit for the benefit of the person who's heaving. Not like that, but still coming from the inside. What I'm interested in is the subjective experience of writing. Of the emotional issues that go along with it and how to manage those in an emotionally intelligent way. Or something.
I like the idea too of writing a blog that is about what I do to fill my creative well so that I have a lot to dip into when I write. Using creativity as a means of expression. I get out of the loop regularly on extracurricular creativity, though, because it takes up so much energy that it goes on the backburner, and I'm scared that if I set something like that up it would become a millstone if my health goes worse. Plus I'm an amateur at lots of creative practices, but still, that could be an asset, I guess. And it would encourage me to sculpt again, which I miss terribly, and which I feel a natural aptitude and talent for which I want to explore further. But even now I realise that in trying to describe a well-filling-type blog, I haven't even begun to describe what I'm trying to get at, at all.
So much of what I wish to write about these days is hazy, blurry on the edges to myself. I feel like I get a glimpse of it, of the container I could put everything I'm thinking of in so that it becomes more conscious, less fuzzy. But then just as I feel I've got a grasp of it, it dissipates and falls through my fingers until two hours later or the next day or whatever I'll be thinking about something and it will ping and I will go, "That. That's it." I think it's the same thing that I would like to achieve with Liminal if I ever end up getting it off the ground, with a weekly writing meditation group that I would like to run some day, maybe. If I was to categorise it into philosophy it would be in the realm of phenomenology. It's something about living in our bodies and our subjective experiences of them being important, giving us meaning, in an age where the subjective is viewed with abject suspicion.
Something like that.
Ultimately, I feel like what I try to do when I write is pan out to the big picture, to connect things together in an interdisciplinary approach in a world that is fragmented and so super-specialised. I feel in some ways that that's all I've ever been doing here.
It is very odd to keep feeling like you're stumbling forward with something you can't articulate. Does any of this make sense to you (if you've read this far)? Does what I'm trying to do feel more cohesive to you, make sense, than it does to me? If so, I would certainly like your feedback!
I came across a writing prompt a month or so ago and I can't for the life of me find the link to it now.
It was a 'write your own modernist poem of nonsense'. Wonderful fun! It really worked in loosening up my fuzzy becretined brain. As ever and always i wasn't sure if I'd be able to come up with anything, but an invite to the inner shit spurter was readily accepted. Here's mine:
Cecilia, androids help to
navigate cabbage draughts.
The collateral shook Nancy
then in ordinances shook you.
Remembering dread, fondling hibiscus
in the neonatal him of androgyny
I peak. Hark! we yell to the
formaldehyde sprockets, the
lionine scampers, the degenerate
scatological seals on their
lymphatic rocks in the
roiling ocean of sprouts.
Hear us, we say to the
catalogue of Bunnings boilers,
the rows of concertinaed
marshmallow hiss, the graven
pus of cantankerous globules.
And then finally, Leave us,
we say and turn to the flattened
nose of the sun, the hopeful
cup of the sassenach slaps,
the sunny farts of the
beautiful goats and we
breathe home.
Powerful stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Hopeful with just the right touch of melancholia.
Truly, the world passes me by, not seeing my genius. It will be sorry after I'm gone that it did not love me while it could.
It was a 'write your own modernist poem of nonsense'. Wonderful fun! It really worked in loosening up my fuzzy becretined brain. As ever and always i wasn't sure if I'd be able to come up with anything, but an invite to the inner shit spurter was readily accepted. Here's mine:
Cecilia, androids help to
navigate cabbage draughts.
The collateral shook Nancy
then in ordinances shook you.
Remembering dread, fondling hibiscus
in the neonatal him of androgyny
I peak. Hark! we yell to the
formaldehyde sprockets, the
lionine scampers, the degenerate
scatological seals on their
lymphatic rocks in the
roiling ocean of sprouts.
Hear us, we say to the
catalogue of Bunnings boilers,
the rows of concertinaed
marshmallow hiss, the graven
pus of cantankerous globules.
And then finally, Leave us,
we say and turn to the flattened
nose of the sun, the hopeful
cup of the sassenach slaps,
the sunny farts of the
beautiful goats and we
breathe home.
Powerful stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Hopeful with just the right touch of melancholia.
Truly, the world passes me by, not seeing my genius. It will be sorry after I'm gone that it did not love me while it could.
My writing practice rises and falls with whatever is going on in my body. In recent months I have been unable to remain standing for too long, and so I have been writing lying down. Recently I have gone back to researching one of the basics of CFS, orthostatic intolerance, and began trying out some recommendations to address those symptoms. The main one - which sounds odd to many ears - is to add more salt to your diet. Yes, more. More salt and two litres of water. Lots of CFS people suffer with low blood pressure (yep) and also low blood volume (I think so, though I haven't been tested). Many, if not most, CFSers have less blood in our bodies for some odd reason and what we find is that standing up can become a most uncomfortable experience - not because of the fatigue so much as that the blood in our bodies is pooling in our legs, and our brains start going a little nuts and mushy at the same time. Lie down, and five or 10 minutes later you find your mind clearing to a greater or lesser degree. The extra salt and water helps stop that from happening so much.
This brain blood drain can also be hindered by doing things like crossing your legs if you're sitting down. Walking helps, too. There's so many things going for walking when you have CFS. If you're able to get out of bed to start, it can be as hard as meth to stop. The fatigue falls away a little. Your joints and muscles sway to the rhythm. You feel some semblance of being alive. Stuff the post-exertional malaise - this feels good enough for any payback.
Except when you're paying back.
Sometimes though the payback doesn't come as much as you thought it would. Those experiences are as rare as Willy Wonker gold tickets though, so you celebrate them as miracles from the virgin when they do. It's added irony when those moments come from the 101 category of CFS management, orthostatic intolerance, when you've had this thing for 16 years. CFS is such a complicated illness - there's so much going on in your body that keeping up with all of your symptoms is really difficult. Note-takimg is an essential. I wish I hadn't only learned that bit in about year 10.
I went to the footy last weekend. It felt risky. I hadn't even bothered the week before. Anthony had to do the driving, Belgrave to Richmond and back, after driving from Belgrave to Tullamarine and back for work earlier that day. It required a 15 minute walk from the car to the ground, some of which I spent feeling awful and crying a little bit because of the two homeless blokes sitting on Swan Street on the way there. It was loud at the ground. I was worried i was going to fade, start sliding down in my seat halfway through the first quarter, feel trapped feeling awful in the confines of a large outdoor pit with 63,000 too many people. But it didn't happen. I have been following this extra salt/water thing for about 10 days now, and my symptoms are muchly flattened.
So increased ability of course means increased writing. It follows the night like a day. Extra space and the creativity pours in, grown more lovely from the unwanted respite. And so I'm busy at work at the moment writing an essay about why I think Australia Day should be celebrated in August, marking the anniversary of the Wave Hill walk-off, and how that's a story for our time that goes way beyond black and white reconciliation, right through political ideology and right to the very future of our planet.
I also came across a new writing prize yesterday, The Richell Prize, named after the founder of Hachette Press who died too young last year in a surfing accident. The prize is for new and emerging writers, a category that fits me despite me being old and haggy and prolapsed. And so after I finish this essay I am going to work on my collection of train travel stories. Excitement!
I also wrote a novella recently. It's the longest thing I've written, at over 13,000 words, and I think I'm happy with it. But I'm so sick of it at the moment that it feels like a recalcitrant child I've bundled off to Grandma's and I'm happy for the peace.
So I'm well and truly back in the writing seat, and the only thing that has been missing is writing here on my lovely comfy, messy space.
The interesting thing about writing is that while everyone thinks they've got a book in them, not everyone can make it past the nasty gargoyle, the first draft ferryman. Any hubris you have he will shred with his pitchfork in the time it takes him to ferry you from the beginning of your draft to the end. If you can bear to sit for an entire ride with his foetid breath snorting in your ear hole, then by the time you get to the other side you will have a stinky pile to work with. It's generally not pretty. In fact, it's often such a mess that you despair that you'll be able to make even a satin purse out of this sow's ear. It will send you into raptures about' how fucking pathetic you are as a writer and you will question whether you are not completely deludedin your insistence on persistence in this area.
The beauty of having written for a bit is that you begin recognising that this is just a stage of the process. Like one of the lines of the I ching says, "Waiting in the bog invites the arrival of robbers." If you can believe that there is gold hidden in this pile of poo you've written, then that's when the real writing starts - revision. Out of that lump of clay you've crafted from out of the air, you work it up into something good. Sometimes it's even really good, so that you start strutting and thinking you're a little bit fancy. The same way you overdo it as soon as you get a tiny bit of energy and start planning all kinds of things and then find yourself on the couch.
That's okay. Strut and overdo. Have your fun. The loamy, salty dark mess of the next first draft is waiting, just around the corner if you're lucky, to slice a bit of that strut off, keep you humble, ground you back to the beautiful earth.
This brain blood drain can also be hindered by doing things like crossing your legs if you're sitting down. Walking helps, too. There's so many things going for walking when you have CFS. If you're able to get out of bed to start, it can be as hard as meth to stop. The fatigue falls away a little. Your joints and muscles sway to the rhythm. You feel some semblance of being alive. Stuff the post-exertional malaise - this feels good enough for any payback.
Except when you're paying back.
Sometimes though the payback doesn't come as much as you thought it would. Those experiences are as rare as Willy Wonker gold tickets though, so you celebrate them as miracles from the virgin when they do. It's added irony when those moments come from the 101 category of CFS management, orthostatic intolerance, when you've had this thing for 16 years. CFS is such a complicated illness - there's so much going on in your body that keeping up with all of your symptoms is really difficult. Note-takimg is an essential. I wish I hadn't only learned that bit in about year 10.
I went to the footy last weekend. It felt risky. I hadn't even bothered the week before. Anthony had to do the driving, Belgrave to Richmond and back, after driving from Belgrave to Tullamarine and back for work earlier that day. It required a 15 minute walk from the car to the ground, some of which I spent feeling awful and crying a little bit because of the two homeless blokes sitting on Swan Street on the way there. It was loud at the ground. I was worried i was going to fade, start sliding down in my seat halfway through the first quarter, feel trapped feeling awful in the confines of a large outdoor pit with 63,000 too many people. But it didn't happen. I have been following this extra salt/water thing for about 10 days now, and my symptoms are muchly flattened.
So increased ability of course means increased writing. It follows the night like a day. Extra space and the creativity pours in, grown more lovely from the unwanted respite. And so I'm busy at work at the moment writing an essay about why I think Australia Day should be celebrated in August, marking the anniversary of the Wave Hill walk-off, and how that's a story for our time that goes way beyond black and white reconciliation, right through political ideology and right to the very future of our planet.
I also came across a new writing prize yesterday, The Richell Prize, named after the founder of Hachette Press who died too young last year in a surfing accident. The prize is for new and emerging writers, a category that fits me despite me being old and haggy and prolapsed. And so after I finish this essay I am going to work on my collection of train travel stories. Excitement!
I also wrote a novella recently. It's the longest thing I've written, at over 13,000 words, and I think I'm happy with it. But I'm so sick of it at the moment that it feels like a recalcitrant child I've bundled off to Grandma's and I'm happy for the peace.
So I'm well and truly back in the writing seat, and the only thing that has been missing is writing here on my lovely comfy, messy space.
The interesting thing about writing is that while everyone thinks they've got a book in them, not everyone can make it past the nasty gargoyle, the first draft ferryman. Any hubris you have he will shred with his pitchfork in the time it takes him to ferry you from the beginning of your draft to the end. If you can bear to sit for an entire ride with his foetid breath snorting in your ear hole, then by the time you get to the other side you will have a stinky pile to work with. It's generally not pretty. In fact, it's often such a mess that you despair that you'll be able to make even a satin purse out of this sow's ear. It will send you into raptures about' how fucking pathetic you are as a writer and you will question whether you are not completely deludedin your insistence on persistence in this area.
The beauty of having written for a bit is that you begin recognising that this is just a stage of the process. Like one of the lines of the I ching says, "Waiting in the bog invites the arrival of robbers." If you can believe that there is gold hidden in this pile of poo you've written, then that's when the real writing starts - revision. Out of that lump of clay you've crafted from out of the air, you work it up into something good. Sometimes it's even really good, so that you start strutting and thinking you're a little bit fancy. The same way you overdo it as soon as you get a tiny bit of energy and start planning all kinds of things and then find yourself on the couch.
That's okay. Strut and overdo. Have your fun. The loamy, salty dark mess of the next first draft is waiting, just around the corner if you're lucky, to slice a bit of that strut off, keep you humble, ground you back to the beautiful earth.
There have been two giant obstacles to me blogging lately. Anxiety/fatigue is the main one. The other one is inflamed by the first. It sits in the shadows till I notice and name it, so it took me a bit to work out what it was. When I peered closer and thought about it, I identified it. Oh. That again. It's guilt, in its broadest sweep. The guilt that says why do this, where is the value, where is the permission? The creaking bridge that links those two giant hillocks is an abject feeling of uselessness. I feel as completely useless as a great hulk of mouldy cheese, purposeless in a world of people busily achieving their quarterly KPIs. A big lumpy Bob Hatfieldy waste of space, while meanwhile my partner works eleventy six hours a week. And so what right do I have to write?
If I could slice that part of myself out and I only had a blunt knife, I'd consider it. It's an ongoing issue, this lack of worthiness thang. I've written about it before on this blog. It's an ongoing refrain not just of mine but of most everybody who writes, or sculpts, or paints, or does something creative in a culture that despite its Apple ads really does not value innovation from people.
This guilt is the most depressing utilitarianism. It's the same harsh-scratching grey-robed dullness that says I shouldn't be writing by hand because it's not efficient. I'm a major fan of writing by hand. I find that there is something soothing about it so that though the dirgevoice says it's not efficient to write by hand, in actuality, for someone who is a raging fire of anxiety a great deal of the time lately it's quite efficient in the end, thank you very much. It gives me the space to breathe, for time to slow down, just me and the pen moving across the page, the emptiness of the page something exciting, a container that may be filled by something that I'm not even sure of, even while I'm doing it.
Efficiency is not worth a great deal if you don't ever get started because you're cowed down by the voice that makes something fun into dreariness and repulsive cubicleness. Do it this way. This is the best way. Only this way. The world is full of those voices and they're really fucking tedious. And yet here I have my very own in my own head. Maybe it's an understandable virus of the age that says the only way for me to produce is to cubicle myself into chunks of bland party cheese. Maybe I need to inoculate myself out of this idea that the best way is a depressing bland one that vampirically sucks all the joy out. I spent some time this afternoon reading about well-known writers who also do this apparently insane thing of writing by hand.
I don't even hold to this efficiency-by-number-the-fastest-way-possible-is-the-best-because-time-is-money crap. And yet it rules over me so much, like seeping wetiko. It's so boring! And anyway, why does whether I write or how I write have to be linked to worthiness, based on whether I've achieved enough over the previous week? To prove my worth of existing on this planet? Just because that's what I feel like my life has told me doesn't mean I need to hold to it in Inner Susieland. If the kingdom of heaven is there, and all change flows from our insides outward, then this is exactly the place where I need to be pruning back that particularly ugly bush. That bush of guilt and holding yourself back because you're not worth it is a giant bush of massive ugly hairy testicles with big bits of pus drooling from them. Hell, not even pruning that bush ~ chop it down. No herbicides because Inner Susieland doesn't respond well to those sorts of chemicals. Cutting into the bastard and chopping out its roots and burning the whole thing in a bonfire that I dance naked in front of afterwards.
Sheesh. That dancing naked in front of a bonfire thing keeps popping up. Whether I ever had the guts to do it would be another story. I guess I should head up to Nimbin or somewhere to give it a whirl. Or I could practice in the backyard. Burn the house down.
So this voice, that tells me how and when to write, why is it linked to worthiness? Why does it not ever put forward its case as a way to better health, for example? If my own productivity is so valuable to it, then why not treat the vessel in a way that will ensure productivity, treat it with care, fill it with the things it loves, as a way to rehabilitation? Because that would be a bleeding-heart left-wing type of action, and that voice, if it was going to vote, would surely be right in on this Abbott government and whatever other austerity-measure-forcing far right-wing governments it could find in the world that punish the less so the more can keep gorging. That voice doesn't actually seem to be particularly focused on achieving good outcomes via the best way, but just on smashing me in the face with guilt. So why listen to a voice that's so lacking in imagination? I mean, I have to listen to those sorts of voices from the culture all bloody day.
Maybe that cultural familiarity is why I'm not tuned into switching that voice off quicker. After all, it's not just simply a voice I took from the culture, but one that came ready-packaged from within the bosom of my own family from as early as I can remember, so why the hell would I not have created an extra deep rut for it to burrow into? And the size of the rut is probably why I do not sometimes think earlier that it's really simply a case of reaching out with my trusty internal remote and switching that fucker's voice off.
That's it. Simple. I'm not listening to this thought. Switch off. And it is that simple. But it's not. The exhaustion comes from the relentless dirgelike way that it's back again the next day, and when you're a little exhausted to begin with you're weakened, dear boys and girls. Susie is life-tired. Sometimes, all the will in the world can't rise up because the plain exhaustion is there already, disengaging me from reaching for the remote and switching off an energy-draining voice. It's the relentless surrounding culture, it's Tony Abbott, it's the ongoing lack of response from editors when I put my all into pieces and pitches that aren't accepted. It's the inability of others to know what I need to do to be able to do even the little that I do. It's the constant rushing drain of return not exceeding investment. That's why some days I can't even get to the remote at all. All sick people know this space. That's why the breezy recommendations from those who are not here are so teeth grinding to hear at times.
Despite the beliefs of the relentless positivity brigade, switching off the negative voices isn't the end of the story. You could be excused from thinking, by reading the derisive way we comment to each other on online news spaces, that everyone is simply lazy, that willpower and force and application and a good positive outlook are all that's needed to get you to where you need to go. It's the neoliberal sexual fantasy. That way, whatever misfortune occurs to you can be blamed on you. But it's not that simple. Never that simple that a satisfactory result of a complicated situation is going to be something that would spurt from the same spout as the sort of kneejerk reactive blamethink we see on the net, and that we may even engage in ourselves ~ even if it's only from inside our own heads to ourselves.
We need more than willpower and application, good though they are. We need new containers to pour ourselves into. Completely new jars, whose frame will shape whatever new society we are going to come up with next. One that's worthy of us pouring ourselves into, and that recognises our inherent worth. Those sorts of containers contain natural stoppers that block out those voices that are so destructive and do so much damage. The ones that say some should get at the expense of others. There's classier containers than that. Like the one that says that what happens to the least of these is what happens to the most of these That's the type of container I'm dreaming of.
If I could slice that part of myself out and I only had a blunt knife, I'd consider it. It's an ongoing issue, this lack of worthiness thang. I've written about it before on this blog. It's an ongoing refrain not just of mine but of most everybody who writes, or sculpts, or paints, or does something creative in a culture that despite its Apple ads really does not value innovation from people.
This guilt is the most depressing utilitarianism. It's the same harsh-scratching grey-robed dullness that says I shouldn't be writing by hand because it's not efficient. I'm a major fan of writing by hand. I find that there is something soothing about it so that though the dirgevoice says it's not efficient to write by hand, in actuality, for someone who is a raging fire of anxiety a great deal of the time lately it's quite efficient in the end, thank you very much. It gives me the space to breathe, for time to slow down, just me and the pen moving across the page, the emptiness of the page something exciting, a container that may be filled by something that I'm not even sure of, even while I'm doing it.
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| CC pic by Jugni |
Efficiency is not worth a great deal if you don't ever get started because you're cowed down by the voice that makes something fun into dreariness and repulsive cubicleness. Do it this way. This is the best way. Only this way. The world is full of those voices and they're really fucking tedious. And yet here I have my very own in my own head. Maybe it's an understandable virus of the age that says the only way for me to produce is to cubicle myself into chunks of bland party cheese. Maybe I need to inoculate myself out of this idea that the best way is a depressing bland one that vampirically sucks all the joy out. I spent some time this afternoon reading about well-known writers who also do this apparently insane thing of writing by hand.
I don't even hold to this efficiency-by-number-the-fastest-way-possible-is-the-best-because-time-is-money crap. And yet it rules over me so much, like seeping wetiko. It's so boring! And anyway, why does whether I write or how I write have to be linked to worthiness, based on whether I've achieved enough over the previous week? To prove my worth of existing on this planet? Just because that's what I feel like my life has told me doesn't mean I need to hold to it in Inner Susieland. If the kingdom of heaven is there, and all change flows from our insides outward, then this is exactly the place where I need to be pruning back that particularly ugly bush. That bush of guilt and holding yourself back because you're not worth it is a giant bush of massive ugly hairy testicles with big bits of pus drooling from them. Hell, not even pruning that bush ~ chop it down. No herbicides because Inner Susieland doesn't respond well to those sorts of chemicals. Cutting into the bastard and chopping out its roots and burning the whole thing in a bonfire that I dance naked in front of afterwards.
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| Pic by Eris-stock |
So this voice, that tells me how and when to write, why is it linked to worthiness? Why does it not ever put forward its case as a way to better health, for example? If my own productivity is so valuable to it, then why not treat the vessel in a way that will ensure productivity, treat it with care, fill it with the things it loves, as a way to rehabilitation? Because that would be a bleeding-heart left-wing type of action, and that voice, if it was going to vote, would surely be right in on this Abbott government and whatever other austerity-measure-forcing far right-wing governments it could find in the world that punish the less so the more can keep gorging. That voice doesn't actually seem to be particularly focused on achieving good outcomes via the best way, but just on smashing me in the face with guilt. So why listen to a voice that's so lacking in imagination? I mean, I have to listen to those sorts of voices from the culture all bloody day.
Maybe that cultural familiarity is why I'm not tuned into switching that voice off quicker. After all, it's not just simply a voice I took from the culture, but one that came ready-packaged from within the bosom of my own family from as early as I can remember, so why the hell would I not have created an extra deep rut for it to burrow into? And the size of the rut is probably why I do not sometimes think earlier that it's really simply a case of reaching out with my trusty internal remote and switching that fucker's voice off.
That's it. Simple. I'm not listening to this thought. Switch off. And it is that simple. But it's not. The exhaustion comes from the relentless dirgelike way that it's back again the next day, and when you're a little exhausted to begin with you're weakened, dear boys and girls. Susie is life-tired. Sometimes, all the will in the world can't rise up because the plain exhaustion is there already, disengaging me from reaching for the remote and switching off an energy-draining voice. It's the relentless surrounding culture, it's Tony Abbott, it's the ongoing lack of response from editors when I put my all into pieces and pitches that aren't accepted. It's the inability of others to know what I need to do to be able to do even the little that I do. It's the constant rushing drain of return not exceeding investment. That's why some days I can't even get to the remote at all. All sick people know this space. That's why the breezy recommendations from those who are not here are so teeth grinding to hear at times.
Despite the beliefs of the relentless positivity brigade, switching off the negative voices isn't the end of the story. You could be excused from thinking, by reading the derisive way we comment to each other on online news spaces, that everyone is simply lazy, that willpower and force and application and a good positive outlook are all that's needed to get you to where you need to go. It's the neoliberal sexual fantasy. That way, whatever misfortune occurs to you can be blamed on you. But it's not that simple. Never that simple that a satisfactory result of a complicated situation is going to be something that would spurt from the same spout as the sort of kneejerk reactive blamethink we see on the net, and that we may even engage in ourselves ~ even if it's only from inside our own heads to ourselves.
We need more than willpower and application, good though they are. We need new containers to pour ourselves into. Completely new jars, whose frame will shape whatever new society we are going to come up with next. One that's worthy of us pouring ourselves into, and that recognises our inherent worth. Those sorts of containers contain natural stoppers that block out those voices that are so destructive and do so much damage. The ones that say some should get at the expense of others. There's classier containers than that. Like the one that says that what happens to the least of these is what happens to the most of these That's the type of container I'm dreaming of.
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| CC pic Byrev |
I am excited enough that that evil Pointer Sisters song is gonna get stuck in my head as an earworm. My first ever published short story is so fresh off the digital, non-existent printing press that its digital non-existent ink is still wet. My story Colour Wheel appears in the latest Spring 2014 issue, #7, of Tincture Journal. Tincture is an e-reader-only publication, featuring delectables of the essay, fiction and poetry variety. (And writing it did not, as I predicted, drive me into a blue-walled padded room).This is the second piece I've had published in Tincture. The first was in its inaugural issue, an essay loosely about science and ... well, the inability to dance, I guess.
Colour Wheel is described by Tincture's editor, Daniel Young, as either dystopia or utopia, most likely the latter. Which is just how I like my stories to end - with the next beginning in sight, phoenixes rising from the congealed poo of ground-down societies, and easy on the Hollywood violins.
I had fun writing that story. It is a fictionalised, stylised feel of what I would like to see humans become in the next step in our evolutionary future. The story is about a woman who finds herself living amongst a group of people in Melbourne's Federation Square after the Shutdown. The planes have stopped, and so has the internet, and society has collapsed. But then after that come the Colours ...
Chuffed I am, because fiction comes harder to me than nonfiction. Chuffed like Puffing Billy, tooting his way round the mountain.
If you want a copy for your good self, 8 Aussie bucks will get you your very own. You can buy it from Tincture's site, Tomely, Kobo or Amazon.
I have had some pretty nice feedback from editors in the past couple of months about my submitted writing. One piece The American Scholar very much enjoyed reading. The Monthly enjoyed it too. Another was "read with interest" by Creative Nonfiction. Another piece made the 10-person shortlist in New Philosopher's competition. The same piece was enjoyed also by The Monthly but wasn't quite the right fit for their mag.
Concentrating on any available encouraging feedback is the best way to look at rejections. They come thick and fast after all, and as my skin is not thick but translucent, some days I go away and curl up in a sad, deflated ball. And yet even when I'm feeling like that, a part of me knows that in a few days' time I'll get up and get going again. And you need to when it comes to writing. You know the stories - Dune was rejected 20 times before being accepted for publication; Gertrude Stein was rejected for 22 years before her first poem was published.
Some days - like this morning and Monday morning (two rejections in three days) - I read the email, feel a bit despondent but stay unfurled, and simply reread, reedit and then resend the piece out somewhere else.
Yay. And if I can handle being rejected, then any writer can. I guess it just depends on how much you want to write, in the end. If your desire to write and the tiny little twinge of flame on the inside of the guts that says that you can do this, that you need to keep practising and getting better but you can do this - if that flame is bigger than the pain you feel when people say, "Nah, thanks," then you get back on your bike again, squire.
Now, the really professional writers curl up in a sad, deflated ball but then get up and back on the bike in the same day, rather than let a day or two go past while their despair flares and dampens down the flame. After all, writing can be approached through many pathways. Even if the despair is flaring and threatening your fire, you can still write. In fact, writing is a wonderfully creative way to envelop your despair in comfort and help it melt on through.
I still get sucked under by it a little, unfortunately. But then I always bob up again. Sometimes it just takes a few days.
Because rejection is part of the business and as my friend Jane says in relation to the upsetting elements of interacting with other people (she is wiser than I): "Don't take it personally." This fits even more so when it comes to writing and not being accepted for publication.
And anyway, to have some personalised feedback at all is an encouraging thing. A rejection that is not a form letter is gold-edged rejection. Believe it or not, to actually get to that space is an achievement. Form letters tend to be the initial type of rejection you receive when you first start sending stuff out and so I actually feel that I have come somewhere in recent years, with the amount of personalised rejection emails I've been receiving. And to know that The Monthly enjoyed reading my writing still fills a certain part of me with magical disbelief. Even if I won't be reading that particular piece within their pages, it means that maybe one day I will.
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| Adorn by Jenny Downing (cc attribution) |
Concentrating on any available encouraging feedback is the best way to look at rejections. They come thick and fast after all, and as my skin is not thick but translucent, some days I go away and curl up in a sad, deflated ball. And yet even when I'm feeling like that, a part of me knows that in a few days' time I'll get up and get going again. And you need to when it comes to writing. You know the stories - Dune was rejected 20 times before being accepted for publication; Gertrude Stein was rejected for 22 years before her first poem was published.
Some days - like this morning and Monday morning (two rejections in three days) - I read the email, feel a bit despondent but stay unfurled, and simply reread, reedit and then resend the piece out somewhere else.
Yay. And if I can handle being rejected, then any writer can. I guess it just depends on how much you want to write, in the end. If your desire to write and the tiny little twinge of flame on the inside of the guts that says that you can do this, that you need to keep practising and getting better but you can do this - if that flame is bigger than the pain you feel when people say, "Nah, thanks," then you get back on your bike again, squire.
Now, the really professional writers curl up in a sad, deflated ball but then get up and back on the bike in the same day, rather than let a day or two go past while their despair flares and dampens down the flame. After all, writing can be approached through many pathways. Even if the despair is flaring and threatening your fire, you can still write. In fact, writing is a wonderfully creative way to envelop your despair in comfort and help it melt on through.
I still get sucked under by it a little, unfortunately. But then I always bob up again. Sometimes it just takes a few days.
Because rejection is part of the business and as my friend Jane says in relation to the upsetting elements of interacting with other people (she is wiser than I): "Don't take it personally." This fits even more so when it comes to writing and not being accepted for publication.
And anyway, to have some personalised feedback at all is an encouraging thing. A rejection that is not a form letter is gold-edged rejection. Believe it or not, to actually get to that space is an achievement. Form letters tend to be the initial type of rejection you receive when you first start sending stuff out and so I actually feel that I have come somewhere in recent years, with the amount of personalised rejection emails I've been receiving. And to know that The Monthly enjoyed reading my writing still fills a certain part of me with magical disbelief. Even if I won't be reading that particular piece within their pages, it means that maybe one day I will.
The ratio of landline callers who I know versus callers who want something while telling me they don't is approximately 1:9 at this stage.
~
Whilst I haven't yet read Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, I plan to. Reading her piece about how she came to write it was like smoking crack for any "I can just about write short stories but a novel would kill me" writer.
I don't agree with those writers who say that reading writers write about writing is a useless enterprise. Of course it's procrastination - an extremely valid, 99% sugar-free guiltless form of it. It's also encouraging, enlightening and entertaining.
~
I have been reading up a little on my Great Great Grandmother, Jane. She was born in Tasmania and moved to Victoria at some point in time where she married Jean Brehaut, who had also moved to Victoria from his homeland of St Peter Port in Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Jane cuts a bit of a tragic figure in my family tree, dying at the age of 43 after a life where she lost a child in infancy, then her five year old daughter and husband in the same year, and then finally herself to the bottle if the rumours are true.
I can hear that voice in my head. Hmm, why don't you research this? You could do her justice by writing her story, help her bones settle. Why don't you just explore a little bit - say, for example, trying to find out a little of what Hobart was like in the 1840s when she was born?
~
I finished a short story the other day. Honestly, my days are very strange. But I confess I do like their irregularity, when it's not stressing me off my dial. I dislike being beholden to a clock that always runs too fast when I want it to run slow and too slow when I want it to speed. I like working odd hours here and there. The lack of work part isn't so great in terms of stress, but it has given me time to keep on with researching Liminal, and it has given me time to write. And I simply can't explain in words how much better typing my own words are compared to transcribing someone else's. A world of difference. A very vast one.
I struggle to know how to end my stories. They always start off with a bang - that lovely feeling of a lens shifting into view that comes sometimes from bunches thoughts and ideas and impressions and pictures rolling around in my head - often from in the shower. One takes hold and, "Ooh, that'd be a good idea for a story." And so off I roll. But then, as is evidenced by the files on my computer and the pieces of paper floating around in my life, often they fizzle out.
And so this time with a stab of nervousness I decided to stick with writing this one. The fact that it was 10.30pm when I started felt rather impractical and could have been an excuse to not do it if I was less clued into the wiliness of procrastination, but what can you do?
And so I wrote it for a couple of hours and then finished it and went to bed and then I slept and then I got up and wrote some more and I actually truly ruly think that it is finished. It feels finished.
~
I told my mum when she came to visit yesterday that I have written a short story that I hope to send to The Big Issue for its annual fiction edition, and that she needs to be forewarned that if they publish it it contains the words "fuck" and "cunt".
She didn't bat an eye. I guess she's had a bit of time to get used to me.
I take so much delight in being able to legitimately say the words "fuck" and "cunt" to my mother that it's really a wonder that I am not 14, but 43. I have come to the conclusion that there is a part of me that will always be 14. Perhaps we contain within us all of the people that we have been in all of the years that we have lived, like complicated trees.
~
Whilst I haven't yet read Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, I plan to. Reading her piece about how she came to write it was like smoking crack for any "I can just about write short stories but a novel would kill me" writer.
I don't agree with those writers who say that reading writers write about writing is a useless enterprise. Of course it's procrastination - an extremely valid, 99% sugar-free guiltless form of it. It's also encouraging, enlightening and entertaining.
~
I have been reading up a little on my Great Great Grandmother, Jane. She was born in Tasmania and moved to Victoria at some point in time where she married Jean Brehaut, who had also moved to Victoria from his homeland of St Peter Port in Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Jane cuts a bit of a tragic figure in my family tree, dying at the age of 43 after a life where she lost a child in infancy, then her five year old daughter and husband in the same year, and then finally herself to the bottle if the rumours are true.
I can hear that voice in my head. Hmm, why don't you research this? You could do her justice by writing her story, help her bones settle. Why don't you just explore a little bit - say, for example, trying to find out a little of what Hobart was like in the 1840s when she was born?
~
I finished a short story the other day. Honestly, my days are very strange. But I confess I do like their irregularity, when it's not stressing me off my dial. I dislike being beholden to a clock that always runs too fast when I want it to run slow and too slow when I want it to speed. I like working odd hours here and there. The lack of work part isn't so great in terms of stress, but it has given me time to keep on with researching Liminal, and it has given me time to write. And I simply can't explain in words how much better typing my own words are compared to transcribing someone else's. A world of difference. A very vast one.
I struggle to know how to end my stories. They always start off with a bang - that lovely feeling of a lens shifting into view that comes sometimes from bunches thoughts and ideas and impressions and pictures rolling around in my head - often from in the shower. One takes hold and, "Ooh, that'd be a good idea for a story." And so off I roll. But then, as is evidenced by the files on my computer and the pieces of paper floating around in my life, often they fizzle out.
And so this time with a stab of nervousness I decided to stick with writing this one. The fact that it was 10.30pm when I started felt rather impractical and could have been an excuse to not do it if I was less clued into the wiliness of procrastination, but what can you do?
And so I wrote it for a couple of hours and then finished it and went to bed and then I slept and then I got up and wrote some more and I actually truly ruly think that it is finished. It feels finished.
~
I told my mum when she came to visit yesterday that I have written a short story that I hope to send to The Big Issue for its annual fiction edition, and that she needs to be forewarned that if they publish it it contains the words "fuck" and "cunt".
She didn't bat an eye. I guess she's had a bit of time to get used to me.
I take so much delight in being able to legitimately say the words "fuck" and "cunt" to my mother that it's really a wonder that I am not 14, but 43. I have come to the conclusion that there is a part of me that will always be 14. Perhaps we contain within us all of the people that we have been in all of the years that we have lived, like complicated trees.
I was going to have a break from writing here, where barely anyone reads anyway (except for those of you who do, who I like very much). Sometimes blogging feels like a luxury and I feel like I should turn my energy towards something more worthwhile, like some half-written essays that are collecting a bit of dust on them, being written by hand and then left in piles on the floor or on tables. I'm feeling encouraged to return to essay writing (I love her so) after a big morsel of recent encouragement from Creative Nonfiction, who think they might have possibly found space for a piece I submitted something like nine months ago and while they understand that someone else might pick it up in the meantime (being a classy and understanding unit that accepts simultaneous submissions) could they hang onto it for a bit longer? Well, I figure another few months isn't going to make much of a difference, and I understand the difficulties that come with being a small enterprise having to plough through submissions from the world over. So while I understand and yet feel frustrated, I also feel heartened that a journal I love is considering putting some of my words inside it. Even though payment won't extend to me being able to compost some of it back into a new subscription because I'm so bloody broke.
Sigh. Money. I'll repeat here my mantra that money is meant to be a tool and a device that allows us to share our stuff amongst each other. While there are lovely cinnamon-smelling whiffs of people doing it differently, money has on the whole become something that keeps us slogging and slugging and serving the machine instead. This HAS to change - and it will. The most surprising thing is that so little has changed half a decade after the GFC, except in pockets of sanity like Iceland, and even then that's not a systemic change but a facing of damage done.
Gazing into my crystal ball of future trends, I'll say expect to see more and more discussion over the next months and years about interest (or usury as it used to be called in the days where it was widely recognized as a great and destructive evil) and the concept of demurrage, which is something I'm still getting my head around but which basically is an element inserted into the economic system which would mean that the longer you hang onto money the more you lose because it will lose some of its value, so that hoarding it ends up becoming a ridiculous concept. Which means that money again would become something that is meant to flow, not something some of us hang onto in a bid for security, and just this one thing would change so, so, so, so, so much. We would begin resembling again the gift economics of the past and less the beholden and enslaved populace we are now.
~
I began panicking a little yesterday morning because when I woke up, I felt simply awful. I felt like the sinusitis that's plagued me over the last year was making another return. Congested head, dizzy, nauseous. Buddhism talks about learning to face the things we are averse to, that cause a strong reaction of disgust within us. I struggled with this aversion yesterday morning because I have had four weeks where I have begun to have a bit more energy, and where I have actually felt happy, and where my creative juices have begun dripping all over the floor. To have to return to this small and ugly area was not something that I was savouring in the least.
So I tried to work with it. I didn't want to be there, but instead of being averse I tried to embrace it. Which meant going back to bed. I surrounded myself with my phone, with some books, and with some paper and pen, and I wrote a complaining blog post, and I began putting my meandering thoughts down for a competition I've been meaning to begin exploring for a while. And eventually, the aversion felt like it loosened its grip a little. I even felt happy while feeling awful. And so I chilled, drank lots of neem tea, flushed my sinuses with a xylitol rinse, and got through the day. It was not where I wanted to be, but I managed to chillax with where I was. I was very pleased.
I'm feeling so much better today than yesterday, but still weak. But what felt like the beginnings of a full-blown sinus infection I think may have simply been a strong reaction to the smoke haze that hung like curtains all over the place yesterday from several fires on the outskirts of northern Melbourne, most of which have been deliberately lit by people who really need to get a handle on whatever shit they're projecting onto a bunch of innocent animals.
I struggle so much with feeling so vulnerable with a body that does not work properly. It really is a vulnerable position to be in. And yet I keep reminding myself that vulnerabilities can also be strengths. They help us stay open, and compassionate, and understanding of others who feel the same way. They slow us down in certain areas, which may be exactly what other parts of us are screaming for. I guess it's all in the way you get to look at it, if your anxiety levels will distil enough to let you see the sandbars.
Sigh. Money. I'll repeat here my mantra that money is meant to be a tool and a device that allows us to share our stuff amongst each other. While there are lovely cinnamon-smelling whiffs of people doing it differently, money has on the whole become something that keeps us slogging and slugging and serving the machine instead. This HAS to change - and it will. The most surprising thing is that so little has changed half a decade after the GFC, except in pockets of sanity like Iceland, and even then that's not a systemic change but a facing of damage done.
Gazing into my crystal ball of future trends, I'll say expect to see more and more discussion over the next months and years about interest (or usury as it used to be called in the days where it was widely recognized as a great and destructive evil) and the concept of demurrage, which is something I'm still getting my head around but which basically is an element inserted into the economic system which would mean that the longer you hang onto money the more you lose because it will lose some of its value, so that hoarding it ends up becoming a ridiculous concept. Which means that money again would become something that is meant to flow, not something some of us hang onto in a bid for security, and just this one thing would change so, so, so, so, so much. We would begin resembling again the gift economics of the past and less the beholden and enslaved populace we are now.
~
I began panicking a little yesterday morning because when I woke up, I felt simply awful. I felt like the sinusitis that's plagued me over the last year was making another return. Congested head, dizzy, nauseous. Buddhism talks about learning to face the things we are averse to, that cause a strong reaction of disgust within us. I struggled with this aversion yesterday morning because I have had four weeks where I have begun to have a bit more energy, and where I have actually felt happy, and where my creative juices have begun dripping all over the floor. To have to return to this small and ugly area was not something that I was savouring in the least.
So I tried to work with it. I didn't want to be there, but instead of being averse I tried to embrace it. Which meant going back to bed. I surrounded myself with my phone, with some books, and with some paper and pen, and I wrote a complaining blog post, and I began putting my meandering thoughts down for a competition I've been meaning to begin exploring for a while. And eventually, the aversion felt like it loosened its grip a little. I even felt happy while feeling awful. And so I chilled, drank lots of neem tea, flushed my sinuses with a xylitol rinse, and got through the day. It was not where I wanted to be, but I managed to chillax with where I was. I was very pleased.
I'm feeling so much better today than yesterday, but still weak. But what felt like the beginnings of a full-blown sinus infection I think may have simply been a strong reaction to the smoke haze that hung like curtains all over the place yesterday from several fires on the outskirts of northern Melbourne, most of which have been deliberately lit by people who really need to get a handle on whatever shit they're projecting onto a bunch of innocent animals.
I struggle so much with feeling so vulnerable with a body that does not work properly. It really is a vulnerable position to be in. And yet I keep reminding myself that vulnerabilities can also be strengths. They help us stay open, and compassionate, and understanding of others who feel the same way. They slow us down in certain areas, which may be exactly what other parts of us are screaming for. I guess it's all in the way you get to look at it, if your anxiety levels will distil enough to let you see the sandbars.
1). I saw a video today about some people in Ouyen in country Victoria who bought and renovated an old theatre. One of the people's names was Don Dundee. That is such a great name it automatically smashed itself into my head and if I was organised I would have rushed to put it in my writer's notebook as a possible future short story character.
2). I was washing my hands after having a poo before (quite pebbly, irritatingly but thanks for asking. I'd probably class it as a Bristol 5 but it's heading precariously towards a 1; unfortunate side effect of the d-ribose but I will take whatever side effects there are for the extra energy). I was washing my hands and wondering about the first time someone discovered that despite our best efforts there's a fine layer of fecal matter over everything. I was immediately flung into the fictitious head of someone in exactly this position, wondering how they are going to tell their findings to their partner, who is obsessively compulsive when it comes to cleanliness.
3). Perhaps I should combine 1) and 2)
4). I went and had a look at a commercial property today, in my ongoing Ooh, This Idea Might Possibly Have Some Legs But We're Not Quite Sure. Let's Just Have Fun Following It And See What Happens quest, which I haven't told you about yet in full detail but the bones of which are scattered all over this blog, like here and here. Well, maybe bones isn't the right word seeing it's more of a yet-to-be-born thing rather than a something that has already died and been strewn around the yard by scavenging birds. I will tell you about it more at some point if it ever gets off the ground. The property was not appropriate, as I knew it would not be, but it's good to check stuff out because it's fun and because knowing what you don't want is just as helpful as knowing what you do. The only problem with looking at scenarios is having to make small talk with real estate agents but oh well, you can't have everything.
5). I didn't even say in 4). what I was intending to say in it. Those contents have now moved to 6).
6). The best thing about the property I looked at was the pig. He was on the decking of the house next door, along with a man and a golden retriever. The pig is a rusty colour. He apparently has a bit of an attitude problem. The pig, said the man, is overly demanding. This made me like him even more, for some reason. He does not get along very well with the blue heeler, who remained mysteriously indoors and did not make an appearance on the decking with the man, the pig and the golden retriever. The pig does like the golden retriever, who remained outside, staring at me over the fence with his tongue hanging out and smiling.
7). There has never in the entire history of the world ever been an inwardly focussed golden retriever.
7). I do not eat pork, but bacon does taste very yummy, doesn't it? I hardly ever eat bacon, but yet a while ago I bought a whole packet of it. Sighting the pig has made me feel like I'm not going to be doing that for a while now. This in turn makes me feel bad that when we had backyard chooks, their existence did not make me stop eating chicken. It made me feel bad, though and I had to tell myself some convoluted bullshit I didn't even believe about how the flatpacked plastic-wrapped stuff wasn't the same as the girls outside.
8). I wish the Netherlandian lab meat would hurry up and get commercialised.
9).
2). I was washing my hands after having a poo before (quite pebbly, irritatingly but thanks for asking. I'd probably class it as a Bristol 5 but it's heading precariously towards a 1; unfortunate side effect of the d-ribose but I will take whatever side effects there are for the extra energy). I was washing my hands and wondering about the first time someone discovered that despite our best efforts there's a fine layer of fecal matter over everything. I was immediately flung into the fictitious head of someone in exactly this position, wondering how they are going to tell their findings to their partner, who is obsessively compulsive when it comes to cleanliness.
3). Perhaps I should combine 1) and 2)
4). I went and had a look at a commercial property today, in my ongoing Ooh, This Idea Might Possibly Have Some Legs But We're Not Quite Sure. Let's Just Have Fun Following It And See What Happens quest, which I haven't told you about yet in full detail but the bones of which are scattered all over this blog, like here and here. Well, maybe bones isn't the right word seeing it's more of a yet-to-be-born thing rather than a something that has already died and been strewn around the yard by scavenging birds. I will tell you about it more at some point if it ever gets off the ground. The property was not appropriate, as I knew it would not be, but it's good to check stuff out because it's fun and because knowing what you don't want is just as helpful as knowing what you do. The only problem with looking at scenarios is having to make small talk with real estate agents but oh well, you can't have everything.
5). I didn't even say in 4). what I was intending to say in it. Those contents have now moved to 6).
6). The best thing about the property I looked at was the pig. He was on the decking of the house next door, along with a man and a golden retriever. The pig is a rusty colour. He apparently has a bit of an attitude problem. The pig, said the man, is overly demanding. This made me like him even more, for some reason. He does not get along very well with the blue heeler, who remained mysteriously indoors and did not make an appearance on the decking with the man, the pig and the golden retriever. The pig does like the golden retriever, who remained outside, staring at me over the fence with his tongue hanging out and smiling.
7). There has never in the entire history of the world ever been an inwardly focussed golden retriever.
7). I do not eat pork, but bacon does taste very yummy, doesn't it? I hardly ever eat bacon, but yet a while ago I bought a whole packet of it. Sighting the pig has made me feel like I'm not going to be doing that for a while now. This in turn makes me feel bad that when we had backyard chooks, their existence did not make me stop eating chicken. It made me feel bad, though and I had to tell myself some convoluted bullshit I didn't even believe about how the flatpacked plastic-wrapped stuff wasn't the same as the girls outside.
8). I wish the Netherlandian lab meat would hurry up and get commercialised.
9).
I hate doing this sort of thing, but a post I wrote on here a few weeks ago is up at Independent Australia. If you think it's worthy of clicking and sharing on social media I'd be most appreciative if you did ~ if it gets 5000 individual address hits I will be paid $125. Which is nothing near a princely sum but it is a week's worth of food.
Thanking ye :)
Thanking ye :)
There's a reason that it's a cliche that writing is simple, but not easy. It is simple. You sit yourself down in your chair in front of a terrifyingly blank screen and sweat some Hemingway blood out your eyeballs, and you write stuff, and that's that.
It really is simple in a way; it's just not easy. That's why there are so many people walking around who believe they have a book in them but they don't get nothin' writ. They're waiting for the right time. But the right time doesn't come.
The last uni class I did on-campus was a creative non-fiction essay-writing class where we were set 20 minutes to write something. There was a very general prompt of some sort - I can't remember what it was now. And of course I sat there in a mass panic for about 10 seconds thinking that I would never be able to come up with something, until I had an idea. And of course it seemed like a shitty idea, not even worth exploring. (In comparison to the ideas that seem totally amazing, and they're falling off the spoon as you jump out of bed or the shower and run to type them down and by the time you do, they've totally drizzled into the floor and you're just left with a mental spoon. If you knew beforehand that this idea would be like one of those, you would have just stayed in bed and licked the spoon for your own enjoyment and been done with it.)
I'm worried that leaving Facebook isn't going to create the space that I need to do creative stuff. I'm worried that it's not going to take that - it's going to take quitting the internet for hours and hours, plus going entirely through menopause, and stopping being depressed and anxious, and stopping feeling excessively paranoid so that I spend mass energy worrying that my friends hate me. I'm worried that it's going to take my entire life and one day I will be 92 and I won't have any space left because I won't have any time left.
But that worry is really awfully foundless, and I know that it is so. It is a worry that on my bad days I give in to, and on my good days when I have some sort of a purchase on perspective it is easy to smile at it as evidence of being Scaredy Scarederson and to sit down and write anyway.
The bit from the writing prompt that I ended up writing in class that day became a My Word column that I sold to The Big Issue a few months later. And really, I feel like I've got a million of those ideas inside of me. So quitting Facebook and trying to do other things to make space is a really good thing to do. But in the end, it really is just making the time. Not making up excuses that I can't do it because I'm too paranoid at the moment, or whatever the current almost-mental-illness is in vogue in my head (I must say, the paranoia has been in vogue for some time and I'm really rather tired of it. Get here, menopause, and get here quick).
We really do make excuses sometimes, don't we. (Some of us more than others. A post talking about the struggles I have with getting myself writing and staying writing and doing other creative things is a replica. There's probably about 50 others on this blog saying pretty much the same thing :)
Really, it doesn't seem important so much that we're ready to do something creative, just that we need to make space and we need to make time, even if we don't feel like we can do it at all. We can do more than we think we can. That blank screen or canvas or page is always going to hold an element of terror. That will never leave, like an actor's performance anxiety - and neither should it. But neither should it stop you from getting there in the first place.
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| Glowing Stationary by Ablipintime |
So Rima Staines finally joins Facebook ...
... and I leave it.
Again.
I've done this before. I know how it feels - the familiar jittery, "What the hell am I doing?" feeling. The awful thought that you have removed yourself from the entire front loungeroom of the global house. That you will probably lose touch with a whole bunch of people who if you never get on Facebook again you'll probably never talk to again.
The "What the hell am I doing?" feeling is like when you quit smoking. It's a panic. It's a wondering what you're going to do to fill up the space where you used to look at Facebook 30 times a day.
Which is exactly why I'm doing it. I want more space.
I partially blame Rima's post. Because this:
I have a theory that using the internet occupies a very particular place in us. I think it takes the place of dreaming. Not night-dreaming, but that very shamanic soul-travelling that we all do to a greater or lesser extent when our mind wanders, when we create art, when we day-dream, imagine, journey in our minds and spirits to elsewhere, elsewhen. Internet-travelling uses the same metaphorical muscle I think, but is utterly hollow in comparison because it is not creative in that same sense. It is not magical. And worst of all it replaces the dreaming.This really speaks to me. I haven't been writing much in recent weeks, after the latest sinus bout. It fills up my head and makes it feel like there is not room enough both for sinus and for words. And so I've fallen off the writing habit again for the moment. But even if my head is relatively clear, it still feels full up with the internet. With the mass amount of information I've taken in over one day that the majority of people in the entire history of the world would not take in over their entire lifetimes, I feel completely full, and often very overwhelmed, even when I'm rolling around inside the house all day all by myself with no work to do. It's not very conducive to characterisation, to essay-writing, to thrumming. And so while I can't get rid of the entire internet, I can at least get rid of Facebook. Because it frees up space, and I know it does because it has done so before. And I wish to fill that extra space with real-time interaction with breathing, living people, and real-time interaction with clay, with pens, and with the keyboard where I am writing stuff that sits in a document waiting to be added to tomorrow, instead of being pasted as a Facebook status update.
Rima is speaking about the internet as a whole, and I agree fulsomely that even if I quit Facebook, I still have to try to manage my internet info intake each day. But Facebook is like the methamphetamine of the internet for me. Even more so than Twitter, strangely. Twitter annoys me too much for it to ever be a meth addiction. Twitter is like a once a week bong-on sesh with your mates. Facebook is like mainlining. I need the space.
I went outside before, after getting home from my Aged Care class, and sat, with my feet bare in the grass, and read a wonderful novel, and felt blissed out from the sun that had poked through the clouds on my way home and which was now heading his way in a slant over to the west. And I made pictures out of the clouds, and thrummed in my dreaming space, and read a story set in the future generations and generations after a giant meteorite has hit the moon and flung it off its trajectory so that every seventh night it looms scarily close to the earth before moving away again in its new spheric orbit. A story most certainly set elsewhen, further off into the future around a church of women, the Sisters of Selene, whose influence has already risen in their small periphery and, over several generations, now begins to wane. It is a book captivating my attention, and hence I was incredibly rich sitting there, more than you could ever guess, out out on the grass, feet buried in grass, reading the words of an author who sounds like he's writing in some Icelandic country - his name is Torsten Krol, if he is indeed a he - but who apparently lives in Queensland. There is apparently some mystery surrounding Torsten Krol, about whether he is a famous author writing under a pseudonym. I think in some ways I like it like that - an anonymous writer. There is sometimes something nice about not knowing who the author is, of the story just wafting to you all on its own.
But I also really like it when a piece of writing is attached to an author. It's why I will always prefer blogs over Facebook, even as Facebook has stolen many bloggers away. I prefer being able to go to read someone's extended thoughtfulness, where my reading is a little more longform, even if it means that I can read less, because it's more fun to spend time inside one person's mind for five minutes rather than flicking my attention between 13 different people in two.
And so my love-hate relationship with this online space, and my haggling with it over how much of an effect it gets to have on my attention span and mindspace continues. Rima says it better:
But do you not also share my frustration and loathing for the way the internet has squirmed into our every minute, addicting us to updates, and overloading us with eons more information each second than we are naturally made to process in a lifetime? Even if we ignore the endless shite and horror that the internet contains, it is still spilling over with wonder. There are so many beautiful things out there, genuine heartfelt pieces of writing, ideas and images - too many - so we have learnt to skim, to take in only the bubbles from the top of every slowly crafted brew. And I for one feel this is not a true and considered honouring of these beautiful works, not to mention of the eyes and hearts and souls and bodies of the people who are consuming these streams of information every millisecond, utterly removed from the place and land where they sit, out in the ether somewhere, following a trail whilst their extremities get gradually colder and they forget to eat lunch.
... I speak from a concerned and somewhat frightened yet simultaneously grateful and amazed viewpoint. If we use this thing, we still need to remember the land on which we stand, remember our bodies and the faces of those we love. I think we should be frightened that all intercity trains these days are filled with blue-faced passengers, every one of them swiping their fingers across a tiny screen, oblivious of the people around them acting identically. If we use this thing, then we should use it to find other faces in the throng and go and really touch them, in real life. Arrange it so that you can look into their real eyes and hear their real stories. This amazing network can be used for proliferating inane fluff or it can be used to organize and gather for good and real reasons, and to stir souls.Sometimes the soul you need to stir is your own. To make more space for the daydreaming. To not let connecting on Facebook replace connecting with people in real time. To go cold turkey once again. To disconnect to reconnect. A mighty challenge for us all ~ internet newbies all as we are ~ to navigate.
Practice is meditation. Non-practice is also meditation. I read that quote, or something like it, in Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. What he means is that what you learn about meditation by practising is great, but that even in the space where you are not practising, even that is not wasted because there is much to learn in the not-doing. You can see what meditation does for you by not practising it. By experiencing the lack.
I am 1/4 of the way or so through the theory component of a Certificate III in Home and Community Care, which is to be followed by 120 hours of placement. I'm grateful for those 120 hours but in terms of finance, the amount of time it takes to gain a certificate that will enable me to get a job that will certainly not be paying wonderfully stretches out over months and months and throws me into depression at times. And meanwhile I'm floundering financially. Me and finances have never been very good together. We continue on in that vein.
The course, though it's only two days a week, feels like it's eating up a big chunk of my energy. This week I had classes on Monday and Friday, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I went out both days, once to visit a good friend for lunch and once to meet up with my mum in the city to go to the Monet's Garden exhibition at the NGV. So nice to get out and socialise. But stretching it just a little. For me.
It all caught up with me last night and I realised I was daydreaming while driving home about climbing into bed. And so I did, while my partner cooked dinner (bliss) and stayed there for several hours. I struggle to stop and rest. How hard it is in a society where so many of us are seemingly addicted to the opposite? Even though it is bad for us? Even though it is a creepy playing to the oppression that is stifling the way we live as complete human beings. I struggle to stop and rest because I feel guilty, even though I need to do it more than so many people I see every day who juggle kids and jobs and housework and still find time to do other things. I struggle with the resentment I feel towards those people. They're often the ones who if you mention fatigue-related chronic illness will say that yeah, they reckon they've got it too. It is hard having a fatigue-related chronic illness in a fatigued society. They can't begin to understand how far the spectrum stretches, and how well they are doing comparatively. They think that because they're sucking it up and getting on with it, that you should too. It doesn't, however, work like that.
If I could suck it up and get on with it, I'd have a few more bucks in the bank than I do now, believe me. And less stress. And more security. And I'd be bigger in the world's eyes but smaller in my soul's because I wouldn't be looking after myself. If we suck it up and get on with it, we keep the world's status quo, the insane version we dance to, and I'm not so sure that that's exactly the thing that doesn't need to die down to the ground, get composted, and reborn as something better.
But anyway, I digress. I am nattering on with my usual frustrations of time management/energy management/money management because I feel like even though I make many lovely and varied efforts to keep my head above water, just keeping up the current level is a struggle. And the frustrating thing is that I'm feeling smaller, and I know that it's because I'm not swimming in the ponds that give me energy, the creative ones. Because they're the easy ones to put aside. Because writing when you're aching is possible - and you forget about the aches - but getting to writing when you're aching is harder than it already is. And anyone who has a regular creative practice knows that strange space where you are resistive to doing the very thing that you know once you climb enfolds you like a mother and opens up the minutes.
I read an article a few days ago where a writer was recommending that you have 40 submissions on the go at any one time - eight pieces, sent out to nine different markets. That's great in theory. I have about four things out awaiting reply at the moment. One of them I received yesterday - another no. I am thickening up ever so slightly, getting used to the ongoing nos. Many editors are kind, and they make sure that they tell you that whilst they enjoyed the read/it was original/thought-provoking that they don't think it's quite for their publication. And so on you go.
But the thought of having 40 submissions on the go is a crazy one to me at the moment. It's about nine steps ahead of the stage I'm at now. Because having that many submissions means that you've put time aside to spend researching markets and sending your stuff out. It's quite a time-consuming process. And that is on top of actually writing. And I haven't been regularly writing.
But you know what I've found? Where years ago I used to get scared, worried that the well will dry up, what I have learned in the process of not-writing is ... well, how much I've learned and grown in the times that I do write. I know, with the comfort that comes from experience, that getting into the habit of morning pages for a bit - Julia Cameron's practice of writing (preferably first thing in the morning) several pages by hand of whatever the hell comes into your head, and throwing it away afterwards - opens it all up, that a few days of feeling grindy and grinchy and what-the-hell-is-there-to-write-about-ey are alleviated rather quickly until I fall into that space where I feel that I will never be able to write about all I wish to even if I had seven lifetimes over.
I trust the space is there. Which is a comfort, when I'm feeling put out that I simply don't have enough petrol tickets to get there after the "concerns of life" are met. Or not, as the case may be :)
I am 1/4 of the way or so through the theory component of a Certificate III in Home and Community Care, which is to be followed by 120 hours of placement. I'm grateful for those 120 hours but in terms of finance, the amount of time it takes to gain a certificate that will enable me to get a job that will certainly not be paying wonderfully stretches out over months and months and throws me into depression at times. And meanwhile I'm floundering financially. Me and finances have never been very good together. We continue on in that vein.
The course, though it's only two days a week, feels like it's eating up a big chunk of my energy. This week I had classes on Monday and Friday, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I went out both days, once to visit a good friend for lunch and once to meet up with my mum in the city to go to the Monet's Garden exhibition at the NGV. So nice to get out and socialise. But stretching it just a little. For me.
It all caught up with me last night and I realised I was daydreaming while driving home about climbing into bed. And so I did, while my partner cooked dinner (bliss) and stayed there for several hours. I struggle to stop and rest. How hard it is in a society where so many of us are seemingly addicted to the opposite? Even though it is bad for us? Even though it is a creepy playing to the oppression that is stifling the way we live as complete human beings. I struggle to stop and rest because I feel guilty, even though I need to do it more than so many people I see every day who juggle kids and jobs and housework and still find time to do other things. I struggle with the resentment I feel towards those people. They're often the ones who if you mention fatigue-related chronic illness will say that yeah, they reckon they've got it too. It is hard having a fatigue-related chronic illness in a fatigued society. They can't begin to understand how far the spectrum stretches, and how well they are doing comparatively. They think that because they're sucking it up and getting on with it, that you should too. It doesn't, however, work like that.
If I could suck it up and get on with it, I'd have a few more bucks in the bank than I do now, believe me. And less stress. And more security. And I'd be bigger in the world's eyes but smaller in my soul's because I wouldn't be looking after myself. If we suck it up and get on with it, we keep the world's status quo, the insane version we dance to, and I'm not so sure that that's exactly the thing that doesn't need to die down to the ground, get composted, and reborn as something better.
But anyway, I digress. I am nattering on with my usual frustrations of time management/energy management/money management because I feel like even though I make many lovely and varied efforts to keep my head above water, just keeping up the current level is a struggle. And the frustrating thing is that I'm feeling smaller, and I know that it's because I'm not swimming in the ponds that give me energy, the creative ones. Because they're the easy ones to put aside. Because writing when you're aching is possible - and you forget about the aches - but getting to writing when you're aching is harder than it already is. And anyone who has a regular creative practice knows that strange space where you are resistive to doing the very thing that you know once you climb enfolds you like a mother and opens up the minutes.
I read an article a few days ago where a writer was recommending that you have 40 submissions on the go at any one time - eight pieces, sent out to nine different markets. That's great in theory. I have about four things out awaiting reply at the moment. One of them I received yesterday - another no. I am thickening up ever so slightly, getting used to the ongoing nos. Many editors are kind, and they make sure that they tell you that whilst they enjoyed the read/it was original/thought-provoking that they don't think it's quite for their publication. And so on you go.
But the thought of having 40 submissions on the go is a crazy one to me at the moment. It's about nine steps ahead of the stage I'm at now. Because having that many submissions means that you've put time aside to spend researching markets and sending your stuff out. It's quite a time-consuming process. And that is on top of actually writing. And I haven't been regularly writing.
But you know what I've found? Where years ago I used to get scared, worried that the well will dry up, what I have learned in the process of not-writing is ... well, how much I've learned and grown in the times that I do write. I know, with the comfort that comes from experience, that getting into the habit of morning pages for a bit - Julia Cameron's practice of writing (preferably first thing in the morning) several pages by hand of whatever the hell comes into your head, and throwing it away afterwards - opens it all up, that a few days of feeling grindy and grinchy and what-the-hell-is-there-to-write-about-ey are alleviated rather quickly until I fall into that space where I feel that I will never be able to write about all I wish to even if I had seven lifetimes over.
I trust the space is there. Which is a comfort, when I'm feeling put out that I simply don't have enough petrol tickets to get there after the "concerns of life" are met. Or not, as the case may be :)
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| Wind Song by Creating-Insanity under a CC 3.0 licence |
When I wake at this hour and my body is behaving itself occasionally I find myself in the delicious zone that writers and creatives and sportspeople talk about, the zone of flow. Almost an otherworldly feeling, like you've still got one foot half in the dreamspace, the perfect place where the space between your subconscious and conscious feels thinner, and images flow up as creative prompts.
Which is exactly what happened to me the other day. I was lying in bed, feeling cosy and warm and happy that I could go back to sleep for several more hours, but then while I was lying there waiting for sleep to roll in like the tide I kept getting sentences in my head that I liked very much, and then a picture of a foggy nighttime landscape with gum trees and fog. And so what the hell, I sat up and started writing a short story that rolled out from the image I saw.
And I kept writing and kept writing until I had for all intents and purposes finished writing an 1800 word story. It felt finished, in the way that fiction and poetry often seems to come out of me, as if it's pretty much fully-formed and I just need to sit with it for a day or two, and then edit and rework and shape it, adding bits here and deleting bits there. When this happens it feels like blessing, and I feel very fortunate to be able to have this sort of experience that comes out of nowhere seemingly unbidden. Makes my innards where all this happens feel as mysterious and sexy to me as wintertime when the fog rolls in.
Creativity is tiring, especially with limited energy. I think if I was healthier this sort of thing would happen more often. But as it goes, I welcome it when it happens.
Don't know if the story is any good or not, but that's another story entirely :)
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| Public domain pic |
My body has gone backwards. I'm really tired of this. I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars I have spent on supplements and tests over the years. Thousands. I am struggling to work enough to crack 200 bucks a week. So going on sickness benefits will mean that my income will effectively double. Woohoo!
Health going backwards and fatigue flaring at the time when my partner could do with me contributing my financial share, cracks open the guilt vault (and I could drown in there), makes me feel more stressed, and then my adrenals have to deal with more, and so the snowball rolls. This has been a snowfield I'm used to playing in in one way or the other. Being back here though in the midst is the closest thing to hell I can think of.
What do the Buddhists say? There are four different sorts of suffering? I can't remember what the other three are but the fourth one is "Not being able to get what you desire." That's me, that's my life, that's the roadblock (which granted I didn't put there. But it's my responsibility to move it).
How do you say internalised oppression? That's me. I think The Secret has a lot to answer for but I do think there is several glimmers in there that are relevant. I do think that in a certain way the reality we have is the one we've created. And I have created, against my own wishes, roadblocks to being able to live the way I choose. Nobody stopping me. Just me. And so it's a couple of rounds of EFT tapping every day, homework from the therapist: "Even though I believe someone or something will always stop me living the life I choose, I deeply and completely accept myself." EFT rocks. It moves and shakes things. I don't really believe it's going to move or shake this issue or others. Hence the other round of EFT tapping about "Even though I don't believe anything will change ..."
Learned helplessness, anybody?
I need to get my website up and running. A digital container to put the work in, you know? I have the idea for a logo. Her name's Speedy Snail. Lots of swirls around her. Lots speeding on in her head, the body snailing along behind. I went back to bed today and spent several hours reading. Nice. It's what I need to do. But I fight it. Because I feel totally useless. I don't know how to not be well after 14 years. I don't know how to do it gracefully. I just don't.
I can feel this same sort of self-sabotage going on in my writing career. Two different arenas have published two of my essays in the last six months. Have I resubmitted anything to either of them? No. I feel a reticence to do so. I even queried The Big Issue about whether they'd be interested in another My Word piece about roosters. Yep, send it on through, Lorraine says. Have I? No. Granted, I haven't written it yet and though I haven't done so, I've been writing a fair bit of other stuff, which is heartily inspiring. I remember once, years ago, I wondered if I ever would clear the river. I had writer's block - a desire to write but I didn't know what to write about. These days, while I still have those times where I don't know what to write about, I know what fixes it - writing. Anything. And then within a day the river's rushing again and it's not so much not knowing what to write, it's choosing what I want to write most, and having the energy and time to do it. Nice, eh?
But that self-sabotaging thing about not wanting to submit stuff to places I've published in before? I don't know what that is. It's in one of the deep caves of my unconscious where I see it's effects without knowing it's there. Those unconscious beliefs are funny little things when they start to become conscious. There's a part of you that is looking in disbelief at this thing you've just realised you think. That you've thunk maybe for years. And while part of you know that this is true, and that bringing it up to your conscious mind is the first step in clearing it away, another part of you sits numb disbelieving it all. This being human is not only a guest house, it's a weird one. A Tim Burton guesthouse with creaky bits and doors that open onto black holes and awesome oak staircases and coolness. Sort of like that teddy bear video I posted on here yesterday - a little gross, a little creepy, but really, in one way, rather sweet (I mean, who doesn't want a bon bon layer? Yeah, I know, I know, there can be problems with the bon bon layer, as teddy's operation so amply demonstrated, but that's what teddy doctors are for. And good teddy nutrition).
That self-sabotaging thing about not wanting to submit stuff to places I've published in before is a known unknown. It's one of the things I say to myself so fast and so deeply in the undergrowth that I don't feel it or see it or feel its swish as it goes by. But I see the effects of it. In this post, in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Erika Dreifus reviews the sorta recently released book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Titled Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead Erika has this to say in response to it:
In this chapter, the overall message is that women suffer from underestimating their abilities more than men do. “[F]eeling confident–or pretending that you feel confident—is necessary to reach for opportunities. It’s a cliché, but opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.” From refraining from raising their hands in the audience to sitting on the sidelines rather than taking seats at the conference table, Sandberg shares examples of women holding themselves back.
For writers of fiction, poetry, and essays, one of the ways to “sit at the table” can begin, quite literally, with sitting at a table of fellow students and an instructor for a writing workshop. I won’t comment here on the ways that gender dynamics and stereotypes crop up in these situations, because I’ll digress to a point of no return (besides, you’ll get a glimmer of this in the next section, “Success and Likeability”).
But the VIDA count reminds us of other tables and other seats. Where are women “sitting” in those venues? Where do they show up at in the tables of contents and bylines and within prominent literary magazines and book reviews? VIDA and its proponents seek institutional change, but what if that isn’t enough? Some female writers who may not habitually submit their work may realize that—like the woman whose tweet is cited above—they need to take some steps themselves.
But as Sandberg observes, even when offered opportunities, women don’t always accept them. One of the most eye-catching accompaniments to this year’s VIDA count was Amy King’s interview with Tin House editor Rob Spillman, who described that earlier VIDA statistics had prompted Tin House “to take a deep look at our submissions.” One of Spillman’s most attention-grabbing revelations was grounded beyond the slush pile: “Although we solicited equal numbers of men and women, men were more than twice as likely to submit after being solicited. This even applies to writers I’ve previously published.”Yep. I sure get that.
Here are a few Weekend Notes articles I've written recently:
Melbourne Free University: Classics of Crime Fiction - a free six-part presentation and discussion covering the beginnings of crime fiction up to present day.
Clothes Swap at Chesterfield Farm Community Garden - BYO unsuitable eBay purchases and exchange them for tokens, which you can use to trade for other clothes. $2 entry goes to the CFCG, a Transition Town in Knox.
Ramona Koval - By the Book - a lunchtime presentation by Ramona Koval, writer, journalist and broadcaster, well-known to Aussie Radio National listeners as host of The Book Club. What better thing to do apart from reading than to go and listen to someone else read from their own - which happens to be a book about ... well, books?
Native Plant Sale and Propagation the folks of The Australian Plants Society Yarra Yarra are big on propagating Australian natives. Their annual sale is on, where they will be demonstrating to folks how to plant from seed, from cutting and from grafting.
If you would like to follow me on Weekend Notes so that you get an email whenever I post a new article there, you can do so here.
Ah. Promotion.
I've really been enjoying writing for Weekend Notes. I did have this idea that whenever I write an article over there that I will write another one here that goes off on some sort of a tangent and then links to the Weekend Notes article. Good idea, but I've been pressed for time and/or energy lately so it hasn't come to pass ... yet.
The thing I hate most about writing is the promotion that goes along with it. To be honest, self-promotion makes my flesh crawl. I just want to write the bloody thing. I don't want to care about SEO and Google Analytics and actually sharing it with people. I just want to write!!!!
I really can't explain just how much marketing and advertising bores the absolute stuffing out of me. People say that writers these days need to be promoters as well and I guess it's true that they do. That doesn't mean it doesn't make me want to spin my head around and vomit green all over the walls.
Melbourne Free University: Classics of Crime Fiction - a free six-part presentation and discussion covering the beginnings of crime fiction up to present day.
Clothes Swap at Chesterfield Farm Community Garden - BYO unsuitable eBay purchases and exchange them for tokens, which you can use to trade for other clothes. $2 entry goes to the CFCG, a Transition Town in Knox.
Ramona Koval - By the Book - a lunchtime presentation by Ramona Koval, writer, journalist and broadcaster, well-known to Aussie Radio National listeners as host of The Book Club. What better thing to do apart from reading than to go and listen to someone else read from their own - which happens to be a book about ... well, books?
Native Plant Sale and Propagation the folks of The Australian Plants Society Yarra Yarra are big on propagating Australian natives. Their annual sale is on, where they will be demonstrating to folks how to plant from seed, from cutting and from grafting.
If you would like to follow me on Weekend Notes so that you get an email whenever I post a new article there, you can do so here.
Ah. Promotion.
I've really been enjoying writing for Weekend Notes. I did have this idea that whenever I write an article over there that I will write another one here that goes off on some sort of a tangent and then links to the Weekend Notes article. Good idea, but I've been pressed for time and/or energy lately so it hasn't come to pass ... yet.
The thing I hate most about writing is the promotion that goes along with it. To be honest, self-promotion makes my flesh crawl. I just want to write the bloody thing. I don't want to care about SEO and Google Analytics and actually sharing it with people. I just want to write!!!!
I really can't explain just how much marketing and advertising bores the absolute stuffing out of me. People say that writers these days need to be promoters as well and I guess it's true that they do. That doesn't mean it doesn't make me want to spin my head around and vomit green all over the walls.
... is none of my business.
Rinse and repeat.
And then repeat it and repeat it and repeat it like a mantra. What other people think of me is none of my business.
I often feel pulled one way and then the other by people's desires for me and opinions of me. The desire to please, to be the sort of person who is liked and accepted, is strong. There are parts of me which I wish to express but then I worry that people will not like me if I do.
But then, in that instance, what other people think of me is none of my business. Being true to myself is.
Sometimes I worry that the way people see me is in conflict with how they would see me if only I had the courage to truly be myself ~ and that's coming from the kind of person who is quite often truly myself. I have been told by more than one person that I am brave in my sharing of myself. And so I realise that though I feel so terrified to express myself, maybe other people are even more terrified to express themselves, and suddenly I think that maybe I am actually more myself than lots of other people are. Which amazes me, really. Because it doesn't feel like it, and it scares me. I have a strange and scary ongoing feeling that something bad will happen if I am myself. It is one of my many terrors, and is a delusion that persists. It has wings. Or balls. (Although, as someone said, "Why do people say, 'grow some balls'? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding." But I digress ...)
If you have a strong inner life, there is always a disconnect dealing with other people because you know that you are never going to be able to truly share that rich and vibrant space with them. They will never see the whole of you. And because of that, we don't really ever know how we come across to other people, and some of that richness inside may not get expressed well or at all, and so then we can be surprised by others' reactions to us. We just never really truly know how other people see us. And we all want to be seen for who we are and accepted for who we are.
But still, despite that true and lovely desire, what other people think of me is none of my business.
It is so easy to feel invisible in this world. And the online space can make that feel even stronger. When people stop reading my blog (which has happened a whole stack over the past few years), I wonder why. I start wondering if I should change the content, make myself shinier. When people don't hit "like" enough on my Facebook page, or at all, I can feel rejected. Some days I feel lonely on Facebook because the people who give me the most encouragement are people I have never met, across the other side of the world, while the people I know in real life are saying nothing at all. I feel redundant and alienated and like maybe some of those people that I know in real life don't really see me at all. I feel like the best way I express myself is in writing. And I feel like maybe some of those people that I have known for years, who know me as Sue the transcriber or whatever, might think that I have a few tickets on myself, calling myself a writer.
Luckily, what other people think of me is none of my business.
Or in a face-to-face conversation someone might make a joke of something that is important to me that I'm never spoken about before so that then I don't feel like I want to ever to say anything about that particular subject for fear of being rejected. Because I'm so fucking totally oversensitive. Sometimes this pyroluric freak will take to her bed because rejection feels like its running down her leg and out through the floor from something someone did or didn't say (often on Facebook), and it's a rejection that ultimately has no basis in reality. It is hard to accept that these delusional sorts of feelings that are so strong are not real out there in the world but are more indications of what is going on in my body. At those times it is a solace to remember that what other people think of me is none of my business ... and that quite possibly what I think they are thinking about me is nothing even close to the truth.
I have been having a bit of success recently in a small way when it comes to writing. In the last six months I have had an essay published for the first time for payment. Last week, I had another essay published in the inaugural autumn issue of The Tincture Journal. On one particular day a fortnight ago I had three different email conversations with three different editors. One of those was saying that they would like to see a piece of mine that I had suggested. Another was to say that they loved my original piece of writing and would publish it on their website. Another filled my heart the most, because it was from The Griffith Review, which I love, and though it was a rejection letter it was the most encouraging one, telling me that my essay passed through the first round with flying colours, despite the fact that it was over their usual reading limit (over 4000 words), and that it was only because of issues of space that they had to unfortunately reject it.
Writing is a strange pursuit. When I first write something, though I am ultimately hoping for other people to read it, I have to write it as if I'm only writing it forever for myself, or I won't be able to write a word. It's as if I have to go inside, close the door, walk down the hallway right to the back of the house, climb the stairs, go down the laundry chute into the wine cellar where there is a hidden, winding staircase that nobody knows about up to a level where there is a flying fox that flies above the clothesline below to the the hidden room that is only accessible by said flying fox, being situated at the top of a 17 foot pole. And it's here that I write. Writing is a solitary activity that is about as personal as swimming around in your own guts, and then when you come back out of that space and return all the way up to your everyday house with a piece of writing to share, then, though you want pepole to like what you have written, and though you are doing a very intimate thing with them by sharing it with them, even if it's the whole world you're sharing it with over the internet, you still have to remember that what other people think of you is none of your business.
Repeat: what other people think of me is none of my business.
For some people, being themselves comes easily, but I suspect for most of us it is a difficulty. It is the tug between the pull of the herd and the call of your own wild. It turns out that one of the hardest things to be is yourself. Who would have thought that? And there are so many multiple layers to being ourselves that I suspect we can go through life with doors left unopened, that opened we would be surprised and maybe even dismayed to find contained undeveloped talents that would knock us a little sideways if we only knew that they lay hidden under a big pile of clothes from 1979 that we forgot to put back in the cupboard. Or they lie under a whole lot of "No, no, not that. It's not possible to do that. It will cost too much." And so there it lies mustering in the middle of the room under a pile of Keds and pairs of black shiny pants and shimmery boob tubes and fears until one day we forget that it's there at all when we glance in that room. Now there's just a pile of stuff, and it becomes easier to simply close the door and walk down the hallway to a different room.
Once you know how hard it is to be yourself and you feel it, then it sometimes becomes easier to at least begin the process of either discovering who you are and what you want (there are always surprises) or else in the even harder work of coaxing and cajoling those parts of you that hide, wanting to be seen, terrified of being seen. Those parts need the most gentle looking after, and if being kind to yourself feels like a weakness then they have probably found a ledge in your soul that they have climbed up on, away from your searchlight gaze. Those undeveloped parts of you need rose-coloured light to shine on them. They already feel a little dead, so if you walk in on them and shine your torch of scrutiny on them, the one that contains energy-saving cold white light, they will stay hidden away on their ledges. They are already in the morgue. Candlelight and rose-coloured light. They're the sorts of light that they like best.
They will also run from comparison. They are just themselves, and when you compare them to other people's shiny bits that have been Photoshopped for public consumption, they will run away from that. This interaction is just between you and them. Because what other people think of you is none of your business.
When I say that mantra to myself, what it does is it provides a space for me to climb out of the raging ocean of paranoia and insecurity when I'm worried I have stepped on someone's toes, hurt their feelings, said something they may not like and therefore may reject me and not like me as much. On and on it goes, that raging ocean. And those words when I say them ~ what other people think of me is none of my business ~ work for me. They send shoots of gold through the water that point out the ledge on the edge of the cliff that I can climb onto, above those waves, and see them for what they are.
And then I feel the bigger me, mySelf, and those fears subdue, and then the space and the hope flood in. Like the tide. As they always do.
Rinse and repeat.
And then repeat it and repeat it and repeat it like a mantra. What other people think of me is none of my business.
I often feel pulled one way and then the other by people's desires for me and opinions of me. The desire to please, to be the sort of person who is liked and accepted, is strong. There are parts of me which I wish to express but then I worry that people will not like me if I do.
But then, in that instance, what other people think of me is none of my business. Being true to myself is.
Sometimes I worry that the way people see me is in conflict with how they would see me if only I had the courage to truly be myself ~ and that's coming from the kind of person who is quite often truly myself. I have been told by more than one person that I am brave in my sharing of myself. And so I realise that though I feel so terrified to express myself, maybe other people are even more terrified to express themselves, and suddenly I think that maybe I am actually more myself than lots of other people are. Which amazes me, really. Because it doesn't feel like it, and it scares me. I have a strange and scary ongoing feeling that something bad will happen if I am myself. It is one of my many terrors, and is a delusion that persists. It has wings. Or balls. (Although, as someone said, "Why do people say, 'grow some balls'? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding." But I digress ...)
If you have a strong inner life, there is always a disconnect dealing with other people because you know that you are never going to be able to truly share that rich and vibrant space with them. They will never see the whole of you. And because of that, we don't really ever know how we come across to other people, and some of that richness inside may not get expressed well or at all, and so then we can be surprised by others' reactions to us. We just never really truly know how other people see us. And we all want to be seen for who we are and accepted for who we are.
But still, despite that true and lovely desire, what other people think of me is none of my business.
It is so easy to feel invisible in this world. And the online space can make that feel even stronger. When people stop reading my blog (which has happened a whole stack over the past few years), I wonder why. I start wondering if I should change the content, make myself shinier. When people don't hit "like" enough on my Facebook page, or at all, I can feel rejected. Some days I feel lonely on Facebook because the people who give me the most encouragement are people I have never met, across the other side of the world, while the people I know in real life are saying nothing at all. I feel redundant and alienated and like maybe some of those people that I know in real life don't really see me at all. I feel like the best way I express myself is in writing. And I feel like maybe some of those people that I have known for years, who know me as Sue the transcriber or whatever, might think that I have a few tickets on myself, calling myself a writer.
Luckily, what other people think of me is none of my business.
Or in a face-to-face conversation someone might make a joke of something that is important to me that I'm never spoken about before so that then I don't feel like I want to ever to say anything about that particular subject for fear of being rejected. Because I'm so fucking totally oversensitive. Sometimes this pyroluric freak will take to her bed because rejection feels like its running down her leg and out through the floor from something someone did or didn't say (often on Facebook), and it's a rejection that ultimately has no basis in reality. It is hard to accept that these delusional sorts of feelings that are so strong are not real out there in the world but are more indications of what is going on in my body. At those times it is a solace to remember that what other people think of me is none of my business ... and that quite possibly what I think they are thinking about me is nothing even close to the truth.
I have been having a bit of success recently in a small way when it comes to writing. In the last six months I have had an essay published for the first time for payment. Last week, I had another essay published in the inaugural autumn issue of The Tincture Journal. On one particular day a fortnight ago I had three different email conversations with three different editors. One of those was saying that they would like to see a piece of mine that I had suggested. Another was to say that they loved my original piece of writing and would publish it on their website. Another filled my heart the most, because it was from The Griffith Review, which I love, and though it was a rejection letter it was the most encouraging one, telling me that my essay passed through the first round with flying colours, despite the fact that it was over their usual reading limit (over 4000 words), and that it was only because of issues of space that they had to unfortunately reject it.
Writing is a strange pursuit. When I first write something, though I am ultimately hoping for other people to read it, I have to write it as if I'm only writing it forever for myself, or I won't be able to write a word. It's as if I have to go inside, close the door, walk down the hallway right to the back of the house, climb the stairs, go down the laundry chute into the wine cellar where there is a hidden, winding staircase that nobody knows about up to a level where there is a flying fox that flies above the clothesline below to the the hidden room that is only accessible by said flying fox, being situated at the top of a 17 foot pole. And it's here that I write. Writing is a solitary activity that is about as personal as swimming around in your own guts, and then when you come back out of that space and return all the way up to your everyday house with a piece of writing to share, then, though you want pepole to like what you have written, and though you are doing a very intimate thing with them by sharing it with them, even if it's the whole world you're sharing it with over the internet, you still have to remember that what other people think of you is none of your business.
Repeat: what other people think of me is none of my business.
For some people, being themselves comes easily, but I suspect for most of us it is a difficulty. It is the tug between the pull of the herd and the call of your own wild. It turns out that one of the hardest things to be is yourself. Who would have thought that? And there are so many multiple layers to being ourselves that I suspect we can go through life with doors left unopened, that opened we would be surprised and maybe even dismayed to find contained undeveloped talents that would knock us a little sideways if we only knew that they lay hidden under a big pile of clothes from 1979 that we forgot to put back in the cupboard. Or they lie under a whole lot of "No, no, not that. It's not possible to do that. It will cost too much." And so there it lies mustering in the middle of the room under a pile of Keds and pairs of black shiny pants and shimmery boob tubes and fears until one day we forget that it's there at all when we glance in that room. Now there's just a pile of stuff, and it becomes easier to simply close the door and walk down the hallway to a different room.
Once you know how hard it is to be yourself and you feel it, then it sometimes becomes easier to at least begin the process of either discovering who you are and what you want (there are always surprises) or else in the even harder work of coaxing and cajoling those parts of you that hide, wanting to be seen, terrified of being seen. Those parts need the most gentle looking after, and if being kind to yourself feels like a weakness then they have probably found a ledge in your soul that they have climbed up on, away from your searchlight gaze. Those undeveloped parts of you need rose-coloured light to shine on them. They already feel a little dead, so if you walk in on them and shine your torch of scrutiny on them, the one that contains energy-saving cold white light, they will stay hidden away on their ledges. They are already in the morgue. Candlelight and rose-coloured light. They're the sorts of light that they like best.
They will also run from comparison. They are just themselves, and when you compare them to other people's shiny bits that have been Photoshopped for public consumption, they will run away from that. This interaction is just between you and them. Because what other people think of you is none of your business.
When I say that mantra to myself, what it does is it provides a space for me to climb out of the raging ocean of paranoia and insecurity when I'm worried I have stepped on someone's toes, hurt their feelings, said something they may not like and therefore may reject me and not like me as much. On and on it goes, that raging ocean. And those words when I say them ~ what other people think of me is none of my business ~ work for me. They send shoots of gold through the water that point out the ledge on the edge of the cliff that I can climb onto, above those waves, and see them for what they are.
And then I feel the bigger me, mySelf, and those fears subdue, and then the space and the hope flood in. Like the tide. As they always do.
 |
| Meditation by Tonyelieh |
I know the internet affects the way my mind works. I guess I tend to think that it's more the pyroluria-affected ADHD-type symptoms that drive my erratic, distracted way of working where, like today, I am flittering backwards and forwards between different subjects, working on 10 things at once.
But then I've just been reminded how the internet makes it so much worse for me. And maybe it's affecting my focus just as much or maybe even more than the physical issues I have. I just before read a quote in this article from Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. The linear Western mind of the past 500 years is moving to make way for something else that likes its information “in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts – the faster, the better”.
That must be why I have, as we speak, 25 different tabs open on my browser. Twenty-five. That's ridiculous. One is for an ad on Gumtree that I've had pinned but then forgotten about from sometime last week, that is so old that there's a 404 error on it when I click on it and it says, "Sorry, that page no longer exists." There's a YouTube clip for chemtrails and an interview podcast with two writers I've been meaning to watch for about a week as well. There's the Telegraph UK article I linked to above that was talking about online distractions, which was part of some research I was doing for a Weekend Notes article I wrote last week about curbing your online distractions (you will understand now why I needed to write that article :) There are eight open pages about WordPress and/or clip arts for logos I'm designing for a blog I'm slowly beginning to put together for my partner. There are two pages relating to a website I'm interested in writing for in the future. There are six pages relating to articles I'm in the process of writing for Weekend Notes. There is a page from Sarah's Early Women Masters' site I'm reading about Emily Dickinson. There is a site about proofreading services that I'm reading for research for future work prospects. There's an article from The Daily Good. And finally there's a pizza menu for tonight's dinner. There's this blog post I'm writing right now, which I started after reading bits and pieces of those articles I'm meant to be in the middle of writing for Weekend Notes.
Wow. That's all very productive, isn't it! It makes me sound like a powerhouse of working energy. And I guess today I am. But it's also just bloody ridiculous, and seriously, I am now just a tad exhausted after writing that above paragraph. It's a cerrrazy way to work. But it's how I work these days, now that computers and browsers have changed so that you can hibernate the 'puter without turning it off and shutting all your programs down. Now, we our internet surfing experience is an ongoing one, unlike the days when everything needed to be closed and turned off.
Part of me enjoys working this way. It sure keeps things interesting. But that's a bit disturbing when I think of how the internet is shaping my mind. And the silly part about it is that I often have this yearning to get all of those tabs closed so that I can have that lovely, fresh the feeling of only having one tab open at a time. But who works like that these days? Not very many people, surely.
Nicholas Carr's observation that the internet is producing people with a broad knowledge that is incredibly shallow is disturbing, wouldn't you say?. I find it so. Especially as a writer, desiring to write stuff that is compelling and keeps people interested. But how do you do that? I mean, using myself as a guinea pig, I don't treat other people's words with the same respect. I flit back to them, reading in chunks.
I think though that part of what fuels this ridiculous incidence of having 25 tabs open at once is something that is the opposite to what Carr is saying. My desire is to understand to the nth degree the very bottom of every subject I study, and sometimes that makes me flick away from one subject to have a breather. It's just that then I have a breather in another subject. And even writing that I know it's a little weird and silly because doing that fuels the very issue I have in the first place, that of focus and attention. And so the snake comes round and bites its own tail.
What a complex and changing world, eh? But I tend to think that the web is not all doom and gloom in terms of changing the way we think. I think that one thing the net is doing is that it is making us realise how connected the world is. (And like my partner just said, paradoxically it's happening via the very technology that is disconnecting everybody from each while they sit in the same room, hooked into their devices). Still, despite that paradox, I think maybe it is helping in the ongoing process that is the Western mind learning to reconnect to knowledge that the indigenous mind possess automatically, being hooked into the world and each other. That connection is what humans need - a worldview of Oneness that maybe we will be able to find our way back to, where we will learn to look after the earth once more.
I hope so, anyway :)
But then I've just been reminded how the internet makes it so much worse for me. And maybe it's affecting my focus just as much or maybe even more than the physical issues I have. I just before read a quote in this article from Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. The linear Western mind of the past 500 years is moving to make way for something else that likes its information “in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts – the faster, the better”.
That must be why I have, as we speak, 25 different tabs open on my browser. Twenty-five. That's ridiculous. One is for an ad on Gumtree that I've had pinned but then forgotten about from sometime last week, that is so old that there's a 404 error on it when I click on it and it says, "Sorry, that page no longer exists." There's a YouTube clip for chemtrails and an interview podcast with two writers I've been meaning to watch for about a week as well. There's the Telegraph UK article I linked to above that was talking about online distractions, which was part of some research I was doing for a Weekend Notes article I wrote last week about curbing your online distractions (you will understand now why I needed to write that article :) There are eight open pages about WordPress and/or clip arts for logos I'm designing for a blog I'm slowly beginning to put together for my partner. There are two pages relating to a website I'm interested in writing for in the future. There are six pages relating to articles I'm in the process of writing for Weekend Notes. There is a page from Sarah's Early Women Masters' site I'm reading about Emily Dickinson. There is a site about proofreading services that I'm reading for research for future work prospects. There's an article from The Daily Good. And finally there's a pizza menu for tonight's dinner. There's this blog post I'm writing right now, which I started after reading bits and pieces of those articles I'm meant to be in the middle of writing for Weekend Notes.
Wow. That's all very productive, isn't it! It makes me sound like a powerhouse of working energy. And I guess today I am. But it's also just bloody ridiculous, and seriously, I am now just a tad exhausted after writing that above paragraph. It's a cerrrazy way to work. But it's how I work these days, now that computers and browsers have changed so that you can hibernate the 'puter without turning it off and shutting all your programs down. Now, we our internet surfing experience is an ongoing one, unlike the days when everything needed to be closed and turned off.
Part of me enjoys working this way. It sure keeps things interesting. But that's a bit disturbing when I think of how the internet is shaping my mind. And the silly part about it is that I often have this yearning to get all of those tabs closed so that I can have that lovely, fresh the feeling of only having one tab open at a time. But who works like that these days? Not very many people, surely.
Nicholas Carr's observation that the internet is producing people with a broad knowledge that is incredibly shallow is disturbing, wouldn't you say?. I find it so. Especially as a writer, desiring to write stuff that is compelling and keeps people interested. But how do you do that? I mean, using myself as a guinea pig, I don't treat other people's words with the same respect. I flit back to them, reading in chunks.
I think though that part of what fuels this ridiculous incidence of having 25 tabs open at once is something that is the opposite to what Carr is saying. My desire is to understand to the nth degree the very bottom of every subject I study, and sometimes that makes me flick away from one subject to have a breather. It's just that then I have a breather in another subject. And even writing that I know it's a little weird and silly because doing that fuels the very issue I have in the first place, that of focus and attention. And so the snake comes round and bites its own tail.
What a complex and changing world, eh? But I tend to think that the web is not all doom and gloom in terms of changing the way we think. I think that one thing the net is doing is that it is making us realise how connected the world is. (And like my partner just said, paradoxically it's happening via the very technology that is disconnecting everybody from each while they sit in the same room, hooked into their devices). Still, despite that paradox, I think maybe it is helping in the ongoing process that is the Western mind learning to reconnect to knowledge that the indigenous mind possess automatically, being hooked into the world and each other. That connection is what humans need - a worldview of Oneness that maybe we will be able to find our way back to, where we will learn to look after the earth once more.
I hope so, anyway :)
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