A Self-Help Blog

"All good novelists have bad memories" ~ Graham Greene

I can't really apply that quote to myself at this point in time without bookending it with this one:

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards" ~ Lewis Carroll

Because I do plan to have a novel finished by the time I'm 85.

Every mood I'm in, every stage of life, it always feels like I've always been this way and never any other. It's very tiring. And something that I see others ascribe to young children, and yet here I am all 41 and haggy, and I regularly succumb to this way of thinking.

Logically and rationally, I know how much things change.  I remember in some vague fashion that things are always changing.  But the fight for perspective is a difficult one, because I am like David, fighting for that perspective using a ragged, pathetically sievelike memory as my weapon. Honestly, I did not smoke that much dope in my earlier years for my memory to be so truly, monumentally fucked up.

I am feeling a little unsure and adrift (geez, what's new?)  Feeling on the verge of new ways of looking at things, hanging onto the hope of other people to think that I can do that.  And so to remind myself of how I have dealt with feeling these sorts of things in the past, I went looking at my blog to see how I felt in 2007, 2009, randomly flitting from one post to another, seeing that really and truly, nothing much really has changed - I'm still depressed in some variety, still anxious in another, still struggling to get through some of the days.

And yet at the same time it feels everything has changed. Every word I have written that is in the past has this feeling of everything being somehow easier than it is now.  Which is not true.  It's just that everything is frozen in time in every second that is not now.

The interesting part about reading the words I had carefully crafted on some day other than today, on days where maybe I was trying to keep my head above the water of whatever swell I felt was sinking me at the time, was that the rereading felt redemptive.  Even apart from bringing you clarity, hope and purpose, the act of writing about your own shit brings along with it its own comfort.  I know I felt that sense of comfort. of reframing, when I hit "publish" on those posts in 2007 or 2009.  Because it's how I feel every time I hit "publish", every time I finish writing something, anything.

The redemption comes twice over, upon rereading your own blog posts.  Discombobula has literally become a self-help blog for me :)

It's all good, as long as you can put aside the discomfort that you must be horribly self-absorbed to go reading your own stuff for help - sort of like how I imagine it would feel after cooking a beautiful meal you're proud of, only to vomit it up whole.  Looking around to see whether anyone else is looking - should you re-eat it?  But hey, you're hungry.  And what better than enjoying it once but enjoying it twice?

:)

Plummetted Back to 1987

I have been soaking some bedding in the laundry trough. The plug is the right size for the sink, but still the water slowly leaches out the plughole, leaving only enough water to kick up a stink if I do not attend to it within the required couple of days. Which I do not. Instead I go to Horsham for a few days and when I return, the smell has stunk out my bathroom, that funny mouldy musty smell that takes me right back to 1987.

I was 16 impossibly young years old. Me and Jacqui had moved into a flat together. I cannot remember if there was a particular incident of mouldy wet washing that impaled the take-back into my brain. Maybe we had a continuous round of wet towels going on in our flat's bathroom. That flat is probably called an apartment now and asking 300 bucks a week rent, but back then it was just a run of the mill flat whose owner saw fit to rent it out to a couple of kids.

Obviously our parents must have co-signed. A photo of the time has my mother standing in the doorway on her first visit. She is wearing a green sleeveless cotton summer dress and looking pretty. She was the same age then as I am now, 38. She is thin-lipped, unsmiling. She must have lay awake worrying about her wayward, impetuous, wilful 16 year old daughter.

I was only a year older than my friend's daughter. Mein Gott, the horror doesn't really hit you until afterwards, how young you were. Of course, I was as independent then as I am now. More fearless. Reckless even. I look from my position of more calculated risk-taking and shudder. I shudder but I am envious too of the freshness, the fearlessness. Although necessarily accompanied by the rampant stupidity of a know-it-all who would not be told (hence my mother's thin-lippedness) there is a certain sort of a fondness for the me that was then. She was in a lot of pain, that girl. Dealing with some big stuff. Just a big kid, really, wanting to be loved, the way all sullen wounded teenagers want to be loved but do not have the words to ask, their pride standing between them and wiser adults like a giant rock. But geez, for all of that pain and youth, I can see even then the desire to know, to understand, myself and the world.

When our boyfriends came to stay (which was often) they would sit with us on the round plastic tub chairs that had been gifted to me by Auntie Dawn and Uncle Alec. Born to be my Baby by Bon Jovi is playing in my head as I write this. We must have been playing Slippery When Wet on high rotation on the stereo that crackled so badly when you turned up the volume. Bon Jovi and mouldy smells all mixed together today as I think about the time I lived with Jacqui, not even lasting the six month lease before I returned home once again. Such little fragments remembered of the whole time, but still, the feel of the whole time all coming back to me in a rush with that yukky bathroom smell.