Slightly overwhelmed

Do you ever have that feeling that everything is just too much?  That you are being slowly overwhelmed and pushed down – not waving but drowning?

I have that feeling at the moment. 

Today is the ninth anniversary of the last time I saw my father lucid and able to talk rationally.  After that, I saw him twice more when he was stoned out of his mind on morphine, and increasingly confused and frustrated by his confusion; and then he was in a coma; and then, of course, a few days after that it was all over. 

The memory of this does not help matters, when I am feeling under pressure in every direction as it is.

I miss my father so much sometimes.  I miss his conversation, I miss his quick mind and his acuteness, and his fascination with any and all new knowledge.  I miss just being able to sit and talk to him.  I miss his whiskey collection and our silly “blind tastings” when he’d bought himself a new malt.  I miss having access to his knowledge of computers and his willingness to share it.  I miss his voice, and I miss his sense of humour - weird musical jokes, dreadful puns and all.

Just now I also miss his support, which was steady and unquestioning and unconditional, and came with no suggestion of expecting or needing anything in return.  He was that kind of chap, old-fashioned in the good way, and utterly sound.  In two weeks it will be the anniversary of his death.  I miss you, Dad.

I could have done with that kind of support at the moment.  I still don’t know if I will have anywhere to live come July, and I still don’t know if I’ll have a job come August - and I do know that the man I fell for a while back isn’t interested in me.  Then there’s the fact that because all this is chaotic and pressured and exhaustingly steessful, at the end of the day I haven’t got the time or the energy at the moment to do the things I really want to do (write, draw, go out, see my friends, and of course my Big Plan for this year, sort out how to publish something online and have a go at it, just to see what happens).  

So I am now just working in order to keep on working; I’m no longer working in order to do the things I love.  This is a state of affairs I dread, and have long fought to avoid.

I have to go on at work, performing properly and demonstrating my ability to deliver under pressure, while not knowing whether my role will even exist in a few weeks time.  I have to pack up my belongings at home and prepare for a move, when I don’t actually know where I’ll be moving to.  I have to smile and be at ease with my crush and accept it will never even register with him how much I would have liked to get to know him better.

I have to keep smiling and saying I’m okay, to all the people who, if I admit to them that I am close to screaming with despair inside, will then get upset and worry about me, and need me to be caring and good, and manage their distress.  I haven’t the energy or the patience to do that at present, so the only practical option is to conceal the situation from them.

It's tiring.

I have to suppress the gnawing doubt, which maybe is not a doubt at all but an unadmitted certainty, that I have wasted my life and am a creature without purpose or use to anyone.  Because if I admit this doubt – this doubt that may in fact be a certainty – then I have to face the question – if there’s no point in me, why am I alive?  Am I alive primarily because it will upset some people if I’m not here anymore? 

And that way madness lies, madness and Ed’s sorry end. 

I don’t want to die; I’m not suicidal, at least not in any sense that I ever have been before.  I think I would recognise the state of mind, as it is hellish in the extreme. 

But I am beginning to wonder if my existence is pointless, and even without any wish to end one’s life that is still a salutary and a depressing thought.

I know my existence wasn’t meant to be pointless (excuse the rather “fate and destiny” tone here!). 

I was born into this life to create.  Of that I am certain.  I’ve known this since I was a very small child. 

I want to tell stories and make images and write songs and plays, I want make beautiful things and share beautiful tales and adventures.  I want to give joy, to cheer hearts and make people smile, to remind those who are feeling alone that they are not alone, that no-one is alone. 

But I’m not doing any of this.  I’m battling-on with a fraught job and fraughter home life, and seeing love go by me like a bright boat on the river.  And my own right work, creating and making new stuff that will give pleasure and joy to those in need of them, is a thing I drag myself to with tired mind and body at the end of the day.  When it ought to be the centre of my existence.

Should I ask for voluntary redundancy here, leave London, bugger off somewhere else entirely and make a completely new start?  It’s almost starting to look tempting.  I have nothing, really, to tie me to London, except liking my life here; or at least, liking the way things have been – until work became insecure and I got asked to move, and all the rest of that, and the bright boat sailed by me yet again... 

New scale of measurement

I have been reminded that some of the people who read this know me in real life, and some of them even work at Kew.  I have been grumbling about pressure at work a lot lately, and I realise it might be construed as unprofessional of me. 

So I've decided to instigate a new scale to grade what kind of day I have had, instead of griping about specifics.  It will be a scale of fictional heroines.

I haven't yet got a full range of markers for every gradient (give me time, I only thought of this half an hour ago).  But, for example, an Anne Elliot day will be one in which I have borne quietly with all kinds of miserable shit, in the patient hope that things get better, while a Lizzie Bennett day will be one on which I have borne rather less quietly and have vented my feelings without shame. A Carmen day will be one in which I have been feelin' good & shakin' my sexy thang - singing in the kitchen, dancing with the photocopier - because I know I am The One.  A  Black Widow day, by contrast, will be one on which I wanted everyone to think I was The One, but only so that I could kill them all.  A Cunegonde day will be one in which I wanted to be able to lament my sorry lot and then have flat-out hysterics in high coloratura. 

You get the picture.  If I ever have an Ophelia day, get help.

Today started out quite cheerful but went decidedly Cunegonde by the end of the day.  It's good to be home, and eat, and write this, and wonder whether to spend the evening in Missouri with Wood and Sarah and Torstein Riis, or in Brentford with my unnamed protagonist getting drawn by Kat Ryle; or whether to cut my losses and watch a silly film.

I feel in need of serious silliness, I must say.  If I had a dvd of "Ghostbusters" I would probably be putting it in the machine right now.  I need to switch my brain off.  Maybe "The Princess Bride" might do the trick; heroes, giants, wizards, villains, true love, sword fights...  Yep.  Perfect switch-off film.

Better for the weekend...

A couple of days off have left me feeling far more human.  I still can't wait for my holiday at the end of the month.  But a quiet weekend, a couple of long telephone calls with my mother, a pleasant meal out at Bistro One in Southampton Street, some brilliant contemporary dance from Northern Ballet at the Linbury Studio (& what a gorgeous little theatre that is; I'd give my eye teeth to be able to use it >sigh<), plus getting my fantasy western past the 100,000-word mark today; yes, after two days of that, I feel more like me.

I've also discovered that crying jags are, like non-specific bouts of depression, frequent symptoms of the perimenopause.  While not exactly cheerful news, this does at least help me to place my weird attack on Friday evening in perspective.  Yup, I'm a menopausal woman, folks.  Be afraid, be very afraid...

The only alternative to going through the menopause is to die first.  Which I should prefer not to do.  Even when it is chaos, even when I am worn out and depressed, and work is hectic and I am trying to get used to using a ticketing system that has the electronic equivalent of several limbs in plaster (& one perhaps tied-on with string), even then, I enjoy my life.  I know I will die one day; maybe tomorrow, maybe not for another forty years.  Why wish it any sooner, when I have so much I want to do with my time?

Anyway, if anyone was worried (& I know one person at least was; bless you, dear heart), don't be.  I'm okay.  It was just one of those days, a day that started well and went sour.  We all have them from time to time.

I've decided to step off the 5:2 diet wagon again for a while, though, since I don't know that this is a good time for being hungry.  It isn't as if anyone but me cares if I am stout or not, after all.  I was trying to diet because I dislike finding it harder to run for a bus, not for my looks (or lack of them).  But right now I think self-care is the order of the day.  That needn't mean self-indulgence, but it's not self-denial either.  It means enjoying that lovely fresh grapefruit I had for breakfast, and the extra pumpkin seeds I put in my cereal.  It means not feeling harried into doing things I don't want to do, not feeling I have to apologise for being an introvert.  It means showering in the morning and using conditioner in my unruly rag of hair, and wearing my good clothes even on non-work days, not because anyone is looking, but because I will feel better if I am clean and do not look like a windswept tramp.  It means going out of the office for some air, and taking the time to say hello to friends and not sit in a slumped heap feeling sad in the summerhouse like a neglected toy.  It means all sorts of things, but it does not mean trying to lose weight.  Not at this moment in time.  Life is too pressured to add any more pressures just now.

On with the motley tomorrow, anyway.  Little by little we'll get there.  My life seems to be full of half-resolved stories, and little by little I'll get to tell them all, or have them told to me. 

Who knows, tomorrow I may get a breakthrough of some kind at work.  I may learn that my job is secure (gods, I hope it is!).  I may get a procedure for a month-ahead report on unconfirmed provisional bookings, or one for last month's figures, or a new process to simplify another task.  If work stays hectic, nonetheless I may find something wonderful in bloom, or be paid a compliment, or run into a friend; I may have the chance to help someone, or simply hear a good joke.  Someone may like my singing or my writing, or may just need a cup of tea that I can make them.  Of such small incidental things much happiness is composed.  

Meantime, all of you who I cried over on Friday; I'm sorry if I worried or embarrassed you, and I hope you are all well, and I love you all.  Even the ones I don't know.  Look after yourselves.

I'm not going to delete Friday's post.  I've thought about it, but it seems a false note somehow.  One should not hide from the shadows; they will still be there, notwithstanding, so better to be comfortable with that.  It's all part of life's rich pattern.

Should I wind down?

Should I wind this blog down?

I hardly ever post anything on it any more.  My evenings of late have mostly been spent either getting on with some creative writing, or messing about chatting to people on tumblr and posting my photogaphs there (& making dirty jokes about fanciable actors >ahem< sorry folks, I'm only human).  And work is so hectic at present that in my lunch break I want to flee and sit outside in the fresh air, not sit blogging at my desk and hoping no-one makes an issue of the fact I've taken a break from working while I eat my lunch.

More of all of that anon.

I'll start by answering my own question, though.  Although I'm fairly sure very few people read this blog (apart from robots in Russia trawling for Russian opera singers' names) I don't think I will wind it down after all.  In very large part, because there seems to be too much winding down going on around me and to consciously decide to add to it myself depresses me in a vague unquantifiable way I can't explain.  It feels too much like going with the flow, when this particular flow is one I want to fight.  I do not want to wind down.  I shall not go gentle into that good night.

I am aware of my body getting plumper and slower, and it being harder to fight that progression into middle-aged spread and torpitude.  I am aware that the tipping point has been passed for some of the things I've always wanted to do; I doubt very much, now, that I shall ever direct a play, or see one I have written performed.  I know I will never be a successful artist, or run that cafe I used to talk about, and I wonder if I will ever get to bum around Greece writing "The Modern Pausanias"...  I am painfully aware that my brain isn't quite what it was, either; tiredness and tension don't help, of course, on that front.  But if I went to live in another country nowadays, the way I blithely did fifteen years ago, I wonder if I'd pick the language up as easily as I picked up Spanish, back then in 1999?

But I remind myself, I am tired and tense; and have been badly depressed, this winter.  As per usual; but still hard going for all it is a familiar pattern.

It's been a rough six months, and there's no sign of that easing up for the foreseeable future.  I was thoroughly ill twice in the autumn, with a horrendous fluey cold followed by a bout of gastroenteritis that had me off work for a fortnight.  All sorts of things since then have been tiring and stressful, too.

There's a massive staff restructure going on at work that will mean roles being lost, and that in turn may mean facing the propect of being out of work.  I hope it doesn't mean that for me; my job makes money, so I'm possibly safer than some, but no-one is really safe when these things happen.  I understand the operational thinking behind it, and it does make sense, sadly; but that doesn't make it any less alarming to contemplate.

At present we're in the throes of implementing a new ticketing and customer relations management database system; damned hard work, let me tell you.  I had no idea how flipping complicated these big organisation-wide projects were to bring in.  In my particular area we are just beginning to make some real headway and I can believe now that in time this will all work, and do what it's meant to do; and it will be tremendous when that happens.  A good visible sign of this progress is that the long email I stayed late at the office tonight to write, detailing the latest list I've made of queries, issues and general peculiarities, was mostly detailing non-urgent things this time - the previous three or four have all been about things that were vital and that needed to be sorted out NOW!  I have complete faith in the person who I know will be doing most of the sorting-out, who is one of the most capable people I've ever had the pleasure of working with.  But I also know he has a lot on his shoulders at the moment.  I'd prefer not to add to that if possible, so I'm even more glad that the queries on my list are now relatively minor ones.  Man deserves a break.

Heck, Man deserves a ruddy medal.  In my humble opinion.  But that's another story.

Paul, my lovely boss, left us ten days ago to go to pastures new, working for a marketing company that has been running less than two years and is apparently going to all sorts of exciting places.  He deserves every success and I hope he finds it; he's been a fantastic manager and I shall miss him.  But I could also thump him, because he's left me at the busiest time of the year for my regular job, with all the extra workload from the new database implementation, and until his replacement is fully run-in I can't ask for too much support from him.  Apart from anything else, he won't know the job or the people well enough to do much.  But meanwhile I am terrified of getting behind and feel as though I'm juggling cats.

I come out of the office at the end of the day and walk home, and tell myself to put it behind me.  I have a cup of tea and a proper meal (I am determined not to fall-back on cook-chill meals, so am making sure I buy real raw ingredients and cook them; I know I need the real nutrition just now).  Then I write, or mess about, as mentioned above.  I've been doing a lot of writing; my Western is progressing nicely and looks to be going to end up at well over 100,000 words.  And every now and then I go out.

On Monday night I was out; at, guess what, the ballet.  Seeing the Royal Ballet's "Sleeping Beauty" for the umpteenth time (well, fourth, or fifth possibly? - it's a gorgeous production, anyway, and I don't feel the slightest bit guilty).  There were some problems in the pit at the beginning - someone needed to have a quick word with some of the brass section, who were all over the shop - but on stage it was sheer heaven.  One of my favourite dancers, Hikaru Kobayashi, was dancing Aurora.  I've seen her in the role before - I made a beeline for this performance precisely to see her in action again.  She has beautiful feet and a lovely luxurious sense of space and scale.  She's one of those dancers who can make it look as though she has all the time in the world, although she has exactly the same number of bars of music, and beats in a bar, as anyone else would.  And she can act.  It was simply lovely to see her dancing a leading role opposite her husband, too; no need to worry about onstage chemistry between this prince and his beloved... 

There was more chemistry between Princess Florine and her Bluebird; Melissa Hamilton being wonderful (as usual) and Fernando Montano (ditto) ; flawless virtuosity from both and a sort of sparkling sexiness that made one really feel this was a fairytale indeed.  And between the King and Queen (Gary Avis and Genesia Rosato) not only chemistry but also a series of object lessons in telling, simple, spot-on mime, using the set conventional gestures and the chances to add one's own elements of expression alike superbly.  Not to mention demonstrating wonderfully how to manage a long trailing cloak with aplomb.  Christina Arestis was a splendid, beautiful, evil Carabosse and I think every fairy was a standout (though the lilac fairy was rather more of an implaccable spirit of justice than the personyification of goodness that I'm used to seeing).

I wish sometimes at the theatre that it were possible to make notes as the evening went on; but of course it would be the most horrible bad manners.  Only one finds oneself afterwards thinking "There were so many great moments last night, and now it's all one wonderful happy blur...".

But a wonderful happy blur is by no means a bad thing.

I shall have to stop writing; for now.  But not forever.  There is still too much to tell, too much to do, too much to say.  Even if I'm more erratic, more chaotic, I cannot stop now.

Freedom from work!...

...for the next two weeks at least.

Things here have been getting very, very hectic of late; basically, since the beginning of April two of us have been trying to do three people's workload, and it simply isn't working. Unsurprisingly. As the spring advances towards summer we get more and more enquiries in Visitor Information at Kew, and more and more off-the-wall weird requests, and more and more complaints; and we can't keep up.

So I am very relieved indeed to reach the beginning of my two weeks' annual leave. I'm taking ten at the end of Friday afternoon to write this, and then I'll probably be totally silent, www-wise, for the whole fortnight.

I managed to book a late holiday, by changing some other things I was all booked up for in order to give myself more flexibity on dates. This enabled me to get a late-deal trip with Olympic Holidays (who unlike certain tour operators I could mention not only will "undersell" but also give thumping great discounts to last-minute travellers). I'm now going off on Tuesday morning for a week in northern Crete, in what looks from Google Earth to be a very small quiet place indeed, with a huge beach that has scrubland and olive trees coming right down to the sand in places. I will paint, read, write, swim, eat too much, and walk. At present the BBC world weather forecast for Chania (nearest weather station) is for a sunny week next week. Bliss; sunshine, swimming, solitude, and Cretan food.

Tired on Friday - but who isn't?

wrOof, it’s been a sticky week. I am tired and I want a drink. I think I may buy a bottle of something on my way home. Ooh, Dent, drinking alone; you sad little (little, figuratively speaking at least) woman…

Work is getting busier, and we are now one person down in the office for the foreseeable future, which means that everything is getting done a bit on the hasty side, a bit on the hassled side, without due care and frequently without being thought-through, monitored, or logged properly. Nothing has happened yet that could be called a major cock-up, but once or twice Roxana and I have caught something literally as it was toppling into deep cock-up territory. It’s depressing; like a local councillor waiting for a fatal crash to take place before he can get a speed limit imposed, we have to wait for a customer-service disaster of some sort before we can go back to our management and say “This is what happens when two people try to do three people’s workload…”

The laptop had hiccoughs again last night. I had to leave it purring quietly to itself all evening to run its battery down, and hope it will be okay again tonight, running off mains power. I’m really enjoying writing at the moment and was madly frustrated at having to spend the evening sewing instead. Although that is also constructive and creative, I wanted to be writing. On the sewing front, I’m altering a dress that is embarrassingly tight across the bos (wearing it currently I am bustin’out all over like June). On the writing front, I’m progressing with ‘Fortitude’, onto chapter two with ‘Café Tano’, and continuing to type and up and revise ‘Ramundi’s Sisters’. Running three writing projects concurrently seems to be working; though of course I may step back at some point and say “Oh my gods, they’re all crap!” On the gardening front, I’ve planted masses of cuttings and seeds, and my first two little tomato plants have come up, as well as a lot of California poppies, sunflowers and other tough easy annuals.

Revising ‘Ramundi’s Sisters’ is probably the oddest job of the three writing projects I'm on at present. After all, revising is an odd business to begin with. I try to write as near as possible to what I want in the first place, but some tweaking is unavoidable. I’ve found I've done it in three stages, in the past. First revision is light, partly just fact-checking, and comes when I type up from longhand manuscript onto the machine. Second one is done as I re-read the typing to check for the multitude of errors that will now have been introduced because I am such a hopeless typist. Then revision three is the one where one has to think “This bit is purple prose, it’s no good pretending it isn’t; aargh…” – and this is the really tough one. As ‘Ramundi’s Sisters’ was written well over fifteen years ago it is almost like revisiting my past self, and a lot of this third kind of revision is occurring right at the start, in the basic typing-up phase. It makes me very aware of how much one really does learn about writing just by endless practice. I’ve written a lot of words since 1993, and many of 1993’s words look purpler now than they did then by several shades.

I had lots of thoughts and ideas I wanted to write about on here but I just don’t seem to have the time to formulate my thoughts calmly in the rushed twenty minutes after work that I cold-bloodedly allow myself to do my own stuff on a work computer. Maybe next week…

Although work is hairy at present, the Gardens are beautiful. It’s a real pleasure to have an excuse to step outside, even just for five minutes to go over to the post room. The weather has been mild and sunny all week; the air is full of birdsong and the clean linen scent of apple blossom and the heady, lemon-wine scent of lilacs. Bluebells are coming out everywhere and the big Cornus florida x nutalli hybrids are covered in great white flowers like saucers. I may be tired and hassled, but I am still very lucky – because I could be equally as tired and hassled, but stuck in a giant concrete and steel and glass office block in the middle of the square mile, with an hour’s commute home jammed on the Tube instead of a peaceful twenty-minute cycle ride in the fresh air.

I'm going home. Have a good weekend, world. Do something creative, and have a good weekend.