I Feel Fine

I read online that most people feel awkward about saying “I feel a bit down today” because they don’t want people to think they might have poor mental health.

Reminds me of Mum talking to an old African woman. The woman asked her in Swahili how she was, and Mum started to say “oh, not good! This went wrong, and that went wrong…” and the woman interrupted her and said “no no no, you’re not supposed to say that! You’re supposed to say you feel good today.”

She tells it as an amusing story that showed her ignorance of how she was meant to behave, but I feel like I’m living that life every day.

At the moment (having recovered from my irritation with iMovie) I’m fighting off the effects of plaintive music (Over and Over by Fleetwood Mac). Apart from that, I feel good! How about you?

Singing Today

David Cameron is in, backed up by Nick Clegg.

Singing today — very mellow.

Yellow is the colour of my true love’s hair
In the morning when we rise,
In the morning when we rise,
That’s the time, that’s the time
I love the best.

Blue’s the colour of the sky
In the morning when we rise,
In the morning when we rise,
That’s the time, that’s the time
I love the best.

(First two verses from Donovan’s ‘Colours’. Playing now on my CD player. If you’ve never heard of Donovan, it says on the CD sleeve: “Donovan Leitch was Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan, yet transcended the impossible comparison to become our very own hippie troubadour.” Seems to be a bit controversial, but who cares? So long as you like one, the other, or both. Here’s a video clip to Colours… just look at those eyelashes).

Singing it all over the house — the cats are giving me funny looks.

Scaring Myself Witless

The front page headline of today’s Daily Mail is ‘Million Britons Stranded by Ash.’
Underneath is a photo of a woman, with the words ‘I DID sleep with Bill Wyman at 14, says Mandy Smith.’

Disorienting.

I said, “I wonder what the volcano thinks about sharing the front page with Mandy Smith?”
“Who CARES about Mandy Smith??” said Mum.

Well, the two articles together kind of begged the comparison.

If you follow the link above (to the Mail Online), there’s a gargoyle-like image of the volcano which is guaranteed to fill you with a supernatural terror. Way to calm me down! I was getting a horrible headache and wondering if the thing had started venting gases — then Mum put the potted hyacinths on the window sill (a foot further away) and my headache disappeared.

I also read the Daily Mail article on p22: “Dieting really CAN harm your health.” It seems if you limit your daily calorie intake to 1200 (which I’ve been doing for four months), your level of stress naturally rises, and some people end up with depression. It increases the risk of things like heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Then at the end of the article it says that being overweight increases the risk of things like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

Losing weight and being able to wear smaller things, and getting up the stairs without feeling exhausted… these benefits do plenty to offset any stress or depression you might be feeling. At least, that’s my opinion. I expect extra stress due to restricted intake IS present as they say — I keep waking up in the morning convinced that something is amiss, though having coffee today probably didn’t help. It would help me to think that now I know the reason why, though that might just be me deciding what’s most convenient to believe!

Introversus Extro

Nonsensical title — excuse me.

I was researching online for a novel I was thinking of writing (it’s not got very far!) and I came across this article from Psychology Today:

Field Guide to the Loner: The Real Insiders

It’s essentially another ‘introverts versus extroverts’ article. I got it slightly confused with the Wikipedia article on loners which claims (rather bleakly) that loners of all types are so much in the minority that they are considered social deviants (it doesn’t say that in Psychology Today), but I had the following written conversation with Mum (TV was up loud!):

Me: “Was reading an article that says three-quarters of people are sociable and look upon ‘loners’ as ‘deviants’ — but often they opt to avoid society because they are over-stimulated by it, and don’t get the same things from it (or from life in general) as the extroverts. Some can socialise for a bit (like Christmas parties with family) then they need to retreat and recuperate.”

Mum: “People who write articles invent their own statistics. How can they say three-quarters etc?”

Me: “No idea. Usually based on a study! It’s always possible most of the people they collared were extroverts to start with, as they were the ones running around and not hiding under sofas.”

Mum: “No — psychologists meet patients or loopy students.”

The next day I was still thinking about it, and when we were walking to town, I began: “If, as that article says, extroverts enjoy social nuances…” and Mum interrupted me (which probably explains why I grew up speaking really quickly, in a rush to have my say): “NO, they don’t! They just like the sound of their own voices.”

“Well, I was going to say that extroverts say they like people and are interested in them — but if they are only interested in ‘social nuances’ and not ideas… people’s ideas… then they can’t be all that interested in people.”

“Exactly,” said Mum.

I don’t know why I don’t write a sort of Winnie the Pooh book…. with me as Winnie and Mum as Christopher Robin!

Keeping Friends (and knowing when to let go)

After falling out (not for the first time) with a friend who lives far away in a place I’ve never seen, I was pondering the mysteries of friendship. Some people are easier to get along with than others, and it helps when they’re not busy and stressed… but I often wonder if I’m communicating the right things in the right way to the right people, and if my expectations are reasonable or the reverse.

I suppose communication styles and friendships are as individual as people are, and all you can really do is communicate in a way that feels right to you, and hope to connect with someone who has a similar outlook.

I decided to search Google for ‘maintaining friendships’, and the following were the most common tips and cautions:

(1) Be a good listener — prove you have heard by responding thoughtfully and in detail.

(2) There should be some give and take — we don’t want a situation where one friend makes all the plans, starts all the conversations and does all the listening.

(3) Communicate frequently (short but regular emails etc).

(4) Be supportive of your friend’s stance unless he/she is really about to land in trouble; avoid judging and moralizing.

(5) Be honest and genuine — preferably in a pleasant and tactful way!

I never understood people who request ‘brutal honesty’ about their cooking, artwork or whatever… I like honesty, but never brutal. Perhaps such a request is just a polite way of making people feel they don’t need to worry about commenting less than positively… but actually, we do need to do that tactfully.

Being ‘genuine’ includes feeling relaxed and ‘yourself’ in someone else’s company… if you feel you’re constantly on your guard and having to maintain a persona, then that’s not a good friendship to be in.

(6) If someone has a tendency to be hurtful, explosive and unpredictable (to your damage), or leaves most of the effort to you, it is most likely time to move on. But consider whether you’ve given the other person enough of a chance, and whether he/she might be going through a bad time just now — perhaps a bad time that you haven’t been told about. Not everyone communicates the same way, and it can be particularly tricky by email. Some people communicate naturally and well by email, but others don’t see it as a valid way to talk.

(7) Humour is good, and can save a situation from spiralling out of control.

Actually it was me who added Tip 7! Humour as a resource doesn’t seem to surface much in the other lists I’ve read, except (a) as a defensive barrier — it can be frustrating if you feel you’re not seeing the real person, or that you’re not being taken seriously… or (b) as something potentially destructive (sarcasm, thoughtless teasing etc).

This is already on the list, but is important enough to explore: real friends feel ‘at home’ with each other. The other day I found myself emailing a friend I always felt comfortable with… not the one I fell out with, but one I’ve not seen for years as we don’t live in the same country any more. I took it into my head to describe the room I was sitting in, just as it was… saggy curtains, CDs sitting around, an old and out-of-date TV that isn’t used much, computers still on the desk that aren’t even operating. The wallpaper came from a time when I was younger and more enthusiastic; those feelings are all locked up in it. It was something to giggle over or relate to… better than trying to come across as perfect and organized when we both knew that wasn’t me.

There were some singular pieces of advice here and there on the internet. I particularly liked one about how people on the edge of the crowd are likely to be the most loyal, down-to-earth and constant friends. They will have more time for you than someone who is very popular and busy. I’ve generally found that to be true.

Arguments, also, are not to be feared (unless someone is constantly browbeating you). I never sought out arguments, but at the same time never felt that a friend was here to stay until we’d rowed about something and survived it! If the friends we’re with tend to see a row as a reason for them to give their side of it but not hear yours, and especially if they see an argument as an automatic end to the relationship… well, we can find better friends; ones who don’t keep us walking on eggshells.

Do any of you have ‘do’s and ‘don’t's you would add to that list? How do you keep your friends, even if they live far away, and in what circumstances do you decide to move on?

The Best Responses that Aren’t

Was thinking about my last post (The Peruvian Bug that Wasn’t) and it led me to think about how sites like Yahoo Answers have someone ask a question, and the best answer gets voted up to the top of the column, often by the other readers. And there’s nothing more depressing than people voting as ‘the best answer’ a response that appears sensible but is completely mistaken.

Then they close the question so people can’t come along later and challenge it.

I’ve seen that before; the response that sounds something like “dearie, aren’t you just panicking about nothing? These are the facts,” is usually the one that gets voted up, whether or not it’s correct. Perhaps it’s the confident, ‘no-nonsense’ sound of it that encourages people to think they’re listening to someone who knows what he/she is talking about.

Isn’t that how we choose leaders? The one who makes decisions, just like that, and sounds like he knows what he’s doing. Pats everyone on the head and says things will get better.

Mum used to be a nurse. I said to her “how long do germs take to incubate?” and she said “depends on the germ.”

“Oh, I like that answer!” I said. “That’s a good answer!”

“Thanks for the vote,” she said.

Something Else I Meant to Blog About

A couple of recent memes asked who my real-life heroine was, and I was stuck for an answer… aside from obvious responses such as ‘family’. But today I have to say I have a new heroine, a celebrity heroine, without placing her on a pedestal or knowing anything else about her… and it’s Cameron Diaz!

In the interview about remaining childless, she says what I’ve always thought… and I was amused by the (presumably tongue-in-cheek) comment (following the article) that there are so many scoundrels around that there’s a need to refill the gene pool with intelligent people. At least, I hope it was tongue-in-cheek!

I don’t know about workplace attitudes (mentioned in the full article in the Daily Mail but not in the summary), but I have sometimes felt it’s hard to make (or remain) friends with married couples when you’re a single woman… couples of your own age, that is. Perhaps that will change when we get older.

Things I Meant to Blog About

There’s so much I keep meaning to blog about, but time moves on and things fall behind. These are three things I’ve had in mind recently:

Micro shoplifting

We’ve had recent brushes with a particular variety of shop lifter. Not the type who will take an entire packet of something and walk out with it, but who will take something out of the box and leave it to someone else (us!) to buy.

My mother bought 5 or 6 small bottles of a refreshing juice from the local supermarket. At home she found the top of one of them was loose, and the level was lower than in the other bottles. Someone had taken a swig of it and put it back on the shelf.

I told her about buying a couple of pads of lined A4 paper from Woolworth. Got them home and found someone had torn a sheet out of one of them.

Then Mum bought me some hayfever relief tablets in Boots… you would think that would be pretty safe, but a tablet had been pinched out of one of the foil strips.

Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I’ve not come across this before; it’s like a new form of shoplifting that targets other customers more than the shops themselves. I said to Mum that maybe the people who do it will have it done to them one day, and will find out what a kick in the teeth it is… though I would prefer if they understood this already without having to experience OR do it!

Trans fats must go

I know I don’t think a great deal of some ‘nanny state’ laws and attitudes, but I would back a Scottish ban on trans fats from food. To me it’s like smoking… there’s far more harm than good in it, and it doesn’t make sense to me that it’s offered as a choice.

More lovin’ needed

Town is quite busy with holidaymakers now, but our favourite coffee shop in town has lost trade. Our initial suspicion is that the students who usually go there (and sit around with their laptops) have gone home, but I’ve been realizing that a lot of the locals are on holiday (not just students), whereas the holidaymakers don’t know the smaller coffee shops and probably just head straight for Starbucks and Costa’s. It’s got so that there’s a blackboard outside the smaller coffee shop saying “Looky here, we need loving ALL the time!” You go in, and there’s nobody else there.

My suggestion is: look out for the smaller shops, even in an unknown town… they need your trade and are probably quieter and friendlier than the chain stores. They aren’t all tables and chairs; the smaller shop we’re talking about is predominated by padded chairs and sofas, whereas the Costa’s here only has one sofa in the corner, and Starbucks has a couple of cushy areas (generally with someone else in them already) and that’s it. I love Costa’s coffee, but to me there’s no contest about which shop I would rather be in. The little one that all the crowds are walking past and not loving.

Deaf Anxieties

I unintentionally missed ‘Blogging Against Disablism’ Day (BADD) 2009 as well as BADD 2008 (May 1). Last year everyone said that BADD 2008 was the best yet, and I couldn’t help thinking, “I drop out, then everybody remarks on the rise in quality!”

You won’t get rid of me that easily, though. I have various ideas rattling around in my head like peas in a drum but never seem to have time to capture them. Also it becomes harder to talk about personal experiences (apart from light, everyday accounts). In any case, I hadn’t forgotten about BADD. My thoughts this year concern anxiety and depression issues amongst the deaf.

I was born deaf (to hearing parents) at a time when children (certainly in the UK) were discouraged from signing. Thus I was brought up orally, wearing hearing aids from around the age of 6. My first hearing aid was a box that clipped to my clothes. If you accidentally caught the wire with your hand, your earpiece would be yanked out of your ear — made you feel awkward.

Of fairly dominant personality as a young child, I tended to be the ringleader in my primary class at deaf school. I wasn’t afraid to voice my thoughts concerning whatever we were discussing or watching, and the rest of the class would say “yes, we agree with Diddums!” It was a sweet class, now that I remember…

At home I regularly challenged my sister (also deaf) even though she was older and stronger. We fought like cat and dog. As time went by, I became quieter and less inclined to argue. I saw that as a positive, more peaceable quality, but took it so far the other way that I began to wonder! I was losing confidence in my own understanding of what was going on, and it’s hard to take a stance and support it when you worry that you missed something important.

Anxiety surfaced quite early, though not enough for panic attacks at school — thankfully, I was free of that particular problem till I was 19. One day, when I was old enough to go shopping without adult supervision, there was a particular album I was after. I went into a store and handed the assistant a note of the record I wanted, and fidgeted while waiting for her to check. They didn’t have the record in stock. I thought I had disguised my nervousness, but at home my friend surprised me by saying to my older sister “she was so flustered!” and waited for laughter. She didn’t get the reaction she hoped for, as my sister said nothing — but I felt bad about being flustered and being caught out in it.

For a while I was convinced the real anxiety started when I was 19, which was when the panic attacks began — but when you look back far enough, you realize the seeds of it were always there.

Take my first day at the local High School… the babble of children in those echoing corridors and gym hall! When my sister introduced me to the deputy head, he asked me a question and I didn’t answer — too transfixed by the seething mass around us. “She’s overwhelmed!” he said.

While still in high school, I remember telling a visitor from the deaf school that I wasn’t happy in groups of people, and she did not seem surprised at all. I was afraid she would tell me to get on with it and not be a silly… but she didn’t. She filled in the blanks for me where I stopped talking, and I went home thinking how maybe she had seen this happen before.

People would advise me, “just ask for a repeat” or “tell people if you didn’t hear,” and I blamed myself for not doing that… but it was hard to interrupt a conversation without being rude, and the conversation would go on and on until someone stopped it to ask me something. ‘Just asking for a repeat’ wasn’t easy either, because sometimes you wouldn’t understand no matter how often it was repeated, and the person doing the repeating would start to go pink with frustration and embarrassment. So you would bow out by pretending that you got it. In the end you didn’t ask for repeats at all unless it was unavoidable… you already knew what would happen, and that you would be asking people to repeat everything all the time.

In the end, being in such a group meant being bored, embarrassed, and thinking a great deal less of myself. It made me feel different because people observing the group would look at you as being the only one not talking and laughing. I would long to be on my own or with a close friend, doing something I wanted to do where I would feel competent and at ease.

The quality of the sounds I heard also seemed to play a part. At university I loathed the dining hall… people shuffled about and scraped their chairs, clattered cutlery, clashed trays and dinner plates; laughed and chattered. It was all too loud; too echoing. I ‘froze’ a few times and was unable to finish my food. Soon my friend began to recognize the signs; I remember her saying, “oh, I know that look! Let’s go.” We worked out the quietest times to eat, which were usually after everybody else had finished.

In my late 20s, waiting outside a cinema in a long queue, I was fine because I was with friends. Then I got tense. The anxiety rose, and rose, and there seemed no reason for it… till a car waiting nearby roared away and left us in peace. That was when I realized it had spent the past five minutes vrooming and revving loudly. It was a busy street and I hadn’t really been paying attention at first, but it seems the noise got to me anyway.

Perhaps the hearing aids have played a part in my anxiety… amplified noise: formless and unhelpful. It seems to me that I’m more relaxed when I don’t wear them at all. Everything’s silent and people float past as though in a dream. Once I was in a long queue in the bank when my batteries quit; I normally hate queues and banks, but this one time I was almost euphoric. If I can’t understand someone, they have to write it down — the pressure to make reasonable (and correct!) sense of what I hear is somehow not so great.

Where Mum is concerned, it’s amazing how much I absorb of what she is trying to say even when I can’t hear her voice at all. Recently I’ve not been wearing my new digital hearing aids because both filters gradually got damp (stopping them from working) and my clinic hasn’t laid in any spare parts at all. They said they didn’t think they would be needed ‘this soon’. The old analogue hearing aids didn’t have these wretched filters… it was easier to dry them out ourselves. These ones will NOT dry out at all, so I have a bit of a bone to pick with modern hearing aid designers! They may be better hearing aids, but they’re also less usable.

Without hearing aids this past while, I have communicated with my family by writing, lip-reading and gesturing. As we are learning the British Sign Language alphabet, I decided to try it out on Mum, signing the name of her fat cat…. MOLLY. She got it right away, and said “Molly”, pointing at the corner of the house where Molly normally hangs out. “Fatso,” she added affectionately (without writing, signing or repeating it), and went upstairs! I didn’t hear her voice but I knew perfectly well what she said.

Sometimes her message eludes me entirely, but other times I know when she’s said something I wasn’t necessarily expecting. That doesn’t make it a perfect or relaxing way to communicate, and I wish that we had been allowed to learn sign language at school. And not just us…. everybody! I still haven’t learned, partly because my growing anxiety and discomfort in group situations has stopped me from attending courses. That is a vicious circle in itself. I have always felt that communication is more important than how we communicate, though I can’t offer myself as a good example. Doubtless it’s because I don’t have that extra resource that I feel it so strongly.

We borrowed two British Sign Language books and a video from the library. One of them is quite an old book from 1988 — British Sign Language: A Beginner’s Guide by Dorothy Miles. It received two reviews on Amazon UK; neither of the reviewers seem impressed. Personally I enjoyed the potted world history of deaf people in education and society. I had a rough idea of some of it, but didn’t know everything described there. It was a shocker, and I found myself growing angry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, as I haven’t read around a lot on the subject yet, and most people have been doing their best by their own lights, but it hit home anyway. I have been affected by some of the policies described in the book, and not in a positive way.

It brings to mind a Dean Koontz book (Seize the Night). My favourite, laid-back, surf-loving character, Bobby

“… didn’t trust those he called ‘people with a plan’, those who believed they knew how to make a better world, which seemed always to involve telling other people what they should do and how they should think.” [1999 paperback, p192].

In our history and present there have been plenty of people with a plan for the deaf, and it doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with acceptance. It’s no wonder that many of us end up with problems, emotional and otherwise.

Searching the internet for articles connecting deafness and social anxiety, I came across this piece in The Rebuttal: Deaf Phobias. I was pleased because it says much that I’ve been thinking for years, and up till now I haven’t found all that much on the subject. Mum said, “misery loves company” — but I prefer the line that popped up in a film about C.S. Lewis: ‘We read to know that we are not alone.’ I hadn’t thought about it as such… I think of reading as an escape. But it’s true, isn’t it? It’s why I go on the internet and scratch around to see if others are thinking and experiencing the same. There aren’t always answers for our problems; at least, not immediate answers… so it helps simply to know there are others, and that I’m no different from anybody else.

Photography Restrictions

I agree with Pete on the issue of restrictions on photography in the UK. It does sound very vague, and we could be doing ourselves a disservice. Apart from anything else, recent targets of terrorism have been ordinary citizens, and I don’t see how becoming paranoid about photography will reduce such risks. While we are doing that, are we going to reduce the number of CCTV cameras counted here by Pacian? Hmm, didn’t think so.

If you are a British citizen, there’s a petition against it… so far it has over 4,000 signatures. Some of my friends have signed it as well… they didn’t need much persuading. When I was saying I’d signed it, Mum looked grim and said “GOOD.” Though she may have been thinking about stories from friends of hers who were stopped from taking photographs at birthday parties and suchlike because there were children present.

Where will it all end?