The Pearls of Age

I’ve always liked the company of older people, and felt a little less at home with younger folks (who are more unpredictable in some ways).

Mum was talking about things from her childhood. She remembered buying dresses… they were taken ‘on approval’, and delivered in boxes and tissue paper. She kept missing trams and jumping on while they were on the move. The conductor would say “you’re not supposed to do that!”

I said I remembered double-decker buses with the door at the back with stairs — they had bus conductors with ticket machines. Mum said admiringly, “you’re quite old too!” and I said “thank you.”

I’m fascinated by any nuggets of wisdom older people decide to share… they are individual but have the ring of truth. Like from the rather worried old lady who said you know you can be perfect, but you must expect to make mistakes. Be kind to yourself. (I have a horrible habit of lying awake at night counting the very many mistakes I’ve made. Sometimes I think wistfully about Ally McBeal’s boss who said tactless things, then in the next breath he would mutter “bygones!”)

Liz Smith (elderly actress) had a lot to say that I was interested in. She said you can’t know why people react the way they do; it’s probably connected to things that happened to them. It’s rare to have true friends; people who know exactly who you are and what you’re about.

Liz wanted to talk with other passengers (while on her cruise) but couldn’t bring herself to make the first move — she was convinced they wouldn’t want her. I feel that more and more, even on the internet; I hesitate to comment, email or join in as much as I used to. I used to have an opinion on everything, but now I watch everybody else making mistakes and putting their foot in it, knowing that this time it isn’t me. More and more I decide it’s safer to pretend I’m not even here!

Perhaps it’s all part of getting older.

A friend and I were having a discussion recently — we were saying how we used to blithely do things that now make us curl up in horror and amazement. We were not mountaineers or explorers… but she used to ride rather nervy horses over jumps she wouldn’t even consider these days. Whereas I used to fill in those email letters that asked for your mother’s middle name!! Perhaps along with age we learn fear… but hopefully other, more positive things as well.

I wonder what pearls of wisdom might drop from my lips when I’m over 80 — everything I’m doing and thinking now takes me closer to those truths! It’s an interesting thought.

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.

Diddums Comes Rushing Up

I took the Overcoming Low Self Esteem (Melanie Fennell) book back to the library. I read it in one sitting (which apparently isn’t the best way to make use of it, except perhaps as a first reading). I believe my self esteem isn’t that impaired… if it was, would I have a blog?

We are supposed to rate how much we believe our own statements, so I asked myself for a rating for that one:

“I have healthy self esteem.” 80%.

Some of the book was interesting and even amusing, but when I tried to follow the exercises, I made myself a ‘vicious circle,’ remembered one that the cognitive behavioural therapist and I were trying together all those years ago, wrote down “we focused on the wrong one,” and then stopped. I couldn’t make myself do any of the rest.

The one we were dealing with in therapy was the big bewildering one, the going out and panicking; it wasn’t any of the individual events that all added up to make this one big Snowball. It’s of interest to trace back and think about why you might have felt a particular way in a specific situation; less helpful to say “the world won’t come to an end if you do have a panic attack.” I know it won’t… but it doesn’t stop me feeling that I don’t want to be there.

I agree with Elizabeth from 1sojournal that we’re all full of self-doubt; in this world it would be hard to avoid. But I also have a certain confidence in myself. I believe that, given time, adequate resources and enough space, I could solve problems and work things out. It’s mostly in my communications with people that things go wrong.

I’ve seen a lot of posts by others saying the same thing. They can get by perfectly well with whatever their specific problems are, and it’s only where other people (or their structures and arrangements) come into the mix that things take a nosedive.

I don’t know if that’s low self esteem or something else. I don’t think all anxieties will be due to that. I started life believing it would be a certain way, and that everything would be straightforward, and soon discovered it was anything but!

I can’t give a fair opinion of the book unless I follow its suggestions and guidelines, which I didn’t do, for reasons of my own. It led to some interesting trains of thought, however… the idea that we have personally-developed ‘rules’ which cause distress if we break them. Some are obvious; others less so, and might not make a lot of sense when examined.

Do you know what your ‘rules’ are?

One of my ‘rules’, I think, is to be the ‘finder’. I was the youngest in the family (sometimes feeling left out due to lack of age), and we would go on rambles, and so it was wonderful to be the one to discover a flower, shell, mushroom or fossil that nobody else saw. The vexing thing was that I rarely did… or if I found something, it turned out to be something perfectly ordinary, like a piece of quartz.

When I was 5 or 6, I read a short story about four-leaf clovers, and forever after I was always looking for one. My class was taken on an outing to a farm, where I found a four-leaf clover which I gave to my teacher to look after. At the end of the day I was surprised and hurt to find she didn’t have it any more… she had just dropped it. To me it was a magical thing, a rare find. It was like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and I thought she would be as happy as I was.

I don’t know if it’s a ‘rule’ as such, but… I rather think it is. Nothing makes me happier than to be the one to answer a question; find something; make the best suggestion; think of the nicest name. I can’t say I come crashing to the ground if I fail, but that’s because there’s always the next time…

Worrying Tuesday

On Tuesday night I was answering an email and preparing to go downstairs to watch a film at 9 pm. I heard some thumps and clanks, and thought Mum had decided to wash her hair.

I went down and put the kettle on, and then Mum appeared, looking wretched, saying that she had just been sick and was going to lie down. She’d been bright and happy all day, so it was a shock.

I let her rest a while, thinking an uninterrupted snooze would do her good, and then during an interval in A Few Good Men, I took her a glass of water, mostly to see that she was all right. She was in darkness and looked so old and unwell, sort of crumpled in her bed… flapped a hand as though to say “thank you, now go away!”

I thought to myself “is this my new future, and does it start here tonight?”

Cheeky (who worships the very ground she walks on) seemed lost. The cats all looked towards me, and I looked back at them, and wondered if I could afford to look after all five, or even just my two. I’m not sure I would be able to stay in this house, and if I had to move back to my house, I would lose the rent. Not really an option.

Next morning I got up early and had a fortifying coffee (letting her lie a bit longer, but thinking I would have to go and check on her again), and when I finally looked, her bedroom door was wide open and the room was empty. Well, that was good news! I figured she would be upstairs, so went up, and the bathroom door was closed. More noises. Hmm. Turned my computer on, and when I came back out, the bathroom door was ajar and the room empty. I went in and looked around, and there were hairs in the sink and it felt warm and steamy, so I guessed she’d been washing her hair. On the way back down, I saw her bedroom door was half-shut this time… looked in… room empty!

Finally bumped into her between the sitting room and the kitchen. The way we keep passing each other in this house without seeing each other spooks me; it’s as though she scuttles across the ceiling.

She looked much as normal, though with her hair damped down from her wash, and I said “are you feeling better?” and she said “yes. I hope.”

Turns out it was probably the scampi she and a friend (across the road) had in town. She said Bella was unwell earlier that night before she got sick herself.

I wished she’d mentioned Bella’s illness yesterday, as it might have soothed some of my concerns; she must have suspected it as soon as she started to feel queasy. Bella today was quite cheered up by the news that Mum was sick… “what, you too? Must have been the scampi then, nothing worse!”

When you’re already worried about someone’s health (or your own), dodgy food doesn’t really help, does it?

I was so glad to have her back, that when she said she was going across the road to talk to Bella, I looked out and saw the road was white with frost. I got some rock salt and put it down around our driveway, and part of the way across the road. I meant to make a safe path across the road, but she passed me and marched across the rest of the white frost without a problem, and I felt silly.

Night now… hope there are no more scares for any of us!

Pulling My Head out of the Sand

I saw somebody writing about passive-aggressive characters, and I thought “what’s that? Is there any difference between one type of aggression and another?” I remember a friend telling me years ago (when I was having trouble with a client’s dog) that a dog who is aggressive through fear is the least trustworthy. Opposed to which other types of aggression, I wonder? I suppose some dogs are aggressive because they wish to control, and it’s not out of fear.

Anyway, I went and looked up ‘passive-aggressive’ and got completely sidetracked (sorry!) when I came to a list of passive-aggressive traits; apparently one of them is procrastination. (Perhaps if I looked further down, it would say ‘tendency to be sidetracked’ is another).

I never saw procrastination as being aggressive. Possibly, though… you might use it to annoy, or to avoid issues you didn’t want to accept or agree to… such as the example of spending so much time getting ready for a party that it’s too late to go (or nearly over when you do).

I’ve done that… but it wasn’t aggression so much as social phobia, communication problems (poor hearing) and being in denial. I decided I could and should go, but when it came to the point, I really didn’t want to.

Talk about hiding your head in the sand.

Glancing at the labyrinth of links to this trait or that, to this personality disorder or that, I started to think “we all have something like this going on; we might say ‘this is an unbalanced thing to do’ but it doesn’t mean we are not normal!” I think most of us are unbalanced in one way or another, often due to the types of experiences we have gone through. I actually typed ‘personality disorders don’t exist’ into Google, and was rewarded with a direct hit to someone else’s thoughts along these lines. It’s not like saying “you don’t have any issues; just deal”… it’s more like saying “OK, you have issues, and society itself has issues, and sometimes it’s society’s issues that impact on you…. and it doesn’t mean you are ‘not normal’ or beyond help.”

These are just random musings of mine, backed up by very little research…

Anyway, I decided it was long past time that I dealt with my own tendency to procrastinate. It usually means I spend far too much time doing things I don’t need to do (like changing my blog template, looking up what ‘passive-aggressive’ means or watching Frasier reruns) and not enough time doing new things (like maybe go up into the loft and set up my knitting machine. Or bake game pie. Or write a book). All these things I never leave myself any time to do because I’m (1) wasting time; (2) fighting fires (e.g. scrambling to get my tax figures in before Christmas).

If anyone has read any genuinely helpful books on procrastination and time management, please let me know!

I dug out my most recent ‘to-do’ list (2003) and found there are some things I still have to do, whereas other things are completely out of date.
These are some of the things I meant to do in April 2003 (two years before I began my blog):

• Find out about organizing teddy bear shows
• Look for the Baghdad Blogger
• Encourage my chat list to talk
• Movie of Sharky (my Oriental cat who died early this year)
• Baby sunlotion on Fusspot’s ears (they were like pale pink shells)
• Straighten lino in kitchen (gah, I remember how it ballooned up where the heavy washing machine had trapped it)
• Put a tag on the Bridal Wreath saying “please do not prune”
• Return cat trophy to next show
• Space loo

Space loo? What’s that?

My 2008 to-do list (written today) includes:

• Finish Middlemarch (then get rid of it)
• Read Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway (then get rid of it)
• Get rest of the rubbish out of the garden… then check neighbours aren’t still dumping it
• Reframe the cats’ certificates – rescue their medals
• Write up dream blog posts (illustrate one about the monkey peanut spider)
• Try out portable DVD player (it was left out in the rain)
• Check Mum’s memory chip

Now… to start on this to-do list!!!

Actually, I can already score out the first entry, which was ‘write blog post about to-do lists’.

(Do you think this list is actually getting me anywhere…?)

High Adventure in the High Street

A friend said once, “Only you could make a simple shopping expedition sound like a tale of derring do and adventure.” It sounds like a compliment but was probably another way of saying I prattle.

In town today, looking at a super-shiny PC laptop in Currys:

Mum: you could get this as a kind of backup.
Me (not sucked in): hmm.
Mum: on the other hand, as it’s a laptop you would probably take it to bed with you. So we better not.
Me: “I wouldn’t! I don’t do that with the Mac.”

It struck me afterwards (it’s always afterwards) that I managed to rattle it off the way I described in Yam Artiklit… “Idoont do that wivver mak!”

Later on we were in Argos. “Look, there’s an iMac in here,” I said, pointing at the catalogue. “Where?” asked Mum, surprised. “There… but it’s just the smallest one. I would need to go at least one step up.”
Mum read out loud: “20 inch screen.”
“Ah,” I said, “but it only has one gigagigagigabyte memory.”
I’m always doing that. Once I begin a word like that, I can never stop, and it’s machine-gun fast.

I… must… slow… down.

I don’t think my best friend at university was much inspiration to change; I remember her as a speed-speaker. I complained to the speech therapist that she had me reading things out slower than most people actually talk, and she said essentially I had to learn to walk before I could run. It makes me think of a funny cartoon strip featured by Thomas… I’m not that good at ‘learning to walk’ if I find it too tedious or am used to doing things a different way…. I’m too set in my usual routine.

But I’m rambling… the real story was our going shopping. (!)

I think I can tell Grandad I’ve discovered where the internet crowd have vanished to… they’re all in Costa, drinking coffee and dangling babies on their knees. I wondered why there seemed to be so many more babies than usual, then noticed a sign next to the loo: ‘baby changing facilities’. I thought that explained it till I realized they were all over the place in town as well… prams, pushchairs, toddlers, some of them running around the library. Is this normal and did I tune them out before? Is there some reason why…? Is there some sort of baby conference going on in the area? Or is it just that town is full of holidaymakers out with their children? There seemed to be a higher proportion of them than usual, but maybe Mum knows what is going on; she’s more ‘on the ball’ in social matters than I am. A year or two ago I said “it’s so busy this weekend; last weekend the town centre was echoing and empty!” And she said something like “oh, it’s the (Big City) Holiday… they all come over here from over there.”

Maybe it was the same thing today. I didn’t make a note of it in my calendar.

In Costa I had to bag a table, so I went to the back and looked around, and the only tables left were little round ones in the middle with two chairs each. My sister was meeting us, so we needed at least three chairs. I was a bit stuck and looked around, and met the eye of a guy in his 30s or 40s who was sitting at one of the big tables… he had four chairs and was all on his own, spreading out his newspaper.

I’ve noticed people doing that before, and I can’t believe their lack of forethought and consideration. Geez.

I chose one of the small tables in the middle (normally I loathe them with a passion because my agoraphobia makes it hard to sit out in more exposed areas!) but I’ve not been bothered by it so much recently… also it seemed to be the table closest to other tables which meant some people had vacant chairs in the vicinity which we could nab.

I think it’s interesting that it’s not just me who doesn’t like the tables in the middle of the room – I’ve observed in all sorts of places that they’re always the last to be taken. I remember a meeting at work where everybody was expected to stand in a ring to hear a director announcing unpleasant news. Everybody who came in tried to duck behind the people already there, though the people already there were standing back, expecting the others to go out in front. It wasn’t just me who didn’t want to; nobody wanted to. There must be some kind of deep-rooted instinct that says to get our backs against a wall.

Mum used to say the reason I didn’t like to be out in the middle of a pedestrian precinct (rather than walking closer to the shops) was that my ancestors had left me with an ancient fear that a dragon would swoop from the sky… those people who were out in the open, furthest from sanctuary, would be its main targets.

Har.

There is danger in the shadows too. I often see articles about falling masonry in old towns and cities. I have a long-standing joke with a cat client about it; she was going on one of her frequent trips and I said “look out for falling masonry,” and now it’s mentioned every time she goes away and again when she comes back. One time she had gone away, and it was a particularly windy day, I had to go out and walk the dog. I was late leaving the house as I was involved in sorting out something blog-related on the computer, and when I got out there, there was a heap of rubble on our steps. A roof tile had come down. I calculated that it had come down at some point during the previous couple of hours, possibly around the time I would normally be heading out to walk the dog. Mum said she heard a crash but didn’t know what it was.

So it was lucky for my cat client that her petsitter didn’t get hit by falling masonry! That would have been too ironic. Gah. And I suppose there’s still time yet.

Today Mum insisted on diving into butchers and bakers and other such places, leaving me standing outside with the shopping trolleys, and at one point I looked up uneasily just to make sure there wasn’t some malignant gargoyle in the process of leaping off its ledge…

I don’t think I’m paranoid, but I’m convinced accidents are all around us waiting to happen. You don’t go out in the morning thinking “maybe I’ll be hit by a random brick,” but it happens.

My sister said one of her PC-aholic friends bought an iMac the other day to see what all the fuss is about. I asked if he liked it, and she said “very much. He’s keeping his PC as well, but only because he can’t afford another copy of Photoshop… and it has a top-notch monitor.”

Oh, I said, thinking about my own PC at home, with a little but heavy 17″ CRT monitor… the kind cats love to sit on so they can dangle their tails between you and your work/blog/fractals. There’s no Photoshop on my PC, but there’s an old copy of Paintshop Pro. It only has 128 megamegamegabytes of RAM, and takes hours to render fractals or 3D pictures. The original hard drive failed a while ago and it has a new one (larger even than the Mac’s hard drive) but it is still not well… it refuses to turn itself off. And if you force the issue by turning it off at the mains, it refuses to come on again the next morning.

I was going to hang onto my old PC when I get a new computer, for Windows XP. But I’m not sure it’s such a good idea really. To my sister I said “I don’t suppose your friend would swop PCs…”

Of course not! But there was no harm in trying. Sigh.

When we got home, there was a little excitement mixed with bad news; my agents visited my house and say the tenants are keeping it in good nick. They are very happy with it and want to renew their lease, but mentioned there seems to be a bit of damp and it should probably be looked at. Will cost £50 to get someone out to inspect it, and who knows what they will find… I shouldn’t be staring through shop windows at computers just yet. I better put that plan on the back burner for a bit. Again. (Or maybe I’ll get a cheap PC to tide me over as I’m really edgy about this one here).

Time for coffee now… actually, looking at the clock, it’s a bit later than I thought; I don’t know how long this post will stretch down the screen once I’ve published it! Here’s hoping you all stay safe… please keep an eye out for falling masonry.

Anxiety Blogs and Jolly the Trolley

During the Blog Monsoon (see last post but one) I found a nice collection of ‘anxiety blogs’ but they’ve actually been pretty quiet. I’m careful not to read them with too much absorption anyway, as I’m terrified they will set me off again! “Don’t think about the hippopotamus.” I’ve been so much better recently that the other day I was whizzing along the street in a total strop about something else. That’s good news.

Jolly the Trolley is still in tow. Mum tried to get me to leave him in the car, but I wouldn’t. I’ve picked him up and carried him, though, which means I’m not really leaning on him. I’ve got fond of him and have started saying encouragingly “come along now” (much to the bemusement of a nearby three-year-old). I also call him ‘him’ without thinking.

Yesterday I said to Mum, “the reason his long handle is rather stiff and I can’t collapse it back down is that he’s got a metal stud down here that’s gone rusty. I better treat it with WD-40.”

Mum, peering intently, said, “mm. I suppose you better.”

When we were in town, feeding cats and buying overpriced ink cartridges, we were crossing the road and Jolly the Trolley got so anxious about the waiting cars that he collided with Mum’s ankles. When we reached the safety of the pavement, Mum spun round and threatened to give him a good smack if he did it again. We both took a step backward.

It surely isn’t just us, though… have a look at this photo of Jolly the Trolley. Do you see a large toothy grin?

You sheltered me from harm
Kept me warm, kept me warm
You gave my life to me
Set me free, set me free
The finest years I ever knew
Was all the years I had with you

If there’s someone you know
That won’t let you go
And taking it all for granted
You may lose them one day
Someone takes them away
And you don’t hear a word they say

(from Everything I Own sung by Ken Boothe)

Edit Feb 2008: Comments for this entry when it was on Blogigo:

1. Pete wrote at Sep 22, 2006 at 21:18:
nice to put a face to the name

2. bluestone wrote at Sep 22, 2006 at 23:12:
ha! I do see that smile!

3. kateblogs wrote at Sep 23, 2006 at 17:48:
Yip a definite smile

4. Pacian wrote at Sep 23, 2006 at 18:01:
I also see a nose and a pair of sunglasses…

5. Diddums wrote at Sep 23, 2006 at 18:30:
I guess he needs the sunglasses because he’s looking up into the sun so much of the time.

6. Sacha, from IrkedMagazine.com wrote at Sep 25, 2006 at 15:58:
AHA! So THAT’S what Jolley the Trolley (J.Tro?) looks like! Handsome bugger, he is…!

I dig the way you write, Diddums.

Get in touch; come write an article for IrkedMagazine.com…

Blessed Confidence

In this world, confidence is vital. Not just confidence in your own abilities, but also confidence in how you communicate and how you face the world.

This reminds me of two songs from old musicals. The first being Have Confidence In Yourself (Oliver Twist) and the second being Whistle a Happy Tune (The King and I).

There may well be others, and with reason – can you imagine how far any of us would get in this kind of civilization without confidence? How far would one get without friends and contacts, and the ability to communicate well with them?

Well I started to blog about this issue, but it’s a truly difficult one, so I’m hesitating. The problem with confidence, ‘fitting in’ and generally being normal (this topic was recently discussed by Goldfish on her blog)… well, the problem with that is, if you don’t feel able to get along as smoothly as others do, (for instance I’m profoundly hard of hearing), your confidence takes a dive. It takes a dive nearly every day. And when your confidence has banged its nose on the ocean floor often enough, you can end up with panic disorder and agoraphobia. After which everything gets still harder!

How do you contemplate a job in an office, supermarket, shop or anywhere else when you’re not even sure you can face the interview? Well you can go to the doctor for help, but how do you (a) make the appointment? (b) get there? (c) cope with the very claustrophobic waiting room? Particularly if it’s the kind of waiting room where you wait to hear your name being called.

Actually I’ve been through that in the past. I was starting to get stressed out at work, so I went to the doctor and said I was worried. She said “oh – what are you going to do about it?”

The problem with that was that I wasn’t really able to talk to people about something that I was finding increasingly difficult to handle. I didn’t feel able to say all the right things, ask for all the right things (even if I knew what they were – what I REALLY wanted was never to have to darken their doors again) … and on top of all that, how to avoid the inevitable hearing complications. Perhaps I had left it a bit late to ask for help, but there is no ‘right time’ as people won’t take you seriously till they see you actually disintegrating in front of their eyes. And then they panic.

My immediate superior was terrified I was going to turn round and say it was the work that made me ill. When I said to him the work was not the problem, he was so relieved that I had to smile. It was never about the work. It was never about him either.

Around this time (it’s all blurred in my memory now), I had gone to the doctor to see what she said. (All this happened ten years ago)! She said she would refer me to a cognitive therapist, but as they were booked up (the rest of Scotland was cracking up as well, presumably) I wouldn’t get to see this person for six months. Meanwhile, what was I going to do about the job situation, asked the doctor solicitously? I said well I might feel a little better if I moved my desk somewhere quieter (even though I knew there was nowhere – the office was packed out like a sardine tin). She said good, come back next week and tell me how you’re getting on.

Well, next week, I was well along in my little nervous breakdown, thank you very much. I couldn’t even face my mother. I was at her house, and every time she came into a room I was in, I smiled politely, sidled out, and went somewhere else. Eventually she found me lying on the spare bed, gazing at the ceiling.

I sat up and started to slink away again, but she stopped me – in tears. She knew something was badly wrong. I said I had to go to the doctor’s that afternoon and wasn’t sure I wanted to go. She said I must keep my appointment and get this sorted out.

Even more upset, I toddled along the road rather as though I was drunk – in fits and starts, hiding behind lamp posts every time a car went past. I felt completely dizzy – the sky spun around and the cement seemed gritty beneath my feet. It loomed at me.

I got most of the way to the Health Centre and then got stuck outside the small shops just across the road from it. There were cars parked outside, and a man waiting in one of them, looking at me. I couldn’t force myself past him – it was like trying to get a nervous horse to pass a large flapping scarecrow. I just couldn’t. (Ever since then I’ve had a special sympathy for skittish horses). Eventually I turned round and went home.

Now, every time I hear someone say “we ought to make people pay for not keeping their appointments and wasting everybody’s time”, I cringe. I don’t want to live in this unforgiving kind of world. I’m not hinting that I’m going to jump off a bridge or something revolting like that – I just sometimes feel like saying “enough! Stop the world! I want to get off.”

But I can’t.
So.
Next step is to bolster my flagging confidence. For we are nowhere without it.

I whistle a happy tune
And ev’ry single time
The happiness in the tune
Convinces me that I’m not afraid

Make believe you’re brave
And the trick will take you far
You may be as brave
As you make believe you are…

Sorry, I’ve just realized – I can’t whistle either. Kind of stuck now .

Edit Feb 2008: Comments to this post when it was hosted by Blogigo:

Pacian wrote at Jul 21, 2006 at 12:07:
Hum instead!

I haven’t had it quite as bad as you, but I sympathise with much of what you wrote. It would be nice if confidence came in pill form. Although I’d probably be too timid to ask for a prescription.

Diddums wrote at Jul 21, 2006 at 12:57:
And that’s the real problem, isn’t it . Maybe we should try Ally McBeal’s trick – her imaginary backing group.

Nastiest Phobia of All

Once I watched something flat and uninteresting on TV about a well-known personality. I didn’t know that she suffered from various anxieties and phobias. Having experienced similar things myself, I wanted to know more. For her, it’s flying, travelling, crowds. Surprisingly little was said about all that – more was said about her stalker! I don’t think he should have been given the coverage, and she said she didn’t want to talk about him. I didn’t want to talk about him either – or listen to him talking!

My dissatisfaction with the programme got me surfing the internet and I found this: “Agoraphobia is known as the ‘mother of all phobias’.”

I didn’t know it was referred to as that – I don’t hear it often. The article warns against agoraphobics throwing themselves into some program that claims to cure phobias in minutes. Well good grief, I’m a complex person; I can’t be mended with superglue. Meanwhile it’s reassuring to know that others know what I already know.