Dusting Myself Off

I'd like to write about something beautiful instead of just feeling poleaxed. I'd like to tell you about the way the wind keeps making the leaves of the small tree opposite turn back, showing white undersides, and flutter like the wings of baby birds. The weird sound of the freezer, somewhere between wind and water, slightly reminiscent of an aquarium. The little dabs of white cloud against a powder blue sky. And I can do it if I try, despite the constant ache in my upper chest, the perpetual urge to cry. I want to reclaim the beauty and the weirdness, to let it in instead of just watching it as if from a distance, as if it were something I dimly remembered.

This poleaxed feeling, this stopped in my tracks, it's all over, how can I go on feeling, I've felt it before. When my Dad killed himself, the world abruptly stopped, and it was my job to find some way to set it in motion again. It took more than 14 years to get just a little momentum - when I amazed myself and got my job with the children's charity I worked for in London. I had felt I couldn't ever get a 'proper' job, though I was working as a therapist in private practice at the time, on a very small scale. But going out into the world seemed beyond me. Irrational from the outside, the internal logic was compelling to me. But then I got the job, and my world changed forever. I became so much more than I thought I could ever be. Coped with so much more than I believed I could cope with. Was good at what I did. Went on to be the manager of the project. Went on to build a career of sorts on those foundations...

Having my job ripped away from me, and this awful feeling that the way back to work is barred to me, seems to have sent me inwardly back to that place where the world is shattered and can not be pieced back together, is unravelled and can never be knitted up again. Walking up the hill the other day, or, actually no, walking down it, I began to get an inkling that this had to do with my father - this devastation that I feel, this dreadful feeling of being unable to do anything, this post-apocalyptic feeling. Trauma reawakens trauma, and then there's the shock to cope with, so here we go now, getting on for 9 months down the road from 'you are suspended on full pay', and I begin dimly to see where I've gone. And this is why I appear to have no perspective on how bad my situation really is, and a limited ability to retain hope of things getting better. Real world factors like the massive cuts in voluntary sector funding are obviously contributory factors, just as Black Monday was a factor in sending my Dad over the edge, but are not objective reasons for feeling that there is no more hope left. It really is hard to get a job at the moment in my sector, just as my Dad really did lose money in the stock market crash. But a different story would see him or me picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off and starting all over again... As, of course, I will, when I can find a way to do it.

Magma

I'm searching a wide open arid plain - a sort of flat and featureless desert landscape. The sky is wide and grey, and I can taste fine dust in the air. Thirsty, so thirsty. No landmarks, no paths, no sense of direction, no compass.

I'm on a plane that is preparing to take off, and L is not there and I can't make my phone work to find out where she is.

I regularly think, right, now it's time to roll my sleeves up and make a fresh start. To get organised, impose some structure, order, self-discipline. To start writing in some regular way, to do some exploratory writing to help myself out of the desolate plain, to take charge.

This thing that has happened to me is a bend in the road I never saw coming.

It could be an opportunity. Sometimes I have had flashes of that. Sometimes I sense the grace of trusting that 'all shall be well'. Mostly I keep fighting with the terrors of the unknown. Mostly I keep fighting with what happened back at the beginning of the bend, when I slammed on the brakes, and steered for dear life the best way I could so as not to crash.

What I'm searching for is a way to turn the anger out. The day I learned that my colleague had been sitting beside me in the office for a year, friendly, professional and nice as you please, and all the time ('out of nosiness') reading my blog on the quiet, I walked through Manchester on legs of molten rock, so fast and furious, I imagined I left a trail of knocked down pedestrians flailing in my wake. Incandescent. I was incandescent. I could not remember ever being that angry before, or maybe just never so entirely righteously. I felt so wronged, so betrayed, so utterly deceived, and so completely incomprehending of the motivation behind the complaint she made after a year reading the blog. A complaint that she knew without doubt would (certainly could) lose me my job. Why? Why would anyone hate me that much?

I'm still so angry with her, with the other team member who started the meltdown of confidence in my team, and possibly most of all, with the supposedly 'senior' people in the organisation, the supposed 'adults', who so signally failed to deal with what was going on in the team, in the project, in the desolate and desperate place where we found ourselves trying to work without the support we truly needed. Who betrayed me utterly in the name of 'risk management', in the name of corporate HR values, who could not forgive a naive, an entirely innocent mistake. Who were more worried about protecting themselves from the poison that might be spread about the organisation as a result of my mistake by a mad woman who was already on the warpath, than protecting a (supposedly) valued member of staff, who was close to the edge of what she could cope with, and consequently made a horrible error of judgement.

A wise adult knows that there is more to telling tales than the tale that is being told. When the adults descend to the level of vindictive children, there is no protection.

Maybe there is a metaphor here, maybe an old feeling of not being helped, of being abandoned in my darkest hour. This doesn't explain away the crap behaviour of the senior management of a respected national charity, but might help me get to the heart of my enduring sense of aggrievedness.

So, I had the idea that what I was looking for on the plain was water, but it's also fire. Water as renewal, refreshment, life, and also the fiery energy and aliveness of my outrage at being so treated, a fire that can burn away the dead wood, that can refuse to take any more crap, that can look for something better, look for renewal and new growth.

Rising from the ashes takes time.

Inclement

No good news to report. I feel quite despairing.

I have just finished How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, which was quite cathartic, and made me realise that of course, 'things could be worse'... A strange not-quite children's book. Very compelling.

It is extremely windy here, and from time to time rains pitchforks, several of which come down the chimney (that can't be right...) At the moment bright sunlight making the underside of the honeysuckle leaves look white. Then gone.

L and I will have been together 22 years on Saturday, and are working hard to come up with plans that will honour the occasion... and cheer us up, which we sorely need.

My friend K texts me that I am a really talented person and there WILL be a job for me. I cry.

Daily Surf

It's raining hard, and the wind sighing down the chimney. In my daily surf of job websites I have seen something I'd like to apply for (I guess only if current applications don't work out) - working in a community arts project, getting the residents of 'deprived areas' writing, performing and publishing their work. Something that would bring together different strands of myself - the writer and the professional. Exciting initiative of which phase one has already happened, with lots of enthusiastic testimonials on the website, and now they've got funding to go ahead with a second phase. I'm so happy that something like this exists.

Back to the preparation for tomorrow's interview. Fiddling with PowerPoint slides, checking timings... Blah. And what to wear?

Reasons To Be Cheerful (Part 2)

Working on a presentation for a job interview on Tuesday - this time with disabled people. Interesting, challenging, nervewracking. Where to position myself emotionally? It is hard to start feeling enthusiastic, as I inevitably do while I do my research, and start to see the potential of this project. Hard, because the underbelly of the excitement is the possibility of another knock-back. I just don't feel as resilient as I might...

I'll go in a while to visit the horses and foals in the field along the road, and take some photographs, though the light is far from perfect - sky almost entirely covered in grey and white cloud. We saw them last weekend, and watched the spindly-legged foals run alongside their mothers, up and down the field. There seemed to be a collective agitation or excitement afoot. One of the adults took to bucking and kicking at one point, so we decided to withdraw, as another group of people were watching from the other side of the field, and we wondered if the mares were feeling threatened.

The honeysuckle is finally opening its flowers, dark red, with orange and white inside, yielding up a deep perfume you feel in your belly.

My memories of the befriending scheme where I worked in London are fresh and tender when I tap on the door of that recess of my brain. I remember the young people, their families, homes and pets as if it were yesterday. I wonder how hugely tall, unconfident S is getting on, how softly-spoken, creative N, so vulnerable and beautiful, has fared these last six years. I hope they are finding ways to be adults that keep them safe, and let them blossom...

Like A, my nephew, who visited briefly this week, before flitting off to North Yorkshire to see his old friends, then back down South to his girlfriend's today, before returning to his home in Brussels tomorrow, then off in a couple of weeks to travel round Europe with an Interail ticket with S for a month, then back to Brussels to work for six weeks, then back to university to embark on an MA!! He is tall, lightly bearded, tousle-haired, blue-eyed, ripped-trousered, but not shambolic - in fact he seems very responsible and well-organised. Very nearly got a first in his degree - gave me his interesting, thoughtful dissertation to read... Never sure when I will see him these days, but always a pleasure when I do.

Still Horses

Five horses stood in a field. Still, so still. All five of them, three chestnut, two greys, standing close, but not too close, one a little further away and at a slight angle to the others. Motionless, their eyes half-closed. Heads up but a little down, eyelashes visible against fur. All entirely still. Tails not swishing. I stood and watched for a minute or two. No change. Fantasising about a horse meditation group, a standing siesta. Really, I didn't know, nor ever will.

Reasons To Be Cheerful (Part 1)

The brass band at the primary school over the road rehearses with open windows. They are brilliant! We march about, dance and sing along.

My friend K is on the train up from London, delayed, but still heading this way. Later we shall go down to friend E's house to watch Andy Murray take on the Titan Nadal in the semi-finals at Wimbledon. Even later to town to hear jazz in the Arts Festival.

Bacon lettuce and tomato sandwiches for lunch, on malted grain bread, lightly toasted, with mayo and ketchup.