Posts made in April, 2011
Potential
If there is one word that I wish I could erase from my past and from my identity and the way I see myself, it is the word POTENTIAL. It was pinned to my chest as a school girl and I’ve been carrying around ever since.
In some respects I was lucky, very lucky. I have always had people that believed in me. They would tell me over and over, “you have such a bright future ahead of you, Josie”, “you could do anything you wanted to do”, and at 17, with a string of A’s and A*s and the gift of the gab and smile that people warmed to, you’d have thought it true.
But potential is about what’s possible, not about what’s actual. And although my possible perhaps might have meant a first degree somewhere prestigious, and an exciting career, or something else notable, my actual ended up being more about illness and disability and false-starts and many disappointments.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t change a lot of my past. It has made me who I am and, when I can get a sense of her through the self-doubt that’s always been a bit of a curse, I like the girl that is me, I do. I think she’s interesting and quite cool and I like how she sees the world, (although saying all of that in first person would be a bit of a stretch for my self-esteem).
But, whatever I do, when I embark on something, it is expected that I will run with it, that I will shine, that I will take that long-promised potential and do the thing that everyone has been waiting for. And when I don’t, when I am just human and average and frequently flawed and failing, I cannot shake the sense that I am a disappointment, somehow. That although what I’ve achieved is okay, there is left the feeling that I have not fulfilled this glittering could be. I have written about this before on here, and I am more than aware that it is far more about my own perception of myself than about others – I doubt many people that care about me see me as a disappointment, but still, the feeling is remains, and as I watch Kai grow I am becoming more and more conscious of it.
Read MoreThe Scenic Route
Kai and I walk the same walk almost every day. Our treks to town, to the park, to nursery, take us down the same pavements, half the time pounded by my power-walking buggy-pushing if we’re in a hurry, or dawdled over by little legs if we’re not.
There are days when the monotony of it makes me want to scream. I find myself almost desperate for a change of scene just now, new things to look at and be inspired by, tired out by the same old same old. I could vary the route I guess, but one wheely bin-lined street is an awful lot like an other, and invitably, often in a not-really-thinking state, my feet end up taking me along the same route on auto-pilot. I had this wish one day, as I walked head down, that I could somehow design shoes that left rainbow footprints as me and Kai trod and to bribe the council to let me turn their pavements into a strange map of art – footprints over footprints that meandered round puddles and pot holes and paused at all the myriad of strange little landmarks that make up mine and Kai’s trek. I reckon we’d paint the whole town in our wanderings – walking is something we do a lot of.
What makes me smile though, despite my own boredom of the same old sights, is how WONDERFUL Kai finds our daily route. He has always been a boy keen on routine and repetition. Like most toddlers it’s how he makes sense of his world, and walking the same way every day is a routine that he loves. It is like he has mental map now of the way, with a whole series of landmarks marked, punctuated with objects and occurrences he has collected from our repeated walkings. As we walk, or he rides in the buggy, each one needs to be pointed out as we pass, so that now our walk has become one giant, repeated story – a folktale for just the two of us, elaborated and growing and changing with every telling. Kai still communicates mostly with mime, odd half-right sounds and signs but it all makes sense to me. He tells me this story every day.
We pass the orange on the road, squashed flat now – Kai tells me how a car squished it and how he thinks the cats will like to eat it. We pass the rubbish in the gutter and a blue bag caught in a bush – Kai tells me that if everyone put their rubbish in the bin then the bin men could take it away (a brilliant system, I’m sure you’ll agree. Wonder if it will catch on?). We pass gravel spilt out from a drive-way onto the road and Kai reminds me that he thinks Nana should come with her broom to sweep it up. Sometimes new things appear and are added to his story – crisps on the road today prompted a five minute stop as he wondered how they had got there. Sometimes things change – a container of grit had toppled and spilt prompting Kai telling me every morning for a week that a man needed to come with a digger and crane to sort it out, which, to his immense excitement this morning, HE HAD! something I imagine he will remind me of every day for another week.
Everything is WOW. Everything is meaningful and pause for thought and conversation. And when I’m tired or in a rush, I’ll be honest, sometimes it is exasperating and tiring and I just want to GET ON and not have yet another conversation about the yellow truck.
But then he’ll come out with a new story, or notice something different and I can’t help but be swept out of my humdrum into a world of dinosaurs and speeding cars and snails that are looking for their mummies. His imagination seems to grow every week and so his stories are getting more and more inventive. I got him to tell you his latest one, the one he’s been telling me every day since last week – it’s on the video at the bottom.
The route may be the same every time, but he is not. And I’m beginning to think that will keep me going till I get my much longed-for change of scene.
Read MoreReasons to be
… finding upside-down moments of calm…
… solitary adventures that last all day…
… beauty that you only see if you really look for it…
… and the best little companion in the world.
When it hits, really hard at the moment, I struggle to remember why I’m here at all. So I’m mostly spending my time reminding myself, over and over.
Borrowed camera and sunshine helping some.
Kai and the people who love me most helping more.
You lot helping too.
Read MorePortrait
I want to capture this feeling, because I don’t intend to know it for very long. It is not me and I do not want it.
I want to write down this panic, this head-thumping, ear-ringing pressure that makes me bite down hard and dig nails into palms, this wordless, thoughtless white noise that seems to be my default just now, like someone switches off the thinking, functioning me to leave this motionless, gibbering, shell that just wants OUT. I want to know it, what it is that takes hold these days, because one day it will seem as unreal as being alive does to me now and I won’t even remember what it felt like.
I want to remember this numbness. This monochrome vision. This feeling of not existing in my own body, looking through TV screen eyes at some stage-show I don’t understand rather than on a living, breathing world. I want to remember it so that when I get my colour back, my eyes that usually notice more colours than there are names for, when I get back to feeling like the whole world is plugged directly into my retinas and that I exist with every fibre and bone and surge and pump within it, when I get it back I want to be able to never take it for granted again, to never forget how gray the world turned when it all got too much for a while. In the years I couldn’t walk, I forgot what it felt like to run, and now it always feels like some kind of magic when I do. I want all this to give me a similar appreciation, as trite as it sounds. It might as well be good for something.
I want to inscribe this feeling of worthlessness, this doubt and paralysing lack of purpose, when the confidence even to have a purpose seems like a gift that was given to everyone but me. I want to record it. This thick-tongued, slow-worded, sloth of a girl that can barely stand to be looked at. How I felt when life seemed like something I was never going to be any good at, when every skill and talent at my disposal seemed like a joke, given that they had been granted to someone without the strength or courage to ever use them to any merit. I want to set it down here, so when one day soon I get my firework mind back to set me off on an orbit of action and productivity and beauty and bravery and success, all the things I know I am capable of, when I won’t have time to look back because I will be so busy BEING something extraordinary, I will have the memory of it to look back and wonder at and exclaim “How could I ever have felt like that?!”.
I want to capture all of it. The no money, the empty bed, the feeling of no future, the feeling of being unlovable and incapable of ever making another relationship work, ALL of it. Because I am not going to have these things for long. Once I get to step into the future I have waiting for me, that I can’t yet know but that EXISTS, it exists because fuck me if I’m giving up on it and letting this bastard sink-hole win, I won’t have time to remember because I will be too swept up in love and security and promise and plans.
Sitting small in a puddle of your own tears is horrible and uncomfortable and embarrassing only while you’re in it, and pretty soon I’ll find a ‘drink me’ of some description that will give me back my size, and I’ll get to look down on my puddle and all its collected flotsam and jetsam and wonder at how big it seemed at the time. I’ll stride through it without another look and be on my way.
So while I’m here I might as well sit and laugh at my shrunken, damp, hopeless self, and read some good books, and catch up on some sleep, because depression is stupid, really, as is this ridiculous, melodramatic post, and I’m not going to indulge it any more.
I won’t be here long at all. You’ll see.
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