Feeling a most ungrateful cow today. My husband is home and being thoughtful, kind and helpful. My son is mostly not here or in bed, so making much less mess than usual. I should be happy but I'm not. I feel confused, rather blank, sluggish beyond words, and as if some lifeline to myself has craftily been severed while I slept.
Every time I start to get an inkling about who I am, what I want to do, and how I want to live, Steve comes home and I bury it beneath a mountain of habitual thinking and behaviour. HELP! I am the jelly woman. I have no spine. My brain has been replaced with marshmallow. My blood has all the passion and purpose of flat lemonade. I am a kid's tea-party wrapped in skin.
I have trapped myself in a way of thinking that flattens out all other thoughts. Today, for instance, I have absolutely no clue what I feel capable of or how to proceed - I only know what I think I SHOULD do which is finish painting the bathroom, but my CFS is making me too exhausted at the thought. I feel like I'm in a bubble and the life that is really mine is on the outside, just out of reach.
Is this the most outrageous self-indulgence? I don't know. You're quite welcome to think so and you may be right. I am too busy bumping into my self-imposed barriers to care. I am aware, however, that the world out there is full of people with REAL problems, so I give myself no sympathy here.
Hamlet said "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" and he had a point, you know. Mrs Shakespeare didn't raise no idiots, as they say. I suspect Mrs McDonald (my mum) might have though.
Perhaps I just need some more time. I have been a parent for twenty-eight years, after all, and that is a long time to embed a pattern of thinking that demands you consider others with your every thought. Maybe one month of freedom from that is not quite enough to consolidate.
See what I'm doing here? I've been through shock and denial, and arrived at acceptance and excuses. I wonder what bargaining is going to look like? To Steve - give me more time on my own or I'll spit in your coffee? To Sam - clean up after yourself or I'll convert to Judaism and you'll be long overdue for a bris? Bit extreme, perhaps, and not really me. Oh well.
Do you remember Worzel Gummidge, who had different heads he put on according to the occasion? What a whizzy idea, I sure could do with that. A whole head that gets things done, then I put it aside and put my ME head back on again. Bish-bosh, job done. Clarity of thought kept in the head with the good hair. That would be nice.
So, I don't know - a bit of a dogger mucka of a day really. (Had to get that in - new swear word sent to me by Matt, and loving it). Might substitute the 'M' though, unless the day improves.
Right - boring myself rigid now with my negativity. Have written up to chapter 6 with my new book so am decided, am absolutely decided, that I will continue with that today and sod everything else. Phew, done it, made a decision that comes from outside the barrier. Only took half an hour and fifty lines.
After all - I have readers waiting for the next chapter, (well, my friend Diane, the 'leper', and her daughter Ella, does that count?) so should really crack on. The public is SOOOOO demanding (picture me with hand on brow, fainting from the pressure of fame onto a crusty chaise-longue, wearing my head with the good hair, natch)!
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