Saturday 28 October 2017

now

You know how people go 'all of the chickens are coming home to roost'? Well this is eighteen moronic chickens roosting on and in an upside down shopping trolley that the chook group uses as a quarantine pen for sick birds. They have a perfectly fine and huge room with perches to sleep in but this night they all wanted to sleep here instead


It's hard to know what to say. I might start with what I don't want to say. I don't want to list all my troubles. To some extent they involve other people. I don't want to whine in a free-floating way about the quality of the troubles or the effect they're having on me. Not much point in doing that, from my perspective, since I think about these things all the time, and as far as 'you' are concerned, without 'you' knowing specifically about the background I don't think it would be all that edifying for you to receive a decontextualised account of my feelings. All seems a bit Livejournal, in short.

I'm trying to deal with things by thinking about them. As far as it goes that is all right. I am coping and that is because I am thinking rather than acting out. But to go beyond coping and into changing the situation, I don't know how to do that. There isn't the necessary space in my life as I currently live it. I think this is entirely my own fault. I have recently and foolishly ruined some friendships that brought good dimensions and textures into my life and which I now miss very much. I work very hard all day during the week, at work where I have traded off not being bored for being overinvested, and then at home cooking dinner etc, and I'm tired at night. I'm absorbed in that state. The weekends, when that busyness isn't there, are difficult, and recently, the early morning bike ride to work has also been very challenging. I'm fresh, alert, not preoccupied, and I'm alone, and on cue, in comes rushing more emotion than I am able to handle. It doesn't improve matters that I eat breakfast alone every day at my desk. It's a very delicious breakfast (muesli, apple, blueberries, walnuts and soy milk) but still, I should change that.

Would you do me a favour? Tell me what you think about this question. Let's call it the anti-AB Facey conundrum. When you have a problem and you're unhappy, but you also know that your life has been, relative to many other people's, amazingly fortunate and holds many wonderful things, and also that relatively speaking your problem and associated unhappiness aren't all that intractable, what do you think you should you do with all of that, including the bit where you go, unattractively, 'well at least I'm not as messed up as that other person.' Should you just get over yourself, or try to, and get on with it?

I have a friend who's a Holocaust survivor. He was born in Paris in 1939 and when the city fell he was two years old, very cute and heartbreakingly small and vulnerable in the studio photo on his ipad. The photo was organised by his mother who sent a copy of it to every relative she could locate so that if anything happened to her, etc etc. He's travelled a lot and also on the ipad are photos of holocaust memorials around the world. I've been shown several times the pictures of this one in Miami. Usually when I'm looking at these things there are lots of people around, doing their nice everyday Melbourne stuff. The look on his face, though - he's alone, entirely isolated. I think maybe he's been like that all his life. Don't know.

I've been reading while not blogging, and I'll force myself tomorrow to write a reading log. I do feel a bit better having written the above. Confused, bitter, sarcastic, unnecessarily long and plain unnecessary attempts at jokes will be back on the time-wasting agenda soon enough I dare say.

3 comments:

jc said...

"Should you just get over yourself, or try to, and get on with it?"

I don't really know what getting over yourself means, I am always in my own way.

I think you should accept that you are going to need to WALLOW in it for a bit, in the free-floating whiny way. But you should also make sure you do the old reliable good things: craft or being in nature or what have you. A lot of my problems have seemed like horribly devastating things but then some how time passed and I was still alive and the problem was still there and I still felt sad about it, but not in an overwhelming way. Nothing was solved or anything. I just stopped feeling it so intensely.

I don't know if that was useful, but you asked it in a taking-a-survey way, rather than an advice-seeking way, so consider it a data point.

lucy tartan said...

Very useful. Thank you.

Helen said...

I just started reading your blog again (thanks for blogging!) I see the last comment was November 2017, which was just between the taking-responsibility-for-incapacitated mother event and the discovery-that-husband-has-accumulated-crippling-debt-remortgage-the-house event. I don't discuss the latter thing on Facey for the same reason you don't. Really, I got nuttin', except "what JC said", especially the being in nature bit and the diminishing horribleness bit.
I think feeling emotional on your ride to work is a good thing. It gets it out.