[Miscellany]

I'm going to level with you;  I'm not doing too well.
I feel like I'm on the precipice of a nervous breakdown though I'm too aware of how unable I am to have one to actually ever let it happen.  Who would be there to pick up the pieces exactly should that happen?  I don't have the luxury of letting myself completely break down and decompose like I want to.  I resent that too, by the way.

The past year has been excruciating.  I'm now at the stage where I don't even look forward to weekends.  I don't even look forward to the long night ahead after work finishes.  What do people do with those hours exactly?  How are they filled?  I see them all before me and just get exhausted by the daunting task of navigating their emptiness.  I drive home, late with my fingers gripping the wheel and my stomach churning with pain the closer I get to my house.  I often take the long way home - sometimes driving close to 2 hours to postpone the inevitable nothingness that follows when I am here.

"What is the point of me?" is a question I ask of myself daily.  More than daily; perhaps closer to hourly.  It's a valid question.  What is the point of me?  I can see that I get up every morning, I pay my taxes, I work in a job that is giving back to the community, I love those around me, I am kind and giving (well, mostly), I am a good friend and a human that aims not to harm others but there is nothing there that actually has a point.  There is nothing there that makes being me actually worthwhile.  I'm not saying that I'm going to disappear any time soon - remember, who would be there to pick up the pieces and all that?  No, it's just - what is the point of all this emptiness?  I'm sick of sailing these seas.  I'm sick of being me.  I'm sick of getting up and paying my taxes and being a productive member of society.  I don't have the things that basic humans need - connection, hugs and love and so what is the point of me?  I keep asking - like as if I expect a disembodied voice to boom back an answer that makes sense.

But there is no disembodied voice.  There is no answer.  There is only that emptiness, stretching out before me tauntingly.

MVOR thinks this is productive of me; to be feeling so raw.  This rawness is new.  It's the repressed me that is now surfacing, that has to surface in order for me to peel it away and expose the new, I suppose.  But maybe not.  Maybe it's just me winding down, coming to terms with my supreme insignificance and a dawning of many more years of chaos and myself spiraling in a downward direction.

I wish I could say that I was having a moment of feeling sorry for myself but I'm honestly not.  I'm grateful for every wretched breath I draw.  I'm amazed by my ability to imagine beautiful things, always.  I'm inspired by the beauty I am able to find in every chaotic moment.  I recognise my unique qualities in seeing things that others don't and in surviving what others couldn't even imagine.  There is nobody I know that could handle the daily circumstances that I do and I wouldn't wish it on anyone either.  I'm amazing and all that.  I know.

But it's not enough for me to see what the point of all that is.  What is the point of me?  It's a question I'll keep asking until my voice grows hoarse and every silent beat that follows after sends me hurtling further and further into space away from everything and everyone.

What is the fucking point of me?

Labels: in treatment, musings, MVOR, pondering, psychos, wonderings

posted by M at 12:18 am 11 comments

When summer break began so did my spiral into delinquency.   I've become a serial graffitist; I graffiti comics on the walls of public restrooms.  I've been posting my scribblings on my IG account and by all accounts it's the first time in a long while that I've felt truly excited and inspired by something I've created.

I told MVOR about my new project after reminiscing about an old book I read as a teenager.   The book; Displaced Person by Lee Harding is the story about a boy who slowly started losing grip with reality to the point where he completely disappears from view and ceases to exist to all the people that once knew him in his life.  At first he finds it hard to get people's attention, then his parents start ignoring him and soon he slips through a crack in reality to find himself in a grey world where he can't engage at all with the life he once knew and wondering whether he was going mad or if this was some cruel joke being played on him by God.

MVOR was interested in the tale I told and immediately drew parallels between by own life of feeling invisible, undervalued and insignificant and the life of this fictional boy who was going through a displacement.

Then I told her about the graffiti.

Surprisingly, MVOR applauded me on this.  I was expecting her to question my reasons for doing so and to caution me against defacing public property but she didn't.  She laughed; of course you are doing this!  You are putting your hand up in the only way you know how.  You are making your mark.  You are asking people to see you, to notice you, to understand you.  You are reaching out and leaving a legacy.  You are validating yourself as a person worthy of being noticed.

Oh... well.  In that case...

Labels: art, displaced, life and art, MVOR, psychos, thinking

posted by M at 3:47 am 5 comments

Sometimes my conversations with MVOR are inconsequential, they float away into the atmosphere as soon as I leave the comfort of that cosy little room.  Other times the conversation has stayed with me dancing on my shoulder and poking me with a pitchfork like a little devil so I never forget.

The Archetypes conversation we had last week has lingered around me and refusing to leave.

Like all our conversations, this started somewhere rather remote and eventually meandered in that same way it usually does, past the inadequacies of my upbringing and taking a right through my lack of self esteem and stumbling somewhere near the babbling brook of discontent until we reached the fairytale discussion.

If you think about it, we are all in our consciousness and at the very core a collection of archetypes.  That is how our point of reference for ourselves and the way in which we size up and identify each other.  Every story has its wicked witch, its naive traveler, a caregiver, a Prince.  There are those that look one way and act another like our friend The Beast and there are those that without doubt are exactly who they appear to be, like Snow White.  Love it or hate it archetypes are important to us.  How else would you know what I meant by Perfect Mother unless you already had an idea in your mind of what that would entail?  Even if your own Mother wasn't perfect at all, you would still have a projected ideal in your mind of what she should have been.

The fairytale discussion began with an unflattering description of someone in my life as the wicked witch from Hansel and Gretel.  MVOR agreed that this sounded consistent with my observations about her in previous discussions and so if that was true when who was I?

As the leading lady in my own sorrowful story you'd think that this would be an easy question to answer but I couldn't reconcile myself as a Red Riding Hood, Snow White or Belle.  There is no heroine for me to project forward.  MVOR heard my silence, as she often does... and in her perceptive way eventually prompted;  I thought that would be obvious.  Aren't you Cinderella?  She gave a multitude of good reasons why I should be.

I considered it for a long while but ultimately had to disagree.

I couldn't be Cinderella because Cinderella, like all leading heroines, is a character laden with hope and possibility.  You go into reading her story knowing that she will prevail.  Despite her lowly and doomed status as a servant to her Stepmother and horrid Stepsisters, success is still a certainty for her, like it is for all heroines.  I can't say that anything is a positive certainty for me.  The jury is still out on whether I will turn these lemons into lemonade or even if I will manage to maintain this exhausting balancing act of my life that can at best be described as a "status quo".  No, though I may indeed be in the soot and cinders, sleeping with the outcasts and edging my way along the fringes like our old friend Cinderella I'm not quite as entitled as she to a happy ending.  Who is to say I am?  What's the guarantee?  Not everyone ends up with love, family, money, security, health or self actualisation.  In fact, not even having one of them is a certainty.

MVOR explained that our archetypes and internal schemas are part of the image we have of ourselves and that which we project outwards.  Is it indeed a self fulfilling prophesy to see oneself in a certain light and to project that outwards, therefore inviting others to see us thus?  And so what do you do if your internal archetype is not positive or constructive?  Well this is a question for the ages.  I'm told it can change with a lot of perseverance and adjustments to our internal narrative.

So if my archetypal fairytale character is not Cindy, then what do you suppose I said?
----

I bought an album the other day for the first time in a loooooong time.  I don't tend to buy albums anymore.  I buy songs. I suppose we all do that now.  But this one... this one I bought.  I seem to be listening to this song a lot.  It takes me somewhere otherworldly.  Exactly what I need.

Pontoon - Emma Louise

Labels: archtypes, fairytales, music, musical monday, musings, MVOR, questions, schemas, thinking, thoughts

posted by M at 11:52 pm 10 comments

MVOR and I talked a lot about self-worth in our latest sitting. Clearly it's a reoccurring theme in my life and we bring it up a lot.  I'd spent a good many years (my whole life) tearing myself down and so I wonder if now I have to spend the same amount of time building myself up?  MVOR brought up me needing to enjoy the soup of my existence rather than looking at my life as a series of individual ingredients.  She didn't put it quite like that - being much more eloquent and poetic than I - but this is how I remember it:

Take everything that you are and put it all together, heat, stir, let it simmer - sometimes for hours - and then you have the soup of your life.  The soup is a dossier of the important bits that make up our person(a). If you think about what goes into your soup it can be quite humbling - perhaps it's the loss of a family member, the love you had for your pet dog, the wife who left you, the happiest marriage ever, the love in your heart for your child, the brother who failed to emotionally check in, abuse, love, joy, bullying, family holidays down by the lake, illness that stole people far too early, being heartbroken and those whose hearts you have toyed with recklessly - it's all there.  Whatever they are, good and bad, all the flavours contribute to the whole.  The soup ceases to be simply the sum of its parts once it has been cooked - it is no longer onion, cumin, celery etc, it's something completely different.

MVOR pointed out that I am picking apart ingredients and judging my whole 'soup' on one little bit.  Cumin tastes like absolute shite on its own, but in the soup it probably adds to the flavour.  I'm looking at the cumin and giving the whole soup a bad review based on that singular flavour only.  It's true that sometimes when you take a spoonful of the soup you might get a mouthful of chilli, or cumin or whatever and it causes you to splutter and fail to swallow but still - the soup is more than this mouthful.  We are more than the sum of our parts, even though the parts make the sum.  Does that make sense?

My soup is an series of ingredients which I have thus far refused to enjoy as a cohesive meal.  I've taken this rather negative perspective on my life instead (as best paraphrased by a conversation in the movie Clueless):

Cher: she's a full-on Monet 

Tai: What's a Monet?

Cher: It's like a painting, see? From far away, it's OK, but up close, it's a big old mess.

I see myself in the microcosm - the Monet up close and as the list of ingredients rather than the whole soup.   According to MVOR I should start looking at myself as the whole soup rather than the sum of the ingredients and if I find myself spluttering on a mouthful of cumin I need to reposition that as part of the whole rather than as a defining part of me - yes it exists, yes it's bad, yes it's part of my history and therefore part of my now but I am not just cumin.  I need to acknowledge and respect those parts of me that are not that great but in no way should I be judging the whole on the sum of it's parts.

Aaaand now I'm hungry.

*no cumin was harmed in the writing of this post.  Feel that perhaps I was a little too hard on it. It's really quite a nice spice.

Labels: analogy, analysis, art, life, life and art, monet, musings, MVOR, psychos, thoughts

posted by M at 8:04 pm 5 comments

I have a lottery ticket in my purse which was drawn last week but which I haven't yet checked. I could be sitting on a million for all I know and then again I might not be. The chances of it not being a winner are almost 100% but it's the .0009% that I'm most interested in. It's like a flash of excitement. A clock ticking. bell chiming. That .0009% is a morsel of hope, something which exists, even at my lowest point.

Perhaps hope is instinctual - like breathing or coughing. I imagine if someone decides to drown themselves, their mind is made up but the body has other ideas. At some point the human instinct kicks in and the body tries with all its might to get to the surface and breathe in some oxygen. The body tries to live, even if the mind wants to die.

Perhaps that's what happens when hope kicks in too. One may be at the end, the edge, so to speak - with no loveliness and no kindness and no joy but then there it is - like a kiss on the cheek; hope. Hope stops you from jumping. It stops you from dying. You grab onto it and clutch at it and somehow pull yourself up and out of the doldrums. While it is yours, hope is your best friend and your only chance of survival. Hope is a smile in a sea of frowns and a laugh in a serious boardroom meeting. She is impossible not to love.

I like having hope but I don't like living with it. She is beguiling and yet deceitful. She draws you in, makes you feel comfortable and then, if you are me - is then crushed, dashed, falsified. Crushed hopes are worse than no hope at all it seems. And yet, instinctively I find some more hope, even where you would think that hope would be lost. It's infuriating. I am constantly fielding the battle between having hope and picking myself up after losing it.

Somehow this ticket in my purse has grown to symbolise every morsel of hope I have left in the world and yet I am destined to never check it for fear of losing it, once again.

Labels: crazy people, hope, MVOR, random, rant, wonderings

posted by M at 12:17 am 6 comments

I have come to realise that these (now) monthly visits with MVOR, the genteel lady with whom I share my innermost thoughts, are not going to fix me. There is no fixing this state of mind I carry around with me.
There's no cancer to isolate.
There's no lump to remove.
There's no ...waiting it out with bed rest until it goes away.

This half nutty, soul destroying melancholic anti-heroine didn't just happen when I awoke one morning. She was created from conception to survive the Big Bang of my life. She was created, like some kind of terminator to keep living and keep doing its job at all costs, eventually acting on its own accord at its own pace.

I've done a thorough job on her, yes I have and she, in turn has repaid the favor and done a thorough job on me.

She is in the bone and the mind and the blood - coursing like traffic on the Eastern Fwy in peak hour. There is very little that keeps me from surrendering completely to her and that is the tiny glittering hope, like a mirage in the driest desert that things will turn around.

I hate that hope. It's a tormenter and a tease and yet
...it's there. Blinking away in my peripheral vision.
I guess I left a light on somewhere.
I guess.

Labels: melancholy, MVOR, wonderings

posted by M at 7:03 am 2 comments

MVOR, (being so much more reasonable than I) made an interesting remark the other day.

We were talking about personal relationships and I was relating a story about somebody that I was (am) on the verge of cutting out of my life. She interrupted my petty diatribe to tell me about the train theory - or rather, the train carriage theory of personal relationships.

Basically the people with normal personal relationships keep them organised in a kind of train carriage system. Some people are very close to us and we hold them dear - our immediate family or spouse, children etc and they go in the first carriage. The next carriage has our next closest people - our best friends, perhaps extended family etc. Then so on and so on as the carriages get further and further away from the funnel and down the track until you get right to the end where it's people you see every few years at a reunion.

Not everyone can be in first class you see - and you can't treat everyone like they are in first class either. It would tire you out and indeed they would take you for granted in the end - especially if you're right down the end of their carriage system. The people with successful personal relationships with others have different expectations and rules for the people who live in first, second, third or last class. If we are going to treat first class differently (by offering our most important asset - our hearts) then we should expect that they also behave differently toward us than those in 3rd or 4th class.

There are times though, in everyone's life where people can move between carriages depending on our personal needs at the time. For instance - perhaps you get married. Your spouse, being so close to your heart is in first class exactly where they should be. However, if you were going through a tough period and considered separating then they would move out of the carriage and into another one further down. Perhaps a few years later you get divorced or perhaps you decided you would never see them again. Well then they would move right back down and perhaps off the train altogether. That's life.

That's how things work for those of you lucky enough not to need an external voice of reason.

Apparently, I don't have a carriage system.
I have one carriage: First class.
Once people fuck with me - they exit first class and have nowhere else to go. I watch them tumble onto the tracks below as I speed on away. Sayonara!

MVOR says that I need a carriage system in order to organise people better. Apparently I don't need to execute everyone to hurts me. Instead I can move them down the carriage system so that my expectations of them change as well as my feelings about them - without having to feel angry or hurt for a long time etc.

Easier said than done.

What's your first carriage like?

Meanwhile Musical Monday comes in the form of a mash up. Usually I loathe Mash ups with a passion but this one is highly ace. It's Blondie's Heart of Glass and Arcade Fire's Sprawl 2. It's an excellent, excellent, excellent song made up of two stellar tunes.

Enjoy!

Labels: friends, mash up, musical monday, MVOR, train carriage theory

posted by M at 10:24 pm 8 comments

I'm determined this year that I'm not going to let the stress of teaching affect all my moods all the time. Sounds piss easy, I hear you say but actually people like me find this quite difficult.

I have two moods: On holiday mood = happy and relaxed. Working mood = grumpy bitch from hell.

MVOR says that I give way too much of myself especially when it's apparent that the situation calls for me to just back away and let it go. So basically, if you hate and reject me I'm going to go right ahead and prove to you why you should love me even though there is no winning with you. There fore all my hard work goes unnoticed and I get further disgruntled which then self-affirms my feelings of being rejected and abandoned by everybody and I'm left there like a cartoon image of myself yelling "hey, what about me? WHAT about ME? I'm useful! Heyyy, ..anybody?". I'm ace, no really, so ace.

Work is a constant source of me not feeling good enough - this is despite the fact that (...and coming from a person with zero self esteem), I'm a really good teacher and operator. I just need to stop caring so much about what I can and can't achieve with other adults and just let the rest go. But I can't...

New manager is not a doer. As in... coasts along and waits for someone else to do it. Who am I? I'm a worrier and a pleaser. What do I do if I see a gaping hole? Why, I fill it of course. You can see where this is heading can't you? On the one hand I am so glad that I came to the decision to give up this leadership role because I *am* less stressed out - on the other I'm constantly in battle with myself to not to keep doing her job for her.

I find things difficult because:
* we haven't had one team meeting since the year started despite things that are in disarray.

* The team still comes to me with their work related issues and then get all defensive when I refer them to the new leader (ie: defensive because ...hey you shouldn't put all the pressure on the new leader!)

* New leader doesn't know the ropes... or anything resembling a rope and yet refuses to come to me for help despite me saying my door is open (like a million times) - now I'm getting other people coming to me saying that new team leader (NTL) is asking all these dodgy questions ..and shouldn't she be asking me instead?

* I'm still actually doing a chunk of her work because I can see that things need to be organised and yet they are NOT!

* NTL actively is using an effigy of me to stick needles into each night.


As a consequence of all this, despite goal not to let work affect my moods and health I look like a crazy lady who has been living in the forest for 2 years and forgotten what it's like to be human.

Does work give you woe? And if not, how did you achieve that kind of bliss?

Labels: MVOR, new leader, rant, stressed teachers, teacher dramas, work

posted by M at 2:44 pm 5 comments

There is a term for people in my situation.
That is, souls who just can't figure out why they can't figure it out. Thus, to try to eleviate the status quo and find something worth blogging for (or living, I don't know) I'm... here I go... coming out of the closet.. I'm ..."in treatment".

What I'm "in treatment" for hasn't been given a name. Am I depressed? Nuts? Weird? Psychotic? Too thoughtful? Ridiculous? Yes, probably and I don't know. I've got to tell you, 11 year old me (whom I consult with quite a bit) wouldn't have believed you if you told her she'd be in treatment in 2011. Of course, 11 year old me would have thought 32 year old me would be living on the moon (true, I wrote an essay on it) instead of in an inner city suburb in Melbs but anyway.. I digress.

My err... what do we call her: My voice of reason (MVOR)? is a poised, thoughtful, intelligent, kind and insightful person who will interrupt my diatribes with highly reasonable examples of why I shouldn't be so hard on myself. I wish I was more like her, but I'm not. I'm the messy person who comes in with an overcooked imagination and disorganised handbag that spills everywhere, often in a bad mood from work and who sits on the couch and blabs, blabs, blabs in a way that is most unattrative and I'm sure highly yawnful.

I'm the opposite of what I want to be.
And what do I want to be?

...just normal... everyday...
simple really.
Not quite sure how many people actually achieve this so called simple stuff, but I'll give it a go.

Time to give someone else my kite string to anchor me for a while.
I've realised it's rather impossible to be the one holding it and flying at the same time.
You just get lost.

Labels: Crazy Nutters, in treatment, MVOR, nuts, talking cure, weird little happenings, weird things

posted by M at 7:20 pm 6 comments