Tag mental health

What matters?

Laurel Lindström 1 Comment

Fractured pictures crack and crumble happy moments into very sad ones: persistent awareness of a dear friend’s deteriorating illness; news of an old friend’s patchy health; some random stranger’s sobbing sorrow on the bus; and an author friend’s terminal diagnosis. You sit and try to take it, hold it, add it to the pile of horrid things that have happened. You wonder at the whelm of sadness distant friends and families, strangers are fighting. You wonder how many more bricks the tower can take before it tumbles. And then as you pause to wallow in sadness, there’s the fascination of a fly’s personal hygiene. She’s taking an earthbound pause in her busy schedule. She’s stopped to check her wings for dust and her feet for spider web remnants. She’s darting back and forth, taking tiny shots at the table’s surface with her long sucky tongue. She’s testing, seeking, looking for something she won’t find and then she’s back up into the air. The debris on her wings and feet, the fascination of the table top, the moment where it mattered so very much, it’s all gone. Fleeting. Over.

I guess sad news of failing heath and imminent death comes more often with lengthening years. Getting older means to expect more news of the fragile and their vulnerabilities, more capitulation. For many, surrender comes with age and yet determination to ignore the legacy of the years can also be unwavering. Eventually the years may be many or not. Either way they will win and yet when they are many so are the memories, what’s left of others. The pictures of faces and places, people and friends keep dancing in imagination and dozing dreams and they are no less real, no less present, no less in need of our attention.

It’s been just over five years since our dad moved on to somewhere noisy and smokey and jazzy and filled with pretty women and brilliant musicians. His children, six of us, didn’t all grow up with him for all of his parenting years, but his influence on us was profound and enduring. A man of intense focus and commitment, but not always to everything and everyone at the same time. Apart from the music of course. A man of brilliance, renown and fame who was always surprised that anyone was interested in him or his achievements. And they were many as you may be aware. We miss him still and every day I see his smile. I hear his guffaw and smell the scent of sweat and second hand smoke settling on the pillow when he was home from a gig and came into our bedroom to kiss us goodnight, deep in the darkness and us deep in sleep. A snatch of a scene, and there is so much still to say.

And riding again this morning, lively horses and too much bounce reminding us that the getting old stuff is absolutely all in your head. Go with it. Push on. Stride along. Don’t forget to steer. Renewed power in the hips, so riding with back again as well as hands, balance and legs. That and faith of course. It works, but it’s a reminder that getting old doesn’t have to be so bad. And how you deal with it is up to you. Our dad was still performing at 87 and still filling in gigs in his diary and planning his solos in his head, which is where he mostly lived. Imagination isn’t just about denial, it’s also about life and living and reaching out for what happens next.

The sad news that seems to keep coming can‘no’t be ignored, but it can be a reminder that there is always something coming next, good or bad, for someone somewhere, for you. Our time will surely outrun our imaginations, but in the meantime keep believing in who and what you are. Keep sharing. There’s only one of you, and you are surely loved. What more do you want?

Care Don’t Care Don’t

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

At various, usually demanding, points in life it’s hard to take things seriously. And yet you recognise that understanding how you reached that point is a serious matter. You see the paradox that is not giving a toss, yet you’re wanting to understand why it is that you don’t. So you sit there in tremulous balance, Scylla and Charybdis-like, wondering what it is you truly care about and questioning if it really matters. You consider the people, the things, the seasons, the strangers who’s lives are surely more interesting than yours, your pets and favourite books, whether 90% cocoa chocolate is tastier than 85% and if so is it 5% tastier or more. At the same time you wonder why it is that you don’t take any of what’s going on seriously, why you really don’t care. It’s not an all the time thing, it’s a point-in-your-life thing but it’s limiting and debilitating and it gets in the way of contentment and happiness.

This taking things seriously paradox can hit at any time, so don’t think it’s about getting old because it isn’t. Apart from anything else remember that the old only get old if they give up on life or allow life to give up on them. This is separate from what happens to the body, you understand. The body’s constantly deteriorating and all that we do is about slowing or avoiding that deterioration and eventual collapse. The body’s always going to be letting you down one way or another: it’s not the body it’s the mind that makes you old. We all know people in their twenties who’ve the mindset of a 55 year old. 

Not taking things seriously when you ought to hits at any time, from childhood through the approach of life’s end. Maybe at that point not taking things seriously is handy, but before then it’s far more of a hindrance. It gets in the way of committment. For example, when your parents let you down because they separate and leave you alone to deal with what’s happened by yourself, you really should take it seriously. You’re told to just get on with it, so in a state of confusion and distress you do. But you can only do so by telling yourself this massive change isn’t serious, not really. Change now is not relevant because the future is just a flicker of a moment someone once told you about. Things will get back to normal soon because this isn’t serious, it’s temporary.

But when childhood trauma hits, it can’t be understood or effectively processed without someone explaining it. If no one bothers to explain it that surely means it doesn’t matter. Whether or not you should, you trust the world around you, so if it mattered someone would tell you. If no-one explains anything then whatever’s going on doesn’t matter at all. What’s happening is deeply shocking and is having a serious affect on your life, but you can’t see it. It isn’t really there. But this is not temporary.

And then there’s the time a person comes into your life who takes you very seriously indeed, but you really don’t understand why. Maybe you should take them seriously but you don’t. Instead you idly ponder their obsession. Is it desire and sex? Is it some fear of being alone they have? Is it their need to nest, to settle down and build a new, family-centric life? When you think about these things, horrified at how close and tight they’re erecting the railings, you can’t believe someone would want to be so intensely serious. Not now, not with so much left to explore. But the idle pondering leads nowhere, and the answers to the questions are uninteresting. Attempts to make you be serious are really not serious, they are trivial, gossamer, someone else’s gig and they don’t involve you. Yet they do. When you wonder about the why of this, you have no answer so you don’t bother. You leave it and you move on, oblivious to the hearts you’ve broken. When in some other context you think about them again, all you remember is that someone else’s feelings might have been trampled. But you tell yourself it wasn’t your fault and don’t see the broken heart, not for a very long time. 

And then there’s trying to be a grown-up in those final months of your degree course. You possibly recognise that the season for learning has shifted and life is going in some different and exciting unseen direction. The original goal and its process are no longer serious, no longer worth the cost. You’re tempted to ditch the whole endeavour, or maybe only almost ditch it with some sort of postponement, a less ambitious goal. But the paradox rears its head again and you struggle to care. If  common sense prevails, you come to understand that you mustn’t give up. You recognise that all the loans, the working double shifts, the scrimping and going without, the hours alone with textbooks, other peoples’ ideas and endless essay writing, the opportunity costs, are indeed serious. You vaguely understand that somewhere deep in the layers that don’t take anything seriously there might be something else. You get that none of the huge effort can be ditched without impact. You fear you’ll be left with a sense of futility, of pointlessness and this you do take seriously. You see that giving up will pollute everything you ever do going forward, so you don’t give up. You make a profound commitment and finish the degree and don’t notice the change in you for years.

There are many such moments in an individual life. The moments when you’ve tried hard to be serious and it hasn’t worked out. Relationships, jobs, shared excursions and holidays that turn sour, deaths; it’s an endless list. Your choice is to keep trying to take things seriously or not, to take a high-risk chance on random and directionless drift. Avoiding committment might require extricating yourself from a key relationship, family, job, friendships, but the wreckage could be truly terrible. And the wreckage is not temporary. Once again the paradox.

Creating wreckage that you understand but don’t want to take seriously is inevitable, unavoidable, but it’s on a sliding scale. Sometimes escape matters more and this lets you not take the wreckage seriously. Successful escape will leave you with another inevitability, being terrified that taking things seriously again will once more entrap you. And it will. That’s the point of seriousness, of commitment, of not being temporary. And that’s the point of not understanding why you can’t embrace it. The paradox keeps on driving us to the next and the next and the next encounter. It might be a person, a book or song, a horse, cat or a hamster. Or it might just be the face staring back at you from a bright and shining rain washed window. It’s daring you to get with the programme and stop trashing what you love.

Unspoken or speechless?

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

People with sore throats apparently have sore throats because they are not very good at expressing themselves. Difficulties we’re facing but can’t express, so we get a sore throat? Nah. People with sore throats may just have sore throats and be in need of gargling with a 1:5 solution of TCP. 

If you’ve trouble with self-expression, it’s much more effective to build a very high, very thick wall. Stay behind it as long as you need to and keep adding bricks when necessary. This is completely opposite to what the head doctors will tell you because it amounts to repression: oh no I’m repressed. And it’s doing me in. My mental health, oh dear. Except no, not expressing yourself isn’t doing you in at all, it’s providing you with a safe space behind walls that only you can occupy and this is not so bad.

Everyone has these walls to some extent or another because it’s how we protect ourselves, how we hide what’s important or the effects of trauma. It’s also where we can stay when times get tough, so that we can work out how to get through those gnarly times. We can wait and figure out what happened, how we feel about it and what we can do to deal with it, which is usually not much. Mostly the best thing is to be patient and be still, to lie in the dark and watch as the wiggles in your eyes weave unseen webs and rehearse their silent chorus. You know it all.

We can talk about stuff and share, or keep behind a wall. Either way anxieties and insecurities, fears, are absolutely who you are along with the rest of what makes you you. But owning such things can be hard sometimes, especially if they’re reflected in your conduct. Fear and insecurity drive behaviours and creativities: we can always do better. It takes a genius on the scales of Lennon and McCartney to have the confidence to say, actually that piece of work is not so bad. And then they could only make such judgements in later life, once the crazy Beatle years were over and they were further along on their respective journeys.

For people aspiring to write fiction, does it maybe ever happen in the same way? Do we ever look back and say, I hated that at the time but actually it isn’t so bad? Time maybe the magic ingredient no one can add at the point of creation. As with music, revisiting what you created ages ago can be instructive for what you are creating now: it shows you boundaries, different walls that you might want to extend or penetrate. For those walls, the limits to your creativity, the more creative work you do, the thinner and lower they might become. We can always do better. There are always more words. 

The next time. The next time bricks get added to your walls is unavoidable. Bricks, mortar and the next brutal trowel are always close at hand, just waiting. But not because of the work. The next time the walls start going up doesn’t come with mean comments about the piece or with people laughing or mocking what you’re trying to do. The next time the walls start going up is because of stuff that traumatises and confuses you, undermining who you are, what you are. And if you are a writer or a musician those safety walls can have nothing to do with the work. The work’s apart from you and your walls; it’s more important. Walls that go up because someone doesn’t like your story or articles are flimsy and easily downed. They are trivial, false and fragile figments you can ignore: there is always more to say, more words, more stories; you can always do better. So when a piece gets criticised, instead of letting a wall go up let come a moment of joy, of elation. Comments and criticism confirm that someone has bothered to read your words and consider them. They’ve made the effort and taken the time to respond to what you’ve written. Creative output and you are intrinsicly bound yet separate, so your walls keep out the work as well as the rest of the world. Be content to toss words over the parapets and watch them fly away across the sky. And be happy if somebody finds them.

© Laurel Lindström 2023

https://www.newyorker.com

Home
Home