In celebration of procrastination.

“Procrastinators are often perfectionists, for whom it may be psychologically more acceptable to never tackle a job than to face the possibility of not doing it well” — Psychology Today

That’s not it, chief.

A lot of us – some with a helpful diagnosis, some without – run into a behaviour pattern which unkind bystanders, our mum, and sometimes our boss, refer to as “procrastination,” when we are faced with any kind of task that we have feelings about.

The feelings may be because of someone else’s expectations and our fear of not meeting them (“I want that on my desk by 3pm on Wednesday, in time for that big meeting”); or they may be because the task we need to accomplish has direct emotional implications for us (eg: making a doctor’s appointment about that funny shaped mole that you’re pretty sure has gone to the Dark Side). Either way a dragon is awake and shifting about in his pile of gold, isn’t he? You can see the glint of his opening eye. You know the fire is coming. It might be a dragon made of anxiety. Or it might be made of organisational/cognitive overwhelm. Or both, as those two tend to travel together.

And what do you do? Do you leap to it and nail those tasks! Slay that dragon!

Oh honey, no, fuck that. You hide.

You play 15 straight hours of Minecraft every day for a week, try out two new recipes for bread, and clip your dog’s toenails.

For instance, right now I’m prepping a complaint to an ombudsman about an experience I’ve had this spring/summer that has been honestly very traumatic for me. It requires me to collate and produce a lot of highly personal evidence, much of it medical. I have to actually go through surveillance footage of me, taken over the years without my knowledge or consent. I have to read people’s opinions of my disability, people who are paid specifically to prove that I am not disabled, shared without my knowledge or consent. This bullshit came this close to losing me my house. Which is the first place I’ve ever really felt safe, or at home. When I think about it, my guts churn with a hot mix of fury and anxiety. And my brain stops working. My hands stop working.

Reader, let me tell you: my house has rarely been so clean and tidy. I’ve bought a ton of new tops. I’m now writing a blog (hi! *wave*). Have I actually put pen to paper on the ISSUE yet? Is there any output on this complaint? Maybe made a start on the letter? Maybe some notes?

Nope.

And yet up there I said “I’m prepping a complaint” in the present tense, didn’t I?

Because I’ve figured out that the way my brain works, the whole house-tidying, blogging, top-buying, feckin about on twitter thing is actually PART OF THE TASK.

While I’m faffing about, in the back of my brain, this stuff is ticking along. Not even necessarily in a way that allows me to articulate the bones of my argument on paper. But the emotional side of it. That’s what’s ticking along. A couple of days ago I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that I feel traumatised and sick and furious about having to make this complaint. But now I have a kitchen that belongs in the Ideal Home Exhibition, and I can look that dragon right in his red eye and say “ok mate. I feel you. Blow the fire.”

I think I still have some dusting to do re the unwatched surveillance footage. But that’s ok. The upstairs bathroom could do with a clean. And I’ve given myself until Friday to get the bones of this taskdragon cracked and into the metaphorical pot for cooking. By Friday, I will have my draft letter, my outline table of contents, and I will have written letters asking for supportive statements to my GP, my two medical experts, the UK ME/CFS charities, the members of the government guideline committee that deals with ME/CFS healthcare recommendations, and to Sajid Javid (I know he’s a Tory but he’s got a real fire in his tank about this condition and he might want to help me with this).

Because what I want to do, ultimately, is change the way the insurance industry treats people with my condition. For ever. It’s kind of a big ask, but go big or go home, right?

I couldn’t possibly contemplate undertaking such a task without an enormous, lengthy, detailed, varied amount of procrastination. So far, I have procrastinated for 5 weeks. But now I’m ready. I can stand right in that dragon’s mouth.

The thing is (and we probably have this in common), I tend to get my difficult tasks done, and done to the deadline, if they are sufficiently important. There is always a lot of faffing about which looks – but it is not – completely unconnected. Usually there is some breathtaking brinkmanship as regards the deadline. Sometimes I drop a less important task. I can live with that. I’m guessing you’re the same.

So please, if you are like me and you tick this way, and yet you mostly get your stuff done, but you lug around a huge sack of guilt about your methods, how long it takes you, and all the weird and wonderful behaviour that happens BEFORE you start to deal with the task, change one thing about the way you view your procrastination:

Procrastination is not avoidant behaviour. It is a sidelong and safe engagement with something you find overwhelming and/or dangerous. It is a way of working.

That epic shoe buying session you did, which you’ll have to send back as you can’t actually afford any of it? That was part of the work. No guilt, honey. The reorganisation of your entire Star Wars collection? That was part of the work. Be proud. Those 15 art projects you started? Those are part of the work. Your clean greenhouse? Essential part of the work. You are bossing it!

Procrastination is the start of your engagement with the work. It may be how you keep yourself safe, if the roots of this behaviour are in trauma. It may be how you generate focus, if the roots of this behaviour are in ADHD or similar (and a lot of people, let’s face it, have a foot in more than one of those camps). You have reasons to need this process, and other people don’t. So let it be. You are human and what works for you is valid.

It’s the part that lets me get the actual task done. It’s the roots of the plant. It is the sine qua non, without which the task will never be completed. Give yourself permission to procrastinate wildly. Embrace it. When someone asks you why your cat is wearing a new hand crocheted onesie* tell them the truth: you got a letter with HMRC on the envelope, and making that onesie is essential to opening it.

And maybe get that report onto your boss’s desk before the deadline (which you would have done anyway) WITHOUT laying an unnecessary guilt trip on yourself about your brinkmanship, this time.

It’s part of the work.

*_{^{never try this}}

Sailing into unfamiliar water.

No walk today as I’m tired, and that isn’t surprising, so I’ll take the rest without grumbling.

Today is my dad’s birthday. Ordinarily I would travel up to north London where he and my sister and I would have a couple of drinks in his local pub, where sometimes his best friend would turn up, followed by a slap up meal in Hendon’s best little Italian restaurant, where we’d been going all my life and they know us well (particularly my sister, who has a facility with humans that I find akin to a magic power).

He would be taking the funeral very seriously, as he was very much a fan of the Queen. But – as my sister remarked to me the other night – he would also be delighted that his birthday had been declared a national holiday.

But dad died four years ago. His best friend – who had no idea dad was dead – died within 2 days of him. Our little restaurant shut up shop within weeks.

I have a republican soul. There is no cornicing on my metaphorical ceiling. No understanding of ceremony or pomp. I can empathise with the death of anyone, and I can certainly empathise with people mourning a public figure who had cultural significance, or a particular resonance for them. But I am very much an outsider observing the particular national phenomenon of this royal funeral. I’m not going to mock or judge. The whole sad business seems fortuitous timing for our current wretched government, two days after the most dangerously inept PM in British history is sworn in, and just as the country that I grew up in really begins to die, to rot, unattended, from the wounds inflicted by brexit and its confluence of big money’s toxic ideologies.

Perhaps the Queen was the spirit of the country. Perhaps it’s all just a coincidental set of terrible events.

But I think back to my dad’s death and the odd little cluster of reality that fell apart when he left this world. Perhaps – and in my philosophy, probably – the world is more joined up than we realise, and much of it in a way that we are incapable of scrutinising or anticipating.

In any event, Elizabeth Regina is laid to rest today, and it is literally a day of national mourning. It is hard to form a picture of what will become of this country in the next decade. My guess is that we are in for unimaginably interesting times.

The Queen is dead.

God save the poor.

Day 3.

Yesterday was a total wash-out. By 3pm I was back in bed – not unusual in itself, this is very much where I am to be found in the afternoons, and that is unlikely to change – but generally I’m not still wearing the same kaftan I threw on when I first got up that morning. I was lying there thinking: aargh! I have so much I want to DO. And I can’t even wash my own freakin hair.

And in that situation you have to tell yourself, come on, self. Tomorrow is another day. Today, rest. And that helpful little head voice pops up and says: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow! The reality of your health is that tomorrow isn’t another day, it’s mostly just the same knackered, frustrating, soul crushing waste of time that today was, repeated again, again, again.

You know, the main problem with that head voice is that the damn thing tells the truth. But it doesn’t tell the whole truth, does it. It tells a curated version. A movie trailer version, with all the comet explosions and the fleeing and the doom drone. None of the connective tissue of the story: none of the quiet, satisfying moments, none of the ok bits. Sure, I do have months of that same tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow rolling around from week to week to month. But I do have periods where it relents. And during those periods I achieve a lot, gently, slowly.

And it will be like that now.

Anyway I ended up sleeping like the dead all afternoon and much of the evening. When I went to bed “properly” last night I was convinced that I’d lie there staring at the wall for hours, but I was asleep in seconds. And today – actually I feel pretty good. I got up, washed my damn hair. Greeted and fed the cat. Emptied my bin, popped a blazer on, covered up my wet hair with a hat, and went for my constitutional “end of the road and back” walk, immediately. Was I wheezing when I got back? Yeah!

I was rocking the grandad chic today, with these trousers and the blazer and hat. Less so, with the leopard shoes.

I got back and ordered a McDonalds breakfast, (double sausage and egg mcmuffin; two hash browns, large latte and an orange juice). I deconstruct the mcmuffin when it arrives, placing the elements separately and lovingly on a plate I placed in the oven to heat when I called the order in. The hash browns and egg get salt and pepper. The sausage patties get nothing. The half muffins get red jam, with anything remotely resembling a piece of solid fruit relentlessly picked out and discarded. Fruit has no place in this ritual. The coffee gets half a teaspoon of demerara.

This is a treat I probably get every couple of months. One of the things I really used to love about business travel was having someone bring me my breakfast while I got ready for the day and I guess this is as close as I get to experiencing that. It felt especially nice today as I had already accomplished my Virtuous Deed of the Day before even thinking of coffee, and then a guy in leather brought me coffee, greeted me pleasantly, and immediately fucked off. And yeah, you know, that’s perfect. I’ll take that.

I am going to have a rest and a couple of coffees and then I’m going to open up the big Keter box that’s sitting in my side garden. It contains one of those enormous garden storage boxes (it’s a box in a box, life is weird), which I have to put together. I love putting things together. But the box-in-a-box weighs 68 kilos, so my ambitions for today are a) open the box, and b) on the basis that once the contents are individual, they are unlikely to be too heavy for me to move, put them in the pergola. That’ll do.

I’m having fun and games with the foxes in my garden at the moment. Papa fox and his 3 children are a lovely addition to my gardens (I have no idea where their mother is), but they dug up every one of my tomato plants, tunnelled directly down into that bed in a very exciting way (I think they were quite likely chasing a slow worm, as this excavation does not resemble an attempt at setting up home), and the youths invest a great deal of time and energy chewing absolutely everything that’s out there. And shitting. I love them, but also GUYS CAN YOU NOT. So I’m going to have to ensure that any components of that store that might be damaged by chewing before it is put together are placed in the locked pergola before I come in today. I don’t want my project harmed. And I really don’t want the foxes to ingest something that might harm them.

It doesn’t really matter how much or how little I manage to get done. The only jobs that need doing in one big rush are surgery, rocket launches, and laying concrete. Everything else can be done in little stages.

As my old accountant (god rest his soul) was wont to say: Anything’s something, and nothing’s nothing.

Zip.

No plans today, unless one can think of the lofty ambition of a shower as “plans”. Having ventured out for the last two consecutive days – albeit very modestly – I didn’t make it out of bed until after 11 this morning. Why yes, I am proud. The tinnitus is absolutely screaming along and my head – my thoughts, I mean – are a catherine wheel of half baked schemes for redoing this and getting a new that and oh! oh! this DIY project needs doing and shouldn’t I be digging in the garden? In three places? At least?

I know the signs, and that one says “You are very very tired.”

So today the name of the game is to rest, take it seriously, and slow down that wheeling mind. If I don’t take it seriously I will attempt to do all or some of those things and that’s how you end up in a proper relapse and flat on your back for months.

It is a beautiful day, here. Crystal clear, nicely cool, and I’ve got my loudest kaftan on. That’ll do.

The small successes are sometimes the sweetest.

I flung myself downstairs this morning at the crack of 10.30, filled with an unusual drive to accomplish something after a glorious 3 hours’ sleep (ME/CFS is a hard master when it comes to sleep: if you become too tired, you won’t be able to get any when you most need it). After greeting the cat and giving her breakfast, without so much as a look at the coffee pot, I ventured out to fulfil my wild ambition of reaching “the end of my road and back.”

Well, first, I grabbed my secateurs. But of course I did.

I should have grabbed my gloves, but I was young and ignorant, this morning.

“The end of my road” is an absurdly short distance. I do not live on an ordinary road. I live on a stupidly short road. But I also live on a very steep road, so I figure what I lose in length I make up for in height. The “to the end of my road” bit is all downhill and can be accomplished largely by accident if you lose your footing on a wet day. I am built to roll. It’s the “and back” bit that houses the climb, and therefore the devil. Still, at a leisurely pace – remember this is not intended to be a push but an amble – I got two thirds of the way back and spent a few minutes brutally decapitating the pampas grass that has taken up residence between road and pavement, and which has recently shot up what I thought were “maybe five or six” (it turned out to be about 20) large, silky-looking seed heads. Sadly the grass must be killed or it will damage the road surface. But I’m not going to waste the lovely heads, so they came home with me. I was almost home with the whole haul of two-and-a-half-metre tall heads tucked under one arm, when I noticed that my hands and bare arms were tickling in a strange way. I glanced down (SPIDERS!? AHOY?) to find that it was not spiders at all. I was bleeding quite copiously from both hands and forearms. Turns out those warnings about pampas grass being “sharp” are a wild understatement.

Well, at least now when I set out to kill the grass, I know it is a worthy adversary.

So I did it. Day one of my “end of the road” experiment. Was it too much? Maybe (thumping headache, fantastic tinnitus). But it was also very worth the sense of accomplishment and the faint dim glimmer of hope. And the huge bunches of nicked pampas grass.

First, there is a mountain.

So for the last [few] years I’ve been a lot less well than I usually am, even by the lamentable standards of, say, 5 years ago. In general my health, since I first got sick with ME/CFS, has been a long slow trundle downhill despite all my efforts to head that off or slow it down. And the pressures I’ve been under this last couple of years in particular have kicked my arse to a degree where I’m kind of scared now by how weak I am. I amended this house in case I ever needed a wheelchair, while not ever really imagining I would. 

It’s now not that hard to imagine it coming to that, in the next year or so. And that bothers me.

You can’t punch your way out of THIS paper bag.

The ceiling on what I can physically do is real, and is absolute. It doesn’t move upwards. But between where that ceiling is, and where I am right now, if I move very, very gently, there is an element of “use it or lose it” to be played with. So, from tomorrow, I’m going to start gently nudging that ceiling with a walk to the end of my road and back. My road is very short, but steep. I don’t know if I can do that walk every day, or once a week, or once a fortnight. But now the pressure is off me, and my health is therefore fractionally less chaotic, I intend to try it and find out. No “push through it.” No hut hut hut bullshit. No speed trials. No bad-talking myself when I can’t do it today or when doing it was a mistake that just kicked my arse. Just tedious sober effort with very modest goals in mind.

First: I want to be able to walk to the end of my road and back, and have some idea of what effect that has on me, and for that effect to be less bad than “I have to lie down for a fortnight.”

Next: I want to be able to walk to the sea without it killing me for weeks after.

And then: I want to be able to walk to Goat Ledge for a coffee, (even though for some reason that – uniquely so – always makes me feel spectacularly lonely). 

And then: I would like to be able to walk to George Street again, and walk back with an ice cream, fielding the gulls, swerving the pirates. 

And once I can do those things, perhaps I will be able to see friends for coffee. My god, I haven’t been well enough to do that for two years now.

I’m probably still under surveillance. But I’m fucked if I’m going to let that stop me. Let them follow my slow ass to the sea. Let them observe with their uncomprehending eyes how often and for how long I have to stop on the railings or use “taking a photograph” as an excuse to grab a moment’s rest or to reorient my lost brain. Go ahead and take your little videos, while I work to get some minuscule grain of my life back on track and within my grasp.

Enjoy the view. Because if you’re filming me outdoors and upright, you are watching a winner, winning.

The start of winter.

The final double handful of red chillies are harvested, along with all the seed heads from mustard “Golden Streaks”, dry as a rattle and placed head down into a small bin bag, to be shaken and slapped and rolled until the bottom of the bag is a collection of full stops. It’s my favourite mustard. It has an aftertaste exactly like new potatoes.

Down come the cannas, and I’ve been a bit clever. When I planted up this spring I put in miscanthus gracillimus in each big planter. They’ve been completely invisible among the cannas and the huge thuggy froth of the cosmos … and today when both those things were taken out, ta-daa! There are these huge graceful grasses in flower. And they’ll look grand all winter. I have some wallflowers and wotnot coming to fill in the spaces between the big canna stumps – half of which are promised to friends and family early next year.

I’d love to show you photographs, but guess which eejit broke their phone? Oh well, I can take pictures next week.

I made a little more progress on the most dodgy bit of the Long Wide bed – which is to say, the most steeply sloped deathtrap bit. There’s only about 1 sq metre left to do. Then it all needs intensive weeding, which is going to be a worthwhile but crappy endeavour on that slope. I have bindweed. Or it has me. You think you’ll be able to weed it out, but you can’t – those roots can disappear down to 15 feet, although they rarely do. And the tiniest bit of white root left in situ regenerates like something out of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The trick is to weed out every strand of white root you can possibly find in about the top ten inches of soil, and forget the rest.

I’m good at getting on top of it, but it’s a repetitive, annoying job you know will take you a good couple of years when you start. You just get out there every few days and where it’s come up, you pull it. And never stop doing that until it’s all dead. Fortunately it sort of gives up through the dry bit of the summer, so it’s really only spring, early summer and autumn when you’ve got to get your pull awn.

Still: the final square metre of the Long Wide bed! This is HUGE progress, and all whittled out in ten minute or half hour chunks because I’m stuck with this wonky body that’s managed – in the absence of regular walks and visits to my mum – to become more wonky during this year’s (2020) Covid Lockdown.

The first part of the Long Wide bed is now overpopulated with achillea, verbena, baby foxgloves etc, and is ready to be split up and planted on so I don’t have to worry about what I’m going to put in this new section of bed – which is just as well, as I’ve absolutely no money! Next spring I’m going to plant more stuff that blooms in the late summer and autumn, and experiment with the “Chelsea Chop”. This year the bed was absolutely terrific until about the end of July and then looked very grumpy from about mid August on. I’ll be embedding soaker hose in both stretches of flower bed as well. I plant for drought – and it does incredibly well, but that fortnight of stupidly hot weather we had in August even left the achillea looking fed up, and I cannot stand in that heat, watering for hours as it affects me in much the same way it does the plants. Plus it’s a very inefficient way of watering plants, whereas an embedded hose is effective.

What remains to be done? A lot.

The top of my rockery needs to be thoroughly weeded and planted – I might go with fennel, verbena bon and some more of that miscanthus. The actual rockery bit, which descends in an unruly manner from the ground level of my top garden, to just outside my kitchen window, is a work in progress, but this week I broke off a lot of the delosperma I’ve been growing on in various pots and poked a tuft in here, a tuft in there. The stuff is famously invasive and I’m really banking on it covering that very underwhelming rockery in the lairiest possible colours next year. I’ve bought three species – and stole one – and I have great hopes that, in time, and perhaps one day with the addition of an exciting agave or two, I can make that unprepossessing rockery into a tiny copy of the planting at the Minack Theatre, which I’ve seen pictures of and love very much.

Elsewhere, the front bed (nothing but bindweed, 3 gigantic weigelas and 3 roses when I came) is coming on. I’ve put irises in – the biggest I could find. I have bulbs coming for it, tulips and daffodils, and have whacked back one of the enormous weigelas very hard, and am now watching nervously to see if it will sprout again (it seems to be). The grass, destroyed entirely by my builders last year, has just been reseeded and has sprouted, and the whole bald area has this almost hallucinatory green fuzz on it, which you can see and sort of not-quite-see at the same time. I have about 2 metres of that bed to plant up for the summer and I’ll have a think about it. It gets scorching hot, and takes a kicking from the wind. Much to ponder.

I’ll have some new beds to create on the new pebbled area next to the purrgola (that isn’t a typo, it’s a pergola I have created for my cats); and then, lower down, a new bed below the new sleeper wall, and then, at the lowest level, the new veg beds. Lots and lots to do. And no rush.

It can take me years.

Furniture

I am in a bungalow in Hastings. Wrapped in a garden. A place that’s secret from everyone, literally invisible to everyone. You have to be standing in front of it before you can see it. I’m on a road that doesn’t exist. Behind impossible walls. And I should, shouldn’t I, be having the quietest, stillest life. Shouldn’t I.

But I’m not. I can feel the furniture moving. Do you have poltergeists?

I saw this place on my phone, on the day I had, I think, eight people come to buy my old house. Clicked through the images, and knew, immediately.  I didn’t know it was on a nonexistent road, then. Or about the garden. Or its invisibility.  Or the still steel band of the sea, visible from all but one of the rooms. Or the dim, intimate rhythm of creeping trains, sometimes, in the thinnest hours of the morning.  But I’ve always been able to feel a bow wave, and I felt it then. So I bought the house. Right away.

I moved in, fresh from the graveyard, still not getting through a day without that storm rising in me.  I knew I was hanging on. But I also knew – know – my grip is solid, the solidest thing I have ever had in my life. So I had no fear at all in that regard.  I settled in, immediately. But with a head full of plans, there was a precarious element to that settling.

I watch the gulls sometimes, when the wind comes in, hard off the sea and they try to settle on the roofs, and their feathers won’t let them. If they move even slightly their biology lifts them. Their bodies want to fly, with or without them. I settled in like that.

Listen.

Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I could really hear trains. When I first moved here, I dreamed about them every night. That slow perfect pentameter.  So faint, it might just be the furniture moving.  As weeks and then months passed, my prayer bead fears began to die, leaving moments, then hours, untethered. I unravelled into sleep and let them be. Walked down to the sea and stood staring at it, from the pier. From the railings, beside Darling John, Who Loved it Here So Much, 1952-2017; by Agnes, by Sarah, by Bill and George and Amanda and Aunty Jane, RIP… I trod the metal footsteps set into the boards. I watched the wash and slap against red girders, and the wind scared me, some days, out there, 0.2 miles out to sea on google maps.  With the gulls, who hadn’t been able to stop it. Who couldn’t resist. Whose feathers made them, made them fly.

Things happened. The big fears started to die, like a comet had hit their planet. Whatever was going on, it was an extinction level event for fear. I let a dentist. I let a doctor. I let, and then withdrew to see what I felt. I felt a lot of things.  When there were two fears left, huddled together in the ash, the phone rang. And someone I had never spoken to before – didn’t know existed – had never made any attempt to summon or conjure – told me one of my two remaining fears was now irrelevant. Pop!

One left. And it’s you.

Let me just stare at you, for a moment. Upstairs, the furniture is moving. Turns out it makes very different sounds from the trains. Heavier. Not rhythmic. Every now and then a piece of furniture gets to where it’s supposed to be, and there’s a thump, a settling, a homecoming.  I haven’t been in that room, but I imagine it is like one of those children’s puzzles, where you have to slide tiles around in a tight little frame, to make the image of a ladybird or something.  To move the one you want, you have to move three others, first. Like that. It doesn’t matter. I trust the process, stop looking at you when it overwhelms me: look at the horizon, read the poem, feel the strong storm wind of that last remaining fear.  I don’t know you yet, either.

Sometimes I think about you, and my feathers won’t let me settle.

Works

I’m in the lap of the gods. And we all know how the gods love it, when they have someone’s life wriggling helplessly in their lap.

Today the final estimator waved me goodbye halfway through PMQs. I don’t want to give the impression that I spent much of the meeting thinking “fucksake, PMQs is on, can we wrap this up,” but frankly I’m tired and I get crabby when I’m tired, so although I smiled and was super nice, that’s exactly how I spent the meeting. And then it was done and we’d bonded (I’m really good with strangers, especially in a professional setting.) And as he left I pointed at him and said “remember: cheap. Or I’ll have the swans after you” (we’d been together for well over an hour – plenty of time to set up a running joke about swans), and off he went. I had two today, one yesterday, and one last week.  Estimators, I mean. Not swans. It’s been a bit er … a bit much.

Exciting. But also frightening.

I’ve gone from “I’m doing this without a loan” to “I’m going to have to have a loan” to “I’m going to have to have a loan AND I still won’t be able to afford all the stuff we’ve planned.”  But now, here I am. In the lap of the gods. Strangely calm.

I’ve been here eight months, now. In the house I refer to as “the Little House”. I love it so much, the idea of having to move out for a few months feels like when you leave a person you love. But it will be worth it.  I started this process about six weeks after I moved in. It took me a few weeks to find an architect, and then planning took ages, and now I find out on Friday what my impossible wishlist of stuff is likely to cost.

It was about an hour after he left that I realised how tired I was. I put on some PJs (pink fleece, unicorn) and sat there aimlessly for an hour, too tired to even make the decision to go to bed. And then I went to bed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Choices.

He says: all these things are choices.

And I’m like: ok yeah, I know.

And he’s like: No, I mean … you make the choice to do this thing differently in order to provoke or begin change.  And you understand that that’s a choice. Because this new thing you’re doing is different. It stands out.

Yeah, obv.

But what you aren’t getting is that the decision to do things the same way you always did is also a choice. All these things are choices. All these things.  Are choices. What you aren’t identifying right now is the behaviours that don’t look like choices to you because they’re the default.  Factory settings.  You aren’t even counting them as choices because you’ve assumed them as the baseline: you don’t question them. You haven’t even identified them. You haven’t even thought about identifying them because they’re so profoundly assumed in your head, that they don’t exist.  And he says: and they aren’t the baseline. They’re choices.

It’s one of those moments where you go wait, wait. Wait. Oh my god. And you can feel the rocks in your head get up and move about. Suddenly there are doors in what was a wall.  Suddenly someone’s given you a level cheat, and months and years of throwing the game controller across the room and saying you’ll never play again is over.  A lot of things are over.

A lot of things may now start.

***

I have lived here for 15 years.  All that time I have had a 2 metre square bathroom. It contains two mirrors. And somehow today, for the first time, I managed to accidentally stand in a whole new spot in that tiny room, in such a way that the mirrors lined up and I SAW MY OWN BOTTOM. For probably the first time since, say, my 20s. And it was massive and ridiculously cute. And that was ridiculously pleasing.

See, I’m a nonbinary person trapped in the lushly mountainous body of a fertility goddess. I’ve had 48 years of gender dysphoria (let me clarify, as a lot of you who read me are cis and straight: I’m nonbinary, and in my case that doesn’t mean I’m half man. It means I’m neither. Other nonbinary people’s experiences may differ, but this is mine. I don’t long for a body that in any way resembles a man’s body, but having one that flamboyantly screams “HELLO, I’M REALLY EXTRA EXTRA WOMANNY, CHECK OUT THIS WILD TOPOGRAPHY” is not good. It is not good).  The experience of liking – or in any way feeling represented – by what I see is novel to me.

But there it was. I have a cute arse. Ok.

***

My unmade bookshelves occupy about half my hall. They will come with me to the new place, and I will put them together and my books will, for the first time in a long while, have a home, right there in my face. My desk will be beside them, fronting directly onto a window from where a perfect blue triangle of sea is visible above and between a sugared almond spine of houses.  It changes everything.

Everything.

The new house won’t have broadband – normally, when you move, it takes a couple of weeks to kick in.  I’m going to kind of accidentally-on-purpose let that couple of weeks ride, and see where it gets me.  I will read. Because reading puts the words in me and when the words get in me, they come out again, but changed, like this.  I have accidentally started reading, like that little dog in the gif starts paddling long before he hits the water.  You had probably guessed.

I make choices.  The choices make me.