Monthly Archives: January 2010

“…I am laid low with crippling depression”

By admin on January 6, 2010

Marian Keyes is a best selling author of popular fiction. This month she posted a newletter on her website revealing she is suffering a “crippling depression…I still feel like I’m living in hell. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t write, I can’t read, I can’t talk to people. The worst thing is that I feel it will never end“.

Marian has revealed that, “...regular readers know that I’ve been prone to depression on and off over the years but this is in a totally different league. This is much much worse“.

I applaud her decision to be so open about her condition and its affect on her. The many many notes of support on her website are touching, with her readers supporting her recovery and affirming her choice to share. I too wish dear Marian well and warm.

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Try to be a little kinder – a resolution

By admin on January 5, 2010

I have a resolution for the New Year, and beyond, to be kinder. It’s a resolution, a wish, a practice, a dream, and will be even more central to my way of life. I’m planning to change the world, starting with me, in the smallest and most gentle way with kindness, creating little ripples of care, respect and acceptance.

It will be magical…

I resolve to try to be kinder to myself, I resolve to try to be kinder in my role as daughter, sister, aunt, neighbour, friend, confidante, leader, manager, consultant, colleague, consumer, constituent, blogger, facilitator, learner, trainer… in every role.

I expect be fully occupied by the task, and growing.

I am indebted to a wonderful Facebook friend in Copenhagen, who inspired me by posting a status that included the latter part of this quote by Aldous Huxley:

“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder”.

It is no more difficult than that, and I intend making kindness a sustained practice in keeping with the emergent global imperative for sustainability, and my own high dreams for a world I want to live in.

Happy New Year

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I can smile at the old days*

By admin on January 4, 2010

One day after work, I sat on a tram looking out of the window at the city parks that lined the route between the office and home. My newly acquired aloneness felt all the more accute, amid a crowd of homeward bound passengers, with no-one waiting at home to greet this city worker. Surrounded by strangers and inspired by the familiar scenery my thoughts harked back to happier times when Mottsu and I would share the detail of the one act dramas that unfold between tram stops. All alone with memories*, I recalled when we’d sit together on a tram, in collusion, observing the other passengers and enjoying the diorama of public transport.

A chorus of school children who’d filled the aisles with unwieldy backpacks loudly discussed their emerging interests in the other gender. The ubiquitous talker took up a soap box stance and berated the Prime Minister, our political system, and humanity in general. There was also the extra, the one that no-one else would sit near or make eye contact with. The soundtrack was underscored by one-sided mobile phone conversations that predictably opened with the line “I’m on the tram” and then went on to share more than the talker realised about themselves.

From my seat in the stalls I saw a woman teetering on stilt like heels almost unable to balance as she negotiated a transaction with a machine to secure a ticket, she tripped clumsily before heavily landing in a seat. I smiled inwardly.

Mottsu would have enjoyed these displays of humaness. I looked out of the window missing the intimacy of his company.

Involuntary tears welled and gently spilled, responding to the pull of gravity and leaving a tiny pools of longing on the empty vinyl seat next to me. I was conscious that by crying I became one of the players in the vignette of tram theatre, a part of the drama. I resisted wiping my cheek not wanting to draw attention to the overflow of emotion. The tears liberated themselves from somewhere within and continued to gently flow and I felt a little liberated too, free to cry or maybe just unable not to.

I also felt conspicuous, becoming a member of the cast on the tram carriage stage. The audience were watching from behind a façade of disinterest secretly spellbound, perhaps imagining what might be unfolding in front of them and all the possible reasons for the quiet sorrow of a fellow commuter. I sensed the scrutiny of their questioning looks and focused on my lines “keep it together, keep it together…”

*lines borrowed from Memories – Andrew Lloyd Webber

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Keep it together

By admin on January 3, 2010

Grieving is a lonely place, it’s impossible to share, you must live there alone.

There’s a tension between the internal, and self imposed, solitary confinement and the real or imagined external judges scrutinising every move while you’re trying to function, look after oneself, in public.

Facing up to the challenge I felt a pressure to “keep it together, keep it together…”. It became my mantra, told to me by my friend Lena who borrowed it from Hollywood.

In the 1999 film, Bowfinger, a desperate movie producer tries to make a cheap film without paying for a big name lead actor. The producer decides to shoot the film secretly around a famous actor filming him in public places. The actor has no idea what is happening as other characters play out a sci-fi script around him. The actor can’t discern what is happening and becomes convinced that he is being visited by aliens, or cracking up, he admonishes himself to “keep it together, keep it together…”.

I tried so hard to keep it together at all times. I had some extraordinary lapses (i.e. collapses) in the first few months,mostly while working in overseas cities. It didn’t count if unobserved by a local audience.

While, ostensibly, keeping it together I cried, in the office, in the street, in the supermarket, at the park, in the airport, on planes, into my coffee, soup, salad, sandwich, and pillow. I kept it together while unashamedly crying. Tears were part of my soggy version of keeping it together.

Maybe I would do it differently now, let myself fall apart more. I wonder what that might have looked like. I wonder if my version of keeping it together looked like falling apart. I couldn’t say…however it was, was how it was.

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Speak of the dead

By admin on January 2, 2010

“What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.” Haruki Murakami:Norwegian Wood

I am learning to live with the sadness. Some will think I am stuck in the past. It is true a little of me has been left behind. It’s a balancing act not to entirely exorcise the dead from the present, and not to canonise them either.

I want to include Mottsu in the day to day, not every day but just to mention him occasionally and listen to someone talk of him. I rarely hear Mottsu’s name spoken aloud unless it is me who speaks it. I do wish it was easier to make space for him and have him present at the table, particularly this festive time of year when his absence from family gatherings is deeply felt.

I also know it is in deference to me that no-one says the wrong thing. It is not that there are right or wrong things to say. The sorrow is there whatever is spoken. I’m trying to be more gracious and less defensive, making my company less dangerous, less difficult, not so upset-able.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. ” William Faulkner: Requiem for a Nun

Each grieves in their own way clumsily navigating something that can’t cured, and remains present. For me it is good to speak of the dead, and find the right place to allow him some space.

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