What the hell is going on?

Today is one of those days where you wonder what the fuck you’re doing and have up until now, done with your life.

Imogen Heap comes to mind

Hide and Seek

Emotions that I currently feel: anxious, tired, irritated, apathetic, frustrated with life and myself, hungry, hangry, fed up, ill at ease, confused, spoilt. Is spoilt an emotion? Possibly just a judgement then. One we normally use under muttered breath when we pass ugly children in the supermarket who are making their parent’s lives a living nightmare.

I’ve had some water. It turns out I was dehydrated too. First world problems.

It’s not often that I let this other side of myself out. Out of the darkness I normally keep it in, out of the friendly, thoughtful, honest and philosophical world I aim to live in. I am kind to strangers, friendly to coworkers, shop assistants, bus drivers and housemates. It normally doesn’t feel like an effort for me to be gracious, warm and welcoming; to strike up conversations, even in haphazard broken Spanish or English, is something I welcome. I have a cheery disposition in all my classes. I like to have the laugh, to enquire about their day, their mood, their weekend and their interests.

I like to use this blog to write about topics that matter to me. At first, it was simply food and all the beautiful forms, recipes, markets, farms, shared tables and quiet coffee shops it can come from. Then I started to write about anxiety and depression in its many forms, guises and lessons. This blog has helped me to write anxiety out of my system at times, to understand why I felt a dis-ease with life and surprisingly, my words, thoughts and insight have helped others struggling to find answers to their mood and their outlook too. This assistance that my writing has provided others would often both excite and scare me.

I had always wanted to be a writer. Look back at most of the gifts I have been given since childhood and the majority, aside from surf or travel orientated presents, were either journals, books, book vouchers or more journals. My friend Carrie and I shared out 18^th birthday and she gifted me a sickly Barbie pink hardback journal with a light pink love heart on the cover. As I outstretched both hands to receive it with a loving smile for her thoughtfulness, I didn’t feel understood. That is until I opened it and read the inscription. She told me that I always had the best stories, the most wonderful way of seeing the world and life, of observing people and that I should write it down. All of it. Like most actions in my life, each journal is partially filled. What began as an earnest exploration into a at least part time career in writing flickered and fizzed out of existence. That is until the next fire started in my belly.

I forced my fingertips to type the most recent entry for the sheer sake of staving off boredom and forcing myself to get out of my head and onto a page, to skip around on it and eventually jump into that land of words and phrases and oddly placed punctuation.

Today, an angry fire built up in my belly. I’ve spent the last hour shopping for necessities while slowly feeling the concern in my gut rumble and sway and the only action I could imagine myself doing the second I got home (and after gulping down about a litre of water) was to sit down and write and let all that fire flow down my arms and onto the key pad because I couldn’t bear to have it trapped inside me anymore.

I’m reading Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Again. Having spent the morning pondering life’s existence and wondering what my life was worth if my weekend felt worthless, I forced myself off my mobile phone while on the bus to the beach and began to read. I have been fearing this reread for quite some time. I know what Clarissa has to say. Reading her words will remind me that I’ve lost my way again, that I need to take my life’s direction and life’s love seriously as well as the signs I receive each day that tell me when one area of my life is in line with that life love and others are not. Clarissa doesn’t fuck about. Her writing may be poetic but her words are beefy.

“So what compromises the Wild Woman? From the viewpoint of archetypal psychology as well as in ancient traditions, she is the female soul. Yet she is more; she is the source of the feminine….she is ideas, feelings, urges, and memory. She has been lost and half forgotten for a long, long time….Where is she present? She walks the deserts, woods, oceans…she lives in the tear and in the ocean…”

“What are some of the feeling-toned symptoms of a disrupted relationship with the wildish force in the psyche?...feeling extraordinarily dry, fatigued, frail, depressed, confused, unaroused, uncreative, stuck, fuming, crazed, unable to follow through, chronically doubtful, self-conscious, separated from one’s revivification, drawn far into domesticity, intellectualism, work, or inertia because that is the safest place for one who has lost her instincts. Afraid to stop, afraid to act and yet otherwise fully capable, fully functioning”

I read that at 1.30pm. I have been awake since 9am. When I woke, I had ideas of going for a swim. My bag for the pool was pretty much packed. It had been that way since yesterday when I didn’t go to the pool either. This is despite the fact that without trying terribly hard, I discovered that I am capable of swimming 2km in under forty minutes. Now I’m bored and lonely in the pool. It’s Saturday and I wished I had something better to do so I proceeded to spend the next hour and a half staring at the ceiling interspersed with doing a Leeloo Dallas on the internet, sucking in the world’s information through my eyes that glazed over at the plethora of useless information coming from my smartphone screen.

At 11am I got out of bed and realized that I needed to get out of the four walls of my bedroom and preferably the flat too. I had a shower and that simple action was pure water therapy and I felt like I could in fact leave the apartment if I could get my shit together enough to bathe. Breakfast was healthy and nutritious and I tried hard to calm my restless breathing as my mind raced over the many ways in which I have failed to make any real friends in this new city.

I walked to a hipster café around the corner, the equivalent of any hipster café of its size. Vintage mismatched furniture, swing and blues on the sound system, tattooed waitresses who didn’t realize I was there until thirty minutes later, an air of superiority. I wondered what I was doing there and what I was looking for by being there, sitting on a cushionless armchair scrolling down my phone and devouring a saucer of green olives instead of sitting back to read and soaking it in.

I kicked myself back up off my resting place and decided to take the bust to the beach. I read Clarissa and had a minor panic attack. Everything in her words reminded me of the feeling that’s been getting my down for the last week or so. Of course, I simply closed her back up and stuffed her tattered cover into my bag. I found the local flea market; everything was five euro. Music danced playfully around ears and between circular tables and roller wardrobes displayed everything from vintage granny dresses to tartan shirts. Old ballet pumps and tatty converse sneakers lined the floors beneath. Shipping containers in the old factory housed a food truck and toilets. I was in my element in one way. It all felt very familiar to the flea market in Dublin and then I wondered again what the fuck I was doing. I wasn’t a hipster. If I hear “pulled pork burritos”, I scowl and then flee the scene. I am here because there are seemingly friendly people, five euro t-shirts and it’s familiar and I miss the ease of familiarity.

I glance at one stall where roller derby skater girls sell their posters and have a photographer take shots of them with their tattoos and their re-homed puppies and their bowler hats and crew cuts. I am immediately intimidated and look down at my clothes in horror. I slouch and feel bitter bile at the back of my tongue. I feel worthless, a loser; a friendless loser roaming around hipster flea markets at the beach because I can’t handle the city and its shoppers on a Saturday. I compare my insides to people’s outsides. I fall deep into the monkey madness.

I tell myself I will join roller derby in September when I have all the gear, that I could definitely be good enough to play if I train and finally get fit enough and learn Spanish so I can converse with them and get the right hours at work in my new contract so that they don’t clash with training times like now and then I’ll be fit and cool and strong and get some tattoos like I’ve always wanted and live the life I’ve wanted to live for a long time. But I won’t breathe or appreciate what I have or take a moment to pause and reflect on how far I’ve come or that moving to a new city (again) is inextricably taxing and challenging or that all good things take time. I won’t be kind to my mind. I won’t take the time to write down my goals so I don’t have to keep running through them in my head like I’m preparing for an impossibly difficult math exam. I won’t trust that I’ve been doing my best and that this weekend is the first time in three months that I have a break and I’m scared shitless and want to run away from the whole thing.

No I will “draw far into work and inertia because that is the safest place for one who has lost her instincts”. My instinct on the bus ride home was that I miss my tribe, I want to surf every day and change into whatever clothes are relatively clean and not care about what I look. I want to wear a flowery hippy dress and run around barefoot and at the same time there is this competitive, edgy, kick ass, pissed off and bold woman inside of me that wants to wear those same cut off jean shorts and top for days on end as I skate and build muscle and get strong legs and a stable and trustworthy core from standing my ground on my skates and pushing the opposition clear out of the way and not apologizing for it. 

There is a strength and a rebelliousness inside of me and I don’t want to feel like I have to choose or explain why I want to skate and be covered in bruises one minute and another have tanned shoulders and wrinkly feet from soaking in the sea and the surf all day. Right now, I work and despite starting to run and swim again, I am bored and I wonder why I am so resistant to making friends. Is it because I know I’m leaving at the end of the year? Why am I being so callous and judgmental? Why do I assume that people won’t want to be friends with me once they know I’m leaving?

Where the fuck is my head at?

I look at friends and their lives and know for a fact that nothing is perfect. I know they have difficulties and joys of equal and unequal proportions. I also look at where they are and what they’re doing and I want to be a part of it. I want to live somewhere warm, where I grow veggies and visit the farmer’s market and go surfing. Where I call into friends’ houses for tea and have them over to mine for dinner. Where I learn a new craft and spend most of my time barefoot and most importantly, where so much of the world around me is green and fresh and vibrant. I don’t factor in the partner that I’ll have at the time because no one can plan for that. I imagine the type of man I’d like to share my life with. Practical with his hands, lover of the sea, kind and funny with a big smile and an even bigger heart. Someone who want to build kitchen tables of old wood for friends and family to gather at. Someone who doesn’t need convincing to watch Autumn sunsets or have BBQs or go on road trips or surf with.

For now, I realize from my writing and my ranting that it’s the familiarity, the warmth of community, the sea, the lack of city and the omnipresence of greenness and options to grow veggies are what I miss the most and cannot be found easily here in Spain. This time in Valencia is a year to settle my mind, to nurture my health and my confidence and to save. I’ve pushed myself hard these last three months to tick boxes and work hard, make good impressions and fill in forms and this is the first weekend that I’ve taken a breather. I’m not new to starting again, moving house or moving country. I don’t regret relocating to Spain for the financial security I so desperately needed in order to afford to look after myself, my mental and physical health, all of which I had struggled to do properly for years in Ireland.

The fire in my belly, the fun outlook in my mind, the desire to be spontaneous and sociable are all dumbed down lately as a result of all this pushing and moving and change. Rather than be pissed off at myself and hipsters and the intense loneliness I’ve felt steadily growing inside, I can take a step back and instead tell the monkey dancing around in my mind and my heart that it needs to piss off. I’d like a break from judging myself. I’ve moved mountains the last three months. Yes I miss my friends and the beach and my surfboard but I also miss my confidence and resilience and spontaneity. I can meet new people here as I have always done but it doesn’t have to be today. I can run in the park and go for a swim because it makes me feel strong, not because I’m trying to counteract the massive stomach bloat side effect of my anti-depressants. I can call great friends and catch up with them and I can give myself a break so I don’t feel like I’m flagging myself trying to muster up the energy, confidence and courage I think I need to say hello to a stranger at a meetup.

I am lucky to have gradually improving physical and mental health. I have a place to live and a job. For the first time in a long time, my most basic needs according to Maslow are being covered. Now for companionship, sociability, recreation and day dreaming. And breathing. Belly breathing. And acceptance that things might not be changing as quickly or efficiently as I’d like but I wasn’t built to change everything in one fucking day. 

Particularly not today.

If I learn anything this year about myself, (as there is always a lesson to be learnt, year in year out, week in, week out) it’s that I don’t need fixing. Instead, I can step back, breathe, take a moment or two and then carry on following my dreams and goals with purpose, integrity and most of all, leaving frustration behind, with love.