Anxiety

This morning in the bath I interviewed myself, asking myself firmly, "What's going on?"

It helps that I live most of the time in a fantasy world with people I have imagined, which allows the different personas of my interior realm to talk to each other. That makes interviewing myself easier, but today I had to resort to direct questioning.

Earlier in the week our Ellen was sitting chatting with Buzzfloyd and me and the kids in their kitchen, wearing a lovely green kaftan. I immediately wanted to change all my clothes for kaftans. I ferreted out the place online where she got hers, and — oh, dear — the only ones left were in size XS, an act of God that saved me from great expense. Two days before that I'd been looking at dresses on Toast. I wanted three. Happily there is just enough in my bank account to buy groceries, so spending two months' income was not an option and I was saved from that. I did, however, buy a coat on eBay, just in case March turns out to be windy and very, very cold. My gilet served me perfectly well through January, but hey. The coat is very nice: also huge, heavy and bulky. Heavy clothes make me tired. I am fairly sure it is destined for the next Shelter collection (Shelter is our UK homeless charity, and every now and then they drop off bags for us to fill for them to earn income. I try always to have something to donate for them).

Then yesterday, I decided I hated all my trousers and herded them up to get rid of them. I looked at skirts on eBay so I could get some more exactly like the ones I've already got.

Later in the day, I decided I hated my hair and ought to have it cut off. "Whoa, whoa, whoa! Thou hast been growing that since last spring," said the Lord. "Think about it, chum! Press 'Pause'. Are you sure?"

I backed off the hair cut and decided I was too fat. This is why everything is horrible. I have a fat face. My grandmother was fat and I look like her. My mother hated her and hated that she was fat. My mother hated my other grandmother getting fat at the change of life. I grew up in a family that hates and despises fat. I live in a culture that has an perpetual fat war. This is the problem, fat, fat, fat. I ought to throw my food away and buy salad. I interviewed myself about what I am eating. It seemed . . . well, not perfect, but . . . realistic. I eat greens. I mean, I had pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and on Sunday I had afternoon tea with friends, but I don't eat Snickers bars or big slices of coffee cake or waffles with ice cream — sadly.

It was at this point that I turned round and looked at myself fiercely and asked — "What's going on?"

And then I knew.

Let me give you a little background (with profuse hand-wringing anxious apologies for writing such a long post).

From my family of origin, discount my father. He was rarely there. I can remember only one conversation of any length with him from my entire life (because he was giving me a lift to Oxford and so was stuck in the car with me for an hour and a half). Fairly nice man, but basically somewhere else. Completely uninterested in my thoughts on any subject in the world. The separation-by-transcendence from God the Father has never greatly perturbed me because my earthly father wasn't that immanent either.

My mother and sister were there, and my mother and I talked about life, the universe and everything all the time. But my mother and my sister share a common evaluation of me. They regard me with kindly contempt, and reject my views on . . . everything. I won't expand on this one too much, it's a big subject for me, let's just leave it there. 

At school I had difficulty, because I couldn't learn anything. Back in the 1960s IQ tests were a big thing, and we did them a lot at school. My IQ went off the chart in the end so they could no longer measure it. I don't even know what that means (How could it go off the chart? Anyway, that's what they said), but I do know that if I take an IQ test these days I can hardly do it at all, so I think it was just practice not intelligence. The thing is, my mind retains ideas but not data. I scored a steady 10% in maths and less in geography. I failed history O-level (that's the exams we took around age 16). I got in a muddle with the sewing machines and didn't know what the art teacher meant about painting the different shades within the pile of white things and stole some eggs in the cookery lesson because I messed up the meringue and had to start again. I was thrown out of the dance class for messing up Strip The Willow. I was okay at English, but got only 50% in the mock O-level exams because the teacher didn't like my creative writing (she thought it was going to be a love story but it turned out to be about God) so she gave me marks for spelling and punctuation (perfect) but none for content whatever. School and I were unsuccessful travelling companions. When I did well in my French A-level (the exams we took at 17/18) the teacher wouldn't speak to me because she'd predicted I'd fail. Anyway, eventually they released me into the wild and life got better.

I've never been much good at jobs because I get bored and tired, but I'm quite resourceful, don't need much money and am fairly good at living. I'm not trainable, really, at anything. When I was a free-church hospice chaplain I asked if I needed training and they said no because I could already do it without. When my life was screwed up to the max in the early 2000s, the church told me to get counselling but my doctor said it couldn't be done — I wasn't counsellable, don't bother. I think she was right; she's a good doctor.

When I trained for ordination, it was terrifying. I seemed to live in a completely different galaxy from . . . everyone. For one thing, I believe in the unseen world. I believe in the resurrection and the virgin birth of Christ. I also believe in angels. And I believe in fairies. I also talk to animals and birds and trees and they talk back to me. I walk on the rim between life and death where it is very luminous. I am only just here, and I am waiting to go home, and I dearly hope they still want me when I get back there. None of this had any place in ordination training. Each course we did made absolutely no sense to me, and I never knew what to put in the essays because they might as well have been talking Japanese. I have no idea how I got through. Kindness, I guess (theirs).

So, back to the present.

I am about a week off finishing the book I am writing and now I am crippled with anxiety. I have what my husband (a kind man; people are always kind to me — they have to be) calls "an original mind", which is all very well but does tend to mean my honest truth is other people's rubbish (viz. my mother and sister). Plus, I have no idea how to write. No one ever taught me, and couldn't have done if they tried. If people try to teach me anything I'm just mesmerised by the person teaching and can't pay attention to what they're telling me at all. So when it comes to writing I just dig around inside and put down what I find. A situation similar to when our Fiona was about four and voiced concern about how she would make a living once she grew up. We were at the time driving past the sweet shop (a favourite venue of hers) so I said, encouragingly, "Oh, you'll find something interesting to do, darling. Perhaps you'll run a sweet shop." There followed a split second's silence then her wail of anguish, "I CAN'T RUN A SWEET SHOP!" 
"No, no," I hastened to reassure her: "Not now. But when you're grown up you'll be able to do all sorts of things." I can't decide whether I was mistaken or simply lying, but I feel the same about writing books, which is the only thing I can do, as she did at four years old about running a sweet shop. I marvel at those people who know about plot structure and whatnot and can tell you about . . . er . . . whatever it is you're meant to know to write a book. So I have put in my manuscript what I think and believe, but . . . if it seems pointless, opaque and childish, I have nothing else to say. Fortunately, this is the month for royalty payments and I have just enough coming in that if my editor thinks what I have written is inadequate tosh, I can give him back the money they paid me on signature of contract and call it quits.

But when I interviewed myself this morning, my inner primitive finally confessed, that's the problem: not trousers, not kaftans, not skirts, not hair and not fat. It's the sense of profound inadequacy that makes the very idea of writing a book seem utterly laughable. Every.  Single.  Time.

Whatever your problems in life may be this morning, dearest reader, be glad of this: at least you are not me. Life is sooooo long.