So long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu

By the time you read this, I’ll have deleted my Twitter account. It’s nothing against Twitter at all – in the immortal dating phrase, it’s not you, it’s me. I’m just feeling a bit too delicate to cope with what feels like a school playground sometimes. In the good times, that was its appeal. Now I feel a bit like the wallflower waiting for someone to start playing. There is little I hate more than the LOOK AT MEEEEEEEE types that lurk in the corners of Twitter and I dread the idea that I might turn into one.

I’ve made some wonderful contacts – and a few friends – through it, and I hope that if you choose to you’ll keep in touch. Leave me a comment here and, as long as I can get back to you somehow, I’ll stay in contact. Or find me on Facebook – I’m the one with loads of coats and scarves on…

Lessons Learned

…and not ‘key learnings’* or ‘key takeaways’ or any other vile pseudo-English phrase that insidiously weasels its way into our otherwise beautiful language.  Yes, the time has come – tomorrow I go back to work after some 11 weeks out of the office.  Am I ready?  I’m not sure I am, but I’m fairly sure if I don’t go tomorrow I’ll never go back at all, and as Blackadder might say, needs must when the devil vomits in your kettle.

So I thought I’d spend a few minutes reflecting on what I’ve learned in my time away.  I’m not calling it time off – it hasn’t felt much like a holiday (apart from another blissful 6 days in gorgeous Portugal).  In fact, I feel like I’ve only really been off for 3 weeks, as before that I was largely in such a state of catatonia that I could barely keep myself clean and string a short sentence together.  But new medication has worked its magic, and I’ve felt able to address what’s really been at the heart of this meltdown.

There are three strands, none of which I’ll bore you with in depth.  I have accrued large debts, largely through my own fault, and I have been pretending it hasn’t happened which never helps – but now I’ve talked to the CAB and I’m working out my options.  I have one unsettling factor in my otherwise extraordinarily happy relationship, which I’ve faced and taken action to resolve.  And I have my work, which despite being for the kindest and most considerate of employers, probably isn’t the right job for me.

I’ve tried – God knows I’ve tried.  I’ve analysed and I’ve pondered and I’ve navel-gazed and I’ve bent myself into every kind of shape to make it fit.  I’ve counted my blessings with having a fantastic team and manager.  I’ve made excuses about why I can’t do certain aspects to the best of my abilities.  I’ve talked to like-minded colleagues and tried to understand where the feeling comes from; a deep, abiding gnaw in the pit of my stomach that something is wrong.  And, like so many of us, I’ve assumed it was me – that there must be some fundamental flaw in me which was preventing me seeing what seemed so clear and natural to others.  I knew I was doing a decent-enough job.  I was told by managers and I had pay rises and bonuses to prove it.  But I could never shake that sense that I was about to be found out for the total fraud I was.

So I’ve thought some more, and I’ve talked it over with the most wonderful, sensible Occupational Health lady, and she gave me permission to say out loud what I’d known deep down.  It’s not the right job for me.

I don’t like to fail, and I carry my perception of other people’s opinions on my shoulders.  Someone once told me that you wouldn’t worry what other people thought of you if you knew how seldom they thought anything at all.  And yet, and yet…  I’m staring down the barrel of 40, and I feel a pressing, unaccountable urge to get some order in my life before it happens.  I know that’s the only way I’ll get any peace of mind.  I’ve been so exhausted for so long, and yet it took a fantastic new friend to point out to me that it wasn’t physical exhaustion at all.  How I got to this age and still believed that 10 hours sleep could put it all right…

Anyway, that brings me to my lesson learned.  It’s an obvious one – trite even.  And yet, despite it being something I’ve had to call on many times in my life, I’d lost sight of it.  I didn’t have the ‘headspace’ to remember it – I was too caught up in feeling dreadful.

To thine own self be true.  Because sometimes it really is them, not you.

(* Do you hear me, employers?! Even your own bloody applications don’t think this is a word.)

A new mantra

Through Twitter and reading online news, I’ve become aware of a character called Kenneth Tong.  I have no idea who he is, and I deliberately haven’t linked to him from here because I don’t want to risk giving him even an atom of the oxygen of publicity by raising his profile in search engines or the like.  From what I understand of this individual, he is using his ‘fame’, such as it is, and his Twitter account, to spread the word that ‘managed anorexia’ is a desirable state for women and that pernicious mantra, that ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’.

I was blessed with an upbringing that ended 20 years ago, with a mother and father who loved me unconditionally.  Before heroin chic, before the age of the supermodel, when what you got teased about at school was buying the wrong clothes, not what size you wore.  I was naturally slim, I suppose, but I don’t remember anyone even discussing it until a girl in my class won a modelling competition and brought her unpleasant judgemental fashion attitudes back to school with her.

Despite all common sense telling me I’m not big, I’ve struggled as much as any other woman I know with feeling I should lose weight.  I haven’t ever seriously followed a diet but it’s in the back of my mind, poking away at me.  I weigh myself more than is necessary.  I guess I don’t worry about it as such, but it’s there.  What size do I pick up in the shops?  Like so many other women, I’ve refused to buy things because they have the wrong number inside.  Last year I got to buy a smaller sized skirt and I remember the high with which I texted all my friends.  Of course, the ironic thing is I weigh about the same as I did when I was 18, and I was a larger size then.  I haven’t got smaller – the high street is pandering to my vanity by resizing their clothes, and I, intelligent woman that I like to think I am, have fallen for it.

I have two young nieces, aged nearly 12 and nearly 10.  I fear for their self-esteem.  As silly as it seems, I’ve always refused to get involved with buying them Barbie because I don’t want to make them think that Barbie is what women should look like.  Maybe I think about it too much.  Maybe they’ll be fine.  But I hate that they’re entering a teenage world where some ludicrous proportion of girls have ambitions no higher than becoming Jordan or a WAG.  I hate that they’ll have friends who think they can only be acceptable human beings if they get boob jobs or botox or dental veneers.  Other than telling them how beautiful they are, inside and out, I have no idea how to overcome it.

Someone I follow on Twitter published this today.  I cried.  What kind of world do we live in where this girl’s suffering is not only OK, but actively encouraged by even one criminally misguided individual?  If he was advocating that women binge-drank, or lopped off toes one at a time, people would be up in arms.  How does promoting abnormal weight loss do any less harm?

I’m torn between wanting to know more and knowing that with knowledge will come uncontrollable, impotent rage.  All we can do is keep our own girls safe, stay alert, live and breathe the idea that mental health is infinitely more important than what size you take to the cash desk.  I’m not a great example, but I have been moved to try harder.  So, a new mantra for life:

Nothing looks as good as healthy and happy feels.

Christmas, or the triumph of hope over experience

I’m not working at the moment, which of course frees me up to watch appalling daytime television.  Today Matthew Wright’s programme hosted a ‘debate’, if you can call it that, on the topic of your worst ever Christmas.  That, and a blog by the ever-excellent Belgian Waffling got me thinking…

It’s not news to anyone who knows me that I’m not a huge fan of Christmas.  I was, of course – as a child I did my fair share of waking at 02h30 desperate to go to see if Father Christmas had made it under the front door (no chimney in our 1970s detached, although that was no barrier to his magic).  My mother, in her infinite wisdom, would feel through the gifts to find one she believed to be a book, and left that on the end of the bed to keep me occupied until at least daybreak.  The hours, oh the HOURS, I spent listening for the slightest sign of movement from the rest of the family so we could go downstairs and open presents.  And that was the rule – nothing got opened until everyone was there.  I had two teenage brothers by the time I was 7 – can you even imagine the waiting?!

And then of course you get older, and your attitude changes.  Just about every year of my adult life has been marked, to a greater or lesser extent, with a seasonal depression that sets in around October and has me crippled by mid-November.  Eventually I get some help of one kind or another, and slowly I perk up again, and then I’m caught up in the writing of cards and the baking and the wrapping like everyone else.  And I start to think, OK, I can do this – this year it will be different.

You may wonder whatever brought me to this point.  Christmas is shiny and happy and wonderful, isn’t it?  Of course it can be.  I wouldn’t pretend that anything that has happened was BECAUSE of Christmas, but it becomes associated with it, and taints its memory accordingly.  Let’s see: 1997, adored god-daughter died two weeks before.  1998, husband walks out one week before.  1999, bronchitis and financial trouble.   2000, glandular fever.  2001, bronchitis.  2002, flu. Et cetera et cetera and so forth.  Every Christmas since has gone the same way, and yet every year we build it up to a level of expectation that it can’t possibly meet.  Everything has to be perfect.  But why?  Do we expect every 22 April to be perfect?  Who says?  Why can’t it just be as good as it can be?  Why can we (and I include myself in this) not reset those expectations and just enjoy it as it comes?  So many people not where they’d choose to be.  So many people lonely or forgotten.  So many people disappointed.  Does it really have to be like this?  I have no religion and so I apologise to those for whom Christmas already has huge significance, but I know I’m not alone here.

I have started a low-level Facebook campaign to change Christmas to be a celebration of the passing of the shortest day, and the promise of lighter days ahead.  Now that’s one Pagan idea I could cheerfully resurrect.

Twitter, and how I’m doing it wrong

Well, I don’t KNOW I’m doing it wrong, but I suspect I must be.  I’ll tell you why.

I joined Twitter nearly two years ago now – blimey, that long?  Anyway, from the start it became clear that there didn’t seem to be a lot of etiquette involved or, if there was, it had passed me by.  It seemed to me that you went looking for those whose Tweets you wanted to read on as regular a basis as they chose to share them, and you followed them, and that was that.  I soon found that the number of followers to whom I could do any kind of justice was pretty much set at about 100 – many more than that and I couldn’t keep up with what they were saying, let alone interact with them in any useful way.  And it’s the interaction that’s such a great part of Twitter.  I’ve indulged in all kinds of surreal riffs on topics as diverse as personalised kitchen clutter, naughty steps, Boutros Boutros Ghali doing my ironing and Strictly Come Dancing.  And that’s just in the last couple of weeks.  If I follow hundreds of people I don’t feel I’m able to read everything they say.  Maybe that’s just one way in which I’m doing it wrong – I don’t know.

And, on the other side, there are some people I’ve started to follow and then, for whatever reason, decided to no longer.  It’s not personal, it’s usually just that they tend to focus on stuff that doesn’t especially interest me.  I’m not passing judgement on what they have to say, just that we’re not on the same wavelength.  I mean, there are 6 billion people in the world, and we’ve all encountered people in real life with whom we haven’t quite clicked.  Why on earth would we assume Twitter would be different?  We accept personality clashes in our workplace and in our family and in every other environment.  So why does there exist an app (not endorsed by Twitter, I might add) to tell you who has unfollowed you?  Not only does it exist, but if you use it, it Tweets all those who have unfollowed you to tell them the user wants you to follow them again, thank you very much.

This happened to me earlier today and, perhaps because I’m a little thin skinned just now, I kind of took offence.  I don’t like the implication that I can’t make up my own mind or that I should be guilted into following someone just because they want to up their follower count.  Which leads me into a whole other rant, and the main purpose of the post.  Why does it MATTER how many people follow you?!

I’m hugely flattered that those who follow me, choose to do so.  I think it’s a responsibility not to blether on about the utter trivia of your life – I’m sure we all do it from time to time but you can’t waste other people’s intelligence by assuming they want to read it.  How arrogant that would be.  And I’m certainly not arrogant enough to be offended if people don’t want to follow me for any reason.  I know that, in real life, I can be an acquired taste.  I can be opinionated and a bit pedantic and, although I think I’m a good and loyal friend, few of the people on Twitter know that or much less care.  If you want to read what I witter on about, I’m thrilled to know it.  If you don’t, well, I’m sure you have very good reasons and I’m certainly not going to take offence.  Just as long as you don’t, either.

The kindness of strangers

I have been Tweeting lately about my struggle to cope with life.  Post-holiday blues haven’t gone away, and despite there being some understandable reasons for my stress, I’ve come to realise that I have to do something about it.  Admitting it exists is the first step, I believe.  When you feel low (it’s funny – I can’t bring myself to say ‘depression’) the easiest, most natural and most tempting thing to do is shut the doors and curtains and hide in the wardrobe.  I was brought up, with the best of intentions, to believe that no-one wants to hear about your troubles and the best way to go through life is with a smile on your face, regardless of how you feel.  I do see the reason for that, but it just adds to the feeling of ‘I’ve failed’ that you end up with at times like this.

It’s exactly this upbringing that has made me reluctant to refer to my current mood in anything other than fairly oblique terms.  I’d rather not Tweet at all than sound like I live my life sitting in a student dive listening to The Smiths or whatever modern beat combo has taken their melancholy place.  And I LOVE to Tweet.  Which leads us neatly to the reason for this blog post…

In the same way that alcoholics have to admit to themselves that the drink controls them rather than the other way around, I came to realise that I had to admit to how I felt in order to be able to do something about it, and to let others help me.  It’s hard to do for a number of reasons; I’m the one people turn to when they have difficulties and, in my head, that’s the way it ought to be.  You know all your friends tell you to call them at any time, and you KNOW they mean it, but then you’re right back to the ‘no-one wants to hear it’ brainwashing and you can’t quite pick up the phone.  Well, I’ve tried that method and it hasn’t worked out so well for me, so this time I’ve gone public.  I’ve told people at work.  I’ve told my closest friends.  And now I’ve told Twitter.

I follow about 100 people on Twitter.  About four times that number follow me (or did, until I started banging on about feeling rubbish).  Of those, I’m aware that I know (I think) five in real life.  Two I’m related to, two former colleagues, one long-standing friend from the US.  Of the others, I’ve met two in real life, just the once.  Those in the ‘real’ world (whatever that may be) sneer that Twitter and Facebook and their ilk are for losers who don’t have lives or friends or a grip on reality.  You know, I think they’d be much better off worrying about some of those who DON’T use social networking sites.  They’re the isolated ones.  They’re the ones who feel that no-one understands them.  I’ve seen kindness, and concern, and empathy and a real, a very real sense that I’m not alone.  I’m not the only person who’s ever felt like this – people I’d consider smart and erudite and witty and competent and blisteringly funny have got in touch to tell me as much.  All those things I don’t feel about myself at the moment.  All those people proving that this too will pass.

And I’m more grateful than I can ever express.  I don’t need to list those to whom I refer.  If you follow me, you’re one of them.

Calendar updates

An item on BBC Breakfast News got me thinking about how old-fashioned our names are for the months of the year.  Why must they stay as they are, reflecting old Roman or Greek dudes or planets or what have you.  No, let’s start a petition – it’s time for a change!  My ideas below:

• January = Cadburys Creme Eggs already?!
• February = Valentine’s Day is an American-invented rip off
• March = We’d all be more productive if the clocks didn’t go forward
• April = Easter Eggs are single-handedly responsible for childhood obesity
• May = Phew, what a scorcher!  We’re in for a barbecue summer, guaranteed
• June = Wimbledon is the wettest on record
• July = Heads Must Roll at the Met Office
• August = Exams are getting easier
• September = Chocolate santas already?!
• October = We’d all be more productive if the clocks didn’t go back
• November = There’s a lottery for secondary school places and it’s a national SCANDAL
• December = Spending down in the high street – DOOM – all the sales have to start early.

Or is that perhaps just what you’d think if you only ever watched Breakfast News?

Black dog

As I mentioned the other day, I’m currently struggling with post-holiday blues.  At least that’s all I hope it is.  I have had bouts of depression before, usually for traceable (and reversible) reasons, but that doesn’t make it much easier at the time it strikes.  I have coping strategies – I try to be kind to myself, I plan things to look forward to, I start taking a little dose of St John’s Wort.  Sometimes the coping strategies don’t work, but they usually move things just enough to get me back to a point where I can deal with things sensibly once more.  I hope that this current slump will be short-lived – like so many others I don’t cope well with the cold and dark and grey of a British winter and I fear that it may last longer than I’d wish.  The more I investigate, the more I believe I have lower serotonin levels than I should, and so I’m looking for ways to boost them.  Current favourite is vast consumption of Fruit Salad chews which, I’m informed by my favourite scientist *, is guaranteed to work.

I had a long drive with a colleague today, to visit a customer.  He’s a lovely boy, but he’s one of those ‘eh, what the hell’ kinds who has no idea what it means to be low or sad.  And it got me thinking of all those who have to deal with someone with depression and how THEY struggle to cope.  (I’m not for a second comparing how I feel with proper clinical depression, by the way – I’ve been there and I’m very aware of the difference, but the same principles apply).

If you’re one of those trying to help someone who is low, there is one vitally important thing you should know.  Please, whatever you do, don’t ask them WHY they feel the way they do.  They can’t tell you.  Don’t point out to them that they have all sorts of things to be grateful for, because that just makes them feel all the more guilty for their ‘self-indulgence’.  Don’t ask them what you can do, however helpless you feel, because they don’t know.  If they knew what it would take to make them feel better, they’d do it for themselves.  Just be.  Just hug.  Just love.  Just wait.  It too will pass.  And when it does, your love and patience will never be forgotten.

* My favourite scientist is not a dietician.  I don’t care.  She’s put in a good word for chips too.

The middle ground, and how we forget where it is

Waiting for my lunch to cook, I listened to ‘You and Yours’ on BBC Radio 4.  I don’t usually pay as much attention as I am today, but the debate is on the topic of public sector cuts and I have a vested interest.  I left a large public-sector organisation nearly three years ago, after 13 years in a variety of jobs spread over two departments.  Ex-but-perhaps-not-for-much-longer Himself still works there.  I’ve seen both sides, the good, the bad and the ugly.  And what annoys me to the point of incandescence is the fact that so few people seem able to be reasonable about what’s going on.

I really hate the attitude that you are either feverishly FOR every last element of the public sector or you are some kind of evil reactionary neo-Nazi who loathes everything Beveridge and all others ever stood for.  I’m neither.  I saw some shocking waste, inefficiency and incompetence in the public sector.  I’ve seen some in the private sector too.  But the difference is people seem to notice more in the private sector and, of course, the taxpayer isn’t usually paying for it (unless you work for some huge-awash-with-money bank, a topic about which I must keep quiet lest I need a lie-down with a cold flannel and a few paracetamol).

However, the thing that did used to make me apoplectic with rage (and ultimately led to my determination to leave the public sector) was that people who worked extraordinarily hard didn’t seem be recognised or rewarded, whilst those who did little were tolerated or, worse, even encouraged by means of pay rises or promotions.  There seemed to be little backbone amongst managers to deal with poor performance, preferring instead to shunt those people off to some little backwater where they could do little harm.  Except, of course, they did huge harm – they bred resentment amongst those who DID bother turning up on time, didn’t ring in sick with a stubbed toe, aerobics-class-induced muscle strain, day-long chest infection (all real examples from staff that reported to me).  They left those who worked hard with the feeling that, if they can get away with it, why should I bother?  There’s nothing more corrosive to team spirit, to a sense of purpose in a job, than the sense that there’s no point to what you do.  And the situation we have now is that those who are capable of leaving, DO leave, leaving fewer and fewer to be flogged half to death doing the work of those who can’t be bothered.

I don’t claim to speak for more than my tiny corner of my tiny department of the public sector.  I think you’d have to be extraordinarily mean-spirited to think that those emergency services, nurses, doctors and social workers on the front line deserve to bear the brunt of the cuts that will come.  But there is another side to it, and there is undoubtedly room for improvement on the administrative side, where I spent my time.  What really makes me cross is the automatic leaping to the conclusion that jobs have to go when there IS fat to be trimmed elsewhere.  Cutting jobs feels like the easy, lazy answer – and from what I’ve seen those at risk are being handled very insensitively.

Let’s not forget that the public sector also encompasses a huge bureaucracy in Whitehall.  If I’m honest, I’d rather the government put its own house in order first, and then see what needs to be done in the other areas of the sector.

What I don’t understand is why the debate has to be so polarised.  Public sector does not equal ‘bad’ any more than private sector equals ‘good’, or indeed vice versa.  If we are all in it together, can we all calm down a bit and look at this rationally, please?  Surely the way forward lies somewhere in the middle – or am I just sitting on the fence?

Plan B

Those who follow me on Twitter (and why wouldn’t you…) will know that I’ve just returned from a week’s holiday in Portugal.  You will know this because I have achieved levels of smugness of which Simon Cowell would be embarrassed, gloating about the blue sky and the cheap wine and the, oh, all-round loveliness.  Of course, smug comes before a fall, and I’m now mired in post-holiday blues so deep I’m struggling to see daylight.

My original thought was that I would take a holiday alone and be a Big Brave Girl.  I separated from ex-Himself back in March, when my insistence on knowing what our future held became deeply incompatible with his reluctance to make any concrete plans.  It was a tough decision – I had drifted in and out of extraordinarily unsuitable relationships since my divorce 9 years ago, and I was so convinced that he was The One that I struggled to get my head around the concept that I could be mistaken.  I tired of his perceived difficulty in making decisions, to change his life about which he always seemed so miserable.  The attentions of a charming but (I later discovered) deceitful man at work turned my head in a shallow, needy way of which I’m not proud.  So we parted, but always with the idea that we’d reassess if life changed.  We stayed in touch, we saw each other often, there were occasional (sometimes regretted) lapses in resolve.  However, if anyone asked, I was single and ‘available’.  Not many people did, if I’m honest…

When I announced I was going away, being in desperate need of my first proper holiday in four-and-a-half years, I was surprised that he seemed to want to come along too.  Surprised and then, when I’d come to embrace the idea, frustrated at his lack of commitment to when and for how long.  I nagged, I threatened, I doubted, and in the end he arranged flights to join me for the first three days away.  He desperately needed a break from an inordinate level of stress at work – stress that had recently played a small part in the suicide of a colleague.

So we went, and we fell in love.  Firstly with Portugal – and who could fail to love a view like this:

 (View across rooftops, Óbidos. Copyright, me)

and then, quite unexpectedly, with one another again.  My cautious, careful, stuck-in-a-rut ex turned into someone who has amazed and thrilled me with his enthusiasm for embracing another, utterly different life.  I have just received a phone call outlining his plans for a first step towards a change of career – a change of perspective, possibly even a change of country of residence.  And now it’s me sitting at my desk, feeling like my life is on hold, knowing I want to make a change and not knowing where to begin.

I’m so inordinately proud of him, and all the more so because I know how hard-fought his change of mindset has been.  As for me, well, my Plan B feels too remote, too far away to reach.  For the first time in a very long time, I wish I were him.