The Cerebral Mum

The last 48 hours have been relatively busy and I was going to talk about all the things I’d done, all the things I’ve yet to do and all the benefits of the new site for me and for my readers but I’m too tired to make administrivia sound interesting right now. Even though it is interesting (to me at least). So I’m leaving that for another day and what I’m thinking about is this:

How on earth do we know when things are real?

I’ve spent the last couple of days moving this blog, which required a certain amount of commitment and energy which I purport not to have, and chatting and joking on Skype with people I don’t even know while we worked together to get things set up. I felt normal. I think I even seemed normal. I almost felt likeable. I almost felt human.

And then I got a message from a long-lost friend, the closest friend of my teenage years, and I sent a happy, chatty message back. That felt kind of normal, then very fake.

I was genuinely excited to hear from her and I would genuinely like to see her again but I was also scared of the mess in my head and hyper-aware that if we were to find a time to catch up, I would be stricken with anxiety and feel overwhelmed by the process. I have to ask myself, is a computer a place to hide or is it a safety net while I find my feet again? And I don’t know the answer. I really don’t. Maybe it’s both.

A few people have left comments, and sent messages, appreciative of my candour. Am I candid? I think I am. I try to be. But my mask is still on when the conversations are closer to home, and away from my homepage. Part of me thinks this is good: It is nice to be reminded that there are actually human beings in the world that I can interact with, it’s nice to feel like myself, but then I’m challenged as to why I don’t feel that way when it becomes face-to-face. Worse, I’m challenged as to whether this depression is just a figment of my imagination, something I’ve made up. Maybe there is actually nothing wrong with me. Maybe I am one big faker. Maybe I am not being candid at all.

In the cerebral part of my brain, I can untangle it all, see that none of this is black and white. I can reject the false dichotomy: That’s logical fallacy 101. In spite of that, I just cannot seem to find solid ground to stand on.

Why do I feel that ominous sense of guilt for momentary pleasure? Why do I feel that ominous sense of guilt for being depressed? Why does everything I do or feel make everything else seem like a lie?

The truth is - I know this is the truth! - that we all have many faces. We all play many roles. How honestly we play them is dependent on us, but we play them nonetheless. Why do I not feel at home in any of them? Being sad feels wrong, being happy feels wrong, being alone, being with people, being quiet, being intense… It all feels wrong. I want to feel comfortable in all my faces again. I want them to feel real.

I need to shake everything up. I need to rattle me in a dice box and just see where I fall. I need to somehow create something to work with again, something to hold on to.

In the past, often I would do something sudden: Move house, change jobs, shave off all my hair, anything just to see who I was. At the moment, I can’t even move the furniture. It’s not my furniture. I am living in borrowed space in borrowed time. Time borrowed from living that can never be paid back. But I can do nothing suddenly. I have created too much of a mess. I need to strip away everything, all my labels, all my things, all my burdens, and try on new faces.

I need people.

I think I require a stage. I think the only set-decoration should be me. I don’t think I can do it in this vacuum. I don’t know how to get out of this vacuum. Am I too scared to get out of this vacuum?

The other day, chatting with my Mum on Skype, I called her Mrs. Plod, an affectionate insult that she is not insulted by in the least. I would be highly insulted by it. Is it slow-and-steady that will win this race for me? I am not slow and steady. I am fools-rush-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread. With nowhere to go and no way to get there.

Tomorrow, I will rearrange my room.

Eve tagged me for a meme. It the usual deal - answer the questions, pass it on. So I’m going to do it all Jung-like, as Eve did, and just say the first things that pop into my head. I have no choice about it because I only have a few minutes before Cas gets sick of the Jolly Jumper.

7 Random Things About Me

(Hey, they’re not called MeMe’s for nothing…)

1. I need to get a new prescription for my glasses. I’d rather have laser surgery.
2. I wore lipstick yesterday. That shouldn’t have been an event. I shall now add wearing lipstick to my daily to-do list.
3. I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair.
4. I used to like clomping around in my male friends’ oversized work boots. I think I’d still like doing that, given the opportunity. I have conquered my habit of stealing their fat socks, though. I think. (Perhaps this is more Freudian, rather than Jungian. You figure it out.)
5. I have a tendency to walk into lamp posts. (Is that Sartrean?) One New Year’s Eve I even managed to break a rib at work simply by carrying a food platter into a wall. I proceeded to drink my way through the rest of my shift, which ended with a brawl and a fired manager and a promotion for me.
6. When I was little, I got caught in the seatbelt when I got out of the car and my father drove off and ran over my foot. I was very brave when I was taken to the hospital and while I had my foot x-rayed. I was very brave until the doctor told me that I didn’t need crutches. Then I cried my poor little heart out.
7. And speaking of Sartre; my great-grandmother’s uncle was Albert Schweitzer, whose cousin was Sartre’s mother. I’ve never figured out what that means, genealogically speaking. My nth cousin in the nth degree?

I’m supposed to tag 7 people of course, but that presupposes I have 7 friends, with blogs, who haven’t already been tagged. Joh? Rosemary? If anyone wants a little free link-love, let me know.

I’ll be back tonight. Today is a good day.

I have no idea who I am. I am in stasis. I interact with few people. I am not working. I do not see my friends. They are ghosts. They live in the world I used to belong to. The only human contact I have apart from my son is Big Sis whom I am both too close to and a world apart from.

Of course, I see other people. I pay the check-out clerk for my groceries. I say, Have a nice day. I speak to the Maternal & Child Health nurse as she weighs Caspar and checks his head circumference. I watch the audiologist as she moves the dials and records Caspar’s reactions on a photocopied form. I ask for a locker key at the front desk when I go to the gym. I say, Thank you.

But these people are nobody.

Because I am nobody.

I blame the suburbs, but it is I who is to blame. I am a snob.

I was always a snob. I liked large things. I liked words which could be capitalised. Truth, Beauty, Art. The people I loathed were those who went to the opera so they could say, “Last night I went to the opera”, those whose tastes were formed by magazine and newspaper reviews: What’s hot? What’s not?

I liked the way the world flooded my mind, rushing through it like a braided river, sometimes of water, sometimes of blood. Everything moved me. Everything was made of words.

When I read Henry Miller I would salivate. Even the bed lice and the pissoirs would make me salivate. Miller said:

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. _{Tropic of Capricorn}

And I was.

I am no longer. I do not want to be aware of the minutiae of life. I reject it. I am self-destructive. I can no longer even feel the Nausea.

I want to feel ill again at the sight of my hand. I want life to be large again. I want to be that girl again, who, when she walked down the street, felt so huge that shop windows would explode and cars would burst into flames. Years ago, in my novel, I wrote:

...I have been trapped here in this silent inertia by my desire to drive earth’s gears into reverse and nothing – nothing! – can be unmade in this world of time. It will not devolve for me.

Writing is prescient.

There is nothing I can do except write until I am true again.

It’s too long since I’ve written. It was never this hard. It was never this hard knot in my chest that feels like tears. I’ve have too much to say. I have forgotten how to say it.

It was never this hard when I made myself jugs of coffee and brandy and typed through the night with the city lights creeping through my apartment, knowing all the while there were people still awake, still out in the streets, still living. It was never this hard when I was sitting in a corner of the Supper Club at 3am with my notebooks and a Pedro Ximénez, surrounded by people, alone but never lonely.

I hate living in the suburbs. When did I decide to stop being? I didn’t. It just came creeping and that’s far, far worse. It’s easy to live with the consequences of decision. You have answers to all your whys; you can respect your choices even when they’re wrong. But this creeping passivity, this loss of passion, this degrading slide into conformity…

I hate living in the suburbs. I hate this lack of will in me. I hate this non-entity I’m trapped inside. I hate being surrounded by clean concrete and new bricks and people who speak in nothings. I hate my hollow voice.

I guess there are things that have happened in my life, there are people, I could blame for where I am and I see the temptation but I refuse attribute my life to others. I refuse to abdicate. So instead, I don’t like myself. I am ashamed.

And after stating so categorically that I am a writer I cannot find words. There are times when reading breaks me down, breaks through that barrier freezing my fingers at the keyboard, but today was not one of them. Today, reading Girl’s Gone Child’s past and present futures, reading that she’s on the road again with a Kerouac quote in her pocket, I saw the sad echo of myself and had to face my stasis. Even her predilection for guitarists and Henry Miller was a mirror, an accusing reflection of who I am, or who I was, or that person I’ve failed by no longer being.

But the future is tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and life doesn’t have to creep in this petty pace from day to day. Somewhere in me there is a breath. It is a hard knot in my chest that feels like tears and I will write it until I am no longer a walking shadow.

When I first set up this site my intention was to create a vehicle to keep my friends and family in the loop with all things Caspar. His Oma and Grandad and most of the extended family are overseas or interstate and I’m terrible at staying in touch. And perhaps his father would read it and feel a little closer to the human being we created. He can’t be here, and that seems much harder to me than being a single mother. In the last couple of days, however, I’ve realised why I actually chose to communicate this way. After all, I could have just bulk-emailed a monthly newsletter.

It’s because I’m a writer. I have been ever since I learned to write. And I’m not good at small talk so those “newsy”, intimate posts I first added to this blog read like contextless babble from some entity other than myself. I don’t like her. Good writing always has context. Context exists within it the same way our consciousness is grounded in our bodies.

And I’m a good writer.

I know this because when I write my thoughts expand exponentially and the world becomes both clearer and more mysterious to me. I know this because when I write I recognise my skin. I become aware.

I know this whether I have an audience or not. And by audience, I mean those people who can or could hear me, not anyone and everyone who adds to my click count. I will always a have an audience of one: I can hear my self. And I know where I am: I am home.

So it’s time to remove those first Noodle Posts (What is a Noodle Post?) and let this blog be what it knew it was even when I didn’t.

There’s still a lot to do. I need to fix up my tags and categories and make this space organically functional for whoever chooses to read it. There are a couple of pages I want to add, a couple of design changes I’d like to make. I still have a lot to learn about feeds and and trackbacks and bookmarking. But all that pales in comparison to my need to write.

So the first, and probably the most important, lesson I have learned about blogging is to just get it working, then write. If that’s not why you started, maybe you’ll find it’s the reason you keep going. Not just in blogging, but in life.

I’ll still be posting Noodles for my special people, but I will pay them the respect of writing them. My noodles will be served with saffron.