I came back from a run yesterday, my last day of absolute freedom, the last day of holiday without M who had gone to Prague for a few days - she booked it last minute to get away when she had a few consecutive days off work at the same time as her brother’s birthday - and as usual, tried to find something constructive to do with the short period of time I had before leaving for the airport.I clicked around the few open tags in Firefox. I had gone out for a run when my two blogs had failed to respond, or when I consequently set up a backup to run to my external drive or something. I have been running or the last few days and have found, as I should know, that I get more, not less, done when I go out to do some exercise.
Still no reply from my friend in Prague to the reply I had sent back to her e-mail. I tend to be very emotional and demanding of affection or advice or understanding or something in the few mails I send her, and she is very busy but it doesn’t half cheer me up when she writes. In my other mail account, though, there was one e-mail that seemed potentially interesting. This was from the bipolar critical thinking forum I signed up to and spent a lot of time reading when I was at uni. It has never seemed so interesting since when I resubscribed a couple of years back on my return from Prague. There are very few posts now. Presumeably people have so many choices now on the internet for such groups that some struggle for regular bulletins etc.
This one, though, seemed interesting. It was a link to a study on depression and writing as a coping strategy. I had not heard of this particular institution before but I had read a lot about such studies before and it seemed interesting to me. I clicked through and saw that it was a well-presented website. I even decided to answer a questionnaire on temperament and personality, to see what it is in my personality that makes me such a perfectionist and so prone to depressions not only from not being able to write, but also from, say, making a substandard soup, something I have had opportunity to notice in myself so many times over the last few months.
Some of these questionnaires are designed much better than others. From the good ones you can learn so much even from your own answers to these questions, which give you a perspective on things you may often not take with yourself. This was one such.
The conclusions?
Well, let’s see:
‘Anxious Worrying’
You scored 14 on this scale. High scores (18 and over) indicate a greater tendency to become stressed, worried and anxious. If unaddressed, excessive anxious worrying can increase the risk of developing non-melancholic depression
‘Perfectionism’
You scored 33 on this scale. High scores (31 and over) are associated with a tendency to be very responsible and reliable, have high standards for oneself and to be highly committed to task and duties. While perfectionism can be a constructive characteristic, when extremely high it can actually limit one’s functioning. High scorers on this dimension are somewhat less likely to get depressed than the general population. However, certain events can trigger a severe depression. These stressful events tend to involve loss of control in an important area, or the feeling that one’s pride has been hurt.
‘Personal Reserve’
You scored 26 on this scale. High scores (17 and over) are associated with a tendency to keep one’s inner feelings to oneself. People high on ‘personal reserve’ tend to be reluctant to let friends and acquaintances get to know them too well. Scoring high on ‘personal reserve’ can increase the risk of developing non-melancholic depression, particularly following events that challenge concerns about closeness.
‘Irritability’
You scored 24 on this scale. High scores (21 and over) are associated with a tendency to be quick-tempered and to ‘externalise’ stress by becoming ’snappy’ and irritated by little things. Scoring high on this dimension indicates an increased risk to brief episodes of non-melancholic depression.
‘Self-Focused’
You scored 7 on this scale. High scores (9 and over) are associated with a tendency to prioritise one’s own needs over the needs of others. People high on the ’self-focused’ dimension can be more likely to develop depression when their needs are not met. However, these depressive episodes tend to be relatively brief, often because the individual externalises their frustration.
‘Self-Criticism’
You scored 12 on this scale. High scores (10 and over) are associated with a tendency to be quite tough on oneself. An ongoing style of self-blame and self-criticism can increase the risk of developing non-melancholic depression. However, it is important to note that most people become more self-critical when they are depressed. Thus, if you are currently depressed, a high score on this scale does not necessarily indicate an ongoing style of self-criticism.
‘Interpersonal-Sensitivity’
You scored 16 on this scale. High scores (14 and over) are associated with a tendency to worry about rejection or abandonment. Feeling rejected in an important relationship is a common trigger for non-melancholic depression amongst people with high interpersonal sensitivity.
‘Co-operativeness’
You scored 24 on this scale. High scores (20 and over) on this scale are associated with a tendency to be generally helpful, compassionate, empathic and get along well with others.
‘Effectiveness’
You scored 17 on this scale. High scores (18 and over) on this scale indicate an ability to cope well with different situations and to be confident in problem-solving. People who are particularly low on the ‘effectiveness’ dimension may have an increased risk of developing non-melancholic depression if they encounter a stressful situation which is beyond their coping skills.
All of which is accurate enough, and like many such things, valuable as an insight if not taken in isolation. I have a few problems with such questionnaires, though, mainly centering around the fact that certain questions can always be answered in more than one way for anybody whose difficulties are either in part contextual, or complex and variable. For me, for example, of relevance to this questionnaire is the fact that I can be very patient and open to anyone expressing their problems at work, but less so in my home life, and similarly I can be irritable and or quick-tempered at home, but not at work. This had always confused me, and possibly even caused no small amount of guilt, because it makes it seem as if I could turn on the charm and could be more patient with those around me, but on reading a book written by a journalist about her relationship with an Aspergic man, I discovered that this is actually pretty common for those with Asperger’s. Being forced to answer every question, including those that seem ambiguous or which yield more than one divergent answer of equal veracity seems to me to decrease the precision of any outcome, but nonetheless most well-designed questionnaires, as I say, do provide answers which are well worth taking notice of.
I wasn’t able to write much more at that point yesterday. Ah, yes, I had indeed given up a little bit. I remember now. I hadn’t been able to concentrate. I had perhaps eaten a lunch with a high Glycaemic load - pork and broccoli accompanied with an audacious attempt at celeriac and beetroot mash with onion sauteed with garam massala and crushed cumin seed: I really didn’t have very much in - and I had to come down to read my Czech edition of Marjane Satrapi (Marjane Satrapiova)’s second book of her excellent Persepolis trilogy/series, reading it out aloud at parts and finishing it before going out for a run.
And so it was all the more important to me to get something written or achieved with the day. And so it was that I looked at the time. It was twenty to nine, and weighed up how long it would take to finish this first part of this study which I would like to be involved in. It was written as half an hour, and M was due to fly in to Scab City just over an hour away at twenty to eleven, meaning that I would have to leave at twenty. Given that I was still unshaven in my running gear having not showered all day, this would really be cutting it fine, especially given that the last time I picked her up from the airport I had also left it late, still in bed with the woman at work with whom I had been having that brief affair while M was away half an hour before I was due to leave, rushing around then to cover all traces before darting out, buying fags to keep me going, and realising that I had left with no debit card and had just spent all my change on fags when I would need it for the car park: that time I had pushed poor old Betsy II hard all the way up the motorway and had turned up to find M walking out of arrivals to find me - she had got her bags more or less straight away.
It did take about half an hour, and though I got rather annoyed at times by the temperamental radio buttons on the study’s otherwise slick interface, and rather bored by the questions which repeated from the earlier questionnaire, I ploughed on and finished it perhaps just over a half hour after I had started. I rushed around, showered, got my Ipod and ran out the door, pushing Betsy II again (she’s really not keen on going up hill anymore) and listening to the Excellent American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. (I really must reinstate this habit of listening to such excellent, informative audiobooks while cooking and doing other things, the kind, like Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore that I can listen to sections of again and again if I miss parts; this really helps me to relax into the tasks I otherwise resent, such as even shopping at Asda today.)
Anyway, I cooked for most of the day today. A curry, for my mother’s party for her sixtieth birthday which is actually on Saturday but which I thought was tomorrow, and then Baba Ghanus with flatbreads, again, and the beginnings of Onion Bhajis. I got up this morning feeling achy from the running I’ve been doing, and perhaps, too, from taking garlic for the last couple of days, something I must blog about on Yeswehavnobananas.net, because it was becoming a real beneficial part of my anti-Candida regimen. I couldn’t do anything else, and besides, had determined that I should find something else for myself such as learning Czech was for me while I was away, that is, something which progresses even when writing isn’t going well. (John Irving’s Garp, used cooking and running in a similar way)
But back to the study. Yes, I cooked and then M came back and I carried on cooking for a while while she tidied up the mess I had made the few days she had been away. I was being uncommunicative and said I would like to carry on writing in the evening. She said she had had other ideas. After dinnerI sat down and played a little Playstation. It’s something I haven’t done for weeks. I got the thing for Xmas after deciding while planning and writing Family Fortunes that this was an area of life I now knew nothing about, but that it was such a feature not only in my protagonist Chris Wakeman’s life, but also for perhaps a majority, certainly at least a substantial minority of men of my age, and besides, I had thought the thing might even help me when I was bouncing off the walls. I haven’t used it much, and for the past month or so an alarm has been going off on my phone every day telling me to ring Sony about the intermittent problem I’ve been having with my memory cards, that the thing will only save on certain games. Anyway, M comes in after doing the washing up (I had been tired and full nd had told her I would happily do it, but not straight after eating), and she’s paying me lots of attention. I jump up, saying I need a dump, which was true, and when I come back down she’s got the lights off and she’s sat there in her knickers and a skimpy top with the Swiss ball out and the fire on playing Tomb Raider. Since everything that happened over Christmas, she’s been making a real effort to spice things up, and it’s been working. Still, with my mind the way it is, full of brainstorms all the while, as it was too in that period over Christmas, I found I had to focus my mind on a reverie, Portnoy like, to keep myself on the job: this was part of the reason the whole thing at Christmas happened, to see if it was possible to be so turned on by a woman that I wouldn’t need such fantasy and wouldn’t need to feel that I’m not able to let go to the present.
(The fantasy, this time, for what it’s worth, the successful one at least, involved a very leggy runner stretching off after an injury. She was wearing very short shorts with an inverted V split a little way up the sides and was herself stretching off like the inverted V (legs taut with feet flat on the ground, bum in the air with back and arms then stretching down to the ground) that I saw in the running magazine I found the other day and glanced over today to find out the old stretches I found so good. The reverie ran over and over like improv takes in a film. I walked up to her. I ran up to her. I drove up to her, offering her a lift because, limping back to wherever she was going, she would be in danger of getting a cold in her running kit. I drove her home the one time, telling her not to take it the wrong way, but that she had a fantastic set of pins. I gave her water another time as she ran by my house, telling her to drop by for water any time she wanted. And finally, the cold getting to her because she had had to stop in her t-shirt and shorts on a cold day, her nipples were showing as I pulled up to her. The inevitable happened.)
Is it perfume from a dress…
And so, back to the study. Fact is that after having ourselves the nice evening M had wanted after getting back from Prague and working this morning, I was getting to feel that I hadn’t done anything with my day, and so, I watched a little bit of an excellent food programme on Spanish Cuisine, went into the kitchen to finish off the curry that had been simmering on and off for several hours without any sign of reducing, by roasting and grinding some almonds and tossing it in, and then went upstairs to write.
M was worried what I would be writing. She is increasingly exorcised about this blog of mine.
And I got on with this Writing Study, writing the first part of the series of, I think, four. Each must be written in 20 munutes and should be about a traumatic event.
Of course, I am too prolixious and too prone to digression for the form of automatic writing I think they want - it is one of these exercises such as I have seen in teach yourself poetry books and the like where the important thing is to carry on writing, even if you must repeat what you have just written. I don’t think I even got to the point. In fact, I know I didn’t. Too busy setting the scene.
What interested me on sitting down to write, though, was the fact that I thought I would get it done. This sound stupid but I remember being angry at myself at university because of the fact that I would sit down in an exam and write almost continuously. In much the same way as I chide myself for not being patient at home when I can be at work, I used to chide myself for not being able to replicate the conditions of an exam when writing an essay.
That I would be able to write for twenty minutes was interesting especially given the programme on Radio 4 I had been listening to earlier on in the day whilst cooking. This had been an interview with Christina Odone and another author who had written novels from popular columns. They had discussed the need some writers have for deadlines. One of them at least, having come from journalism, had needed deadlines and asked fro strict deadlines from their publisher. Without them, she wondered how authors could get anything written at all.
All of this led me to wonder how far this was true of myself. With my perfectionist streak, after all, I could constantly play around with even the planning stage before setting down to write. Deadlines worked for me when I was writing essays for the student magazine. They even worked for me for essays, which, though they were regularly marked down for being late, got written, which is more than can be said for my own stories.
This reminded me of the fact that part of the reason for this blog was to try to discipline myself and place quasi-deadlines on myself, and to force myself, too, to finish pieces for publication of a kind, to do, too, what I have recently been doing and place up half-written pieces as a way of encouraging myself to finish them (when unseen there is little motivation and they can be forgotten in some unseen portion of the hard drive).
This has not, of course, worked as it could, since I have not yet gained a readership. I hope to do so, and hope, too, that some readers could take on the mantle of mentors, helping me to focus on one idea and to finish my projects.
But I have given myself to midnight, and rushed to complete this.
My first submission follows.
Submission:
I went to Prague at the end of December 2003 to escape things, just as I had moved back to my university town to escape things there. That first time, moving from my home town where I had been living with my parents since moving back home after finishing my degree - something that took it out of me, almost wiped me out I was having so many problems with concentration, with depression, and with my social life - I just couldn’t get on with the people back here. Now I’m back again.
That time I remember giving the lads back here chance after chance, trying to say to myself there’s more to them than talk about football and cars, more to them than just drinking, but I never found it.
And it was that time we went out to help out at a scout camp that I really saw that I had to do something again to escape. And there’s was I thinking that I would escape for good when I left for univeristy.
I used to go to scouts when I was a kid, though looking back now I can see that I had as many problems there as anywhere. I was stuck in a fog in my own head all the while. I remember setting fire to things ones or twice, but otherwise, few conversations, and just this sense that everything was going on around me.
Going back to help out, I wanted to get out into the wilderness, and help some kids do the same. Get them away from their Playstations and whatever. Well, they turned up to the camp, where they had got the train, refusing to walk more than a few metres, and already they were on their mobiles, telling their parents all about it.
But it was in the evening that I really saw that I couldn’t get on with these people. We sat there drinking (and I didn’t yet know that I couldn’t, really shouldn’t drink beer, that it makes me more distant and foggy-headed) and the conversation was so stereotypical. I sat there thinking to myself, these people could never go into a book. I considered myself a writer. Still do. But these were the only people I had ever known, and how could they be the subjects of fiction?! They were so two dimensional. They spoke about makes of car batteries, and where the best car batteries were from.
And then came rimming. One of them, a guy so hairy we once took to calling him Clyde after the orangutan in some Clint Eastwood films, had read a word in a magazine he didn’t know - and this guy, despite being brought up by cultured parents and getting dragged to the theatre fairly often with them, had once talked about how books are only for people who can’t afford televisions; he was trying for irony, but he meant it. Rimming. He didn’t know what it meant, and this became the subject for the evening.
Not before we ordered Pizza on the internet on his mobile phone. So much for being outside in the wilderness!
I left for my uni town soon after, and then, after another period of nine months or so, I went to Prague. There I got on OK. It suited me being away from home, being on my own. I was lonely sometimes, and I was working very hard preparing lessons for my English classes, again, because I couldn’t concentrate, but I was doing ok. I was learning the language, and that gave me something to do with every day, something I desperately need. And being away from home, a foreigner among foreigners, masked my social difficulties. It was all taken to be cultural differences, or forgiven much more easily because of my being exotic.
I worked that first term in a pretty low rent school, and worked with a handful of private students in the afternoons. I was just about getting by. And then came the summer and I would have more time on my hands.
I decided I needed to stay and write. That had been half the plan in getting away from things. Perhaps I thought I would get rid of half the miscellaneous obligations I faced at home.
The last day of term and we celebrated, went out with my beginner’s group and got pretty drunk. The next day my head was foggier than ever and I couldn’t stop the constant brainstorms that dog me day to day, but I got an idea.
One novel had died, as they always do with not enogh attention paid to them, or too slow progress. My mind moves on, or the idea swells to unmanageable proportions. Each is like a death it has taken up so much of my life, become my focus to such a degree. But now I had a new one.
I used to travel up to the top of the city. To Letna, where the Kyvadlo, the metronome, swings away on the plinth where the largest statue in the world once stood, of Stalin at the focal point of the city where you can look up from Old Town Square past Josefov, the Jewish Quarter.
I used to travel there often and write.
I was getting into it when my computer screen broke on my computer, breaking up once in a while, freezing and gong blank. I would have to take it back. I couldn’t carry on in any case on paper now that so much had gone onto the computer.
I was desperate. I booked a flight home and, meanwhile, started to realise how much I had been running away from things, how much I needed writing, and why that was.
I got back home and, the computer gone in for repair, and having told nobody that I was back aside from my parents, barricaded myself in my room and started writing a story about a guy with an autistic kid. It wasn’t the first time this theme had bubbled up in my mind, and it wouldn’t be the last.
I had a perfect few days working on this story, left to my own devices, but then Ondrej made contact. He wanted to come to England, and needed a place to stay.
I had stayed at Ondrej’s when I had first gone over to Prague and finished a teaching course. He had been one of my first students. Clearly hyperactive, he was a bank manager, good at organising people, riunging around and booking a place at a restaurant, say, but he irritated most of the people around him, and I had to be in the mood for him.
He had helped me out a lot. I had stayed first at his, and then at his parents! He had really gone out of his way. I felt obliged. I often feel like I need a lot of support and make a lot of demands on the people around me, so this was something I needed to do to pay back.
And so he came with his wife, Ema, to stay at my parents’ place. And that wasn’t the easiest thing for them, living a conservative suburban life…