Nimue Brown's Blog, page 109

Making things for people

My inspiration has always been really people centred. I do my best work when I’m writing for specific people and when I’m interacting. I had a team for the Wherefore project who made suggestions and who were a keen audience and that me going through lockdown when isolation and anxiety might otherwise have made it hard for me to create. Usually when I’m working on a large project, I have some people in mind who I hope will like it.

Acknowledgements in books I’ve written tend to be all about the people I was writing for. There are some regulars. Some, like Lou and Merry are very visible in my online community. Some of them are secretive and like to stay in the background. I name no names. My immediate household are very supportive. It helps to have more input from more people – I can get through a lot of input, and I don’t want to burn anyone out. 

I’ve had a few more involved creative partners along the way. Varying degrees of intensity and commitment on that score. I had a fabulous time writing a novel with Professor Elemental. I have a longstanding creative relationship with Tom, and we’re looking at how that will change after the graphic novels. Keith Errington has become a serious Hopeless Maine collaborator, and we’re exploring more territory there. I’m really enjoying writing for The Ominous Folk, and seeing how the performance and scratch theatre side evolves and who I can include in that.

I’m high maintenance around inspiration and needing people to interact with. I need a lot of engagement – it’s why I do things like writing blog posts and putting out the Wherefore series. Going away for months to write a book and coming back with a finished thing no one will see for ages isn’t really sustainable for me. I need the feedback, but more importantly I need to maintain a strong sense of who I’m doing this for. Thank you for reading and being part of that process!

There’s nothing like someone wanting something from me to get my brain working. It takes me places I can’t go on my own. If you’re ever reading this blog and wish I’d dig in more with a subject, or there’s something you haven’t seen me write about and wish I would, please say. That kind of feedback is really good for me.

Ghosting, boundaries and neglect

Which one appears to be happening will depend a lot on which role you are in. One person’s boundaries can look a lot like ghosting to someone else. Especially when that’s convenient to their story.

Is it ghosting? Do you have any way of contacting them? Did you try? Amusingly I was once accused of ghosting a person who had me on facebook, had my email address, my phone number and even knew where I lived. I wasn’t in a good way and I stopped making active contact with her because I couldn’t manage it. She made no effort to contact me, but apparently told mutual friends that I’d ghosted her. When someone disappears and stops answering email, when their phone doesn’t work, or they don’t pick up or reply to texts then that’s ghosting. 

Are they holding boundaries? If they’ve told you what they’re doing and why – like needing a few weeks off social media, then it’s about reasonable boundaries. If they’ve said no to something you are doing, that’s boundaries. People are allowed to say no, and to need things that are inconvenient to others – including time to themselves. If they’re doing things that really, obviously they should be able to do undisturbed – like going to their jobs, or sleeping – then their lack of response should be a non-issue. If anyone is demanding your attention when the timing is inappropriate, that’s a boundary violation.

Is it neglect? That depends entirely on the agreed parameters of your relationship. If you don’t have agreed parameters, then the thing to look at is how balanced and equitable the relationship is. If you have to be available on demand but they expect to be able to disappear for weeks and have that be fine – then it really isn’t fine at all. If you are asking for more than you are giving, then the other person isn’t neglecting you if they decide not to go along with that. If you are asking clearly and the other person keeps declining, you may not be suitable for each other. You may need a serious talk about expectations and needs.

When it comes to relationships of any shape, people will not usually have parallel needs and feelings. It’s important to talk about expectations, to deal fairly when there are imbalances, and to accept when something isn’t viable. Accusations of ghosting and neglect can be highly manipulative. Ghosting and neglect are damaging, and can be part of an abusive strategy.

Community and personal resilience

Being resilient is awful. Being encouraged to be resilient tends to mean making yourself keep going when you don’t really have the resources. Be that time, energy, money, health, bodily strength – keeping pushing on when you don’t have enough to push with is soul destroying. The longer you have to do it, the more damage you take. If you are well enough resourced to deal with a thing then you aren’t being resilient by dealing with it, you’re coping just fine.

Difficulty and challenge are inevitable. We all face setbacks. We all get knocked down. Having to pick yourself up and trudge on is not the only answer. Resilience is something we should be doing collectively. If we help each other, then it will less often be the case that the person who is least able to cope is obliged to bear the weight of a thing.

In a resilient community, people support each other and cover for each other. You do what you find easiest for yourself and others, and maybe someone else can pick up the thing you find prohibitively difficult. Or at least you don’t have to do it alone, if it is unavoidable. Rather than finding individual solutions to problems, we become each other’s solutions. Of course this depends on people being kind to each other, and being honest about what they can and cannot do. When we see it as an honour to help those around us, not an imposition, everything changes.

Imagine instead of having to crawl back up when you’ve been knocked down, being lifted by those around you. Imagine finding the ways in which you are especially capable and can help others. When we all lean a little on each other, we are collectively stronger than we could ever have been while standing alone.

Crafting for sanity

Things have been tough this week. This year has so far brought experiences that have taken me into the depths of panic and despair. I’ve spent a lot of energy just trying not to be crushed by that. Fighting the panic is exhausting. Trying to fix the things that were causing the panic has been brutal and ineffective. You only have to look at my face to see what a mess I am in. I am going to make a point of showing my face when I’m not ok because I want to challenge the idea that mental illness is invisible illness.

There is patchwork on my lap in this photo. I made six jumpers through the winter. Crafting has always been a coping mechanism for me. The rhythm of it soothes me. If I can take ruined, useless things – as with these dead jeans – and turn them back into something useable, that helps me. I feel better about myself when I make things. If I can use my craft skills to put something attractive into the world, that also helps with the mental health issues. I like upcycling for my friends, too. This jacket will be for Susie and with this jacket made all four of the Ominous Folk will have denim patchwork items.

One of the main reasons I never sell craft work is that this is stuff I do for my mental health. I need to be free to do it on my own terms. Who I make things for is an important part of the process. I can cheer myself up by making things for me. Often what I make is an expression of relationship, and how I feel about the person I’m making something for is part of what makes it a restorative process. A garment like this takes a lot of hours – I don’t count the hours. It is better for my emotional wellbeing to give these pieces away out of love than to find people don’t want to pay a pound an hour for my efforts.

I’ve started on the embroidery part of the process now. It’s a way of making that is inspired by Japanese boro, and it’s something I get a lot of comfort and delight from.

What does it mean to love?

It’s been a curious few months with regards to my emotional life and some of my key relationships. Not least that one of those relationships is starting to look like it was never that real anyway. What even is love? It’s a key question to ask, and not just when things are bumpy in a relationship.

For me, love is rooted in the everyday. It’s about dedicating to share your life with someone – in whatever way you choose and to whatever degree you’ve settled on. That sharing can take many forms. Love doesn’t always mean romance. Romance doesn’t necessarily mean sex. Sex doesn’t automatically equate to love. Any of these things might, or might not be combined with cohabiting, or co-working, or co-parenting. Love means investing in someone else. It means caring about them, and giving time to that.

For me, mutual understanding is an important thing in a relationship. I need to understand – I don’t tend to cope well with things I can’t make sense of. I will invest copious amounts of time in trying to understand other people’s history, experience, perspective, way of being in the world and so forth. If I care about someone, I will do my best to be the person they need me to be – mindful of their needs, preferences and issues. 

Sharing yourself with another human can feel incredibly vulnerable. But this vulnerability is itself the basis for deep connection and mutual understanding. Tom and I have been exploring this in earnest for a while now. I have work to do around being better at saying when I’m uncomfortable – I have history around this. I can do better. At the moment I’m working on being honest about small discomforts and making space for that. I hate eating loud food. Some kinds of touch really stress me out – hair in my face, especially. That kind of thing. Stuff I’ve ignored and overwritten for other people’s convenience. But, if I’m honest about it, I make more room for a better quality of relationship.

I’ve also learned, in an entirely different interaction, about the importance of being able to hold boundaries. I have refused certain kinds of treatment. Being ignored is not ok. Being blamed and made responsible for things I did not do, is not ok. Without honest and respectful communication, there is no relationship. I’m not interested in being used, especially not as an emotional punch bag. I’m waiting to see if this person has it in them to do better, but I am not optimistic.

Love is not an event. It’s not a grand gesture. It is not what happens in films. What it means to love is very much about what we do day by day, how we treat each other, how we invest in each other and what we share.

Stranger Things – some reflections

This isn’t exactly a review. I’ve watched two series of Stranger Things now, and there are aspects of it that I’m really impressed with.

One is that the emotional lives of the teenage characters are taken seriously – by the adults in the story, and also by the writers. I’ve never liked things that treat the feelings of young humans as silly, insubstantial or trivial. The feelings and experiences we have in our teens can have a huge impact on our lives in all kinds of ways. For most people it is a time of finding out who you are, with all the implications that brings.

The second thing I’ve really appreciated is the vulnerability and emotional honesty of the characters. They’re all flawed and messy and they get things wrong. There have been a few instances of this turning violent – especially with the teenage boys. However, there’s a stunning amount of people owning their shit, apologising, and explaining where they are coming from. These are characters who want to understand each other, want to make sense to each other, and want to work through their problems and do better. I love that.

My third big source of delight is the impact of horror in this story. Characters who have been through terrible things together do not become jaded or more violent or convinced that the world is a terrible place. They become kinder to each other. They try harder to fix things. 

We’re a storytelling species, and the kinds of stories we tell each other matter greatly.

Signs you might be a goblin

You are wearing all of your favourite clothes and you don’t care if they ‘match’.

There are some really good rocks and/or stick in your pocket.

You talk to snails.

You have polished the teapot because you love shiny things, but there is something living under your sink.

You like wearing wellies. 

Mending things just gives them more character.

There will be no dusting because the spiders are your friends.

Dungarees. Possibly with wellies. Maybe put a tutu skirt over the top.

Stripey!

You get excited about toadstools.

You get excited about pretty things, and shiny things and unexpected things and things that make noises in the night. You get excited.

I’m seeing mainstream media trying to define ‘goblin mode’ or ‘goblin core’ as being a slob and not really caring about things and not making an effort. I don’t think that is it at all. I think being a goblin is about having an entirely different value system from the mainstream and a different set of aesthetic preferences. 

The photo is of me at The Goblin Masquerade, in my frog wellies. Many people had put a lot of thought and effort into how they were going to be goblins.

Distress as a community issue

The worst experience you’ve ever had is going to inform your sense of perspective. I ran into this a lot when James was young, and it’s quite a process giving a child a framework in which to consider their experiences without invalidating how they feel about things. Distress should not be competitive, and the idea that you shouldn’t make a fuss because other people have it worse, is abhorrent.

How distressing something is depends a lot on how resourced you are. If you’re already at the margins, smaller things will have more power to break you. Getting the flu as a basically healthy person is different from getting the flu when you were already ill. From the outside, it isn’t easy to tell how overloaded someone else might be. 

Even so, in my experience it is often the people who are most privileged and most comfortable who make the most fuss about their setbacks. The more insulated a person is in a bubble of comfort, the more intolerant they are likely to be of other people’s struggles, too. Most of us are challenged and knocked about by life and most of us have more compassion and empathy for other people than that. Unfortunately the UK government appears to have a lot of whinging privilege in it at the moment.

Community is really important in all of this. Investing care in others – humans and non-humans alike will give us a context for our own experiences. Very little is new, most of us aren’t desperately original about the things we struggle with, and I think there’s a kind of beauty in that. We share so much common experience in our flawed humanity. When we talk about that and make the stories of our trials available to each other, we open up to compassion and empathy. It’s also a way of sharing knowledge, and if you’ve seen someone else go through something you’re much better prepared to deal with it if you encounter something similar.

I’m always uneasy about the people who constantly need to prove that they’re the biggest victim, the most hard done by, and the only one who should be getting attention. It’s not healthy. It’s vitally important to be able to look around and see what’s most urgent right now, or most fixable. When we look out for each other, we build resilience and resources. If we all sat in little puddles of self pity demanding that we be recognised as the one with the best sob story, nothing good would come of it. We all need room to express our woes, but doing that together is far more powerful. 

When we rage, and grieve and struggle together we can build things that are more than the sum of our misery.

Confidence is a form of magic

So much of what we do depends on having enough confidence. Day to day life is full of decisions – many of which we may not even notice making on a normal day. However, if fear has paralysed you, or experience has shattered your confidence, those small decisions can become overwhelming. Shower? Breakfast? I think often people fall down on self care because they just can’t figure out what to do, and end up doing nothing.

Every communication we enter into depends on confidence. If you don’t expect to make sense, then speaking at all is hard. If you don’t have the confidence that you will be listened to, heard and taken seriously then communicating is hard. This is part of why it is often so hard to ask for help when you’re in trouble.

It is more normal to frame this in terms of what we can’t do when anxious, but I think there’s some use in flipping it over. Almost everything we do depends on confidence. Without confidence it is so difficult to make choices, act or speak. How much confidence a person has is going to greatly inform how effective they can be. Curing someone’s anxiety is far more complicated than the idea of boosting their confidence, but the effects are going to be much the same.

We can all support each other in being more confident. We can cheer each other on. When we shoulder burdens together we can better manage the difficult choices. When we put our faith in each other, and make that explicit, we can lift and empower each other.

Confidence is belief. Belief is most assuredly magic. We could all use more of that, but it’s a magic we can make together, and for each other.

Insufficiency and the fragile mind

It’s fairly easy to tell when you’ve been overloaded. Be it stress, workloads, noise, light, or people, overloading tends to be self announcing. In recent months it has become apparent to me that insufficiency can be just as damaging, but it’s far harder to spot.

How do I tell if I’m not getting enough calories? Or enough potassium? Am I tired because I’m not getting enough sleep, or is that depression caused by an emotional insufficiency? I spent a while being thirsty a lot, not because I needed more water exactly, but because I needed more electrolytes. 

I’m fairly sure at this point that tactile input is a big deal for me, and that I need to do deliberate things to feed my brain information about my body. Lack of body information may well be what’s underpinned my regular and relentless bouts of burnout and mental collapse. 

I think there’s a cultural aspect to all of this. We’re encouraged to be alert to excess, and to be responsible for not having too much of a thing – food and alcohol especially. Being insufficient often has less to do with personal choice – it’s hard to have a good diet if your budget and available shopping options don’t offer you good nutrition. It’s not easy getting good and restorative sleep if there is noise and light pollution you cannot do anything about. Excess is ours to control, insufficiency may well not be.

At the moment, there are a lot of places around the world where mental health is treated as a discreet and personal problem. That tends to focus you on looking for a ‘cure’ in the areas of life you have control over. Mental illness is not a failure of effort, and it makes more sense to look at the things we have less or no control over as likely suspects when our brains stop working properly.