Nimue Brown's Blog, page 376

Beyond positive thinking

In which a depressed person talks about positive thinking and why that isn’t always helpful…

I know the theories. Positive thoughts make us more open to better outcomes. We are more likely to act for our own good if we feel positive, and that most toxic of ideas ‘like attracts like’. And while it is sometimes true that if you act confident, cheerful, upbeat and positive sometimes you can ‘fake it till you make it’ and sometimes it helps get things done, it’s not always true.

This whole logic assumes you have a choice, and in this reveals why it doesn’t work. Many people who do not suffer from depression assume it is a sort of sadness or loss of enthusiasm, and if you’d only pull yourself together and get on with it, you would be fine. If you occasionally suffer from mild unhappiness, boredom, lack of enthusiasm, and get a bit down about things but find you can turn yourself around with some good old positive thinking, then you are not experiencing depression. What depressed people experience is nothing like this, which is what causes the problems.

I’m a big believer in ideas of free will and choice. I also have an understanding of limits. I would not try and run a marathon with a broken leg. I would not jump out of a tree and expect to fly by force of will. I do not expect a depressed mind to be able to harness the powers of positive thinking in order to heal itself.

A brain is an array of cells and chemical processes. The way we shape our thoughts affects the physical structures and the chemistry, and is in turn affected by these things. Trying to use your broken mind to fix your broken mind is about as easy as trying to use a broken knife to fix the broken knife. If your mind isn’t working, and you tell yourself that you *should* be able to use positive thinking to overcome it, and you *should* be able to pray and recover and you *should* be able to repeat a mantra that will set it all right and these things make no bloody odds at all, well, there’s another failure to add to the list of things you couldn’t do today and I promise, that won’t help you one bit. If you can’t think positive thoughts, this probably a facet of your depression and there is nothing to apologise for.

A broken mind is a symptom. It may be that you have wonky brain chemistry, and that an intervention would help. I like St John’s Wort. Sunlight also makes a lot of odds. You may need a re-set in the form of more rest, your diet may have let you down, you may have been ill, there may have been pain. Perhaps you have grief that you need to give time to, a problem to solve, or pressures from which you need some respite. Tackle it at this level and you get some relief. You probably won’t feel better all at once, but you’ll also be more open to the idea that time for healing is required – if you aren’t looking for magical cures, you won’t expect unfeasible things of yourself.

If you treat mental illness like physical illness, it works better. Be kind to it. Tuck it up in bed with a nice book. Ply it with soothing drinks and comfort food. Take it for gentle walks and show it nice views and adorable kittens, and wait for it to heal. Give it the same time you would a bad cold, and if that doesn’t work, give it the time you would give to a broken limb or a gaping wound.

A head is not so different from a body really.

The only positive thought you really need is to hold the idea that things can get better, and that with time and care you can recover. Maybe not today. Maybe not next week. The demand to be well can be tyrannical, and if you are depressed, actually a lot more harmful than helpful. Positive thinking has its place, but it should never be a stick to beat people with.

The hermit’s call

In ‘A Branch from the Lightning Tree’, Martin Shaw talks about initiatory journeys into wilderness, and also the importance of bringing that back an integrating it into our village. Similar things are said of contemplation, shamanic journeying, and other voyages ‘out there’. What gives the experience meaning and significance, is how we bring it back and add it to the mix. We travel together, and those who venture off the path on wilder adventures have an obligation to their tribe to come back with that. And perhaps arguably also an obligation to self, to mesh that experience into regular life. If you go off forever, into faerie, into the mists, or the wilderness, then you are lost to your own life, to your old self and to some aspects of your humanity.

Nonetheless, there are those who go, with no intention of returning. It may not be the retreat into wilderness, but into silence, absence, or stillness. A deliberate stepping out of the flow. It may be that life and people are just too difficult, or a feeling of having nothing left to offer the tribe. Even starting with that intention, it may be that time withdrawn makes it possible to see some point in going back, something worthy of offering to the wider world.

When I lived on the boat, I was very much a hermit. I spent a lot of time in silence, I interacted with very few people. Sometimes that felt lonely, but it had the merit of being easier. I’m not very good at relationships with people. I never know what to say or how to say it, I find conversations hard work at the best of times, and there are very few people with whom I am entirely relaxed. I never know what to do with my elbows. Self-conscious and over-thinking, agonising over mistakes made and anxious about the inevitable next one…

Perhaps I best serve the tribe by mostly not being in it. Perhaps I am most use when I retreat into silence and just come back, to carefully held spaces like this one where I can piece my words together slowly and I do not have to worry so much about my elbows.

In contrast though, the contemplative Druid group met this week. It’s a place where it doesn’t seem to matter much if I am clever, or not. All I have to do is show up and sit quietly with others. They do not ask much of me, and are very accepting of my not being very good sometimes. There’s a feeling of safety in that. In not having to be anything.

Part of the problem, as Martin Shaw points out in his book, is that when you come back with the light of some otherworld in your eyes, or the darkness of it… this can be scary. You have stepped outside the tribe. You really don’t belong anymore. You are not easily reintegrated. You are other. Every time I try and step back into normal human interactions, I am coming back, from long dark subterranean journeys, from imaginary voyages, from time with the hills and sky. Of course I do not fit tidily anywhere. Perhaps it is my job not to fit tidily. I do not know.

Pebbles on a beach

In the wash of the sea, even the most ordinary and unlovely things will eventually acquire a smoothed elegance and a form of beauty. Bits of house brick and broken glass, unremarkable bits of rock are rubbed down, and while shining with sea water, have all the glory of a precious gem.

Life is very good at knocking the corners off people. Anything too delicate, is all too easily broken away. We are exposed to constant attrition, the grit of daily challenges, the perpetual banging together in disagreement, conflict and confusion. It depends a lot on what sort of person you are, of course. There seem to be people who grow in power and stature as a consequence of challenge, who work out how to knock things off others rather than let themselves be eroded. There are those who get bigger in this process. I expect for some life is nothing like being in the sea.

I am a seashore pebble. I’ve watched myself reduce ever since I’ve had a degree of self awareness. Ideas about what I might be, hopes, aspirations, aspects of self, wants, even things I once thought were needs, are rubbed down and wiped away by life’s sea. As a teen I could have told you what sort of person I was. In my twenties, I based my sense of identity on all the things I was doing. Now there isn’t much I do that gives me a sense of self. I can write you a plausible sounding biography, but that has more to do with the frequency at which writers need to cough up plausible autobiographies, and not to do with conviction around identity.

I have no idea who I am and no idea what I’m doing.

I watch the waves roll in, shifting the grit for a fresh round of abrasion. But perhaps, before life erases me entirely, there will be a time when I acquire something of the smooth grace of sea glass. At present, this is a comforting thought. Whether I have any means left to appreciate that when I get there, is a whole other question.

I know the loss of ego is frequently held up as a spiritual goal. I don’t know if this experience fits with that, if this counts as some kind of achievement. It does not feel like achievement, it feels like the rolling of the sea, and the smallness of being one tiny, irrelevant little pebble amongst billions of pebbles, all grinding down.

To be still, and silent, not moving for a while, not eroding for just a day or two. A little temporary peace would be a thing to aspire to, I think. Pebbles in the sea do not get to choose when or if they will be thrown up onto a beach and left there. I do not know if that is what I get, or whether some other kind of narrative is available.

Observations on breaking

I am fascinated by the limits of my mind and body and what happens when I get there. Because I am a bit shattered, my concentration is shot and I’m having trouble holding clear lines of thought. Forgive me if this is a less coherent post than usual.

Aspect one is pain, of which I have a lot just now. I know why, some if it will improve in the next few days, which may help sort the rest. But, yesterday, I hit the kind of pain levels that mess with my brain. I can tune out small pain, cuts, blisters, etc barely register. It’s funny because I haven’t lost my thinking to pain this way since the early stages of labour. Watching my mind fragment, my lines of thought disintegrate. Today is a bit better, but blogging is hard work. I’m stopping more to pick up my threads. The words are not flowing.

Aspect two is panic. I’ve spent years with fear. I’m better than I was in that I no longer start every day waking into a full blown panic attack, but small panic bursts are still a daily occurrence. It doesn’t help that post remains a panic trigger. I’m working on that. Something for another day, perhaps. So the adrenaline fear spike is part of my inner landscape. Was that a mixed metaphor? Not sure, keep pedalling… fear is part of what I get. Only I seem to have broken the adrenaline side, and this may not be a good thing. Fear, since yesterday, has been arriving more like a slap in the face with a wet sock. I experience something, but not what I normally get, and it doesn’t feel like healing because the fear is still there. Early days, and only a suspicion that you can burn out an adrenal system. No insight really.

So on a normal day, my sense of self owes a lot to my emotional responses. How I feel about things is part of what makes me recognisably me. That’s not working properly. The pain and fear responses are… weird. I know I’ve been hit by a bout of depression – that at least is behaving in a normal way, unfortunately, ‘normal’ for depression tends to include a deadening of self in the first place.

The other key thing for me is that normally I have a very clear and coherent flow of thoughts. The inside of my head is normally like narration in a book in terms of coherence and clarity. This is a defining feature of my sense of self. I usually know exactly what I am thinking and why, and I think my way through and round everything I encounter. This is intrinsic to my sense of self. The absence of it is disconcerting. Wandering about with no coherence, not feeling like someone I recognise. Disorientated, lost. Not knowing if it stays like this or how things go from here. Needing to work, needing to be functional, and everything is so much more difficult than it ought to be.

Odd, finding that my identity was made of a few flashes of brain chemistry and my ability to hold an inner monologue. No idea who I am without that, and surprised to realise how fragile and barely real I was all along, and how easily that sense of self falls apart.

Contemplative Druidry

Some years ago, I joined a facebook group, themed around Contemplative Druidry.  From there I was invited to join a local group, and became part of a mailing list. A day of contemplation was planned, and I said I might go, and then chickened out. I had a family court hearing too close to the date to be equal to any kind of calm. I didn’t know anyone else, I would have been travelling alone. Not far, but far enough to worry me. It was simply too much. I was very fragile back in those days, and largely in a state of retreat from the world, hiding in my narrowboat and trying to heal.

Last summer I moved to Stroud – where the group is based. I’d come out of hiding a bit, all the court nightmares were behind me and I felt  bit more able to engage, so when the next contemplation day came along, I went. It was daunting, and taking a whole day off work was intimidating in its own ways. By then however, I knew some people – I’d wrangled Tom in, my good friend Mr Bish was involved and I knew another participant just a little from Druid camp. OBOD supports its mentors by pairing new ones with more experienced folk who can offer advice, and my mentoring mentor was also part of the circle. (Stroud is a hotbed of OBOD activity, there are lots of us!) It became rapidly evident that I was in a good place, with people who were safe to be around, inclined to be gentle with me, and where very little was asked or expected.

Over this last year, I’ve gone to monthly meet ups and a second whole day, the third is coming round fast and the group has become an important part of the rhythm of my life.

Over the summer, James Nichol (who holds the space and set it in motion) collected experiences from participants, in order to reflect on the whole process. These have been assembled into a book. It’s not a how-to, but an insight into a tide in Druidry over a few years of its development, as seen from the perspectives of various people who have been involved. I am one of the voices in the mix, and it’s been  wonderful thing to take part in. It’s a real community project, capturing some of the diversity within Druidry, and also giving insight into how the contemplative aspect of Druidry works for some of us doing it. Beyond this, there is an invitation to open up contemplation. We tend, as a path, to focus more on the dramatic ritual side of things, but we need to balance that with the slower and more introspective work.

You can find the book here on amazon.co.uk and on amazon.com

 

The too-open heart

I scare people, with almost monotonous regularity. Some respond by being offended, others back away, or run away. From as far back as I can remember, people who I’ve let get close to me have come back to say I am too serious, too intense, too melodramatic, too difficult, too much bother. About this time a year ago, having been through one of those and been told that my excess of feeling had somehow made someone else ill, I called ‘enough.’ No more of this ridiculous exposure. No more knock-backs.

Then six months later, in a triumph of optimism over experience, I sauntered out and did it all again, to the same refrain of complaints… too much, too uncomfortable. On this occasion I had tried too hard and given too much.

It’s hard to express what the consequences are of pouring heart and soul into something, giving all that you have and being told off and pushed away as a result. This has been the pattern of my life, reoccurring down the years with far too many very different sorts of people. As the consistent part of this is me, it seems logical to deduce that the problem must also be me, that the criticism is fair, and that my excessive nature causes other people pain and discomfort. As I have no desire to make the people I care about miserable, learning not to manifest too much of how I am has become an important project.

I don’t know how to be anything other than wholehearted. I don’t know how to turn up to any situation or person in a half-arsed state of don’t really care and can’t be bothered, but as far as I can make out, many of my historical interactions with people would have been a good deal more viable and sustainable had I brought that to the table, rather than this urge to do my best. I’m not prepared to learn how to be careless, and so I have tried to learn how to hide, to downplay the hours I put in, to not mention how important things, and people are to me. There is a loneliness in that, but it keeps me in the game, allows me human interaction and participation, reduces the risk of my causing pain with my too-muchness.

Fascinated as I am by how people think, I also need to deal with the gap in my understanding here. Having never been offended by someone else’s emotions, the idea perplexes me. I can be offended by actions, and by unkindness, but I can’t imagine getting angry with someone because they cared about something. I assume there’s another facet to this, that my care, my seriousness, my work ethic exposes something. Perhaps it feels like a judgement (which it isn’t), or prompts other people to feel uncomfortable about something in themselves that must then be fended off by lashing out at me. Perhaps it is to do with values clashing, and that what I see as ‘can’t be bothered’ is something more important, more cherished by the person holding it, and I am failing to recognise and honour something there.

When I was younger, emotional honesty seemed like the most precious, most important thing. Experience has taught me to revise that. I hold emotional honesty within myself, but what goes out is usually almost entirely muted, both the ecstatic and the agonised, so as to be more tolerable. There’s a certain irony to this, because the ‘heart on sleeve’ nature of this blog has been remarked on by others. This is not heart on sleeve, this is carefully thought through, processed and calmly written. It’s nothing like dealing with me in the raw. I do it because every time thus far that I’ve exposed something in this way, someone else has found it useful.

So, if there are any other little monsters out there, who love too much, and cry too easily, and won’t sit down and don’t know how to shut up and have no ability to shrug and walk away and carry the weight of the significance of things… you are not alone, and perhaps there is some comfort to be had in that thought.

Always be drunk

“You should always be drunk, with wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you choose.” – Baudelaire.

The first one is easily achieved, and it’s worth noting that gods of grape and sacred insobriety turn up all over the place. Alcohol warms the body and eases the mind, makes us more sociable, relieves the pain of aching muscles and helps us to be merry. We shed our fears and inhibitions and are more open to having a good time. The Romans had ‘in vino, veritas’ – in wine, truth. That which slips out when we’re pissed may be a lot more real than our closely guarded lips would normally allow. But don’t always be drunk with wine, you’ll develop a tolerance that lessens the impact, and you’ll wreck your liver, and some things work better when you can walk in a straight line…

Drunk with poetry, with inspiration, vision, the fire in the head – this is awen, and the quest for it is very much part of the bardic path. Be drunk with wonder, and with beauty. Let all that is glorious infuse your spirit so that you are floating on it in an altered state of mind. Seek out exquisite things, or create them, and let the natural highs of your inspiration carry you away. Except also bear in mind all those folklore stories about places you can sit out and either come back a poet or a lunatic – because if you try and set up camp permanently on the high plateau of poetic insobriety, you will go quite entirely mad. Now and then you must come down from the mountain to wash your socks and deal with all those other necessary, earthy issues.

Drunk with virtue, with the perfect awareness that you are acting in honour, that right action and right thoughts have brought you to a state of grace. Knowing that even if it is hard, the sheer virtuousness of doing the right things for the right reasons is worth the price. The intoxicating qualities of virtue are, oddly enough, the least socially acceptable. We are used to those who are drunk on wine. We can be amused by the tripped-out poets, or impressed, if they create anything good, and we expect creative folk to be a bit mad anyway. But virtue? Oh, dare to be drunk on virtue and expect the distaste of those you encounter. ‘Smug’ and ‘self righteous’ are the words we keep for people who dare to be off their faces on the joy of doing the right thing. Of the three, it may also be the most dangerous, the one most likely to have you courting hubris and hypocrisy. It’s essential not to be perpetually drunk with virtue, or you risk buying into your own PR and becoming the exact opposite of what you set out to be.

Fall from alcohol and you’ll have a hangover. Fall from poetry and you can be sorely depressed and disorientated. Fall from virtue, fall from saint to sinner and you will lose so much more in your own eyes, including the respect of anyone who has seen you in your elevated state. Cast yourself as a saint, and those inevitable feet of clay will leave the odd dirty print.

Be drunk, as you choose, but I do not think one should always be drunk. It all seems to work so much better if you surface for air now and then and some alternative perspectives, the washing of socks, the eating of the sandwich, the recollection of the feet of clay…

Gratitude, 5 years on

It’s nearly the fifth anniversary of my going to America to meet Tom in person, and this winter will be our fourth wedding anniversary. Not a day goes by but I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the richness and joy he has brought into my life. Curled up in the warm, safe, friendly place that is our bed, I end every single day conscious of how fortunate I have been in all of this, and still possessed of a sense of wonder about how it’s all worked out.

Fairy tale romance it may have been, but in the sense of there being a good helping of ogres, dragons, dramatic escapes, and hard battles. We’ve come through all of that to this place of stability, a home of our own, some financial security and as much certainty about the future as anyone gets. Not a day goes past but I stop for a moment to recognise that so much could have gone so differently. In part we were lucky, but we also never gave up, on each other and on what we wanted. Although there were some terrifying times when everything seemed set against us, we got through. There have, especially in the last year, been some blessed times of relative peace and ease and not fearing for the future.

Gratitude tends to derive from a sense of perspective. For many people the old adage ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ is all too true. We also tend not to know what we’re missing until we find it. Gratitude can open our eyes to the blessings in our life, but if all we’ve ever known is famine, we can mistake scraps for a feast, and not realise that we could be reaching for more than those scraps. I’ve experienced that journey in my emotional life and it is only in the experience of bounty that I am able to look back and see how much gratitude I felt for what was proportionally very little. Being grateful for very little helped keep me in a place that was harmful to me, and discouraged me from imagining there was anything better to seek.

It’s one thing to be grateful for what food you can find when there really is a famine, quite another to be fed on crumbs while others live in plenty. Gratitude has to be tempered with a sense of justice, or it can become a very good way of helping people who have nothing to stay on their knees. We tell our poor they should be grateful for the foodbanks, not that they should be furious with a system that only gives them the choice of foodbank or hunger. And we should not be so grateful that someone, anyone loves us, that we accept their ‘love’ on any terms, no matter how toxic.

We are told to be grateful to the rich, with their job creation providing our wealth, and trickledown economics spreading the bounty. These are myths, for it is work that creates wealth, and nothing worth having trickles down – just crumbs from the table that others have worked hard to load up although they are not invited to the feast. If we practice gratitude to those who hold power over us, we can end up counting our blessing that they aren’t a worse sort of tyrant, rather than kicking them out and making things better.

There’s an idea (I think it comes originally from Aristotle) that virtue is the midpoint between two vices. Gratitude is a spiritual virtue, and it’s obvious opposite is ingratitude. Place it in a three point way of conceptualising, and rather than gratitude/ingratitude, you can see gratitude as a line between ingratitude, and complicity. Be grateful for the good things you have, but don’t be so grateful in all things that you end up supporting unjust systems, accepting abuse and corruption, and going along with things not being as good as they could be.

Magical symbolism and a normal world

Our entertainment sources play a huge role in terms of how we imagine the world to be, and how we imagine it could be. Consider for a moment the frequency with which you see people driving – in adverts with those mythical open roads, in dramas and documentaries. Politicians and celebrities step out of especially shiny ones to the flashes of many cameras. Superheroes have massively powerful ones. We watch them race for sport, we even given them names and personas and create films about them.

Imagine what it would be like if every day you saw the same amount of footage of people arriving on foot and by bicycle. If celebs turned up on buses as a matter of course, if politicians travelled by train, if more of the epic chases in films involved people running rather than driving. Imagine how your sense of the future possibilities would change if you saw stories about the future full of clean, quiet cities and where the car had ceased to dominate. Imagine what would happen if toy cars became as suspect as gifts for children as toy guns have become in recent years.

Every day, we tell each other stories about how the world is, and could be. The stories washing about our media and popular culture are the ones impacting on the most people. Currently our stories tell us that cars are everywhere and essential and will continue to be everywhere. Cars are glamorous, we are told, but if we started telling each other how wild and romantic it is for some unconventional celebrity to ride the buses, our whole attitude to public transport would shift. If we made films in which future buses were gorgeous spaces full of successful people, we’d start wanting those buses. If we started associating walking purposefully onto the train platform with images of power and status, we might make the car less of a symbol for personal importance.

The industrialised world exists because humans collectively imagined it into being. We could imagine something different. The symbols of power we identify with are a matter of choice. They could be changed. Why isn’t the fit body of a cyclist more widely accepted as sexy than the curves of a metallic car? The answer is largely because one has a well paid marketing department, and the other doesn’t.

I’d like to live in a world where the hum of traffic noise isn’t a constant. I’d like to be able to stand on the hills and not hear the motorway. I’d like it not to be considered merely an unavoidable and unfortunate side effect that people die and are seriously injured every day on the roads. I’d like us to questions that normality. Above all else, I want us to start questioning the role of the car as an icon, a symbol, a fetish within our cultures, and to dare to imagine something different. Something that smells better. Something that doesn’t smear tarmac across our countryside.

The quest for pretty things

I live in a small flat, and it’s not a property innately full of character. Lots of little boxes, and when I first landed, lots of white walls, beige carpet and all the personality of a motel or travelodge. I’ve been working on improving that.

I like playing with fabric, it’s something I can do in my downtime that has little or no cost and some utility. I’ve also discovered that if I sit down to do some crafting, it gives me the necessary headspace to think about writing fiction. I can use it for breaks between scenes while I’m gathering thoughts, as an offset to block and a way of creating space for the writing. I’m seldom in a state where I can just sit down and write, and crafting helps with the transition. So, this was made alongside quite a lot of story.

The underpinning is a hessian sack (bought from the Stroud Valley’s eco-shop). To this I added blue and green background fabrics, and the patches of colour in the centre (fabric mostly sourced from freecycle). The leaves, flowers, trees and birds all came from swatches of curtain samples, picked up very cheaply (fabric shop in Mills Courtyard). I pinned all of this to my sack, sewed it down and embroidered the edges and the bird (there’s a fantastic haberdashery near Bank Gardens for embroidery silks). The frame is wool spun by Theo, which I knitted using an adaptation of her pointy scarf pattern.

It now adorns the back of the bedroom door, hanging from a door-towel-hook-thing, and the ‘pole’ across the top of the fabric, is a bound together bundle of aluminium slats from a cheap blind I picked up in order to Frankenstein it into a much more cheery Roman blind. I don’t waste much. I’m now plotting a second one of these hangings, to cover a glass door, and afford a bit more privacy for anyone staying over. My son was so enthused by the first one that he’s asked to be involved in the design and layout stage of the second, although he doesn’t have the needle skills for the sewing (yet) but is inclined to learn