Nimue Brown's Blog, page 80

Anxiety past and future

When people talk about anxiety it’s often around the idea of being afraid of what’s going to happen. Don’t worry about the future, cheerful memes tell us. You can’t control the future, you have to live in the present. My growing suspicion is that anxiety isn’t about the future at all, but about the past, and perhaps to some degree, the present.

There are people who just worry about things randomly and for no good reason, but they seem to be rare. The people I know who struggle with anxiety do so for reasons. Experience has made them anxious. The fears are not irrational and it may also be the case that the source of anxiety is ongoing and pressing. Poverty is a simple example of this. Living in poverty creates a great deal of stress and causes problems that are not easily solved. Having no money will create the fear of becoming homeless, and the life expectancy of people who are without homes is shockingly low, so there’s a lot to be reasonably afraid of there.

When people experience trauma, it changes them. It’s fair to assume that a lot of people out there are dealing with trauma legacies, most usually from sexual assault and domestic abuse. No matter what the exact shape of the trauma is, it leaves you feeling fundamentally unsafe. A lot of PTSD recovery work depends on asserting that what happened was a one off and that you don’t therefore have to be afraid of everything. This might work for a person whose trauma centres on a specific event. However, when there have been multiple traumatic experiences over time, what’s happened is that the person has been persuaded that the world is not a safe place.

Anxiety is the grip of the past. It’s the ongoing impact of things that already happened. It isn’t about an imagined future or about wonky thinking, its about being unable, bodily, to let go. You can’t forget, you can’t unknow and so the fear lives inside you.

How rational is it to try and retrain a brain so that it thinks the world is, broadly speaking, a safe place? For a lot of people, this just isn’t true. If you have reason to think you might be beaten up for your sexual identity or shot because of your skin colour, you know you aren’t safe. If you have to get up tomorrow and go to a job where the stress makes you bodily ill, you aren’t safe. If you can’t afford to buy sufficient food, you aren’t safe.

All too often what we do is centre the problem in the person who is suffering. What we need to do is make improvements so that people are actually safer, rather than having interventions that depend on persuading people that they are ok, when really, they are not and do not actually have much control over things. The person who can genuinely overcome anxieties by undertaking to worry less did not have massive problems to begin with.

Creative collaboration

I love working with people in creative ways. I’m happier creating music with other people than performing alone. I love having writing collaborations on the go and being in spaces where people interact creatively and support each other. The Hopeless, Maine project has been brilliant for me in this regard because there are some awesome people inclined to be involved with it.

I’ve spent plenty of time as a solitary musician – I used to busk a lot when I was younger and had more stamina. I’ve written a fair few books on my own (more than a dozen novels, eight non-fic titles). I can create on my own, but I don’t get excited about it in the same way.

There’s an energy to co-creation that I get really excited about. When people really gel as co-creators, there’s this wonderful scope to be inspired by each other in a way that keeps the inspiration flowing. There are usually challenges, negotiations, compromises and a lot more figuring out to do when whatever you’re doing has to meet the needs of more than one person.

I think some of this is because I’m excited about relationships. This has always been a significant aspect of my Druidry, that it’s a consciously relationship-orientated path for me. I exist in relationship with the land, and in relationship with my ancestors of blood, land and tradition. As a creator I have all kinds of relationships with people who engage with what I make. I find the kinds of relationships I can have with people around shared creativity really appealing. I have no doubt this is one of the reasons I have a strong relationship with my son – we’ve sung together since he was small, and we still do.

When there are more people involved in a project, it’s likely to be more than the sum of its parts. Even if there are only two people, some third thing reliably emerges that is not simply the sum of the two people involved. There’s a magic in the sharing of inspiration and ideas, and what grows in that soil can be marvellous indeed.

I’m increasingly drawn to thinking about what we can do collectively, as communities, and as small groups or even in pairs. I’m questioning the individualism I encounter, and finding that the more time I spend doing stuff with people, the happier I am.

Washing your dirty laundry in public

With thanks to Tim for the prompt.

I remember hearing this phrase about not washing your dirty linen in public as a child from numerous different sources – as no doubt many other people did. It usually came with a sense that this would be a shameful thing to do, and that it is better not to mention whatever is awful, or sordid or painful. Historically this went hand in hand with a culture of blaming and shaming victims – something we haven’t overcome, but seem to have improved on a bit. It’s always been an issue for victims of sexual assault, where admitting what has been done to you might lead you to being shunned, rather than anything much being done about the attacker.

The idea of loyalty to the family makes it hard to speak out about intergenerational abuse. If you can’t speak, you can’t resist or get help. Silence invariably serves abusers and isolates victims. Cults operate in much the same way, promoting loyalty to the group above all else. When people feel disloyal about speaking up, or expect to be treated as though they are behaving badly if they talk about what’s been done to them, then speaking is hard, and the abuse continues.

When people feel safe to talk openly about whatever’s happening for them, then everyone is safer. It might mean now and then having to witness things that are just a bit gross, but I think that’s an acceptable price to pay. I have seen couples who were intent on doing their relationship drama where everyone could see it, for example, and that was unpleasant to deal with but it’s also easy enough not to engage with that.

Dirty linen for me evokes body fluids, all of which are entirely natural, or other kinds of dirt that are the consequences of living and working. In a historical context, linens suggest underwear and bedding, although there’s also table cloths. Washing your dirty linen in public might therefore give people ideas about what goes on in your pants, or in your bed. So, it’s an interesting metaphor because at heart it suggests we should be embarrassed about a whole array of natural, bodily things that can sometimes get messy, around sex, birth, menstruation and illness. As a Druid, I feel strongly that inevitable and natural things should not be a source of shame. We should be able to wash our dirty linen wherever we need to, for our comfort and wellbeing, not hiding out of anxiety regarding other people’s opinions.

It’s also an example where it pays to think about what we judge and why. The criticism around washing your dirty laundry in public may be a case of making comfortable people uncomfortable. It used to be much more normal for people to ignore signs of domestic abuse in those living around them. It’s only fairly recently that the police started taking domestic violence seriously at all. 

When people can talk openly about their experiences, we all get a chance to compare our notions of what might be normal or acceptable. It can be very hard for victims of domestic abuse to have a helpful perspective on what’s happening. If you have very little relationship experience, you might not know whether something is ok. If your sex education mostly consisted of porn, then you might have some really unrealistic expectations. Our young people are growing up with considerable access to porn and no real context to think about that in an informed way. Reports on abuse and violence amongst younger people suggest that what a lot of teens are learning from isn’t helping them at all. Only by talking openly and honestly about our experiences can we change this.

If someone has hurt you, threatened you, made you feel vulnerable or coerced you into doing things you did not want to do, then it’s important to be able to talk about it. Weirdness gets passed down through families in all kinds of ways, too, and if we want to change ancestral patterns and break with the past, it helps to be able to talk about it. Protecting the interests of the person who made you unhappy often isn’t the best choice.

The sound of a space

The photos on this post were taken at The Folk of Gloucester in a beautiful space we’ve been using to record as The Ominous Folk. I love this building – it’s where we do the Gloucester steampunk events and there are increasing numbers of folk events, too. It’s an honour and a joy to be able to do things there.

Between these two photos, you can see the space we were using, which is part of a much bigger room. We did our usual thing of coming in and singing to the space to find out how it works, listening to how sound behaves. From that, we were able to quickly make some decisions about where to put the people, and the recording device. Working with the space is, I think, a very important bardic skill.

The third of the room nearest the window quickly checked out as having the best sound. Then came the surprise. I assumed that singing to the fairly flat wall (the one behind me in the top photo) would be ideal, but on testing, it turned out to be more effective singing to the wall behind Keith in the bottom photo. Always best to test things! The way sound behaves in a space can be really unpredictable, with both the shape of the space and the materials in it impacting on the sound.

We had to be really careful with the floor so as not to have any sound from people moving. This was not a quiet floor! We also had to keep out from under the beam, which also impacted on the sound. It was just about possible to do that with four of us in a row and a little bit squeezy with five of us, when Keith sang in on a track.

We had terrific support from the team at The Folk, and it’s apparent that this process of being in the building to record has changed our relationship with the space. And so it is that more plotting is under way! It’s also really good recording with someone who entirely understands what we’re doing and who is, therefore, able to work with us easily on capturing the music in exactly the right way. I’m very glad we’ve not gone a more conventional route with this, because this whole process has become something really interesting in its own right.

Spells for the Second Sister

I have a new free novel up on my ko-fi store. This is a novel mostly set in Gloucestershire, and in parallel words, and it gets increasingly bonkers as it goes along. This is an overtly queer book, there’s a nonbinary character and the main character is both bisexual and polyamorous. It’s not graphic on the sexual side, or in terms of violence but it does get decidedly peculiar at times.

We follow the main character – Kathleen – from the age of 14 onwards, checking in at seven year intervals. This structure enabled me to have a first person narrator who does not know the whole story for most of the book. It also allowed me to explore a person growing and changing over a much longer timeframe than I’ve previously tried in a novel. Without giving away too much of the plot, Kathleen ends up finding out what it means to become a sorcerer, and for this book, what that means is not what it usually means. This is a speculative story, heavy on the magic and poking around in ideas of identity and how we change over time. It’s urban-ish fantasy in that much of it is set in a reality akin to our own, but it doesn’t really follow the habits of that genre.

Here’s a video of me talking about the book and reading the introduction – 

You can pick up a free ebook version here – https://ko-fi.com/s/f312aa059a

There are no consequences to picking it up as a free ebook, the site does not add you to anything or add you to a mailing list or anything like that, so far as I know. So, it is genuinely free. If you want to pay for it, there’s the option to pick your own amount. If you read it and like it enough to want to pay for it in retrospect, ko-fi donations are also an option. If you’re on a tight budget and can’t afford to buy books, please just take a free copy, along with anything else in my ko-fi store that appeals to you.

I’m able to do this sort of thing because people who can afford to buy books do so, and because there are some wonderfully generous people who support me on Patreon. 

There is also a paperback version available from Amazon, for anyone who feels really keen.

Ominous Songs

I am delighted to announce that I’m recording an album with The Ominous Folk of Hopeless, Maine! This is one of the projects I’ve been making vague, hopeful noises about for a few months – not wanting to say anything until I was sure it was happening. As it’s taken a while to go from deciding to do it, to being able to start recording, it is as well that I waited.

Back last year I also intimated that I hoped to be working more with Keith Errington, and that’s now officially and definitely happening, too. We’ve worked together on a number of steampunk and Hopeless, Maine projects at this point and there’s going to be a lot more in the future. He’s a remarkable chap with a huge array of skills and talents and I’ve yet to find something where we don’t collaborate well.

More about all of this over on the Hopeless, Maine blog.

The Hopeless Vendetta

We’re very excited to announce that The Ominous Folk of Hopeless, Maine are recording an album. People have been asking us for CDs for a while now, and we started thinking in earnest about this back in the autumn and exploring what kind of space, studio, and technical support we were going to need.

We wanted to capture the sound of us live and we needed someone to work with who has the gear and also understands the sort of thing we’re trying to achieve. We needed a collaborator we could trust, and once we started looking at studios, and realised Lucas Drinkwater was emigrating, it all got a bit complicated. No one else locally was producing anything that meant we knew they could do what we needed.

And then it all became delightfully uncomplicated, because it turns out that we already had someone in the Hopeless, Maine family with…

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Eldritch body positivity

I’m not sure when I last wore lipstick, but it was years ago. I’m generally not very good at anything that feels like performing femininity, or trying to be attractive. By nature I am a scruffy goblin.

However, here I am in this photo, wearing actual proper lipstick, and trying to do something a bit deliberately sexy with my mouth. It turns out that if I set out to be a slightly seductive eldritch abomination, I’m much more comfortable with where that takes me. Sexy swamp goblin might be thinkable.

I’ve been in a kind of non-space with a lot of things for some time now. I’m trying to figure out how to be, and how to express myself around how I present. I’m questioning how I relate to my body. There are ongoing explorations around being embodied as a person who experiences a lot of pain, and whether there’s anything I can do about said pain. 

The context for this photo was making a video for an online event that’s going to happen in February. Last January we did an online Hopeless, Maine event – hosted online by SteamMedia https://www.youtube.com/@steammedia . For this year we have the same core team, and some new contributors, and we’re working under the broader banner of The Eldritch Broadcasting Corporation. While I was messing about with the lighting for the video, I took a few photos, and I rather like this one.

Modern beauty standards are narrow and demanding, and mostly about trying to sell us more stuff. Being an eldritch abomination is cheap – just a few smears of face paint required. It doesn’t matter about age, or gender or body shape. Being an eldritch abomination is much more inclusive and accommodating. It turns out that for me that also feels a lot more powerful.

Rem Wigmore book reviews

These two books follow straight on from each other, and it does work to read them back to back. Foxhunt has been out for a while Wolfpack is coming out this January. I figured it made sense to review the two in one go.

This story is set in a future that has come back from the brink and where humanity is trying to make better choices. That makes for very hopeful reading. There a mix of people going back to older ways of doing things, alongside imaginative future tech and lots of solar power. There’s also a lot to think about around how people organise themselves – this mostly goes on in the background but it’s a source of richness within the books. The world building is deftly done and engaging and I would cheerfully spend a lot more time reading stories set in this future. The main character is trans, there are a lot of trans and nonbinary characters and everyone introduces themselves with their pronouns, which is wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever previously read anything that was so entirely queer and it made me very happy.

There are definite threads for Pagans in these novels. The author clearly knows their mythology, and draws on it in all sorts of interesting ways. There is also reverence for the earth and for the Green threading through it all, which I found really resonant.

If it sounds like your sort of thing, get in there!

Foxhunt

For me the heart of this story is how the main character – Orfeus – grows as a person and learns about herself. At the start of the book, Orfeus presents as cocky and sassy and seems fairly self-assured. However, as the story progresses, it becomes obvious that Orfeus isn’t close to many people and really has no idea who to trust or how to relate to most people. There’s a huge learning curve for the character around understanding other people and forming more substantial relationships. It’s really interesting watching a main character who has very little idea what they’ve got into and who makes terrible choices about how to react. I found that refreshing, and opens the story up in ways that a more competent character could not have done.

Overall this is a charming romp of a book right up until it takes a very uneasy turn towards the end. The story plays out well.

Wolfpack

The second novel introduces more perspectives and we see this future reality through more eyes – which I really liked. Wolfpack builds on the ideas from the first book, expands the cast and develops the characters we’re already familiar with. It’s a stronger novel, and much more emotionally intense than Foxhunt. I came very close to crying over this story on multiple occasions. There are themes of community, relationship, trust, and hope. The way all of that plays out gave me a lot of feelings and the emotional journeys of the characters are really powerful. It’s a story about how we move on together, how we heal together, how we look after each other and this is such good and needful stuff to be talking about. And it’s good to encounter those themes with characters who wear cool masks and have nifty flying bikes and surprise owls.

Find out more on the author’s website – https://www.remwigmore.com/

Using your voice

Voices are very powerful tools, and vocalising has some really interesting effects. One of the things that can make group ritual more powerful than solitary ritual is that when we’re working together, voices are usually deployed. It can be tempting to do a solitary ritual mostly in your head, while doing it outloud can feel weird and exposed. Being self-conscious can be a genuine barrier to doing any kind of spiritual work, but I think it’s worth pushing through if you can.

When everything happens inside our own heads, it can easily be hurried and also jumbled up with whatever else is in our heads at the time. Speaking something is a way of asserting it as your focus. Spells, prayers, rituals, affirmations – there are many things we might do because we want to change ourselves or the wider world. Vocalising creates focus, which means that our brains are more engaged with those intentions.

If you’re trying to put an intention or a prayer into the world, then having it go out from your body as sound is a way of making that happen. 

There’s a significant psychological aspect to this, too. Hearing yourself say something can be deeply affecting. Thinking the words ‘I need to heal’ is not the same as hearing yourself saying them. Again, if you’re trying to change something, the process of hearing yourself saying something out loud can be very effective. If something is too difficult, or too painful to say, or exposes you in ways you don’t like then that can also help guide your actions. I’m not averse to curses, but saying them aloud can make it really obvious whether you’re seeking justice or being vindictive. It’s not difficult to say ‘I hope this person gets everything they deserve’ but even in rage, it can be more obvious if you’re ill wishing someone just to be vindictive.

I find that spoken words don’t have to be very loud in order to be more effective than doing things in my head. It is enough to whisper, because that’s still a physical thing to do and brings in all of the aspects I’ve described above.

I don’t really know how this would work for someone with impaired hearing, or for anyone deaf or experiencing limitations around speaking. If anyone has any insight and is willing to share in the comments, that would be great.

Blog Issues

Dear regular readers of the blog, those of you who are here often are likely aware that there have been some weird things going on in the comments in the last couple of months. I think it will be useful to those of you who have felt disquiet, to explain as best I can what’s going on.

First up, this is just one person. I wasn’t sure initially, but I am now and have been for some time. They use multiple identities to try and make it seem as though there are a lot of people who have taken against me. Whether this is supposed to make me uncomfortable, or intended to impact on you, my readers, I am not sure.

I do not know who this person is or why they are doing what they do. Clearly this is someone who very much needs attention – perhaps having a whole post written about them will help with that. I’ve let the comments through and replied to them partly because at the moment this person doesn’t seem to know how to seek attention in healthy ways, and at least this is a fairly safe space for them. While I do get frustrated and irritated sometimes, I’m doing my best to handle all of this constructively, and your patience is greatly appreciated around all of that.

There are people in my past who I have seriously annoyed, but this person doesn’t write like any of them. I don’t know if there’s any real reason for the anger they keep bringing. I try hard not to cause harm, and if I mess up through ignorance or lack of attention then I want to know about that so I can do better. That’s an open invitation to tell me if you have a problem with something I’ve done.

If this is a case of taking something out on me that has nothing to do with me… all I can do is counsel against that. It’s a way of behaving that does not serve the person doing it, and will not fix anything. If this is about the desire to provoke me into behaving differently, then that’s a bit of a waste of time, because I’m simply being myself here and there isn’t anything significantly different from how I am responding that can be revealed by needling me. 

I’m not especially upset about the comments on my own account. I have spent quite a lot of time wondering what on earth could be going on in a person’s head to lead them to act in this way. I hope the person doing this is able to seek more fulfilling ways of spending their time. I wish they would spend time working through their own issues in a supportive environment, but I recognise not everyone has the friend support to do that, and not everyone can afford therapy or counselling. The internet is full of free resources though. It is much better to invest time in learning, healing and changing yourself than it is to take out your frustration on some random person online.

For most of the life of this blog, I’ve been proud to say ‘do read the comments’ – a rare and delightful position to be in, considering the nature of the internet. I’ve been blessed with readers who respond thoughtfully, who open out discussions, add insight and who challenge in really good ways. Many of you have been reading and responding for years, and I treasure those interactions. I’m not going to change any aspect of what I do in response to what’s going on, and I will wait and see if this person either finds the courage to tell me what their problem is, or gets bored with me, or finds something better. I wish them well, I wish them opportunities to learn, and grow and become a healthier, happier sort of person.

If any of this is impacting on you then please do flag it up in the comments. I don’t want to make regular readers uncomfortable over this. I would rather keep those you you who benefit from the blog comfortable, and I’m not honestly sure what the best way to handle any of this really is.