What doesn’t kill you can still make you quite unhappy

Appointments, little owls and zen monkeys

Outside the window I watch a great tit navigate the molehills I hopefully call a lawn in search of nesting materials, an intrepid mountaineer of her kind. Perhaps it’s the same bird I saw stealing an entire almond from the feeders yesterday; she looks very fat. I refuse to refill the feeders after that, sternly telling them they can only have more nuts and fat balls once they’ve eaten all the seeds. The seeds are expensive, but the birds leave until they start to sprout if they’ve got other options and you’re not firm on the matter. The long tailed tits look so bereft without fat balls I’m not firm at all. They have to weave thier mossy little nests in the hedgerow, a beautiful felting together of lichen, feathers and horsehair; they deserve a nice dinner.

Long tail tit nest from last year. A densely felted thing, spongy, almost.

I need the garden drama to distract me from all the appointments. I am not good at appointments. I do not like having to be somewhere at a particular time. It ruins my day, so for some reason I decided to schedule an appointment everyday this week. I will get used to it, I think, a kind of immersion therapy. After all, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

By Wednesday I am wondering if it will kill me. Can you die of appointments? I bet a heroine in a Victorian novel died of appointments. All the appointments mean I have less time for wandering about; this is problematic because I have memory problems so it’s only safe to write about what happened since I last wrote a newsletter. Everything else is dicey ground; I can’t remember what I wrote even quite recently; even worse, I will confidently think I can remember, so  fail to check, and write the same thing as last month. This is very embarrassing, so it’s best to stick with how many birds are at the lake (two swans, multiple ducks, no cormorants) or the blackthorn blossoming. I really like hearing about what interesting websites and books people are reading in their newsletters, but it takes me a long time to read a book because my attention span is bad, I don’t want to bore people, so I might have to give that sort of thing up.

The deficits in memory and attention are a new and exciting way living with serious mental illness has found to make me lose parts of myself. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing; at least, I don’t have that overconfidence in my identity the way some people do, as if it were a solid unchangeable thing that would remain constant even over lifetimes. The reality for anyone is that it could all change with sharp blow to the head, a fall or an infection; your personality, your youness, is held within a sort of blancmange whose operations are so complex no one really understand them, and a shift in the amount of a neurotransmitter is all it takes for it to it all slip away.  As much as identities can be as  limiting, though, the deficit in attention and memory are something I need to adapt to, which is hard.

This all ties in neatly with what I was saying last week (I think. I hope. I haven’t checked) about struggling to finish sketches in situ. I mostly end up taking my sketchbook home to finish up because struggling to focus means I get tired, and need a break fairly quickly. You could argue that I should do faster, sketchier sketches, but I am a details person and I struggle with that too. If theres something I have a talent for, it’s creating no win situations.

Workings

I haven’t been out sketching this week, as I have mostly been carving a little owl (the species, but the carving is also quite small). I wasn’t going to show you the proofs yet, as it’s probably going to be a while before I can print him properly, but he’s too nice to keep to myself.

When I am carving the tiny fiddly bits, I am always scared it won’t print at all; I never have confidence in the process. A proof print that doesn’t need much reworking is always a relief (in more ways than one, - it’s a relief print after all). I plan in meticulous detail where I’m going to carve, which is probably why I find carving lino such a peaceful refuge. I really admire people that do a loose sketch on the lino and then work out the details with a gouge, but I find sketching tiring because you have to think of where all the lines will go, which is bad enough when you don’t have to worry about ruining your print because there’s no eraser with cutting. If I plan it out first, by the time it’s on the lino, I don’t have to think at all, which is nice.

I also did a little painting of this pumpkin Doris (the horselady) gave to me in November, just for fun. There were two, but one’s been eaten. It’s has a good texture (on the outside. The texture of carving pumpkins is generally rubbish which is why this one hasn’t been eaten) that I thought would be fun to reproduce by spraying alcohol around, which I found satisfying.

Findings

I discovered Lynda Barry many eons ago when I was on retreat. I found an article on her in a Buddhist magazine featuring her drawings of zen monkeys which looked a lot like a toy monkey I’d brought with me, so she quickly became a favourite artist. This week I  reread ‘Picture This’ which is my favourite book for learning how to art. If you are struggling to art, I strongly recommend it. Also, if you are not struggling to art. Like a lot of my favourite books, it’s mostly pictures. Books with pictures are easier to read and it’s a crime adult books don’t have enough. I read Entangled Life twice and the illustrated version was far superior. Once I finished, I ordered another book that’s been on my list which gave me possibly my favourite dispatch message ever:

Arriving today: your order of One! Hundred!Demons!

I do hope I have room for them all.

Monkey on retreat

I’m not a normal person and it hadn’t struck me as particularly odd that I’d brought a monkey along to a retreat. Even when I’m trying really hard to be normal, I often fail to give the expected normal people responses; for instance, if someone tells me they went to a Tudor house and their child is now morbidly afraid of plague masks, I don’t say something normal like ‘what’s a plague mask?’, I say ‘thanks for letting me know! I’ll make sure they’re all put away next time you visit!’ Or maybe someone will say they have seen my cloak, which in itself means my pretence of deborahnomalfolk has been somewhat rumbled, but instead of moderating the situation by pretending I only have one cloak I will ask which one she saw and then be dismayed that she’s seen the red one because that’s my secret magic cloak not my everyday going out cloak.

I don’t want to make it seem like I don’t like being me. I do. Yes, I’m forgetful and I can’t focus like I used to with my eyes or my brain, but that’s small fry in the grand scheme of things. I like normal people too, but I wouldn’t like to be one.

I digress. What I’m trying to say is sometimes people try and make sense of what I do by applying normal people reason to the actions; in this instance, one of the ladies on the retreat decided I brought a monkey for moral support because it was a ‘difficult retreat’. I wasn’t finding it hard, as retreats are mostly sitting down and not thinking too much, and as I said earlier, those are things I really excel at. Eventually I asked why people thought it was difficult and I was told that once a retreatant had gone off the deep end and painted herself entirely blue.

‘Oh’ I said, like a normal person ‘have you never painted yourself blue?’