Slow on Sunday morning

Slept very badly, got up at 2am and read for a while. Dreams to do with my mother’s suicide, those old spectres that come to us at our most vulnerable hours. Lay in the dark and listened to the wind blowing across the valley and owls hooting as they hunted down by the river.

Woke to the relief of a bright windy morning. Church bells pealing out from the ugly red-brick Dutch Reformed Church up the road. Low-grade depression is just one of the occasional bugbears of recovery and I am lucky I have never been through the recurring clinical depressions I have seen friends struggle with over the years.

Making a large pot of lentil soup for lunch. The good thing about dried brown lentils is that they swell up and last for a long time. The bad thing about lentils is that they seem unending. Overseas I bought some Puy lentils in nifty cardboard packaging, tiny and brown, the caviar of lentils. They tasted of excellent chicken stock and, well, lentils.

Being poor doesn’t bother me. Being depressed is worrying because writing fiction demands a high level of imaginative interaction between invented charcaters and remembers place, and the lack of energy makes it harder.

My housemate has arrived back from church with all the village gossip bubbling out of her.

‘You’re depressed!’ she says accusingly. She can tell instantly, the same way I can detect she has toothache or arthritis or has suffered an angina attack. We know each other so well, beyond illusions.

Lentils with a sympathetic hug sounds a better prospect.

Rowing upstream

Woke from a nightmare I can’t recall and just lay in the dark with my eyes closed and praying to get through another day.

And as if by swift grace or a sprinkling of magic, the mood shifted and I could get up and drink coffee, standing at the living room window watching the wind tear across the fields, hearing my housemate sing tunelessly in the shower, seeing the little feral cat grooming herself on a low sunny wall. I hope she is not going to attack all the new baby birds, sparrows and house martins, that learn to fly in the front garden, hopping from verandah eaves to the wall to the ground.

So difficult to feel this churlish within, a mix of irritability and dull misery. So ungracious. It isn’t as serious as depression, but rather like trying to row a heavy boat upstream, working oars against the current or incoming tide.

The answer, of course, is to go out and do something for others, something simple and practical and useful. And not to make much ado about it, just to do it. So I shall help out with the homebased carers and cook a large split-pea soup and then sit with those who might need some help being fed. It isn’t much and I am not good company but I won’t be self-stuck in my unhappiness all day.

Then I shall make an Asian supper with pork, grind up coriander seeds and star anise and fenugreek, chop lemongrass and garlic, play around with fish sauce and soy and sesame oil, squeeze fresh lemons, mince root ginger. Heat up the big electric wok. When I was in the UK, so much was readymade and prepackaged that almost nobody made their own food from scratch and that was very offputting. Sitting on the kitchen step and pounding spices and herbs in a mortar with a heavy granite pestle is the most heartening therapy imaginable.

What I really need of course is AA offline; to be able to sit face-to-face with others in recovery who are telling my story and reminding me why I need to stay sober and how they managed to do it. How I miss those draughty meeting rooms with old latticed windows that creaked and stuck, the dingy halls and circle of uncomfortable chairs, the nicotine-stained gurus, those palely loitering and despondent newcomers, the smiles and hugs and heart-rending confessions! No real-life nittygritty AA here and I am lost without it. But at least I have online AA and I am more grateful than I can say for the supportive emails and comments.

So I settle back onto my seat in the boat and take up the oars in their rusty fetlocks, resume what alcoholic poet Anne Sexton called ‘the awful rowing towards God’. The ‘awful’ is about us, the hope is all to do with God and coming home. At least I’m struggling in the right direction.

Post-Lammas Blues

Rain last night and I watched Billy Connolly on video being scathing and deliberately offensive and very funny. The writing has come to a standstill and I feel flat, exhausted and depressed. Nobody to blame and the mood will shift in a few hours or a few days.

 

When I think of my father lying in a coma in hospital on a tropical island, I wonder if he cannot die because there is so much still unresolved in his life. And verbal assurances do not change the reality he must live with, die knowing. There is no escape. The consequences of our choices and actions stay with us. When we lie or cheat or behave in cruel ways, the real unseen watcher is the self and at the end of the day that self is mercilessly truthful. Those we have victimised may be dead and gone or they may have forgiven us and moved on, but the self demands a true account.

 

Noting how often I hear through the excuses and self-pity of AA drunkalogues to the inner self looking on in a unsentimental and dispassionate way. that blunt inner knowing and naming. This is very much the case in my own life: ‘I know what my hand hath done.’ The guilt and insight and unsparing truth is all there — and that is also the liberating insight of that reality-loving self. To know what really happened. Neither victim nor monster but human, flawed and power-hungry and thoughtless.

 

When I went to bed last night, coming out of the bathroom  all steamy and scented with soaps, wrapped in a big towel, I paused at the door of the study and looked out, hoping to see a wild Welsh Lammas moon. Nothing there, just the black skies and rainy darkness. Autumn approaching, another season to be discovered anew.

 

Breathing through the fear and sadness and loneliness and trying to expereince all of this reality, to trust that I am moving forward, walking in the right direction, that a future is opening and not closing for me.

Trudging not skipping

Writing to Una back in South Africa yesterday I admitted that I was feeling depressed and flat, very demoralised about the writing going so slowly and feeling isolated over here, the future very uncertain. I have never suffered from clinical depression, but years of blotting out emtions with alcohol have taken a toll.

 

I am not very good at living a balanced life even if I share a life with somebody who has established a routine of meeting others and spending time with friends, hard work and plenty of outdoors exercise. The need to write takes up hours each day, and when it goes well I feel energised and happy. When it goes badly I want to crawl into a hole.

 

Moving here was not a geographical escape but it hasn’t been easy — sometimes my life now feels very unreal and uncertain. I don’t miss the Cape — well it is early days for that — but it is an effort adjusting to this society and the climate, the very different way of life.

 

There seems to be something missing at times and I can’t seem to access my deeper feelings except every now and again there is intense despondency or fear. I need to persist and try different ways of establishing a life and working on finding that balance. Making friends, talking more to others in AA. Perhaps I could speak more to Polly tomorrow when we go up to the cathedral gardens after the meeting.

 

I am afraid something will happen to Una, that things are not working out here. But the fears seem unbalanced and not unlike chimeras, erratic and fleeting, not grounded in realism.

 

Sunshine outdoors, the garden needing to be watered. I will go down and tidy the kitchen shortly. Have breakfast and read the Guardian. Then come back up here and try to write. Line after line, paragraph by paragraph. So many false starts and dead ends. Breaking stones, that is all, and I have to keep going.

 

This inner flatness is something I don’t quite know how to deal with — it makes me realise how I depend on my fertile imagination and the abundance of energy usually there early in the morning. This is the way I often feel towards the end of the day. But somehow to keep going and hope for a breakthrough.

 

Staying in the day, sober and learning to live sober, learning to write in a long-delayed apprenticeship, learning to live with somebody else while living with this dull self.

 

Perhaps a walk by the river might be a good idea — or some gardening. Mundane but life-restoring routines. Or perhaps I should find somebody to talk with, break the loneliness. The mood will pass, it is just a question of patience and common sense.