letter #14
we're all making our own sense of things
I want to let you know that in this letter I'm not talking about depression, but I am talking about things in that vicinity ... I just say that so that if you don't feel up for that kind of thing when this lands in your inbox, you can delete before reading.
...
Sometimes, and for no particular reason, I have a day, a couple of days, a week where life feels heavy. It's not because something enormous happens or something changes. It's just that the light dims a little and the shadows grow less grey, more dark. It's not depression--I've had an experience with depression and although this has similarities to depression it is not that.
I am grateful that it isn't depression (I'll be pretty pleased if I get to the end of my life without having that experience again). I'm grateful too for the deeper understanding I've learned about this feeling of disequilibrium over the years. One of the things about growing older with yourself as your constant companion is coming to have such a deep understanding of yourself and your rhythms, and becoming much less likely to be blindsided by yourself. I am not only more familiar with more of the signs, I can also recognise those signs in their earliest and lightest manifestations. Some of these things are chemical--that twitch in a certain part of my brain I would never be able to describe properly. Some things are emotional--I'm frustrated by tiny moments like my keys getting caught in the bottom of my bag. Some are physical--I'm a bit more clumsy. But because I know I've felt it before, I also know that if I use all of the tricks I've gathered over the years it's only a matter of time and the feeling will pass, equilibrium will be restored. Mostly what I do is focus on the one thing I'm doing in that moment. Read this chapter. Write this paragraph. Slice this tomato. Talk with this person. I think it's a form of mindfulness, although I think my thought processes are far too scatty to ever say I'm being mindful. (And I want to be really clear here that while some of these might be things that some people who have depression use, I would never say mindfulness or exercise or any of the other things I use to shift my mood are ways to cure depression).
Even though I've got all the tricks (including the trick of recognition which is perhaps the best trick of them all), I'm finding it pretty tricky to implement the tricks these days. Are we really facing end times? The climate, our politics, what feels like an emboldened surge in racism and misogyny ... it takes more than a bit of mindfulness to work your way through that. In between the pictures of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, I found our Prime Minister's behaviour in Fiji confronting to say the least. I won't got on, I'm sure you get the picture.
Social media isn't helping. It isn't just that its a constant scroll of pictures of men I'd rather not see (see previous paragraph), facebook in particular I find almost unbearable. Its interface has always been ugly, but it seems to be filled with more and more to take my attention from the things that I want to be attending to. I used to love the conversations, the links to music I hadn't heard or articles I hadn't read, but I can hardly see them anymore. If they're even there (and I'm not sure they are), they're impossible to see through the ads and the memes and the weird repetition of the same posts time after time, comments sometimes reading latest to recentest, othertimes recentest to latest.
Some of my issue with social media is my own fault for the way I've trained my algorithm. For example, for a while I was horribly fascinated by the ads that popped up about 'how to write and launch your course' (what course? why?); or the ones about how to make your live streams pop ... so now my feed is an endless stream of people telling me how to grow my instagram or pinterest followers by 10,000 people in a month. I just don't get it, not any of it...WHY would I want 10,000 people to follow me? WHY would anyone want to watch me streaming live? Why? Internets, I do not understand you.
Over the last year or so, I've noticed that while the mood still always lifts, left in its wake is an ongoing sense of low-level grumpiness, high-level irritation. Part of this I do attribute to the overwhelming sense of powerlessness I feel in the face of political and environmental reality. Part I attribute to my plummeting levels of oestrogen. Part I attribute to what it means to be fifty in a middle class life, making peace with your flaws and mistakes you can't undo; watching as friends face challenges you would do anything to soften. And part I accept as simply characteristic of what it means to be me.
I've had to search for some new tricks and one of the biggest changes I've made is to go for a more light-hearted approach to my writing. Not that you'd know it from this letter which, on re-reading does sound a little gloomy. And not that I want a complete change in direction, but I do want to mix it up a bit. The new show I'm writing is much ... I'm not sure of the word, the best I can think of is 'sillier'. It's still got a death and it's still got some patches that are fairly dark, but it is lighter in tone and more clearly a comedy than anything I've produced before.
Earlier this year, I rewrote the ending of my next novel, trying to get away from the utterly devastating ending that was there. Interestingly, in changing the ending from something that was flat-out devastating to something that was simply challenging, I found a lot more nuance not only in the story, but in my language too. Then, over the weekend, I went a step further and decided to rewrite it all in the first person ... I'm still playing around with it to see how that will go, but so far I feel a greater sense of playfulness in the language. Of course, it does mean that a novel I'd thought was pretty much finished needs a lot more work.
Again, I find myself coming towards what feels like it should be the end of the letter and I feel that I haven't given you much in the way of a cohesive narrative or come to much of a conclusion. But back when I used to write letters a lot I don't think they ever came to any particular conclusion, they just stopped when I got to the end of the page or the bottom of the aerogramme or couldn't squeeze anything more into the postcard because I had already looped along the side, then upside down around the stamp and down the other side. I think we're at the point, don't you?
With every love
Tracy xx
PS I've been knitting a lot which means I haven't been able to read. But I've been listening. Do you like Beccy Cole? I love her. Her new album, Lioness, is wonderful, and it was produced by an all-woman team. I think I've listened to at least one song off that album every day ever since it was released. (True to the form of this letter, I'm a little bit grumpy because I've missed out on tickets to her upcoming performance in Adelaide. The venue where she's playing is small and has wonderful shows, but they do a completely rubbish job of their publicity and don't seem to have a mailing list so I keep not hearing about things until they've sold out. Anyway, if you did get tickets, you will have a great night.)
If you're in Adelaide, I'm remounting The Forgettory in October, and tickets are on sale here.