+ve-ity (or not)

As anyone who knows me in real life (or has been a reader of this blog for more than five minutes) will know, I have a very slight tendency towards negativity. I see problems everywhere, I have little confidence in my own abilities, I tend towards melancholy and I am a pessimist. Yes, one of those.

The problem for me, and others like me, is that in society in general, and the workplace in particular, it seems that it’s not acceptable to be negative, even when the negative thing is the true thing. For example, the other week, we were evaluating something at work. We’d had quite a few negative comments from staff, which we wanted to put into the report because we felt it was important people had the chance to have their say about the situation. But one person in our group said we should leave them out because they were too negative. But they were people’s opinions – why should they not be entitled to have their voices heard just because their feedback wasn’t positive? (We put it in the report in the end as the majority of us thought it should go in.)

Anyhow, one of my (two) new year’s resolutions was to try and be more positive, so I have decided to actually do something about this. I usually enjoy reading Oliver Burkeman’s columns in The Guardian weekend magazine, so when I saw he’d written a book called The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, I decided I would read it. Happily, I was able to download it as an e-book from the public library. [I'm still slightly over-excited about the fact that one can borrow e-books from the public library - perhaps I should write a blog post about this and get it out of my system.] I enjoyed the book, and I think it’s worth reading, particularly if the usual run of self-help books just makes you feel worse than you felt to begin with. For starters, the book describes just what a waste of time positive thinking (aka pretending everything is alright when it’s not) can be. Hooray! I felt better already.

I was going to summarise the main points of the book here, but (a) it’s probably better if you read it for yourself, and (b) this post would be too long if I did, so instead I will share the quotations used at the head of each chapter, which are a sort of summary in themselves:

Try to post for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky - Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

- Arnold Bennett, Things  That Have Interested Me

You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.

- Marlo Stanfield in The Wire

Future, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends and true and our happiness is assured.

- Ambrose Pierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 per cent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself – and there isn’t one.

- Wei Wu Wei, Ask the Awakened

Security is a kind of death, I think.

- Tennessee Williams, ‘The Catastrophe of Success‘

You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a Veal Orloff. But you can do something very good with a sow’s ear.

- Julia Child

If I had my life over I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death…without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

- Inspector Mortimer in Muriel Spark‘s Momento Mori

One of the most helpful ideas I got from the book was the idea of, when worrying about something, to think about what the worst-case scenario could really be. In most situations the worse-case scenario is probably not really going to be as bad as we might think it is, and even if it is bad, it is unlikely to be something that we really can’t cope with in some way. Also, being a brilliant procrastinator, I found the idea of procrastination being a result of  feeling that we can’t do something rather than us really, literally, not being able to do it an interesting one that I hadn’t thought of before. E.g.,  I might feel that  I’m unable to do some Hebrew exercises, but really, I am literally (physically) able to do them, I just don’t feel like it. So, the answer to procrastination is to just get on and do things.

I was also interested to learn that the expression “X  [person] is a failure” and the idea of people being “failures” only came into being during the growth of capitalism in the late 1800s when people started to get credit ratings, and bad credit ratings came to determine a person’s “moral worth” as well as their financial status.  Also, there is a particularly intriguing chapter on the evils of goal setting that should be read by all managers, IMHO.

In general, Burkeman advises embracing such ‘negative’ things as failure and uncertainty, because seeking after success and security are likely to make us more unhappy. None of this is news, but, when you look around at society and at the workplace in particular you would be forgiven for thinking that it was. I suspect that most people secretly (or not so secretly) know that trying to be perfect is going to do us harm, that setting goals is not the way to get the best out of people, that it’s OK to fail, and that we need to think about death a bit more (in a good way), but ‘society’ and the way we’ve been taught to live tell us the opposite. We spend a lot of time deluding ourselves, in various ways, about a myriad of things, when, actually, if we could just see and accept reality we might just be a bit happier. 

The bad patient

This post was prompted by Liza’s post, which you may wish to read if you haven’t done so already.

After 34 years I’m still not a ‘good patient’. Even now, when faced with an invasive medical procedure, it’s quite likely that I’ll cry, panic and may even, in extreme circumstances, try to escape. I know that behaving this way isn’t not a good idea, and that it makes everyone’s jobs more difficult, and that it makes things take longer, but that doesn’t matter. When I’m in that moment of undergoing whatever unpleasant procedure it is I don’t think rationally, I just react – badly!

I think that one of the problems faced by people who have grown up with medical conditions is that sometimes the medical profession expect us to be well-behaved, because we ‘should be used to it by now’.  And, of course, no one really expects someone in their mid-thirties to behave like a five year old when having an injection. As well as this, there is the idea of ‘the good patient’, who suffers stoically and bravely – the word ‘patient’ taking on its full meaning here.* As Liza has discovered, this patient is the one that medical professionals really want; someone passive and uncomplaining, who makes their job as easy as possible – which is understandable enough. If I was a doctor I wouldn’t want to treat me either!

Like ‘good’ patients, ‘bad’ patients also need people, especially medical professionals, to look beyond their facades and to understand why they’re reacting in what can seem like an extreme and unnecessary way. While ‘good’ patients’ feelings and fears can be overlooked because the person is being quiet and calm, those of ‘bad’ patients’ can also be easily dismissed; under that useful phrase “just making a fuss”. In both cases, the person’s feelings are not addressed or taken seriously**

Speaking as a ‘bad’ patient, I don’t mean or want to be difficult. My behaviour is not premeditated. I don’t want special treatment, either***. I’m just frightened – yes, even though I’m 34 and I’ve undergone several operations, dozens of procedures and hundreds of tests – I’m still frightened, and unlike Liza, I’m not very good at controlling that fear.

I’m working on not being such a bad patient, but I’m not sure I’m ever going to be a good one.

__________________________________

*This idea of the ‘good patient’ , and where that idea comes from is something I’m trying to write about in another post, which may or may not ever be ready for public consumption.

** I must say that it’s not always the case that patients’ feelings are dismissed. Part of the reason why I think the work of Adult Congenital Heart Specialist Nurses is really valuable is because they are there to listen to patients’ concerns and feelings, and actually talk through things like the emotional impact of surgery.

***At least not consciously, but I suppose the fact that I’m protesting against the procedure being done to me indicates that I do want ‘special treatment’ in the sense that I want to be allowed to escape the procedure!

PMS and [my] mental health

Yesterday I discovered, via the Singing Librarian’s blog post on the subject, that this week (21st-27th May) is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK. I’ve been thinking about writing something about my battles with (or rather defeats at the hands of) Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS) for a while now, so I thought that perhaps now would be as good a time as any, seeing as PMS is something that affects the mental health of many women (and possibly, indirectly, the health of some men as well).

I wasn’t sure whether it would really be OK to write this post under the banner of ‘mental health awareness’, because I think a lot of people probably don’t think of PMS as something that affects mental health. Or, alternatively, they just think something that makes women grouchy and unreasonable at their ‘time of the month’ and write it off as ‘women’s problems’, or women making a fuss, or just something not to take very seriously. I was (and am) a bit worried about this post coming across as me making a fuss about nothing, even though I know it’s not nothing. However, as Mr C said, if people think PMS isn’t something to be taken seriously they should talk to the people who have to live with it.

So how does PMS actually affect mental health? During the menstrual cycle the levels of  particular chemicals in the brain change. When there are changes to levels of chemicals which affect mood, such as serotonin, this can lead to symptoms such as those I experience:

• feeling angry for no apparent reason
• feeling very aggressive – lashing out at people or (preferably) objects (verbally or physically)
• anxiety
• feeling in despair
• sadness
• feelings of hopelessness
• crying for no real reason
• low self-esteem/self-hatred
• restlessness (I have to do things and can’t really sit still)
• or, alternatively, inability to do anything because I feel too sad
•  food cravings

See the NHS webpages about PMS for more information about causes and symptoms.

I wonder whether being a person who is quite anxious and doesn’t have a massive amount of self-esteem anyway makes me more likely to suffer the psychological effects of PMS. It would not surprise me if this was the case!  I find that my symptoms can last for quite a lot of the month, to varying degrees of severity, but, again, I’m not always sure whether I’m feeling the way I am because of the PMS, or whether it’s just me being me. Sometimes it gets to the point where I feel like when I’m feeling OK is just a short respite from the majority of the time when I’m not, but not every month is the same.

When I’ve felt really bad, I’ve seriously considered going to see my GP, but I’m a bit worried she’d just tell me to go away (in a nice way), and, anyway, I’m not really sure what she can do, apart from prescribe medication – the side of effects of which might make me feel worse than I do already. I’ve decided to make some lifestyle changes to see if these help, for example trying to avoid caffeine and alcohol, and eating regular healthy snacks to try and avoid ups and downs in blood sugar levels which can affect mood. I’m also making a chart to monitor how I feel each day, scoring myself, with ‘well-balanced’ being 0 and then plus or minus scores as appropriate. It’s not very scientific, but I’m hoping that monitoring my mood will help me make more sense of it, and if I ever do decide to go the GP I can take my chart as evidence!

In the meantime, and in the spirit of Mental Health Awareness week, here are a few things that I find are good for my mental health:

• Singing! This has been scientifically proven to be good for your mind. Hooray!
• Walking. Even just walking up the stairs instead of taking the lift makes me feel a bit better.
• Good conversation and spending time with people I like.
• Playing the flute (which I don’t do often enough).
• Reading a good book. Anything that sucks me in is good – it doesn’t have to be fiction.
• Learning Hebrew. I find this strangely relaxing! I suppose because it demands concentration, so I have less mind-space to, e.g., worry about things.
• Writing things down. I don’t mean necessarily writing down my feelings, but maybe just writing down the things I’m worried about, or writing down what I really want to say about a situation but wouldn’t really say in real life – it can help get things out of my system a bit.

I’ve written about my experiences of PMS before, and I’m not entirely sure why I’ve felt the need to write about it again. I suppose it’s been on my mind (literally and otherwise) a lot recently. I’ve felt like it’s been getting worse, particularly the anger and aggression, and writing about it helps me to sort out my own feelings about it (see above!), as well as hopefully being of some use to people who might be going through the same things and thinking they’re the only ones doing so.

Alas

• My computer is ill. It keeps turning itself off without warning.
• My (not really my) sewing machine is ill. It keeps turning itself on without warning.
• My plants are are being eaten by woodlice (indoors).
• My level of anger/upset about these things is totally disproportionate to their actual importance.*
• Is disproportionate really a word? Firefox doesn’t seem to think so.

Stuff I’ve been doing recently

Recently, among other things, I’ve been:

• Reading Locked Rooms, by Laurie R. King, starring Sherlock Holmes…and  his wife. I’m enjoying it more than I expected to. In fact, I think it’s rather good.
• Before that, I read Understanding Jesus, by Alistair McGrath, and The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman.
• Continuing to knit the purple gloves. Unfortunately I don’t think they’re going to be ready for my colleague’s birthday. I’ve done one, and I’m about a quarter of the way through the other one.
• Cataloguing some really unpleasant DVDs.
• Watching fireworks. We went to visit my parents and went to the first fireworks display I’ve been to for about fifteen years. It was good, but cold.
• Watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I think I must have seen it about twenty times, but I still like it.
• Getting trapped in doors. Well, OK, this only happened once, but it wasn’t very nice. It was the front doors of the Shiny New Learning Centre, which I’ve never fully trusted not to attack me, and I was obviously right not to. Perhaps they know…
• Being fed up. I am in a fed up, grumpy, irritable, angry, negative, whiny, annoyed (and annoying) phase at the moment. It has lasted quite a long time and I hope it goes away soon. I’m at the stage where I’m actually fed up of being fed up.
• Wearing skirts. I’m still wearing skirts (and dresses). I think I might like it.

Childish

This is in response to the Post A Day prompt ‘What makes you feel like you’re still a kid?’

I don’t  consciously feel like an adult very often (but does anyone?). I look around me at other people and how they go about their lives doing what I consider to be ‘grown up’  things –  making decisions, buying houses, driving cars, having careers and I just don’t know how they do it. I have no real idea about mortgages or pensions,  I can’t drive and I don’t really have any ambition concerning my career. Also, I’m rubbish at making decisions. I can barely decide whether or not I want a cup of tea, never mind which house to buy. [I'm not looking for a house, this is just an example.] I suppose the fact that I consider certain things that I’m not doing to be ‘grown up’ things says quite a lot in itself – I do know that doing certain things does not make you an adult, and not doing them doesn’t make you a child, or childish, I’m just saying that not doing them makes me feel less like an adult than I think I should.

See, it’s all about me. How childish.

Other things that make me feel like a child (as I’m British I can’t really use the word ‘kid’ without thinking of goats, sorry) are: other people (particularly meeting new ones), medical procedures, well-dressed women, appraisals, being criticised, being naughty (this is obviously a very rare occurrence), being patronised, feeling incompetent, feeling helpless, feeling embarrassed.

Some people seem to think that feeling like a child is a good thing, but, really, I have no desire whatsoever to re-live my childhood, except perhaps for the times when I was lost in a good book or doing well at school. It wasn’t an unhappy childhood, as a whole,  it was just a childhood, with its worries and difficulties and fears as well as plenty of fun and enjoyment. It was a wonderful, privileged, childhood compared to what many experience. I think all childhoods are difficult really, whatever rose-tinted glow we try to see them through as adults. I was a worrier as a child (no change there, then), so I think there was always this ‘something bad’ at the back of my mind and I don’t remember ever feeling truly free of it. Being ill a lot as a child probably didn’t  help but it wasn’t all about that. I just worried about lots of things.

Oh dear, I’m not being very positive, am I? Something nice that makes me feel like a child. It would have to be food related, of course. Jelly and blancmange, the blancmange preferably having been made in a rabbit-shaped mould and then put on a plate and surrounded by green jelly for grass. It’s making me smile just thinking about it.

La Corona and the Tin Frog

Recently, with my cataloguing hat on, I stumbled across one of my favourite childhood books, La Corona and the Tin Frog, written by Russell Hoban and illustrated by Nicola Bayley. It was waiting on my desk one day, and when I saw it I was immediately transported back in my mind to my childhood, when I used to go into the front room and take this book off the shelf. It’s quite a tall book, although not very fat, so it lives on the bottom shelf at home – easy for a child to get to.

The book is a inter-connected collection of stories about various seemingly inanimate objects who actually have hopes, dreams and adventures of their own, but they can only come alive and pursue these just before the clock strikes midnight. Although this book might sound quite tame, when I saw it lying on my desk the feeling I had was a mixture of nostalgia and ominousness, because, as a child, I found bits of it quite frightening – so much so that I remembered the feelings quite clearly, twenty-odd years later.

The main thing that frightened me about it was in the story ‘The Tin Horseman’, which is (as you might expect) about a horseman made of tin, who is in love with the beautiful lady in the weather-castle. He sees her looking out through the weather-castle window and vows to rescue her from her entrapment there, but he is very afraid of the monkey inside the puzzle box. [It's one of those puzzles where you have to roll the little box with the ball-bearings in it and try and get the ball-bearings to stay in the eyes of whatever animal is drawn in the box - hopefully you know the kind I mean!] Eventually, he overcomes his fear and rescues the lady, and the evil sorcerer (who, it turns out, was keeping the lady prisoner by means of enchantment involving fear of the monkey puzzle box (if I remember rightly)) ends up trapped in the puzzle box instead of the monkey.

The book is beautifully illustrated, but it was (and is, still, a bit) the pictures that made me afraid. Well, I don’t know if afraid is the right word – more discomfited, somehow. The picture of the monkey looking out of the puzzle box was one that I didn’t really linger on, because they monkey in it looks rather malevolent, but the picture of the sorcerer trapped in the puzzle box (which I think might be the only way you find out the final conclusion of the story) made me very uneasy indeed. I didn’t like looking at it at all.

This probably all sounds a bit weird. I suspect that when you’re a child things like book illustrations have a bigger effect on you than they would do had you read the same book as an adult, but I find that the feelings I had about books as a child, whether good or bad, have stayed with me into adulthood. The power of a good book, I suppose.

Just call me Nancy

Recently, I have been feeling like Nancy Pearl, or rather the librarian action figure (doll) version of her. This is not because I’ve been demonstrating my amazing shushing action (I’m actually not very good at telling people to be quiet – the irony!), but more because I feel how Nancy looks – at least the doll version of her. As I said yesterday, the real Nancy Pearl is quite beautiful and elegant, very successful and definitely not boring (see her website) and this is not how I feel. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I feel like the stereotypical version of a librarian  – old, grey, plain and dull.

Before anyone gets upset, there is of course nothing wrong with being old, but I think there is something wrong with feeling old and (metaphorically) grey when you’re actually 32.

I know it really shouldn’t matter how people look or dress, but it does, and I have come to realise that I dress in a manner that is rather similar to my mum – in fact, she dresses in a more interesting and wider variety of clothes than I do. I have improved my dress a bit – I started wearing coloured cardigans to work when I began working as a library assistant (I used to wear black), but my basic outfit is still the same – black trousers, mainly white shirts and cardigan.  My hair has been basically the same my whole life – although I managed to grow my fringe out, thank goodness, so it’s not quite as bad as it was pre-2005.  Out of work, things are a bit better – I have a wide variety of t-shirts and similar, which I wear with jeans and…cardigans. Hmm.

I feel dull. People look at me as if I’m not there, or they just don’t look at me at all. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing until you actually want to talk to someone, when it can get quite embarassing after you’ve spent five minutes standing in front of them trying to get their attention and they just don’t notice you.  It’s like I’m invisible.

Of course this may not be anything to do with how I dress and is much more likely to be due to my slightly-less-than-assertive nature, but that and my dress sense are probably related.  I’m wondering whether changing the way I dress, or my hair, or both, or something, would make me feel less grey and act more assertively, or whether I would just feel self-conscious and silly. I think the latter is more likely. Also, there is quite a lot of me that thinks/knows that it’s frivolous and shallow to worry about how one looks and it’s what’s on the inside that counts yada yada…

But I really don’t want to feel metaphorically grey and be ignored anymore.  Maybe I just need to think of more interesting things to say. That and wear a dress and high heels and dye my hair an outlandish colour. Maybe I should just start by wearing different coloured shirts and see how it goes from there.

How much junk food can a girl eat in one day?

I had a migraine this afternoon/evening. In a way, this was a good thing, because I think the chemical changes in my brain that occured as part of the migraine attack got me out of what was a rather grumpy mood. They also made me crave bad food. So, I ate a bag of Maltesers, followed by a packet of Doritos and then, when I got to the station, I ate a packet of Randoms.  Not good for my health, I know. However, it could not be helped (well, it probably could if I’d had any willpower at the time) and at least I wasn’t wallowing in self-pity anymore.  I took my medicine early enough, so, fortunately, no horrible pain ensued.

Now I feel tired and weird and I think I’m beginning to feel grumpy again.

I know I’m very lucky to not always get pain with my migraines.

Me? Avoiding things? Surely not…

This was written in answer to the Plinky prompt ‘What are you avoiding?’.

Hmm, what am I avoiding? Nothing in particular at the moment – not consciously, anyway. Generally, though, I am probably one who would rather avoid things I don’t like than confront them. I suppose this is the case with most people, although I have heard that there are some people who enjoy confrontation. I think I probably know a few of them, actually.

Personally, I would almost always rather avoid any kind of confrontation or what I perceive as a potential cause of confrontation. This is one reason why I was not suited to my previous job!

Although you might not believe this if you know me in real life, or if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, I try to avoid showing negative emotions in public. If I do get visibly upset in front of people, it will be because I haven’t managed to hide somewhere in time.

One of the (it now seems like many) things I try to avoid is decision-making because I am rubbish at it. Sometimes I can’t even decide whether or not I want a cup of tea! It drives poor Mr C a bit mad.

Occasionally, I just want to avoid everything and everyone and not emerge from my bed or my house, depending on how extreme my desire for avoidance is. Fortunately, I usually have things I have to do, so I’m unable to hide myself away for very long.

Hmm…I think I avoid things more than I thought I did when I started writing this post! I will try to be a braver bookmouse from now on as I don’t think so much avoidance is very healthy!