Words that sing

I think I understand, now, why I’ve recently been experiencing a bit more sadness about my ex than I’ve been used to in recent months.

It’s very simple - I feel lonely just now. It’s a loneliness that is an inevitable part of starting a new life in a new place. I am isolated in the office because of the nature of the job, which will not really change. And I’m isolated in my personal life because it takes time to meet people when you’ve just arrived. This will change, indeed is already changing, and I’m familiar enough with this process of relocating myself that I can wait patiently and proactively to make new friends.

But what I hadn’t expected was that feeling lonely in my life in general would make me feel lonely for a partner. Not my ex, but the person I thought he was when we first met - or someone with some of the same qualities.

I miss that feeling of having someone on your side, who’s there for you when you need them as you’re there for them when they need you. Someone who’s there to do things with - making it safer and more fun to explore a new country. Yes, I miss that. And the stab of pain at the weekend was the memory of how it felt to have those hopes so cruelly and suddenly betrayed - the pain of finding that someone who I thought was on my side didn’t respect or trust me. That he was damaging rather than strengthening my confidence and happiness. That he couldn’t bear to be in my company, and any contact with me was increasing the intensity of his distress and fear.

The wound left by that betrayal has largely healed now, which is why I was surprised to feel that pain again. The loneliness of starting a new life just brought it all a bit closer to the surface than I expected.

Still, I am already making progress in filling my new life with interesting people, and so I know this sensitivity will soon fade again. This process goes in phases of pain and learning - they’re much gentler now, and don’t distress me even a fraction as much as they used to. But still there is a lot to learn from each new period of sensitivity.

… is what it feels like at the moment to be conducting delicate discussions with my team and with external contacts in Spanish.

These discussions would be difficult enough anyway, but they are made so much harder by having to struggle for the correct vocabulary, not to mention constantly being unsure of the nuances of what I’m saying. My Spanish is pretty good, but I’ve not used it for a while so it’s rather rusty. And sitting through two hour meetings about complicated issues in Spanish is really draining my mental energy - not to mention giving introductory speeches to workshops! There are times, like now, when I just feel mentally exhausted and unable to think or speak any more, even in English.

It’s inevitable to feel under pressure during the first weeks of a new job, particularly one as challenging as this. I have been expecting that pressure, and I have been dealing with it pretty well. But when, as occasionally happens, I have the opportunity to speak to someone in English, I realise just how much of the pressure and tension comes simply from the difficulties of operating in another language.

Still, it’s a question of the base of comparison. If I could use Spanish as precisely as I can use English, clearly I would be a bit more effective at my job. But a more useful (and encouraging!) comparison is with how much worse things would be if I didn’t speak Spanish at all! It makes a lot of important things possible - without being able to speak Spanish there are people I would only be able to speak to through an interpreter. And it’s a true cliche that people do really appreciate my efforts. It will also get easier as I get more used to using Spanish and specifically using the common terms in my professional field.

So perhaps threading a needle wearing ski gloves would be a more accurate simile. Not easy, but so much better than trying to thread a needle without hands!

Something inside the human yearns to be visible,
Whether as a diva lime-lit on the stage,
Or a writer proud to publish her scribble.
Something to show when we arrive at old age,

A souvenir of the lives we have been touching.
Yet the words and sounds slip from our fingers,
Revealing as cliched the phrases we thought fetching,
Untamed is the symmetry of our mind’s tigers,

Becoming too self-critical is the ultimate buzzkill.
As a child it was easier - an effortless joy ride,
Yet the words flow harder as age plunges downhill.
Still, sometimes we catch again the muse’s high tide,

And our pen becomes a perspicuous harpoon,
Capturing the essence of life’s high noon.

This is a bout-rime - the last words of each line are derived from a list provided by Christine at Read Write Poem, who explains that:

This is a writing game, started in France as a joke in the seventeenth century, and popularized in England during the Victorian era. The game is a collaboration between poets. One poet chooses the end words for the sonnet, and everyone writes a sonnet using those words. I’m including two sets of end words for you, a rhyming set and a non-rhyming set for those who eschew rhyme.

The caveat is to use each word in the same order, as an end word, and to only write fourteen lines. Those are the rules of the game!

Rhyming end words: visible, stage, scribble, old age, touching, fingers, fetching, tigers, buzzkill, joy ride, downhill, high tide, harpoon, high noon.

Some of the end words fitted rather more easily than others, but I think I managed to fit them all in reasonably smoothly in the end!

I came across an interesting post at Cafe Philos asking are all aesthetic and ethical opinions “relative”?

I think Paul’s conclusion could be fairly summed up by this quote:

The notion that everything is just an opinion and that everyone’s opinions are equal is not always true.   More care and insight goes into some opinions than into others.  

I broadly agree with him, but had some points I wanted to add to amplify this. So I started writing a comment, and then it sort of expanded to post length so I thought I’d take up my own blog bandwidth rather than Paul’s!

The first thing I wanted to say was that to some extent it depends how we express our judgements, and in particular who we claim they’re true for. If we’re just expressing a personal preferences, that can, without contradiction, vary from person to person. E.g. my feelings about the taste of marmite probably differ from those of many people, but I can say “I like marmite” and you can say “I hate marmite” without that being a contradiction. But if I say “Marmite is delicious” or you say “Marmite is disgusting”, then there’s a sense in which we can’t both be right. The trouble is we tend to use these two different types of statement quite interchangeably. Sometimes out of casualness… but sometimes because we believe that everyone should react the same way as we do.

If we keep to the I-like-marmite kind of statement, then we can happily bounce along together and never disagree. But at the same time, we don’t actually learn much about the way the world is, because we’re not seeking out other people’s reactions.

I think making a “Marmite is” statement requires us to go beyond our own experience, to bring in objective data to support our argments, and take into consideration other people’s opinions, definitions and so on. If we are trying to make a claim about how other people should view something, then we need to do more than state that we view it that way.

Of course, this doesn’t matter much with marmite, because nobody is forcing other people to eat it/not eat it. But when it comes to obscenity, to pick up Paul’s example, then it does become important because people are trying to act as if their personal reaction was a universal desiderata. And I think there are some important principles - valuing informed experience over lack of experience, valuing the opinions of those who consider the opinions of others, acceptance of some greyness combined with a wish to minimise it, and so on.

But why should we go to all this trouble? Isn’t it easier to accept that everyone has different views. Well, it’s easier, but a lot less interesting.

I think relativism is a great excuse for not putting your own opinions to the test of real discussion with someone else.

If two people disagree about a “marmite is” or a “pornography is” issue, then you can either say that all you really meant was an “I like” statement. Or, if both of you are interested in truth and willing to be wrong, you can start trying to establish whether pornography or marmite are good or bad.

The willingness to be wrong is crucial here. Relativism allows us all to be “sort of” right. But if it means we’re not prepared to consider that some of our views may be wrong, it becomes dangerous. I believe that all the opinions I hold are true, but I also think that it’s virtually certain that at least one of them is wrong. (Hat tip to Alonzo Fyfe at Atheist Ethicist, who keeps mentioning this rather important but uncomfortable truth!) I want to find out which of my views are wrong, even if finding that I’ve been wrong about something I sincerely believe is embarrassing and uncomfortable.

Collision with someone else’s equally sincerely held views of reality is one of the best ways of putting your views to the test. Saying that everything is relative and everyone’s entitled to their own opinion is a great way of avoiding collision of worldviews. It’s also a great way of getting the subjective and objective hopelessly mixed up. And of stopping learning anything meaningful about the world we live in. 

Someone said that if you want to increase your success rate, you need to increase your failure rate. I think something similar applies to opinions. If you want to have a lot of well-founded opinions, you need to give the world lots of opportunities to prove you wrong! 

… a sudden pain like a stab to the heart. Why? I caught a glimpse of a photo of my ex on facebook. After all this time, sometimes there are moments when the hurt springs out of nowhere and spills over into my new life like some sludge of polluted dreams. It’s so rare these days for anything to do with him to hurt, indeed the last time must be well over a month ago, but somehow it hurts all the worse for that.

It’s strange too - it has nothing to do with wanting to see him again, or wishing we hadn’t split up. It’s just simply a flashback to the pain of breaking up… heartbreak reflux?

Everywoman

At night she would wander,
creating a small road
herself among the stones,
a small black spot carefully engrafted

Graceful in her movement
sniffing fresh wild flowers and clods of clay
hair grazing her neck
in a burnt orange haze of golden waves

Now her eyes are silver
as if she were looking at me
from the other side of a mirror
listening quietly to old stories.

Random expressions of foolishness
fall apart; she goes back to old ways,
circling through time
earthed in tradition and roots.

This is a patchwork poem based on lines written by the following poets, who kindly gave me permission to play with their poems:

Our Muse, by Lissa at Just Writing Words.
About a man and a dog, by Christine at Mariacristina
Pit of your spit, by gautami tripathy at Rooted.
Sinking Ships by writerwoman at Shores of My Dreams
Beloved mother, by jillypoet

I’ve again used complete lines, though I made one tense change and changed a few pronouns to “her”.

To see what other poems have made with the same material, or to find out more about patchwork poems, visit the patchwork poetry blog.

I feel a strange tranquillity at the moment.

My job is really very challenging, with a lot to learn and a lot to manage. Because of my role I’m also quite isolated within my team, though they are a friendly lot. And I’m in that stage of not really being settled into my new life here - it always takes time to establish new friends and new social activities, and I’ve only been here less than 3 weeks. And though I brought quite a lot of books out with me I’ve read and re-read them until I’m fed up with them, and the rest of my library hasn’t caught up with me yet! On one level I should be feeling stressed and demoralised and lonely and bored.

And yet I feel this strange feeling of relaxation, of sufficiency. A feeling that the waves may be big but I’m a tough little boat navigating the best course I can.

Perhaps this is another bonus of the heartbreak and turbulence of last year, and the enormously strengthened self-confidence with which I have emerged. Some of my worst interpersonal nightmares came true in an intense period of self-doubt made almost unbearable by the strangely physical agony of heartbreak. And yet I survived, and not only survived but came out strengthened.

I can’t imagine anything at work that would approach that level of deeply personal pain and stress, so it seems silly to worry about what this job will be like. And I am doing my best to keep to the advice I gave myself on my first day, which is basically about having realistic expectations of myself. Yes, it will be difficult, but I have confidence in my own ability to not only survive difficulties but learn and grow in the process.

Photo by merlineden at flickr

As I said in an earlier post, my close friends (you know who you are!) were absolutely vital for me in dealing with the break-up. As one of them said, sometimes it’s utterly crucial to have people whom you can turn to and ask for an outside opinion:

“I know I’d get really lost without outside neutral (insofar as friends can be) witnesses if I were in your position. Sometimes it all sounds so crazy you wonder if you’re the one who’s the nutter. But let me reassure you, you are not a nutter!”

When you lose your own anchoring self-esteem in the face of a storm of personal criticism, it is so useful to be able to raft up with someone who knows you well enough to be able to say with confidence that the criticism is wrong. For example, my ex said that I was too dependent on him - he seemed to take the view that any reliance on other people was a weakness. And for a while I almost believed this was true. So it was an incredible comfort to read this:

“From having been your friend for the last 14 years (!) I would say the biggest change I have noticed in you is the development of your ability to rely on others, and to talk to others when you have problems, rather than keep it all inside as you did.  I see that as a sign of huge strength, to be able to talk to others, to hear what they say and to make yourself vulnerable by opening up to the possibility of rejection. 

As the months have passed I have regained my strength, my confidence, and enough anger to protect myself and define my own boundaries. But there were a few months where I really did need support, and I am profoundly grateful to my friends for the way they helped me through that time.

So for them, I have written this - another text for the series “Songs to heal a broken heart” (see earlier posts here).

The hugs, the tea, the sympathy
The warmth, the anger for me,
The insights and the confidence
These gifts my friends give to me.

I long to see my lover
And my heart is slow to mend -
But my life is far from empty
While I have the love of my friends

The certainty of long familiarity
A faith that is not blind,
The tissues, the food, the company -
My friends are wise and kind

I long to see my lover…

The comfort and the distractions
The patience and the time
The wisdom and the sharing
I receive from these friends of mine

I long to see my lover…

Photo: friendship can never be measured…, originally uploaded by rAmmoRRison.

I hear that someone has declared that today is blog reader appreciation day!

Which strikes me as an excellent excuse to thank all my readers for dropping by, and particularly all those people who have left me so many kind and encouraging comments. It makes such a difference to have thoughtful feedback…

Here is a picture of a star (You’re A Star, originally uploaded by Pink Sherbet Photography.) as a small token of my gratitude! I hope you’ve all found something interesting, encouraging or thought-provoking in these pages!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sugar-bliss/409158249/

Reading recent posts, it occurs to me that regular readers of this blog could be forgiven for think that I am still obsessed with my ex and having real difficulty moving on. Which is strange for me, because my life is very full with other things, and there are days when I don’t think about him at all. And yet somehow most of the entries on this blog are in some way related to our relationship. Even when given different and challenging prompts for poems, somehow the same story seems to keep recurring… I think there are two reasons for this.

Firstly, one of my original reasons for starting to write, and starting to write this blog specifically, was to give myself the opportunity to express the feelings that, because of his silence, I had been unable to express to him. Somehow to be able to express these feelings publicly and permanently has had a really healing effect - probably much more effective than expressing them to him would have been! This blog is the place where I express my thoughts about this relationship. In many posts, I have expressed some pain, or anger, or fear, and in the process taken another step towards healing it. They’re not painful emotions any more. But if I didn’t write about these things, I would be denying emotions that are part of my journey.

But I think there’s a more important reason.  What I have experienced in the last year has been an intense and powerful personal version of a universal human story. And like so many poets and writers and singers before me, it seems a neverending source of inspiration for creativity. (Judging by page views and comments, people also seem to be most interested in my posts about this relationship, which again says something.)

And I also hope that what I write can be helpful and inspiring for others. I am so vividly aware of how much I have learnt from this relationship and its painful ending, and how much stronger I am as a result of what I have been through. I hope that through my writing, and my songwriting, I can reach out to people and encourage them to see just how brilliant the light at the end of their own dark tunnels can be.