My Office Colleague

My OC is what makes going to work a pleasure.  Not only do we work incredibly well together he has also become one of my best friends.  The OC is tall and gangy and socially inept.  He makes me look good.  However, he is one of the cleverest and kindest people on the planet.  Together we have created some fantastic teaching and developed ideas which could have a serious impact on our discipline area.  Last year he completed his PhD and then went a bit mad so I realised that I would simply have to cover all his work as he clearly didn’t notice how dysfunctional he was.  This year I suddenly realised that he was doing the same for me.  ‘I’ll do that then’ I heard him say and remembered that that was I was doing last year.  That’s a true friendship. 

He has listened patiently to all my woes and never run out of a kind word or sound advice.  He has the most tasteless sense of humour which we share and can indulge while together alone.  We just moved offices today and spent a while unpacking boxes and setting up our room.  At one point we were very unwisely trying to balance a bookshelf on top of a cabinet and he started quoting fictitious  news reports about two academics seriously injured while unwisely trying to … ‘We hadn’t really thought it through properly’.  I nearly wet myself laughing.  It’s partly his delivery.

I am so lucky to have him as a colleague and office mate and sometimes I wake up gripped with fear that he will leave or something will happen to him and I’ll have to go back to simply working instead of seeing work as going in to play with my best friend. 

Our new office has views of Canterbury Cathedral and Augstine Abbey – better than the ring road and the sound of incessant sirens (police station and fire station nearby).  Now I feel like a proper academic!

I have fantastic friends.  So I want to tell you about some of them over the next few posts.

My Best Friend

I have a Best Friend who’s been my best friend since I was 12, so 41 years!  Now that’s pretty awesome.  We’ve always got on, never quarrelled, and although we live far away from each other when we get together it’s like no time has passed.  She is the most constant person in my life and would do almost anything for me – as I would for her.  We met at school where she was the most popular girl and I was the wierdo loner.  No one could understand what we had in common but somehow we just got on.  We never run out of things to talk about.  She is one of the funniest and most fun people I know and helped bring out my sense of humour and introduced me to the art of being silly.  We were a complete double act and made everyone laugh when we were together.  We could have been French and Saunders!  She has had a very different life to me – she married a lovely man over 20 years ago and they are still happily married. She loves socialising and is always the life and soul of the party.  She is one of those parents who creates loads of fun on holidays – Easter, Halloween and of course, Christmas, are all opportunities to get the family together to play games, get covered in flour, be creative and eat loads.

My Best Friend and I seem to be telepathic and know when we need to call each other.  We’ve been known to not call each other for months and then pick up the phone at the same time to call each other.  In some ways it’s the simplest and easiest relationship I’ve ever had and I never felt I had to work hard at it and it’s only as I get older that I realise how remarkable that is.  She is the one person whom I never feel judged by – she just seems to completely accept me, is always interested in me and my life, happy for my successes and ready to bolster me up when things go wrong.  I feel like a bit of a disaster area in comparison to her – although her life has not always been easy – but somehow her faith in me has kept me going over the years.

If you plotted my mood on a graph it would show an upward trend.  Which is good, I suppose.  I had a great conversation with Mac the other night.  Mac appeared in my life last May and has become such a good friend to me I wonder what I would do without him.  Mac helped me understand how the encounter with the L.I. brought out all my addictive, co-dependent behaviours which I can see so clearly linked to the issues I’ve brought from my childhood.

Isn’t this a great photo?

Anyway – I’m currently investigating attachment because I suspect that is the root of my issues.  I was reading on the baggage reclaim site about the addiction to drama in relationships and I thought to myself ‘this isn’t about me’ because I dislike heightened emotions and feeling anxious or upset, I’m not addicted to that.  One of the reasons I was wary of the L.I. was because I felt anxious about whether he liked me or not – but then when I got a ’sign’ that he did, I felt this immense rush of peace and wellbeing.  And talking to Mac the other night I realised it was that feeling of immense peace which was my ‘hit’.  And the L.I. was like a pusher – right at the beginning when I met him I felt the calm, but then he withdrew and I got hooked in to chasing that feeling – imagining that it was something I’d done to put him off and make him withdraw.  So I looked for ways to get back into his affections – but in retrospect that was  because I was craving that feeling.

Ram Dass describes this perfectly here:

When I was a child, I coped with my mother by staying out of her way – in my room, out of the house or, if I had to be around her, by withdrawing into my head.  She’s in my house – and I can’t escape her so I keep finding myself withdrawing into my head.  I close down.  I have to find ways to combat this but it’s so hard.  Most of the time I don’t want to come home. On bad days I struggle to feel like an adult.

I will start a new series of posts entitled ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ in order to capture the good things.  For example, my younger daughter (YD) was given the award of Best Player of the Year in her rugby club and my older daughter (OD) has been elected a youth councillor for the county.

Oh and the snow on this page falls in the direction of your mouse.  Move your mouse from side to side and see!

Things are changing.  I’m changing.

I know where I am now – I’m in the pits!  My usual methods of coping and maintaining my life are not going to work any more.  Although it’s unpleasant, it’s not going to stop me from living my life and continuing to develop and grow.  Having realised where I am, I now have some hope of moving forward in the right direction – it’s like positioning my compass.

I had a conversation with a remarkable 15 year old.  He suggested that I should realise that my mother could no longer control me.  This was very insightful because ever since she’s been back in my world I have experienced a churning up of old emotions, feelings of inadequacy, invisibility, seething resentment and outright rage, but directed internally.  For as long as I can remember my sanity has been predicated on being out of her sphere of influence and I’ve always felt that when she’s around the ground becomes shaky under my feet and I struggle to control myself and my emotions.  I’ve always felt that she can influence how I feel.  This isn’t surprising because I was given too much sense of locus of control as a child by the things my parents said: ‘don’t behave like that, you are making your mother sick’, for example.  omg I can make my mother sick!  I have superpowers.  That makes me powerful but also dangerous.  Not really hard to see how that leads to anxiety and hypervigilance and an over-developed sense of responsibility for other people’s emotions.  Intellectually I had known this for a while, but somehow I connected to this really strongly and realised how completely irrational this really is.  Then the remarkable 15 year old said ‘you aren’t like your mother you are better than her’.  ‘What evidence do you have for that?’, I asked.  ‘Your children are your evidence.  You are a better mother than she was.’  What an amazing gift.

Since then I have felt grounded and realise that I finally have an opportunity to develop a strong sense of self-esteem and a more sensible perspective on my relationship to others.  This can only be a positive thing.

I’ve decided that I’m going to stop blogging here for a while.  Somehow this doesn’t seem like the right place for my journey any more.  I think I may start another blog with a different theme and flavour.  Not sure what yet.  I’ll let you know.

In the meantime – look!  it’s snowing again

My life is a train wreck.  Six months ago I was on top of the world.  I was single, happy to be single, excited to be single, free, able to pursue my own interests , work was great, my children were getting on well at school and happy at home.  Now I’m depressed, unhappy, and resentful and feel hopeless most of the time.  I’m way behind in my work, and too stressed to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  I have 3 articles I wanted to write, unwritten.  I have some really important reports to write which are 2 months overdue.  I have new module to write which is starting in January.  My house is a total mess.  I realise that I am totally incapable of choosing or attracting sane, emotionally available men, I have no social life and I have little time for the few friends I have.  Worst of all I have little emotional energy for my children, I am deeply upset that their lives have been so disrupted and I am worried about their schoolwork.

This is all because my mother is now living with me and will be living with me, probably forever.  Unlike children who grow up and become increasingly independent, she is and will become increasingly dependent.  It is unfeasible for her to live anywhere else – even if she could cope for a while, I would essentially be managing two houses, being called for help constantly and it wouldn’t be long before I had to make alternative arrangements anyway.

I find myself unwilling to paint a positive picture or find the ‘silver lining’ right at the moment.  This is isn’t a situation which is a ‘matter of perspective’, this is a bloody awful thing to have happened to me and I am shocked, upset and resentful and that is just the way it is.  My life as it was is ruined and I don’t know if I will ever have the potential for a sane, happy life that I had 6 months ago.  I am desperately upset by the idea that the last few years my children will be living at home might not be ones they will look back at with joy – that they will be dying to leave home as soon as possible.  They’ll leave and I’ll be left looking after my mother.  Yes, she’s frail, but frail people often live a remarkably long time, especially nowadays.

I have no warm feelings for her.  She is my abuser and she is living in my house.  What else is there to say about that?  I can’t see my feelings for her changing so I have to fight the urge to be nasty and mean and angry towards her all the time.  I have to act in my own house.  My sanctuary, the place of safety I had created for myself and my children has been invaded and attacked and I no longer have a place of safety in the world.  I can’t remember the last time I felt so truly alone and unhappy.

The only thing I know I can do is to move forward slowly step by step and rebuild my shattered life as much as I can.  There is no easy route I can take, no ‘switch’ I can pull, nowhere to run.  My worst nightmare has come true and I simply have to work out how to live in it.  The sense of loss is immense.  I only have shreds of my life left.  I know I won’t give up and I won’t give in but I know that I won’t feel truly happy again until she’s gone.

Postscript to the L.I.

Since ‘breaking up’ from the L.I. I have been doing a lot of reflection on what happened.  It’s very much a story with two halves.  One half is falling in love (yet again) with an emotionally unavailable man though this time I managed not to have sex with him – yay, progress!  The other half is having recognised it and identified it and consciously engaged with the madness in order to understand it.  So progress there too.

The latter activity has been extraordinarily powerful – watching my obsessional thought processes and the descent into emotional attachment has been a combination of claustrophobic, catastrophic, sickening, terrifying, exhilerating and ultimately liberating.  I’ve watched myself being pushed and pulled, my emotions manipulated (the L.I. is probably the most skillful emotional manipulator I’ve ever come across – he assimilated emotional information about me with the speed of a Borg and deployed it with the precision of a chess master) and witnessed my own willingness to fall for the game, to let love grow on scraps of hinted affection, to hope with psychotic intensity and to despair at my inability to get his interest.

And I feel such enormous gratitude to him for coming into my life and letting me see myself, for giving me the opportunity to free myself from this horrible curse I’ve lived with for years.  He is a lovely man by the way – not in any way evil or nasty.  He does what he does from his own set of fears and neurosis and I don’t blame him at all for the way I’ve felt.  He has his own path.   There is also a Buddhist ‘reading’ of our story, but I can’t write about this now.  This has to be about me and what I do, what I allow, what I discount, what I sacrifice, if I’m to move on to a healthier way of being.

I am determined to break this pattern and even if I never do have a healthy relationship, I am going to commit here and now to avoiding unhealthy ones.  The one insight which I am holding on to is that I saw, clearly, the first sign that the L.I. was emotionally unavailable very early on.  After our first date he asked me out for 2 dates – a weekend day two weeks ahead and an evening meal before that.  Very keen, I thought.  The meal never materialised.  Then after the weekend day which was magical and lovely and seemed to show we got on really well, he went cool and said he thought ‘things were moving too fast’.  He had instigated every move.  I did feed this back to him pretty sharply and he apologised, but there, right there, I should have said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ because a man who’s scared of a walk in the woods and a brief kiss isn’t going to cope with intimacy, now is he?  I carried on with him, however, and I saw every move he made with hideous clarity right up to his last ‘killer’ move – after he told me he didn’t want a relationship, he made a phone call which was (unconsciously) designed to ‘hook’ me back and I saw with such clarity how every tiny element of that call could have done that (and despite seeing it I still ruminated about it for days and watched my emotions being drawn to wanting to connect with him).  But I watched it, and I’ve seen it and I know absolutely the level of madness it represents and I don’t want any more of that in my life.

So I’ve been doing some research about being attracted to emotionally unavailable men and came across some really useful materials including this list which I wish I’d had years ago!  From the list, here are the ones that have been present in all the men I’ve ever been with (each man has manifested at least one of the signs).

He’s recently separated

He’s very reliant on text messages, IM’ing and email for the majority of his contact

They’re ambiguous about the status of the relationship

You’re not sure when you’ll hear from the next, even though you’ve been dating them for a while

You think you’re in a relationship, but it’s closer to a booty call

When you try to tackle the status of your relationship or any issues, he either tells you what you want to hear and then returns to his normal behaviour or he just skirts the issue. One way or the other, you wind up back at square one.

He says he’s over his ex but he’s quietly still trying to cope with the end of the relationship

He mentions his ex or things that happened between the two of them often

He’s an overt mother lover – mummy’s boy

He’s a mother hater – has an overtly negative relationship with his mother

You feel empty after you sleep with him.

He has a stringent routine that he just won’t deviate from

He won’t take calls either before or after a certain time

He is resistant to involving himself in your life

He talks about his problems, his successes, his life – it’s me, me, me all the way

He determines the momentum of the relationship – you meet up when he wants to meet up

He never refers to you as a girlfriend, partner or any form of significant other

It feels like he blows hot and cold

He’s quick out the gate in pursuing you, gets your attention, and then goes into a slow canter

He tells you that he has a lot of issues that he needs to deal with
He actually says ‘I’m not ready for a relationship’ but is still with you

He can’t commit to anything, no matter how miniscule – everything that he’s asked, such as whether he can do something with you is a big drama to get him to say yay or nay
He’s got about as much emotion in him as a stone

He may try and sleep with you on the first night

The thing about admitting that I go after emotionally unavailable men is that I then have to admit that I am also emotionally unavailable because that is what all the literature suggests – we are both as bad as each other, both playing a fear-avoidance game.  The L.I.’s pattern in the past has actually always been to pursue emotionally unavailable women and run a mile from people who show an interest in him.  I know I do the same.  It’s time I face up to my part in this mess – not in the ‘blaming’ way which accompanies the pursuit of unavailable men (“why did I say/do that?”, “why aren’t I good enough” etc) but simply be honest about what I want and what I can offer.

I feel hopeful, in a good way.

… just keeps getting crazier.

Did you know my mother is living with me now?  I can hear your collective gasps through my computer screen as I type this.  I can’t even remember what I’ve written about this to date because, if I’m honest, I’ve been living in a bit of a dream for the last 2 months, pretending to be bumbling along as usual when in fact it is simply a coping mechanism to avoid the horrible truth that my life is TOTALLY OUT OF CONTROL AND I AM COMPLETELY OVERWHELMED!!!

But I will plod on and as long I keep my head down and try to avoid allowing too many disasters to occur, I will get through this as long as I don’t give in to the chaos.

At the beginning of August my mother, who was on holiday in Germany, became ill with pulmonary oedema – basically she has heart failure and because it wasn’t being treated properly, her lungs were slowly filling up with water.  She was, effectively, drowning.  Thankfully she got to hospital in time for it to be treated and she’s recovered really well.  They treat this with forced diuresis – she lost an impressive 3 kilos of water in a week!

I flew out to Germany and brought her back to the UK with me.  As I was on the plane I already knew that she was not going to be able to return to live in Jordan.  Initially I thought I might be able to afford to buy somewhere locally for her to live.  This option began to fade as I realised how much of  a burden the mortgage would be on my already fragile monthly budget.  Then I thought she would be able to rent – she has a bit of savings – but this option also had to be abandoned as I realised that she would very quickly run out of money and also that my life would consist of her calling me with problems to be solved day and night.  This isn’t because she’s incapable – quite the opposite, she is a remarkably independent and resourceful person – but simply because she hasn’t lived in this country for 40 years and just doesn’t know how things work.  So the only solution open to us is for her to live with me for the foreseeable future.  This means she’s safe and life is relatively simple and also that she has plenty of money to do the things she wants like take taxis and buy clothes.

Regular readers with wonder at my equanimity – well, all I can say is that it is quite remarkable how quickly one adapts to the inevitable.  Lack of choice focuses the mind towards acceptance.  I could make my life very miserable with resentment and anger at this unwanted turn of events.  And yes, I do have moments where I feel furious that yet again I don’t seem to be able to hold onto more than a couple of months of stability and happiness before the universe throws yet another challenge at my feet.  I know other people have problems but I do perceive other people’s lives to have longer periods of stability.  I crave a boring ordinary life.  But that doesn’t seem to be my destiny.  So be it.

I’m going to Jordan on Wednesday to pack up her personal belongings and ship them over here, sell her furniture, car and piano and sort out her financial affairs.  Single handed.  If anything that is the one thing that I resent.  That I have to do all of this alone.  I’m tired, overworked at work and overwhelmed by the responsibility that I am only just getting used to.  It will pass.  This too will pass.

Apropos of nothing, one of my friends has started a rather wonderful blog about swimming in the sea.  Too bad it’s a Blogger blog, but it makes magical reading.  Give it a go.

Ok so Lord Hutton suggested I enter the tuesday photo challenge (which seems to take place on Fridays – but who am I to question this) and it appears that I have stumbled upon the most challenging challenge of all time!

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with the most fantastic idea. What would you shoot if time, money and skills were no issue? Then work within your limitations to realise your dream. See what unique surprises occur.

So I love photos which involve exciting things with light – and I was lying in bed this morning and spotted this amazing effect on my curtain – a ribbon of light created by the gap in the under curtains:

I need a project – otherwise I’m going to keep filling up this blog with moaning about what arses men are!  And I’m fed up of that now – need to move on.

So I need a project for the blog – something I can write about or play about with here for a month.

Any ideas?  Post them below and I’ll do one or all of them.

I am so in love.  Totally enchanted.  Already missing my new love.  No, don’t worry it’s not a new man so soon after the other!  I’ve just spent a week in the US of which 4 were in New York city.  The last time I was there was when I was 17, in 1973.  I spent a summer there while my father taught summer school in Columbia University.  I remember it being super cool – well that was an incredible time.  I can’t believe that I haven’t been back since although I did quite seriously think of moving there while I was in my late 20s and I wonder how my life would have turned out if I had.

So I wasn’t expecting to love it quite so much.  A White Bear recommended a hotel in Brooklyn and it was really exciting to meet my first blogfriend in real life.  She was refreshingly similar to how I had imagined and we fell ridiculously easily into intense conversation.  Highlight of the week was going to see John Zorn and friends perform crazy improv avant garde jazz which was so totally ‘New York’ it felt like I had actually planned the whole trip when in actuality I sort of gravitated towards all the things I wanted to do with a strange magnetism.  I simply got out the map and guessed where it would be a kind of good idea to go and somehow it all worked out.

I did some classic things – walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and along the East River at night (thanks AWB and D!) and wandered round Greenwich Village and West Village looking at the interesting shops and cafes.  I walked around Central Park in the rain watching all the runners panting their way past me.  But it was actually the whole atmosphere which enchanted me – slightly haphazard, endearingly grubby and extraordinarily friendly.  It was very familiar – partly I think because so much of New York has been used in films.  Coming into Brooklyn the taxi drove alongside the raised railway and I half expected a car chase to ensue!  But familiar too in the sense of ‘family’ – it felt like home, I could relax and put my feet up.

It was so much the perfect thing to be doing post all the madness of the last couple of months with Mum and the L.I.  I felt I had time and space to process things – and the advantage of having AWB to talk to about it all too – and yet I was, at the same time, truly on vacation, away from work, from family responsibilities, from anyone who had expectations of me and the freedom was intoxicating.  I honestly think the last time I felt like that was nearly 20 years ago.  It’s a feeling I want to remember, to build more and more into my everyday life.  I was a creative, imaginative and energetic free spirit once upon a time.  I’ve spent too long feeling fearful and constrained and I need to be planning my escape strategy lest I forget myself once more.

Three days of the trip was also spent at a conference where I was presenting my work.  It went down a storm with some very important people in my field and I feel incredibly excited by the possibility of my ideas becoming internationally recognised by my peers.  I need to focus on my work more than anything else over the next few years because that is one area where I do have the potential to gain self esteem and the recognition I desire without it being bound to nonsensical fantasies.  Better late than never!!

Here are some photos: