Hello Everyone, what a break from writing this has been! It was February 2021 when I finished publishing my 1990 Diary. I think the last seventeen months of the Covid 19 Pandemic has taken its toll on all of us one way or another. Personally, for me, my work in Adult Social Care as an Office Manager has been extremely busy and highly stressful. Partly from restructuring of the Office Managers and Admin within our Learning Disability Services, recruitment, training and induction issues; project and development work and partly to do with supporting staff; the team remotely working and adapting the way in which we manage the day-to-day work coming in for the services we run. Mainly though it boils down to too much work and not enough resources, which, I fear will not be changing in a positive nature any time soon.
Therefore, I have not really had the headspace for creativity other than some further house decorating and garden work. I continue to practice my weekday daily yoga before work, and I did use the work counselling services in January 2021 for six sessions which helped me a lot at the time. I have felt very low of energy and quite “stuck”, even as we start to emerge into life again. I don’t feel my life has stopped really as I have been working late most nights and exhausted myself as far as my brain goes. There has also been the obvious lock down limitations which has meant no theatre work for me and no live music, two of the things in my life which provides me with a work life balance. Luckily though late July early August saw a return to doing some lighting at my local theatre for 3 nights of a comedy, sell out shifts at the theatre for some gigs and most importantly back to my musical home, Bloodstock, a heavy metal festival, it was amazing and over far too quickly.
One of the biggest developments from the counselling sessions was a final goodbye to my Mum, as detailed in my ‘July 1990 – The month where nothing was to be the same again, ever!’ blog. One of my biggest dilemmas / decisions was around this feeling of being “stuck”. I cannot help but think it was also linked to this symbolic ceremony of ‘moving on’ I had just performed in February. If I continue to type up my diaries, I would be entering into the darkest years of my life. Did I really want to go back to that after releasing such emotions? If I just read them and not continue to publish them, would I regret it as I moved through each stage of despair and through my early adult years, peeling back the layers, then would I ever go back and type them up….probably not? So, I did neither and the longer I did neither, the more “stuck” I suppose I felt!
What has brought me to today and the decision to write this introduction and open up my diary of 1991 you may ask? It’s quite a simple answer really. The lady, HB, my first cousin once removed, who published her Mum’s diaries (my Great Aunt, my Grandad’s sister on my Mum’s side) from the 30’s and 40’s and who inspired me to start typing up mine, suddenly died in August 2021. Completely unexpected after a short illness and a great loss to the family, especially her husband and 3 children. I attended the most gorgeous Remembrance Service on Thursday in Canterbury and on the drive home, listening to my music, I realised I needed to move on and push myself out of this rabbit hole I had been hiding in and to do that, maybe I needed to continue with my mission, for my own wellbeing, otherwise I would remain “stuck” between the year I lost Mum and the rest of my life. Not the best way to follow my earlier ceremonial release hey!
The thing about my Great Aunt’s diaries were how simplistic they were, with only three or four lines per day, yet, as a story together, made up of five volumes spanning from 1935 to 1945, they drew you into the normal day to day life of a young lady who was strong, passionate, inquisitive, funny, a film lover and who threw her hand at anything asked of her and who also had lost her Mum, aged fifteen, around the same time the diaries started. The comparison to my own experiences had a profound affect on me, even though she does not detail her feelings around this loss or appear to spiral into a dark descent like myself, maybe the fact there is not much mention of her Mum at all reflects the pain and loss she suffered so young.
So, to honour and in memory of HB, I have got my Diary of 1991 out of the drawstring bag and will continue to embark on my journey with the year after I lost my Mum. My first year of college and living away from home. My memory milestones of that year are quite prominent from feeling that initial freedom to go out whatever time of night you want, wherever you want with whomever you want and not having to ask anyone’s permission or let anyone know where you are to the more mundane like getting a job, learning how to live with 13 other girls in a big house and of course college, boys, friendships, teenage dramas and the grand ole Public House (aka Bars), gigs, music and finding yourself…..or not!! As I am an only child, this was a huge transition for me at such a devastating time, my whole life had turned upside down and learning how to socialise in that kind of environment, when I didn’t want to be left alone to think about my loss, maybe freaked me out more than I realised (and maybe drinking was a way to cope and build up that façade, something which I maybe have only realised this last six years).
Another reason though is also because over this last twelve months with all the stress and fuck it moments going on in my head, together with no evening / weekend work at the theatres, somewhere along the line after two or three years of giving up, I have started smoking in the evenings again and by keeping my fingers busy and hopefully release some of those head demons and stressy feelings, along with the return to my theatre jobs, I am hoping the smoking will decrease again and eventually stop.
Before when I gave up it was following a hospital visit for a minor op and I had what I can only describe as a spiritual experience and I just stopped overnight, first with the help of a vape and then nothing. The op was not smoking related, and I hadn’t even been considering giving up but after a while I could not understand why I even smoked in the first place!! To help get me through the stress and to avoid more frequent drinking, I returned to what started me smoking aged 17, in 1991, a bit of wacky baccy to see me through and as nice as this was over Christmas as I was able to shut off my work head and just schmoke and sleep, I suppose around February time, I realised I was only really continuing to schmoke so I could have that motion of rolling and smoking, a reward at the end of the day, so I stopped the regular schmoking of the wacky baccy and continued with just the tobacco which gradually went from weekends, to the odd one in the evening to every evening and weekends and I know it is not what I want to do.
I think I am coming to realise I have an addictive personality and whether it be food, alcohol, smoking or routine, it is a constant struggle to not give in to life, to break something which has become routine again, to continually seek a reward for getting through or achieving something in the day. I am fully aware I do not do these things because of trauma or circumstance but because of how my brain is wired, together with the ways in which we try to cope and the habits that we fall back to time and time again. Even though it is nowhere near to the extent that it was back in the early to mid 90’s, my feelings around these pleasures or quick releases and the guilt I carry with them weigh heavy on my mind; the devil on your shoulder, the parent telling you off, the rebellious nature of a teen, the who I am and who I should be, the what do people think of me, should I be this way or that way instead of being confident to make your own decisions and just be who you are. BUT, when you do not know who you are or just keep questioning everything you think and do, it is difficult to see the wood for the trees sometimes and refrain from returning to old habits. The counsellor seemed to think the letter to my Mum would help me bridge the gap between the child and the adult and let it go and to some extent it did for that particular trauma but I think to move on in my life once and for all, I must continue and move through the “stuck” emotions of that teenager who turned to alcohol to hide, to escape and to give in to others, the growing up pain, the guilt I carry which I should not and face up to them myself rather than think I have dealt with them but really the raw ugliness of that time which I keep buried just under the surface, still haunts my mind at times through how I deal with life.
I think I am in a place where I can handle revisiting these times as I have done so much growing and work on myself and I know if I need support, I will always ask for it. What I don’t know is how better fulfilled I would be by living my life if I didn’t continue with what I started. At the beginning of my blog in January 2019 ‘Life & Diaries An insight’ I said “I may not get to the end as it really does depend on how it unfolds, let’s see” and maybe these pauses in publishing are the right thing for me to process my feelings and move through them so step by step, year by year, I know I need to move on past 1990 so 1991, here we go………….
December 31st 1990 cont.…
Quite depressed about Mum today, more than Christmas Eve. Didn’t do anything much all day but went to pub at night. I didn’t really enjoy it much. For some reason I get frightened of Dad when he drinks cos I don’t like how he is with women and I think it may rub off on me. I feel weary of clothes I wear etc. Why should I feel like this, I have no reason to?
Where The Earth Meets The Water 