Show Me The Way to Go Home
Maps like this one I can follow. I can find the route, understand the symbols, get my bearings, not get lost, can find my way back.
This map was drawn perhaps two hundred years ago, but the hills have not walked off somewhere else and the valleys would be as familiar to a time traveller from then as they are to me now. We could communicate directions to each other using ancient words for landmarks and routes that each understood.
In this virtual world, this www, I am caught with only cryptic hieraglyphics for reference points, which are meant to sign the way round but only lead me into deeper darker paths of confusion.
The laptop glitches of both hardware and software and the various wireless internet connection problems; hard, soft and firmware, have coincided with a Lupus mini flare which has scrambled my brain, so I have never known whether it has been me or them. Past experience would say "its them !" everytime, but when I got my blood results I felt, temporarily at least, that I didn't stand a chance. It seems the physical trauma involved in the skull operation, straightforward though it was, has antagonised the Lupus, and I have higher than usual levels of antibodies to my own dsDNA circulating through my system; hence brain fog, mood dampened, physically slow, greater fatigue, generally needing to go back into my shell. That frame of mind is not good. I didn't want to cancel the few social diary entries and I needed to sort out Social Services, IBM, my laptop, blogger and the bastard county library van driver's bosses, and the 2' stack of filing, so three weeks ago I had a systemic steroid injection. I should be imitating the Duracell bunny by now, but I am not. So its slowly slowly for a while.
I want to get back to that other country, where I enjoy writing posts. All I have managed to do is stop myself writing whinging posts. That is my significant achievement over recent weeks.
When I was little, with little legs, before the we had a car, on long walks home in the dark along Toll Bar Lane, my father used to sing to encourage me to keep going: "Show me the way to go home, I'm tired and I want to go to bed ..."
Labels: Archive March 07
posted by Sally at 6:40 pm
8 Comments:
Oops!
"I had a little drink about an hour ago/And it's gone right to my head"!
Sorry to hear you have not been so good; and I don't see at all why you shouldn't write "whingeing posts" if you need to get it out of your system. It's good therapy courtesy of Blogger, and you can always delete it later if you wish.
Thank you Charles.
Do you know the rest of the song ?
Writing as therapy: The poet Wendy Cope talking on Radio 3 said:
"If it works as therapy, it works as poetry (creative writing). But only if, at the end, there is some change. If the writer feels as bad at the end of writing as at the start of the process, then it is not poetry (creative) its grim.
That's how I feel about my blogging. And your whinges have been creatively entertaining.
That's interesting. I find that thoughts and phrases sort or squirrel around in my head, and by writing them out I can purge them for a while.
Besides which, trying to make them entertaining (thank you!) helps to put a certain distance between me and some things; for example, it isn't really funny to be stiff and immobile and always in danger of falling, but IF I can make it slapstick for other people helps take some of the edge off.
I think I can rely on my regular readers to see between the lines out of their own experience.
Are you sure you're not just self-conscious about having a whinge at all? We may say - this is how I'd like to feel, as a noble, brave, suffering cripple - but to hell with all that, this is how I feel RIGHT NOW and let rip.
And why not?
PS Rest of song goes
"Wherever I may roam
On land or sea or foam
You'll always hear me singing this song
Show me the way to go home!"
Yes, certainly your first point is true for me, at times. Writing things out: "I write to pull it out from thinking, then I can move on."
When we can write entertainingly (to ourselves and others) of our predicament/s we are looking back at ourselves, from a vantage point of no longer being stuck in it, literally on all fours in the mud, metaphorically or emotionally. So yes, when your readers chuckle at your being up-arsed, the frisson comes from knowing, from what you have written in the past, that it could have been very bad for you, and we are all relieved, and chuckle with you, that you are ok. The vantage point is after we have recovered from the event that we write of. This virtual community becomes something more real than our outer lives when we consider that there are people out there who we have never met, who know and understand much about us because we have volunteered that information, and they have remembered it. Kept it in their hearts.
I don't think in this instance I am being self-conscious about having a whinge - I can whinge with the best of them, when I am no longer stuck in the circumstance that is being whinged about - when it is in the past, it can be complained of with annoyance. I think that is what a whinge is. Its a knowing comment about ourselves and our annoyance with what the world is doing to us.
There is the extreme circumstance of need, real deep needy need, and I think then, when I know I am needy, and know that I and my circumstance, deserve to be cared about; then I can say: this is hell and this is how I feel and I need feed-back, support, love, even virtual love.
What I don't deal with well, is those times of Lupus and/or weekly drug induced brain fog, when really I don't know, just don't know where I am with something, what I am in, what it is. I cannot articulate the circumstance, to myself or to my blog. I cannot articulate myself out of the fog. Its gloomy, I cannot see the way, or what I am stuck in, I do not know whether it is me or 'them'. I cannot articulate myself out of the brain fog. Then, I just need a hug.
I wrote of this ... 'Tired, tired or just tired'. Can't find the damned post.
(Goes off muttering: where did I put it, has blogger got it, I bet blogger's gone and moved it, bugger blogger.)
Found it (from a time when I could articulate it, and wrote it down to remind myself for those times when I was in the fog !): posted on 4 August 06, and CD articulated it as malignant fatigue. Blogging friends are wonderful, even if they are never there to give a hug when you need one.
Sorry about the lupus flare, Sally. (insert terrible language directed at lupus)
You've thought about several different times/conditions that affect you, and I think that's really helpful-plotting out where you are on the map, so to speak. I'm stuck at the want to write/grunt in fear & run away stage. ;)
I am grateful for your visits and company SE, and sorry that you are stuck - and I hope you get hugs.
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