World of Work

Oftentimes it seems that we adults (I find it strange to include myself in that category.  However, I can assure you that I most definitely am not a ‘grown up’!) are valued only for what we produce economically, in terms of whether we work and the work we do.  Many people place the emphasis on having a career and earning a high wage, judging both their own success and that of other people’s by that stick.  I am not motivated by money and while I’d love to be more productive, I know that work is not only the thing in life.

I’m a drifter; you’ve probably guessed that.  I’ve never really had the encouragement to make plans or to fix goals and my personality doesn’t really push me that way naturally either.  I left school and got a job and then another.  I worked when I could get work.  It was something that the older generation struggled to understand too, that there wasn’t always work available.  In my case, there wasn’t always the health to go to work with either.  I’ve never been able to work full time since leaving school.

If you’re not raising children then the foregone conclusion is that you should be in full time employment.  It’s something of a moral duty, a responsibility.  Or else what are you?  A loser?  A lazy person?  It’s got harder to find work and to keep a job, in recent years people are accepting that being in or out of work isn’t necessarily something that you can control, it isn’t in your hands.   I’ve seen that attitude change since my husband lost his own job three years ago.

But me?

The last I worked I had a terrible experience.  It was absolutely wretched and my health really, really suffered.  I’m still too stressed about it to discuss it.  I think possibly because somehow I also feel guilty.  As if I could or should have done something differently or prevented how other people chose to act and to treat me.  That was six years ago.  I haven’t worked since.

At the moment, I have to accept that I am probably not able to work at all because of my health.  I say this as though I could or should maybe make some kind of effort but the reality is that I’d struggle to go and wash my dishes right now and writing a post like this is hard work, a big effort and I need to proof my work very carefully because I make all types of stupid mistakes (leaving v living).

And because I haven’t worked regularly or for such a long time, there are gaps in my CV.  Having gaps in your CV makes you highly undesirable.  I know.

And I’d need part time work if I ever returned to work.  And it’s the mums with whom I’m competing.  And any boss would rather give someone like that the job, someone who has a valid reason for wanting part time hours.

That’s even before we start the conversation of health conditions.  But probably after they’ve decided that they don’t want to employ someone who isn’t wearing a polyester trouser suit.

There are people around me who keep encouraging me to get a job.  As if it was that easy.  As if that would be the only way to have some value in their eyes.  Is it fair to judge me only by standards to which I can never attain?

They have fixed ideas about what I should do, these experts on who I am and what my talents are.

They want me to become a translator.  Just like that.  Because I’m so good at languages.

I’m not good at languages.  I don’t have a good foundation, I could perhaps blame the education at school or maybe it was the lengthy absences, I don’t know.  I don’t have the hearing to be what they call a translator because in fact that they are referring to interpretation.  Interpretation usually happens over the phone.  I loathe the phone.  Interpretation is instant, someone says something and you have to render it in perfect English.  (Usually that way round, but sometimes vice versa).  I like to take my time with words, to savour and select the best and most meaningful candidate.  I am a fan of the thesaurus.  I don’t have an extensive vocabulary either.  I would also need an appropriate certificate to be able to go anywhere near a job like that.  The same as you need a degree to shelf books.  And training doesn’t come cheap.

But it’s more than that.  It’s more than just the ears and the phone.  It’s just not the right job for me, it’s too pressured and I’ve said already how I like to work with words, with translation.  And you know what?  I just wouldn’t have the confidence.  And you know what?  The people who are pushing me to do this work are the people who have torn that confidence to shreds over the years.

They don’t know me.  They like the idea of me being good at languages because it would be a good job and being employed is a good thing.  It’s about me succeeding at their impressions and standards of what is important and of who I am.  Some of these are the people who still ridicule me for having taken a giant bilingual dictionary on holiday when I was eighteen.  Why did I take that dictionary?  My parents chose to go on holiday a few weeks before my A-level exams.  I had to revise and I was using the language daily at the time.  Does the really make me such a weird person after all?

I can’t be who they want me to be.  So they will continue to perceive me as a failure.  It is a vicious circle, a dark pit.

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• Real Friends Don’t

The Mask I Wear

~ Trigger Alert! ~

It’s funny because I actually hate wearing masks, claustrophobic with scratchy edges, eyeholes positioned carefully to be in the wrong place for me blearily staring out without the safety of my glasses underneath.  It was cool to use masks in our drama work at school, I’d wriggle out, try and find some other role for myself.  The cheap, white plastic faces that the others delighted in, high art at its very best, just meant fear and induced panic to me.  I was never cool.

You see part of the problem is that I already was wearing a mask.  Some paint their faces, an inch of slap, to hide behind and to pretend that they’re something that they fear that they might not be.  Others create intricate masks, masks that allow them to play a role whilst hiding the reality beneath.

I don’t know what role I was hoping to create.  I think it was generic ‘normal’.  I don’t remember consciously creating the part nor do I remember the moment when I first donned the mask.  But now it accompanies me everywhere, I don’t go out without it.  I even forget that I am wearing it.

This mask allows me to be, relatively, cool and collected.  This mask gives me a veneer of confidence, a quiet assurance that I try to pass off.  It permits me to function in a demanding world without a barrage of questions, without exposing myself to the pain, threats and dangers that everyday life poses.

I got so nervous about going out; I felt somehow that I had no right to be out and about, I was embarrassed by being out and about, that I used to force myself to greet strangers in the street.  Don’t worry this was perfectly normal behaviour for everyone else; I grew up in a small, friendly town.  Eventually I built up the confidence to ask questions in shops, I would force myself to walk in and find something to ask about.  Asserting my right to be present in their shop.

I was talking to a friend the other day.  She hadn’t realised that I was shy.  I am, painfully shy.  I hate talking to people; will do anything to avoid it.  I only do it for the sake of politeness; I have mastered the art of small talk.  I have even mastered the art of small talk without looking like I am being tortured.  I do it to fit in, I do it to be ‘normal’, I do it because it is expected.  When I have to go out to something social, my stomach churns with nerves, never mind butterflies it is an entire fleet of Wellington bombers.  And not in rubber boots either, hobnailed ones.

My nerves got so bad that I once developed a stutter.  I’ve suffered with panic attacks for over a decade.

But life has to go on.

I got through the stutter by pretending that I was performing a role.  I could speak in public by pretending to be someone else.

I guess that that is where the mask partly comes from.  But there were other expectations too.  Expectations that family, culture, society all impress upon you.  You try not to let anyone down and to do that, you have to become someone or something else.

Otherwise most days I wouldn’t be able to function.

Now I am so used to wearing it that I forget that I am wearing it.  The role I have unwittingly created is also a burden to me.  It is a responsibility to keep it up, to maintain it daily.  A responsibility and a struggle.  I can’t just crack now because everyone knows the other me.  I can’t burst into tears for the slightest reason.  I can’t ask for help.  Because with this mask on, I am in control, everything is under control.

But it isn’t.

So what do I do?  I have no choice but to keep on wearing the mask, to continue with my daily performance.  An artiste pandering to some expectant audience.  I have become the mask.  I don’t know if there’s anything underneath anymore.  Or if, maybe, that fragile shell is all that is holding me together and then I don’t really want to risk taking it off either.

Revising Expectations

I was talking the other day about how I really need to read patterns through thoroughly before embarking on them and I guess that’s really a metaphor for life.  It said there on the very first page on my pattern that it would be about 48 cm but I’d somehow decided that it was going to be about 15-20 cm.  Then I got a little surprised when it kept growing.

Sometimes we don’t read the small print, maybe because we don’t care or because we’re in a rush.  Life has small print.  Life also throws more surprises at you than a piñata.  I think this would also be a judicious place for those unfamiliar American baseball similes, something about curve balls or coming out of left fields.  (Don’t worry, I know even less about cricket, at least baseball bears an uncanny resemblance to the pastime, not sport, of rounders).

Speccy compared it to directions in her comment.  Sometimes you can feel that you’re nearly there but then you notice just one more stage at the very bottom which completely changes the scale of the thing.  I remember turning up somewhere in the very middle of an Irish nowhere with the directions to pull up by a house with a certain colour door to phone for an escort the rest of the way.  It’s rather difficult to tell the colour of a front door in the pitchy black when it’s a long way up a garden.  There’s also been occasions when people who are so familiar with the route omit a key detail in their directions.  It doesn’t help.

The problem in life is that we don’t always get a printout, a pattern or the directions handed to us at the start.  Life has more of an improvised feel, it’s a pattern of our own design.  We try this and adjust that.  But that’s the key point.  You can’t always just keep going on blindly, sometimes you have to look things up or ask for help.  Sometimes you have to look back and adjust the mistakes or change the shapes.  Knitting is more forgiving, you can rip back a little, worse case scenario you can frog the whole thing.  Life doesn’t give you many opportunities to start over so I guess that makes it even more important to review and revise as you go along.

Sometimes a crisis will come along and you have to jump feet first into that deep water.  But sometimes even crises require a different approach.  Sometimes you have to plan before you jump, taking the time to come up with a workable solution rather than making matters worse with two of you now flailing in the water.  Sometimes you’ve been doing all you can to keep someone’s head above the water but there comes a time when you have to hand over to someone else, someone who’s maybe a little more competent or experienced or even just less tired.

Last week was a week when I had to revise my expectations.  It was busy and only my second week out of the fog but I enjoyed it.  It was full of good friends who reached out and helped me get to where I need to be.

But I had to be bold in both senses and ask for that help.  I had to acknowledge that I needed the help first too.  And that I wanted my life to be in a different place.

Then I learnt what true friends are like and how you don’t get burnt when you ask them for help.

I finally accepted that there are days when I can get on with a little housework or some projects and there are other days when my body just wants me to leave it in peace, preferably under a duvet.  You know what, I was fine with it.  I could see my own achievements clearly for once and I was happy with what I had done.

I’ve had to accept that life and housework isn’t about ‘everything’ or ‘perfection’.  It’s about doing what I can when I can.

I’m also learning that my perception of myself isn’t always accurate, others see me differently, in a more positive light.  I see myself as incompetent failure.  My friends, the opposite.  But that’s a discussion for another day about the mask I wear and how I project myself.

When knitting, you can often see the finished article in your head.  That’s what spurs you on.  What’s more difficult, especially when you’re designing your own pattern, is how to get there.  It is a case of improvising but you have to sit yourself down and regularly take stock of where you are and what you need to change.

In life, it can be harder to visualise where we want to end up.  But that’s apparently what drives success, knowing your destination and it being real.  It’s no good kidding ourselves either that we want to be somewhere else and sometimes our journey dictates our current destination.  But you have to keep adjusting your course and if you end up take a stop in some apparently not so pleasant place then you have to revise those expectations one way or another.  Maybe this is where you’re meant to be and it’s not such a bad place after all.  Maybe you need help to get back on the road to your actual destination, maybe you’re a little lost because you haven’t consulted your directions or pattern for a while.

In life and knitting, I need to take the time to find out where I’m going to end up and ask myself if that’s really where I want to be.  I probably also need to work on visualising my destination, where I want my life to be.

The indomitable Jester Queen has recommended that share this post with the Just Be Enough Linky.  So here goes!  (I hope it fits).

Can You Guess What it is Yet?

(If the rest of the international community of bloggers don’t recognise the expression, it’s a popular catchphrase).

I’ve got a new project on my needles.  Yes, those very expensive, luxury needles I talked about before.  And yes, it’s in acrylic.  An expensive acrylic too.  My sweet husband chose it because research on Ravelry shows that although this pattern indicates a plain yarn, a variegated yarn really looks best.  Thank you to all those wonderful knitters who share their creations with the rest of the world.

The first problem that I encountered is that all my stitch/row counters are in use.  I have two fun clicky ones.  (Yes I do have too many projects on the go.  Ask my husband).  So I had to use a twisty one, you know the type?  They require you to put your knitting down at the end of each row and give it your undivided attention.  You also have to remember to increase the tens after every nine.  I forget.  Then I get confused when I’m ten rows behind where I thought I was.  Or worse, twenty.  I read the numbers backwards too, which means I can get very confused sometimes.  The very first row becomes number 6.  Huh?!  Oh.  I twisted the wrong one.  That’s a nine.  Sigh.

I thought I was doing quite well with it, might even have it done by the end of the week.  Ah, unbridled and foolhardy optimism.  If I don’t put it down and forget it about of course, which is why it’s very brave of me to declare that I have a project on the go here. I had of course read the pattern through before casting on, you know, as you do, the kind of read through which means casually skimming over it to make sure that there’s nothing too alien or scarily complicated happening.  Does anyone read the pattern through religiously before they start?  Am I meant to?  Hmm.  Oh well.

I did notice, whilst knitting not skimming, that after row 80 it stopped counting.  Now 80 rows is quite a lot when your counting skills and attention span are as limited as mine.  Not a problem.  I mean most patterns don’t count all the rows and you just have to knit until a mysterious ‘work measures X cm’.  That scares me, I’m never quite sure if I’m stretching it too much or too little.  I’d rather have rows actually at least then I know that I’m in the right place, roughly.  So even if after doing 80 rows of increasing you have to do the same amount of decreasing, that’s what?  Not too bad probably, not too different to working until a certain measurement, you’re just counting the rows instead.  Different sort of counting.

I was coping.  Making good progress, keeping optimistic.  Keeping an eye on the devious behaviour of my counter.  Then I saw a little instruction.  You know, just after that all important row 80.  Optimism flew away faster than you can say ‘bullet’.  Wheezy breathing commenced.  Just a minor detail.  Between the increases and the decreases, there’s a ‘Rep rows 79 and 80 30 more times’.  Yes, THIRTY more times.  This thing is going to be a lot bigger than I was planning.  It looks kinda small and cute in the photos.  Now it’s a monster.

Oh wait.  I’ve just done some more maths.  Hang on, just need to try to breathe.  If it says that about TWO rows, then I need to do them BOTH THIRTY more times, which involves multiplication.  That’s SIXTY rows.  OK, definitely not breathing.  Definitely not going to have it finished by the end of the week.  Sigh.

If and when I finish this project I’ll let you know but here’s what it looks like at the moment at row 63 (or 39 when I look quickly):

Can you guess what it is yet?!