5 years, 1 month, 11 days

It's been a while. In fact, it's been a long while, and many things have changed. Back in the days when I used to update this blog (fairly) regularly, I stuck by the tagline that this isn't a "niche" blog, because there's no such thing as a "niche" person. We are all who we are, good and bad, hopeful and hopeless, misguided, misdirected or just plain missing.

Back in the days when I used to write about all sorts of things, there were some things that I didn't mention. I probably hinted, obliquely, that my mind, attention or affection was sometimes not where it should have been, but I wasn't explicit. I complained a lot about being tired, and as Samuel Johnson nearly said, when a man is tired all the time he probably has things weighing him down.

Why am I here again? Because I am still me. This is still Steve, older and with the potential to be wiser, still the same person who is different every day, every hour; still learning who I am while being me way better than anyone else could be.

So maybe I'll write about that. I might even write regularly.

Well, fairly regularly.

Spring news

I've been in a kind of hibernation as far as writing anything for public consumption is concerned. It's not been the short winter days (though it is wonderful to see some sunshine again) but rather some of the murkier areas of my psyche that have slowed me down. The problem with ferreting around in your own soul is that some of the things that are unearthed become, well, preoccupying. I can't/won't write about them, but it's hard to write about anything else. I wonder if this is what newspaper editors have felt like over the past weeks - no matter how great your gossip and human interest stories are, Global Catastrophe pushes them off the front page every time.

Finding faults

I had my first lesson yesterday for my Part 2 exam, the second stage in becoming a driving instructor. I'm hopefully going to be taking my Part 1 (Theory) in the next couple of weeks, but I have to have 18 hours instruction before my Part 2, so the lessons need to start now. I'd been thinking about how I drive over the last couple of months, trying to spot and eliminate bad habits, but it turned out yesterday that my main driving fault is one I wasn't even aware I had. I change gear too soon, even changing up as I steer round corners. Not necessarily life-threatening, but enough to fail my test.
It did make me think, though, about my other faults, in other areas of my life. I can list lots of things about me that need working on - some urgently - but there must be some faults of which I an completely unaware. Which is why I need genuine friends, who will point out the problems I hadn't noticed - and why I'm not being much of a friend if I won't do the same for them.

All work and no play (well, panto)

The last couple of nights I've woken up worrying about the panto - nothing major going wrong, but I'm very aware that there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that needs to happen, and that it's down to me to make sure it does. Unfortunately at the moment I seem to be pretty bad at prioritising my time, so that I never get past the 'Urgent do it NOW' stuff that keeps the household running, and the 'Important do it soon' stuff gets put off again and again and again...

Real life

For the last week I've been meaning to post something about how astonishingly busy I've been. I expect it would have been a lighthearted look at how many different things I'd been involved with, with a serious undercurrent to make the reader think "Hey, this guy really is incredibly busy."

Unfortunately I haven't. And the not very lighthearted reason is that I've been busy, tired, and procrastinating. When I used to be employed full time - especially in the months before the NHS and I parted company - I imagined what life would be like when I was having to do all kinds of things to try and raise money/get people off our backs about debts. In my imagination I would get up early, work hard all day, and then when evening came and my loving wife and family beckoned me to come sit with them and maybe watch a movie, I'd ruefully but resolutely smile and explain that no, I had some more work to do.

Reality (as is often the case) is somewhat different. Yes, I do get up early. Yes, I try and work hard to get some money. But I don't work hard enough or for long enough to get sufficient money to stop the graph on the household budget looking like the advanced slopes at St Moritz. Because in real life there are lots of other things that need doing, where a smiling refusal doesn't make any difference. And come the evening, frankly I'm so exhausted that I've hit the settee before you can say "Why don't you come and sit down?"

Part of wanting to be a writer is the discipline of writing when I don't want to, or when I'm tired, or when there's too much else on. This blog ought to have daily entries, except in extremely unusual circumstances. Right now, I need to get my act together.

Things to do

Things I need to do: finish the bathroom, mend the hole in the hall ceiling, sort out the heating and hot water, sleep more, get some exercise, eat properly, help look after children, help get the house ready for Christmas, move Rachel's room around.

Things I want to do: finish the bathroom, mend the hole in the hall ceiling, sort out the heating and hot water, sleep more, get some exercise, eat properly, help look after children, help get the house ready for Christmas, move Rachel's room around.

What I did today

Pictures from this afternoon's party for the cast and crew of "Once Upon A Fairy Tale" are here.

I had a lovely afternoon.

Preaching School

Image via Wikipedia Reflecting on last night's preaching school, I have to say that although James has put a fantastic amount of work into it, and Jon, Karen and Matt are great and very supportive, I feel less sure that I would want to carry on to the point where I was preaching in front of the church. This is partly because of my generic laziness - the positively-phrased feedback last night included the word "underprepared" - but, more seriously, because I can see two major problems. Firstly, I am too busy to be able to do this properly and take it as seriously as it should be. I can't even manage to do basic housework, let alone put in the amount of time and effort that preaching in public needs. I wouldn't put myself forward to lead a small group or do children's work, precisely because I know I couldn't give the commitment, and even allowing for preaching not being very frequent, I'm not sure I should say I'll do it if I don't think I'll be able to do it properly. Secondly, I am chronically depressed, with acute phases of misery and despair. This means that when I preach from the heart, I will not actually be giving a very good impression of giving Good News. Last night I really thought I'd given a sober but balanced exposition of the passage, and it wasn't until it was pointed out to me that I realised that I had missed out on the positive element of it and basically said "Life is shit, and that's the way it is". Now, I may think that about my life, but I cannot generalise from my point of view, and I certainly can't do it in front of church, where people will give more weight to what I say precisely because I am at the front of church, and I dare not risk generalising from my experience of life and doing it in a way that has a major impact on someone else if I don't even realise I'm doing it. I don't have anyone (other preaching school members aside) who I would go to for feedback and support, and I know that if I was asked to preach and was feeling down and miserable, I'd say "Yes, of course, that will be fine."

The only thing in favour of me carrying on is the feeling that this is something God wants me to do. On the other hand, I have previously thought that God wanted me to go into ordained ministry ("Thanks but no thanks" said the Church of England) or that God had called me to do youth work (managed to mess that one up myself), so a vague feeling that this may be how I'm supposed to use my ability to stand up and talk in public might not in itself be a good enough reason; certainly not good enough to risk doing something very important very badly.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible

Apologies for the lack of anything much here recently. I've been thinking about some stuff that I want to write but it doesn't quite feel right to do so at the moment.

Many teenagers

Well, it's Friday night and I am at home with only fifteen teenagers for company. It's Peter's birthday party, so he invited Josh, Ansley, Dan, Callum, Elliot, David and someone whose name I don't know round for pizza and a DVD. This was a good night to do so, because the others would be out - Rachel dancing, Benjamin and Reuben at NRG and Daniel almost certainly out somewhere or other. Unfortunately JK had gone away (to a stag night apparently) so the usual group of young people who gather at our house before NRG each week gathered anyway, but ended up with nowhere to go. After a certain amount of confusion and to-and-fro-ing, we said they might as well come round here. So now we also have Benjamin, Reuben, Ben, Shelby, Sam, Lucy and Zoe. A few are still watching Stardust, but there are also groups shouting at each other over Halo or playing outside on the trampoline. Katrina has gone to Tesco and to fetch Rachel, so I'm left here with many many youths. It's not that bad actually.

++ Out Of Brain Error ++

Went over to the library to borrow some CDs. Thought, "It's a lovely day, I'll leave my coat in the office." Walked over to the library. It was, indeed, lovely weather. Got to the library. Returned last week's CDs. Browsed round the shelves. Thought "It's a lovely day, so I left my coat in the office... with my library card in the pocket."

The sooner we all get microchips implanted in our heads the better.

openSUSE

I finally have the openSUSE install program running on the Compaq Armada 1750 that I bought before Christmas. It turned out that it was nothing to do with the BIOS, nothing that needed any of the hoops that I've been jumping through. It just needed me to read this, and in particular the bit that says

"Microsoft Windows users
Windows XP can't burn ISO images without third party software."

Maybe this could be a little bit more obvious for first time users? Because lo and behold, as soon as I used the recommended software to burn the image (rather than simply copying it to a disk), it ran the install from the CD with no problem at all.

Therapy

Went for an introductory session with a guy called John Baker at the GP surgery this morning. Unsurprisingly, talked about addressing my needs rather than just trying to placate them with chocolate, hopefully it will be useful for looking at some of my recurrent Romans 7:15 moments.

Monday morning

I'm struggling to stay awake this morning, even worse than the average Monday. It wasn't that long after midnight that I went to bed, but the 6:30am alarm interrupted a really bizarre dream, and I felt as though I hadn't slept that well. Still, we did win the quiz again (quite a common occurence these days - we're becoming the new Monkey Tennis), partly due to James coming to join us. It's a good feeling to be part of this little group who get together on Sundays. Realised last night that we're not going to be there next Sunday because we'll be with Rachel at the Fonteyn Nureyev Young Dancers Competition. I'd totally lost track of the fact that that is next Sunday. Mind you, I seem to be temporally disorientated at the moment anyway: having remembered that we're not here next Sunday evening, I then spent five minutes worrying about who was going to do what at Conversation, until it occured to me that that is on the third Sunday of the month - and earlier I'd told several people that I'd left decorations up past Twelfth Night because I spent several hours believing that it was the 7th January yesterday.
Perhaps I should go and work in Japan.

Happy New Year

Good grief! I've just looked at this blog and realised that I hadn't posted anything since November, and that wasn't exactly chatty and uplifting. Thankfully, I'm feeling more positive than I did back then, so I will try and put slightly more on here in the next few weeks and months. This isn't a New Year's resolution: I haven't made any, partly because I never keep them, but also because I'm a chronic maker of resolutions, and I know that keeping on saying to myself "From now on, I will/will not do x any more" is often another way of saying "I don't like myself because I do/don't do this thing", which then means that when I don't keep that resolution, I've confirmed what a no good/unreliable/unlikeable person I am. So, no resolutions.

Not that this means I'm not aiming to be more like the person I was created to be, or that I don't want to improve my relationships, or that there is nothing I want to achieve. But rather than setting a list of tasks and targets, I'm more interested in developing my relationship with God and allowing him to change me. That way, the things that I do more or less of are outward signs of internal change, rather than things to beat myself up with.

Absence of anything

Sorry I've not posted much. The thing with being depressed is that I'm, well, depressed. One result of this is that I don't feel much like blogging. Or to be more accurate, I do feel like blogging but I don't actually get around to it, because doing anything, even stuff I want to do, feels like too much effort and I put everything off that I possibly can.

So anyway, there you go.

Ups and downs

One of the things I really hate about depression is that when I have a down couple of days, it feels so much like things will never improve. If I was down all the time, or if I had an Eeyore personality, then I presume either I'd think that things might get better one day, or I'd give up entirely. But when I have a few good days, or a good week, and then go back to feeling sluggish, lethargic and hopeless, it feels so much worse. I guess that one of the first things to go in a down spell is the belief that I can do anything about it. Being happier seems to go along with feeling more in control, more able to get things done. Being down inevitably goes with feelings of being overwhelmed, of not being able to make anything better, no matter how much I want to.

Hope springs eternal, just not very high.

Extemely lucky

I'm sitting here in my kitchen, typing on my work laptop which is attached to my home wireless network, having drunk a couple of espressos and eaten far too many chocolate biscuits, and although this is a treat rather than an everyday occurence, it occurs to me that globally speaking I am part of a tiny privileged minority.

Maybe I should be mindful of this more often.

P.S.

And my knee hurts.

Work

Have I moaned recently about how much I hate my job? Moan, moan, moan, etc. Unfortunately saying "I hate my job" is simply a bit of convenient buck-passing; a way to avoid how I actually feel. This is easier to spot when someone asks me what I hate about my job. Is it the hours? The people? The amount of work? The environment? Do you have a horrible boss? At this point, if I'm being honest, I have to say that for the money I'm earning, the job is wonderful: regular hours (yes, there's an expectation that you will work evenings and weekends, but if you don't, nothing bad happens) - I work more or less 9-5 Mon-Fri and don't take work home with me; there is plenty to do, but nothing that I couldn't do in my working hours if I actually got on with it; I share a modern, well-designed and comfortable office with a whole bunch of people who are generally pleasant - I wouldn't call any of them friends - but then I can't think of anyone I've worked with in the last eight years or so who I would consider a friend; my boss is supportive well beyond the bounds of what she has to do in employment law. So what's the problem? The problem is that I feel anxious and miserable at the thought of going to work, and when I'm at work I spend most of my time wishing that I weren't there or putting off doing what I'm supposed to be doing because I feel so anxious and horrible that I want to run out of the door. And if it's not the work or the working conditions, that means it must be me. But then again, I don't feel this bad when I'm not at work: insecure and generally having a low opinion of myself, yes, but not feeling this bad.

The likelihood is that it's a combination of factors, or that I've learned to associate particular feelings with certain environments or behaviours, or that I can successfully project my negative feelings onto work. (All that money spent on therapy over the years wasn't wasted then!) The question, as always, is: What am I going to do about it?

And this is the point at which I run out of useful ideas. Yes, every morning I pray for the strength and the ability to put in a productive day at work, and every night I regret that I didn't try harder with what strength I had. Yes, I could look for another job - but what if I feel the same there? And in any case, few employers would take on someone with my absence record. ("What were your significant achievements in your last post?" "Umm...I turned up occasionally?") Yes, I ask my boss to be hard on me, to ask me what I've been doing if I can't show her anything productive from that day or that week, but it doesn't make me feel any better, it just adds another layer of worry and feelings of failure.

I know that this doesn't answer any questions, and I don't really believe that the catharsis of blogging will change anything; I wanted to post something and this is the main thing on my mind, that's all.