Day 117

Today, I start therapy again. I don’t now what will come of it, if we’ll decide that I don’t need something long-term again, or that we’ll decide that I’d be better off changing to a local practitioner rather than zooming with my therapist who lives down in deepest darkest Suffolk. What I do know is that I decided over a month ago that some old bad habits were creeping into my life again, only in a small way, that I think need dealing with. The whole issue of the low self-esteem, the calling myself fat, getting cross with myself because of my perception that I have achieved nothing, the negative voice sitting on my shoulder and whispering hateful and critical things into my ear. All these things need to be addressed while they are still only inklings rather than having regrown into big issues. I saw what these things did to me and my relationships because I ignored them for over 30 years and they grew into almost uncontrollable monsters.

Inklings should be small drawings flowing from a fountain pen or a Chinese brush.

Coming back to what I was saying about some people only reading the personal blog and not reading Aggie. To an extent, it’s unimportant. What is important is that I’ve discovered a different way of pushing myself forward with the prose writing. And to that extent, Aggie is a throwaway, an experiment, a trial run for other books I’ve had in my head before I even thought of Aggie over two months ago. I just need to add to that output, can’t let Aggie be the only creative output. I need to get back to The Mortality Code, and I will, and need to write at least a poem a day. I’ve written before about the chaos in my head in anything that’s not day job related, and I need to organise myself. And I’m not putting it off. I do just genuinely need to do the best I can while the study is a repository of all things that were in the garage, while the study has shelves full of double-stacked books, while everyone who zooms with me can see the hoover hose behind me, because we’re a 2-hoover family, and the second one sits in here with me for now.

Inklings should be the children of hand-written prose.

When I was in here last night working and putting some things to bed that I had to action, it rained quite hard. So long has it been since it has rained that at first I didn’t recognise the sounds on the roof and on the door. Not that I had been wishing for rain; quite the opposite, actually. I’d been hoping for a dry barren spell that would last until October, wishing for intense heat that would drive the whole of England’s negativity away into the middle of the North Sea forever. A pipe dream, as always. My acupuncturist and I were talking about how so many English people think 16C is hot when we both actually think that that sort of temperature is very cold. I often think of sitting on a balcony in Torrevieja at 11pm in just my boxer shorts and a T-shirt at the end of May, strolling through an olive grove in the south of France in August at midnight and needing to wear nothing but some thin trousers and a T-shirt (it would have been shorts had there not been so many mosquitoes), and sweltering.

Inklings are the special scents of black ink that emanates from a fragmentary.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 74