Drifting…

‘We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end…’ – Blaise Pascal

I’ve been crippled by an odd sense of detachment lately. Actually, I don’t know if I can call it an entirely new sentiment, but this feeling of being seemingly adrift has become unsettling. It’s got me wondering how truly isolated we really are, each of us, in little bubbles of self perception, nobody else sees the world as we see it, our perspective is as unique as the DNA we possess.

Nothing settles, nothing makes a lasting imprint, moments come and then…they pass, and we move onto the next and then the next….in the vain hope that something sticks, something imprints…something is remembered and makes a lasting impact. Moving through the world in an isolated circle is tiring, we go through the motions…the same actions…reactions….actions…reactions…time and time again…each of us in worlds of our own making, brushing pass each other, close…but no connection, no intersection…no overlap.

I’m tired of the endless disconnect and I hate that we’ve become so isolated, stuck in our tiny, impervious little bubbles circling others warily, caged…on edge…scared of making a connection (Note my use of the word ‘we’, I refuse to believe I’m the only crazy one). Scared of letting someone in, letting anyone in, scared of letting someone see the neurotic, crippled, broken side of us lest we scare them away.

But scared, afraid…terrified…because there’s no guarantee, all there is is this…this moving through the world…seeking a connection…but being rejected. And so we drift onwards, motion to motion, feeling…not feeling…wall to wall…closing in on our selves, the bubble shrinking, the world becoming scarier…smaller.

I hate feeling like this…woe is me, meanwhile there are people with real problems, tangible, earth shattering problems in the world. Of course that’s true, and I wish…wish with every fibre of my being that I could force myself to feel better, but it seems no matter what I do I return to this point of emptiness.

Numb.

Thank you Mr Bear…

‘Time spent with cats is never wasted’ Sigmund Freud

Ladies and gentleman I’d like to thank you for this award,

but frankly, I find it hard to believe…

I’ve won?! But I never win anything…

Well nothing that matters, no, that snazzy pen,

I won that when I was ten, best essay they said.

They say a lot of things, white noise most of the time.

I’m going to cut this speech short, only fools talk too much,

Natter and empty chatter, empty brains, that’s not me

I’ll never set out to make your ears bleed.

So, in short, thanks Mr Bear, you’ve taught me much,

How to live for the day, to purr for food, get into a scrap and win,

and such. Victory never tasted so sweet as a half eaten cat ear.

Rock on. Down with marzipan. Peace out.

*cue lone hand clap at the weirdest Oscar speech ever, I blame the Valium and sparkling white grape juice*

Written for Daily Prompt- http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/daily-prompt-victory/

Remember to stay in the lines

‘There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.’ Edouard Manet

I hate being on edge, hate it, makes me feel like everything grates, like there are needles under the skin, scratching, bleeding hurting…can’t sit still, can’t concentrate, can’t work…just can’t do anything except wallow in the teeth grinding, nausea inducing, heart breaking uselessness of it all.

Except…except when I colour in. Yes, colouring in…that childhood activity involving a drawing, some coloured pencils and a joyful suspension of time and circumstance. There’s something immeasurably comfortable in opening up the colouring book to a brand new, crisp, never before touched picture of a butterfly, just waiting for you to apply imagination and colour.

Perhaps it’s the remembrance of childhood, that innocence, the simplicity. Of course I’m much better at colouring in now than I was back then, hopefully. Maybe it’s the metaphor of ‘staying in the lines’, the careful application of pencil stroke so that you’re close to the edge of the line, but you don’t cross outside, you don’t smudge the paper, you leave a perfectly printed outline with all your colour, all your imagination, all your creativity locked inside those little, dark, printed borders.

Mmm…maybe, but just once I’d like to be brave and colour in like my 5-year-old niece does when she’s feeling particularly giddy; by scribbling all over the page in a haphazard, ad hoc, joyful glee.

Daily Prompt: Activity http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/08/19/daily-prompt-activity/

Queen of Procastrination…

‘You may delay, but time will not…’- Benjamin Franklin

I chuckled when the DailyPrompt turned up in my blog feed today, chuckled, then shook my head in mirth. I seem to have spent the last year putting off until tomorrow what I reasonably could have done today. I declare myself the Queen of procrastination, I’ll fight anyone for the title…just not this week.

I’ve been putting off writing my dissertation, my 25,000 word dissertation that’s due in November. I spend most of my day on a computer doing everything else…indulging my inner fangirl with Firefly, catching up on satirical news websites, listening to Pearl Jam albums on Youtube…anything but get on with writing my dissertation.

Why? Because I’ve always worried about being judged. I hate submitting work as then it’s the nail-biting wait to see if it’s good enough. If I’m good enough, I hate that, the self-doubt, the nightmares about a panel of people judging me…casting an disparaging eye over my research and deeming it…inadequate.

Gah…

Here I am blogging again when I should be writing my dissertation. Dammit! Well I won’t tell my supervisors if you don’t.

Written for the Daily Prompt: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/daily-prompt-time/

Lights dancing on the water

‘All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another…’ – Anatole France

Change…change…change…winds of change…those

Longed for whispers of hope…love…life…dreams

Drifting…floating…swirling, smoke in the water,

To grasp at it is to reach for the impossible…

…no…

Not impossible…for to wait for change is to wait for hope…

So sit patiently by the water’s edge, see the colours change,

ripples merge and sink…lights dancing on the water…now black…then…

…red…orange…yellow…brighter…brighter…as hope renews,

circumstances change and life begins…

again.

Poem for Daily Prompt: Change http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/daily-prompt-change/

To thine own self be true…

‘Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice…’ -Hamlet- Shakespeare

Not everybody is meant to standout and there’s nothing in the world wrong with that. Finding yourself under an intense spotlight can be disconcerting, and, as shown with some in the public spotlight can be your undoing.

Choosing to standout can be a matter of complex intricacies, in a way all of us can standout if we wish to be the center of attention. But then there’s the old adage of ’empty vessels making the most noise’, those who standout from the crowd rarely do so on account of some brilliant mind, or some fascinating talent. Think of those in the spotlight right now, you know, the beautiful people always in the magazines, those who are ‘standing out’, how many do you know that have contributed positively, or meaningfully to the world?

Standout…shout out…louder, louder…louder…

Until that’s all they hear…drown out the little voices…

The voices that say…you’re not good enough…not pretty enough…clever enough…

Standing out isn’t about being the best, it’s about being at your best.

Shakespeare said it perfectly:

‘This above all: to thine own self be true

And it must follow, as the night the day

Thou canst not then be false to any man.’

Written for the Daily Prompt: Standout http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/08/15/daily-prompt-standout/

Shadows of the world

‘And moving thro’ a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear…’ – The Lady of Shallot by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The Lady of Shallot a poem by Lord Tennyson fits perfectly here, and relates the tale of the Lady Shallot who is cursed to watch the world pass by only through reflections in the mirror. It’s perhaps indicative of writers and bloggers the world over who reflect their experiences outwards, seeing the world and interpreting it in their own unique manner.

The Lady Shallot is indeed cursed when she glimpses outside at the ‘real’ world, and by the time she floats down to Camelot, she is dead, I’m fairly new to blogging, and when I started this blog a mere three days ago, I wrote as a means of exorcising some demons, the mirror had crack’d and I sought to reflect it’s fickle, unfair nature in my inital blog posts. My choice of theme was what seemed at the time an almost random choice, but upon ‘reflection’ I see that choosing a chalkboard was a matter of chalking up my bitter experiences, a way to show and tell, standing up in class and letting everyone know exactly what I’d done that summer.

My blog name, ‘notsinglenothappy’ is exactly what it says, no frills on that one. But I think it shows what a difference a day makes, I was in a very dark place only three days ago, and I may not have left that place but I’m getting better, there are chinks of light reflecting from the broken pieces of mirror on the floor.

Reflections ripple outwards, they touch not only our senses but all who glimpse sideways at them, when what see of the world affects us we reflect that in our blogs, our poetry, in our pictures, in the threads that we weave both metaphorically and physically. I have read and seen many lives refelcted in writer’s blogs, glimpes that are sorrowful, funny, pitying, loving or joyful…all of them are reflections of unique perspectives on a world of shadows that can have many faces, plagued by light and dark.

Daily Promt: Mirror, Mirror on the wall: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/daily-prompt-reflections/

We’re laughing at you, not with you…

‘Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand’- Mark Twain

Laughter is healing,laughter makes the world go round,

but sometimes it loses that geneorus feeling, for

That politician who fell off the stage, a ‘public fall’, literal, figurative,

The one who mistakes a religion for a country, driven by an impotent rage.

The one caught with their pants down, sexting at your age, tut…

The dour faced clown, the false moral emptiness you can’t proclaim.

When we laugh, us plebs, us ‘normal’ folk, when we laugh, we laugh at you

And it’s never too soon.

Poem for the Daily Promt challenge: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/daily-prompt-funny-2/

Fit to write…?

‘I see the world, feel the chill,
which way to go…?’- Release
Pearl Jam

Being fit to write is an interesting concept. How do you assess levels of fitness? Is that a measure of your physical or mental wellbeing, a combination of both? Who decides what the optimum level is, how do we know when we’ve reached that plateau, that zenith of wellbeing that allows to wear the mantle of being ‘fit’?

Michele Foucalt wrote about the ‘History of Madness’ and how people with mental illness are treated, or have been treated throughout history. Foucalt suffered with depression and experienced the mental health system as a patient, thereby he theorised the concept that the medical profession is a form of discourse, a predetermined set of truths that configures people on the side of madness or sanity depending on the ability to reason. Those who were melancholic or depressed had lost the ability to reason therefore their judgement was not to be trusted.

But Foucalt saw madness, the unreasonable self, as an untapped form of creativity; only in truly allowing ourselves to explore the dark struggles of our nature can we struggle to develop something that is brilliant, profound…but above all, closer to the truth than we ever dare imagine.

My point is that we are never ‘fit to write’. We write because we have something to say, and it does not follow that what we say must resonate from an entirely ‘sane’ or ‘reasonable’ premise. Sometimes when we are at our most melancholic, when we feel trapped in a dark well we can’t climb out of, when everything is dark, when we feel all is lost…then when we write we are….raw…honest…brilliant…beautiful.

Post for the Weekly Writing challenge http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/writing-challenge-health/

notsinglebutnothappy

That unique non-existence that is a Muslim woman separated but not divorced…

Author Archives: Ribs