Triggers of grief

Grief comes in waves

A trigger of a memory

A word or two heard in passing

Thoughts of them come to you

Trespassing your mind

You can’t help it, you find

You love those memories, but they make you sad

Bittersweet, you feel bad

Guilty that you don’t want the memories, guilty you think of them

Moving on is difficult because it hurts again and again

Any little trigger will make you think of those

Who are in the heavens, those whose death caused you woes

But you know that you love them and happy memories you did share

But why does it have to hurt so much? 

When they are no longer there?

The irony in procrastination

I learned something today which has helped me feel a little less frustrated about myself and accepting the fact that I am not lazy when I have procrastinated in my work, because of something a motivational speaker on Instagram had said.

“When a person goes into procrastination it is the brains coping mechanism, a response to coping with too much emotional trauma and overload”.  I may not have quoted them correctly, but it made me understand why I have procrastinated so long in my work.

Since September 2022 I’ve hardly written a thing towards any novel, because I have undergone a lot of emotional turmoil in my life.  A grief, followed by a diagnosis in my son, followed by erratic behaviours and arguments and a break in a long term relationship – coupled with the emotions I was already trying to tackle of loneliness, recovering from long-term sickness, trying to start foundations for a new routine, career, every aspect of my life I was trying to concentrate on all at once and I got overloaded and emotionally burned out.

This is why I have procrastinated so long, because I was trying to fix too many problems in my life at once, that I ended up exhausting myself on an emotional level and found I lacked the energy to think creatively, because I’m tired.

I’ve tired myself out by overthinking other problems that I did not have the energy to throw myself into the problem solving of make believe problems.

I understand this now and it has taken a huge weight off my shoulders, the weight was the anger that I had become lazy, when in fact I was the opposite.  I was working myself like a slave to do everything and being hard on myself when I failed my personal creative and career goals and dreams. 

I have also sat back and reflected that some of the things I was angry about because I felt I was lazy about them, I had actually accomplished great things but didn’t notice because I was bogged down in over perfecting them or just simply not noticing the progress I had made.

For example, March 2022 I could barely get out of bed and walk downstairs and up just once without having an asthma attack and shaky legs. 

From Easter 2022 I started to do small exercises, forcing myself to do the little things, until they built up.  Well they did build up over a time and I didn’t notice the physical achievements I was able to do.  Now I can walk up and down the stairs five times before feeling shaky.  I can do 70 reps of side reaches before I feel I need a break and for the past week I have been able to start preparing my own meals and even cooked a meal for the whole family the other day!

Things I haven’t been able to do in almost eight years!

But did I praise myself for doing all that?  No!  Because I didn’t notice until I sat back and reflected on the past year.

No more than had I noticed last week that I’ve lost 14 inches around my waist in 2yrs!  14 inches!

I’ve been on a high protein diet and I have cut out a lot of the unhealthy snacks and caffeine I used to drown myself in, not all of them, but most – to the extent my diet is almost unrecognisable from last year! 

Certain aspects of my health have improved immensely, though I still have two major problems which will never go away completely because it’s part of the auto-immunity problem I have. 

I’m reading emails daily, whereas this time last year I used to go three weeks without checking them! 

I’m spending a lot less time on social media too, I spent my whole day on social media last year! 

I’m starting to read more books.

I’ve finished an art class online.

I am halfway through two more free courses, one ran by Mel Robbins. 

I’m posting on my blog more often than not, whereas early last year I could only really post about once a week. 

I’m cutting my nails instead of biting them. 

I am replying to friends and family as soon as they message me instead of taking weeks to get back to them! 

I’ve accomplished more milestones in the past year than I have my whole life and I didn’t notice them!

I was beating myself up for being lazy and yet I was doing so much – the irony!

I also noticed another thing – I felt I didn’t have the energy to write towards my novels and I was journaling my life pretty hard in private for the past two months and guess what?  I noticed all my journal entries about my life amounted to 350k words, 350k in just two months!

I was writing approximately 2k in private journals and 4k on another one which I sometimes share with selected people a day, I say was, I still am.  This is not including the word counts for my blog posts and poetry by the way, I never counted those up! 

I told a friend online about this and I said why can’t I write like that towards my novels?  She asked the same question back at me too!

Yes, why can’t you?  Why can’t you implement changes in your style of writing so that you can do that just to get the first drafts down quickly?  Maybe you are overthinking your first drafts way too much?  You are trying to perfect first drafts immediately because you feel it’s urgent to write your novel, yet you are not writing your novel because of it. 

Irony again!

Once again I may not have quoted her 100% but that was the gist of the conversation.

Using the same method I do for journal writing to write down first drafts would mean that I would get the first drafts of four or six novels down per month that would be amazing if it is as affective as my journal writing is!

However a novel is more than just a first draft, so that was just over optimistic thinking!  But you get me, right? 

I haven’t started implementing this yet, I am talking about it today, because it is today I am trying to start with that, today is the day I am going to change my first draft method.

Wish me luck!

Thanks for reading!

Top of the wheel

I’m not setting goals anymore in regards to novel writing, they get done when they get done but I haven’t given up; Yes I’ve had a respite since September 2022 and that is a long time, unreasonably long, but I had to have it due to mental health healing.  I had a hard time, there were lots of things happening in my life I had to think about – think a lot.

Lots of things in fact, lots of different problems to solve and many of them just needed me to try and calm myself enough to allow myself to think, then once I had managed to do that, I needed to calm myself again and stop thinking in order to heal from it all.

There was grief, death of a relative, a revelation I wasn’t sure was a trick or not, an announcement, an opportunity, a break up, a diagnosis and so many things all rolled into one major thing for me – that I could not cope.

Ultimately my entire life has been turned upside down and I am still in the situation of not really knowing if it is a good or bad thing just yet, I am still teetering on the edge of trying to determine which – it could be either!

It’s a strange situation to be in.

I feel at the moment I am standing on top of a wheel and if I fall backwards I will land in shark filled waters and if I fall forwards I will fall safe into someone’s arms.

At present I am still on top of the wheel.

It’s like sitting on a bomb really.

My mind has been so preoccupied with all these things that I haven’t been able to keep to my reading goals, my writing or practising of my art.  I haven’t even been able to hold a conversation without my mind wandering off, worrying about things.

It’s only been this past week I have manage to slowly and surely restart my habits.  I have started to write a little again, I have started to read a little again and I have even done some art.

Not as much as I would normally do in a day, in fact, I am doing less than ten paragraphs every couple of days towards anything, my one poem a day has become three or four again; my art practises are happening every couple of days.  It’s more than what has happened between September 2022 to March 2023 in any case and I am proud it’s coming back together again.

The frustrating thing is this – my typing speed has got extremely slow and I can’t seem to speed it up again.  I used to write 90 to 120 words per minute and now I struggle to get above 40.

I am making a lot of spelling mistakes and errors, cognitively I am suffering a lot and I don’t know what to make of it.

My Easter Project and Project AD has hopes to be finished before Midsummer, but I am not going to force myself, it’s still early days for me, I still haven’t fully healed.

In reality, I need a holiday – get out of this environment, get out into nature and remember how to laugh and play again – playfully scream – wash my hair with the rays of the sun – chase faeries – hug trees – and try to learn how to feel happy again.  Because happiness is a distant memory, one I am not sure I can remember how it feels anymore.  Strange as that sounds…

I also need to learn to trust again.

Trust in the process, trust to love again, trust that I have self-worth, that I am someone deserving and someone who can be free to laugh without someone complaining about the noise or worrying I am going to get over excited and hurt myself.

Because a couple of years ago I was bedbound sick and laughing really did hurt me, because it would cause a coughing fit and my spleen was swollen and so it genuinely was rather painful to laugh – but those things are behind me now.  But still, out of habit I have people trying to calm me down, because they’ve forgotten how much I have healed.

I need to lose myself in feelings that are opposite to negative ones – I need to, because I don’t feel very human anymore.

There are times I have sat back and realised all the negativity around me, all the bitterness, envy, jealousy, contempt and discomfort and I wonder what am I becoming exactly?  Am I becoming a demon?  Because the only things I can feel are variations of darkness…

It’s a scary place to be – see, there – fear – another negative emotion… but you see, I try to remember something a motivational speaker called Mel Robbins once said – that fear is the exact same chemical in the brain to excitement and that you have to change your perspective and realise when you fear something that you might actually need to try and tell yourself it’s exciting, rather than something to fear.

Odd… but I am trying this trick.

I am on the cusp of something amazing which is about to happen in my life and all I can think about is how scary it is – I know there are wonderful things coming with it, especially a lot of love and tenderness and protection – but I still can’t help but focus on that one major problem.  I have like 30 pros and only around five cons to this chance, yet it’s the cons that are taking up brain space!

When you see it like that, you realise there is something seriously wrong with how you are wired!

Wired might not be correct actually… trained is perhaps the best way to describe it.   Because I used to be such a Positive Pollyanna and it has only really been in the past decade that the Pollyanna in me has started to die.

I need to do what happened in the book Pollyanna – I need to find my tribe to help resuscitate me, bring me back to the light.

Although saying that, I think I don’t need to, I think – if I am reading things correctly, my tribe has come to find me and all I need to do is wait a little while longer, then reach out my hand fearlessly and say to myself – I am excited to be a part of your life!

Thanks for reading!

How you’ll ride this storm alone

The world becomes darker when you lose a friend

When the world becomes darker, you need that friend

All your fears come true, when their life ends

There is no one to hold you tight and make things right again

All hopes and your fears are turning the gears

Your friend who has helped you all these years

Is no longer there to help you through

You are without a clue

Of what to do now

You don’t know how

You’ll ride this storm alone

Vanity & suppression

I have been thinking about the YouTube channel I am going to set up after Christmas a lot, I have been trying to think about what it should be mostly about.  People like themes, they don’t like random people no matter how authentic they are, or do they?

I mean, I like a lot of stuff and I would like to do a lot of stuff – I don’t want to be bored with the same old same old, you know?

I want to sometimes read out my poetry to people, I want to share gardening tips and recipes and my journey through weight loss and other things.  I don’t want to just be a gardening vlog, or a beauty and fitness vlog or a writing vlog.  I want to do the whole caboodle, now people say, sure you can do this but have multiple channels, but I don’t really want to do that.

If I had multiple channels, then I will need to film and edit every day for a once a week post on each and that is taking up more time than I want to do.

Plus I am none too thrilled about the editing process, I hate doing anything technical for too long.

One of my biggest desires in having a YouTube channel is to visibly show people my weight loss, fitness progresses.  But contrary to that there are two things I hate about it… the fame this could give me and the fact I have to show my fat ugly body and face on the camera, or else, what am I showing?

I’m paranoid enough without being famous!

Seriously, you have no idea how paranoid I am when a stranger points and looks like they are talking about me.  I mean… I can’t cope now, let alone when I know they know me… you know… at least right now I can put it down to me being a schizoid, of course they aren’t really pointing at me…. Until they then call me fat ass to my face and I am like… ok I guess they were then, rude!

I keep my mouth shut to people who shout that at me, primarily because I want to live.  But inside I want to shout out “Like your lip will be if you carry on mate”!

If people knew the attitude that goes on inside my head, I would have been murdered years ago!

I don’t like the idea of going out dressed up in a headscarf and huge sunglasses and learning to turn my head away from anyone as I walk past them like some super international spy!   

I just want to dawdle down the street in my scruffs on a lazy day, walking a dog, without it being splashed on the papers “TC bad hair day” or “TC midlife crisis” you know.

But then again, there are days where the attention whore comes out and it’s like “for goodness sake notice me, notice me, stop ignoring me, why am I being ignored when I have just walked down the street looking like a bowl of fruit”?

Thing is, I do like attention if I have to be honest with you.  But the problem is, on my terms and the world doesn’t work like that!

Fame scares me because of the stupid lengths some journalists will go to for a good pic and a front page position in their newspaper; it’s disgusting what some people will do to advance themselves.

When I was little I was famous for a few months in North London as being a pageant queen stripped of her rightful prize because of nepotism in the judging panel.  I remember someone taking me by the hand to pull me away from my mum so they got a perfect shot of me, The Angel of Burnt Oak!

That scared me, let alone the incidences with a couple of my more famous relatives.

The universe has wanted me to be famous for a long time, but I have always fought it.  My grandmother and some of the Romany relatives we have often sat down having fortune telling annuals for the family and from the age of seven they have all been convinced I will be a huge name in the world someday; though they said I will be late in getting that name.  I will be in my early forties.

They suggested even back then, that I am destined for greatness, I will find greatness myself, but I will find someone equally great to spend my life with.  They warned me I would have a child with a man but then I would leave him to start a second family quite late in life. 

Though I would start all this late in life, my legacy would be huge and I would be like Shakespeare or Charles Dickens in how long my fame will last.

Vanity, I know – I know its vanity and I would hold my hands up and say, you think I am bad for this now?  You should have seen me when I was thinner and I felt prettier than I do now, then you’d know how vain I really can be!

I even have a playlist called “Vanity” where you will find songs on it such as “keep young and beautiful” by Annie Lennox, “You’re never fully dressed without a smile” by the musical Annie and “beautiful and dirty rich” by Lady Gaga!.

So yes vanity has always been part of what I call “my true” personality, but it has been badly abused and supressed over the years.  Make no mistake, I don’t think I am beautiful, but I do know there’s a lot of people who said I am and although I don’t believe them, I take their word for it; as the world isn’t generally nice about that sort of thing, unless it’s true and I know a lot of beautiful people who hate themselves too.

I used to obsess over my looks a lot because I can’t stand it when another woman notices; you forgot to do your eyebrows today, omg you have no lip liner, just lipstick? 

I can’t afford to be vain anymore; I don’t have the budget for it.  But when I got sick in 2014 I totally let myself go because my illness made me bedbound and for a while we thought I had some type of cancer, but it wasn’t. 

I also thought, nobody is interested in me with a child and I am approaching forty, why bother?  Especially with my baggage. 

But I have been doing a lot of inner child therapies lately and its waking the true me up again – I love it, but I also hate the idea of people seeing my changes and thinking I am trying too hard to impress others or that I am being pretentious, when in fact I am actually becoming my more authentic and very supressed self! 

As a child, before my mother started to peel me apart from the age of 7yrs I used to love standing in front of people performing for them, singing, acting, dancing, showing off and being my beautiful self in such cocky little way!  This I believe is one of the reasons behind why my grandad called me “cocker” because I was cocky before my mother got her nails into me!

It’s funny but I started to get fat around the time mum started to hate me and supress me, before that, when I had her love and support, I was blooming marvellous and hadn’t a care in the world, I could move mountains with my confidence. 

She insisted she needed to hold me down though, or I was going to the devil, she especially freaked out when I got the notion of burlesque – a thing I saw on TV thanks to my grandad and uncle watching it and predicting that will be me when I am older, mark their words! 

My grandma said if I turn out like that, I’d definitely be following her mother’s footsteps as she was a cancan dancer and burlesque performer!  Imagine that, my great grandma a cancan performer! 

As a child my biggest career dream was to be a fashion designer but my mother worked like a woodpecker on my confidence when she found this out and wouldn’t encourage anything that might be connected to fashion and destroyed my sense of self love as much as possible to get this stupid dream out of my head.

Yet, ironically, it was she who’d force me into the pageants until I became embarrassingly fat for her and she told me she was ashamed to be seen in public with me because of it.

So yes, given the right environment, the right sense of self, I am a vain creature and attention whore to boot and my mother did everything possible to knock me off the pedestal I was on, because she felt the way I was going my life would be filled with sin if she didn’t act cruel to be kind.

But I have tried hard not to be vain, narcissistic or to reach too high – because I can’t stand the reactions from people like my mother who are vitriolic and jealous or greedy to try and do something to you to either destroy you or make entertainment out of you.

I have to say it has been a battle that’s been with me my whole life.  I want to be this great person that everyone admires and to be beautiful and loved, but I also don’t want the evil that comes with it.  You know?

I am on a weight loss journey, so I can be whoever I want to be unashamedly and with a little extra confidence – I will never have oodles of confidence, but I am going to fake it until I make it and I want to be a butterfly or better yet, a peacock!

As I’ve said before, I have had to learn to do everything on an emotional level alone – no support – no friends, nada.

It’s scary to think of what I could be if I am still alone, you know?  I need security, I mean emotional security.  Yeah sure, physical security, physical assistance is in abundance in the world, but it’s the emotional security that really counts.

I’ve never been taught to cope with grief or have my grief acknowledged by anyone.  I was always made to feel bad and selfish when I was sad and grieving a loss.

Told I am a stupid girl who needs to snap out of it, snap out of the idea my grandpa has just died, the same grandpa who I lived with for the last 3 months of his life as he died of cancer right before my eyes!

10yrs old and all I got was a pat on the head from my dad, nothing else from anyone else, when grandpa died, when I was still tearful after three days, people became aggressive with me – get over it you stupid girl stop going on trying to get attention for yourself!

All I wanted was a cuddle, some kind words, but being raised by adults who are all self-absorbed, obviously they don’t think about anyone but themselves.  They might have been a close family in that we had a massive family extended for five or even six generations that still maintained contact, but they were not supportive of each other.  They were not the kind of family that pulled together to grieve and help each other, they all go off into their own small groups or by themselves and the children usually end up forgotten.

When raised by people like this, is it any wonder then, why I cry when a stranger shows me kindness and goes out of their way to be nice to me and sympathetic?

Because I am genuinely not used to being treated with any kind of humanity!

I was raised like a thing, not a person.

I remember when I was in therapy groups as a teenager, I remember joking with my peers about how I wasn’t raised I was dragged up and spat out, reeled in and clout, clout, clout.

My peers though knowing it to be tragic laughed, the therapists cried and some refused to treat me as my case was so specifically hard, they needed a lot of mental time off from work, as hearing what I went through, broke them.

It happened to a lot of therapists, I often had them in tears when I recalled my normal daily life and they’d have to end sessions early.  I tried my best actually to hold back a lot because I needed the therapy, but some of them insisted I didn’t – my mother did.

I remember one therapist in particular was so aggrieved by what I went through, she broke all protocol just to give me a long, long tight hug as she cried and she told me, she so desperately wants to get me away from my parents and adopt me.  Then she came to her senses and she couldn’t be in therapy with me alone anymore, she had to have a colleague with her to maintain a professional standard.  This woman worked tirelessly to try and have me removed from custody of my parents, but she failed.

I was weirdly happy with quite a bit of my childhood until I realised that my parents weren’t normal, after seeing so many professionals break like that.  I really thought it was normal that at 7am you’re kicked out into the garden until lunch time, made to entertain yourself when you’re not at school with only a dog and a rabbit as company or the elderly neighbours talking to you over a fence.

At 12:15pm daddy comes home for lunch, perfectly normal to cook for him and yourself, eat your lunch and get out into the garden by 12:45 again until you’re called in for dinner at 4pm same routine, mums working night shift, you got to cook for everyone – then outside again until 7pm.

I thought it was perfectly normal to only bath once a week and nothing else and that in the summer your bath became the kids paddling pool, but with soap!

Of course it’s not, I know that now, but back then, it’s normal life!

I remember my mum when I was of legal age to drink getting excited that I was of age to become her drinking partner at nightclubs, but I was terrified of going to places like that and refused to go.  She was disappointed, but still tried to have drinking nights in with a slap up meal with her mates and tried to make me drink alcohol with her – “here love, drink more of this, you are more human after you’ve got a drink down you, you’re so tight otherwise… go on have another and another”.

She nearly poisoned me one night when I gave in to every temptation.  I got so ill I nearly needed the hospital, the hallucinations were really, really bad – she said it was only alcohol, but I never really knew.

Dad was furious.

I still went with mum to her mates, but I started to insist control in my drinks and never trusted anything given to me after that – I wanted to know my orange was just orange and not some exotic new type that mysteriously contained vodka or gin that they didn’t tell me about.

I am not tight; I will drink, but not enough to get drunk.

So yeah, all sorts of things could end up on my vlog, but I won’t make it a sympathise with me vlog.  It will all be upbeat or informative, nothing dull, nothing depressing; it will be my happy place.

I was thinking about being 100% authentic on there, no matter how tragic it is.  Doing all sorts of things, whether I get laughed at or not, because no doubt I will because I am cheeky – I am self-deprecating and I do stupid things, I am accident prone, I am just not graceful and clueless… it will be hilarious. 

I mean the other day, I was putting on something really tight and I struggled and I was hopping around the room like a Chinese vampire, trying to heave these darn pants on and I fell ass over tit on my face!

Don’t be surprised if that happens in the vlogs if I am brave enough to show my face!

Henry forgot his password to his Roblox game review channel he had, where I’d comment from time to time funny little quips now and again, interrupting his shows and he said if it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have had as many views – because a lot of people loved the mum stuff.

We thought at the time, Henry was a budding “Morgz” because he did a lot of stuff with his mum didn’t he?

Well this post is getting a bit long now, so I think I had better end it here, sorry about that, just so much on my mind tonight.

Thanks for reading!

Grief

Grief tastes likes the salty sea

Bites like a salty dog and screams like a spoiled child

It feels like an over enthusiastic aunt cuddling you so tight you can’t breathe

It smells like warm salty blankets and looks like a broken toy

Makes you feel alone in the world and blinds you with abstract pictures through a window in a heavy rainstorm

Grief pains your heart and gives you cramp and a snotty nose and a lump in your throat

Grief sedates you as you cry yourself to sleep

That’s what grief is

I am exhausted

For the past few weeks it has been a mentally exhausting time for me and my whole family; Some people from my past have been trying to contact me again and I have learned recently that two relatives on my side of the family have cancer, and understanding that more distant relations are also suffering loss; along with this I have been trying to manage my sons increasing anxieties and screaming matches between him and his father amongst other things, such as the house falling apart, quite literally due to storm damage and damp.

All of it has taken its toll on my physical health and unusually I have been sleeping eleven to thirteen hours a day and still unsatisfied with the rest.  Consequently for the past five days in particular, I have not written a word towards any novel and this is going to severely affect my chosen deadline.

Paul would like me to stick to my deadline but also understands that I should not push myself to do it by the deadline, because my mental health and mental growth is more important – however, I have people waiting for my work and that gives me a sort of pressure.

Also my perfectionism drives me to the point of insanity and if I make a statement about doing something by some self-imposed deadline, I am merciless even to myself if I fail it.

What is frustrating about all of this is the mental bashing has come at a time when physically I was showing big signs of improvement because of the high protein diet and small activities I have been doing as well as giving up the caffeine. 

It is almost like bad luck is queuing up, waiting their turn.

I told Paul recently that I feel like I am cursed, or that I have somehow cursed him because he had a wonderful family and a sort of happy life before he met me and slowly his life is going the downward spiral I have.

It’s like I am an unlucky penny.

I have to say, it’s one of the many reasons I don’t like to get close to new people, because I really do think I bring them bad luck.  However, take me to a casino and you wouldn’t believe it, I have been used as a good luck trophy at those places in the past for good reason!

My grandma in particular loved me tagging along with her at bingo and casinos, because she would regularly win large prizes and a couple of exes owe big wins to me too; but in everything else though, I seem to doom people who live with me to a hard life.

I noticed it only affects people I live with if the people are happy with stagnation, so maybe it’s not me after all?  I noticed people with an ambitious drive for life etc; seem to do better around me than those who are happy as they are.  I don’t know, but it does affect my confidence somewhat.

I need people in my life who is energised by positivity and excitement on a consistent basis, that the more positive energy and drive the person they live with has, the more they have – but I noticed some people are different, some people get the energy from me for a short time, love being around me, but to live with me drains them and then consequently they drain me.

It’s a strange phenomenon.

Paul is convinced I am an anomaly, that there are very few people like me who can have consistent positive energy without falling apart eventually.

I am drained by stagnation and people who make do.

Gosh I sound bad.

Well in any case, at the moment I am drained and I am finding it hard to keep my positive outlook and that is affecting productivity.

I am beginning to think that October 21^st was a bad idea, I should have kept with my instinct of the 23^rd of January, but I believe I got a little cocky, thinking that being firm with everyone in my household would make people back off each other and I could be more productive.  Instead, some people have used this against me in order to become worse. 

Henry in particular openly confessed to me he doesn’t want me to be successful and potentially famous because that would mean he would become famous too and he doesn’t want that.  This is a major reason why Henry has been trying to be sick from school a lot, even becoming bulimic in the process to be sent home from school because of the vomiting factor, and so he understands whilst he is at home I cannot write because of the screaming matches between him and his father, who is home all day too.

Often I try to diffuse the screaming matches to no avail, because it just seems to make things worse, no matter how calm and collective I try to be.  The both of them are as bad as each other and so often I sit there just watching them scream at each other, because most of the time they don’t hear me anyway.

It did work, me being in the bedroom writing on my laptop for a couple of days, but Henry started to scream louder to the extent he nearly lost his voice, just because he wanted to disturb me.  He then started to sit outside the bedroom whilst I wrote, in order to play his robot wars with the loudest commentary he could muster.  This is what I am trying to work around; I have little support from Paul who seems to be falling apart at the seams in every single way right now.

It’s exhausting because it is almost constant now.

I have learned to write when they go to Tesco’s forty five minute bursts every three days, not enough.

I am trying to get a handle on my physical health so I can go to a café to write, because really, even the nosiest café in town is quieter than here and this house is getting a reputation in the street in being the mad house, because neighbours can clearly hear what the yelling is exactly about, it’s that bad!

They’ve even asked if I still live there as they noticed I am the quietest person here and they rarely hear me!

I can’t afford to sit in a café daily, but even if it’s twice a week I’d get more work done there than I would here, but I need to walk there and I need a while to get strength back into my legs.  Because I have been bedbound and housebound sick for years, it has taken me nearly three months of small exercises to be able to stand in the kitchen for fifteen minutes, whilst preparing a fruit salad for myself.  So it will be at least another three to six months before I can walk to Tesco café.

I am not putting off the deadline that long.

But it does mean I have to do unsociable habits; sleeping during the day, so I can write at night.  Waking 11am sometimes 1pm to sleep by 2am only gives me ninety minutes a day, but it’s something.  But it does depend on how exhausting that evening has been.

I am trying hard to pull Henry away from the laptop and robots in order to do something with him that won’t provoke screaming matches between his father and him, but it’s a task to get the boy doing anything else.

I am thinking about going into credit again to buy a shed/office for the garden, but honestly I can’t think about doing that until one debt is completely paid off in March.  If I am still struggling by March, I would have to consider it strongly, so I can work on my novels.

It drives me nuts not being able to write as fast as I want to, even resorting to taking hearing aids out and sitting with cotton wool in my ears, they still manage to penetrate that and I am completely deaf in one ear and 30% hearing in the other; but as I said, they scream loud enough for the street to hear the conversations.

I really don’t say it lightly.

I am knackered.

Happy reading!

The untold grief

My recent poems are because I miss various friends who were involved with drink, drugs, which lead to crime and depression which lead to suicide or lead them losing their natural spirit entirely because they were absorbed too much in the darkness of the life they got into; many didn’t get into it by choice, I might add, some were viciously coerced and in some cases were literally beaten into taking various substances which hooked them.

I have lost a lot of great people and there is a big hollow in my heart, people who never experienced this kind of loss couldn’t possibly understand how close this is to actual grief of the death of a loved one, only they aren’t dead – physically.  It is something that is hard to explain and in my experience, there is very little help out there for people who are experiencing this type of grief.

If you are someone who is addicted to substances and you are tired of your loved ones constantly nagging you about your life, please take into consideration that they are hurting too and they miss the old you! You won’t realise it, but you’ve changed and it’s like you’ve died to them and got replaced – it’s hard to get over, especially as there is no professional help for people with this kind of loss – not to my knowledge. Please understand their point of view…

Thanks for reading.

Floating but not happy

I am floating without a purpose

Wondering where I will flow

Don’t know why I exist here

I don’t know where I will go

Who are these people flying by me?

What are their names and what do they do?

I want to know everybody, want to know who is who

But mostly I am seeking for another you

I am in the air floating

I don’t know why I’m here

Floating because reality is hard

It happened ever since you broke from me dear

The floating feeling is not happiness

It is a sense of loss

It is a surreal moment

Look some floating moss

I can’t be normal anymore

My brain is too mushed up

I’ve been this way ever since you broke us up

I can’t be who I once was

She is dead and gone

I keep on floating by the weak and the strong

I don’t think they see me

Though I wished they did

I float along in silence

Will I crash into them?  God forbid

I keep on thinking about you

Although you’re lost and gone

I keep on wanting someone

Who will end this sad song!

August 15th Poem to a lost one

Happy birthday to you

Today I feel blue

With memories, happy memories

Of a time I was with you

But now you are gone

I’m alone with my song

Happy birthday, happy birthday

I wish I was with you

So long

❤