Currently reading May 2023

I am currently reading quite a few book according to my Goodreads.com list, but I would say I am only really active in four of them for the past week now, despite there actually being 22 books on the list, a handful have been slowly slogged through for the past year!

But never mind – it’s just the result of an ever increasing chaotic and information starved mind!

The four I am currently reading are from the library so I have to whip myself to read them before the 21 days is up!

They are;

The High Five Habit by Mel Robbins

Grow your own poem by Kate Clanchy

A nature poem for every day of the year Edited by Jane McMorland Hunter

Eating to extinction by Dan Saladino

“The high five habit” by Mel Robbins is being read the fastest because I am trying to get my act together basically!  I finished a free Mel Robbins course a couple of weeks back and I wanted to learn more about this “high five habit” I’ve heard about and although I have been doing it for a few days now I have forgot on two days, so it’s not ingrained to do that yet for me. 

But I have noticed a difference with me approaching mirrors nonetheless, I have a faint smile these days, which is something – because I was a pretty miserable person whenever I look in mirrors before this thing.

I’m really trying to motivate myself to fight for a life and I tell you it is hard, it is a battle and I have virtually no support in doing this – I am on my own!

So I have to haul my own ass to change, as Mel Robbins says time and time again “nobody is going to save you, only you can save you”.

So that’s what I am trying to do.  Save myself.

“Grow your own poem” by Kate Clanchy has been borrowed and reordered to borrow from the library with small breaks in between since November!  Why?  Because there are a lot of small tasks in them and I would like to do them spread out, so I could learn better that way – it will stick better.  If I read the whole book then go back to do the essay one after the other I am more likely to forget what I am learning.

So I am doing it my way and it works!

I have noticed an improvement in the quality of my work and so has Paul and I thank this book for it!

“Eating to extinction” by Dan Saladino, is a gripping read about how humanities social progress and diet is actually going to eventually starve out humanity because it is unsustainable and not very diverse; monocultures and picky farmers are literally making extinct thousands of alternate food sources around the world yearly, in order to condense our diets down to a few of our favourites.

Which by and large is not healthy for us and not a wise thing to do in the long run because of climate change, but also our microbiota is starving which is causing all kinds of auto-immunity problems and other health risks.

And if you know me, from reading things about me in the dim and distant past, not only am I a huge advocate for sustainability and paleo thinking, but I am also incredibly geeky about microbiomes!

“A nature poem for every day of the year” by Jane McMorland Hunter – again I am reading this to kind of study poetry but also because of Ray Bradbury’s idea of reading a poem, an essay and a short story every day. 

I read a lot of non-fiction daily anyway, it’s a habit I’ve always had, I don’t read much fiction to be honest but when I do I tend to like picking up short story anthologies and I virtually never read poetry until recently, so I felt like a kindred spirit of Ray Bradbury when I read this quote the other week!

I used to read fiction a lot when I was younger but I got out of the habit of it because I started to panic that my ideas were like this and that and this too!  So it made me worry constantly about plagiarism.

Again, if you know me, you’d know by now I am an incessant worry wart!

So to ensure I don’t give up my current words in progress (WIP) I got out of the habit of reading too much fiction.

Which is kind of stupid, but there you go.

Thanks for reading!

Being too technical

I’ve never really been formally educated to understand what a vignette is, a lyrical piece of writing, a prose, a poem vs rhyme or sonnet and what constitutes flash fiction, micro-fiction and so forth; but I do try to learn, even though I don’t understand it.

I want to understand it, but I think it goes in one ear and out the other; I just can’t seem to absorb technicalities.

I may incorrectly be calling things on my blog “A vignette” when it isn’t, mistaking vignettes for mere philosophy and even putting philosophical prose amongst fiction rather than non-fiction without actually understanding that my philosophy was in prose format.

I don’t really know what I am talking about here, can you tell?

I am trying to be smart, but I really should try and give up trying to do things like that and just get on with it and hope for the best!

I am for all sense and purposes a creative person, its art no matter what form it is – why worry?  I could be ground-breaking, doing something new and all the worry about trying to do something old could ruin it all because I was trying to be smart and technical about it.

Or I could just confuse everyone and never get anywhere…

That could happen too…

Thanks for reading…

03:01am 24th February 2023

Blogger articles

I have restarted blogger again, with a new look!

My site can be found here https://tardytalk.blogspot.com

This is the place where I will be discussing reviews and views, articles mostly.

However this blog here will always remain because I love it and this is the place where I can be creative but also get personal and emotional with you all. 

Blogger won’t be like that, it will be mostly head over heart if you get me?  I won’t let my emotions get the better of me on there, but it will show you my views on things in general in a dispassionate and balanced way – I hope. 

I used to do a lot of article writing before I moved in with Paul and I kind of miss it, I miss sharing my thoughts on what’s happening in the world.

I used to write mostly about science updates, gardening, wildlife and nature, charity awareness and activism in general usually pertaining to child welfare, domestic abuse and the environment.

But it will also talk about sexuality a lot too so it has an adult only warning thing, because I do a lot of sexual freedom activism, or used to for both the LGBTQ community but also BDSM lifestyle choice and polygamy.

I’m not sure how often I will update it, but I hope to post at least twice a week.

Thanks for reading and please do enjoy my article style blog too!

Books saved me from crime

I haven’t been raised to be who I am, I was raised to be something quite different and I fought against that system heartily because it felt wrong, corrupt and somewhat evil.

I read ferociously, reading was my weapons against self-destruction.

I am glad I took the quiet path and found solace within the pages of books – because the other path would have been a huge detriment to myself, my life, any offspring I had and perhaps a loss of art from my perspective – because the alternative path would have been a life of sordid means and running away from problems, skipping town to town to avoid being tracked by my past abusers and potentially I would have followed one of my older siblings into a life of crime.

Instead the path I took was a weird one, for the type of family I was raised in.

My mother often told me she was disappointed that I appeared to be some kind of flake, some kind of weird little creature who sat in dark corners reading books and seemed alien to what she said was a normal person’s idea of fun!

So what did my mother think was a normal person’s idea of fun?  Going out Friday and Saturday nights drinking themselves into a stupor with your friends, gorging on take aways and BBQs wherever possible and bothering the doctor about your strange back pain, without telling your doctor that you recently fell off a balcony with an 8ft drop because you were too drunk to realise what you were doing!  Oh but that’s not all, pick on the quietest person in your group and make them do things they’d never do without your cajoling and bullying – oh such fun!

Then on Sundays spend all day cleaning the house whilst worshipping God in the form of watching biblical movies in dead silence. 

If it wasn’t for books I would have successfully ran away by the age of fourteen, I knew at that age the only people who’d help me on the street were the bad kind and I was near enough prepared for it because I needed a way out.  I knew from past experiences of other women in my life that once you are in that kind of life, it is hard to get out of it, but I very nearly took that chance.  Thought that maybe I’d earn my way out, but you never do.  The big kick which knocked sense into me was that I had a cousin who had the same notion – only she had the guts to actually do it and came back home in tears, black and blue and with a new found drug addiction only a year older than me, she didn’t know, like I did back then, that it’s not only sex they get you into for money, but drugs too and in order to sell it, you have to take it yourself like a good sales person.

Fifteen years down the line, it killed my cousin. She was murdered when she was clean of drugs for nearly 2yrs as an effort to win her kids back from welfare and stumbled across her old dealer who was desperate for her to buy again! It could have been me, if I chose the same path.

Drugs was a big issue for me, because I saw the damage it did to several of our relatives growing up, drink and drugs are bad, very bad, it changes people heads, make them do stupid things and then they fall apart in tears because they genuinely didn’t meant to ram your head into the wall fifteen times, they were just stressed that’s all!  So I never wanted to experiment or be lead into it.  Several near misses though of people trying to sneak it into me, but I was paranoid around strangers and never accepted food or drink from anyone just in case!

No, after what happened to my cousin I decided to stay as the quiet one of the family, lock myself away in my room because if I didn’t, I’d usually end up the night’s entertainment!

They treated me like a circus freak, something to poke fun out of, to test, experiment with, to scare, to have a laugh with her, see what she’ll do next, like some kind of trained monkey or puppet.

Despite all of this, they still had the audacity to call themselves god fearing Christians!

If it weren’t for books, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a writer.  Because I thought movies were just movies, people playing pretend and they made something good together; it didn’t occur to me until I watched several Stephen King movies with my horror loving grandma that I kept seeing in the credits “written by Stephen King” over and over again in most of the movies I watched.  I knew when I went to markets and charity shops that Stephen King books were everywhere and I decided to collect and read them at the age of 9.

My grandma was very encouraging – another horror fan in the family made her feel less lonely.

I realised at the age of nine most books I liked were movies and that movies very rarely come from other places; I liked movies and I wanted to watch my ideas on the TV or at the cinema.  I wanted the world to visually see what I see in my head or at least adaptions of it.

Books are a love – but mostly I love movies, I am very stimulated by vision and art.  I learn better with visual cues for example – I have mild dyslexia and dyscalculia as well as ADD and Paul thinks ADHD.  If something visually pulls me, I lose concentration on other things because of the interest it holds.  This can be difficult at times because I can zone out on people if I find something visually attractive about the environment around us, fashion, hair, or even a beautiful person – now that one can be awkward!

So, I am really writing in the hope that my books make it to the movies and if they don’t then I have a plan B.  I will give my first book out to publication and if there is no interest from movie producers to make something of it, then I will have to bore myself to tears to learn technology where I can create my own movies online.  How?  I don’t know, but I hope it won’t come to that!

One major type of book that saved me from a life of sex crime etc. was non-fiction psychology.  From the age of 9 I taught myself how to pacify aggressive people without becoming too submissive or self-deprecating, how best to react in violent situations and how to talk to angry people.

Now it works to a certain extent on a vast majority of people and I have been commended in work for excellent customer service and hospitality skills, but there is a small margin where the advice can actually make some people more aggressive with you – my mother is one of those.

If I didn’t emotionally react to her behaviour with me, she’d get absolutely hysterical, come close into my face screaming and then slap me repeatedly about the head, because damn it, she is going to get the reaction she wants because she needs to feel her power over me!  Because she is insecure, that’s all, my fear and tears make her happy, because it verifies to her that she is strong and she is still alpha.

It wasn’t until my mastoid surgery when I was seventeen that she was positively shitting a brick about hitting me, because I have a vulnerable spot at the side of the head would could be lethal if bashed.  So she tried other tactics to hurt me in other ways, usually the legs.

In 2012 it was a book called “Toxic Parents” by Susan Forward that helped me finally tell someone outside of the family and family friend circle about my mother.  They responded in horror, they were a nursery worker for my son Henry.  They got me a nurse and a family support worker to come and speak with me and then the police came to give advice too.  Unfortunately their advice was, get her out of your life or it may affect your ability to care for your son appropriately, meaning that we could take court proceedings to put your son into care until we feel that you are safe!

Because my son did sustain a head injury earlier on that month due to my mother encouraging him to do dangerous things, such as deliberately climbing onto the dining room table to jump off it onto the floor, he was 14 months old and had only been walking seven weeks!

She didn’t want me to have children, you see, it wasn’t part of her plans.  She wanted me to stay home forever and become her nurse when she is old; she told me this over and over as I was growing up.  I accepted it, because it’s what daughters do, but mothers tend to want their daughters to thrive, be independent and happy in their own right too and usually good mothers want their daughters to expand their family, don’t they?

She didn’t.  She didn’t want what she called “more problems” that came in the form of new family members – she didn’t want me to go out alone and make friends, because she liked to micromanage my every waking moment.  It was hard for her to allow me to go into full-time work and she’d often sit in her car all day long outside my work place waiting to see what happens, if I leave early etc.

On some occasions I was ten minutes late in leaving the building because my boss required extra work, my mother would embarrass me by making a visit to the building demanding to know where her daughter is and how they can’t push me around into doing more than my times worth!

I often lost jobs because of her.

Because I knew how she liked to micromanage me and because I wanted to be a good daughter and keep my head down and please her the best I could, until I could convince her to allow me freedom and a family of my own – I decided to talk with her about me becoming self-employed with homework of some description, there was always an issue for her and that never worked.  Because she would become obnoxious when I was on the telephone (up until 2015 I had perfect hearing in the left ear), so keeping those jobs was a task too.

She revelled in telling people about how lazy I was, how she is stuck with a quiet reclusive freak of nature that is eating or starving herself to death periodically and has no enthusiasm for life whatsoever.  Not true, I had no enthusiasm for the life she wanted for me.

I had a lot of ambition until I gave up wanting.

When I was twenty seven I left her to move in with Paul, it was done sneakily but I had to do it that way.  By thirty I had to stop all contact with her, because she is a respected matriarch in the family that meant I had to say goodbye to everyone except for a small handful of relatives on my dad’s side of the family.

She would never know or appreciate that all I ever wanted in my life was for me to be considered a daughter that was good enough to stick around and help as much as I did.  Good enough to trust out alone, good enough to get chores done, good enough to deserve a good husband and family of her own and good enough and trustworthy enough to be humane enough to want to care for her mother if she ever needed it.  I didn’t need to be moulded and abused to do that, but she didn’t understand and I don’t think she really cares.

Because I messaged her in 2014, two years after not speaking to her and I said to her – I am willing to forgive and forget everything about the past, if she is willing to tell the truth to others about how my life was like and repair my reputation in the family and secondly I’d come back into her life if she could allow me to take full charge of my own life because after all I am a woman of thirty now with my own child – she said no, she won’t do that.

I said well just give me permission to live life how I want and I will work it out with the others myself.  No, she said, I won’t do that Tina, because I don’t agree you know what is best for you and as far as I am concerned, you don’t need that permission really, what are you playing at exactly?!

So I said to her – are you telling me then that I have got you wrong?  That you’ve always allowed me to make my own decisions and you never intended to interfere?  No she said – I never said that and you know what Tina, this is the end of the conversation.  I leave the ball in your court, come or go as you please, but I won’t change – I stand by the fact that you haven’t a clue about life and that you are a stupid, stupid girl and as far as I am concerned I wish you never have any more children, you made a stupid mistake when you decided to keep that one! (This was in reference to my Henry who was planned and is very much loved)!

I also wanted to point out, that the message came about because I wanted to tell my mother that I was hospitalised with an ectopic pregnancy and how my plans for a large family could be over and I was feeling suicidal over it – because all I wanted in life was to be a mother of a large brood.

Books have helped me heal from that too… books are magic aren’t they?

Thanks for reading! 

P.S my idea of fun is… picnics or eating out at buffets or country pubs with a large group of family or friends, rowing on a lake, visiting a zoo, playing with dogs, doing messy arts and crafts with kids and playing pretend with my creative and kooky friends, oh and swimming, I love swimming and gardening or being in a beautiful garden that isn’t overlooked! That’s the light side of me… there is a dark side too… What does that part of me like?

Once again friends or family around me, snuggling down with a horror movie – watching thunderstorms, creeping people out, telling a good story, having sex and generally being my weird self!

And guess what!  No drink and drugs for any of that is there? Well, erm, maybe the pub lunch eh?

Summer of cyberpunk potentially

I decided in January that my reading year will contain less non-fiction in an effort to at least read twenty five full-length fiction books instead; this has failed miserably so far, because I am always in research mode. 

So far this year I have read thirty two books and of those there has only been seven books of fiction and five of those were children’s novels or comics, one was a chunky novel of five hundred and twelve pages and the other was an anthology of horror.

Basically I am trying to be like how I used to be, I used to read one or two novels a week with two or three non-fiction books, but in the last decade I haven’t kept to that, due to only having approximately three hours late in the early hours of the night undisturbed for myself. 

My Goodreads goal is fifty two books, I know I will reach my goal a few weeks earlier than the end of the year, but I would be disappointed in myself if I were to reach the end of the year and I hadn’t read at least twenty full sized novels.

So, with that being said I decided last night (Friday) to pick up some old classics I haven’t read before and I have started to read “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” by Philip K. Dick.  I have to say, as a slow reader of fiction, I am only fifteen pages in and it has hooked me already!  But I have attention span problems and fifteen pages take half an hour and I needed a break.  I have never been able to do anymore in more than half hour bursts!

I know the next planned book is not a classic yet, but I know I will need to finish up all the currently reading non-fiction books this month before I get this one from the library “Empire of the vampire” by Jay Kristoff, I heard its some seven hundred pages in length, which at my reading speed of thirty pages a day will take me around three weeks to get through!

Funny, but I read non-fiction faster; I can get through around eighty pages a day on average with non-fiction and still retain a lot of memory about what’s in the book!  I think I over imagine scenes in fiction, that’s what it is!

So, I know that I am currently reading in some seriousness right now “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” by Philip K. Dick, that’s my fiction for the week!  My non-fiction reads for the week are “Danse Macabre” by Stephen King and “The running hare” by John Lewis-Stemple.

I think after Empire of the vampire, around the beginning of July, I will think about picking up some more cyberpunk fiction, not sure what yet, but Snow Crash is kind of calling out to me a bit, I do like mafia characters.

So that’s what I think my reading summer is going to look like!

Happy reading everyone! 

Writer’s journal plans

I have decided to keep a writer’s journal as well as an artist journal, to record my thoughts, feelings and inspirations about the work I do and where those ideas may have stemmed from.  I plan to do this on a daily basis, or at least if I add anything towards my stories or ideas, which is generally done on a daily basis anyway, even if it isn’t towards an actual novel – there are always notes and plans made!

This will be private only to me until certain works are published, because I plan to use some of the things I put into my writers journal as non-fiction bios about where my work came from and who inspired me to do it.

In this writer’s journal, I will explain how I meshed ideas together and the thought processes that went into it.  I will be doing this for every piece of work I do regardless of whether or not it gets published or not, because you never know what the future might bring!

Meanwhile, my blog will start to be updated with my general thought processes anyway about works I have read, things I have researched and programs I have watched and how I feel about them and how I am inspired by them.  I will only be doing this with things that I feel have influenced me in some way, with my own work!

Happy reading!

Hyper-thoughts a mental illness?

I think one of the biggest reasons why I dislike reading novels are because they feed my imagination and make me think of new stories and I am not in any shortage of story ideas as it is.  I think reading fiction can add to my insanity at times, overflowing me with too many ideas that sometimes it literally does feel like my creativity really is driving me insane!

I am the same if I am overloaded with looking at other people’s art, new movies and playing new games.

I do all these things with caution but not matter how cautious I am in doing these things, reading, watching movies and looking at art etc, I can’t help but become over exposed to stimulus that feeds my imagination at least three new story plots at a time!

There are times I have actually bought on strained wrists or my carpal tunnel syndrome to just write the ideas down fast, I can never do so fast enough and I have even had people buy me Dictaphones to try and help me but again, I can never speak fast enough!  It is actually quite horrible, people say it sounds like you are blessed, but in my head it is utter chaos, I can’t focus at times and this is a huge part of my procrastination in general, because I can’t seem to focus on one idea, my brain thinks about multiple things at once.  I am sure this is actually a mental illness, but I don’t think there is a known mental illness out there for people who can literally think about several subjects and problems all at once and then get confused when they have to try and focus to explain to others what those ideas and thoughts are!

I wish telepathy was a thing, it would solve a lot, I could have a room filled with people who would be writing separately all of my ideas for me and help me organise the chaos and bring it into reality as fiction or art.

I have been suffering from this strange mental problem even more in the past few weeks; I am inspired by almost everything I have access to lately.

 I suffer from migraines frequently and it could be my auto-immune inner ear disease doing it some of the time, but most of the time I think it’s the hyper-thoughts as I like to call them. 

I have been told I can’t be a very good writer unless I read a lot of fiction and I don’t generally.  I read more non-fiction than fiction, so I feel lately I have to throw myself into some more novels by other people.  I am finding it hard to fit into creative circles because of two major flaws I have, the lack of fiction reading and the lack of social media I indulge in.

Ugh, I don’t know what to do.

But I do know this; it is affecting productivity lately at a major scale.  Whenever I sit down to write stories these days I don’t enjoy them as much as I used to, I sit there sometimes and cry, because my thoughts can’t seem to align themselves.  I am confused and often confounded by the goings on in my head that I stare at my previous words in awe that I finished those at least, but I can’t seem to move on and I can be like this for over an hour before giving up.

I am trying to do what other people recommend that I do, that is focus on one to three novels and finish those before doing others.  This is not working for me and I am so out of focus these days I find it hard to go back to my old way of writing – which is to literally write towards one idea until the others call me and so on.    This has meant in the past I once had as many as 27 separate novels on the go at once and the average time it took to complete just one of those stories was around 5yrs.

What has put the pressure on me the most I think is the notion that I have been told that some of my words in progress will be of out of date or over used themes by the time I get it to publishers that they won’t be interested in it when I get around to it.  That is so very demotivating.

I don’t really know what to do right now because of it.

Happy reading

Gardening & writing plans & books – oh my!

I have only written about one page towards a novel this week, because of sickness, but also because I am reading a little more than normal – mainly magazines based on gardening and permaculture.  I have no energy to garden yet and it is actually quite unlikely I will do much in the garden this year, but I am learning as much as I can whilst I am out of sorts.  I have reinjured my leg twice in the past two weeks and so mobility is now getting affected, I have an old break that never healed properly and the two separate injuries were heavily on this old break.

I have written approximately 5 pages towards the plans of a new novel for April’s NaNoWriMo as I do intend to participate this year.

I have also started writing a non-fiction book based on my current knowledge of gardening and self-sufficiency, hence the extra research too, I want to be thorough as I realised there is not enough of the kinds of information I want out there readily available and I wanted to make it easier for others like me to find.  So far I have written approximately 10 pages towards that.

All of this whilst sick with a chest infection, injured leg, ear infection and the extreme depression caused by the harassment I am getting from my neighbour, which is actually making me scared to go into my own back garden these days.

I am planning to start selling my artwork around the end of the year; there is a local opportunity for me to take up positions in the local art gallery and I am going to snap those up.  I won’t be ready until autumn.

I have also done four half done pieces of artwork this week, there are plans for 6 more, I am trying to do them fast, but they require a lot of layers and drying time so that can be frustrating!

I am also starting a junk journal for the first time.

Whilst I am updating you all, I may as well tell you about some of the books I have read this month.  I have read “Conversations with God” as a non-believer in mainstream religions; I found it refreshing, because to me, it proves all the instincts I had about God growing up are true and valid.  But I had all those ideas beaten out of me because my family can be quite radical about this sort of thing.

I have also read “The library of the dead by T.L Huchu” which I absolutely loved, it was about ghosts and it is a mystery, a sort of detective for the dead sort of supernatural thriller/fantasy.  I found some parts of the story very gory, but it was a fun read and I look forward to reading more from this series – as I think I heard it is a series now?

I read “The Spooks Apprentice” by Joseph Delaney, which I felt was not really suitable for children under the age of 14.  I found it too disturbing in some parts and my son and his entire classroom had this read to him during school lockdown online and most of the children were asking the teacher not to read it to them because of nightmares!  So there you go!  I enjoyed it, but I found it too quick paced.

I am currently reading two other books I got from the library, so I will update you all on those soon.  The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey and Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor!

So this is a condensed down and short as possible update for you all, hope you all are well and I will hope to post again in a few days’ time.

February’s reading pile

1. Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson
2. How to build a girl by Caitlin Moran
3. Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
4. The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr
5. The little book of Wonder by Bernadette Russell

I very rarely read fiction in comparison to my friends from goodreads.com; I consume mostly non-fiction books and self-help, so my monthly updates will rarely show that I have fiction on the list.

I am fascinated by the structure of language and its origins, all languages worldwide, not just the development of the English language.  I definitely consider myself a philologist, hence why Mother Tongue is on this month’s list. 

I have a life goal to become fluent in 5 contemporary languages and one ancient by the time I am eighty years old – hopefully I’ll live that long!

I am not yet fluent in anything other than English at the moment, but I can understand small bits of French and Italian.  If I were able to travel, I suspect that I could feed myself and ask very basic questions in France and Italy, I would say my Italian skills are better than my French skills at the moment.  I would also say that the main problem would be hearing conversations if they are spoken fast because I am deaf – totally deaf in my right ear and with only a half working left ear.  People ask me why bother learning then if you know that eventually you will lose all hearing altogether?  Because I believe that tomorrow there will be a cure for me – I believe that science will provide, so why not live with what I have and make the most of it now?  Basically – why give up on something I love, just in case I can’t?

I’m not really sure how I got spoken into reading Caitlin Moran’s books this month either, this is the second book I have read in the last couple of weeks by her and I can see a consistent theme, a theme which is getting eye-rollingly boring to be honest.  I shan’t be reading anymore from her, there is only so much masturbation you can read about!

Entangled Life is on my list because I have a weird fascination for microbiomes, fungi, bryophytes and subterranean lifeforms in all its forms.  I have no idea where the fascination came from but I can say, that if I lived my life again, I would run away from home, tell social services everything that ever happened to me and study maths and biology hard, because if I could live my life again I would like to be a microbiologist or something along those lines.

The prophets look really refreshing and I was just lured to it, I have no idea why, but at the moment I am enjoying the read.  I love learning about Afro American culture ever since I found out my nan was right about her great grandmother being mixed race and from Boston USA.  I believe this is fiction, but not sure to be honest. 

The little book of wonder is being re-read with fresh eyes and new perspectives; I am redoing all of the tasks in there and enjoying it again – especially as I have different ideas these days about things. 

So with any luck, all of these books in particular will have been finished by the 1^st March and I might write up the reviews of how I feel about them all.

A dying spirit

I need to get this off my chest, I apologise if the following becomes a long-winded rant and it is not my intention.

But I simply can’t do it anymore – I cannot live up to other people’s expectations and other peoples idea of what is or is not morally correct or what is or is not true; Everything that I talk about regarding my current life and my past are all true in my eyes, but a lot of people will deny that it is the truth and I can understand why they would lie about that – they are trying to socially protect themselves because they treated me wrong and don’t want the ramifications of how others may perceive them for it.  I appreciate their feelings on this, but I won’t hide the truth, I won’t keep deleting things just because the truth fucking hurts them, they never take into account how much their actions have hurt me so why the fuck am I so bloody accommodating to them?

I have rights too, I have a right to express myself anyway I blooming need to in order to heal.  Living a life of quiet pacification is literally killing me as a person and me as an artist/writer.

Living the life that my previous abusers want me to, is killing the person that I am in every way shape and form that a person can be!

I took on this blog back in winter of 2012 purely as to act as a form of therapy for myself as recommended by my therapist, he suggested I talk freely about everything I want to regarding my life, he recommended that I also use it to bring back the creative person I was again.  It worked until some people found out a few things about my mum they never knew before and they like defensive little minions went and told her and defended her and grouped up on me via telephone and emails to hound me to tell everybody who reads my blog that everything I said was a lie.  They wanted me to lie about the truth I told – they demanded then that I go to London again and at a family gathering literally grovel for my mother’s forgiveness in front of them!  I am quite serious about what I just said; they did demand this of me!

Every time I say something about them on my blog, I do run the risk of anyone in my family still sticking around to read what I am saying, relaying and potentially getting telephone calls and emails again, which is why I had to change the telephone number and we are considering moving because of this, because I can’t be silent anymore.  I need to express everything I have gone through and I feel it is my calling to help others who have gone through the same coercive upbringing as I have, by talking about my past.  A coercion that I was raised in is quite unusual but not unheard of and many people who have experienced this kind of abuse rarely talk about it, because of how violent a large amount of people can get if they hear of it.  You see it is usually lead by one individual who has a large social circle who will act like posse to reign in the abused child if they start getting out of hand or rather, start becoming independent and so-called rebellious to their clique ideologies. 

It rather like living with a mafia minded family with an extended social circle of friends all of whom think alike, like a big extended hive mind. 

This kind of abuse is hard to deal with for a lot of therapists; I have never found one who has been able to help me.  They all suggest that various people of whom have taken a part in controlling me should go and see them, but who the fuck will go up to their abusers and say “you know what?  My therapist wants to see you as I seem relatively stable in comparison to you guys”.  Lol – no one is going to do that and the therapist appreciates that for safety reasons it is probably best not to suggest it.

You know how badly the revelation to my mother has affected me? 

I became for a long time now, primarily a poet who occasionally dips into abstract impressionistic paintings, because I have been scared to talk about anything anymore.  I have even been told that some of my novels I used to write, that the family often used to read, that they see now that some of the things in my fiction work could actually be based on my supposed “poor abused childhood fantasy life”, to a certain extent a few of the themes in my stories are based on my own personal experiences, but I understand enough to know what is true and what isn’t.  That is my fiction.  The stuff I talk about regarding my life is TRUE and I state this quite clearly, the message has not been mixed!

Because I am struggling to appease my abusers so they don’t come back into my life in an aggressive way, I have almost ignored a lot of my creative expression via words and non-fiction posts.  This has led to me becoming so severely depressed that it is affecting my health badly.  I have a lot of problem with mobility of the whole of my left side of the body and I have extreme insomnia and hypersomnia – what I mean is, I can’t sleep for like 30 hours and then when I do I can’t wake up for 15 hours and sleeping comes randomly at any time and once I feel just a tiny bit tired, it is almost like I have collapsed into a coma.  Nobody can wake me up, not even Henry having a tantrum on the bed next to me; it is like I have died!  Quite often, the last thing I think about when I go to sleep is “I hope I die in my sleep – I don’t want to wake up, I don’t like the burden of my memories”.

My appetite is dead, I only eat when extremely hungry now and it is usually just one meal per day and around the side of a sandwich, coincidentally I am losing a huge amount of weight pretty quickly and my hair is around 60% white now.

To say the suppressors are literally killing me by using my own mind against me is an understatement.  I find no joy in anything anymore.  Everything about the sweet, bubbly, fun, obedient, passive, quiet, little Tina everybody once knew is dead.

In trying to force me to be their idea of perfect instead they have made me their idea of a waste of space.

For my health and sanity sake I have to heal the only way I know how.  So I am taking a risk, if they get back into my life again somehow, so be it, I am ready for the repercussions because the alternative is death anyway.  I am going to die someday anyway, why is sooner no better than later?  Would I rather die in secret of how I died and be a mystery to all who knew me forever, or do I want to die in a way where other people can understand me and understand my situation and perhaps, just maybe, stop this from happening to other people?

I know which one I have picked.

The thing is – before they interfered and demanded me to delete and shut up, I was only sharing what I thought was the minor stuff, the stuff that isn’t too big to shout about.  The stuff that is easy for my readers to digest – but now they’ve done this, maybe it is time for the real big stuff, the stuff that makes my therapists cry?  That stuff I kept to myself, that stuff I never revealed and I don’t think people like my big brother, understand there is an even darker side to our mother, than even he realises!

I don’t like talking about that stuff, because I hate remembering the really, dark, dark stuff, but how I express it here, sometimes it comes out sub consciously through my abstract impressionistic art and the images I paint are also not easy to digest for a lot of people.

But I think it is time to just be me in every way shape and form and not hide from myself anymore.  I can’t.  Shutting me away in every way possible is suffocating my spirit and body to death, I need to free myself and that makes taking big scary risks!

Because I am pretty damned sure, since November, my body and spirit is preparing to die.  I am convinced of it and I need to stop this process – not for me, but for my boy.  I care only for him, not these coercive “I have a problem with your life and truth” assholes!  No one can have a bigger problem with my life and truth than ME!  Get over yourselves you control FREAKS!