I fired up an old Windows 7 laptop today and had a wander through an old browser on it. It turns out that I had entirely forgotten not one, but two entire blogs. This takes some doing, even for me. This is an increasingly common occurrence; a disturbing side-effect of peri-menopause and, in a lesser way I suppose, just getting older.
It boggles my mind that I can have a routine, habit, behaviour or pastime that I visit regularly and then, one day, just stop - and rapidly, I then just forget I ever had it. I don't think I used to be like this, but I can't honestly remember. It makes putting new habits in place pretty much impossible, because the habits never form. Anything can just get dropped at will, at which point it will pretty much disappear from the psyche in short order.
This year I've been trying more to get my life in order - Covid-19 (and subsequent long-tail infection) threw this for a loop back in March, along with Paul's employers being utter bastards (but what can one expect from neoliberals?) This latter, in conjunction with Brexit and a revisit of our options, means that moving again might well be on the cards, if the stars align. But it's somewhat up in the air - and who knows what January will bring? Although a hard cliff-edge there is looking likely.
The biggest change since the last update is probably getting effective treatment for peri-menopause symptoms. Those destroyed much of the last decade for me. The HRT shortage (caused largely by the health minister's refusing to pay the going rate for most treatments) nearly did for me last autumn. But the new treatment regime has settled down and seems to be pretty effective; I've been able to do things I haven't done for literally years. It's still not helping the memory too much, and memory is a bit like hearing or smell - you don't realise what you're missing until something or someone calls attention to it. But there are other things I can try for that, and now am starting to get the motivation back to do them.
I'm also thinking about having another shot at writing - blogging, if nothing else. (Not on Medium, though - their privacy policy is creepy as hell.) Recently, a friend pointed me towards RaRa Avis Press and her Design Your Days book leapt out at me and grabbed me by the throat. I've been working through it and I'm struck yet again by how I have no aim, no dream. (As Captain Sensible so rightly said, if you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?) But something else in there phrased it differently - what are you drawn to? What do you feel compelled to do? (To which I could add - what is scattered around the house, largely under-utilised?) It was a bit of an "A-ha!" moment. Crafts and wordcraft are figuring strongly. The work to be done includes working out what exactly is mine - a lot of what I was drawn to when I was younger was tied up with my relationship with my older sister. Are these things mine, or hers? The archery was hers, for sure. I'm still uncertain about the guitar playing (although love of music is mine). I think the art is hers - I used to draw a lot but never had the flair for art. I was better with colour and pattern. But craft is mine (and I can trace that back to a 1970s pamphlet about country crafts). Sewing may be, though I don't have the skills. Spinning's definitely mine. Horses and riding were definitely mine (no-one else in the family apart from one distant cousin shares that) although that's gone now - I made that decision long ago. Swimming might well have been my Dad's rather than mine - I'd like to swim better but I revisited this a couple of years ago and didn't feel the love. Words were an ability I was told I had but never enthused me; but it may be the underlying need for communication that continually drives me with this one. The house is full of notebooks and pens, which is strange as often I don't use them. (Although I'm clearly not alone in this.) I wouldn't call myself a writer but then, what do I call this? Or the other blogs, including the haiku blog? Or the notebooks whose contents aren't just externalised memory?
I didn't pick up the laptop this morning with the intent of blogging. Strange how these things turn out. Part of me wants to hunt down all the other blogs now, go through and rationalise them (there are one, if not two, mothballed on WordPress, and I re-found my LJ the other day, which hasn't been updated since 2007. There are several more on Blogger, mostly live.) Despite all these words over all these years, I rarely go back and re-read, even the "memory book" notebooks. The danger of that is, if too much time passes, the neurons fray to the point where the writing no longer triggers any original memory, and the words on the page might as well have been written by, or about, someone else. Having turned 50 a couple of months ago, now feels like a good time to go back and take stock.
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