Reverb day 5: kindly cynical

What is the sound of your own voice?



I am not sure that people hear much of my voice. I am a quiet person; I sit at the edges of conversations and listen. Sometimes I have something to say, but not very often. I'm much more vocal online than I am in real life. Or - is that true? I'm a lurker, not a commenter; I read a lot and only occasionally respond. Sometimes that's because I don't want to get drawn into drama. Sometimes it's because someone else has already said everything that I would have done.

When I do, how does it sound? Diffident, kind, amused, sometimes veering to cynical, wanting to believe the best of everything, not necessarily sure that it's safe. Prone to long words, ellipsis, and sentences that run on and on, far away from the original point. Much like my real voice, really.

If we are going to take this literally, I have recorded my poem Manifest. I am always nervous about hearing my recorded voice, but I find, when I muster the courage to listen, I am not the awful person I thought I was.

Reverb day 6: biting back

Despite our usually sunny dispositions and dedication to the practice of “assuming positive intent,” we all occasionally find ourselves having to deal with an incredibly unpleasant individual.

While I’m sure you always handle it with the tact and finesse for which you’ve become so well known, I’m going to ask you to step outside yourself for just a moment.

Think back to such a situation: if the gloves were off, how you really would have liked to have dealt with them?




Earlier this year I found myself in a situation where I had to remind myself very hard that not everything requires a response. This is the response that wasn't needed:


You say that you should have gone with your first instincts and not have replied. I agree with you. I had given you every indication - I had, in fact, explicitly stated - that such a reply would not be welcome. I had said what I needed, and what I did not need. You presented me with what I did not need. I had my reasons, and I considered you very rude to think that you were entitled to override my wishes, in my own space.

Since we're being honest here, I thought your follow-up, deleting your comment and then communicating by private message, was pathetic. It looked to me as if you were worried that other people might agree with me about your bad behaviour. I have done my best to interpret it as a sincere desire to keep that comments section harmonious, but I find I'm stretching my powers of belief. I didn't reply to your private message.

You had a history of ignoring my boundaries. I can think of at least two other occasions when you ignored what I had asked for, to give me something that I had asked not to receive, that I knew would be of no use to me. I dare say that you can be forgiven for assuming that I wouldn't enforce them this time, either, but things have changed, and I am no longer going to put up with that kind of response in my own arena.

I wish you well, but I feel that I am safer without you.

Reverb day 7: like Alice and the Hatter

Please post your favourite picture of yourself from 2014, self-portrait or otherwise!





One night in late June I drank an espresso martini and stayed the night with a friend who has very pale curtains in her spare room. I'd been waking up with the dawn all spring. I managed about two hours of sleep that night, but before I finally dropped off I worked out exactly what to do with my green and black dress that I'd made in 2006 or 2007, which I loved but which no longer fitted.

There had been a conversation, earlier in the evening, which included the oft-heard line, 'Do I need to buy a hat?' The answer, it turns out, was 'No' - but only on the metaphorical level. It served to remind me of a hat that I'd been hankering after for a long time - because it would go so beautifully with the dress, if only I could rescue it. And because it was completely outrageous. And because it was made by my dear friend Arnie, whom I have known since the first day of secondary school, when we met in a very cold and windy lunch break and decided that we would be each other's friends.

I spent more on this hat than I've ever spent on a hat in my life. It may have been more than I've spent on any garment. I was angsting a little bit about this. 'I'm spending all my money on hats. Not even hats. A hat.'

'The singular is important,' Tony said. 'It proves that this is a significant hat.'

And this is true. It is not just a hat. It is art. I have been thinking a lot this year about art, and about how it deserves to be paid for. I need to value other people's art, and my own.

I bought the hat. I bought some black velvet and replaced the bodice on the dress. I made a set of jewellery to go with them. I got new glasses this year, too; it took me a while to get used to the (comparatively) huge frames, which made me feel like Woody Allen for the first few weeks, but I love them now.

( Photo under the cut )

Reverb day 8: keeping connecting

How have you created and/or sustained connections in your life this year?



As so often with Reverb prompts, this makes me flinch, and then realise that I didn't need to. Sometimes I feel that I am a complete disaster when it comes to connections. Every autumn I drop off the radar.

I have to expend so much energy keeping myself together that I can't keep a conversation going with anyone else, particularly when it's something that the rest of the world seems to consider easy. A phone call. A birthday card. I just can't, and I feel so pathetic for not being able to. Even now, with my head almost back in the right place, the thought of having to buy, write and send Christmas cards is filling me with a vague sensation of dread.

But -

- this year I have reconnected with two people from secondary school, fifteen years after I last saw them. Now we follow each other on Twitter.

- the internet is, in fact, excellent for keeping up with people. Generally speaking I'm better with the written word than the spoken word, and the ability to build in a delay is incredibly helpful.

- finally getting around to setting up a blog reader has helped, too - I follow an eclectic mix of people, on an equally eclectic mix of blogging platforms, and remembering to look at them all was becoming an arduous task.

- I am still in touch with my colleagues from Guildford, the ones I was so worried about losing, this time last year.

- the London Waterloo-Portsmouth line has been, and will be, seeing a lot of me through December, as I catch up with family and friends.

- this year we re-instituted the tradition of meeting at Warblington to remember Héloïse.

- I don't lose people. Not permanently. They come back to me, and I go back to them. I'm not perfect, and they understand that.

How to keep this going, next year? And how to keep it going when all my social systems shut themselves down? Last year I was concentrating so hard on getting through the great move, on making the most of my last months in Surrey, that I did it all in a state of accidental mindfulness and it was fine. I worked very hard on my connections then, because I thought I was about to lose them all. I'd like to recapture that, but without the stress that induced it all.

I remember something I saw written across a wall in a hostel in Spain: SER SINCERO Y COHERENTE ME HACE UNA PERSONA AUTENTICA. That, I think, comes very close to being the answer.

Reverb day 9: the bells

I'm caught up now; there are two things I want to say at the top of this post:

1) I am very excited to have won the 2014 Reverb giveaway! Thank you, Kat, for this and everything!

2) I'm still collecting prompts to take me through Christmas to Epiphany. If there is something you'd like me to talk about, please leave me a prompt here. Pick a specific day if you'd like; otherwise I'll slot it in somewhere. I'm very open to prompts from passing Reverberators or anybody else who's reading.



As you enter into the new year, what would you like to do/make/have/be more often? How will you bear witness and celebrate the tiny milestones? How will you respond on the occasions when your intentions do not come to pass?

Milestones. This year past has been full of them, and big ones at that. Tony's graduation; my new job; my novel; moving house. If I'm honest, it's all been pretty exhausting. It is, however, over. For the first time in years we both have a decent job, and neither of us is having to worry about money.

It's so easy to pick a goal and, as one approaches it, as it suddenly looks like it's going to happen, to persuade oneself that this wasn't really what one meant, that actually one was going for that next mountain, never mind how high this one is. I want to begin this year with the assumption that I'm already where I need to be.

This year coming has one big milestone, which is my 30th birthday, and I'm resolved to devote the rest of the year to - well, to the rest of the year. I want to be in this year, not some ghost of the past that wants me to worry about something that's long over and gone. I want to make the most of it. I want to start living as if I've nothing to wait for. I want to have a huge amount of fun, and I want to pay attention to everything that comes through.

I am planning plenty of rest into 2015. We are going to have our first foreign holiday since our honeymoon, yes, but I also want to make sure that I have at least two separate weeks where I book nothing in at all. I'd also like to get a retreat in there somewhere.

I want to be very present in 2015.

How do I do this? A chiming clock.

My office is opposite a church, and this church has a clock that strikes the quarters. I have made it a practice, every time I hear the chime, to stop. Just for a second, but it's enough, to reconnect to the stillness within.

I'd like that at home, too. So that will be my Christmas present to myself, if nobody else gets me one. A clock that chimes.

Copy/pasted from elseweb, here are my less tangible wishes for 2015:

It is Advent, and so new year for me. I have wishes for the whole year to come…

Fun
Colour
Ease
Spaciously (this was a typo but I liked it. I will do everything spaciously!)
Trust
Joy
Clarity
Clear-seeing
Presence
Love
Courage
Freedom
Sacred

Retreat. Holiday, actual foreign abroad holiday. Weeks of nothing. Another New Opportunity. Further adventures in mermaid twinning. One whopper of a birthday party. If I make a mistake, I make it a good one. I greet everything joyfully and with curiosity.