health, motivation

My raw food eating disorder

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One of the exs, who befriended me this week to borrow a ladder (I kid you not) last night announced that my objection to his attempts to sabotage my health constituted an eating disorder.

This guy has just spent three years with us, on and off, and is well aware that in the course of his gaining 14lb I gained 140lb eating the same thing. He literally just watched that happen. I am very active within the constraints of taking care of my mother and this place, basically the only difference between us is that I am constantly under a great deal of stress, which is usually made worse by spending time with an unpredictable and potentially violent person who is apparently obsessed with getting attention in the form of food and interest.

This is one of the main weaknesses of declaring yourself a raw foodist.  Your former friends just don’t get it.  They believe everything they have been told and think that you aren’t getting a balanced diet.  Another objection, which I have just read from a Paleo site, is that the use of superfood products just ain’t natural.

The social difficulties of retaining your raw diet include not being able to eat out, being an awkward guest at parties, frequently finding yourself either very hungry or eating non hydrated nuts because nothing else is available, and basically avoiding social events because you know you will be unable to eat anything that you haven’t prepared. You can get as obsessive as you want, the opportunities are endless, but there are workarounds for almost any problem.  Fairly early on, I came across someone who had managed to remain raw whilst eating from a MacDonalds, so I figured, you have to be a little flexible.

In recent years, thanks to some of the wrecking attempts of close observers of the raw foodies, it transpired that almost nobody was 100 percent raw, even though they were telling you they were.  Having actually done it for some time, I concluded that my first impression was correct.  90% is as much as is sensible.  That was certainly the case for me, but as I come from a cold, meat obsessed country, it may not be the case for everybody.

Another frequently observed criticism is that raw veganism, as it is sometimes misnamed, represents extreme asceticism,  in other words you are not only vegan, you are raw vegan.  This is a typical reaction of somebody that has never either done it, or thought about it.  Many raw vegans are not actually vegan, using bee pollen and honey, for example.  I prefer raw foodist, as it conveys the same difficulties in feeding yourself without the loaded moral gun.  Besides which, my ten percent involves smoked fish.  From a personal perspective, it is more of a way of indicating that I am unlikely to suddenly enjoy flour, sugar, potato, steak, milk etc so please just give me a green salad.

Over the last few months, I have employed what I learned from the raw foodies to create a high nutrient diet for my mother.  Having seen her go from ‘weeks away from death’ to a more robust state, I can verify that the use of superfoods and raw food principles works extremely well in cases such as hers.  From being unable to lift a fork to guzzling down 1500 calories of nutrient dense drinks per day, with a meal when she requests it, she would have probably have died in hospital if I had not used my knowledge to take care of her.  Nevertheless, I had to explain her diet over and over again to nurses with no nutritional knowledge or interest in learning anything.  I then had to explain it to GPs and a dietician.  I have no confidence at all, even after all these explanations, that they fully understand the implications of my mother’s life having been saved by this.  Even now, they attempt to tell me that she should be eating more mince. (she hates it)

A great reason for doing it is in combination with use of your knowledge of herbal medicine, amino acid and antioxidant therapy.  It is a particularly good base for this, and if you happen to sell health products, I am sure it is very lucrative.  From my perspective however, I wanted to be able to regulate, medicate and ensure that my mother and in the past, myself, had the building blocks to repair actual damage, and a ‘normal’ diet would have slowed this down enormously.

Having said all of that, I choose to combine my ‘health crank’ raw foodism with some eggs and fish.  This is not to denigrate all the people who do it without, I just find it works better for us as we do not like to think about food all day.  It is still easier to say raw foodist than list all the things we avoid in order for her treatment to work.

My friend knows this, and still refers to us as having an eating disorder (he is an ex-nurse, so presumably old habits die hard.  I had to explain poo to him a year or so back.)  This from a guy with high blood pressure, anxiety and a host of other health problems, which vastly improved when I briefly managed to persuade him to do it.  He is, of course rather jealous of Wolfe, as he was the perceived problem blocking my undivided attention.

Having been goaded into again ruining my own health by the aforementioned emotional garbage (see previous posts) of the last few years, I am having none of this.  A normal diet makes me ill, is the bottom line.  Now the awful Wolfe issue has finally been cleared up, he is nothing to do with it.  I employ a vastly different knowledge base than he does anyway, as my original interest was from the European/Swiss tradition.  I am just sick of being sick, basically, and I am more than tired of prioritising other people since it clearly does my health and well being no good at all.

So, when in doubt, do more research.  This Paleo dude I am reading seems to have thought that raw foodism consisted of eating a bag of raw cabbage.  If you thrive on that, I will happily shake you by the hand, but it isn’t really how you do it long term.  The bottom line is that you are unlikely to be eating enough vegetables, and you are likely to be eating too much of everything else, so start from there if you cannot be bothered doing any further reading.

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creativity, health

Hanging by a thread

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Hanging by a thread

When your life falls apart, as mine did in 1995 you try very hard to find a silver lining. You grasp at straws, you pretend all the bad stuff is temporary, even when it goes on day after week after year. Your mother can be vile to you, your father can be getting sicker and sicker, your family can show how immature and stupid they are. You make the best of things as best you can, even when your idea of the world has fallen apart.

By 1998 I had given up my career in stately home catering and gone to university. This added a few extra unexpected years of youth and I did well despite working throughout my studies at a variety of horrible part-time jobs.

It was not until 2003 that things really started to unravel. When my father was resituated next to the front door I realised I had to stop going out at night, and my mother, not the most caring of people, started to really struggle. Four years of over-working, over-caring and slowly coming to the realisation that my life was effectively over ensued. There was no question of introducing new people to a situation in which I would have to explain that my family were dishonest or having children in this house.

Besides which, the house needed lengthy repairs, which had to be fitted around my jobs and paid for. I quietly got on with it. Now and again the exs would turn up and help for a while, apart from that it was a case of accepting that the education was a waste of time, since I wasn’t able to go anywhere.

My mother had a stroke a month before my father died. My best friend and my uncle followed in the next six months. Two cats died in the same period, which with my isolated life is just as bad as losing a person.

It still took until a few days ago to fully accept that my life was over. I kept looking for things to do to distract myself and pretend that not having a normal adult life was OK because I was helping other people and doing other things. I was quite literally clutching at straws for all that time.

I had busied myself with creative projects, all of which were labour intensive and not otherwise practical. I am quite good at some things, not so good at others. What has really fallen by the wayside is the sense of perspective and dumping things that just don’t work.

In the spirit of my rather extreme delusion, I decided not to deal with things I cannot change in the real world, in favour of things I might have been able to change in the virtual world. Now that this thread has also, mercifully, been cut I am left in a fairly poor state of health, realising that even the few people I have been engaging with have not really been engaging with me. I seem to have spent a lot of time pandering rather than bothering to observe whether I was being pandered to.

Any close observation of American soap operas will tell you that thin women whinge about their feelings an awful lot. Fatter women simply eat instead, enabling them to shut up and get on with whatever they are doing. It seems to me that the alternative is to take up activities which avoid people, avoid stress and in particular, avoid women altogether. If the last three months has shown me anything, it is that I was right to avoid them for all these years as their communication seems to consist of bullying each other.

So, to that end, I am now up to walking 10 miles per day. I have to sneak out during the hours that we are not under scrutiny, and I am working on felling a few trees when I am here. One of the exs tried to create boy jobs, and I told him that if he did that, I would not be able to manage anymore and to butt out.

My neighbour laughed at this at the time. She is not laughing now that her husband has dementia and is only capable of burning a few weeds. I have been offering to fit a bannister in her house for the last year, and despite visual deficiencies and having fallen down the stairs, she is refusing. These are big Georgian villas, you have to prepare well in advance if you plan to remain in them during your dotage.

Who knows if the combination of fasting, detoxing and walking excessively will produce anything apart from a very tired Ina? Does it really matter anymore? Is there any point in talking, when you know nobody is listening? Do trees make a sound when no-one is listening?

If I persist with the project I am forced to believe that I can deal with a lot of stress that I do not currently think I can deal with, otherwise I have to give up entirely. I could have lived without the last 8 years altogether. Perhaps sometimes life trades happiness for longevity and it isn’t actually worth it at all? Certainly if I factored happiness into my calculations about life, I would have decided not to bother at all, so how important is it really?

All that there is left, as far as I can see, is anger and a modicum of self-worth that I did not previously have. Maybe this is a good thing? Time will tell.

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health, motivation

Disassociate to succeed

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As I walk off some weight in order to progress Ina – I am more aware than ever that a face is required to move projects on in this day and age – I am considering the lessons from a lifetime of being too considerate of other people. I cannot tell you how much your connectedness to others holds you back.

In the past, I have considered my family, I have considered my friends, I have considered everybody else before myself. I used to think that this was a virtue, that vanity was selfishness and that my health was incidental and not to be considered above anything else that came along.

This led, in 2009, to my painting a 14 room house in 10 minute increments, lying down for 20 minutes in between times to recover. I was extremely ill by the time I started researching natural approaches since my GP was not at all interested in helping someone who worked four jobs and looked after everyone but themselves when they said they were tired!

Ironically, had I indulged my fascination with selfish people at a much earlier age, I would have been ready to discard others far more easily. I have always been fascinated by the ability to simply ignore everyone and carry on regardless as I am incapable of doing it.

In the most recent case, I tried many times to let go of the idea that I had done something terrible to deserve the last few years. I had not done anything apart from being born, being a perfectly normal adult, and trying to make the best of a bad situation. I am continuing to punish myself for it, even by persisting with this project. What I should do is ignore any new information and continue to push for what I want, regardless of anyone else.

This, however, would be psychotic behaviour, and I am, despite my many other failings, a thoughtful person. What I now have to do is repair my ailing health, pick up the torch I was trying to give to Wolfe, and do something with it. Whether it turns out to be useful or not is not really relevant. What is relevant is whether I believe in it, and I think the most loving response is to decide that I do, regardless of the consequences to my privacy.

So. in the spirit of disassociating, my first job is to replace the icon on the homepage, which will take about a year, since it is a work of self-sculpture. In the course of doing that, I have to turn myself into a public speaker and I have to write at least two major non-fiction books. The first one being Lucifer Ogilvie, which is my alternative history of Boris Johnson, and the second being the original book.

Do I feel stupid for trying to invest in Wolfe, when I knew it was a bad bet in the first place? No, it was an act of stupid selflessness, but it was in keeping with my less bitter and twisted character and it was a kind of play against someone I knew to be extremely selfish from his history. I admire that, rather than condemn it, but any time I have tried to give a gift to such a person, they immediately assume that the gift is somehow loaded. From this, I consider that time spent listening is as important as time spent talking, and this should stand me in good stead for the future.

That is not to say you should take everything everyone says on board. Quite the reverse, you should discard anything you aren’t interested in, otherwise you end up being a follower rather than a learner.

There have been many times over the years that I have tried to take it in other directions in the time I have available. All of these have turned out to be bad ideas. Best Adventure Ever, the game I am working on, for example, will fail to absorb Wolfe’s marriage, but it is still worth making from the perspective of what it has to say about people and their approach to life. Therefore I am going to persist with it anyway. As a creative exercise it is still a worthwhile project, despite its failings in terms of reality. If Wolfe has a problem with a couple of million extra followers, I daresay he can let me know.

I have actually come quite a long way since the pre-Ina days. I used to worry about doing anything because my name was on it. Ina solved that problem. I used to worry in case things weren’t of sufficient quality. Wolfe cured me of that. What is most important is that you do something, regardless of anybody else or the consequences, because the more ripples you create, the more inspiration you dispense.

So, I must again thank Wolfe for my new cold, more efficient approach to rocking the boat. There are far more ways to skin a cat than you could ever imagine. There is always a way out of the most convoluted mess, as long as you are willing to leave it behind. Shame and feeling sorry for others is a waste of time you could better spent making your dent in the world, whether the dent is useful or simply self-serving.

Being bullied is quite serious in the course of your life, both in terms of your assumption of lack of importance and the voice that tells you that you just aren’t good enough. If you are in a similar position, please remember that the love of your life will not understand your baggage and it is therefore important to discard it and not expect any understanding or consideration. Fight for what you need to grow beyond what you are told you are capable of, regardless of the consequences or the length of time it takes you to stop beating yourself up. I know better than most how difficult that can be, especially after this harrowing and lengthy episode of self doubt. I can do better, and so can you.

For the benefit of regular readers, I obviously have no intention of attending the event in October. I am sure I could manage to have a civilised conversation, since that was all I wanted in the first place, but I am not at all confident that Wolfe could manage it, whatever his dick-led reasoning.

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motivation

Contentment versus Glory

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There comes a point in everyone’s life when they choose contentment over glory. Chefs, in particular learn this very early in life. We discover that we don’t actually have to work 20 hours a day to earn a living, and that it is kind of counter-productive for your health. Therefore we take lower level jobs, and work fewer hours for more money as there is better profit in lower level food.

Today’s blind fury with Wolfe, for no really good reason other than I thoroughly enjoyed being furious with his apparent contentment. was extremely productive. (I think that blog post was probably written 2 years ago, so it may be rather out-of-date, but never mind.)

I have no real wish to rain on his parade, nor the opportunity given that I have been here for years taking care of my mother. I just missed getting annoyed with him I think. It is very odd that a person who irritates me intensely, and that I have had so little interaction with, makes me feel more alive than some of the people who were actually in my life in the even more distant past.

This begs the question of why I would actively crave discontent for me, and more importantly attempt to inspire it in him. I see discontent as being strongly linked to achievement, in terms of striving for future contentment. This is very Western, this idea that happiness is something to be pursued but not gained.

I find it hard to forgive Wolfe for not wanting to achieve more, and yet I daresay he feels he has done enough. I have attacked him on a similar basis several times over the years. I am not sure how much sense it makes from the other side, probably none at all.

My mother used to say it was the irritation that kept my father alive, so perhaps, having had two parents with radically opposing political ideas, I identify argument as affection. Certainly I find calling Wolfe an asshole more affectionate than his syrupy assertions about happy relationships. Whether this is personal psychology, or an expression of how driven I feel on his behalf, I do not know. What seems to have been a brief and insignificant period for him, has been absolutely devastating for me.

When I first made contact with him, it was with a view to simply handing him my work when it was finished, having established a direction he was happy with. My life is kind of over, since I took on care of my parents and this house. I no longer tolerate people terribly well, so, I reasoned, why not pour it all into him. I rather like the idea of doing something spectacular for the world in a slightly self-serving way, and Wolfe has demonstrated a capacity for this.

Having been brought up with a particular interest in public speaking and natural health, it appeared to make a peculiar kind of sense to do this work. The emotional string-pulling just happened kind of by accident, and then when I became despondent, fiction made more sense than trying to produce something more solid alongside the inevitable artwork. I am glad at least part of the mystery has been solved, although I am not so glad that I could not help being stuck behind a non communicative block in terms of actually getting on with the work. I can only blame my crippling self-doubt. It certainly isn’t directly Wolfe’s fault, although some communication and a modicum of actual respect would have speeded things up enormously.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Apparently I would be faster to come out of my shell than await Wolfe smelling the fucking coffee in terms of work. It comes back to my usual ponderings on economics. The basic economic problem is not scarcity. It is satiety. Wolfe is sated, apparently, and his knife is somewhat blunted by contentment. Therefore the raw material is not nearly as appealing.

I am not in a hurry to become content if it means that I become similarly blunt. I am a spiky character, and I plan to remain spiky for as long as possible. I miss the slightly tortured Wolfe. Perhaps he no longer exists. I’m sort of weirdly glad I bumped into him then, even though he has been a royal pain in the ass. I did so enjoy sticking pins into him. It made me very happy.

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motivation

Best hate ever – Ina Disguise versus David Wolfe

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As you can imagine, I am feeling a bit flat today, given that I have just had another lousy birthday and have ascertained that I have wasted yet more time appeasing somebody on an utterly pointless basis. Therefore I will be spending today re-editing some of my funnier stuff and tidying up before I decide whether to remove all the free marketing Ina did on the grounds of really not caring about anything anymore.

On a funnier note, here is why Wolfe and I did not get on, although should he read this I happen to know that he will secretly find it hysterically funny – no, I do not plan to explain this further, worry not Wolfe. This is from his lovely blog post, which I found yesterday. I did catch sight of some boring and rather staid posts a couple of years back, but chose to avoid them and I was hoping the indication of brain aging was temporary.   David’s words are in bold:

Here are 10 Things I do to Help Keep my Wife Happy!

1. Chores

Small tasks seem simple and straightforward, but they tend to pile up. Pretty soon, the wife is running around the house for a half an hour getting everything done before bed. This is hard for anyone. Small things like emptying or loading the dishwasher, moving along the laundry, or taking out the trash, are easy to do and help to make a loved one feel more appreciated. It is hard because I really live to work, to make sure I am helping around the house. However, taking 2 hours out of each day to be one-on-one with my daughter is a huge break for my wife. Helping with bath time, reading time and simply making sure I clean up after myself is enough to keep things rolling with positivity.

Congrats on managing to clean up after yourself.  This already looks like the most boring day ever. Do not refer to your wife as ‘the wife’ as it is extremely insulting. What happened to the queue of groupies you were so proud of?  Is she first in that queue?

2. Her Needs First

Being in a relationship means caring for the needs of your partner. As often as possible, I try to put her needs first. I ask her what she wants for dinner instead of stating what I want. When we walk or run together, I try to match her pace. Alternatively, she will yell at me to slow down!

I am not sure why anyone would have to think about this, unless of course they aren’t actually doing anything apart from role-playing ‘the best husband ever.’  Time apart is a lot more important than time together, unless of course you are trying to create a homogeneous unit of melded non-thought and pithy unproductive boredom.

3. Listen Not Fix

Sometimes my wife just needs to talk about her problems without someone trying to fix it. Men want to get to a point in the conversation where they can offer a quick fix and then drop it. However, my wife needs to talk through her issues, and I allow her to do that with me, without glancing at my smartphone as she does.

This is straight out of a self-help book from the nineties.  You do not deserve a medal for avoiding your text messages.

4. Use Kind and Grateful Words

I constantly remind myself to use kind and comforting words with my wife. Thank yous and pleases go a long way in any conversation. I want to make sure she understands how much I appreciate what she does for me.

Know each other well, do you?  This is not the person I know.  He was a lot more interesting and doesn’t give a shit about anybody.

 

5. Compliments

I make it a point to compliment my wife whenever she tries something new like a hairstyle, a new sweater, or even a new craft. I also talk highly of her to our friends. She is very talented and, whenever I can, I tell my friends all about how amazing she is.
That said, my wife and I keep it real with others. We are not afraid to look ‘messy’ around others, as real relationships are not without complications.

OK this is now into the realms of extremely tedious.  How do you expect to get better at anything if you are constantly soft-soaping each other?  Try starting from the standpoint that you aren’t good enough and work from there.

 

6. Take Responsibility

Jobs like mowing the lawn and taking out the trash, are mine to do. I try very hard to get them done without my wife having to ask me more than once. No one wants to be a nag, and by getting stuff done when asked, I take that burden off of her.

You sound like Theresa May  “There are boy jobs and girl jobs.”  What a boring old fart you turned out to be?  What happened to the importance of male – female friction?

 

7. Listen, Apologize, Change

Your wife knows you better than anyone else on the planet. Thus, when she has something to say about how one deals with other people, take note. She is the perfect outside observer that has your best interest at heart. She stays out of my business affairs but when she speaks up, I listen, and it has helped me take my business to the next level.

Evidently she doesn’t know you very well, otherwise you wouldn’t continue to be such a rude, tiresome wanker.

 

8. Ask Her Opinion

I always ask her for an opinion when I have a big decision I have to make. She is also very good at considering the feelings of others and does a great job helping me see all parts of the situation.

Keep doing that, she is undoubtedly better at that than you are.  She couldn’t be any worse.

 

9. Support Her Dreams

Supporting your wife’s dreams is a lot easier than one may think. All one has to do is make sure she has the time and the materials to make her dream happen. If she wants to learn how to operate her computer better, get her a book about that. If she wishes to take up hiking, set aside time so you can both enjoy the outdoors together. We have a second kid on the way, and we are looking to move into a bigger home to accommodate that. 2016 is a year of big dreams for us.

That’s really great, I am delighted that you are happy, but you aren’t going to be saving the world any time soon.  This is a time-consuming, patronising and boring relationship.  Sorry, but I am glad you are happy with it anyway.  I didn’t realise you were this limited? Is this new?

 

10. Say, I Love You

The phrase, “I love you” should be used as often as possible. You chose your wife to have and to hold, and she should never have any doubt that you still feel the same way about her.

Role-playing a relationship isn’t real.  I take it she has more money than you then?

 

One’s words and actions have a huge effect on how their loved ones feel. This is especially true in a husband, wife relationship. I make it one of my biggest priorities to help my wife feel cared for and happy.

Tell me about it.  I do not forsee a bright or productive future.

 

What are the little things you do to help your wife feel happy and cared for?

Well, personally I like to lock myself up until I feel less ugly, stupid and undervalued, which can take anything up to fifty years.  Perhaps you should try insulting her intelligence more.  That seems to work well for you. I’ve been dead for years anyway.

 

If anyone wants any artwork, I am wanting rid of some of this stuff before I have to pay to store it.

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business, health

My 47th Birthday Present from David Wolfe UK event 2017

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My 47th Birthday Present from David Wolfe UK event 2017

Today is my birthday.  I am avoiding all calls from social services and have been out buying obscure seeds and a gigantic commercial blender (we are into horsepower level of power now and the kitchen sounds like a large car starts up when I prepare our respective supermix)

I took the liberty of looking up the UK events page for Wolfe, to see if I wanted to buy the ticket for October, and on a very tiny link at the bottom of the search box, at last came across the blog post about how Wolfe keeps his wife of seven years happy.

So thank God I found it before buying a non-refundable ticket for an event that I would have been tolerating only to get moved on with my academic work.  The last seven years has been a source of hurt, self-doubt and self-loathing for no reason at all!  How long would it have taken Wolfe to email and simply say sorry, misunderstood, what is your work about, actually?

Instead of which, I have been blocked in terms of an important piece of work, I have done a lot of completely irrelevant and unnecessary work, and Ina has, all things considered, been a complete waste of my time and energy!

I am pretty delighted that I spotted this very tiny link before I spent any money on the non-refundable ticket.  I can now not bother doing anything about my health and basically stop wasting my time worrying about hurting the feelings of somebody with no apparent conscience about how he treats complete strangers.

Not the first time I have been assured of my complete lack of importance, and it won’t be the last. Happy birthday and wasted decade.  What a bore. Don’t think there is a way of putting a positive spin on this.

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health

Handling Stress

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I have not handled the last three months at all well. As a result, I do not feel in control of my surroundings, I was chatting to myself about how tired I was this morning as I fed the cat, and I entirely cracked up despite being lauded as taking great care of my mother at the meeting I did not attend. So here is a post about handling stress, from someone who cannot, to the point of ignoring the phone this morning.

One of the pithier things that are said to you when you are a carer is that you are supposed to look after yourself first, as you cannot pour from an empty cup.  Whilst this may be true, it is not practically possible for many people, never mind somebody in a position where they are scared to accept help because it means the involvement of family who mean them harm.

I became aware that I was suffering from more advanced levels of stress after my mother came out of hospital, and rather than accept that my mother’s new raw diet was making her well, social services and the NHS did everything to refuse to accept the information, which as you can imagine is extremely frustrating in addition to being a time-waster in other respects.  Why would I give up my pension, career and right to children to make a bad job of caring for my mother?  You would need to ask them this question.  Clearly I am very ugly, and have nothing else to do.

It has not affected mother’s care up until the last month, when I have not been as assiduous about her massage and exercise as I could have been, since I did not know if she was going to be here or not.  They like to tell you that they are doing the opposite of what they are actually doing, so as they told me many times that they had no intention of removing her, I was convinced that everything they were doing indicated that they were.

This week, they had a third meeting about her ‘protection.’  Her protection has consisted of passing information to her vile children, stressing me out as much as they could, investigating her unusually healthy diet on the grounds that it did not look ‘normal’ enough and insisting that nurses who are here for 5 minutes a day are to be listened to, whilst I am not.  I did not end up going to this meeting, as I was aware that I was too stressed to sit in a room full of hostile and in many cases stupid people expressing their opinions about my care of my mother.

Anyway, when I realised that my stress levels were out of control, I first took to spending a lot of time lying on the couch with my eyes shut trying to think my way out of the situation. Unfortunately this means I try to think in advance of an established system based on stupidity – they simply pretend that they are too stupid to accept any information from you in order to insult you.  As my family have been doing this for years, you would think I would be used to it, but no, apparently not. So, recounting conversations to myself in an effort to handle things better was of limited use and wasted a lot of worry-time.

I am unable to do any creative work when I am like this, so I then had the lucky break of discovering Wolfe’s event, and set myself an unreasonable target in terms of my appearance.  Walking helped with stress quite a lot, as did attacking the jungle gardens of myself and my neighbour.  Mrs W insists that I must remove clutter, so a lot of niggly jobs that I was ignoring have now been done.

B vitamins, which I doubled up on, were of limited use in terms of myelin sheath repair, and I still went off like a rocket every time the social workers tried to talk to me, as their enquiries varied from illogical to insulting.  Valerian and rose water was of marginally more help, although I did find myself choosing tryptophan rich foods during this period.  I have not attempted any big decisions as I have no confidence at all that I would get anything right.

I managed to communicate that fact that I just want to be left alone, with a return of my previous privacy, reasonably calmly this morning after a five hour panic attack overnight.  This is  not good for your health, and I should probably have done an 8 mile circuit rather than stay in bed.  The cats at one point sandwiched me between them, so worried were they that I would fail to open a can this morning.  Anyone who knows cats, knows that this level of organised cooperation is quite extreme even for cats that know each other well.

Today I managed to sleep a bit, and am going to go out later in the spirit of my Mrs W project.  I wonder how I expect to handle a public event if I cannot handle a bunch of strangers entering my home and expressing ill-informed opinions about my mother’s care?  Should I not be more laid back about this, since she is 90 and I cannot expect her to live forever?  Given that she has had 22 years, and the life I wanted is out of reach, should I not be pulling back?  Or is it just the seething fury at the level of disrespect for the sacrifices I made for this family whilst being treated like utter garbage being extended to random strangers who readily make stupid assumptions about my life?  Again yesterday, I had a nurse telling me that I failed to maintain long-term relationships in response to my explaining that I had managed even heavy jobs here thanks to my team of ex-boyfriends dropping in at various times over the last twenty years.  On the contrary, they have been around for thirty years.  It is a bit like having six absent husbands who don’t hang around for the nagging.  Surely that suits everyone?

Anyway, I have learned from the last three months that I am no longer able to handle strangers in my home or stress particularly well and I definitely need to improve my level of fitness and I need to get out of this situation a bit more.  I feel considering going to the event is on one hand selfish, and on the other not selfish enough.  Nobody gives a shit about my well-being.  They keep telling me that I need more help to manage one sleepy old lady, apparently not understanding that the more superficial bullshit I have to talk and the more strangers that come into my home, the more danger I feel we are in, given the persistent investigation.  Therefore even when they want to come here and deliver good news, it is just another threat and I do not want to see them.

So, after saying all that – the best stress coping mechanism I can see from all this is getting out of the situation entirely.  Making space is at least as important as nutritional tweaks.  Apart from that, just don’t get into the situation in the first place.  Nobody is really worth being reduced to a doormat over.

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For those tracking statistics…

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It looks as if nobody is reading the blog at all. I have 14 spammers per day, who hit the same pages without leaving a trace, and I probably know the only people actually reading personally.

Facebook and Twitter used to yield quite a few, as did linkedin, and there used to be a few direct readers checking in to whatever the blog said. Now, also because I tweet a lot less widely, there are no real readers by the looks of the statistics.

So, thanks if you have been keeping tuned in, but there looks as if this is a dying blog from the last couple of weeks or so. Youtube is doing marginally better, so I may concentrate more on the audio blog once I have filled in all the blanks that are worth filling.

I am having pretty much constant anxiety attacks due to the extended attack on my mother and I, and I am not sure how much more my health will tolerate, so everything is now very unstable here.

Am spending a lot of time de-cluttering as a result. I have nothing to prove in terms of my care for my mother, and I am not really in a position to carry on fighting to make myself ill.

Not a great period, and certainly not a productive one as I am worrying about how I will store all this stuff and pay for everything in the near future.

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creativity, motivation

The Quest for Quality

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The Quest for Quality

Today I am considering the matter of quality.  As I have previously written, perfection is for failures and people who don’t try.  Today I want to consider the matter of finding your degree of excellence and reaching for that.

If you wish, you can check out my work so far.  You will notice that the work for David Wolfe is more experimental and less perfect than some of my previous work, and that the colours are fairly vibrant, depending on my mood at the time.  There are also a lot of word games involved, and a fair bit of whimsy.

I now look at this work and think it is intermediate.  This is no reflection on Wolfe, I was really seeking to demonstrate the time wasted on pointless emotion whilst creating something new out of this wasted time.  I do not like waste.  Having feelings for somebody I don’t know is a waste, therefore something had to be created.  Between the books and the pieces of artwork I have spent a lot of time on Wolfe.  It was something that I never thought I would actually get done, so I am kind of grateful for the misery.

You don’t get to seek quality unless you take a risk on your experiments, if you are trying out something new.  Therefore in order to be a master of your new direction, you have to be prepared for lemons.  I will probably sell these off at less than their value once I hit my true pitch.  I will put out the Boris collection next year probably, which is rather different and more British/rural than the Wolfe stuff, and then perhaps work on some of the more advanced Wolfe pieces if I have not found a new point of interest by then.  I think the Mrs Wolfe piece of work is likely to take up most of the next two years, as it involves a lot of changes of habit which really need to be permanent at this point.

In terms of my own public speaking, I have put out a lot of very raw readings on youtube, which I am not happy with.  My justification for this was that I don’t have a lot of time, and the audio versions are really just to get more thumbnails of my artwork onto people’s screens.  I do not think this is a good reason to put out half-assed recordings.  I think I should redo the lot and start an audio channel elsewhere to make the most of the time spent.

It is really up to you what level you want to end up pitching at.  As I was discussing earlier in the month, your popular online writers often expect to put out several articles a day on their chosen topic, therefore the weight of content and level of information dispensed is likely to be quite low.  This is more digestible, acceptable and attracts more interest, but if you are not happy to put out pulp, you might want to consider condensing your material and drawing from it later, in the same manner that I have done with the original book.  I have not really used the material, but I think I probably should as it is quite interesting work.

I wanted to be the Lalique or Tiffany of carpets, therefore I am less than halfway to my goal.  I am happy with the extent of the Wolfe phase development, but I think I could take it a lot further.  That is more about me than him,  I could get serious but I was so ashamed of having human feelings for a long time that I kind of feared taking it further.  I will see if my personal reinvention on the Mrs Wolfe project improves this somewhat. (for those not quite understanding this, I had this picture in my head of what I would have to look like to stand next to Wolfe, and I am now laughingly thinking I should shoot for it for the sake of my health, even if she is a monstrous bitch!)

I am considering attending Wolfe’s event in a niqab.  This would certainly solve the smiley problem and not be at all distracting.  I will see how I feel later next month.  I could do with the stimulation for the sake of the game also, since I am currently relying on American reports of his events for information, and this is unlikely to be strictly true in the UK, since he is in more of the upper-middle delusion (too posh for Icke) market here.

The horrible meeting is tomorrow.  I may just avoid it altogether.

Ina

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