Kangerooing
Give a car insufficient gas or raise the clutch a little jerkily and you’ll tend to lurch forward repeatedly. Instructors tend to call it kangerooing. That’s how I feel at the moment.I’m very self-conscious at the moment, and analysing everything I do. I suppose it is inevitable on the diet I’m on, looking out for the many and varied symptoms. If I say something idiotic and put my foot in my mouth, is it a symptom, or just the status quo? If I have a reverie here and there? If I forget something, leave a gas ring burning and go out leaving a steamer on? Park up the works vehicle and stall it, taking my foot off the clutch with the handbrake on but the stick still in gear?
I have seen my confidence veering wildly in such a short space of time. Feeling settled in my work and respected one moment, and paranoid the next, feeling that nobody takes me seriously.
It’s only now looking at myself so closely for symptoms, a return to the bad of days of searching all the time inside myself for signs of mania or depression, that I realise how vulnerable I can sometimes be, how much I need affirmation. I have found I can be quite confident with new people but soon ask myself if they think I am crazy, weird, pathetic and unassertive or whatever else.
I see it with the women here, and see that I am the worst with women of my own age or younger, forever trying to play this second and third order theory of mind game, trying to work out how they think about me, and how they think I think about them. I see it with the Russian student here and others I either blow hot and cold with, depending on how I feel they think about me at any one time. I am constitutionally incapable of being consistent with these women. I either think they must think I fancy them and possibly find it intrusive and so hold back or that they must think I am ignoring them and so make more of an effort.
This Russian student has been here for only a short while and already I’ve been up and down, thinking she was pleased that I was showing an interest in her, that she was finding it difficult. My attitude to her language too, has gone from crazed engagement to resentment at the amount of time it is taking.
For so many years I thought this was manic depression. Perhaps it was. But there are so many other factors involved in this.
One is the solecisms I continue to make from time to time. Yesterday I felt like an idiot approaching one of the girls in the kitchen who has taken over cooking when Bodger left. She was sitting outside of our office and I was walking that way. I had barely ever spoken to her, and numerous times felt awkward walking past her since I am incapable of making conversation walking past somebody, in corridors or courtyards etc. I told her I don’t hate her food. I had felt I ought to explain myself since I had stopped going to her kitchen since she had taken over. I told her I was on an exclusion diet and she politely asked how it was going. But the way it came over I felt like a fool. Was very conscious of my voice while having my hair cut in town looking at myself. It seemed disembodied and depressed, lacking energy. I was aware too of my eye contact, as I always am at the hairdressers (I had an amused reverie today of, or a donnee rather, of being at the hairdressers and talking not of Eastenders or football but of Kant and contemporary novelists): it’s always a real ordeal for me.
One big solecism can knock me for six, really make me depressed. My confidence ratchets up for a while, and then… crash, it slips and it’s all gone.
The same can be true when I throw myself into something and find myself lacking. Russian could be one such. I put a lot of energy into any priority and suddenly it gives because no project can withstand every demand I place on, that is, to shore up my confidence, my sense of worth, sense of purpose in life. God knows what I would feel like if I ever did finish a novel. I had some reveries about that at Mardy Hell yesterday which I’ll have to write up about.
Today it was something else. My new manager told me he would have to have a word with me. He told me about a report I had written the other day, while I was reintroducing milk as it turns out. I would have to rewrite it, because it was too subjective. It was strongly worded, calling a student a bigot, homophobic, racist and misogynistic. This of course allowed the paranoia to take hold. How are people thinking of me now in management etc.
It’s yeast today. The second day. And it’s difficult to tell if this, any of this, is a reaction to the yeast, the subtle first stage of Candida’s entrenchment in the stomach, or if it is in response to my disillusionment with the diet, which by now is no longer novel and seems to promise less, and having seen no dietician because I was handed a form to ring rather than simply given an appointment.
I feel a little down, but for the most part I’m still enjoying the job. It’s just difficult with my confidence so up and down like this.
Jaffa asked how the food was going today. He seemed to give a damn. Perhaps I’ve proven myself a little. But I’m finding it tricky with people from time to time, feel my voice coming out so weak sometimes when I’ve not got a specific purpose.
