Letter number 17: Red blobs

Dear Alexandra,

As part of my apparently ‘throw enough shit at a wall and see what sticks’ approach to sorting myself out I’ve been reading a book recommended to me by a colleague. It’s called ‘Stop Thinking, Start Living’ by a chap called Richard Carlson. To ridiculously try to summarise it quickly, it is concerned with the fact that all of your feelings are a result of your thoughts, and ultimately your thoughts something you can control — and, maybe most crucially, aren’t actually real.

I kind of implied that when I started off this writing project/therapy — these words are my story, out of my head, I imagine if you wrote something similar to me with no prompting or knowledge of the words I’ve put down it would be a very different story. That’s not to say I haven’t written honestly, because I have, but I can’t (as much as Sherlock Bert would love to) get inside your head for a real perspective on how these events have been experienced for you.

It’s a much more succinct framework for the kind of thing Logical Bert has been trying to say. It’s combining factfulness with acknowledgement that a compulsion to over-think isn’t going to change anything. I have spent many an hour agonising over what happened between us, how you could throw away what we had so cheaply, how you couldn’t at least tell me you were going to do it (you still haven’t), but really, what difference does it make?

If you rang me now and said you’d made a terrible mistake, you wanted things to be how they were, you were sorry even — there might be a part of me that derives some satisfaction from it, but I think we both know it would be a churlish exercise on both our parts. This is why I’ve consciously decided to stop looking for answers — they aren’t there, and even if they are, they don’t change the outcome. Once you accept that, which I’m not sure I fully have yet, you can conceive of the idea of moving on.

It got me thinking more broadly (ha, and I just said our problems and feelings are just our thoughts). Red notification blobs on my phone jar with me, I can’t stand having unread emails, social media notifications etc. it’s the same at work or on my personal device, and it’s probably symptomatic of that same compulsion to understand, analyse and tackle stuff rather than just accepting that it’s okay to just leave stuff for a while.

You used to have loads of email notifications stacking up, thousands of them — maybe you already think more like this than me. It came to the fore because whilst I’ve been forcing quiet mode on my Facebook app, it still counts notifications to tease me with. It’s been an interesting exercise in willpower, the two ‘windows’ I’ve had so far since starting stacked up a number of them, and frankly most weren’t that interesting.

Now as I was looking at my phone screen seeing them rack up, some 5 hours before I’m ‘allowed’ to look, it wasn’t quite as traumatic as before. I’m sure there’s nothing that urgent there that requires my immediate attention. If someone really wanted to get hold of me they could call or message. I could go to the lengths of disabling notifications for the app, but I’m quite enjoying the experience of trying to reframe my reaction to them.

I do think about you and us quite a lot still. But I’m finding it easier to call out my thoughts as unhelpful, and push them to one side. That’s quite at odds with the received wisdom we have that analysing, reliving and agonising over problems is the way to ‘work through’ them. It really just gives you the opportunity to go through the pain again, reopen (not particularly) old wounds, reignite the desire for answers and careful investigation.

Viewed through cold hard logic, that’s never going to be helpful is it? Why not consciously push those negative thoughts to one side and encourage the positive ones to take root instead? They are, of course, just as ‘not real’ as the negative ones, but at least are likely to engender positive feelings and actions. So I’m perversely enjoying taunting Negative Bert with the increased numbers in my social media red blobs.

I wrote a quick entry on my seldom-updated personal blog today — nothing with any degree of detail. I wrote something last year about struggling with lockdown when we were having a difficult time with each other. I tagged it as a reprise of that post — just high level ruminations, I talked about outcomes rather than specific causes. It made P. drop me a WhatsApp — he doesn’t do Facebook so wouldn’t have known until then about what happened. He reached out to me after my last blog post too.

Definitely going to find some time to get out for a walk or something with him, whilst we’ve drifted recently as people do he’s one of my oldest friends and I do feel bad we don’t do so well at keeping in touch except when I have a blog tantrum. You met P. a couple of times actually, once when he was working at a beer festival where we camped for a weekend, and he came to see Prodigy with us. I think it will do me good to reconnect with him.

Reading through the first lockdown blog post I wrote as a reminisce, I know it was prompted by our falling out which I didn’t explicitly write about. I also wrote about worrying constantly about Frankie who was starting to show signs of ill-health. Get cool calm and collected Logical Bert out for a minute, and he observes that “sad as it was you had to make that awful decision for Frankie, you don’t need to worry about her any more” — he’s right. And the other thing consuming my mind was how to fix whatever was going wrong with us. I don’t have to worry about that any more either.

When you think about it like that, that’s a whole lot of worry that I should now not have. That should leave me ultimately feeling better, shouldn’t it? Once the trauma of the last few weeks subsides and loses its sting a bit, could it be I’m better off? Of course I miss you — emotionally and physically — but I did spend an awful lot of time worrying latterly, feeling like I was walking on eggshells. I won’t miss that part of our relationship, or maybe I will, but in a positive way.

Work was okay today — I’ve started to try to break down things I need to think about into smaller achievable things, it’s made life a bit easier than trying to juggle all the things whilst my mind isn’t perhaps at peak operating capacity. I had the interview today too, it went well, the chap seemed nice and the company did too. The role sounded interesting and challenging, if not something I feel desperately compelled to get. It’s quite nice to not have any pressure — I feel like I made a good impression.

He’s planning on feeding back by the end of the week, there would be a second stage of the process. I’m kind of ambivalent about whether I get invited to that or not — maybe that’s a good indication it’s probably not the right time to be considering a move. I ought to ping a message to the recruitment consultant really, but he’s on holiday this week so I might as well leave it I think.

I must admit I did have a sneaky look to see if you’d posted anything on Facebook during my allocated half hour. I don’t count this as Sherlock Bert activity because Facebook is your window on real people, so there won’t be any virtual world spoilers on there. You hadn’t, or at least if you had it wasn’t visible to me. I think I wanted some hint that you were okay. I hope you are.

I love you, Bert