Kill your darlings

That One Lady & I saw Kill Your Darlings this weekend - we chose it by going "we should see a film together, that would be nice"; trying to work out if there was anything on we were interested in; TOL went "wait, I've got film listings right here"; we flipped through and didn't spot anything we were interested in; then we got distracted by an interview with Daniel Radcliffe to the tune of "but isn't he a sweetheart though"; and about thirty seconds after we'd moved on to flip through the listings some more, I went "hold on, doesn't he have a film out at the moment?" "Oh," said TOL. "Ginsberg! Yes." "... who?" sed I. "Gay poet," said TOL. And thus a plan was born...

... and now I am having feelings. Some of them are standard-inadequacy feelings about how I should stop trying to play with the big kids and let the Real Poets get on with things; some of them are about wanting to create more, to create better; some of them are about how poetry isn't necessarily the best way to express a thought or feeling, but can perfectly well be a best way.

And then some of them are about themes in my poetry, and about whether I am being boring and trite - specifically with how often I am returning to the image of shards and rebuilding [1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ] at the moment (which is not to mention long nights and daylight) - but then again: I am writing for myself, and this is an image I keep being drawn toward. On rereading, it actually feels a little less like I'm repeating myself, more like I am playing with the same idea from lots of different viewpoints, which helps me a little; and in fact I think I might be settling into the idea that I don't have to fit all these disparate pieces together in one poem, and as though separate they stand in their own right (having said which, one of the other ideas I've been toying with is collecting them all in one place and pretending that the thematic consistency is a feature, not a bug...)

So. Mmm. Lots of insecurity trying to snare me. I'm doing my best to just sit with it, but as you can see that's not squashing all of the doubts.

Things I've learned from counselling #9: knowledge is not belief

That's the snappy one-line summary right there in the title.

I think this is actually something I worked out for myself when I was about 13, during my first staggeringly obvious round with mental illness, long before I spent any time in counselling, but it's no less valuable for that (and is still something I use frequently).

Think grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference, with a bit of a twist: what I actually want is the wisdom to know which beliefs I can - or should - trust.

Because: I get convictions that sink their claws into me gut-deep, that I believe (for at least a time, but it's always an unpredictable time) with unshakeable faith - like, I am the worst person in the world, or I have made so-and-so hate me, or it is not safe for me to be around [behaviour X].

The first two - oh, that is where knowledge comes in. That is where I cling tight to the knowledge that I am not the worst person in the world (and where I sometimes make lists of people who are unambiguously worse than me); where I turn to mindfulness techniques, and try to come up with more plausible reasons that someone hasn't got back to me than that I've broken everything forever (which tend to range from "I know they're having a rough week at work" to "giant fish rained from the sky and ate them"). That is where I sit with my belief and stare right through it; where I orient myself by the flotsam and driftwood on the surface of my ocean-deep despair, by the bubbles that float inexorably up, and hope that if I hold on tight enough I'll wash up on a shore I can't see and don't trust to exist. Knowledge feels weak and flimsy and fragile, here, a paper screen I could poke holes in without trying, but I school myself to it anyway.

But the last one - oh, that's harder. That is so much harder. To eye a belief, to want desperately to quash it and ignore it and try to grit my teeth through the screaming sirens in my brain; and to trust it anyway, to use knowledge not as shield or escape route but to examine and pick apart and shore up the yawning horror, to say "I refuse to train myself out of lesson I won with blood and fire and agony."

It is learning how to get free: what to keep, and what to discard.