Writing a Memoir: Tips for Bypassing the Inner Censor

When you’re figuring out how to write a memoir, it’s sometimes easy to get caught up in the mechanics. Of course these are important. But unless your memoir is primarily factual in nature, getting to the emotional core of the story – the most profound version of what really happened – is vital if you want your writing to be compelling.

But how do you do this? I’ve written in the past about the challenge of finding your memoir voice. Your unconscious mind may be prey to all sorts of strictures about telling the truth that you’re not aware of. You may have an inner censor that metaphorically blacks out your most intense memories.

Yet this censor is often asleep on the job, and it may not be difficult to get past them. Below are some tips for doing just that.

Mind’s eye

Sometimes your inner censor is only working on the level of the writing itself, and not your actual recollections. It may be that you’re easily able to picture and remember whatever you were feeling at the time of the event you’re writing about, but somehow the link between this internal state and the writing process is missing.

You need to be conscious of the gap before you can bridge it.

As an exercise, start writing about a memory. As you write, focus on what is present in your mind’s eye. Does your subject matter accord with the picture in your mind’s eye? If so, chances are you’re in touch with what was really going on emotionally at the time.

If there is a discrepancy between the two, start to explore this inner picture. Ask yourself the following:

Which room or environment are you picturing? Why is this room significant?

What are the feelings or thoughts that circulate around this mental image? Can you put them into words?

Sometimes there’s a delay between completing a piece of writing and being aware of the underlying emotions that accompanied the original experience. You may complete the writing and only later become aware of a deeper layer of feeling and experience. Try to capture this deeper layer in words as soon as it comes up, and use this later writing to enhance what you’ve already completed.

Studying photos

Photos are a great way of jogging memory and unearthing perceptions about the past.

One option is to find a photo that appeals to you, study it, and start to write freely about anything that comes to mind. Think about what was happening around the time the photo was taken, and what the underlying dynamics were. If you're writing about relatives, a photo that appeals to your imagination can spark a search for more information.

Another option is to keep a photo nearby, or in your mind’s eye, as you write, as a general reminder of the subject matter. In this case you're not so concerned about whatever is going on in the photo, but of the individual character of the people that feature in it. Whether the photo is of you alone, family members or other significant people, use it to help you retain a strong sense of the character, emotional burdens, or general circumstances of those you're writing about.

Perceptions on waking

One of the times we’re most vulnerable to unconscious thoughts and memories is when we first wake up in the morning.

Sometimes a deeper layer of perception or emotion may reveal itself in a dream, or simply as a general impression when you wake. Keep a pen and paper or writing device next to the bed to capture these impressions, or alternatively write about them as soon as you get to the computer in the morning.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might also like Haunted by the Ghosts of Memory: Is Memoir Writing Good Therapy?

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The Lure of Hoarding: Keeping Our Appointments with Memory

I'm a mad thrifter and lover of op shops, but I also like the idea of decluttering. Indeed, thrifting and decluttering are both megatrends that have swept the consumer world in recent years, yet they have totally opposing aims. Does a love of thrifting inevitably lead to hoarding? Can a scourer of op shops like me actually lead a minimalist lifestyle?

My preoccupation with hoarding comes from the fact that my parents display totally opposing tendencies in this area.

My father is a hoarder of sorts. This trait took years to fully reveal itself, and remains limited to a few rooms in the house because my mother is a tidiness freak. 

While I was growing up my dad’s hoarding hardly impacted on me – except as an exemplar of untidiness – apart from the garage and garden shed, both almost unusable because stuffed with useless junk, including a canoe that to this day hangs upside down from the roof of the shed like some bizarre art installation, and is purported to have a hole in it. Oh, and my dad's huge glass-topped mahogany desk, whose surface was even then obscured by papers, that my mum had to suffer in their bedroom for many years. As she's gotten older, it's become harder for her to control my dad's messiness.

When we kids grew up and moved out of the house, Dad inherited a bedroom that became his 'office'. He used to complete his watercolour paintings in there, but it's so full of junk now, apart from a small space cleared for a computer and chair, that he’s abandoned it for this purpose. With its boxes of obsolete papers, discarded canvases, painting materials and plastic bags of electrical cables taking up most of the floor space, and the desk obscured by nests of manila folders stuffed with papers, it's a safety hazard.

Ominously my father has been 'given' another room for his painting, a tiny room at the back of the house that was formerly a spare-cum-sewing room. So far it's sufficiently free of junk that my dad can paint again but I predict that in a few months this room too will be unusable. He will occasionally create messy outposts in the rest of the house – for example, spreading his tax return documents around the dining room table, completing a painting project in the sunroom – but these are always temporary and are soon shooed back into the general chaos by my mother.

Dad is in some ways not a typical hoarder. Hoarding is often associated with compulsive shopping; Dad hardly ever shops for non-necessities unless he has to. Nor does he actively accumulate material objects in other ways (although he used to buy the odd broken-down car that he would tinker with on weekends). It's the past he hoards: religious pamphlets, old copies of journals, financial and administrative documents, and anything to do with his political battles with his teachers union, the local council and government bodies. He still has papers from at least fifty years ago.

While hoarding didn’t impact much on my childhood, its roots were present in subtle ways. For example, I knew one thing that would always garner my mother's approval (the usual things didn't really cut it with her): 'cleaning the kitchen' at night. What this meant was not just doing the dishes, but sorting, filing and taming the accumulations of junk that regularly spread themselves around the kitchen benches (this wasn’t just Dad of course – we are a family of seven). Organising this assortment of mail, torn pieces of envelope with phone numbers written on them, tiny miscellaneous toys, coins, sets of keys and so on, and creating sweet if temporary order, was something that my mother and I could both rejoice in.

Has Dad passed down his hoarding tendencies to me? Not at first glance. I'm a tidiness freak and I like to think I’m a great declutterer, but in that regard I’m fooling myself. I'm good at getting rid of some things but not others.

I hold onto clothes for longer than many, but I can get rid of the most treasured garment once I’ve made the decision; I actually enjoy the process of weeding out my wardrobe and dropping off a bag of goodies at my favourite op shop. Once it's time for a piece to go, I don't give it another thought.

But the fact is I do have my own hoarding weakness – books. I have five bookshelves if you don't count the one in my office that is stuffed with folders of edited educational materials.

I find it very hard to let books go. I have thrown the odd few out, but my decisions are extremely conservative. And I still have many books that I won't read again and that bear little relationship to how I live my life these days. Do I really need my secondhand copies of Emotional Intelligence and Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? (These books were both written before the financial crisis – if they were so influential, why didn't their sage advice for corporate types stop the Goldman Sachs executives plundering the USA and destroying the world economy?) To me the knowledge these books hold represents security, and a link with past versions of me, and I can’t let them go, not yet anyway.

Another thing I hold onto is appointment diaries. Mine go as far back as 1994. I keep them in my bookshelves so it doesn’t feel as if I’m hoarding them. I tell myself they’re useful as primary sources for memoir writing and so on, but they’re really just another link with earlier versions of my life and myself. In the rare times I go through one, trying to discover when some long-ago incident occurred, I’m strangely comforted by the mundanity of the various lists I was so fond of making. Whatever my emotional and material struggles, I continued to go to the supermarket, have my hair cut, drop my books back to the library and pay my rent.

Flyers relating to arts and cultural events – exhibitions, readings, films, plays – are another weakness. It’s so easy to forget the details of these experiences, and while there’s enough room in my filing cabinet, I can’t bring myself to throw away anything that jogs my memory.

In fact, the things I hold onto suggest that I’m more like my father than is comfortable to contemplate. Like him, it’s reminders of the past that I cling to. In the absence of a photographic memory, these refugees from my past testify to my changing life and the things that continue to sustain it.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might like Furni-phobia: the fear of buying big-ticket consumer goods.

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New and Improved Version? Or Slightly Nutty Does Drugs

Please note: the following is my experience only and is not advice about whether or not to take antidepressants. If you are experiencing any serious side effects from pharmaceutical drugs, including suicidal thoughts, contact your doctor or a close family member immediately.

I am 49 years old, and it sometimes feels as if my evolution as a human has consisted of removing one inadequate story to explain my life – one veil over my eyes – and replacing it with another. The replacement story is never completely accurate but gets closer to the truth each time.

My latest revelation is this: not that it would be beneficial for me to be on medication, or that I would do better on it, but that I should not be let out of the house without being drugged to the eyeballs; and that this has probably been the case for my entire adult life (except they didn’t have SSRI antidepressants when I was 19, so I and the entire universe are excused from responsibility for my mental health until the creation and dissemination of Luvox).

Having been on ‘drugs’ for a grand total of six days I realise that this is just another story to explain where I’m at right now; whether relatively accurate or not, it’s too early to judge.

Crunch time

I had a crisis on a recent weekend. I’d come to a total halt. Just about everything had become hard, apart from buying groceries at the supermarket using the self-serve checkouts, and browsing in clothes stores. Hairdressers too hard, didn’t like the close contact, podiatrists too hard, what if you have a panic attack while they’re literally holding onto your feet? Dates too difficult, how not to hyperventilate when the date is sitting opposite you and you don’t even trust yourself to pick up the glass of mineral water, carry it to your lips and sip from it? Family gatherings increasingly too hard: this has been all too easy to be in denial about and to dismiss as a symptom because I don’t get on with my family – it’s their fault I feel so uncomfortable, not the fact that I suffer from a virulent combination of social anxiety, OCD and panic disorder undergirded by affect phobia and hypervigilance.

And even – get this – too hard to sit in the audience – not in the podium, but in the audience – at an author talk or discussion forum. What if I catch the eye of one of the speakers and there are not enough tall, big-headed people to hide behind? It feels as if the person on the platform can see right through me. Yes, folks, this is how bad my whatever-it-is actually is these days, how controlling it’s become. Extreme, but in a quiet, polite, implosive kind of way. I can’t even have a conversation with an uncle or male cousin at a family do without a panic attack hovering in the background.

How did I take so long to reach this conclusion? There have been so many warning signs. It’s amazing how many books you can read about people coming to terms with being on medication and not think it applies to you in the slightest.

I did make some progress when I saw a psychologist for a period in 2010-11, but when I stopped seeing her I started to slip backwards again.

My physical difficulties are the reason why I’ve been (mostly) undrugged for most of my adult life (along with my attitude towards them). If you already suffer from brain fog from food intolerance and low blood sugar, and an eating disorder that makes it difficult to stick to a restricted diet, and you live in a cold, mouldy old house with a gas heater that sends you to sleep whenever you lounge in front of it, why would you further compromise your precious grey matter?

Because you have almost nothing to lose.

Because there’s no other option.

Because you are almost two-thirds of the way through your expected lifespan, and suddenly it makes no sense to preserve future cognitive ability for some mythical perfect self, rather than make life better in the present moment.

Because you are curious.

What I’m hoping is that there’s a pay-off: the drugs will get me out of the house, especially at night, so that the mould and the cold won’t matter so much.

My not-so-hidden agenda is to be able to sit in meetings. Social meetings, support meetings at this point. Later, political meetings (a very big ask). I want to start off with a mental health meeting and take it from there.

My hidden agenda is that I’ll actually make some new friends. This has been a huge sticking point with me all my adult life, but especially in recent years. I made my last new friend way back in 2004, and no-one I’ve met since then in the world of internet dating has stuck, yet I’m haemorrhaging old friends. It’s time to go out in the world to find people with common interests.

Never have the words ‘easier said than done’ been more applicable. Some days I am confident that I am on the way to becoming the most socially phobic person in Australia. I have no confidence in my ability to sit in a circle with a group of people with the slightest degree of equanimity for, oh I don’t know, two minutes. This hurts to write, because I can chart how I’ve gone downhill in the last 12 years: it was never easy, but some one-off workshops and ongoing classes and meetings were once manageable, depending on where I was sitting and the combination of people.

So last Thursday I finally came to the end of my tether and made an appointment with my GP, whom I hadn’t seen in 13 months.

‘I want to go back on Luvox.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘I’m the kind of person ...’ I said, repeating my dramatic ‘drugged to the eyeballs’ line.

She was great. Scrutinised me in her no-nonsense, non-judgemental way, curious as to why, after briefly flirting with Luvox in 2010, I’d suddenly come to this decision. I mentioned the crisis but didn’t go into much detail.

Loving and leaving Luvox

I have a history with this drug that made the flirtation in 2010 possible. I first started on Luvox in around 2001, when I began a writing and editing diploma. It was a low dose, but it helped me sit in my classes more comfortably in the first year, and perhaps, towards the beginning, took the edge off my social anxiety.

Luvox is one of the SSRIs used to treat OCD as well as social anxiety. My psyche at the time, an elderly Freudian with compassion and wisdom, had chosen Luvox for me instead of a host of other SSRIs, so he perceived I was obsessive. But I regret that he chose not to suggest to me that I might have some low-level form of OCD, and that this might be affecting my ability to handle my social anxiety. To his credit he wanted me to increase the dose to 50 mg (which is still low: the maximum is 300 mg) but I was too paranoid about brain fog to comply.

But – and this is an indication of how all-over-the-shop I was in those days – I have no idea how long I stayed on it beyond the months in which classes were held in 2001. Whatever the length of time, and whether it stretched into the second year of my course, I must have at some point stopped monitoring its effects on my social life or believing it made much difference to my social anxiety, because when I did decide to stop it in early 2003, I was very blase (surely I must have noticed, though, its ability to reduce my obsessiveness?). Whatever the time period I was on the Luvox, I took only 25 mg a day. I feared a higher dose would turn me into a zombie.

I'm now curious as to whether I stayed on the drug continuously the following year, 2002, the second year of my editing course, but I marvel at my stupidity either way. If I did stay on it, I should have upped the dose: it was a year of accumulating social and emotional disasters. I remember being very phobic in a couple of classes; sabotaging some emerging acquaintanceships; starting a doomed fling with a randy right-wing barrister; and moving out of my Carlton cottage, which was in the centre of everything, to a lonely and undersized one-bedroom flat further north of the city that I eventually flooded. Towards the end of 2002 I embarked on a course of useless homeopathics, which just made my blood sugar problems worse because the only active ingredient in a homeopathy solution is the alcohol. If I was still on the Luvox then, I evidently put no thought into what the combination of Luvox and the alcohol solution would have been but I soon realised how spaced out I was becoming.

I finally went off the drug completely some time early in 2003 because I remember writing that it was making everything ‘white and exhausting like a snow storm’ and I wanted my brain to be as clear as possible for the editing business I was in the process of establishing. As I’ve said, I have no idea if my use had been continuous throughout 2002.

What I wanted then, and would still choose now in the best possible world, would be some kind of perfect non-drug therapy that involved a return to an infantilised state and reparenting. I have read about this kind of therapy and often thought it sounded perfect for me; I’ve also had the sense that given a strong, resilient enough therapeutic community that could deal with the acting out of my symptoms I would over time heal.

But in a perfect world.

First days on the drug

So now I’m back on Luvox again, starting with a low dose of 25 mg. Once I’ve adjusted to this dose, I am hoping to increase the amount to 50 mg.

The adjustment period is impossible to describe. I have felt very odd things that are difficult to put into words. None has been unbearable, but some are turning out to be pretty hellish. If these feelings persist beyond a month I’ll stop the drug but I want to give my system time to get used to it before I make a decision.

Last Saturday afternoon at the local mall: a horrible jumping sensation when I lift my self-conscious feet as I prepare for the escalator. I feel that I must focus on my feet in order to walk normally, but I notice that already I am less self-conscious about the rest of me. People aren’t staring at me all of a sudden; they’re not that interested in me. We are in our separate worlds.

Tiny beads of sweat like powder on my skin.

I am in an awful mental brace. Back at home, I go online and find other people complaining of things like ‘feeling medicated’ and a sensation, apparently common, of having two brains.

Hmmm. I can sort of understand what they mean. One brain feeling all the feelings, the other brain containing the feelings and stopping them from spilling out? Are two brains better than one?

Or two heads? Back in 2002, someone in my 12-step program said, of her battle with depression and her firm belief that drugs, however difficult to get right, were essential to her wellbeing: I don’t care if they give me three heads, at least I can function.

Once you can’t function any more, side effects and future risks become moot.

Saturday night: awful. I ring up one of the few friends I have left who is as usual too tired to go out, as she had promised. (If any of my friends are reading this: it is not a complaint. I’ve somehow set it up that way.) As we talk an unutterable, mildly suicidal depression kicks in along with that medicated feeling. A sort of terminal gloominess, like an extreme version of boredom. But I am bored, terribly bored, and I’ve been bored for ages.

(This feeling returns in the evenings of the following week from around 8.30 pm, seemingly when the drug starts to wear off and when the hormonal changes caused by nightfall have well and truly kicked in.)

Sunday is drastic. I wake with unutterable relief that the drug has started to leave my system and my intuition screams at me not to take it. I listen to it and don’t take the Luvox, wondering if this will be the end of my drug experiment; but I end up taking it every day of the following week – Sunday’s refusal turns out to be just my body telling me to ease into the new regime.

It’s a sunny afternoon and after going back to bed and nursing a need for an extra hour’s sleep I have plenty of energy to get out of the house and even brave Melbourne public transport’s new and fairly disastrous ticketing system (worth a blog entry on its own). And go to the National Gallery of Victoria (oddly named as it’s actually a state gallery with ideas above its station).

While the punters pay twenty bucks to see a blockbuster on Napoleon, I swan through the almost deserted eighteenth century art rooms, and my memory being shit, am pleasantly surprised at how good and interesting the collection is even though I’ve seen it before (the drug still lingers in my system, a positive offshoot of my sensitivity to drugs).

On that entire visit, not so much a sense of having two brains as two contradictory feelings: unutterable, yet low-level depression and a sense of meaningless and lack of being rooted in the world (I often get this in public spaces, as if I don’t belong in my society any more, but this is more intense) and an awareness of a new social ease.

Galleries are hard for me these days, yet today actually isn’t too bad, apart from the extreme aloneness that the drug seems to highlight rather than mask.

Things pan out a bit as the week progresses. I feel a bit hyped up and spacey in the mornings. At the same time, because of the increased energy, I have a sense of urgency about getting things done. There’s also a sense of my energy feeling scattered. These last two are both unwelcome, in the case of the former because I already experience obsession about getting things done, but it has seemed to dissipate as the week has progressed. I am still feeling shy, but on the other hand my brain is far quieter in ways that are impossible to explain.

Something else is happening that I did predict, because it occurred the previous time. Because I am less depressed and frightened on Luvox, some of the more objectionable parts of my personality, normally repressed by the depression, are coming out to play. The desperately competitive, ambitious girl who gave it up because she was too ambitious and didn’t want to be cut down. The narcissist who dreams of fame.

It’s not such a terrible thing, these personality factors coming up for air. They may make me painful but at least if they’re showing themselves they can be dealt with.

The drugs aren’t doing my blood sugar much good. I want to collapse at around 3 in the afternoon but this effect reduces as the week goes on.

Thursday: I brave a mental health group. The drug holds me like a mother, although I make a couple of inappropriate comments. I see my GP afterwards and she asks me about my OCD and remarks on how cheerful I am. I tell her it’s the drugs – they are making me a bit hyper. But at night, as the drug wears off, that guttering sense of angst that borders on despair.

On Friday night I have a terrible sleeplessness combined with a vivid sense of my brain being so alive it is playing, constructing nonsense sentences just because it can (as a wordy person, I’m used to this happening as I drop off to sleep, but this is occurring at an earlier stage and is quite disturbing). I wait it out and eventually get to sleep.

One other thing I’m noticing: in a minor way, my brain is more acute, especially in conversation; it’s as if the anti-depressant effects of the drug make it easier to make connections, be less self-conscious and think laterally. On the other hand the drug is definitely affecting my memory adversely and even more so my concentration: when I read, I have to sometimes focus on slowing down so that I retain the information my mind wants to skim over. Sometimes I find that I’ve stopped reading and started ruminating, and I have to jog myself into starting again. Still, early days.

Warnings

Information about Luvox available on the internet suggests that it is not suitable for children, adolescents and young adults as it can create suicidal feelings when first taken. It also seems to create that feeling in smaller percentages of people in the older age groups. The information expresses uncertainty about whether these feelings are caused by the drug or are simply a symptom of the depression for which the drug has been prescribed. My experience: it’s the drug!

I have no recommendation about whether or not anyone should take a particular anti-depressant – each person must use their own judgement. But I would suggest arranging to be ‘babysat’ by someone when you first start to take a drug such as a Luvox, at least for the first week. If that’s not possible, have someone you can check in with regularly. These drugs can have very strange effects on our brains, even if some of these effects are short term. I’d also suggest making an effort to eat sensibly and keep your blood sugar levels steady while on such drugs.

Onward and upward, with Luvox in my system and a song(?) in my heart(?)

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might like The Dilemmas of Therapy.

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Dog Despair

Neurotic and self-obsessed as I am, minor physical problems can throw me into a tizz. I metaphorically shake my fist at the sky and am haunted by dark imaginings of future health nightmares: rosacea will scar my face horribly; tinnitus will sound like a crazed pizza deliverer who keeps knocking at the front door, never realising he's come to the wrong place; I'll get permanent brain damage from the black mould on the kitchen ceiling. And then I pick myself up and gradually learn to manage and adjust to the latest issue that life and ageing have imposed.

When other people in my life show signs of ill-health it’s even more dire. These people are not supposed to get sick. They are there to support me, aren’t they? (Well actually no, but that’s what I believe deep down.) When family members acquire conditions much more serious than whatever I’ve had to put up with physically speaking, it feels as if the universe is making a direct attack on my fragile support systems. Forget the people themselves.

The people may not necessarily be human.

So far I’ve taken three paragraphs to get around to the point of this blog entry: Jordan, the 99-per-cent-cocker-spaniel-one-per-cent-cute dog that belongs to the family of one my sisters and that I used to walk in the park twice a week, has a slipped disc.

As soon as I write this, it starts to sound trivial. Anything to do with dogs ultimately does. Their status is infinitely limited compared with humans. The ones who are truly cosseted are derided by society with the label ‘pooch’.

As with all non-human animals, part of the reason we trivialise their suffering is because they can’t tell us how they’re feeling. So we take the easy way out and assume they put up with suffering more easily than we do. We tell ourselves that animals are hardy creatures who live and die in the wild without doctors, artificial heating, or guarantees of a regular food source, and that with us as their carers they have it made. I wish that as a society we could start to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Jordan has his own chair in the lounge room because the family don’t like him sitting on their large modular couch. His old chair – a black swivel leather chair – was fine. But they didn’t like the look of it so they got him a new one and that’s when the trouble started. The new chair was too high for him and he slipped a disc when trying to jump up onto it.

I went around to my sister’s place last Friday to say hello to Jordan and sit with him for a while. I kind of invited myself, something I normally don't do, but I was anxious to see that he was okay and give him some time. My sister agreed to me dropping over at 4.30 that day, and I promised her she wouldn't have to stop and entertain me. The self-invitation turned out to be a perfectly predictable mistake. 

I found him worse than I’d wanted to believe. He greeted me at the front door so excited he was shivering compulsively, but when placed back in his previous position he lay there listlessly. He can walk around slowly but should be resting. Watching his attempt to simply sit on his haunches was pitiful: tentatively moving his bum towards the floor, then giving up; obviously too painful. He is, to put it bluntly, temporarily disabled. Someone who didn’t know what was wrong might assume he was an elderly dog with a terrible case of arthritis.

My sister has taken him to the vet and he is now on painkillers and will go back for a further check-up next week, with x-rays a possibility if he makes no progress. He is obviously in some pain even when still, but it is not so extreme that he is yelping, as he was before the painkillers. ‘It could be months ...’ I said to my sister, who is a nurse and understands the travails of recovery. She nodded. ‘I know,’ she said in her irritable way. When she lets herself stop and focus on Jordan, she has a reservoir of affection for him, calling him puppy even though he's now five years old, and insisting that he uses his long ginger-coloured eyelashes to communicate: 'Look, see how he blinks to tell you how he's feeling!'

But the spigot of her empathy is easily turned off. Since the onset of the condition Jordan is allowed to sit on the couch with a towel underneath, but apparently only during the day when my sister is not at work. ‘We need the couch to ourselves,’ she explained as she relegated him to a corner next to the television at around 5.30 pm. In this alternative position he lies on a doubled-over rug where he can’t see the television screen; not that he seems much interested in it, but it means he’s cut off from what the rest of the family is doing when they’re all sitting down together to watch it. Jordan’s haunted, unhappy eyes shone darkly from this lowly (and probably colder) position; I imagine this alternative spot is because my sister’s husband doesn’t like him being on the couch, and was due home any minute.

There's no one to blame for this mishap, and it wasn't foreseeable. But I can't help seeing a kind of metaphoric correlation between the family's lack of care and Jordan's current state. They seem obscurely to blame for not watching over him more closely. And assuming Jordan’s new chair was higher than the couch, the family’s subtle distancing of him (not allowing him on the couch in the first place) has inadvertently contributed. My sister is cosseting him somewhat, but not enough.

My tenuous relationship with him has become even more fragile, because I can only see him within the confines of the house, where I am soon made to feel unwelcome – ‘of course you can stay, sorry, could you get off the couch? I have to tidy up, I’m always like this on a Friday afternoon’ – and I am shooed out along with the dirt my sister is sweeping up from the living room floor in preparation for her husband’s return from work.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like Dog Days.

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