I Capture the Castle

It’s now five months since I moved to my new flat, on the first floor of a modest block about eight minutes drive from the beach – and I can finally declare the experiment a success.

The whole thing was so rushed that for many weeks it felt as if I was living on faith in the future alone. I can now report that the future is starting to come through.

For the first time in years, I chose a place using my gut feeling. I chose a place that felt right even though I could have found a million reasons to turn my back on it and continue my search.

At 51, the moving process was so wrenching that there were countless times when I convinced myself I’d made the wrong decision. And times when, if I’m frank, I lost the plot completely. As the flat revealed its myriad small faults, it seemed like I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. But I was wrong.

The other day I met the owner of the flat opposite, doing some basic renovation before selling it. She lived in her flat before my time and seems to have partnered since. The family who were renting that flat when I moved in had moved downstairs to the flat below it a few months ago; since then she’s been unable to get tenants and has decided to sell (I couldn’t help wondering how much rent she was asking).

She invited me in to take a quick sticky beak inside her place to see the differences and similarities and for the first time I was able to talk to someone about how great this area is. We both gushed about its many hidden delights, and how astonishing it is that the masses haven’t yet discovered it. For her this now translates into worrying that she won’t get a good enough price for her place; for me it’s affirmation I made the right decision to move here.

‘I used to walk to the beach’, she told me. ‘And to the Elsternwick shopping centre.’ She used to study in a tiny postage stamp sized park which is around the corner, a sweet little triangle of land that features a summer house.

There’s also another park just over the main road, in the neighbouring suburb of Brighton. I’ve only just visited it during the day in the last week, although I’d walked past it on an evening stroll. She used to go there too, she said.

Being able to escape to the beach, even though it’s a bayside beach with industrial elements in the distance, is magical. In the last decade or so the various councils have put money into their foreshores and there are some lovely native grass plantings and inviting timber benches along the walkways. Sometimes I just drive to the shore, get out of the car and stare at the sea for five minutes. Other times I go for walks along it that surprise me with their length – the sea air seems to give me energy. The beach has become my sanity, my touch point.

After our chat I appreciated my place even more. My living room looks out onto two huge trees in the yard of the tenants below me. It’s a lovely view on sunny afternoons when the sun makes patterns on the opposite wall; later as the sun sets I’ll be able to see its orange aura sinking in the west. There’s so much light in this place and it is several degrees warmer than the old place so that I am saving a fortune in heating bills.

I’m so unused to feeling lucky in my life. My constant mantra is a sense of being hard done by – a classic victim mentality. It is unusual for me to feel the emotions of triumph and mastery. Perhaps I perceive these emotions as dangerous, even politically incorrect. When I ‘win’ and something good happens, there is a fear that someone else ‘loses’. It’s creepy to think that one of the hidden self-destructive ideas that I may have taken from my Catholic childhood is that it is fairer on everybody else if I take the dregs of life and don’t strive too hard to gain an advantage. Of course, things can go too far the other way – there is a balance to be struck when it comes to self-interest and perhaps I’m finding it for the first time.

Soon after I moved in to this place, one of the flats downstairs got sold to a brash thirty-something man who, without bothering to inform anyone, started to renovate the bejesus out it (this is the flat my upstairs family of neighbours would later move into, probably for the small yard). One morning suddenly the place was alive with buzz saws, crashes and bangs, and labourers chucking out fixtures and throwing them onto the skip out the front.

In the coming weeks our shared lobby would see an endless stream of noise and activity. But the owner never put drop sheets down. Workmen traipsed back and forth across the carpet and the square terracotta tiles. The tiled area starts inside the lobby, then continues outside, forming a walkway to the front entrance of the block.

The tiles and carpet would never be the same again. I surmised that all the flats in the block must be owned by investors – none of the owners seemed to know or care about the damage to the common property. At one stage the owner had a contraption set up on the patch of grass outside the security door, where the new kitchen and bathroom tiles he was installing would be dipped in cement and then taken into the flat. Drip, drip, drip on the terracotta tiles, not to mention that patch of grass turning into mud although moss and grass have since grown back.

The terracotta tiles now have cement stains and skid marks. The ones on the walkway from the street have new cracks and chips.

But the whole thing did get cleaned up. One day the daggy coronet carpet no longer had plaster flecks all over it. Same with the tiles, although to this day they’ve never been mopped. Inside the flat, though I never got a proper look, I glimpsed a beautifully renovated place with meticulously chosen fittings.

And since that day my mind has turned  the damaged terracotta and the neat but faded patch of carpet outside the front door of the renovated flat – carpet that now has a pale layer of ground-in dirt – into a metaphor.

That transformation mirrors my experience of moving house. The lack of method, the speed of it, the sense of being thrown out of one place and into another. I paid a high price for that speediness, but the end result was good.

For the first weeks there was psychic and physical exhaustion. With all the packing and lifting of boxes I’d damaged tendons in both arms, and for the first two or three months lived in terror I would lose the ability to do basic things. The damage was then worsened by RSI. Both arms are a lot better now. But even while I was most worried about them I thought of them as war injuries sustained in the process of my hero’s journey.

The roughness of things, their natural decay. I will damage this house, I accept that now. My kitchen and bathroom both have white ceramic tiles on the floor. There were already cracks on them and I dutifully photographed these when I first moved in. But I have noticed small chips since then and wondered if I did them and if so how. Why worry? Life is wear and tear. 

Things get damaged. My tendons got strained, and I escaped my dungeon.

In my twelve-step peer support group we are urged to ‘accept disorder in lesser things’ while recovering from mental illness. For many weeks I accepted a surface disorder while I was improving the underlying order of my life.

I certainly don’t want to discount the shortcomings of this place. The main one that I haven’t solved yet is sleep. There are two things interfering with this: the excessive light in my bedroom that the venetians don’t cut out and the fact that the soundproofing is absolutely non-existent – Victorian soundproofing standards became incredibly lax in the seventies, when these flats were built.

It’s not just the degree of noise I fear but its unpredictability. The neighbours are mostly quiet daring the week but every and now then it sounds as if someone’s clomping around the bedroom below mine on stilts. I was letting myself get very unsettled by this and it got to a point of crisis.

Then I realised I had to start changing my thinking about it. I had to stop telling myself how terrible it was and accept that sleep was hard for me, but insomnia wouldn’t kill me. I still sleep badly but I accept that now, and am getting better at sleeping without ear plugs. I can always catch up during the day if I have to. I know that’s bad sleep hygiene but sometimes 

I’ve just been too tired to function without a nap.

If life can get worse, I am discovering, it can also get better. I’ve still got a long way to go but moving house has definitely been a step forward for me.

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Why I Called My Memoir Love Shy

Picture:  Tambako the Jaguar

My memoir, which I first self-published back in 2012, is called Love Shy. As a confirmed commitment phobe I only settled on this title after going through a string of others, starting with the first one, Splitting.

I settled on Love Shy because it suggests my main disorders while acknowledging that there was a familial and psychological aspect to my illness, a basic problem with the formation of self – it wasn’t a case of a fully formed ego being hit by a breakdown out of the blue, which is how mental illness is sometimes represented in memoir.

But the term 'love shy' is now mired in controversy and I feel the need to explain why I used it.

Love Shy is the name of a forum, now notorious, that is the voice of the Incel community – a group of primarily men who are, to put it primly, unable to ‘get any’. Incel stands for involuntary celibacy. These are men who try their luck with women, and get nowhere.

The forum received worldwide attention following the horror of the Elliot Rodgers mass murder in Isla Vista, California. Not that he was on that forum as far as I’m aware, but there is a strong anti-feminist movement associated with particular Reddit groups that some men on the Love Shy forum subscribe to. Before the shooting spree that he carried out on 23 May, Rodgers had aired his revenge manifesto in a chilling video. In the video he expressed disdain for the women who had rejected him sexually over the years, and his intention to punish both them and the sexually active men whom he despised.

The misogyny of Rodgers’s thinking would have fitted in perfectly with those of many on the Incel forum. (Which is not to say the Incel community are potential mass murderers – in the light of the murders the internet exploded with debate between those blaming the murders on mental illness and those pinpointing the structural misogyny that made Rodgers’s views mainstream thinking. It’s worth mentioning that Rodgers killed five men, including himself, and two women.)

I’d looked at the Love Shy forum before the Rodgers murders, of course, but not analysed it in any depth. The forum seems to equate love shyness with involuntary celibacy. But my own definition of love shyness is the opposite of involuntary celibacy. The difficulty in making a distinction between the two terms indicates the difference between the unconscious and the conscious minds.

My memoir details how I ran away from love and emotional involvement. It’s not that I didn’t have opportunities – of course I did. And if asked at the time I would have said that of course I wanted a relationship. But I had a phobia about love and sex, so everything I did ensured that I obtained neither. The unconscious forces within me were stronger than my conscious wishes.

Committed relationships are quite different from casual sex. In fact as a young person I was very phobic about the latter too. There was an inner saboteur (which my psyche saw as a protector) that kept me away from both love and most sex.

Those who grew up with the internet won’t understand how much harder it was then to negotiate sex in real time, without the mediation of electronic devices to let one’s wishes be known at one remove. Before the rise of the internet, when you had to have some social confidence to negotiate casual sex, involuntary celibacy was the consequence of love shyness but for me they were not the same thing.

For me, the internet made it easy to get around that saboteur because meet-ups could be neatly arranged. I can now cope with the anxiety around casual encounters, although I’ve pretty much lost interest in them for various reasons. But the internet didn’t change the fundamental problem. Nevertheless I became more open over the years, and have begun to believe that fate itself has played a role in my more recent lack of long-term relationships. I had rejected the major loves of my life over a period of years and before the advent of the internet as dating platform. Perhaps these earlier rejections of love have created such bad karma that, willing or not, real relationships do not come my way.

As I've said, I found the internet amenable to ‘hooking up’ – although unless you’re at any age where a large pool of your peers are unattached, actually finding suitable candidates for even casual encounters is not that easy. But what I realised from these experiences, as well as countless celibate ‘pre-dates’ with both men and women, is that whether you find a relationship or not is ultimately out of your control. Sure, you can increase your chances by frequent dating, joining interest or hobby groups and pursuing ‘personal growth’ (using your intuition to avoid time-wasting and dangerous situations) but, at the risk of sounding hippy-dippy, it’s really up to the universe.

My date-to-relationship ratio has been about 60:0 (this excludes casual short term relationships). Sex may seem available at the drop of a hat, but bad casual sex can actually reduce your chances of a future relationship because not only will you will need time to emotionally process the negative experiences, but they could damage your level of trust in the future. Which is not to say all casual sex is bad of course – intuition is the key here.

Some people are simply frightened of their own inexperience, or just very shy, and have been able to use the medium of the internet to start off with casual sex and then move onto relationships once they got the chance, without having any deep-seated fear of involvement. Good luck to them.

It may even be true what the male incels say about women – that most can get sex if they really want it and therefore can’t rightly be called incel.

But to my mind a phobic fear of love, intimacy and the often wordless courtship rituals that surround those things is not the same as the fear of casual sex, a fear that may be more controllable now that sex can be neatly arranged beforehand via dating sites, email and texting.

Despite what some incel men believe, it’s therefore quite possible that there are love shy women out there (using my definition)  who can get casual sex if they want to, but flee potential relationships – not that I think my level of phobia was or is very common.

I doubt very much whether most of the men on the Love Shy forum have the kind of problem that plagued me. They seem to be willing to approach women, and to ask for what they want. In their own narratives, they just keep getting rejected. Instead of thinking their own approach might be the problem they therefore conclude that women are castrating bitches.

But in a great irony, this is itself a form of self-sabotage. Patriarchy is a psychological construct and never just a social one, but male power is contested these days. Patriarchal masculinity and its manifestations, ranging from old-fashioned views on rape to the extremities of domestic violence, are often evidence of crippling psychic terrors to do with fear of abandonment and fear of female sexual power that are beyond my powers of analysis (and may also be related to early trauma).

Clearly it is not just the misogynistic views of these men but the psychic defences that underpin them that are the problem.

So perhaps these men are in fact closer to me than I would like to think, to the extent that both they and I employ psychic defence mechanisms (albeit very different ones).

Patriarchal machismo is a powerful psychic defence – but this is not immediately clear because in so many circumstances it is socially sanctioned.

The more embittered men on the Love Shy forum might do well to go into therapy with qualified psychologists who could help them to challenge their fears of genuine involvement with, and commitment to, people of the opposite gender – as well as the distorted ideas about women they have picked up.

As for me I can rail against fate all I like but the fact is that what we have done in the past always affects the present. My rejections of love have helped make me the person I am today. Being in Grow has enabled me to adopt a more philosophical approach to life, and to accept that if I follow my path I’ll be okay. But my past actions with significant others continue to haunt me.

Love Shy: a Memoir of Social and Sexual Terror is available as a Kindle e-book on Amazon. It's available on  the UK Amazon site here and on the Australian or US Amazon site here.

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