Pack Mentality

This morning the first words I heard were Alicia saying in a sleepy tone “look at Charlie, she’s wearing my top.” I was about to put this bizarre statement down to a bit of sleep talk, when I looked up and there was Charlie, strolling up the bed towards me, wearing a blue and white stripy T-shirt. “When did you do that to her?” I asked in confusion. It was early and Alicia isn’t the sort to wake up early to execute a practical joke. “I didn’t” came the drowsy reply, “she did it herself.” This is Charlie in a nutshell.

Our Bichon Frises are the embodiment of unconditional love, and it is good to feel part of the pack. I admit, they sleep on the bed with us every night. Molly is around five years old now, whilst Charlie was the only female from her first litter, now around nine months old. I didn’t grow up with dogs, or pets for that matter. It was the combination of my parents' religious beliefs, although I wonder how much of that is cultural and how much of it is spiritual teaching, and the fact that they grew up in Port Louis, Mauritius… where the dogs that wandered the city lived on the streets, as did other domestic animals.

Shortly after dispensing with the T-shirt, Charlie wrapped herself around my head, against my pillow and her soft smooth tummy could be felt against my skin.  A big white, curly, fluffy, cuddly, canine hat. Every night when I get into bed, Molly jumps on with me and nestles herself in close; little spoon to my big spoon. She stays there, usually for around 10 minutes until it gets a bit to warm for her, and then slinks off to the bottom of the bed for a change of temperature. She’d turn the pillows over to the cold side if she could. Right now, as I write, she is sleeping beside me. Pack love.

It is a feature of our ‘old’ brains that we experience positive feelings when we have a sense of connectedness to friends and family, when we have some sort of status within the tribe… not necessarily the leader… just not the most inferior member. I’m fortunate to have my pack, and we all gain a lot from belonging to each other.

Establishing the pack feeling amongst fellow human beings has always been much trickier, and for much of life I’ve felt like an outsider. To conceal this from others I’ve adapted many times over… trying to find comfort from an accepting tribe and never really feeling like I have succeeded. The approval junky in me finds that hard to take, and it probably explains why I sought to become a valuable working member of my tribe, given that it was so hard to be a valued social member. Of course, this entire picture is muddled and confused by negative feelings and self critical thoughts. What is clear though is that I want to feel ok in my own skin, not care so much about what others think of me, and not have my day to day behaviour steered by an uncontrollable drive to belong. The control such things have over my mood is overwhelming.

I’ve asked Judy of I can see her again a little earlier than planned. We’ve arranged to meet today at 3pm. I want to talk to her about how I can break with my approval junky habits. She helped me come off perfectionism, so I’ve turned to her again. I’m hopeful.

Dodging

This morning I woke up not feeling so great. I got out of bed to find that I was still fully clothed from the day before. I came down stairs, checked my e-mail and felt myself sinking a little further.

Alicia is a childminder amongst other things and so from time to time the house is filled from the early hours with little voices. I am ‘silly’ at heart so we all get on just fine. I like our conversations amongst the bustle of breakfast. One of this morning’s exchanges went something like this: “Please can we play with the robots?” “Sure”, I say, “but the parts are scattered here and there (pointing to the car basket, the multi-story garage and the robot box) the robot pants are in here.” “Smelly pants.” “Noooo, not smelly pant” I say, “everybody knows that robot pants don’t make smells”. The silly conversations come easy… and we all laugh.

I stepped outside for a cigarette, trying to feel what shape my day might take. It occurred to me that I should do something to change out of this slow gear. I could take the dogs for an early walk… but the motivation isn’t there and with little effort I convince myself I don’t have it in me. I’m tired, unnaturally tired.

My writing is postponed for a moment whilst a wand wielding fairy turns me into a frog. When the fairy leaves the room, my writing resumes.

This writing helps me to reflect with objectivity; I am getting better. Much better. The faulty morning is put into perspective. It doesn’t reflect the general run of things. Yesterday I cleaned for the first time in a long time. I am one of those people who enjoys cleaning, I like making things shiny. Alicia and I took on the lounge together and now it is a beautiful and peaceful space. I spent the afternoon in the back ‘garden’, I use this term loosely, clearing away months of unwanted growth.

There are many ways to measure how long someone has been down with a depressive episode. Just look at the height of the weeds in their garden, or the size of the laundry pile, or the stack of unwashed plates by the sink, or the number of unopened letters by the front door. Fortunately for me, Alicia has kept our household running as best she can and we don’t have so far to travel to get things back to the way they were; the exception being the ‘garden’. I must really find another word to describe the outdoor space at the back of our house. Garden, to my mind, conjures up all sorts of lovely images. I would sit and play in a garden, and would admire a garden. We have a small area of land covered in a mix of gravel, weeds, and concrete slabs, minus any kind of perimeter since I took the trees down last summer. I have plans to turn it into a couple of raised beds for vegetables, little pea shingle paths, a chicken house and run, and somewhere to sit and eat. It will take some doing to bring the transformation about. In the mean time, nature has been undoing the work of last summer and yesterdays pursuits were strangely familiar. The set back of depression has given everything a generous head start on me.

So when I sat down to write this morning there was something I thought I would get to. Something that I was going to confront. Muhammad Ali tells me that we don’t get far unless we stop dodging our fears. But I’ve talked about the garden and the general run of things and the thought of writing about anything else, it, is making an uncomfortable void inside my chest. Today is not the day. I’ll deal with that another day maybe.

Small Change

How’s business? That is what everyone kept asking when I started out as a handyman. Starting my own business was exciting… and I took pleasure in it. Before long I had a little van, a local advert, a logo on my polo shirt and an answer phone full of customers.

I started the business on recovering from the second major depressive episode. Our life was changing because we designed a change. Judy had done me much good, and I was starting to enjoy perfectionism now rather than being held hostage by it. People had come into focus, and everything else was receding into the background; a natural order was forming. Work brought me happiness: I saw the stress lift from customers when I did the jobs they couldn’t do for themselves. Relationships with my family were the best they had ever been in my adult life. My relationship with Alicia was enriched by a deepened understanding of each other. Xavier was seeing more of me than ever. I had broken with a well paid job in education, during the onset of a recession, and we accepted that an uncertain future was better than the course I’d been following. The changes we made threatened our way of life as we knew it… right down to our little house… but we talked about everything and made decisions together. It was a risk and it took courage to break with the entrapments of a ‘normal’ life. We didn’t have all the answers but we did the best we could. Our motto, us against the world, would once again be tested, just as it had been when we first started seeing each other. We were preparing to break with a life in which we willingly gave up our time together in exchange for money. We were getting our heads around ideas of ‘what we wanted from life’ over ‘what we wanted to buy’.

These are risks that my parents found difficult to get their heads around. They appeared to see the world in terms of security and stability. They wanted Xavier to have a certain and determined future. In their own way I suppose they thought this was the path to happiness.

On reflection, it was some time before we had a clearer idea of how we would make ends meet. I was keeping the books, reluctantly, and a pattern was emerging. Business was growing but each month our income fell a long way short… we were biting deeper into the overdraft just to pay bills and I could see there were going to be problems ahead. The problems stemmed from our old debts, serviceable (ish) in my old job but now back breaking for our new business.

My good friend (and brother to me) helped me to put a figure on the problem; something that would mean confronting our finances and my own judgements about failing. To be in debt was one thing. To admit and share this fact was another… to put a figure on it was, well, painful. But the harsh critic in me had every opportunity to thrive in these circumstances and it took some rationalising. I needed to remind myself that ill health with depression had driven us further into debt as we used credit cards to put food in our mouths and pay utility bills. It was all we knew how to do at the time.

So my friend helped me face the problem and put us in touch with the Consumer Credit Counselling Service. With his encouragement we took steps to put a plan in place before things got desperate, approaching our creditors early and agreeing payment plans within our tiny budget. We had a modest, but beautiful, marriage planned for the spring and he wanted us to start our married life together free of this worry. What he did for us, and how great a person he is, I will never find words for.

So the wind was turning in our favour. In the background however, old habits were surfacing and the business mentality was beginning to corrupt the dream we had for ourselves. The handyman business was there to help us get by; it was never intended to be the focus of life or the subject of grand expansion plans. I enjoyed the work… it was a place where people appreciated my perfectionist tendencies and where I could take pride in what I could achieve. My perfectionism had found a home and elsewhere my expectations were starting to ease up.

But vanity and drive were influencing me again. ‘How is business going?’… Well, the measure of a business is conventionally the size of its profits isn’t it? ‘Are you going to expand, I can see you with a fleet of vans in the future?’ ‘Where is your website? Get to work on it and get yourself out there.’ All these words of encouragement would start to awaken the approval junky in me, and set me to work on new and bigger projects. Jobs became pressured as customers were booked back to back. Smaller jobs were squeezed into evenings and weekends. The spaces that remained were filled further with quotes, invoicing, book work, advertising and research. Over the quiet week after Christmas I set about learning how to create a website for the business from scratch. Taking care of the site and propelling it up to the number one spot in Google searches would become another time consuming and obsessive quest, involving a steep learning curve.

The business model that pervaded my years in education, and that I had escaped from, had started to drive my daily life again. My drive came from a mechanistic will to be more efficient, productive and profitable. I didn’t need to be any of these things. None of these things were in my heart. I didn’t set out to be any of these things. I set out to earn a modest sum that would cover the bills and give our family time together. I set out to run a small business that wouldn’t grow and demand more of me. But I created a business where I had enough work for a small army of handymen… even though there was just me to respond to this demand.

An old brain hard wired to be a ‘wanter’ and ‘seeker’ (Paul Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind), my approval junky tendencies and a society built on a business model of efficiency over welfare (Madeline Bunting, Willing Slaves) had combined to draw me away from the healthy life we had designed for our family. The resulting poor choices would lead me back to old habits, abandoning activities that brought me happiness (like making pancakes for my family each Sunday morning or walks in the woods), obsessing over margins, driving myself too hard mental and physically. Without realising it, I had changed course and was steering myself towards another depressive episode, creating the conditions for it to thrive again.

So again, I learn something from the journey. And now Alicia and I are figuring out how we can set sail again and stay true to our life’s course. It isn’t as easy as pointing ourselves in the right direction and pushing off. It is clear that holding a true course is not inevitable. It is why, I suspect, so many religions are punctuated with daily ritual, because it is recognised that following our life’s path is not necessarily in the flow of the world.

Lessons

On paper, Monday would look decidedly average. But I hate looking at things on paper. A head teacher once said to me, ‘on paper, you’ve only been teaching for two years.’ It was a strategic thing to say, said by someone who wanted a bargain. I was far from average even as a trainee teacher, I loved what I did and my educational career speaks for itself.

Back then, I just worked the classroom and everyday was an exciting adventure, learning and teaching at once. When ambitious bosses saw opportunity in me they appealed to my vanity and in no time I was picking up more and more responsibility… in education that is the word use to describe things that take us away from the children! Leaving the classroom in those early days was a mistake. Not because it was too soon or any such thing, and not because I miss it now and want to go back, although it was a great time. No, the regret is a good regret, one I can learn from.

Taking on extra responsibility was a mistake because I was led by vanity into making choices that weren’t right for me. What I did for vanity! Appealing to my vanity dealt to the approval junky in me.  I remember a colleague meeting me for lunch and saying ‘well Med, what is the plan… you aren’t going to do this for the rest of your life are you?’ I remember being taken aback by the question but people always seemed to see a future for me that I didn’t see for myself. In their view it was a better future... they saw wasted potential, opportunity and prosperity ahead for me. I’m someone who was fortunate enough to be told by many, excepting my mother, that I can do in life whatever I want. It sounds like an ideal and fertile start to life but it was one I would misinterpret.

Working in education is complicated, I guess like working in healthcare or other such services where there is a strong moral component to your work. It is an easy profession to dedicate yourself to; so many good people enter into teaching with a genuine interest in bettering the lot of children and there is never a shortage of things to do that could make a difference. It is a complex relationship that our masters exploit constantly. It is difficult for many to know when it is ok to go back to their own families and pursue their own lives without guilt and fear of judgment. For many, home time comes when they are truly exhausted. It was common place for colleagues to simply sleep and eat between working days, and little else. This psychological play on the part of our English education system squeezes the life from dedicated teachers and unsurprisingly, school holidays provide much needed recovery. Whilst in theory, a model of intense hard graft and longer holidays seems balanced; it is better suited to race horses than human beings.

Pressure has a habit of flowing. In education, London’s Whitehall pressures regions with targets, which in turn tighten the screws on local education authorities with financial incentives and penalties, which in turn pressure head teachers with the same, who come down on their managers and teaching staff with a culture of winners and losers, and inevitably this pressure reaches students and their parents. Yes, we pressured children each and every day to work harder, better and faster. When you say it like that… it starts to reveal how warped our education system is. I was often frustrated by how the day to day humanitarian work of schools was overshadowed by the will to just get children quiet and back in the classroom again.

Never in my training or my career as a teacher was I ever encouraged to convey the message that what children produced in work was good enough. Sure, we would praise… but it was a sweetener to sugar coat the message about improvements. Schooling was and is about constant and relentless improvement in this county. Targets are generated like sales targets in the boardroom, the graph steadily climbing upwards. But we were not salesmen and there is no big marketing campaign. The children that come through our schools in any one year are varied and unique, but on the whole one year is much the same as the next in terms of the variety and challenges it presents. But somehow, each year… learning was to happen better, faster and more efficiently. At every layer…. from impressionable children to tired adults, we were and still are training and nurturing discontentment.

Whether others work in education or not, if they live in the ‘developed world’ I suspect they will recognise this life too.

But reading Professor Paul Gilbert’s Compassionate Mind I know too that in all likelihood our ‘old’ brains have evolved for a tougher world of scarcity rather than abundance and we are hard wired to be ‘seekers’ and ‘wanters’, always preparing for a hard winter. We are discontent by design.

In life I realise now that I passed through happiness on the way to somewhere else. I didn’t stop because like everybody else, I wasn’t satisfied. I added complexity and stuff to my life to better it, thinking that this is what ‘being the best I could be’ looked like. Since then I have found new and greater joy in Alicia and Xavier. There it is again, a liquid silver lining that brought them to me.

It is time to stop writing now. But I remember why I left a career working in schools, the choices and freedoms I was exercising and why I started my own business as a handyman. I can see again where I went wrong and what caused this most recent episode of depression. The penny has dropped and tomorrow I shall write about it. I have always liked learning, even when it comes from mistakes as it so often does.