'Your Voice in my Head' by Emma Forrest.

Another book I stumbled upon in my local charity shop. 

I loved it and could not stop thinking about it for days (and not just because of the celebrity gossip element of GH). It made Amy Winehouse's death even sadder in my eyes and made me even more determined to seek help for whetever it is that troubles my head.

At the moment I feel that tools may help us make sense of what we feel and that as for anything else differet tools fit different people and different situations. It may take a while to find the spanner that fits. And so from tomorrow I am trying a new, for me, approach. Could CBT mellow me down and stop me from always looking benevolently at myself and accusatorily towards others?
"It is very arrogant to presume you know what someone else is thinking or the reason behind their actions. As you cannot read theirs they cannot read yours. You must understand what you feel and let those close to you know so they can act accordingly!" tells me the therapist. She instructs me to repeat to myself in front of the mirror "When you do x I feel y. I want you to do z" and then I have to try telling someone face to face when their action has created in me a strong emotion.
I have tried it. Cheating slightly as I chickened out and sent a text, but hey it worked!! (Note to self: why chickening out? worth exploring.) Damon Bradley did not get all defensive and verbally aggressive as he usually does, we did not get into a competition but instead, to my utter surprise, he got it and did exactly what I wanted from him and, most importantly he did it lovingly.
Too true that my original plan (involving sulk all week, attack DB for something he was now too late to do anything about it) would have hardly been a success story. It was a nonsensical plan, yet one that I have found myself adopting often. I thought it a righteous way to behave - if one has done something wrong, one will have to be punished for it, unless one admits so and apologises. No wonder we always ended up arguing and saying unpleasant things to eachother!
Instead we had a brilliant week, and felt closer than we've had in a while.

And so I have since been doing my homework: recount my feelings daily and connect them to an event; try setting boundaries - finding those boundaries proved harder than imagined.

Tomorrow my first official session. Feel very apprehensive as this is going to push me out of my confort zone - if I like talking about myself I may not like to DO things differently. I fear it will try to change the way I think of myself.

http://www.emmaforrest.com/

"... it's a much harder job for a man,

... that's why male escorts charge a lot more than women do." tells an interviewed Kevin to Katie Glass in her article on male prostitutes (published in the Sunday Times Magazine on the 10/7/11 - cannot provide a link as The Sunday Times requests a subscription).
The comment enraged me and I want to reflect on why it has striken a cord. Has it upset me because is based on old assumptions and works at reinforces them? Did I want to reflect on why it is harder for a man? (Is it because of the performance? or because men do it better or they treat it as a job rather than pleasure?)  All the above certainly apply but it was the shockingly tone of absolute that surrounded such statement that astounded me and the fact that Glass did not pick up on that. I wondered if from her pat it could have been a well thought stratagem to make the wrongness the whole more obvious to the reader. I am not convinced but can only hope.
Because that is the issue here. Somehow we were all, men and females, led to believe that, to various degrees, what men do is harder than what women do. Even when what we do is exactly the same.
The tacticts used fall into two categories. The first puts women down: we are unable do it as well because of our nature, etc. The other puts elevates us: we are far more advanced that can do it better and in less time. The former uses policies, biology, science etc whereas the latter uses our pride. Both are leavers to contain, construct and imprison.

The point I had when I started this post 7 hours ago and a trip to Ikea in between has vanished but I am sure you got the gist. As you can see I am blaming m-l for shortcomings that may have been there regardless. Something for me to bear in mind.

In relation to this concept of being trapped into and by a construction I will suggest a book:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Penelopiad Margaret Atwood The Penelopiad. I loved it.

Beginning...

Some years ago, searching for a house my brand new family could move into, I stumbled upon an interesting book in a charity shop. A sign? It seemed so to me and maybe what its anonymous author, 'A Graduate in the University of Matrimony', had in mind, for he or she dedicates it 'To those brave men and women who have ventured, or who intend to venture, into that state which is "a blessing to a few, a curse to many, and a great uncertainty to us all, [...] in admiration for their courage.'
I felt I had no choice but to buy it!
Since then in similar fashion to the very marriage it was meant to guide, rather than be a source of enrichment, the book sat ignored and forgotten. Do not assume this is due to faults with its prose or content, for I had no idea about either: I had only managed to get to page fifteen and I did not remember when or how. Poor performance one may think but in the current climate it was quite an achievement really, considering that reading, always an activity as fundamental to me as breathing, since marrying and having children, had become an insormountable task.  
Books collecting dust offered a stark reflection of the course my life took since getting married and of course also of the marriage itself.

I have found married life, the hardest thing I have ever done, far more challenging than having children and raising them. When I say 'married life' (or m-l from now on) in my case means the sharing of my life with another human being and our offsprings. For me this is crucial at the moment for I feel (and hope to be proven wrong by those without children and by my own researches) that my m-l without children could have turned out quite different. If this is an illusion that needs to or will be shattered by my voyage rests to be seen.

Some share this feeling, others condemn me or look at me with pity for not feeling the whole package of m-l as one is meant to, as one should: as part of life, or life itself, a skip in the park hand, and so on.

It could be that I have lived had a 'life of Riley' previous to m-l. A life embedded with the luxuries and conforts of independence of thought and judgement, freedom of movement and of choice. A life in which admittedly I had not suffered any real true hardships but more to the point a life where equality between the sexes was the current currency.
As a child I wanted to be like Pippi Longstocking and I wanted to live the way she did: by herself but not alone. I wanted to lead not a solitary life but an independent life, a life where I was in charge, surrounded by plenty of friends and beloved animals, within which I was free to be me. I also spent long Italian summer days reading Scott O'Dell 'The Island of the Blue Dolphin' and re-enacting Karana's survival adventure in my garden, dreaming of an island all for myself. From the library I kept borrowing over and over a novel about the adventure of a wild pony, the title of which I cannot recall. Today I sob inconsolably, to my family amusement, watching Spirit - Stallion of the Cimarron galloping freely in his land, his stolen freedom feeling way too close to home.
After a few cagey and rebellious teenager years I managed to break free and moved to London. London has always been my Wild West. Only in London I felt truly free as was able to develop a truly mine sense of self.
I spent 10 years in such blessed state. Even with ups and downs and positive and not so positive adventures and encounters I was living my life and I loved it.
Then one day I met what I never thought it existed: the soulmate, the other half, the one to walk with for the rest of your life.
What I did not know, and still don't know, was how to walk this walk. My lifetime spent perfecting the solitary life meant that m-l felt like being captivity. Here I was saddled and bridled by the person I trusted the most would preserve the essence of ME. This is the story of a once wild horse who tries to make sense and survive in her new stable compounds.
It is not intended as a guide, nor a handbook. I offer no solutions or advice (not directly at least), hardly knowing what I am doing myself. But I will share my experience, my thoughts, my attempts to make it work not just for the children's sake or for the couple, but for my own sake, having recently concluded that ultimately in order to work m-l has to work for me too.

With the book at hand I will write about my attempts to make sense of it; record progresses and failures; point at sources of help; analyse the culture in which my experience live and from which it has grown. In doing so I aim at looking at the position and role that women hold in our times within matrimony, hopefully as cross-culturally as I can. It is my primary interest to assess whether my condition is an isolated case caused by my own personal upbringing and proper to my individual personality or if patterns of similarities can be found when compared wth the story of others. For this reason every comment will be truly appreciated.
Perhaps a global medium such as the internet and a tool such as a blog could allow for the unveiling of an interesting picture of the 21st century woman within marriage.

But enough for now.

This is the beginning... the beginning of the blog, but also the beginning of something I do not yet know. More to come. More about what happend before, more about what is happening now and more about what has yet to come.