The Tall Girl from Somerset 15. Anne Removing a layer of the onion.

Anne.  Removing a layer of the onion. 
Let’s take her day.

7.00 – 8.30

Her alarm went off at 7.00 and woke her to wondering what the day would be demanding her to do.  After having a tea and a shower (Thank God for the humdrum things that you can do with an empty mind.  She could relax and postpone facing what had to be faced by following these routines of washing, cleaning her teeth and brushing her hair.)  She sat on the edge of the bed.   “Right, prepare yourself.  Think ahead.  What’s on the menu?  First, a seminar at 9.  I’ve prepared everything.  Then a couple of lectures. Then, this afternoon, I must finish my essay.  I must finish it today. Then, tonight.   A walk, then supper.  Can I do it?  Yes, I can.”  And, feeling right (and she had to feel right), she went towards the bedroom door. ‘No, I can’t go out.  I can’t go out.’ She had to retreat to the corner of the bed and begin again.  She had to be “in the right frame of mind”.  She had “to see” her morning clearly.  On bad days she had to go through all this two or three times.  Sometimes she cheated with “I’ll feel better later” or “I’ll start, and it’ll come alright later.”  This was a way of fooling her mind, and in this way she could at least get out of the room, get breakfast and start out on the day.  Using one strategy or another, with the demands of her thoughts satisfied or postponed, and her fist clenched in defiance, like a tennis player on match point, she left her room and began the work ahead.  “For the rest of the world,” she thought, “it must be so easy.  Why is it like this for me?” 

Sometimes she managed to leave the bedroom fairly quickly, after only three or four minutes’ of sorting things out.   But then, as she rushed to her car, a thought would hit her, a Parthian shot from the back of her mind.  And this thought would often be one of the most difficult thoughts to combat: a worry about worrying.  ‘Listen Anne, this worry that you’ve been through is wrong; you shouldn’t be worrying.  You should do nothing in the mornings except have some toast and a cup of coffee, and get out of the house.’  Then she had to quieten the worry about worry before that too became a worry, and sometimes there followed a series of moments of multiple self-reproach. Anne thought of the two mirrors at school in the Oaks common room. They stretched from the floor to the ceiling and were in old gilt frames and they faced each other.  Parts of the mirrors were aging and showed yellow stains.  If you looked in one mirror you saw images from the other mirror that reflected the first and this spiralled away ad infinitum, a little smaller each time. The same spiral existed with her multiple self-reproach about worrying about worrying. 

 “OK.  The worrying was bad, but what matters is the day, what matters is what I do, what matters is what I produce.”  In the end she finally managed to have a clear mind, and go fairly calmly to her seminar.  Poor Anne!  She was drained before she began.  The work itself seemed child’s play after all this.

Too much thinking; yes that was it.  “The pale cast of thought.” Isn’t that the expression?  Anne sympathised with Hamlet.  Life stretched before her, but it was a life “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

Yet sometimes she had moments of great strength when she could see ahead clearly.  Life seemed so easy then.  It was just a question of getting on and doing things.  There were no thoughts to hold her back. These moments, these easy days, were too few; still they gave her encouragement.  She had a brief insight into what she could do, if given half a chance.