Welcome to my blog..


"We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

When I started this blog in 2011, I was in a time of transition in my life between many identities - that of Artistic Director of a company (Apocryphal Theatre) to independent writer/director/artist/teacher and also between family identity, as I discover a new family that my grandfather's name change at the request of his boss in WWII hid from view - a huge Hungarian-Slovak contingent I met in 2011. Please note in light of this the irony of the name of my recently-disbanded theatre company. This particular transition probably began in the one month period (Dec. 9, 2009-Jan. 7, 2010) in which I received a PhD, my 20 year old cat died on my father's birthday and then my father, who I barely knew, died too. I was with him when he died and nothing has been the same since. This blog is tracing the more conscious elements of this journey and attempt to fill in the blanks. I'm also writing a book about my grandmothers that features too. I'd be delighted if you joined me. (Please note if you are joining mid-route, that I assume knowledge of earlier posts in later posts, so it may be better to start at the beginning for the all singing, all dancing fun-fair ride.) In October 2011, I moved back NYC after living in London for 8 years and separated from my now ex-husband, which means unless you want your life upended entirely don't start a blog called Somewhere in Transition. In November 2011, I adopted a rescue cat named Ugo. He is lovely. As of January 2012, I began teaching an acting class at Hunter College, which is where one of my grandmothers received a scholarship to study acting, but her parents would not let her go. All things come round…I began to think it may be time to stop thinking of my life in transition when in June 2012 my stepfather Tom suddenly died. Now back in the U.S. for a bit, I notice, too, my writing is more overtly political, no longer concerned about being an expat opining about a country not my own. I moved to my own apartment in August 2012 and am a very happy resident of Inwood on the top tip of Manhattan where the skunks and the egrets roam in the last old growth forest on the island.

I am now transitioning into being married again with a new surname (Barclay-Morton). John is transitioning from Canada to NYC and as of June 2014 has a green card. So transition continues, but now from sad to happy, from loss to love...from a sense of alienation to a sense of being at home in the world.

As of September 2013 I started teaching writing as an adjunct professor at Fordham University, which I have discovered I love with an almost irrational passion. While was blessed for the opportunity, after four years of being an adjunct, the lack of pay combined with heavy work load stopped working, so have transferred this teaching passion to private workshops in NYC and working with writers one on one, which I adore. I will die a happy person if I never have to grade an assignment ever again. As of 2018, I also started leading writing retreats to my beloved Orkney Islands. If you ever want two weeks that will restore your soul and give you time and space to write, get in touch. I am leading two retreats this year in July and September.

I worked full time on the book thanks to a successful crowd-funding campaign in May 2014 and completed it at two residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Wisdom House in summer 2015. I have done some revisions and am shopping it around to agents and publishers now, along with a new book recently completed.

I now work full-time as a freelance writer, writing workshop leader, coach, editor and writing retreat leader. Contact me if you are interested in any of these services.

Not sure when transition ends, if it ever does. As the saying goes, the only difference between a sad ending and a happy ending is where you stop rolling the film.

For professional information, publications, etc., go to my linked in profile and website for Barclay Morton Editorial & Design. My Twitter account is @wilhelminapitfa. You can find me on Facebook under my full name Julia Lee Barclay-Morton. More about my grandmothers' book: The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick & Jani

In 2017, I launched a website Our Grandmothers, Our Selves, which has stories about many people's grandmothers. Please check it out. You can also contact me through that site.

In May, I directed my newest play, On the edge of/a cure, and have finally updated my publications list, which now includes an award-winning chapbook of my short-story White shoe lady, which you can find on the sidebar. I also have become a certified yoga instructor in the Kripalu lineage. What a year!

And FINALLY, I have created a website, which I hope you will visit, The Unadapted Ones. I will keep this blog site up, since it is a record of over 8 years of my life, but will eventually be blogging more at the website, so if you want to know what I am up to with my writing, teaching, retreats and so on, the site is the place to check (and to subscribe for updates). After eight years I realized, no, I'm never turning into One Thing. So The Unadapted Ones embraces the multiplicity that comprises whomever I am, which seems to always be shifting. That may in fact be reality for everyone, but will speak for myself here. So, do visit there and thanks for coming here, too. Glad to meet you on the journey...

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Anxiety and Transition


June 8, 2011

I know all the platitudes about anxiety being excitement that hasn’t taken a breath and all that, but when in the middle of days on end of anxiety attacks, it’s easy to hate such sayings.  I have noticed that this transition time has at least two phases, with many shades of grey in between, but the major theme is: flowing and a sense of possibility and freaking out because of the uncertainty of feeling in transition at age 47 (about to be 48) and comparing myself to others my age and finding myself falling Way short.

In the freaking out moments, I think ending the theatre company was incredibly stupid and is the result of some kind of self-destructive tendency that no amount of therapy and recovery has managed to unearth.  On the other end of the spectrum, when feeling a sense of possibility, every decision I’ve ever made in my entire life seems to make sense as I am happy to be where I am, feel secure that all will be well and can see some almost cosmic pattern in it all.  When freaking out, it’s all fragments, hard-edged, senseless and sliding somewhere helplessly between dangerous and pathetic.

The other shift has to do with a sense of agency and helplessness.  When feeling a sense of possibility and the ways in which this transition can lead to new ways of working, collaborations and exciting manifestations of the many kinds of work I have done, working between theatre, photography, writing, performing, directing and philosophy, there is a sense I can do it all and find a way to make it all work and somehow – crucially – find a way to make a living with all this.

When in the anxious-freaking end of the spectrum, every task seems daunting, I will die poor, alone, sad, pathetic and somewhere on the street, or even worse as a bitter person in some job I don’t really want resenting others who are more successful than me while keeping a smile stapled onto my face.  This all takes on a kind of inevitability when I’m in the middle of the storm and I feel myself unable to breathe and with an acid stomach.  The weird, sad part of this is that even worse than the circumstance of my fearful projections is the sense of How I Will Look to Others, that I will Appear to have Failed.  And this fear, above all, rules me in the anxious times.

And as mentioned above the two poles have a lot of middling territory, and below all of that, in moments of meditation, I can feel an identification with the atmosphere rather than the weather, not absorbed too much in either the rain or sun, but a sense of a kind of infinite groundedness and basic OK-ness.  This is a place of total freedom, and is where I would like to live all the time but do not.  I visit most days at least for a few moments, and on some extraordinarily peaceful days I know more often than not this is the case. 

***
A break for lunch and now back.  We are now at the holiday ‘camp’ by ourselves, Bill and I and his Dad, as Andy and Rachel fled to a hotel in Port Patrick.  The advantage is that we don’t have to be in a car all day and the disadvantage is we are without a car.  However, we are on the water and took a long walk along the sea and back, had lunch and now there are naps being had and reading being done.  I find myself in this kind of normal family situation feeling generally on edge, which I think may be exacerbating the anxiety.  I find I want to ‘fit in’ and have a way to explain my life, which I find it hard to do under even the best of circumstances and right now it seems inscrutable even to me.

All of the Big identities are in flux: not doing a PhD anymore, not running a theatre company anymore, not even sure of my surname anymore, not British but not simply American anymore, not a New Yorker anymore, because I’ve been away for so many years.  I still feel like a New Yorker, but would anyone but me consider me such?  I am a Londoner because I live in London but don’t feel a complete identification with that.  I do some lecturing as a ‘visiting lecturer’ – the British equivalent of ‘adjunct’ – but there is no security there.  I am working on a writing project but am growing increasingly afraid of it.  I am writing all this in the blog and thinking: you fool, you should sound more confident, witty and Be Entertaining.  But I have committed to writing what is happening in this period of transition, so continue.

There are certain things I am not writing about, too, out of a sense of discretion, but in terms of my own experience, I am being about as ruthlessly honest as I can be without invading someone else’s privacy.

So, the question that remains on a philosophical-psychological level is: how much transition is possible before you just feel like you are an amorphous non-person.  Is the level of anxiety I am experiencing normal or is it higher than the average person’s would be because I tend toward the control freak personality profile?  Why is it that I persist, as a control freak by nature, in putting myself in precarious risk-enhanced positions?  Is this some kind of masochism?  A game of chicken with myself?

Why is it that before this holiday I was feeling OK about all this but now that I am in nature and out of internet/mobile range, the anxiety gets worse?  Is it the being with in-laws family thing or the I’m not moving forward so can see where I am and it freaks me out thing?

I should add that I’m reading Jennifer Egan’s ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad,’ which is about 40-somethings (primarily) getting to about my age and freaking out.  So, that isn’t helping, like at all.  Plus I’m having the oh-she’s-writing-fiction-so-should-I response.  And every day I wake up I have another idea for a book and I think: but I Have to finish one, but the next one always seems like it’ll be better.  And I’m really unsure about the format I’ve chosen for my grandmother book but feeling this insane loyalty to the original idea thing, so feel I can’t change that either. 

I so don’t want to be writing this.  I so want to be charming you with my wit and wisdom about well anything and not this…the insecurity diaries…how lame.

Hey, if you’re reading this, I’d love to know if you go through any of this, too.  And if there’s any benefit to you in hearing another person’s spectrum from confident to freaking.

It’s times like this I realize how little security I’ve ever had, and I look back at my childhood and most of my adult life with a sense of vertigo.  I know in the larger cosmic sense there is no security, but I also know lots of people have things like oh say financial security or one family with a discernable tree rather than multiples halved on staircases full of steps.  I also know there are at least 5-6 billion people way worse off than me who would kill to have what I have: an education, a roof over my head, the ability to work, residency in a wealthy country with a social safety net, access to health care, the ability to vote (weirdly enough in a different country, but oh well) and on and on and on.  I have spent my life at the bottom of the top in other words, aware always of the vertiginous drop between me and the many people who live below the poverty line and with no way out.  I feel like there is a very thin line between them and me, but it’s there.  And it’s more like a plate of glass than a line. 

Would the grandmother book be best if it was collapsed into this writing?  If in following them I am following myself or in following myself I am following them?  The fact is I don’t know what they were thinking or feeling.  I can guess but that’s all I’m doing and I wonder, is that enough?  Really?

Is it going to turn into my version of Sherman’s March after all?  A search for something historical that ends up a rumination on all that obsesses me now: class, the rules we live by, and how – just how really – to live?

I mean really, how to live?  Am I the only one who refuses to put what tiny bit of money I have in the stock market because I think it is evil?  I mean because profits from corporations are always made on the backs of others, usually in third world countries - many of who die?  I was the only person at the law firm I worked at in New York that would not put my money in a 401K and was considered insane for not doing so. 

Am I, as one person I met in Norway called himself - who also believed in communal ideals circa 1960s-70s - ‘the clown of the century’?  Are all these ideals dead?  That is how it feels, like the desire to live a certain way that does not involve money or prestige at the center is hopelessly nostalgic and stupid.  And am I lying to myself anyway?  Do I want these things as much as the next person but convinced myself otherwise?  And now am regretting it?

Anyone else finding themselves here?  I would love to know, because I have a suspicion about people in our ‘who the fuck are you generation’ (too young to be baby boomers and too old to be gen-Xers) – that many of us are in this strange space.  Am I right about that?


June 9, 2011

Another day and another point of view.  A photos of the sunset light yesterday where we are staying are below to give you an idea of the beauty of it when walking and it is sunny:




After writing the post yesterday, we were chatting away again with Uncle Harry and Betty in their caravan and something about their attitude and Harry’s ability to make a living in many circumstances and without any discernible ‘career’ made me see everything in my own life again in a more positive light.

The specific shift was remembering that I hadn’t yet sent out proposals to teach a workshop that I have taught at many universities in the past, which is based on work created in NYC and London in labs.  This is a small thing, but was enough to remind me that I have a whole body of work behind me and experience working, teaching, writing, etc. that I can offer and make money doing.  When in the throes of anxiety as described in the last post, I can forget all this.

However, the specifics, which seem so practical and obvious when they arrive in my head as an antidote to panic, come along I’ve noticed with a change first in perspective, not usually the other way around.  This would be hard to prove of course as the two can come so close to one another, but I’m fairly sure it is true.

After that shift yesterday, I could enjoy the day again and talk with cousin John and his wife that showed up with Harry and Betty later on, and there was not the sense of a running commentary in my own head that kept me from hearing anyone else’s conversation. 

It should be noted too that the shift occurred after writing about the anxiety, which is interesting because when I was writing, it was having the effect of making me more anxious and I was wondering if I was making it worse.  Even writing about that brings about a tinge of the anxiety, like a shadow becoming visible that I want to run away from.

I remember the first time I had this anxiety awareness was when I was 17 after a summer program I had attended at Wesleyan University for young people in the arts, a wonderful program with a horrendous name: Center for Creative Youth.  We all hated it, the name.

I had fallen in love, hard, for the first time, to a guy who was 5 years my senior who was teaching a class in media studies, where we also learned how to DJ a radio program.  His name was Jim Boylan, and I say was, because he is now a she named Jenny Boylan.  I mentioned in the first post that the first man I fell in love with turned him/herself into a woman, well this would be that person.  She wrote a book about her transformation, She’s Not There.  Really good stuff.

I hasten to add here, not because of the sex change, but simply to clarify for Jim/Jenny’s sake that my crush was unrequited, except in the gentle way of a slightly older young man (22) attempting not to hurt the feelings of a hopelessly in love 17 year old.  However, as I was so crushed out on him, and it did not feel like a crush at the time, it felt the way one’s first love does feel, like the entire world depended on the outcome, that any movement towards me or any kind words were proof of his undying love towards me.

Yes, I was that stupid at 17.  I know some of you were probably way more sophisticated at that age, but I was not.  I was still a virgin, unbelievably naïve, especially considering my background and waiting for Jim to come along and sweep me off my feet, seriously. 

The story of this crush is of course it’s own long mini-saga, but for the purposes of this post, the main thing is that when I left that summer program, having fallen in love with Jim and in the throes of the emotional up-ending that that (and my mother’s reunion with my now step-father Tom after Jani’s death – which angered me at the time as he had left her the winter before to go back to his then-wife after having said they would get married and I had been the one that had to helplessly witness my mother’s total disintegration after the event – including not being able to find her on the phone when in boarding school and worrying she would kill herself) brought along with it, I spent the rest of the year in high-school reeling between anxiety attacks, the inability to eat, overeating and something close to manias.

During the worst of the anxiety attacks, I would stare out at the picture postcard boarding school campus from my room in a house George Washington had slept in, wondering if I even existed, sweating and unable to move.  I did not tell anyone about any of this as there was simply no one I trusted.  Instead I directed plays, which seemed to keep the dragons at bay, painted abstract oils and freaked out about where to go to university.

I did try to go to therapy for a short time, but only after the worst of the anxiety attacks had passed, as I had heard my mother tell me horror stories about someone trying to have her put away when she was a teenager after she’d been molested and was afraid if I told anyone what was really going on, I too would be put away.  I’d also watched two of my friends disappeared off the campus ‘for their own good’ but I knew they had been to the school shrinks who must have broken confidentiality.  This was not a situation that bred trust.

However, when I did go see one of the therapists, I told her an incredibly watered-down version of my childhood, and her response was ‘well, if that’s all true, then you have a lot to deal with.’  The ‘if’ was my favorite and I realized this woman would not be able to handle even the tiniest bit of my reality.  I saw her a couple more times and left it alone.

But what does any of this have to do with anxiety and transition?  Well, a lot actually, because the biggest decision I had to make that year had to do with what university to attend.  I had originally applied to Yale, which seemed logical given my grades and achievements, etc. but after falling in love with Jim and the Wesleyan campus during the summer (and probably in that order), I thought maybe I should consider Wesleyan.

I visited both campuses, and at Yale I visited the daughter of a famous playwright who had graduated from my boarding school the year before (she was one of the very cool kids who ran the literary magazine…mentioned in earlier posts), she was in love with the place and her roommates were quite nice to me, but I felt a certain darkness at Yale and I was not in love at the time with this idea of hallowed halls of learning and sitting at the feet of wise old men.  I had an interview, which was a sparring match.  I knew I had done well, but something was not sitting right.

When I visited Wesleyan, I was visiting another not-famous friend from drama at school.  Her room seemed light, and I got stoned for the first time that day with her and her friends.  The interview the next day felt more like a long conversation, and I liked the idea of the freedom that this place seemed to offer.  I ignored, much to my later regret, what my high-school theater teacher, Mr. Ortwein, had told me about the weaknesses of the theater department, and decided instead to focus on the fact that there was a student run theater and independence was prized.  This was also true, btw, and saved me.

The anxiety thing matters here because, when I was feeling anxious and not good about myself, I wanted to go to Yale, which clearly had all the credentials (it’s the equivalent in Britain of Cambridge or Oxford), but when I was feeling good and not so dependent on the outside world for my sense of achievement and well-being, I wanted to go to Wesleyan.  This led me, after months of angst, to choose Wesleyan.  Actually, thinking back on it, knowing the deadlines, it could have been only about 2 months, max, of angst.  In memory it seems way longer.

And in the weird way that feelings have memory lines, just like smells and tastes, this anxiety, when it pops up periodically in my life, and again now, at a time of transition, brings me right back to there, to that decision, and if I’m in a particularly bad patch, can make me think: see, you fucked up way back then.  If you’d gone to Yale, you’d be set right now, more secure, have all the right connections, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

I think living in a country that is run Exclusively by people who went to Oxford or Cambridge exacerbates this feeling.  The entire cabinet of the Tories went to one of these schools and most of the leaders in any field – including the arts, easily 80-90%, went to these schools as well.

And this is the irony of love and falling in love, even if it is unrequited and you are 17 and dumb as a board emotionally.  Because it was in falling in love, acting like an idiot but feeling something of my own self deeper than I ever had that I had the guts to act on my own behalf and defy a certain expectation of where my achievements should lead me.  But, being female or perhaps more to the point being me, this falling in love was also an act of total abasement.

These days I reserve that feeling for what some may call God, but that I refer to as something larger than me that seems to defy naming.  I made the mistake later in adult life to entrust another person with that feeling who accepted it, and this caused much misery.  I learned finally not to give this feeling to any one person but to this sense of something larger, where it is more safely held.  And more accurately as well.  Meaning, no one person can be all that, nor should be.

However, these stepping stones, even if inaccurate are powerful.  I have to wrap up this post now, as there is now activity back in the ‘chalet’, but just to close on the interesting fact that it was Jani, who had died only months before, who had said to my mother that I would need to fall in love at some point to bust out of what she saw as my ice queen shell.  I think my mother told me this at some point when I was in the throes of unrequited love, waiting for letters and phone calls, perhaps as a way to soothe me.

I think however I took this to mean my pain was virtuous and this led me to a certain heritage of emotional masochism, which has taken many years to untangle.

And yes writing this post has brought about the anxiety again, but also a sense of what is underneath it.

Now time to walk a few miles to the town where I can post this…

5 comments:

  1. Julia, a lot of this resonates with me. What have I done with my life ? Are those around me of a similar age even anxious about the things I'm anxious about ? They seem so sorted. Some of them (and I'm looking at the women, not surprisingly, given that I am a woman myself) are very materialistic, love home-improvements,live very close to their own family and have never lived in another neighbourhood. I have no desire to fit that profile, but they seem happy enough. Then there ARE people rather more like me, who write seriously, who have published. . .but who seem so much more at ease with themselves. They are in happy relationships, they have pension plans, etc.

    As for failure, my dad (who knew nothing about the publishing of poetry, or about the poetry world at all, the world I partially inhabit) , he thought I had failed because I was not earning "lots of money" being a poet. No-one earns a lot of money being a poet. But no, this was (in his eyes) MY failure. He pitied me for that and other things. This screwed-up, mother-dominated self-aggrandizer pitied me. I have to re-program myself every single day due to him and his toxic messages, re-cast myself in some way that does not have the word FAILURE stamped all over it. His definitions of failure were daft (polite word), but it doesn't help when I DO feel that I've failed at anything.

    Answers to all this ? Are there any ? "IF what you say is true. . ." ? A bad, bad therapist.

    Panther

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  2. thanks for the comment...have you gotten in touch yet via my email yet? would be interesting to connect that way, too. Yes a bad therapist and I've had a couple good ones as an adult so know the difference, thank goodness.

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  3. No, Julia, I thought I'd get in touch once you have finished your Scottish journey.

    Good therapists and bad therapists (I typed "mad" there) : poles apart. Different species. I could write effusive odes about the good ones.

    Panther

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  4. The university story really resonates - I applied for Oxford and Cambridge early, that is before taking A levels in the UK (back in those days, it was more usual to do a '3rd year 6th form' if you were going to try for Oxbridge. If you were thought bright enough, you could apply early and some people did pass the entrance this way). I didn't get in at the first go, but was told by Oxford that if I waited a year I probably would.
    I turned the chance down - ostensibly because I wanted to separate from my parents, who were both older and not that well, but also because I couldn't handle the idea of a second academic rejection. So I went to another university (Nottingham) and have always had an uneasy feeling that it 'would all have been different/better' if I'd waited to go to Oxford.
    Compound that with my mother dying not long after I left for Nottingham (no-one knew that the cancer she'd first developed some years before was to recur quickly and virulently) and I am left with a mix of guilt, failure, not good enough, got it wrong etc. etc. Like you, I've looked at all this stuff in therapy and recovery, but every now and then up it bubbles again.

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  5. Hey Lesley, thanks for this and it's amazing isn't it, how we can come back around to these 'origin myths' whenever...I am glad and sad these stories are resonating people as I said in another comment to another reader...both glad that there is a sharing and sad for the reason...but I believe, as I think you do too, that facing it all is the best way out and through...even the darker, unfun bits...and of course it's Always healing to know I'm not alone...for some reason that can be the worst, when these feelings and memories come up and I start thinking: it's Only me...you know the terminal uniqueness bit...lonely, lonely...this blog is a way of 'outing' myself in some way I think...and connecting with the world not hiding out in the recesses of the dark licking real or imagined wounds...

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