10,000 hours

10,000 hours: the legendary amount of time you need to practice something to get it off pat, give or take. 10,000 hours. Well, Since Dad died around 350,000 hours have passed, 340,000 more hours than I should have needed to become a pass master at dealing with loss. But, dear reader, I am terrible at it. Just beyond ghastly. And I am currently getting to practice my awful skills, yet again, because I've been dumped.

(I should point out that this is a remarkable event. I have been so single for so much of my life I am kind of glad to have had the opportunity to be dumped. Having an actual relationship with an actual man where it - or I - was so significant to him that he had to tell me it was over, was something I'd been doing my level best to accept never having again. The hope of finding... um..... it's hard to remember what.... I think it's someone to share something of their life with me, has seemed so audacious, and for so long, that part of me feels as if I've achieved a thing of note by getting dumped

(Of course, I'm a bit shocked that this is how arid my life has become: despite the heaving tears and paralyzing nausea at losing whatever it was, I am actually glad to be able to pass as an adult human in having had someone to surprise with gifts, with the number of seminal movies I've not seen and with and the state of my flat. When I was offered a job post-dumping I wanted to tell him because I genuinely thought he'd be interested. And it's not whether he would be interested that matters here, it's the fact that I believe he might be.))

Because so much of my energy and thought throughout my life has been dedicated to loss, rather than other things (clarinet practice or skiing or a 'career', etc), I'd've thought I'd be a natural by now and staring loss in the eye and laughing like a maniac. Hours and hours spent trying to cope with myself in the light of loss is definitely my Major at the University of Life. And the more I've worked on it, I fear, the more terrible ways of dealing with loss have been ingrained - like so much fox shit into the white carpet of a friend's new girlfriend's carpet - of my life. If I'm looking for a loss coach, you might suggest a therapist - they're the closest you get to an Olympic gymnastics coach or driving instructor when it comes to developing improved neuroses that serve you better.

This loss has me reeling in absurd ways. To me, loss feels like re-entry: that thing that spacecraft endure to get back into the earth's atmosphere, and, hopefully, onto the surface of a body of water or land, and, you know, to safety. Falling for someone is like successful re-entry, culminating in a good landing; being dumped by someone is also like re-entry, but those re-entries where bits fly off the craft and everything spins round and astronauts vomit and the heat resistant tiles are not as good as the engineers hoped.

Re-entry, every time, like the footage from those of astronauts - hot, shaky, nauseating, disorientating, shaky, thunderous, potentially life-threatening, shaky, hot hot hot (that noisy, spinny hot) and nauseatingly shaky. The spacepeople train for it, all the floaty/spinny/uncomfortable stuff, so that, when it happens to them, they are not taken by surprise. They do their 10,000 hours and then some. Re-entry, in all it's will-they-burn-to-death horror, as some have in incidents over the years, is something they prepare for. They don't do the full 350,000 hours, yet they make it work.

Me? Not so much - the hot/cold, up/down, distressing, frightening, disorientating, shaky, vertiginous state of loss is one I know like the back of my hand, in a way, because of Dad dieing when I was six. It's all I know, and yet I'm terrible at loss. It leaves me staring into the most tempting abyss in the world, transfixed and unable to see any value in anything.

Don't get me wrong, I do all the right things, these days known as self-care, but the desolation is 100/100; it is ruinous for the motor which I rely on to keep the dinghy of my self chugging down the estuary of my life. That familiar on-board motor powers me, pushes me when I can't pull myself, but it often falters and mostly brazenly fails when I need it most. I have to restart it - and sometimes I can - but mostly I can't. So I sit in the reeds where I drifted when the power failed, and wait. Sadly I suspect what I wait for is someone to join me, at least, and in an ideal world, save me. I'm probably waiting for my father, right? That makes pop-psychology sense. But they don't come, and he certainly won't come - the dead are like that. Cannot. Be. Arsed.

So I wait, frozen to the spot, in the entirely inadequate vessel of my existence, seemingly designed by Dali, until I get cold and damp enough, until the light has failed and I'm truly afraid for my life, and then I start to make more efforts to make the damn thing - my very self - work. And in the end I mostly just stay there because, despite these 350,000 hours, I have not developed the skills to get the motor going again. So, I may get out the oars and rely on my own rowing to drag me through this delicious slice of loss. But mostly I just stay put, frozen and bemused. And whether I row or stay put, I find myself exhausted, so exhausted and overwhelmed with all the other losses which appear as if on some Dunsinane Generation Game conveyor belt. This emotional stasis makes achieving much at all in life a far-off, wibbly idea. The near-constant emergency lighting which bathes my existence is no way to live, as any risk assessor will tell you.

And as I endure this re-entry to the life I had before someone thought they might enjoy my company, as I shake and sweat and fill with terror, desperately trying to get my self revved up enough to move away from danger, I am amazed that I cannot deal with it. I know the territory so well, but I am so tired it's beyond me to survive this loss. I am a babe again, experiencing a first loss. And I know that there will be losses, and I know that there is only one state which doesn't involve loss and that state is not compatible with life.

Why have the 340,000 extra hours not covered it? Why am I not a loss professional? As the dumper himself pointed out to me, practicing loss over and over and over again is not like doing scales on our tuba or step-ball-changes in your tap shoes. He was, in fact, pretty bemused at the idea of this blog: my comparing 350,000 hours of living in spite of loss, trying to find a way out of its desolation, with 10,000 hours of practicing a free kick. His challenging of the fun premise of this bit of writing focused me, and I'm grateful. I realized that what I mean is, some people have practiced their choux buns and others changing the carburetor, while I have practiced looking like I was not imploding whilst at parties and interviews and in bus queues, and others have learnt to wield the pipette and got the horse to canter consistently, while I've tried to stop crying when they want to unpack my bag at security, and yet others have learnt to purl without looking and to insert a cannula with minimum damage, or maybe none at all, while I've tried to leave the house.

My dumper is right: loss is an emotional thing, not a skill to be perfected, but the insurmountable gristle of my father's death has demanded my energies, tethering me to the bottom of the ocean as it did. Maybe I might have ignored it, or therapized it into insignificance, making of it simple, troubling memories, or let it go... or something. Maybe there was a way - I'm sure many therapists would say there is - which would render it more-or-less harmless, just a useful memory. But it didn't start like that for the little kid I was (obviously) and now I have no idea how to untangle the pain of every mislaid teaspoon, or failed project, or friend who died way too young, from the strings of my parachute. I fear I've become more and more frantic to untangle everything, knowing in its current state it will never open, never work. On the other hand, maybe I should just ignore my parachute, enjoy the descent and relax for impact. It’s a thought.