An alternative thread: On being alive

First of all, I want to point out that a week has passed since the equal marriage debate. It seems so obscure, that passage of time. So long ago, yet equally pressed right up against my back as if it just happened.

Secondly, this post was going to be about something completely different until I wrote those few short sentences. It was going to be about something I wasn’t sure I should be writing about publicly just yet. So thank you, Mind, for suggesting to me this new thread of thought. It’ll give me time to think about that other thing for a while.

I remember when my life really did seem to stretch out in front of me like those great long motorways across America which I have only ever seen on a screen, which disappear into the hazy heat waves on the horizon, and I had forever ahead of me. But now it doesn’t do that at all. People sometimes talk to me as if I still see things that way, but I don’t. I’m spoken to at times as if I haven’t got a clue, and eternity is mine. Truly, I know that I haven’t got a clue. I’m perfectly willing to admit that. My mind has changed so much in just the last few years that I can’t possibly deny that I won’t think very differently in five years’ time from how I think now. But about my perspective on life – the actual experience of being alive -, nobody seems to get it right. I don’t think in terms of A leading to B, leading to C, leading to D, and so on, with each letter stacking up neatly just behind me like freshly written books on a shelf, lessons learnt to carry on with me to the next stage. I don’t see myself as different. I’m not pretending to think differently for sake of appearing alternative. I believe we all think as I do, only I let my thoughts play on my mind a little more than some others tend to.

I see life as this, now. There is nothing ahead of me. Anything I get after tonight, after typing the next letter is a bonus as far as I am concerned at this exact moment in time, and when I get to ‘the future’, like tomorrow afternoon, I’ll feel the same way. That will be now and nothing will exist apart from that. All that the future is is our ideas of what we would like for ourselves, or what we expect for ourselves, projected out into the darkness that truly exists. The projection fools us into believing we’re walking a clear path when really we’re walking absurdly confidently into the pitch black. Thankfully, we do walk. Otherwise we’d never do anything for fear of the darkness. When I imagine myself at eighty years old (this is me narrating my projections), I expect I’ll experience life just as I am experiencing it now. The future will be just as black, and the past will not exist anywhere except inside my head, as a patchwork of memories, and the now will be all there is. What’s frightening is the idea that even then, as I come to the end of my imaginable lifespan, I’ll still feel like I do now. I’ll want to grab on to something real, to hold me back and let me stay a while longer, but there is nothing to hold on to. I’m not ready for this to be over now, and I really cannot imagine that I will be ready then. Can you imagine not being alive? It’s completely absurd. This is everything we know. How can it just not be? This is the reason I  disagree with the death sentence. Some people may say that people who do bad things will live on eternally to pay for their sins, or reap the rewards of their goodness, but I’m not religious and I don’t believe there is anything to follow the exhaustion of our fragile bodies. Therefore, nobody in my opinion has the right to take from anybody else the experience of being alive, because it is the only experience. There is nothing else, so how can anybody justifiably make nothing of the delicate something we have? It’s terrifying, and utterly barbaric.

Of course I experience my mind through projections just like anybody else, but always at the back of my mind is the little voice saying this is it, and I know it’s right. 

The past is only what we’ve been told went before us, and what our unreliable memories make up from what we have experienced, or even not experienced and fabricated completely in our own imaginative heads. Looking back on good memories, we don’t experience them as they were. We will never feel that exact feeling ever again, and our memories are not perfect, so we can’t really rely on them to recreate those feeling authentically. All that truly matter is this right now. It comes across as completely clichéd, but I really mean it; I really believe it. Of course, social structures dictate that in order to experience life as we would like to experience it, we must do work to earn money to pay for what we want, and so most of us never achieve the feelings we project into our own individual darknesses. I can honestly, openly say that if I could be feeling anything else right now, as I am alive, I would not be feeling what I am feeling now. I’m not feeling anything dreadful, but I want to feel something better. It seems like such a waste to spend these valuable minutes experiencing the intangible thing that is being alive in any state other than that which we call happiness. There will come a point when you are not.

Look back at certain points in your life, and they seem so close, so defined, even if the image is blurred. The future seems so far away, so unreal, because it is. But when we get to a point we imagine now is far away, it will feel just like being here in this second feels. Progression is an illusion. The future doesn’t exist, and it exists no less than the past.

There is nothing more than this biological existence. Can you see your eyelids blinking across your eyes? That is it. We have no choice but to keep on walking, taking whatever chance happens to cause us to exist with from one moment to the next, be it pleasure or pain, sadness or happiness. But please let it be happiness. If nothing else, let the end come whilst I am happy.

I will, I hope

In 2007, when I was sixteen, I came out firstly to myself, secondly to my friends, and finally to my parents. Six years on, I remember the feeling this long and terrifying process gave way to pretty well. It was a concoction of emotions. Firstly, there was the relief of throwing off a mask, and the acknowledgement, in hindsight, of the exhaustion that wearing it had caused. Secondly, there was a feeling that I could do anything. If I could do what at the time was the most difficult thing I could even imagine doing, then I must have been able to achieve whatever I wanted. Thirdly, I felt I had conceded defeat to the people who called me ‘gay’ as an insult, and to my body, or my mind, or whatever it is that means I am as I am.

I had until that point maintained that I was straight because I saw being straight as better, and easier, than being gay, and having outed myself I hadn’t yet changed my mind. As I saw it, if I had only been different I could have got a proper job (gay men didn’t have jobs in my mind – don’t ask, because I don’t know), been friends with other men, laughed and joked and fantasised about man things like beer, and tits, and football (if ever I somehow taught myself to enjoy them), had children of my own, and walked in public with my hand in the hand of the person I was to love, without anyone batting an eyelid. Nobody would whisper about me from across the street as they did from the other side of the classroom. Nobody would spit at me in the street. I could have been normal, which is all I’d ever wanted. I wanted to give in to the taunts. I wanted to let them win, because it was easier.

A big part of the heterosexual fantasy I played out in my mind, as I waited for the moment that my sexuality righted itself, was marriage. I was never and am not now religious, and will not be seeking to be recognised in marriage by any religion, but I have always wanted to one day be married. To me, marriage was and is not about declaring love in the face of that big lie in the sky. Marriage is about two people declaring their love to each other, and in the faces of all of those whose opinions and blessings matter most to them. It is a statement that one person is going to spend the rest of his or her life with the other, and by telling everyone they care about that this is the case, they are proving to that person that they really mean it; look, I’m telling everyone. I love you. It’s hard to take it back if everybody knows, so you have to work for it when things aren’t so rosy. You don’t really want anybody to have to one day read that Such and Such has gone from being ‘in a relationship’ to ‘single/divorced/lonely/a failure/Bridget Jones with no Mr Darcy’, so you put the work in. At least that’s what it’s supposed to be about, I think.

Until today it was supposed to be about a man and a woman. Until recent decades it was supposed to be about a white man and a white woman or a black man and a black woman, and until Henry grew tired of Catherine (whose marriage to Henry was actually annulled, and no divorce took place, but go with me here), it was supposed to be forever. Marriage, like most things, changes. I believe that change is positive. Change is synonymous with progress. I have little respect for the upholding of ‘tradition’ for tradition’s sake, which in essence is merely stubborn unwillingness to let go of one’s dummy because one’s dummy is all one has ever known, and therefore must be all that is right and holy. It is short-sighted, stagnant, and upheld by the fear of change. But nobody is perfect. We all have to adjust. Technological advance would likely occur a lot more quickly if only we weren’t so frightened of it. Social change is just the same.

I feel as if I’ve taken you all on a merry dance. What I wanted to say is simple. It is that now, following a monumental decision made earlier today, and providing I am not sad and alone forever more, I might be able to be me and married after all. I don’t have to put up with having one thing and not the other. I can have it all, just like everyone else can. I can be equal, without being the same. It’s a big hurrah for me and people like me, and a satisfying fuck you to all the ignorant bastards who ever gave me and anybody like me any sort of hassle for nothing more than being ourselves, and proud of it. They are the frightened ones, quivering in their caves with their dummies sucked tightly between their lips, ancient life manuals clutched to their chests, and eyes tightly shut, and the the rest of us are marching forward with the torch of progress and enlightenment ahead of us, eyes open, in pursuit of the next hurdle over which we shall drag our terrified cousins, as they kick and scream, and scramble for their mothers’ familiar wombs. Silly sods.

We have jumped a hurdle in a race with no foreseeable finish line, and on we go…

Everything will be all right.

I’m a bit prone to anxiety. Sometimes, when I’m at home, the kettle’s boiling, and the mugs are set out for Mum and me, my chest suddenly feels an almost indescribable bonding of both cavernous hollowness and virginal anal tightness, and no matter how long I stand still, hold my hand to my chest, and take deep breaths, the feeling doesn’t go away. Hours later, Mum will ask whether I’m feeling better, and most of the time I won’t be.

I started a new job today. A graduate job, too. Instead of muttering half-under-breath oh, I just work at a call centre – it’s temporary whilst rolling my eyes at my own sad existence, I can now proclaim I’m a copywriter – for a green energy company, no less, with what feels like it might just verge upon pride.

When I got up this morning, I couldn’t have smiled if I’d tried. My heart was beating as if it were racing against the hare, whilst my feet moved as if wishing to keep the tortoise company in his travels. On the day I was offered the job I wasn’t excited. I wasn’t nervous, and I didn’t look forward. I dreaded it. I just didn’t believe it could be. How could I hold down a real job? I’ve never had any real responsibility and been paid for it in my life. Working at a call centre I had constant supervision and worked seventeen hours a week. Now I’m going to be working full-time from home almost every day for the next ten weeks (until the company relocates to accommodate for its growing staff) and everything I am responsible for is completely down to me, with no helpful, friendly face around to reassure me if something isn’t as blindingly clear as I would like it to be. Aren’t you excited? Mum kept asking as I busied myself with making breakfast. I didn’t even answer. I mumbled a humph sort of sound, stared listlessly at the fruit bowl, then the cereal cupboard, then the eggs, the toaster, and the fridge, because breakfast I could deal with. I’ve made breakfast countless times, but I’ve never written an article on something I know nothing about and then had to submit it to someone who is paying me to write it, for it to be scrutinised, picked apart, and thrown back at me covered with red ink. By the time I’d gone to bed last night I’d decided it wasn’t unlikely that I’d be fired from my new job within the week and that the call centre would be receiving a call from me, begging them to take me back (again).

I was driven to work by my best friend who was also beginning her new job at the same company today. We were offered twin jobs, which is just typical of us. Glued at the hip anyway, we’ve got the same job too. I didn’t speak much on the journey, stared out of the window at the passing trees, and wondered how long it would all last. She was excited, and I was depressed. The call centre would reluctantly take me back, and I would hate everything, and probably try to become a dancer at a strip club in Blackpool before rotting in a plastic bag at the bottom of the Irish sea. It didn’t help matters that I’d forgotten to take along my graduation certificate, which we had been asked to take with us. That was the bruised cherry on top of a stale cake, and my fate seemed sealed. I would be kicked out before I’d put my name on the dotted line. I was useless.

But when I got there, and my new colleague, O_____, made us some tea, and began to talk through the areas we’d be writing about, my chest felt better, and it wasn’t so bad after all.  I began to see the new job as a positive thing. I might actually make something of myself. Perhaps I won’t be sleeping in a single bed in my mum’s house until I’m forty. Perhaps I might be good at something. We were taught all about things we’ve never shown an interest in before, we chatted with O_____ and our other new colleagues and, once we’d covered everything we needed to know, I left with a smile on my face.

So, at the opposite end of the day, my heart is beating not just as slowly as the tortoise moves, and my feet are moving not quite as speedily as the hare’s, and I feel okay, possibly even good. I might go so far as to say I’m excited, which is nice.