Building a Mind

Today I am suffering day number two of a god-awful hangover, and in between sips of orange juice and slices of pizza I have wondered what happened to the pledge I made to myself two blog posts ago to seriously cut down my alcohol intake. I don’t drink often, but as is typical of the British I have a tendency to drink to excess whenever I do do it. Not experiencing this dryness of the mouth and aching of the head is the reason I wanted to stop drinking in the first place, but it’s all gone a bit wrong. This has gone a bit wrong too, I think. My writing on this blog. What it is is that I feel as though I’ve begun to preach. I didn’t start posting these thoughts with the intention of shoving my views down people’s throats, but I believe I have started to do just that. I feel anger and discomfort in my own writing, and I don’t like it.

My ‘views’. I don’t feel comfortable with that term in itself. ‘View’ implies ‘opinion’ and I find the concept of opinions difficult to come to terms with. What is an opinion but a learned connection between an action or a certain belief system or a piece of music and the idea that it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’?  Opinions are really just associations our brains make between a thing and a feeling. As I understand it, (and please, anyone who knows better, do correct me if I’m wrong) our brains are not like pools of water within which the ability to think is fluid and capable of taking any course we feel like. An individual thought – an idea connecting two other separate ideas – takes a strict course. It is the interaction between those two separate ideas already existing in the brain via the synapses that, I believe, are created each time we think a new thought. So it isn’t random or fluid, and it’s sort of stuck. Opinions, it seems to me, once set must be added to in order to expand one’s knowledge, or understanding, or to develop one’s empathy. So is it possible to ever truly change an opinion if that original thought – the bridging of one idea to another via a physical structure in the brain – always exists at the root of the issue? It’s like building a Lego house around a broken Lego brick which won’t come unstuck from the big green base. I don’t know. I am not remotely scientific. I have never studied the brain beyond the basics of GCSE biology.  All I can say is that I am interested in people’s opinions because they can be so solid, yet somebody else’s opinion on the same subject can be completely opposite to it. This suggests to me there is little fluidity in the creation of opinions. We set ideas in minds like we show people where to drive their cars by laying roads. Point A leads to Point B, from which the road leads directly to Point C. What a child learns, therefore, will be the basis for whatever information it collects from then on.

I have mentioned before my young siblings’ strong opinions on certain issues of particular interest to me, and how they worry me. Recently I have been worrying less about the fact that they have them, and more about the fact that they have been put there by somebody, or something. Something has taken a young head and structured it in such a way as dictates that its owner is made to believe that X is bad and Y is good, and without fluidity of thought there is no way of getting rid of that association. The car must follow the road. I can try to build upon this broken brick in such a way as reduces the influence of that small initial thought by drowning it out with ideas which contradict it, but it will always be there. It is a seed planted deep in the soil of the most fertile mind.

Each of us is a product of our influences, be they natural or nurtured, and it terrifies me that we have this capability to influence. We are all of us – no matter how much we try to fight it and to think for ourselves – we are all given a road to travel by those we are made to or choose to spend time with, or by what we read, or are made to read, or see, or are made to see. None of us is free. We are all wired like robots to behave in certain ways, filled with combinations of ones and zeros and corresponding actions and beliefs. So, I have been wondering, why do we not feel a greater duty of care over young minds? I am not a parent, although one day I hope to be, so perhaps I am completely unqualified to comment. Perhaps it is just too hard to manipulate a child’s mind in only the best ways possible. But is there no way of setting the best foundations for the construction of a mind? Surely that is our greatest responsibility in the advancement of the human race. But who am I to decide what the best way is? By my own admission I cannot think any more fluidly than the rest of humanity, so how can I ever be sure that the ideas I intend to plant in my children’s minds are not the poisonous foundations of hatred, apathy, and selfishness?

What I can do is to focus on the building blocks I choose to add to the structure that is my own mind. What foundations are laid will be in my head for the rest of my life, until perhaps my mind begins to dismantle itself, and even now I will continue to be laid roads for by outside influences which I do not choose, but cannot help, to acknowledge. I have been steadily teaching myself mostly over the last three or four years simply to question. If there is anything which can help us build positively it is questioning. Once the idea of questioning everything is established – once that seed is sown –  the ability to reassess and to stop and wonder becomes not only an ability but a compulsion. Since making the conscious effort a few years ago not to take things at face value, and to properly determine the worth, the validity, and the goodness of things on their own merits, I have enjoyed riding with the changes I can feel in my own head. There is nothing more satisfying, and nothing more important for us as human beings than influencing a mind, even if to begin with that mind is only your own.

A new me, or something like that

When I had to give up on living in London having spent two months and all of my money there I considered my coming back to my home town to be a pretty big step in the wrong direction. I went to London for a job I didn’t want and which didn’t pay enough because, having graduated and enjoyed a great summer, all I could think to do with myself was to escape this town and just to be  in a big, new, exciting place.

The reality of returning home hasn’t been anywhere near as bad as I expected and in fact I think coming back is exactly what I needed. Going to London was great fun and a lot happened within the short space of time I spent there, but I barely had a moment to myself and career-wise I was going nowhere. I worked as a fundraiser and didn’t like, nor was particularly good at my job. Also, I couldn’t find the jobs I really wanted, and I didn’t have the relevant experience behind me that would make an application to those jobs successful even if I did find them. On top of that, my living conditions were far from ideal and at times I felt unimaginably lonely in a city of so many millions of anonymous faces. I was stuck, but found it difficult even to try to remove myself from my situation for a number of reasons including not wanting to prove everybody back home right in betting that I wouldn’t make it in London and would be home by Christmas. (As it turned out, I was back over a month before Christmas came around, well in time to spend yet another birthday back at Mum’s house.)

Since I’ve been back I’ve got a full-time job as a copywriter, I’ve moved into my own flat, and most importantly I’ve been given the time, the security, and the structure to allow me to really consider what I’m doing. I’ve got a real routine for the first time since I was at school, and as much as working nine ’til five insatiably devours the minutes, hours, and days of my life, it has given me the ability to plan like I never have before. I write all day five days a week, and in the time since I began my new job I’ve written half a novel’s worth of words on subjects I had little to absolutely no understanding of prior to writing about them. For one thing, this has shown me that perhaps writing is a serious possibility for me. I’ve always wanted to write for my living, but until now I doubted it was possible for me. Now I have ideas that are not just flitting back and forth around my head, but which seem somehow possible to harness and to translate into real pieces of work.

What I really mean to say is that I feel in control. I am ‘in a good place’, an American might say. Looking after myself all by myself, I am eating healthily without having to deal with the temptations of Mum’s (very tempting – almost irresistible) baking, and I’m working out harder than I ever have before, and with a proper weight lifting schedule to follow too. I’m also expressing myself creatively, making things with my hands, sketching, writing, and painting. It’s like I’m a real, rounded person all of a sudden.

I have a series of good intentions for the next year, or however long I end up staying here. Getting really properly physically fit is one of them and I am working on that already. Another is creative expression and I’m dealing with that too. A couple of other things I want to achieve, but haven’t yet stated on the Internet: giving up alcohol altogether, and writing for a magazine. I want to achieve both of these things this year and now I’ve said it here it’s going to be hard not to try my very hardest. Now I’ve made a promise not only to myself but to you too. I will be letting down both myself and anyone reading this if I fail.Oh, and my best friend and I are starting yoga next week. New us or something like that. Really I would just like to be able to sit in the seated angle pose without worrying that my legs are about to snap.

I sat down tonight not knowing what I wanted to say. I haven’t posted anything here for over a month, and this feels good.

The End.

P.S. I’ve developed a habit in perhaps the last nine months or so of distractedly playing with my nipples in public. Make of that what you will.

To be a Writer

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. At school we would, now and again, have to fill in an on-line form in conjunction with another careers advice initiative (which would invariably tell me, following in-depth character analysis, to pursue tree surgery or something of that ilk), and at some point towards the end were given the opportunity to type into a small white box, which most likely nobody paid much attention to, what it was we would like to do with our lives, and how we would like to be defined once we became our adult selves. I always said that I would like to write a book, and to ‘be a writer’, whatever that might have meant. I still don’t really know.

For the most part, I have held on to that dream. I still want to write for a living, and to leave my mark on the world through what I’ve written. But something niggles at me, and as hard as I try (which, admittedly, most of the time might not be very hard) to shake off or ignore this doubt tapping at my shoulder, I always turn my head to find it is still there, telling me ‘you’re not good enough for this’, and leaving me trawling the internet at midnight trying to find myself another path in life in admin, or pottery, or ski-instructing. At other times my ego can be so inflated that I will completely convince myself that the Nobel Prize for Literature is mine and I just haven’t been handed it yet; that it is only a matter of time, and that my brilliant mind will change the literary landscape for ever. These periods don’t last very long, and most of the time give way to crippling doubt, before evening off once again and leaving me neither here nor there, yet more in doubt than out of it.This feeling didn’t always exist, and what brought it about (I believe) is studying literature for my degree. Reading the work of so many revered authors and finding meaning and intention within their craft, I began to question myself and my ability to write anything that actually means anything. I’m still confident that I can write something pretty that moves easily from word to word and phrase to phrase, almost poetically at times, but what is the worth of beautiful writing if the words prancing prettily on the page tell a story no deeper than the paper they are written on?

I feel as if I must make a decision. A recent conversation with my dad changed slightly the way I think, or at least the way I think I should think. He told me that ‘life isn’t what you want it to be, so enjoy what it is’. He referenced the well-known ‘Choose Life’ Trainspotting speech. It is something I had tried to ignore until that moment. Nobody had said it to me, and so it wasn’t completely true. Don’t we all see ourselves as outside? ‘That won’t be me,’ I have always told myself, ‘sitting in an office all day every day until the end of time’. But won’t it? Who am I that I can so confidently say everything will come easily? The decision I mentioned is whether or not I can try to write meaningful literature and, if ultimately finding and accepting that I am unable to write both deeply and beautifully at once, be happy writing without much meaning behind my work, telling a story in well-crafted phrases, and to be happy making a living with that. This is all, of course, assuming that I am any good at writing at all. People tell me that I am good, but it is a flaw of my character that I treat all praise with great caution. Any compliment, whether related to writing, drawing, cooking, or looks is, to me, to be held at arm’s length and shaken about a bit. ‘Is this solid?’ I ask myself. ‘Will it bear inspection, or crumble at my touch?’ ‘Is there truth in this?’ If only I could accept these compliments, whether vacuous or not, and use them to fuel productivity, I might for once get something done and actually come to a decision as to what I am capable of creating.

I could be using this afternoon to hone my fiction-writing skill, but it’s been a long time since I last posted anything on my blog and I was beginning to feel that I was giving up. I’ve been nagging myself for days to just sit down and get something out. If you’ve read this far then please accept this apology for taking so long to write again both as an apology in itself, and as a thank you for reading this right the way through.

P.S. I have my first pair of glasses now, and wearing them to write this has made me feel like a very serious writer. I keep looking at myself in the mirror to remind myself that I look like a proper adult who is most definitely capable of writing an entire book of at least some worth, even if only monetary.

Time to tie my laces

I’m in Wales and it’s raining. I’m in the kitchen of my mum’s house, and once again this house is my house. I moved to London two months ago and now I’m back here because I made a mistake in leaving in the first place. I’m holding up my hands and admitting that, yes, I fucked up. I should have listened, and yes, Dad, you told me I would be back here by Christmas, tail between legs, plans in pieces, and yes, Dad, you were right. I didn’t even make it to my birthday.

I’m planning to begin writing this week. I’m going to make myself write and stick to a project. I’ve let countless ideas fall through my head to rot in the landfill of my mind. If I can just grab one and hold on then maybe I can…

I don’t know.

I feel like I’m in a vacuum. It’s like I’m not an actual thing. I’m looking around, and everyone is doing something and they seem to know what they’re doing, but I can’t seem to do anything. I want to sit in a room for six months and create something, and shout out ‘I MADE THIS’, but that’s not possible. I have debts to pay off. I have to go and get a job I don’t want to earn money that I am made to want, to give that money away to fill up this intangible thing that is my bank account, which my bank tells me is empty (less than empty), so that I can continue to do work I don’t want to do to get more money to exchange for more stuff I don’t want to give it away for so that one day, maybe, I’ll have enough money to stop doing this work in order to concentrate on what I really want to do and so that one day, a little later on, I can try to enjoy myself when my body and mind are finally so exhausted that they’re too useless and broken for doing what they’ve been made to do all my life.

I’m terrified. This is all happening very quickly and I have to keep up with Life, which is very fit and fast from all the running it’s been doing from all the billions of people who have lived before me, but I think I must have forgotten to tie my laces and I’m going to trip up and hurt myself if I don’t just take a moment to bend down and pay some attention to these things flapping around my feet.

Just hold on a minute. I’m not ready yet.

Airhead

What’s that thing called at the end (or beginning, or middle) of the sentence called? The flashing black line telling me ‘type something! Type something! Type something!’ even though my head feels like a dusty old urn with the ashes tipped out.

I am empty of things.

Inspiration does this. It comes like a whirlwind that blows the leaves all around me for a day or two and then suddenly it dies down and I’m left with complete stillness, and I have to force myself just to write about being unable to write.

And it’s always this odd time of day (or night), usually within a few hours around midnight. (‘It’ being the strike of inspiration.)

I desperately want to create, to make a thing. I spend a lot of time wondering what ‘s stopping me. The rest of my time I spend wondering either what I might like to create if and when inspiration does next strike or making plans for various dream lives that exist within my mind. (A small portion of my time is allotted to real-life worries: bills, employment, ‘the future’.) I think I read somewhere recently that people generally spend a lot of their time doing this. (Or is it a certain type of person? I don’t remember it exactly.) Anyway, we spend our time in these fictional worlds we create that make us happy. I have a few. Some of them revolve around travel and exploration, others around having children and a long-term relationship and a completely stable life at some distant future time, and others are purely materialistic.

I’m writing! I forced myself and it worked. The lesson? Not to give in to lethargy, or apathy, or whatever it is that’s keeping me in bed watching video after video of cute animals and scientific facts and make-up tutorials (yes, really) on Youtube; to push, sweat a little, and admire my creation at the end of it.

Inactivity is a slippery slope.

I have spent a long time not writing anything, except the odd adjustment here and there to my ineffective CV, and really all I want to do is to put down into words the things I am thinking. In other blogs, I have tried and failed to keep up a journalistic style of writing. I don’t want to be a journalist. I don’t want to tell you what I think you will find interesting. I don’t know whether I want to tell you anything at all. I just want to say things. I like talking to myself, but chatting to the dishes as I do the washing up only means pouring my thoughts into the browning water without the ability of ever fishing them out again. I feel as though I need to do something. Create something. Make a stamp with my head. Give myself a release. Spunk, so to speak, before I drive myself down into a tight, dark hole of frustrating expressionlessness.