Growing pains me

Real life has crept up on me and I feel like I am actually beginning adulthood now. I’m in my Twenties Proper. Twenty-one didn’t count, because I was at university, and then I graduated and went on a holiday I couldn’t afford, and to a festival I couldn’t afford, and dossed around a lot even though I couldn’t afford to do that. That moving-to-London-and-running-out-of-money thing happened too.

I visited my friend Hannah one night this week. I could only stay for a few hours because she has an even more proper job now and had to go to bed at a sensible time. It’s one of those jobs where she has to actually go to an office and sit in it, doing a job, from 9-5, Monday to Friday.

I’m still working from home.

You know when they – the people older than you – said that your school days are the best of your life? You didn’t believe that being picked on, made to take your shirt off in P.E. even though you thought your body looked like a potato, and dating girls because you didn’t want to make yourself even more of a target could actually be anything other than the pile of shit it felt like. But they might have been right.

I don’t get to sit in dingy rooms hung with throws with my best friends, smoking weed and watching something weird on TV, and eating my Saturday job wages in junk food until the munchies go away any more. I guess I could do that but then everyone’d be late for work the next day. It’s not like school when we could decide how we feel about going to lessons today every day and most of the time decide that, you know what, we don’t really feel like it so let’s just go and get some chips and a Coke, and smoke a bit ’round our friend’s place, yeah? Yeah.

Things are changing, and they’re changing so quickly that it’s difficult to keep up. Change is good, but change is hard, and it takes some effort.

Some things I have to make the effort to do within the foreseeable future are:

1. Apply for better-paid jobs
2. Finish this TEFL thing I’ve started and not done much about in the last fortnight
3. Think some more about my life and what I might do with it
4. Clean the flat

P.S. It’s been a while. I ran out of things to say, so I didn’t say them.

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.

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.

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.

Work worries

I am sitting here at my desk with the idea of putting something down ‘on paper’, but I’m almost certain that nothing will come. I haven’t written a word outside of text messages, Twitter, and Facebook, and the odd hand-written reminder, in the last two weeks. The reason for this, I believe, is that I have had a job to do. A real job, like ‘they’, the masses, all do day, after day, after day. I have been filling shelves with food for two weeks as well as making calls for the charity for which I have worked for four years, and I have barely had a moment to myself. I have woken up, gone to work, been told what to do, done what I’ve been told, come home, slept, and repeated, and throughout this entire time I have often been aware of a cloudiness of my mind, and an inability to properly focus on anything other than the menial tasks at hand. I have worked alongside people whose lives have been consumed by this ‘busy’ routine, and whose days consist of nothing more than the simplest of thought processes at the workplace and the supposed enjoyment of numbing themselves in front of the television (the television! I have grown to fear the television, but I won’t talk about that today) at home, before repeating the miserable process the next day. This routine is excepting weekends (‘Here you are, have a small portion of your life to enjoy yourself with’ – ‘Oh, thank you, Mr Man’) when people like to do ‘nice’ things like ‘going for dinner’ or ‘watching a film’, never allowing themselves more than five minutes’ peace lest they should actually develop a disconcerting thought about the meaninglessness of our wonderfully material existence.

I can feel the constructed necessity of earning money pulling at my life down one road, but I want to take another path. If this fortnight of non-stop ‘real world’ work has taught me anything, it is that I don’t want to be a part of it. What is a life which is handed to us with terms and conditions?  We’re all in a web, and I look around and everyone else seems to be so happy to be stuck that they don’t even blink for fear of upsetting the balance, but all I want to do is kick and scream and tear at the strings (which, of course, will only cause me to become even more tangled).

When I was fifteen I had it all planned. I was going to be heterosexual, I would get married, and I would have children, and I would be a lawyer, and write books on the side, and I would wear a suit. In one way, I wish I were stupid. Stupid people live so quietly, and happily. (This sounds awfully arrogant, but I believe honest expression is the most appreciated form.) At the same time, I want to embrace my yearning for something more, and make use of it to my benefit, and the benefit of anyone who cares, or is able, to take note. I can’t help feeling that from here onwards everything is going to become only more complicated, only more of a struggle against the rules imposed over our lives, and only more of a disappointment for someone who, at aged fifteen, thought that earning money was his chief aim. That is not to say that I am not tempted by money now, but chasing a vacuous dream has somewhat lost its allure since the daydreaming days of my mid-teens when to be ‘normal’ seemed the height of fantasy. The ideas I’m chasing now are still unclear. I need time to sleep soundly before the images will properly form in front of me. If I can somehow shake off the shackles of work, and earning, and fabricated, meaningless, life-consuming responsibilities, then maybe I will figure things out.

So, I’ve written something. I have been granted a few hours of my life to myself this afternoon, before the slog continues tonight, and I have got a little bit of something off my chest. I feel like every time I write anything I am covering old ground, but if I can still write then I suppose I must still have something to say, even if it isn’t coming out as I’d like it to.

I’ll try to write soon.

On becoming and being a Longhair

The Longhairs might sound like a clan of medieval Scandinavians, but aren’t. A Longhair is neither a species of monkey nor a type of carpet, as far as I’m aware. A Longhair is a man (sometimes a woman, too [see UrbanDictionary]) who (pay attention here, because this is pretty complex) has long hair. Longer hair, anyway, than most men, who subscribe so strictly to a shorn scalp. I came across the term on-line a few months ago when I was trying to find out what – if any – effect having hair longer than the average male’s would have upon my life. I was researching this, because now that I have long hair at last, I am pretty reluctant to let it go. At this point, I would honestly rather feel happy in myself and be looked at askance for it than to chop off my hair and blend in – outwardly, at least – with the crowd. People might (and do) see me and dismiss my ‘look’ as an immature rebellion against some indefinable authority, but I don’t see having my hair long as me making a statement. It’s just me enjoying existing in my most comfortable, natural state.

I clearly remember sitting in my classroom aged ten or eleven and wishing more than anything that I had hair that flopped down over my face at the front and tickled my neck at the back. I remember pulling at my fringe, which didn’t reach my eyebrows, and despairing over how long it would take to grow. Worse than the time it would take to grow was knowing that before long Mum would have me back in that bloody chair and Sue-the-hairdresser would be buzzing around my head with the electric clippers, that favourite line of Mum’s ‘when you’re older, and you’re paying, you can have it as you want it’ ringing in my exposed ears. It was so unfair! My sister was three years younger than I was and she got to have exactly what she wanted. I had to walk around looking like a boring boy – like a boy who played football and was friends with other boys. ‘This isn’t me!’ I was silently crying from beneath my high, straight, carpet-like fringe. When I watched the Disney films I lusted over the smooth wave of the men’s hair as they swung themselves about after the women. Tarzan was really fucking cool. Kind of attractive too, in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on just yet.

By the time power over my own appearance was finally granted me in my early teens, I had been struck by that fear of ‘being different’ that I’m sure plagues each of us who within him-or-her-self feels not quite the same as everyone else. I habitually shaved and sculpted my locks into the towering, gleaming sculpture of wax and fringe that was so popular amongst my male peers. I regret to admit that, furthering my appeal for normalcy, I played a (slightly pathetic) part in the ‘wars’ between ‘townies’ and ‘goths’ that broke out in the playing fields of my secondary school on a regular basis: I on the side of the gold-chained, wet-look, trackie-wearers, lobbing bottles, sticks, and stones at the  long-haired ‘weirdos’ in the corner. For this, I apologise. In my defence, I can only plead duress: that of peer pressure, made only more difficult to avoid by my own particularly crippling fear of exposure as not truly feeling I was one of the crowd.

I think I was fifteen when I finally decided to let my locks grow. My girlfriend (yes, really) of the time was disgusted by the idea. Long hair was for girls, and short hair for boys. She is now a fierce homophobe, or so I’ve heard. For the first time I made a conscious decision to do something I wanted to do even if it did set me apart from the majority. My hair grew, and I loved my floppy mop, swinging in my eyes and hanging over my school shirt collar way beyond the bristles of the other boys’ ‘dos. I would have liked to grow it out longer, but that still seemed like ‘goth’ territory, and not somewhere I wanted to venture unless I fancied a bottle across my own head, courtesy of my ex-war-mates.

I kept my hair relatively long, hanging somewhere between eye and upper lip level, following me through my ’emo’ experimentation, and my brief baggy-clothed ‘hippy’ identification, until I reached seventeen. At this point I followed that long-fringe, short-around-the-edges trend that was popping up in the fashion magazines and on all the trendy ‘indie’ boys of the time, but still enjoyed a good lip-level swish of fringe across my face. By the time I reached university in 2009, something had happened. In fact, something awful had happened, and it was not to end until the early months of 2011. Leaving school, I felt I had to somehow ‘change’ as my life did. I felt I should grow up, and I decided that meant adjusting my image to better suit others’ expectations of how a young gay man in 2009 should look. I began to wear make-up. I bought clothes in sizes I might now dress my big toe with. I once shaved my chest, and felt a bit sick. Worst of all, I cut my hair. I cut it to the scalp, leaving just a minimal flap of fringe, and I had the lot of it dyed a horrifying raven black. (When I was alerted to the colour’s contrast with my pasty face in mid-2010 I began staining my skin orange to counteract my ghostly glow.) Looking back at that time now, I can see what an idiot I was being, but at the same time I still understand how I was feeling. I was growing slightly more comfortable with myself inside than I ever had been in my teens, but how best to match that inner adjustment to my outward appearance remained a mystery. The basic thought process, I believe, went something along the lines of ‘well, I’m gay, so I’ll look gay’. Thus ensued a year and a half of a very strange period of my life. People I met at the time now tell me they thought it was odd even then, and that my personality and my garish appearance clashed more obviously than the raven hair and Caspar face had before the ‘tan’ had taken care of it.

It wasn’t until 2011 that I actually looked at myself in the mirror, probably whilst cooking my fringe with the straighteners, and thought ‘what the fuck is that?’ This, I believe, ended up sparking in me a shift that has transcended many more layers of myself beyond my skin. Over the last almost-two years I believe I have changed more than I ever have before. But that will be for another time. For now, we’re sticking faithfully to hair.

Growth: On June 30th 2011 (I remember the date because on that same day I bought a new railcard at Swansea train station, which I have kept as a memento), I got my last haircut. So, since then, it has uninterruptedly grown. ‘You should trim the ends, you know. It’ll grow faster.’ Bullshit. It’s grown perfectly, and I’ve not a split end in sight. Having abstained from blow-drying, straightening, and dying for this entire time, everything is just fine as it is, thank you. And as it has grown I have felt cosier, happier, and more relaxed in myself with every day passed. I am at peace with my outward self (my nose still isn’t straight, and I would like whiter teeth, and bigger arms, but time, lasers, and continued exercise will rectify these issues), and it is blissful.

The problems I face now are not my own, but those of the people around me. I am told I should cut my hair by various people, and for various reasons. Yesterday I was yelled and sworn at by a group of shaven-headed youths speeding by in a very small car, something about cutting my hair because of something to do with ‘look[ing] like a fucking girl’. I can ignore these Neanderthals easily enough, having grown used to their ignorant type in the town I’ve grown up in. Closer to home, however, the strong suggestions of a trip to the barber’s are not so easily pushed aside. My father tells me I should cut my hair for the good of my career, which I accept as fair advice. I know very well that discrimination over skin-deep elements occurs. But I don’t want to spend my time here pretending to be something other than that which I feel I am. So I feel as if I should say sod it to being employed by anyone who wants me to be their version of me. I want to be my me in all ways and in all the parts of my life until the day that it comes to its end. My sister tells me I should cut it, just because. Her friends, I hear, think I’m ‘not hot anymore’. How tragic. I’ve been told by another I should cut it because I need to ‘grow up’. If cutting my hair off truly constitutes ‘growing up’, then, please, call me Peter and let me be. If being a grown-up means allowing myself to be moulded by the crowd to the extent that I can’t even control what my hair looks like lest it should offend anyone by its differentness, then I’m quite happy playing in the trees and dreaming my days away with my curls around my ankles. Surely the greatest ability of the mature human mind is that which allows it to open itself up to all of those varieties of appearance, thought, and behaviour; to accept that differentness is not inherently bad, or in need of rectification; to do battle with the prejudices indoctrinated in the minds of children and which remain largely taken as gospel, and carried to the grave unquestioned. I don’t want to live my life in battle for assimilation. I am no longer the thirteen-year-old boy who consciously tailored his mannerisms to replicate those of the other boys around him so that they would stop calling him ‘girly’ and ‘gay’ (which I then considered an insult – I was a child homophobe). If the length of the filamentous biomaterial (cheers, Wikipedia) growing from my scalp offends you, then I suggest it is in fact you who has the issue in need of resolving. I won’t be getting a haircut, but please feel free to indulge in a little self-enlightenment. You really should.

You might say that I’m setting myself up for a struggle I needn’t undertake. You might say I should grow up and wholeheartedly conform. Watch The X Factor and stop thinking. Have a Big Mac and shut up. Cruise towards the end with a close-cropped cranium. Well, thanks for the advice, but no thanks. At almost eighteen months and counting, I consider myself Longhair and proud, and as long as my thinking remains much the same on this topic, only baldness might stop me now.

P.S. Mum says my hair is lovely, so there.

A post for a post’s sake

It’s been a while now since I’ve posted. I’m asking myself whether quantity or quality is the more important. Of course the answer is ‘quality’, but I can’t just write nothing. I have to do something. If I give myself too much of a break I’ll begin telling myself that there’s no point carrying on and that people already know I’m unreliable and uninteresting so I needn’t bother trying. I just don’t have any developed ideas right now. I’ve been thinking over a handful of things but I’ve not had the time to consider them properly. If I sit down and just start writing about one then I’m liable to miss out some key points that later I’ll wish I’d got in there to begin with.

I have turned twenty-two since I last posted. I was born on the twenty-ninth of November, nineteen-ninety. It was a cold day (it was November), and my mother was screaming (probably), and my father was crying (probably). North Tyneside General Hospital is the setting. I came out of my mum and I was fine and I went home with my parents and everything’s been pretty much all right all the way until almost the end of twenty-twelve. If I were either of my parents I would be terrified by the fact that it were even possible to have a son in his twenties. They probably are terrified, actually. In fact, I know that my dad is because he told me so, or at least said something to me to that effect. He’ll turn fifty-one tomorrow. My grandfather was fifty when Dad married my mum. Dad was twenty-three. He says he remembers him (that’s my grandfather) as being an old man on the day of his wedding. I don’t see my parents as old. (Mum isn’t yet fifty. She has roughly seven months of her forties left to her.) I see them as in a sort of undefined stretch of life. Both still have young children, so maybe that’s what makes them so hard to define. We’re no longer the nuclear family, and our definitions haven’t quite been set in stone just yet.

My dad says that now I need to sort myself out. I need to cut my hair and change my image, he says. I won’t. Not for now. It’s taken a long time to settle into myself and I don’t want to uproot everything again just as I’ve breathed a sigh of relief at just being me. I don’t want to give up on my dreams (excuse America’s influence) already. There are things I want to do. One of them is not to get stuck in a life that is going to make me miserable. Wouldn’t it be so fucking simple to do things with our lives that we actually enjoy? So few of us manage it. We’re all so skilfully led into the pen that is a career. In we go, and on we plod until we reach the man with the stun gun who knocks us on the head with it so that we’ve no idea what the fuck is going on but we’re still essentially living beings, and then Death is looming and as he’s nearing we’re bleeding out over the floor and after a bit of a shake we’re dead.

I’m sure I’m covering old ground here, but I am so scared. My life is sitting on the road in front of me and I just want to crawl back into the warm den where Mum and Dad and all the other adults were such mysterious beings, doing their adult things like ‘meetings’ and ‘work’ and ‘taxes’ whilst I fiddled around at their ankles with a pencil and some card, oblivious to what lay ahead. They were so rich that they could buy cars and houses and masses of things to keep in them. They’d stay up late and talk about secret things in semi-whispers, and sometimes they’d slip into broken Welsh to disguise the mysterious grown-up conversation topics as I fell asleep to their deep voices amongst the big feet beneath the table.

I’m considering teaching. I have always said I do not want to be a teacher. It’s beginning, isn’t it?

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.

What Direction?

This week I attended an interview at a recruitment firm in central London, but don’t wish me luck.

If you know anything about recruitment, and anything on top of that about me, then you will understand that the gulf between those who call recruitment consultancy their calling and he who is typing this is pretty fucking wide. One might say the gulf is so great that, standing at one side and facing the other, the far ledge is barely distinguishable from the gulf itself, and that I to them, and they to me, appear as barely visible fuzzy black dots, featureless and strange on their respective horizons.

I was interviewed by men, or boys, of my own age. They were wearing suits and were clean-shaven and had a suffocating air of arrogance about them, and I felt like a lamb waiting to be diced up and served for lunch. How did they do it? They have proper jobs. They probably earn more than most people ever will. They knew exactly what they were doing. They’re sorted.

I applied for the job in the first place because I just want a job. I’ve also applied for nannying jobs, bar jobs, admin jobs, publishing jobs, and a trainee barista’s job at Starbucks.  There is nothing I will not apply for, and I think that in that lies the clue to my major problem: chronic direction-less-ness. I have no idea what to do with my life. I studied English at university and all I see before me as I plough my way through page after page after page of graduate positions available is requirement after requirement after requirement of a specific degree related to that specific job. English is as unspecific as the faces we’re told we see in dreams: not really there, but not really not there. A bit of this, and a bit pale and washy, and not really sure what they are. Why didn’t anybody tell me this when I was seventeen and had to decide the course of the rest of my life? Instead all I heard was ‘you must go to university and that is the only option and if you don’t go to university you will become a poor person and a waste of space and nobody will love you and, frankly, you will be a really fucking shit piece of crap’. I wanted to take a year out to think about what to do, but the pressure was too great and I crippled beneath it. I just chose what I liked at school, and not even what I liked best, which was probably art, because I thought an art degree would be looked upon as useless, and spent three years pretending everything would just go swimmingly.

The thing is that I think I’ve made a really big mess. I know that I have time to turn things around, but even so I don’t know what the fuck to do with that time. I have no direction. I am Katy Perry’s plastic bag, blowing along in the breeze and wondering where in the name of shit I’m going to land, which is probably under a bridge or in a box somewhere damp and piss-stained.