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…

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.

The onset of odious opinions.

Aside: I’ve been putting off posting anything. The last entry I made to this blog got a few really nice reviews from a few people whose opinions really matter to me and although I felt encouraged to begin with, I have inevitably ended up in battle with that great nemesis, Self-Doubt. I have told myself that what I wrote must have been a one-off. I must have fluked it. To begin with I thought ‘fuck, yes, Ben – you are good‘ and I had to hold myself back from quickly bashing out another entry to add to that which had received so much praise. Although I’m glad that I didn’t do that, I have now reached a point at which I feel I have to post something because if I don’t then I’ll lose my way and stop posting altogether, and people will stop paying attention. (Didn’t I, in my first or second post, declare that I was writing this mainly, if not solely, for myself? I am a liar. Who writes anything with the intention of nobody ever reading it? If someone writes a journal [which I have tried and failed at a couple of times] that they claim to wish nobody else to read, then I am almost certain that they are lying too, and at the very least dream of its posthumous reading by some unknown stranger of the future who will find it beneath the loose floorboard it was left beneath.) 

What I really wanted to write about leads on almost perfectly from what I wrote about in my last post. Worried about the possibly illiberal opinions my brother might develop in the next few years as he enters that minefield that is The Teens, I didn’t consciously suspect my eight-year-old sister of being the one more likely to take the path towards black-and-white conservatism. The girl is only eight years old. I can’t hold her responsible for everything that comes out of her mouth. She is regurgitating constantly. Half of the things she and her peers talk about they most probably don’t understand. But, sitting with her and my mother, I browsing Twitter, with Come Dine With Me on in the background last night, I heard her say “he’s gay – that’s disgusting”.  For a moment I almost let myself allow the moment to pass with nothing more than my own raised eyebrows and a moment’s eye-contact with my mother to mark it, but, realising that I was calmly controlling a deep stirring of anger inside myself, I felt obliged to say something.

Me: ‘Why is that disgusting?’

Her: ‘He’s gay. He kissed that man.’

Me: ‘Why do say think that’s disgusting?’

Her: ‘Because they’re gay.’

It went something like that. Not much was said, and my mum left the room on a household errand. Abbie remained and thought no more of my chirping up at her comment, and continued to play at whatever game she was creating for herself on the footstool. Again, although I told myself to breathe and let the matter lie, I felt I had to speak up. I asked her again why she had said what she’d said and she told me that being gay ‘isn’t normal’. I told her that’s fine, but that to be ‘not normal’ isn’t bad; that to be different from most other people doesn’t necessarily make someone a bad person. There is a great difference between ‘different’ and ‘bad’. I asked her where she had got this idea that for someone to be gay is inherently bad, and she named her peers at school. I asked her what she would think if someone she knows turned out to be gay, and she told me that had she known this person was gay from the outset then she would not have become friends with them at all. My brother entered the room and joined the conversation midway through, and offered the opinion that ‘gay people are just the same as everyone else: they just love different people’. I was relieved, and delighted, (see my last post – you’ll understand) because even if this is a regurgitated opinion too, then at least the opinions he has been fed are those which I believe should be offered to all children in this day and age. Where my sister and her friends have heard what they have heard I am at a loss to imagine. What parent, teacher, or any other adult exposes a child to as strong and damaging an opinion as that?

This is where my issue lies. The children are unaccountable, and will lap up whatever it is that they are handed. At some point they might rebel against those beliefs, but I believe that usually a child will follow its childhood influencers’ values to a fair degree. So what are these siblings of mine hearing that allows them – causes them – to think this way? Perhaps it is partly what they are not hearing. The film Weekend by Andrew Haigh includes a speech by Chris New as the character Glen, outlining his ideas about the overpoweringly dominant and exclusive nature of heterosexuality in popular culture and the complete lack of any gay role models in everyday life. On adverts, in books, films, TV, stories, songs, sport, and everything in-between, we see straight people. Homosexuals are today slowly being let out of the gloom into the light of the mainstream, but are still a long way from shedding the shackles of their social subdivision. It is still considered newsworthy for a gay couple to feature on a television advert. What impact does this have on my siblings? The idea that the gays must not be spoken of is blindingly obviously insidious. Like the devil, children learn that what is not to be spoken of is bad, and not to be trusted. Don’t let children know about drugs, because they’re bad. Don’t let children hear about the rape stories on the news, because they’re bad. Don’t let children watch horror films because they’re bad. Don’t let children develop awareness of homosexuality, because it’s bad.

Is this a valid argument? I believe so. I believe that if my siblings had grown up understanding that their big brother likes other men (they are yet to find out) the way that Daddy likes women and Mummy likes men, then there would be no question in their minds that there is nothing wrong – nothing even to comment upon – about homosexuality – that homosexuality just is. I believe that the sooner we bring up our children to think this way about homosexuality amongst the various other divergences from the norms of human nature that have for so long been lauded as the good against the otherwise bad, the better for our own social development. I won’t be letting the subject lie, and I have hope for my siblings yet.

The next step? The big reveal.

I don’t bite my nails.

I have a bad habit, and like other bad habits I don’t notice mine until it’s plainly pointed out to me by an irritated other. My bad habit isn’t bodily, nor is it mannerly, nor is it directly detrimental to my health or that of those around me. My bad habit is silent and nameless, and I drag it behind me like an invisible train, tripping people up as I go. My bad habit is obscure. My bad habit is social.

People have never been easy for me to deal with. I’ve always been too worried that somebody would think I’m ‘weird’ or ‘different’ to feel completely comfortable in their company. I think this developed in me as a result of desperately trying and pretending to be straight throughout almost my entire secondary school life, and being constantly conscious of what other people were thinking about me. Throughout primary education I saw myself as just ‘a boy who is friends with girls instead of boys’, and I didn’t really have any understanding of what that might mean. Then secondary school happened, and suddenly I was hit with the quintessentially ignorant quips of the teenage playground: ‘you run like a girl’, ‘you throw like a girl’, ‘you’re gay’. (I’m losing my way. This is going to become my ‘coming out’ story before long and you’ll never learn of my ‘bad habit’. Bear with me.) All of this made me incredibly self-aware. I consciously tried to change the way I spoke, walked, sat, laughed, and put my hand up in class, and I was dumbfounded when despite all my best efforts my schoolmates still somehow saw (and had no qualms about pointing out) what I was desperately trying to hide. Needless to say, I eventually conceded. All the girlfriends, all the times I’d tried to enjoy straight porn but found I’d kept my eyes fixed firmly on the phallus, all the engineered shoulder-swinging struts were to no avail. I was, and  am, alas, a ponce.

I’ve come pretty far from the point of what I wanted to say, but what I was hoping to indicate through that last paragraph is that I believe being a fairly sensitive person already, and on top of that being brought up to be one thing when somewhere inside I knew things weren’t quite right, has left me a little too self-conscious; a little too wrapped up in myself; and a little too distant from everyone else.

I recently spoke to a friend from school who pointed out to me that she had no idea I’d recently moved away from home to London. ‘Shit’, I thought. I hadn’t told her, let alone said goodbye. I just went, focussed on myself and what I wanted for my life at that moment. It wasn’t just this one friend I’d not told, either, and this was not an isolated incident. I have before now unconsciously cut ties with numerous people for no apparent reason. I’ve known about people having a tough time and not even written them a message wishing them well. I’ve built bridges and let them crumble again even though it all seemed to be going well between me and the person at the other side, and I honestly don’t know why. I falter at the moments when steadiness is key, as if I’m frightened by things becoming all too serious, and I slip away silently to be on my own again.

I can’t pretend to have any idea about this sort of thing. I have no understanding of the workings of the mind. I don’t even know what I’ve just written. It hasn’t come out as I wanted it to.

This isn’t what I expected, but the basics are here. I have a bad habit, and isn’t admission the first step to recovery?

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.

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.