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.

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.

Body versus Mind

We are all essentially physical beings. We’re clusters of cells and one day our bodies – the things that we are – will give up the fight against whatever happens to attack us, be it cancer, or heart disease, or a speeding car, and I believe that will be the end of us.

It is possible to prolong, even if only slightly, the time for which we experience being simply by taking care of ourselves. I was nearing legal adulthood by the time I began caring at all how well my body worked. I spent my childhood and teenage years wrapped pretty cosily inside my head and the thought of taking care of myself – my skin, bone, and muscle – laid dormant somewhere in the back of my mind behind the straightened hair and eye shadow that represented my yearning for physical wellness. Hair products and make up were more familiar to me then than dumbbells and running shoes, and so I took care of myself as best I knew how to in front of a mirror. At the same time I read books, falling into a bit of a love affair with Jane Austen at sixteen and seventeen, both because I enjoyed it and saw it as mentally enriching. I wanted to take care of myself physically as well as mentally even though I didn’t know how to do both.

I underwent something of a revolution between the ages of seventeen and eighteen, when I slowly developed the courage to venture into a gym – I had never been, and still am not a fan of sport – to begin figuring out how to look after myself. I began by assimilating in the only way I knew how, by sticking strictly to the treadmills where the women tended to congregate. The grunts and groans of the weights section were as frightening as the centre of the rugby pitch had been during P.E. lessons and I nervously crept around its edges for a few months before bravely venturing to try out the weight machines, which I had noticed some of the women using to hone their abs.

Since then I’ve become pretty competent at working out and eating pretty well, and I enjoy feeling healthy and fit and – something it took a while to realise I even wanted to feel – masculine. I’d always tutted at the notion of ‘masculinity’ and the image of the hefty, heaving Neanderthal I associated with it, and lifting weights perfectly complimented that image. I considered myself to be an academic and, like so many people still do, I believed that people are destined to exist as either academics or a body-obsessed ignoramuses, and that never the interests of the twain should meet. It was books or sport; essays or reps; fine wine or protein shakes. But why? Since I’ve begun taking care of myself I have faced criticism from various people – all invariably the type to consign themselves strictly to the academic division of humanity – who for one reason or another see something demeaning in my strive for physical fitness. ‘Oh, why’ – they ask, exasperatedly – ‘are you doing that?’ Well, why not? Does it say something about me that I don’t want said? Does it say ‘this person does not think’? If so, so be it. The attitudes of academics to physical exercise that I have encountered are attitudes based in ignorance. I’m inclined to believe that envy plays a part in the criticism I have received. To exercise requires determination and strong will. Just as writing an essay takes the discipline of sitting and focussing on any topic for extended periods of time, lifting dumbbells takes the discipline of ignoring the urge to relent – to do what is easier and go home to an early dinner – in order to achieve a goal.

However, even I am guilty of viewing physical gains as a result of gym workouts as something to be ashamed of for some reason. Whilst writing this, I took a break, and during this break I received a compliment on the evident progress I’ve made with my body in recent months. Even though I am proud of what I’m achieving, and intend to continue to achieve indefinitely, I couldn’t take the compliment standing tall. I shrunk away and mumbled an ‘oh, yeah, thanks’ half to myself. I’m pretty certain I blushed. I could feel the judging eyes of my academic peers burning into me as I sat there like a limp leaf, shy and not sure how to react.

Still, I am proud. I’ve come across examples in the past of intelligent people writing about the satisfaction they feel in not bowing to the pressure of the media to be slim, toned, bronze, and rippling with muscle. That’s fine. I really, truthfully, do not care what anybody else does with their body. But I consider not exercising the body in cases where it is possible to do so as equal to not exercising the mind when it is possible to do so. I could sit at home and wrap myself up in the goings on of the lives of celebrities whose every move is documented by countless identical magazines. I would learn nothing and probably not develop in any meaningful or beneficial way. What I choose to do is to read novels, informative articles, and opinions which I think will somehow enrich my mind and life in general. Similarly, I could sit at home not exercising, eating whatever I liked whilst finding out when Kim Kardashian had her last colonic. Instead, I organise myself so that I know when and for how long I will exercise and what I want to achieve with each visit to the gym. I work hard, resist temptation, and see the results. And it makes me happy.

I like to read and I like to write, and I like to run and I like to lift weights. I’m pretty content, and I’m making my choices for me. Whether or not I am influenced by the media I couldn’t say for sure. Besides, is someone who lives differently from the way I do any less influenced by what they see and are made to see? Live and let live, unless it’s life or death. I think that’s a pretty good attitude.

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.

An alternative thread: On being alive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will, I hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything will be all right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.