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.

Time to tie my laces

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

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

I don’t know.

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

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

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

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.

The Tea

It may be the case that weeks go by without The Tea showing up in my mug. Day after day I will enjoy a tea, but it will not be The Tea.

The Tea is that tea that when first enveloping my tired tongue invokes memories of cosy afternoons spent reading a book in front of the fire, watching the kittens snooze on the backs of the sofas, and listening to Mum pottering about the kitchen. The Tea is that tea that when swallowed can be reacted to in one way only: that is, by closing my eyes, grinning like The Cheshire Cat, and saying to myself: ‘mhmmm’. The Tea is a remedy. The Tea saved my life today.

Having discovered I had lost my Oyster card, I spent three hours on one bus this afternoon in the unexpectedly lengthy process of getting it back. It was by the end a matter of pride that I should not give in and come home empty-handed and pay the five entire hard-earned pounds required for a new card. Three hours of shaking about the bus as my frozen berries and spinach deteriorated into bags of mush. Three hours of researching Furbies (I would like one for Christmas) on my iPhone, and finding that after the fifth review there is really little more to learn about them. Three hours of wanting to cry because all I wanted was some tea and a sit down in a chair that doesn’t rattle along the roads at thirty miles per hour.

At last, I was home, and The Tea made everything better. How lucky I was to have come across The Tea today. I dare say that had I not come across it this evening after my three-hour transport binge on the H28 from Osterley Tesco to Bull’s Bridge Tesco and back again, I might well by now have been voluntarily lying in several bloody pieces across the stretch of the Piccadily line running beside my house.

Praise be to The Tea.