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.

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.

On becoming and being a Longhair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A post for a post’s sake

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.