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?

Airhead

What’s that thing called at the end (or beginning, or middle) of the sentence called? The flashing black line telling me ‘type something! Type something! Type something!’ even though my head feels like a dusty old urn with the ashes tipped out.

I am empty of things.

Inspiration does this. It comes like a whirlwind that blows the leaves all around me for a day or two and then suddenly it dies down and I’m left with complete stillness, and I have to force myself just to write about being unable to write.

And it’s always this odd time of day (or night), usually within a few hours around midnight. (‘It’ being the strike of inspiration.)

I desperately want to create, to make a thing. I spend a lot of time wondering what ‘s stopping me. The rest of my time I spend wondering either what I might like to create if and when inspiration does next strike or making plans for various dream lives that exist within my mind. (A small portion of my time is allotted to real-life worries: bills, employment, ‘the future’.) I think I read somewhere recently that people generally spend a lot of their time doing this. (Or is it a certain type of person? I don’t remember it exactly.) Anyway, we spend our time in these fictional worlds we create that make us happy. I have a few. Some of them revolve around travel and exploration, others around having children and a long-term relationship and a completely stable life at some distant future time, and others are purely materialistic.

I’m writing! I forced myself and it worked. The lesson? Not to give in to lethargy, or apathy, or whatever it is that’s keeping me in bed watching video after video of cute animals and scientific facts and make-up tutorials (yes, really) on Youtube; to push, sweat a little, and admire my creation at the end of it.

Inactivity is a slippery slope.

I have spent a long time not writing anything, except the odd adjustment here and there to my ineffective CV, and really all I want to do is to put down into words the things I am thinking. In other blogs, I have tried and failed to keep up a journalistic style of writing. I don’t want to be a journalist. I don’t want to tell you what I think you will find interesting. I don’t know whether I want to tell you anything at all. I just want to say things. I like talking to myself, but chatting to the dishes as I do the washing up only means pouring my thoughts into the browning water without the ability of ever fishing them out again. I feel as though I need to do something. Create something. Make a stamp with my head. Give myself a release. Spunk, so to speak, before I drive myself down into a tight, dark hole of frustrating expressionlessness.