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?

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.

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.