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.

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.

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.