Fourth

It’s always as the leaves start to burn amber that the need to write sets in, and that the inability to do so cripples my mind as the season cripples my fingers white with cold. And as rub, nor blow, nor glove can warm my hands, nor does anything but force enable me to translate the nameless senses in my head into language understandable by anyone but – and anyone including – myself.

It is autumn, with its wetness, its earthy hues, its wool, and early morning shivering beneath the sheets, that ignites within me the belly-borne rumbling of the engine which exhales from the exhaust of my literary existence – my keyboard, my pen – the neat, black fumes onto the page.

Welcome the day with porridge thick and coffee black. Hours indoors with a contented cat on my cord-clad lap. Rain drives hard at the windows as wool hugs warmly my back. I sneak in a little writing to my working day, whilst others are distracted by routine. The call to write is nagging, and I answer between phone calls, instructions, tea rounds.

Pull a rubber band around my fingers. Roll a ball of tack in my palm. Sip my tea, silent and adrift in thoughts without names until I see in the fog a shape appearing. Here it is – forming itself into language – this creature I recognise but until now haven’t seen in any clear conformation; an idea becomes apparent. The next sentence, or maybe only a word with which to lay the first step across the stream. Struggling, and balancing, one half submerged stone after the last, towards a sense of completeness that I’m sure lies on the opposite bank, and from which I will pick up haste and ramble onwards over the damp fields, through the forest thick with black and up the crumbling mountainside towards the heavy, hanging blankets overhead.

Building a Mind

Today I am suffering day number two of a god-awful hangover, and in between sips of orange juice and slices of pizza I have wondered what happened to the pledge I made to myself two blog posts ago to seriously cut down my alcohol intake. I don’t drink often, but as is typical of the British I have a tendency to drink to excess whenever I do do it. Not experiencing this dryness of the mouth and aching of the head is the reason I wanted to stop drinking in the first place, but it’s all gone a bit wrong. This has gone a bit wrong too, I think. My writing on this blog. What it is is that I feel as though I’ve begun to preach. I didn’t start posting these thoughts with the intention of shoving my views down people’s throats, but I believe I have started to do just that. I feel anger and discomfort in my own writing, and I don’t like it.

My ‘views’. I don’t feel comfortable with that term in itself. ‘View’ implies ‘opinion’ and I find the concept of opinions difficult to come to terms with. What is an opinion but a learned connection between an action or a certain belief system or a piece of music and the idea that it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’?  Opinions are really just associations our brains make between a thing and a feeling. As I understand it, (and please, anyone who knows better, do correct me if I’m wrong) our brains are not like pools of water within which the ability to think is fluid and capable of taking any course we feel like. An individual thought – an idea connecting two other separate ideas – takes a strict course. It is the interaction between those two separate ideas already existing in the brain via the synapses that, I believe, are created each time we think a new thought. So it isn’t random or fluid, and it’s sort of stuck. Opinions, it seems to me, once set must be added to in order to expand one’s knowledge, or understanding, or to develop one’s empathy. So is it possible to ever truly change an opinion if that original thought – the bridging of one idea to another via a physical structure in the brain – always exists at the root of the issue? It’s like building a Lego house around a broken Lego brick which won’t come unstuck from the big green base. I don’t know. I am not remotely scientific. I have never studied the brain beyond the basics of GCSE biology.  All I can say is that I am interested in people’s opinions because they can be so solid, yet somebody else’s opinion on the same subject can be completely opposite to it. This suggests to me there is little fluidity in the creation of opinions. We set ideas in minds like we show people where to drive their cars by laying roads. Point A leads to Point B, from which the road leads directly to Point C. What a child learns, therefore, will be the basis for whatever information it collects from then on.

I have mentioned before my young siblings’ strong opinions on certain issues of particular interest to me, and how they worry me. Recently I have been worrying less about the fact that they have them, and more about the fact that they have been put there by somebody, or something. Something has taken a young head and structured it in such a way as dictates that its owner is made to believe that X is bad and Y is good, and without fluidity of thought there is no way of getting rid of that association. The car must follow the road. I can try to build upon this broken brick in such a way as reduces the influence of that small initial thought by drowning it out with ideas which contradict it, but it will always be there. It is a seed planted deep in the soil of the most fertile mind.

Each of us is a product of our influences, be they natural or nurtured, and it terrifies me that we have this capability to influence. We are all of us – no matter how much we try to fight it and to think for ourselves – we are all given a road to travel by those we are made to or choose to spend time with, or by what we read, or are made to read, or see, or are made to see. None of us is free. We are all wired like robots to behave in certain ways, filled with combinations of ones and zeros and corresponding actions and beliefs. So, I have been wondering, why do we not feel a greater duty of care over young minds? I am not a parent, although one day I hope to be, so perhaps I am completely unqualified to comment. Perhaps it is just too hard to manipulate a child’s mind in only the best ways possible. But is there no way of setting the best foundations for the construction of a mind? Surely that is our greatest responsibility in the advancement of the human race. But who am I to decide what the best way is? By my own admission I cannot think any more fluidly than the rest of humanity, so how can I ever be sure that the ideas I intend to plant in my children’s minds are not the poisonous foundations of hatred, apathy, and selfishness?

What I can do is to focus on the building blocks I choose to add to the structure that is my own mind. What foundations are laid will be in my head for the rest of my life, until perhaps my mind begins to dismantle itself, and even now I will continue to be laid roads for by outside influences which I do not choose, but cannot help, to acknowledge. I have been steadily teaching myself mostly over the last three or four years simply to question. If there is anything which can help us build positively it is questioning. Once the idea of questioning everything is established – once that seed is sown –  the ability to reassess and to stop and wonder becomes not only an ability but a compulsion. Since making the conscious effort a few years ago not to take things at face value, and to properly determine the worth, the validity, and the goodness of things on their own merits, I have enjoyed riding with the changes I can feel in my own head. There is nothing more satisfying, and nothing more important for us as human beings than influencing a mind, even if to begin with that mind is only your own.

Body versus Mind

We are all essentially physical beings. We’re clusters of cells and one day our bodies – the things that we are – will give up the fight against whatever happens to attack us, be it cancer, or heart disease, or a speeding car, and I believe that will be the end of us.

It is possible to prolong, even if only slightly, the time for which we experience being simply by taking care of ourselves. I was nearing legal adulthood by the time I began caring at all how well my body worked. I spent my childhood and teenage years wrapped pretty cosily inside my head and the thought of taking care of myself – my skin, bone, and muscle – laid dormant somewhere in the back of my mind behind the straightened hair and eye shadow that represented my yearning for physical wellness. Hair products and make up were more familiar to me then than dumbbells and running shoes, and so I took care of myself as best I knew how to in front of a mirror. At the same time I read books, falling into a bit of a love affair with Jane Austen at sixteen and seventeen, both because I enjoyed it and saw it as mentally enriching. I wanted to take care of myself physically as well as mentally even though I didn’t know how to do both.

I underwent something of a revolution between the ages of seventeen and eighteen, when I slowly developed the courage to venture into a gym – I had never been, and still am not a fan of sport – to begin figuring out how to look after myself. I began by assimilating in the only way I knew how, by sticking strictly to the treadmills where the women tended to congregate. The grunts and groans of the weights section were as frightening as the centre of the rugby pitch had been during P.E. lessons and I nervously crept around its edges for a few months before bravely venturing to try out the weight machines, which I had noticed some of the women using to hone their abs.

Since then I’ve become pretty competent at working out and eating pretty well, and I enjoy feeling healthy and fit and – something it took a while to realise I even wanted to feel – masculine. I’d always tutted at the notion of ‘masculinity’ and the image of the hefty, heaving Neanderthal I associated with it, and lifting weights perfectly complimented that image. I considered myself to be an academic and, like so many people still do, I believed that people are destined to exist as either academics or a body-obsessed ignoramuses, and that never the interests of the twain should meet. It was books or sport; essays or reps; fine wine or protein shakes. But why? Since I’ve begun taking care of myself I have faced criticism from various people – all invariably the type to consign themselves strictly to the academic division of humanity – who for one reason or another see something demeaning in my strive for physical fitness. ‘Oh, why’ – they ask, exasperatedly – ‘are you doing that?’ Well, why not? Does it say something about me that I don’t want said? Does it say ‘this person does not think’? If so, so be it. The attitudes of academics to physical exercise that I have encountered are attitudes based in ignorance. I’m inclined to believe that envy plays a part in the criticism I have received. To exercise requires determination and strong will. Just as writing an essay takes the discipline of sitting and focussing on any topic for extended periods of time, lifting dumbbells takes the discipline of ignoring the urge to relent – to do what is easier and go home to an early dinner – in order to achieve a goal.

However, even I am guilty of viewing physical gains as a result of gym workouts as something to be ashamed of for some reason. Whilst writing this, I took a break, and during this break I received a compliment on the evident progress I’ve made with my body in recent months. Even though I am proud of what I’m achieving, and intend to continue to achieve indefinitely, I couldn’t take the compliment standing tall. I shrunk away and mumbled an ‘oh, yeah, thanks’ half to myself. I’m pretty certain I blushed. I could feel the judging eyes of my academic peers burning into me as I sat there like a limp leaf, shy and not sure how to react.

Still, I am proud. I’ve come across examples in the past of intelligent people writing about the satisfaction they feel in not bowing to the pressure of the media to be slim, toned, bronze, and rippling with muscle. That’s fine. I really, truthfully, do not care what anybody else does with their body. But I consider not exercising the body in cases where it is possible to do so as equal to not exercising the mind when it is possible to do so. I could sit at home and wrap myself up in the goings on of the lives of celebrities whose every move is documented by countless identical magazines. I would learn nothing and probably not develop in any meaningful or beneficial way. What I choose to do is to read novels, informative articles, and opinions which I think will somehow enrich my mind and life in general. Similarly, I could sit at home not exercising, eating whatever I liked whilst finding out when Kim Kardashian had her last colonic. Instead, I organise myself so that I know when and for how long I will exercise and what I want to achieve with each visit to the gym. I work hard, resist temptation, and see the results. And it makes me happy.

I like to read and I like to write, and I like to run and I like to lift weights. I’m pretty content, and I’m making my choices for me. Whether or not I am influenced by the media I couldn’t say for sure. Besides, is someone who lives differently from the way I do any less influenced by what they see and are made to see? Live and let live, unless it’s life or death. I think that’s a pretty good attitude.

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.

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.