For three weeks I have had nothing to say. But for the new year, the new decade, I wanted to put some thoughts down, about my own existence if nothing else. My existence. What it means to be me. What I think about me. Where me is going.
A new year is always a time for reflection. What plans there might be for the next 12 months. 2019 was a pretty dramatic year for me. My politics has been shattered, just like my family relationships, my mental health, and more physically the operation I had in July, something that has turned around my outlook on life somewhat.
My physical illness and my mental illness have been somewhat entwined, with the one feeding the other. Like a wounded animal, I cut myself away from the world, my family, my career, my ambition as I weathered my decline. But now I am through that, at least physically, and at least for now. Who knows how long my transplant will keep going for. It isn't a perfect fix after all, but it is enough.
So I do have ambition, but in order to realise this I need to address my lingering frustrations. My career has plateaued and I can see the end point no the horizon. Yet in order to extract myself from this path I need to be able to see an alternate route. That is still lost in the fog. This is the same fog that has shrouded my thinking for years, sometimes lifting to provide clarity but then enveloping again and incapacitating my vision.
I want to move on but I need to know where. I look at the stars but they are too small to make out between them. I want to extend my intellect, that is clear. I don't feel clever any more. Perhaps I was never clever, I was just good at faking it. That is certainly the case now. To hide my ignorance I become obscure and distant, so that people cannot identify the real me. I keep myself isolated. I am a loner. I prefer my own company than any tedious drinks party or bourgeois dinner party. I enjoy theatre, Becket in particular, but anything cerebral. Maybe I am pretending to myself of my intellectual superiority, when I am incapable of demonstrating it to others any more. I am insular to the point of seeming weird.
But what is weird? I need to own weird. It is the only interesting thing about me. My backstory is the usual pained youth story, from a broken home, coping with the psychologically damaging stepfather who eventually goes off the rails, my mother only justifying her remaining with him for 25 years by the fact that they produced a son, the wonderful can-do-no-wrong kind, who clearly holds the same gene. That's a gene that has impacted my family since 1983, blood line or not. But is that weird, or just normal family dysfunction?
What it has lead to is my insularity. Like a gradual tightening over the years. Not that I was very outgoing at school, but then that was when family life was at its worst. At university I avoided the Students Union on a Friday night because it was always just drunken and dull, preferring to sneak off to the local gay bars where I was far more likely to find myself. In my year in France I chose an area that was unpopular with the other British students, opting to live with French students. I was probably my most open there, but even then I regressed to isolation on some weekends, preferring the solitary to the busy.
Then my working life began, without ambition I opted for a low paid role in a bookshop in my university town, using the ambition of my then boyfriend to travel to pin myself to him wherever he went, first to Ethiopia where we worked in a Mother Theresa home in Addis Ababa and then by an overland trip to Australia. I've often been known to us my Trans-Siberian train journey story as a foil to show that there is something interesting about me, but its a bit fraudulent when it has always been chance and circumstance that has pushed me onto new experiences.
In Australia I did enjoy a moment of self-awareness when I taught myself to code professionally, yearning to return to the UK where I could throw some energy into my career. Travel was good to me for that reason: it let me identify what I was missing out on: a job and the London property market. I soon made up for that by throwing myself into my career, then saving up for my first property, then saving up for my first pension. Then saving up for a future I had no idea about.
I think its since my recent health concern that this has brought in some light to the question of what future I am living for. I remain isolated: the thread of my dysfunctional family has followed me for over 30 years and I am at the stage where I am considering whether it is of benefit to me anymore. My operation has once again brought me some self awareness. And energy. Energy is good. It fuels motivation and passion. But does it identify which star in the sky to aim for?
So I think I have some ambition but still no focus. One thing I can do is to put this down into words. Like Becket says, we can be pessimistic about the futility of life between birth and death, or we can fill it with words, talking none stop until we finally fill in the void and there is nothing else left to say.
Let's see what words I can fill into 2020. Let's see if I find my direction.
A new year is always a time for reflection. What plans there might be for the next 12 months. 2019 was a pretty dramatic year for me. My politics has been shattered, just like my family relationships, my mental health, and more physically the operation I had in July, something that has turned around my outlook on life somewhat.
My physical illness and my mental illness have been somewhat entwined, with the one feeding the other. Like a wounded animal, I cut myself away from the world, my family, my career, my ambition as I weathered my decline. But now I am through that, at least physically, and at least for now. Who knows how long my transplant will keep going for. It isn't a perfect fix after all, but it is enough.
So I do have ambition, but in order to realise this I need to address my lingering frustrations. My career has plateaued and I can see the end point no the horizon. Yet in order to extract myself from this path I need to be able to see an alternate route. That is still lost in the fog. This is the same fog that has shrouded my thinking for years, sometimes lifting to provide clarity but then enveloping again and incapacitating my vision.
I want to move on but I need to know where. I look at the stars but they are too small to make out between them. I want to extend my intellect, that is clear. I don't feel clever any more. Perhaps I was never clever, I was just good at faking it. That is certainly the case now. To hide my ignorance I become obscure and distant, so that people cannot identify the real me. I keep myself isolated. I am a loner. I prefer my own company than any tedious drinks party or bourgeois dinner party. I enjoy theatre, Becket in particular, but anything cerebral. Maybe I am pretending to myself of my intellectual superiority, when I am incapable of demonstrating it to others any more. I am insular to the point of seeming weird.
But what is weird? I need to own weird. It is the only interesting thing about me. My backstory is the usual pained youth story, from a broken home, coping with the psychologically damaging stepfather who eventually goes off the rails, my mother only justifying her remaining with him for 25 years by the fact that they produced a son, the wonderful can-do-no-wrong kind, who clearly holds the same gene. That's a gene that has impacted my family since 1983, blood line or not. But is that weird, or just normal family dysfunction?
What it has lead to is my insularity. Like a gradual tightening over the years. Not that I was very outgoing at school, but then that was when family life was at its worst. At university I avoided the Students Union on a Friday night because it was always just drunken and dull, preferring to sneak off to the local gay bars where I was far more likely to find myself. In my year in France I chose an area that was unpopular with the other British students, opting to live with French students. I was probably my most open there, but even then I regressed to isolation on some weekends, preferring the solitary to the busy.
Then my working life began, without ambition I opted for a low paid role in a bookshop in my university town, using the ambition of my then boyfriend to travel to pin myself to him wherever he went, first to Ethiopia where we worked in a Mother Theresa home in Addis Ababa and then by an overland trip to Australia. I've often been known to us my Trans-Siberian train journey story as a foil to show that there is something interesting about me, but its a bit fraudulent when it has always been chance and circumstance that has pushed me onto new experiences.
In Australia I did enjoy a moment of self-awareness when I taught myself to code professionally, yearning to return to the UK where I could throw some energy into my career. Travel was good to me for that reason: it let me identify what I was missing out on: a job and the London property market. I soon made up for that by throwing myself into my career, then saving up for my first property, then saving up for my first pension. Then saving up for a future I had no idea about.
I think its since my recent health concern that this has brought in some light to the question of what future I am living for. I remain isolated: the thread of my dysfunctional family has followed me for over 30 years and I am at the stage where I am considering whether it is of benefit to me anymore. My operation has once again brought me some self awareness. And energy. Energy is good. It fuels motivation and passion. But does it identify which star in the sky to aim for?
So I think I have some ambition but still no focus. One thing I can do is to put this down into words. Like Becket says, we can be pessimistic about the futility of life between birth and death, or we can fill it with words, talking none stop until we finally fill in the void and there is nothing else left to say.
Let's see what words I can fill into 2020. Let's see if I find my direction.
