This is a rant from the train journey back to Brighton. I wouldn’t read it if I were you. It’s self indulgent, self obsessed post Christmas malaise. The feeling is lingering longer than it should. I’m hoping this is just a preamble to a much more positive and forward facing New Years post. But then, I think I got my new years excitement on the solstice, in true pagan style, and may have run out far too early. Anyway, consider yourself warned.
Essentially just bored and trying to convince myself back into starting writing again. It’s been a funny year. I think I’ve succeeded in doing the majority of things I set out to do this year, but they have not exactly turned out to be what I expected. The best example of this was of course Nanowrimo, where I set out to write a slightly shallower novel than previous years, which led to me overcoming various blocks by just settling for rubbish, and so suceeding in finishing a 50,000 word story, that’s absolutely rubbish. I’m quite happy with some of the writing. To be honest I think my prose fiction style is improving (my prose non-fiction remains self indulgent, rambling, obscure and impenetrable) but I seem to be running out of ideas. Or depth. Or a willingness to treat things with the importance they deserve. I’m not getting that across. What I think I’m saying is that this has been a shallow year for me. I’ve done things, many of which have been reversions to earlier forms of existence (work being another example) and so I’ve not really progressed much. I think my personal growth is even in recession. Not entirely. Meeting Lucifer (the illustrator, not the Morningstar) has triggered a series of changes that have made me more thoughtful and better at engaging with others. I’ve finally grown up enough to acknowledge and hopefully start to deal with the way I have treated some of my former partners. I am finally taking responsibility. But I’ve stopped doing Tai Chi, I’ve started smoking. I stopped drinking for a while, but it didn’t make the usual impact on my mood swings. Instead I’ve spent plenty of time moping around, unable to sleep and suffering from headaches. My dedication to everything this year apart from NaNo has been pathetic. I’ve made plans, for example my theoretical plan to go into teaching from a science angle (which means doing A-levels) has just wallowed in my brain. I plan I am proud of having come up with, but am too scared to actually start enacting. I guess this is what new years are for. Christmas has been wonderful, but it hasn’t stopped me tearing apart the threads of my identity and questioning everything about myself. Hence this ramble. Last night as I lay awake in the darkened silence I found myself circling around a few different themes. Firstly feeling let down by my mother, something I’ve never felt before. It’s a tiny thing, but basically I made a self deprecating comment about the fact I was putting off these A-levels because I was scared it wouldn’t work. I’m pretty sure she meant to be reassuring but it wasn’t the feeling I got. She said maybe it shows it isn’t the right idea for me. I felt that like a kick in a gut. I haven’t realised until now, writing this, how much I’ve relied on my mother’s unconditional support of my choices. Mum is good. She is incredibly stoic and has never put any pressure on me. She wants me to be happy, and she wants me to do what I’m good at. That is all. In fact, that is all she is doing here, telling me to find the right path in the most relaxed way possible. Anyway, the other theme is more personal. I think if I scour through my dangerously unreliable and self serving memory I realise I have this crisis of conscious this time every year. Essentially, I doubt the solidity and substance of my genderqueer politics. I dress as a traditional boy (tiny nods to femininity, but all discreet and measured) for a few days because I’m scared of coming out to my parents (even though mum at least would be stoic and supportive no matter what). It doesn’t bother me, but I feel like it should. I start to think about how it would be if I entered into a more conventional job/life structure, and whether I’d just abandon this whole thing to a youthful rebellion thing. I mean, I’m getting a little old for that sort of thing (though I’m not far enough along for it to be a mid-life crisis), but I just don’t know. Add to that the loneliness of being single at Christmas, a time when I feel it more intensely despite being surrounded by loved friends and family. I just wish I had someone to share this with. To introduce to my family and my surrogate families and all the tumbling mess of connections that surround me. I want to pull someone into this and throw myself into someone else as well. And I wonder, ‘would it be easier if I wasn’t wearing skirts?’ What sort of barrier am I putting up? I think I still look good most of the time, but attractive? That’s a different question. I don’t know what people are looking for. Obviously, you’re all yelling what I know I should be thinking. It doesn’t matter. Someone who doesn’t see you as you are and love you for that is irrelevant and useless. There’s no point in not being yourself. But I just don’t know who I am sometimes. I spend so much time thinking about it, and telling people stories about it, and trying to present my most appropriate facets, that I really don’t know. Like I’m a swirling mass of ideas around this hollow core of emptiness. I am the calm at the eye of the storm. I am meaningless. Which is, despite all my usual clichéd platitudes, the truth. Or at least a truth. The centre cannot hold, and all that jazz.
The train is getting closer to home. Back to Brighton. Where enough people are weird enough that I can fit in. Where I can wear what I want and only get heckled, and not abused. I love it. But the bubble scares me. What do I look like to people on the outside? And is it enough to pretend they aren’t there? Or that they don’t matter? I mean. It doesn’t matter what they think of me. Sticks and stones and all that. If I can be happy being me, then that’s what matters. If I can strive to be a good me, by my own standards, then that’s what matters. But it doesn’t get me closer to knowing who to be. I take cues from others. Who my friends expect me to be, who strangers scare me into pretending to be. And it’s only when I am alone, agonising over every thought and moment, deconstructing and destroying my identity, that I have these worries. Put me in the situations I’m talking about, and unless I’m REALLY depressed, I’m fine. This is all just thoughts, painful thoughts. Words, words, words.
And I can’t help it. I solliloquise my misery and thus make it so. I’m like a boring Hamlet. Too clever to take action. Too thoughtful to just be. Too lonely to speak truth to anyone but myself. Too pretentious to bother with.
Ah well. These things happen. I’m home. And I’ll be fine soon. Very fine.
Ooo! Your blog’s changed. I hear you about the Brighton bubble… it was the London bubble for me but I came from near Brighton so I didn’t notice it until I went to university in Nottingham. Everyone there was a normal and it took about a year for many of the people who knew me to summon up the courage to acknowledge me in front of people they knew but I didn’t. Ha and you think you write obscurely.
On the writing front… just keep doing it. You’ll get there, I promise. Maybe you are writing too much? I find the harder it is for me to make time for my writing the better the stuff I produce is, so it needs less editing so I don’t get to that lose-the-will-to-live point with it quite so quickly. ;-)
In fact, I’ve just finished my first novel. I say first, but I’ve written four, three of which I wish somebody else had written. It’s with an editor now and the first (already edited bits) are going to agents as we speak! I’ll give the agent’s malarky a couple of months and then I may e-publish it.
Sorry I digress… what I’m saying is… one, keep writing stuff, any old thing. Two, if it gets too hard, try limiting your writing time to one hour a day and spend the rest of the day doing other stuff… and thinking about it.
Cheers
BC
Oh yeh and I forgot… I’m forty one years old. I’ve been writing all my life and it’s taken me until now to write the one novel I’ve finished that I’m proud of.
Don’t give up!
Cheers (again)
BC
I like you. I’m not from Brighton. I guess you’ll think it doesn’t count because I haven’t really met you, and also, I’m pretty weird according to most in this place, so I’d probably fit in that bubble just fine.
Also, you’d also point out that the internet is also a bubble in a way.
I know something in your head also thinks this, but why should it matter that much what all the average people think? many must think you are too weird and slowly back away from you but that only reflects their own flaws and not yours.
And I don’t think you are any less solid because you aren’t showing your ideals in the way you dress 100% of the time. In a way you’re trying to survive too and you measure how people will respond to that. In the end, you are who you are. You’re also young, and the process of knowing yourself is still happening.
Congrats on the NaNoWriMo. :)
Thanks y’all. Mostly because it’s really great to know you’re still both out there, and still being you. This makes the world much grander than it could be. SO yeah. Thanks. Also thanks for expressing the bits of my mind that I was trying to shoot down when I wrote this. Down-ness does that, and it’s a huge problem. You can see the arguments, the reasons why you should be happy, they are still there, but you refuse them, disavow knowledge of them, and try to make them self destruct.
But they can’t, and won’t. There will always be those understandings in my life, and thankfully, praisefully, there will also always be people like you, who will stand outside of my body and represent those ideas, notions and thoughts.
Which is fucking awesome.
I am an incredibly lucky person.