Sequinned Mannequin

A Path Through the Forest…

(This is a sticky post. It lives up here at the top of the page. There are more newly recently birthed postings below this one, down in the nether regions, where newly birthed things are often found.)

It occurred to me that this blog covers some diverse topics, some of which are addressed more frequently than others. Song for Today, for example, is near-daily and therefore overwhelms other posts, which might be reviews, poetry, general pontification, whatever. I considered making a separate blog for each category, but then that seems to be what the categories are for, so instead of having a billion blogs or leaving you overwhelmed by the forest of entries, I decided to make you a sort of map.

Below are links to the categories, so if you click on one it will take you to all posts categorised thus. If you read the front page, you will see all of them together. Hopefully this will make my many opinions more easy to navigate. Do let me know if you have any better suggestions.

Alaska Diary
This was a project initiated by my good friend Gretel to get us through the winter. Participants wrote a fictional diary of being in Alaska, including other participants and overlapping stories if they so wished. As you can tell, I didn’t get very far.

Delightful Miscellany
Things I can’t really fit into any of the other categories.

Others’ Writings
Good stuff by other peoples that I wish to share with the world.

Photography
I take pictures. Sometimes I will share them with you because sometimes they are pretty.

Poems
Poems by mine self.

Prose
Fictions by mine self. You won’t find much here. It’s a bit ironic considering the length of some of my blog entries, but I don’t have the patience for longer projects.

Reviewish
My experiences of gigs (mainly), films, books, whatever else I might care to ‘review’. It’s ‘ish’ because I’m not attempting to be objective or give a balanced view of the event.

Soapbox!
Ranting, mainly. Every now and again I get a bit political, bring out my metaphorical soapbox, and voice my opinion as if someone might care.

Song for Today
Most days there is a song that I have particularly liked, that seems especially relevant, that got stuck in my head, that I listened to 72 times, or that I just discovered. I post a YouTube of it with a bit of an explanation as to why I’ve chosen it.

Thinky Thought-Rambles
When I just start going off on some spiral of thought about something. Generally long and cerebral, a bit similar to Soapbox! but more personal and less political.

Uncategorised
I try not to leave anything uncategorised, but if some sneaky bastard found its way through then this is where it’ll be.

While I’m at it, here are some other things my digital persona does:
Twitter // LastFM // MySpace Music (I’m so retro)

Collapse

I had a bit of a meltdown today. (Sorry, this is going to be one of those serious posts again.) In the interests of making explicit a couple of things that I have referenced before but never properly explained – and which are relevant to today’s blog – I have two chronic health problems that will never go away, one mental and one physical. Sometimes the symptoms are better than others, learning to manage these conditions limits their impact on my life, and the mental health problem can have periods of remission in which I barely know it’s there (or so I am told…). Nonetheless, even when asymptomatic, I will never be ‘cured’. In general I try not to let these things define my identity – although of course they define my life in many ways because they affect my ability to carry out a ‘normal’ existence – or place too much emphasis on them because there’s no point creating a drama about it. These things are part of me, part of the way I live, and – at least in the case of my mental health – I have no frame of reference for it being any other way. I have no memory of a time in which I did not feel that my brain was being crushed under the weight of something that it could not resist and feel terrifyingly powerless to my emotional life. At this point I cannot extrapolate what parts of my thought and behaviour are due to my ‘illness’ and what are just part of me – and, really, when you think about it, chronic illness is not a separate thing that intrudes upon a person, it becomes a fundamental part of who they are. The diagnostic criteria for illnesses are created based on the symptoms people display, and people with similar symptoms that fall into a particular bracket are described as having this or that disease or disorder and therefore this externally imposed diagnosis breeds a kind of feeling that the disorder is therefore almost a separate part of the patient, some little demon to be exorcised. Of course it’s true that most conditions can be ‘treated’ in some way to make the sufferer more ‘normal’, but I don’t find it helpful, personally, to focus too closely on which aspects of my personality or identity are the ‘sick’ bits and which are the ‘healthy’ bits, or to try and separate them out, or to assume that all of my behaviours are the result of my diagnosed conditions.
Read the rest of this entry »

For 22nd January 2012

As I write this title I realise that I have just incorrectly named all of my January photo albums ’2011′. Please, no, god, no, do not make me repeat that odious year.

I’m going to start using this ‘more’ code to condense the main blog page a bit more. If you followed a link directly to this entry you will have no idea what I’m talking about because you can already see everything like an omnipotent god of wondrousness. If you are on the front page its very self, please click the link to see the rest of this entry – there are photographs, the usual quantity of unnecessary complaining, and a song for the day all contained within its bounds…

Read the rest of this entry »

Comment is Free?

A few days ago the Guardian asked for readers to write a short piece about their views on body image for the People’s Panel, in light of the recent protest against dieting. Having much to say about any topic, but especially as I’ve been talking quite a lot here about issues relating to body image, I thought I’d give it a bash and bookmarked the page. Of course I promptly forgot all about it and only remembered at 11.30 on Monday night (deadline Tuesday) but nonetheless decided to cobble something together. By the time I’d finished, 100 words over the upper limit of 300 (it’s very hard to say anything of actual substance in 300 words when dealing with a complex topic), it was very much past my bed time and I wondered why I’d even bothered.

So it was a nice surprise when I got an email back on Wednesday saying one sentence was unclear but otherwise they were interested in running my little bit of comment. I clarified the sentence and today was emailed the link to the article (as far as I’m aware it just goes online, so not quite ‘in print’). Having never written anything for publication by someone else it didn’t really occur to me that they might butcher it at will – although I had thought it was unlikely they would choose it in the first place due to my ‘colourful’ style. Of course newspapers edit things and it’s really just me being a bit thoughtless, forgetting that I have the latitude here to express myself any way I damn well choose and that therefore the only barrier to not saying what I mean to say is my own inability to express it. I’m sure that taking some of the more loaded terms and ‘frilly’ bits out is sensible in terms of both trimming the word count and making the piece a bit more neutral, but the problem that presents for me is that I think it changes the tone quite dramatically. Maybe I’m wrong, and I’ll give you a chance to compare for yourself in a minute, but whereas in my original I tried to keep a level of self-deprecating humour in there that was intended to both be entertaining and to mitigate the potentially arrogant attitude of what I was saying, the edited version just makes me sound like an up-myself dick. It felt risky to enter the piece in the first place, being as I know that I am a) very sensitive to being misunderstood and b) fundamentally unable to tolerate criticism, so it’s even more scary knowing that what eventually appeared doesn’t quite accurately reflect my point of view.

Such is the way these things are, though, and it’s helpful in its own way as several people have suggested journalism as a career but I’m not sure I could really feel comfortable with knowing that someone was always going to edit and change what I’d written in a manner that potentially alters the angle of what I’m saying. Not that I was previously unaware that this is how journalism works, just this is my first experience of it – and it’s not even a piece I wrote for (as in on behalf of) the Guardian, it’s just a thing I wrote as an experience/opinion piece that the Guardian used in their feature. I expect I’m blowing it out of proportion, I guess I just feel strange that I can write something and it can have bits taken out, words substituted, and without my knowledge or consent it will be published under my name when it’s not really even what I wrote any more.

Knowing how ridiculously over-sensitive I am, I have to keep reminding myself not to read the comments. I know, I know, it’s Comment is Free and the whole point of the People’s Panel is to initiate debate, but I’m just not strong enough for it I’m afraid. That said, I would be interested in knowing what other people think about the differences, if there are any, between the original and the edited version (I mean differences in meaning and tone, obviously, rather than literal differences).

(As a side-note, I can completely understand the practical reasons why the edits were made and was aware as I wrote it that certain words in particular were perhaps controversial, so I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad to edit, or that there aren’t very good justifications for why it’s done, I’m just saying that it’s quite weird when it actually happens. And that in this case I feel that those aspects of the piece were integral to its perspective and therefore think it would have made more sense if they simply hadn’t used it… but then I’m probably too close to see either version clearly so perhaps it’s not so drastic really.)

So, here is the article that was published today on the Guardian website.

And, in the extended blog under here, you can find the original text:
Read the rest of this entry »

For 14th January 2012

As usual, frequency and length of blog posts has a strong relationship to the amount of other things I have to do. I.e. the more important and greater the amount of life tasks requiring attention, the more often I empty my brain onto the internet. Today I did actually manage to clean the flat, including taking out the pile of recycling that’s been multiplying in my hallway since well before Christmas (and if you’ve ever seen my hallway you’ll know that obstructions of any kind, like Ediths, let alone teetering constructions of cardboard Jenga, severely impede both getting to the bathroom and getting in and out of the front door), so I am not a complete failure. The recycling is still something of a phantom limb though, so every time I go to the loo I find myself walking around it unnecessarily; the absence of a bag of some type of rubbish or other is now more disorientating than the presence was inconvenient. I have not, however, completed the job application whose deadline is on Monday, or done any work on my essay, or done any reading for this week’s seminar (or, for that matter, finished last week’s text either), or done the ironing (what an odious task ironing is; I do wish my skin was not so fussy and would tolerate synthetic fibres more readily), or written to my aunt who has sent me another nice card to which I will always intend to but most likely won’t ever reply to, or sewn the fastening back onto my cape, or sorted out the cupboard under the sink that is only ever one tupperware away from exploding all over the kitchen, or made carrot soup for lunches next week even though I bought about twenty-thousand carrots from Abel and Cole last week for this specific purpose, or made a list of all the things I need to do (this is most alarming and suggests that I have gone into Extreme Avoidance Mode, which is one step on from Panicky Freak-Out Mode in which I make comprehensive lists of all the things I need to do and get so paralysed by anxiety about them that I can’t actually do anything).

I did clean the flat. I might feel a greater sense of accomplishment had I not intended to clean the flat every day since last Friday, and had I not troubled to eventually do so only because L is coming over tomorrow. I used to be so disciplined. I don’t know what happened. At work I’m highly productive and somehow manage to force myself to do things there and then even when I reeeeeeallly don’t want to (though having said that I’ve had a post-it on my monitor to call the Student Loans Company for over a week…), but I’m failing quite wonderfully at my actual life. I have a book waiting at the post office that was originally delivered two weeks ago, that I got them to redeliver today but I ignored the bell because I couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed. I have two hospital appointments that need rescheduling. I’m about to run out of medication and don’t seem to have booked a blood test so that I can get my next prescription. I’ve had four messages, dating from before Christmas, from a company who are supposed to be assessing me for an ergonomic work station. I used to be renowned for being this organised, on-the-ball person who did homework on the day it was set and always knew exactly what was going on. Now I feel like my brain has fractured into separate departments that don’t even talk to each other; I keep forgetting things, I keep losing things – which is very disturbing as I usually know where everything is, even if it’s somewhere really strange – and I don’t like it. I feel out of control and unproductive and like I’m losing the few positive attributes I have.

Anyway. Aside from cleaning I also managed a walk in the cemetery and dinner out with H. The cemetery was lovely, if chilly, although I probably alarmed any other inhabitants by spending most of my time there wriggling around on my stomach taking photos of the grass. I don’t advise this behaviour on cold January afternoons – you will end up soggy, earthy, and somewhat lacking in warmth. Dinner was also pleasant, although slightly marred by a matter of principle. I ask you: is, or is not, dessert a food? I know that was a horribly constructed sentence. Let that be evidence of my moral disturbance. You see, we went to La Luna (yes, I know it’s in Walworth, and I was skeptical too, but it’s actually rather nice if you like Italian food – to be honest I’d never choose to eat Italian out because it never seems worth spending money on but it’s fairly reasonably-priced and has a good atmosphere) and we used a Taste card, which promised 50% off food. And yet when the bill came they charged us regular price for the desserts, leaving me in a state of mystification. My tiramisu certainly felt like food. I put it in my mouth, I chewed, I swallowed, I’m feeling this is a fairly reliable description of what one does with food. Now before you point out that this made the difference of the vast sum of two whole English pounds and that just before this I had been extolling the virtues of said establishment, I will reiterate: it is a matter of principle. You should stipulate if you do not consider desserts to be food, because it might just be me but I rather think most people would make the assumption that in fact they very much do fall into the ‘food’ bracket. I do take note, however, that my anger about this is quite unreasonable. I’m afraid I’m irritatingly dogmatic about violations of my principles. I just don’t like it when people say one thing and do another and then treat you like you are the idiot for following ordinary logic when they are the ones being devious and confusing.

On a more positive note, last night I discovered The Cinematic Orchestra. Or rather was introduced to The Cinematic Orchestra. I’m not quite sure how but a text from B spiralled into a six-hour text/MSN Messenger marathon in which he sent many typically riddley and nebulous messages and I returned many which I’m sure for him were annoyingly serious-taking and prosaic: I am highly intolerant to vagueness when I interpret it to be veiling something that I therefore am unable to access. You don’t have to call a spade a spade, but if you’re talking about a spade it would definitely be helpful to construct your metaphor in the right semantic field or you could just be talking about absolutely anything. May just be me, but nothing is more infuriating than not having a bloody clue what someone’s on about, especially if it seems like they could be on about something important.

Anyway, endless elisions notwithstanding, it was not an unpleasant way to spend the evening and we had a listening party to Man With a Movie Camera at B’s suggestion. The Cinematic Orchestra is really a very apt name; as soon as I started the album all these images played in my head, and not just pictures but little films. Hearing Dawn I was by a beautifully still lake somewhere, in the very early morning just as it’s getting light, watching the mist rise off the water and the dusky pinky clouds getting brighter, the animals all starting to wake up. I was standing listening to the sounds of the birds and the trees creaking awake, chilly but knowing I would shortly go back to my log cabin and make coffee then sit on the porch in a rocking chair with a red blanket, just watching everything go about its business, watching everything exist. I ache to go there. If it only was really a place. When I expressed this to B he accused me of ‘being not normal’, which a) is rich coming from him, b) should not be much of a surprise given that our friendship is largely based on our mutual not-normalness, c) not even true. I’m reasonably certain that everyone goes to imaginary places in their brain and therefore it is very much normal. Perhaps less normal that I didn’t want to come back, but why would anyone want to return to dirty old London when they could be in a lakeside cabin surrounded by nature?

Right. Bed. This is short by my standards but it’s taken hours for some reason. Have to get up and cook L a pheasant tomorrow – thankfully remembered to remove it from the freezer – so sleep must be had before that horrible Monday comes round again.

The Cinematic Orchestra – Dawn

Internal/External

Following up, in an oblique way, on yesterday’s post, I have been thinking a lot recently about this blog and the perils of its existence. Sometimes I get positive feedback from people who like the way I write, or find something helpful in what I am saying because it aids either their understanding of themselves or of others, and I really love it when that happens – not just because it pleases my ego, but because it means this isn’t a pointless exercise (or, more accurately, an exercise whose beneficial effects are localised to myself). Of course the impulse to write is of myself and the primary reason for producing the endless reams of windy neurotic hyperbole is to satisfy that impulse in an effort for some kind of catharsis, but we could question why, then, I make the inner workings of my brain a product for public consumption. This question is never far from my mind, because for every comment I have in praise of this place, I have five people utterly mystified as to why I would ever put so much of myself on ‘the internet’ (this always said with a touch of horror, a slight recoil as if to suggest I am certifiably bonkers).

I put the internet in scare quotes because it has become mythologised. ‘The internet’ stands for the ultimate public arena and due to the over-awareness of online scams, people posing as other identities, people having their online actions used against them in ‘real life’ (or suffering the consequences of them at least), etc., it has in many ways become a source of fear. We are at once dismissive of the internet, distinguishing it from so-called ‘real’ life, and terrified of the potential presented by the anonymity it affords its users. We still haven’t learned how to tread the balance, online, between what is private and what is public, between what is professional and what is personal. The internet is still very new, and most people who use it now were not early adopters; when the internet was in its beginning stages it was a very different kind of place.

I’m not denying that there are people who use and abuse the internet in just the same way there are people who use and abuse anything they conceivably can, and that the diffuse nature of the internet makes it harder for people to protect themselves because it’s less clear where their information is going, how far it reaches, and who will pass it on. I admit to being particularly lax when it comes to things like shredding my bank statements, or even thinking about doing such a thing, so I’m bound to be expounding the lackadaisical approach to the online universe (a more ranty version of my attitude to self-protection online occurred in an email to my father a few months ago) but I’m afraid I just can’t bring myself to care. As with ‘real’ life, on the internet you have to balance trusting your instincts against the possibility that you are wrong against the possibility that some people are just bastards against spending all your time and energy trying to protect yourself against the simple fact that some things are completely unavoidable. This is one of my many ‘unrealistic’, ‘idealistic’, ‘immature’, ‘naive’, ‘irresponsible’ points of view. But it is a calculated risk and I do accept responsibility for any outcomes: on weighing up those balances I have decided that trying to work out how cautious to be is not worth the amount of time and energy it takes to decide. I’m not stupid, I’m not reckless, but I’m also not going to stress myself out about all the possible bad things that could happen – that’s a slippery slope to start rolling down. I also reject this excessive emphasis on security because it takes us into victim-blaming territory; there is no way around the fact that if someone uses your information to harm you they are in the wrong, regardless of whether you made that information available to them or not. I’m not claiming that this means it’s a good idea to go around leaving yourself open to whatever havoc might be wreaked just because you get the glow of having a moral high ground while you’re living on your best friend’s floor because some fucker wiped your bank account and you couldn’t pay rent, I’m just pointing to the automatic questions we/the police/the law/insurance companies ask when the havoc happens – the questions that subtly suggest you could have prevented the havoc, that you left temptation out there and therefore the havoc is your fault because don’t you know these poor criminals just can’t help themselves? Like this idea that if your front door is unlocked and a team of bastards clean you out it isn’t theft. That if your partner has sex with you without your permission it isn’t rape. That if you make your address available on Facebook then someone lurking outside it isn’t stalking.

I know it isn’t how it works, but I would like to think our society was founded on trusting other people not to screw us over. And that because we have that we don’t screw them over either. The eminently practical will point out that our society, alas, is no longer founded on this trust and that therefore it is nothing short of immensely stupid not to protect oneself adequately against the risks posed by Other People. They will tell me that I have to be realistic and work with things the way they are because otherwise I am vulnerable. But you know what? I don’t. I don’t have to be realistic, and I can strive as much as possible not to work with things the way they are, and maybe that will make me vulnerable but at least I will know it. And being vulnerable isn’t so bad anyway. The most dangerous thing is to think you aren’t vulnerable, because it comes as such a shock when you inevitably realise that you are. All that time and effort and energy you spent guarding the front door, you were so absorbed in it you never noticed an intruder sneaking in the back.

I think the more we focus on how dangerous ‘things’ are the more we create danger. By subtly shifting towards this mindset where people’s actions are only really wrong if they had to work hard to do wrong we remove the crime from the criminal and give it instead to the victim. Which in turn creates a way of thinking that suggests that easily committed crimes are in fact not wrongdoing – that if someone was ‘asking for it’ then this should be taken advantage of. That ‘don’t leave your bags unattended’ very quickly stops being a precautionary reminder to keep an eye on your stuff in case some rogue makes off with it and becomes shorthand for ‘unattended bags are fair game for thieves because it was very very silly of you to leave it so unprotected’; so we all become paranoid that everyone is trying to steal our stuff, and anyone minded to steal begins to consider all property that isn’t under lock and key to be liftable. Again, I must iterate that I’m not suggesting I have a solution to this problem or that I think it’s a bad idea to warn people of particular dangers, I’m just observing that we are placed in tricky territory with scaremongering – most of the time it starts out as a simple, sensible piece of advice, but in the Chinese whispers game of life no utterance ever remains simple and sensible for long. Fear begets fear begets paranoia begets paranoia. And, where possible, I don’t want to participate in that. Call me naive and unrealistic if you like, but I’m not. Suddenly The X-Files flits into my mind (bear with me, I am going somewhere with this, I promise…). Fox Mulder is a great example of someone who is considered nuts by his peers – ‘Spooky’ Mulder – and whose obsession with aliens, government conspiracies, etc., make him a figure of mockery regaled with accusations of being unrealistic and deluded. But I am minded of his poster:

I want to believe. Do I think that the world is a nice cuddly place in which bad things only happen because we have made room for them happening? No. Do I think I will not suffer as a result of my decision to act in certain ways? No. I choose to trust. I want to believe that it is possible to trust and not be fucked over. I accept that sometimes I will be fucked over regardless. But if we get to this point where we’re all so cynical, where we assume we can’t trust anyone or anything unless there is evidence to the contrary, what hope do we have? Innocent until proven guilty and yet I can’t help thinking that’s not really how things work these days; to save time we seem to doubt first and let people in once they’ve earned their dues. I don’t want it to be that way.

Which, at greater length than I intended, is a segue into the original subject of this post. I suppose that’s part of why I make so much public, as some small act of defiance. Mostly I just don’t get the horror of it; I thoroughly respect everyone’s right to reveal what they wish to and by no means do I wish or expect anyone else to go around spilling the inner contents of their consciousness all over the place, but I find it difficult to fathom what people think is going to happen. B, one of the most incredulous observers of my online splurge-fest, said it’s ‘dangerous’, and other people have indicated similar responses… but why? I mean, really really why? There is one argument for not revealing things like bank details, addresses, etc., and I can see the practical reason for that, but what about the emotional stuff? That’s what they’re really speaking of, because honestly I think if anyone is looking to defraud me this blog is not going to give them much to go on. As with matters of financial security, I’m not much in the business of protecting myself emotionally either, but I’m so intrigued by what is specifically dangerous about publishing my emotional landscape online. It’s probably not just online, actually, but anywhere very public (i.e. no-one seems to have an issue with ‘personal’ stuff being discussed between friends, or in confession, or with a therapist), and these days the internet is our main public forum as well as being this nebulous space that is a cause for no small amount of consternation in and of itself.

So the rub here is with the publicness of the personal. One assumes the issue can’t be about over-sharing because no-one has to read this; new posts are advertised on Facebook and Twitter but I wouldn’t say it’s intrusive, and it is possible to hide the alerts. There are two potential negative effects that I can think of, and they’re the only things that ever give me pause. One is that people I already know will read this and take objection to some of the things I say and they won’t want to be friends with me any more. The other is that people I don’t know will read it and hate me before we’ve even got to know each other, and that I will render myself undateable because all of the neuroses that most people keep hidden are all out there already.

In the case of the former, that’s just a risk I have to take – the things I say are the things I think, and there is always the potential in any relationship that you find out something about someone that suddenly renders the whole thing in a different light. I may decrease my popularity, and every time I publish a new entry I live in small fear of someone taking offence at it, but if there are any disastrous consequences they will only be the result of what is true. I am afraid again that I’m doing my naive unrealistic act here, in assuming that the best and most fundamental basis for relationships of any kind is in truth and honesty rather than occlusion. Maybe I’m wrong to say that I reject relationships that only survive because they keep some things hidden, that any relationship that cannot survive the full revelation of the people’s characters is not a relationship worth having. Maybe I really will end up friendless if I follow that route. Maybe relationships in fact are predicated on selective ignorance, selective veiling, a wilful desire to not see the incompatibilities. All I can say is that I absolutely don’t want them to be, but that doesn’t stop me from being a human being, and even as I say it I hear the idealistic tone in there, the thread of certainty that another part of me scoffs at – you want relationships to be honest? You want truth? You ‘absolutely don’t want’ relationships to be about what is hidden? Child! You presume to know what you hide or what you reveal? You presume to know how best these things work? You think you know what you want? Child! I suppose my fear is that I’m wrong, that relationships cannot survive the full truth, and that every time I reveal more of myself I am destroying my relationships bit by bit.

In the case of the second point, with respect to new relationships, well… that’s just a fact. New relationships are built on mystery, on not displaying certain things about oneself until the opportune moment so they don’t scare people away. Being one of these people who happily tells anyone anything, I am not very good at meeting new people. Romantic relationships are properly disastrous in that respect… I have no sense of how to hold myself back, everything comes tumbling out and I always justify it with ‘they would’ve found out sooner or later’ but I’m starting to realise that the temporality is quite important. Once someone likes you it’s harder to scare them off with neuroses. You show this stuff right at the beginning and they’re running for the hills faster than you can say fuckingcoward. And again, I want to believe that there are people out there who are not terrified of the idea of real human beings and are quite okay with not pretending that they are having drinks with Ms Perfecto McPerfect. I suppose I want to believe that there are people who see through this, who appreciate this, who are not afraid or perturbed by it. Because really I don’t think anything that I say or feel is very different to anything that anyone else says or feels, the only difference is that I express it more freely, more often, and with less discrimination. I’m not saying that I expect anyone else to feel comfortable being so open, or that I think I’m better than anyone, or that I think it’s a good thing – I would just like not to be seen as insane for putting it out there. Out there or in here, it’s still just what I think and feel. I don’t stop thinking and feeling it just because I stop expressing it.

That said, there is still a looming question mark over the expression of it. Why express it? Sure, I find writing it cathartic in a way that talking isn’t, but why publish it in public? To, of all places, the unregulatable internet? Well, this is complicated. Firstly there is the writing issue. I prefer writing to talking partly because I am not verbally inclined (although I’m sure those who sit near me in the office would disagree as they listen to me ejaculate my frustration to myself all day) and I can organise my thoughts better in writing. It comes naturally. And when I have written something it leaves my brain, at least for a bit, whereas when I talk it I never feel like it’s gone anywhere. I find quite often when I speak I have no idea what I’ve just said – I made some kind of automatic response and didn’t even hear myself. Also, importantly, speaking is usually a dialogue and, terrible as this may be, when it comes to talking out problems I usually find the input of others unhelpful. Writing is just my thing. I think in words (DON’T laugh – I thought everyone thought in words but I was recently told otherwise), but not just in words, in narrative – when I was a child I used to narrate what I was doing to myself in my head as I was doing it, but in the third person as if I were a character in a book (probably I have some kind of psychological illness… another one). These days I compose blog entries (most of which don’t get written because I would have to spend all the time I spend thinking of them writing them and then I would end up spending my whole life just transcribing my thoughts and never having any actual life) or hold conversations with people. I don’t know how other people think, so I don’t know if it’s ‘normal’ – forgive me if I’m just stating what thinking is – but my thoughts are self-reflective. As in, I know that I am thinking and think about the thinking; I don’t have much time in which thoughts just waft over me, they’re composed thoughts that read in my head the same way they do here (or, I suppose, this actually is a transcription of my thoughts, hence why it’s sometimes a bit whirly and I get distracted from the thing I was intending to talk about). So the act of writing I find cathartic and purging, but also it’s a way of anchoring thought, of having it as a reference later, a move towards creating a sort of virtual life that can be reconstituted. I have observed that most of the things I do are geared towards nailing down, making permanent, taking the transient and not permitting it to fade away. Photographs are of the tiny things that no-one notices; poems are about one brief moment; blog entries used to be largely reviews of live music, events that can never be experienced again. I’ve been reading too much Freud to go into an interpretation of why everything must be made concrete and organised and pinned down – I’m bound to discover I’m a hysteric.

Writing is fair enough. Lots of people like writing. Lots of people find it helpful. In their private journal. I’m not the only person expunging a personal load all over the internet by any stretch of the imagination, but as I now find myself outside the circles where that’s commonplace I find it’s anathema to most. In one way I just have a history with the internet and it feels quite natural for me to use it in this way. When I first started going online, in 1999, it was mainly a community of the marginalised. The population of most message boards and chat rooms was small, you bumped into people from one website on another website, and there was virtually no social networking in the way we think of it now (i.e. it was message boards and forums rather than sites where users constructed a stable digital version of their identity like MySpace or Facebook). I had a LiveJournal account and I poured myself into it – I was 14, I was having a horrible time, and writing helped. I never made it private because there was no-one to read it aside from the friends I’d made through LJ or other communities – people just didn’t know about the internet. I mean, they knew it existed obviously, but there was a limit to what you could do unless you really committed yourself to becoming part of the community. Connection was slow, expensive, and with such little traffic it didn’t inspire most people at that time – not until MySpace came into vogue and broadband meant you could actually load images without watching them appear pixel by pixel. But by the most incredible luck, I stumbled upon an abandoned Tori Amos newsgroup at the same time as a handful of other people, and we became great friends and I was hooked by the internet. Even for back then it was incredibly basic – a constant plain-text stream with an input box at the bottom; you wrote a message and it came up under the previous one, so there was a chronological flow of writing, no threads or anything. We used to communicate about ourselves and lives, but we also had a running story that we all contributed sections to – the chronological format (unusual even then to have the newest things at the bottom so it read in order) was perfect for that kind of ongoing project. The newsgroup and LiveJournal revolutionised my life. They kind of were my life – which is why I always find this ‘real’ life distinction funny – and I found love and acceptance online that was absolutely missing from my daily existence, in which I was an ostracised, unpopular, unhappy teenager with a truckload of mental health problems, a mild eating disorder, and a penchant for slicing my arms open whenever I got the chance. Yes, I was a walking cliche. But in seriousness, the community I found online saved me. And people would ask how I knew they were ‘real’ people and how could I even say I knew them at all and what if they were 40-year-old men with sawn-off shotguns? Well, you just know. You know if you’re talking to a real human being, especially when you’re speaking on the phone and sending letters. People forget quite easily that just because you originally encountered each other online it doesn’t mean you can’t also use more traditional methods of communication.

Of course, chatting on the phone is one thing but when I proposed a trip to Canada to meet them my dad almost went into orbit. And I went into Canada. I met G in London, flew to New York, met N there, then got the train to Montreal to meet M for the dawn of the year 2000. After that I met more people from the UK and I’m still in contact with all of the people I was close to back then – most of them are now just some of my oldest and best friends and I forget that we even met through the internet originally. Anyway, again I am sidetracked by reminiscences, but my point I think was that for me the internet is a refuge, a home, a place where I found acceptance and friendship, and a place that I still can’t quite believe is so huge and accessible. It used to be a challenge to find people online – there weren’t networking profiles, search engines were crappy until Google hit, and hardly anyone was looking anyway. The chances of stumbling upon someone were very slim so it felt safe to have stuff ‘out there’. I suppose I’ve never quite removed that way of engaging with the online world. When I see that people have found this blog through search engines I’m always a bit amazed (I love seeing what search terms brought people here, though – my favourite recent one is ‘why has my belly button been squashed’), or when people I don’t know start following it, because I can’t quite fathom that genuine strangers might be reading. It’s not an unpleasant idea, it’s just strange to think that anyone finds it interesting enough. Maybe that’s another strand of why I put it out there – in one way I don’t ever really think anyone will actually bother to wade their way through all my ramblings.

There are other reasons, though, and whilst they’re not worrying in terms of making the content any more ‘dangerous’, they probably signal bad things about me. I can see a craving for recognition, a need to be seen, a want to be understood, a desire to offload myself indiscriminately because I’m too lazy to make a judgement about whether or not to trust people, a perverse determination to make myself uncomfortable (because as much as I say I don’t have qualms about opening up the personal to the public, it’s not quite true – I just force myself through the discomfort as a way of breaking down shame… the only reason I don’t want certain things to be public knowledge is because I am ashamed of thinking/feeling them, but I’ve been trying, over the past few years, to be honest about the way I am in the hope that it enables me to accept it). For whatever reason, part of the catharsis is in the purging being public. If I just wrote this out and published it as a private entry it wouldn’t have the same effect. Whether people actually read it or not is secondary; the important thing is the potential that it could be read. Somehow it makes it feel less like a gigantic waste of time. I do the same thing with my MySpace music page – I’m a terrible musician but it seems less indulgent to spend an hour noodling away on an out of tune guitar if at the end I have something to show for it and an audience – even if only a theoretical one – to show it to.

I’m not sure I’ve reached any epiphanies about why I do this. If any of the questioners are reading, perhaps it helps answer your mystification, but I’m still undecided. All the things I’ve said are true and are part of it, but I fear that the drive to do this open house type thing on my inner world comes from an unhealthy impulse that I’ve been trying to eradicate – the impulse to escape myself by making someone else take my me instead. Typically that would be in a relationship; I would give myself completely to the other person because I was just so relieved to be rid of me, I’d prostrate myself at their feet and let them pick me over, deciding what they wanted and what they didn’t, giving all of myself and asking nothing in return so I could avoid being responsible for myself any more. I’ve made progress on this, but I still have a tendency to grant free access far too easily – whether I trust too quickly or I’m so insecure that I use this as a ploy because I’m afraid they won’t stick around to find out who I really am I don’t know. I can’t be sure that this doesn’t factor in the externalisation of the internal that I’ve been talking about; I can’t be sure I’m not still just looking for validation and saying ‘love me, want me, see me’.

On Counter-Intuitive Logic

This is going to be one of those serious, probably ‘intense’ (I wish I knew what people meant when they described me thus), entries I’m afraid, so if you’re looking for that tone of cynical jocularity that occasionally passes for wit I’d skip on by and come back next time. I’ve been meaning to write this for a while – by which I mean I did actually write this a while ago, on the back of a Heidegger essay (oh no, sorry, Walter Benjamin), but never got around to typing it up. My main reason for doing so now is that I’m trying to clear away the many stacks of paper currently loitering on all surfaces in my living-room and I’ve been moving Benjamin around, unable to shove him under the bed with the rest of the crap I don’t know what else to do with, in anticipation of this very blog post that you are reading right very now.

Before I experienced it myself, I always wondered why it was that one of the classic symptoms of people who have been sexually abused is promiscuity, or being sexually forward. In fact, even afterwards I didn’t really identify that kind of behaviour in myself and therefore felt almost like I couldn’t ‘really’ have been raped (funny how what were once descriptive observations soon pass into diagnostic criteria and become almost requirements – like dictionaries, I guess, which set out describing how language is used and soon become the measure of what is ‘correct’). But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that actually I had become more free and easy with my sexuality, I did attach less meaning to sexual acts – and that doesn’t have to mean simply The Act itself, and that in myself at least it was far more strange because I have never liked sex. It has never been something I sought for the sake of physical gratification – only as the shortest route to something that vaguely approximates emotional closeness. I engage in the sexual because it is the closest I can come to satisfying my need for intimacy and closeness. However, having an abnormally high moral standard for sexual contact and an inability to divorce the physical from the emotional, I didn’t often find myself in situations where there wasn’t already a link between the emotional and physical – i.e. random kissing/sex with people I was unlikely to ever follow up with (or, if we’re honest, people with whom I may have followed up with but knew they wouldn’t with me) was something I avoided both because I sort of had a naive belief that it denigrated the act of sharing one’s body with someone else and because I knew I couldn’t handle it – i.e. I would either become attached to that person beyond all sense because I actually liked them, or I would become attached to them because I couldn’t quite get on board with the idea that I might just kiss someone drunkenly because I felt like it and not because there was anything more to it than that so I had to create an emotion to justify the action.

This has changed, though, over time. I’m excessively abnormal when it comes to this, so I still don’t think I’ve reached the realm of what is usual (as in, everyone else seems to be able to just flit about kissing and fucking whoever they feel like and the next day they carry on without having two thoughts together about that person and I can tell they think I’m insane for ever thinking there might be more to it, that I even want there to be more to it… but where’s the fulfilment in the random encounter? It always seems like a tantalising taste of what there could be, of what’s missing, that ultimately leaves me feeling more empty. But then most of the time I don’t know I want something until it’s given and just as quickly taken away), so anyway I’m still not normal in this respect but I have noticed a decided shift. Not just that I have more random encounters – and we’re still not talking a lot here, and we’re very much mostly talking kissing and not sex – but that they don’t matter like they used to. As in, I don’t link them emotionally in the same way. I thought for a while that this was just a natural consequence of getting older and wiser and less fucking naive, but the more I considered how I feel about my body, and what’s changed about it, and my general attitude to permission, I had to see a correlation.

The older I get, the more I place my value in my sexuality. And the less I value sexuality. Thus goes the inverse relationship that effectively destroys any sense of worth I may have had. A couple of months ago I was talking to my mum about some boy that I was going to have a drink with and I was marvelling about the fact that I had an actual active desire to sleep with him – something that has never happened. And she told me not to, something along the lines of that sex keeps men interested but mainly that they don’t want to be with girls who offer it all up right away, that I should make him wait. The idea was impossible. Not because I was so desperate to leap into bed with him that I couldn’t conceive of the idea of waiting, but because I couldn’t think how on earth I would go about saying no. I couldn’t imagine it. I still can’t imagine it. And I hate myself for the fact that in the cases of both people I have slept with since D I had no real desire to do it, I just didn’t feel like I could say no. I went along with it because I knew that was what they wanted from me and if I said no they’d have no interest. Now my argument is slightly undermined by the fact that I know this is actually true in the case of these people, but even if it wasn’t, even if potentially a guy wanted more than just a fuck-hole, I can’t imagine denying them access even though my own desire usually registers somewhere around zero. Comparing this to my first relationship, in which I made J wait six entire months before we slept together (and although I was eight years younger than him I was 18 – 19 when it did eventually happen – so not like I could use the age card or anything; I was still a very late developer in that, and all, respects), I absolutely marvel at my younger self and my ability to not give in to pressure. I had absolutely no qualms about putting the brakes on if someone wanted to go faster than I did back then. Now, one of my biggest anxieties is the idea of meeting someone and taking a shine to each other and negotiating when the sex happens. A friend of mine started dating someone quite recently and they didn’t sleep together for quite some time. I can’t imagine that not only because I can’t envisage being able to say no if they wanted it, but because I would fall to pieces if they didn’t.

For me, this is a large part of it. If we were to make a very generic and offensive list of female ‘roles’, I know where I fit in. I may have written about this before – I’ve certainly spoken about it to several friends, and each time I do I sound like a twat and want to stab myself in the face, but I do still think it’s true even if it is somewhat objectionable. The way I see it, there are three loose categories of women that men could potentially be attracted to (I’m obviously using a highly simplified model of heterosexual culture here): the Friend, the Girlfriend, and the Lover. These are quite self-explanatory. The Friend is the girl he gets on with really well but has no physical chemistry with; the Girlfriend is the girl he enjoys the company of, he finds her attractive but this is probably a secondary characteristic in terms of his appreciation of her, which spans a greater breadth of traits that make her a good partner; the Lover is the girl his penis can’t keep its eye off, who he would give his little toe to have a night with but whom for whatever reason he can’t bring himself to consider in relationship terms (reasons include but are not limited to feeling threatened by her attractiveness, her being too ‘complicated’, a preferment of maintaining the mystery rather than getting to know her thus upholding this ‘complexity’, allied to that she becomes an excellent screen for his projections, etc.). In fairness this is no less true of women, but right now we’re not talking about them.

So when I say I know I fall into the latter category I feel like I’m humble-bragging or something. And I’m not. For one thing, even if it were a good thing it’s just a fact and I’m trying to resolve this issue whereby it’s apparently arrogant to acknowledge ‘good’ things about oneself even when one has no power over them. Feel free to disagree with me on the categorisation – I’d actually love it if you did. Of the three categories – and I know I’ve created this model myself and am therefore just sort of entrapping myself by constructing a set of negative criteria into which I fit so we could question why I don’t just abandon this point of view and begin again with something more healthy but… – of the three categories I’m really not very enthusiastic about being in this one. I’ve come to the conclusion that all men who like women pretty much want to fuck all women and they aren’t too fussy about which women they are. They are more fussy about the ones they want to be with though, and once they’re with someone they have sex on tap so it’s all dandy. They will always be happy to have sex with their girlfriend, even if sometimes they might fantasise about having it with someone else. But the Lover loses her sheen as we all do when we get older, and then she’s just a woman that all the men used to want to fuck who now has no-one. The Lover can have a million wonderful qualities, but they will all be eclipsed by the desire to fuck her, and the men will never really be able to be friends with her properly because that sexual tension will always be there, and the women will never really be able to be friends with her because they will either envy her or be threatened. I’m making this sound very hopeless and simplistic, like there’s no way of working with this constructively and of course there is, but my experience of being here is that it alienates people and you have to work extra-hard to make any kind of relationship work.

I don’t help myself. I know I don’t. I dress in a way that sexualises my body, and I admit I enjoy the power of it. I love to go out feeling hot and I both love and hate the comments I get shouted at me in the street and I both love and hate the way people look at me and I both love and hate being looked at. I hate the comments and the looks because they’re demeaning, but I have come to expect them and if they don’t come then I feel worthless. As much as I hate being seen primarily as a sexual object, nothing terrifies me more than the idea that I one day won’t be – because what then? Then I am just this unlikeable, cold, distant, difficult person whose relationships are frayed in part by the tensions created by the power which has now been lost. And it’s not power really – it’s not empowering. I can’t DO anything with this; the only times we see women ‘do’ with their sexuality it’s the femme fatales, the manipulators, and the only thing they can do with it is destroy. And the most destructive thing of all seems to be that the understanding of my ‘value’ in the world leads to a lesser sense of my own value. Because I don’t really place much value on sex appeal; that’s not where I want my worth to reside, and so I can’t take heart in the way I am appreciated yet all the while I am working to comply with it so that the appreciation doesn’t stop. Thus the idea of saying no to a guy who wants sex and who I like is impossible; the idea that he might want more from me than that is impossible and so along the same lines I take what I can get while I can get it and have taught myself to expect little more. Which of course begs that eternal question of how can you expect someone else to respect/love/value you if you don’t respect/love/value yourself and I don’t know the answer to that but what about the other question – how can you respect/love/value yourself if no-one has ever shown you how to do it?

Which, at great great length, leads me on to the actual bits of scribble I wrote on the back of Walter Benjamin. I know not why I was thinking about this sexual abuse/promiscuity conundrum whilst attempting to do reading for my MA but regardless it popped into my head and I didst scrawl it out:

And of course, of course we who have been raped are more promiscuous because fo us it has lost meaning. It has become nothing more than a base physical transaction based on the same laws of power and exploitation experienced daily in all aspects of the subjectified, objectified female existence under patriarchy. Where once perhaps there was discrimination of choice based on who was worthy of the honour of closeness, who was admitted into that vulnerable realm, there is now indifference. BEcause once it has been desecrated what difference does it make? It is always violated, broken,open, trampled upon. The bond of trust has no meaning. Trust is no longer a prerequisite.

(I’d like to clarify that I am of course aware that rape happens to all genders and is committed by all genders; I am speaking partly of my own experience and partly in broad terms in which anyone can be rendered into the pose of ‘subjectified, objectified female existence under patriarchy’ regardless of whether they are a woman, etc.)

Then I took it a bit further a few days later when I was waiting for someone in the pub. Just started writing and out it all came…

And if love means nothing any more either then how can we expect to do anything other than throw it all away, than say love me love me love me love me all the while knowing we cannot be loved we cannot love we wonder why only we are the empty and lost and abused and not worthy of love or respect or gentle tenderness. I remember realising that you really do have to love yourself to love another, saying ‘if you don’t treat yourself with love and tenderness why would you expect anyone else to?’ but it does actually go both ways – if you have been treated carelessly by those who claim to love and support you then how can you know how to care for yourself?

We are told that to love means to cherish above all things, means to care deeply for, to respect, to protect, to support and to hold in sickness and in health. Yet who has ever been treated this way by one who ‘loved’ them? Do they not love? Does love exist? Maybe love is undone by our idea of love. We think it is one thing and when it fails to be that we assume we are not loved and this in itself damages us so we become less capable of loving, less capable of being loved.

I was abused. Physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually violated. Something I thought was mine (my body) was used without my permission. Something I thought was sacred (sex) was enacted as violence and power-play. Something I thought was beautiful and loving (my relationship) became the very means through which the violation could be possible Something I thought was safe and innocent (sleep) was made a site of trauma.

So the meanings attached to these things are emptied and new meanings replace them, or confuse them at least, and now I don’t know what is real. A fundamental lack of trust. Losing trust is not about knowing that my body will be violated, that sex will be taken from me, that relationships will be extorted, that sleep is dangerous. It’s about not knowing that it won’t be. It’s about the difference between believing that when I go to sleep in a bed with my loving partner he will not rape me and not believing that any more because I have been given reason to doubt it. Which is not to say that I believe it WILL happen. I just don’t know any more. If I was good at maths I could calculate it or explain it using probability perhaps. That if something has never happened on all the days of the year the probability, based on history, is that it will not happen. Then one day it happens and the seal is broken and even if it happened only on one day of 3000 days, the probability is 1 in 3000 that it could happen on any of the 3000 days following and you don’t know which day. When it comes to air travel or something we can look at safety statistics and feel heartened. Even if we look at rape statistics – frightening as they are – we can feel heartened if we have never experienced it. We can still believe it will never happen to US. Once it has happened that belief no longer holds – we don’t give the benefit of the doubt; we just have doubt. Something has been broken. And it is unfixable. And strangely the impulse then is not to guard oneself more carefully, lest a similar thing happen again, but to give away more freely. Where once I was guarded with my body I am now ambivalent. Fuck it, take it, it’s not mine any more anyway. It’s not a sacred place worth protecting any more. And also, I suppose, with partner rape there’s this extra dimension of the fact that the body was stolen by one who claimed to love it, by one who had free access to both the body and the soul, to love, to all dimensions of the person. So it’s as if somehow none of that is satisfying; love and companionship and sex when consent was given was not enough. Or, even more, and this is the one that really explains promiscuity for me – the body is all he wants. By choosing sleep, not only is she at her most vulnerable but she is her most empty. Just a vessel. Fuck it, I’ll take it, the body is all I want anyway, I just put up with the rest as a means to an end. So that’s all you want? Have it. Let’s not even bother with the pretence. This body doesn’t mean anything to me any more. This body isn’t mine any more. No-one wants me for me, not even the people that say they do. Have it. Take what you want – it’s the only way I can be wanted.

I derive literally no pleasure from random encounters, physically. Not kissing, not sex, none of it. In fact, even in a relationship I’m mostly ambivalent about sexual contact. And yet I’ve kissed more people drunkenly than I’d like to have, I’ve had flings, one-night stands – not many, but for someone who doesn’t like sex definitely a high enough amount to be irregular. Why? It makes me feel wanted. I used to be so uncomfortable with this that I’d persuade myself I really liked these people in order to justify it. To make it seem less desperate. I’m better at not doing that now, but I’m worse than ever for getting involved when I really don’t want to. I feel a bit like a failure if I go out, or go to a party, and don’t mildly hook up with someone. I feel unwanted, unwantable, and I hate myself for it [because I'm not wanted but also for feeling unwanted]. Now, it’s not that many people because I don’t go out or to parties very much, but the impulse perturbs me, When did I start putting so much of my worth in my appearance/attractiveness? Around the same time I realised that it was where others placed my worth. Around the same time I realised that this made me, as a human being, worthless in their eyes.

So
My worth = my body
My body = violatable at the expense of my me
My body/worth = desirable only when devoid of my me
My body/worth = a husk, a shell, a vessel for gratification
My worth = worthless

I put up a barrier. He tore it down. What difference does it make now? There’s not much point shutting the gate after the cows have escaped.

Both of the above were written back in November. The second one, which I haven’t read since then, is a bit disturbing in light of what I’ve been saying above. Hmmm.

My overall realisation has been that I need to cultivate some nice qualities that make me a person who is wanted and appreciated even when people have stopped wanting to sleep with me. It won’t be too many years before I’m not looked at in this way any more, and whilst I can probably get away without a pleasant personality whilst no-one’s paying any attention to my personality anyway there will come a point at which I will just be everything that I am now – difficult, unfriendly, serious, intense, negative, bad-tempered, narcissistic, awkward, lonely – but more so, and more old, and more lonely, and all my friends will have their partners and children and good jobs and I will still be swimming around in circles like a duck with one leg wondering why I never took the trouble to learn to be nice.

In Pictures

Bright Sunday

This is a short entry for the purposes of proving that I am not 100% curmudgeon.

Yesterday I woke up and I’d fallen out of love with London. It’s been a few months coming, but we’ve finally reached that point in our relationship where it’s become clear that it’s untenable. Walking home from the cinema I was again seized by the desire to up sticks and leave, so to mitigate this I decided to give myself a day out. The sea called me, and as my last Brighton trip didn’t quite go to plan it was the obvious choice. I took my self, I took Astrid, my camera, and I walked me nine or so miles out to far far Hove, up to Preston Circus, out to Kemptown, down the pier. Had a great roast, got some work done on the train, and in the company of my greatest friend and my worst enemy I had a spanking good day.

I’ll write a more proper blog on this and put in photos but I wanted to remain unplugged today (on my phone). Plus all that walking in the cold on the shifty slidey pebbles has left me utterly knackered.

Good good day. Just what I needed. And need more of.

For 5th January 2012

Today you just get this. Because I like it. Especially the video. And also because I’ve kept a tab open on it for several days to remind me to post it and every time I start Chrome it automatically starts playing so that I think my flat is infested with ghosts.

All is under control at Undiagnosed Illness Towers. I have given the hospital samples of every substance my body produces and probably this will confirm that the cause of my malaise is One Of Those Mysteries. I don’t know if this is preferable to finding an actual wrongness, but if there is one I would rather it was the cause of my woes and not an incidental discovery like my friendly cyst, the removal of which seems to have served only to diminish my wellbeing thus far. Edith also went to the doctor today and had similarly inconclusive results – she was declared to be ‘like a noisy little toy’ (hmph), I was advised to buy her Piriton (?!), and am now contemplating retraining as a vet upon discovering that you can charge people £31.20 for spending 15 minutes insulting their pets and recommending hayfever tablets. On the plus side, and something I do not resent paying for, I have the peace of mind that there doesn’t seem to be anything serious wrong with her (she’s been kind of sneezy and snorty and I was worried that perhaps she had a tumour or ulcer or something) and it is most likely either a virus or allergic reaction. She complained heartily about the whole experience, but not nearly as much as my arms are now after carrying her there and back – her and a full hot water bottle.

Prodigy vs Enya – Smack up the Orinoco Flow

For 4th January 2012 (And a Story About Rockets)

Ever since my mother pointed out that I am negative and constantly complain to the degree that I am, and make no mistake that this is a direct quote, ‘out there’, I have felt somewhat self-conscious about blogging. Because I’m afraid I just can’t conjure up any enthusiasm at the moment, my ebbs being so uniformly low as to represent a flat line. Probably I should amend that old ‘if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all’ adage to ‘if all you have to do is moan and complain please shut the fuck up so we can all get on with our lives in the glorious absence of your incessant whinging’, but if I do that I really may as well take vows to be a silent nun – the silence would hardly be a challenge under such circumstances, and a life without romantic entanglement would almost certainly be of benefit.

And why so glum? Well, for one thing it’s the time of year when everyone complains, because everyone wants to kill themselves in January, so obviously I have to wail all the more vociferously to maintain my status as the most disgruntled of all the ungruntled feeblings clawing their way back to sobriety after the festivities, writhing on the floor attempting to wrangle their seasonal cellulite into ill-advised skinny jeans, unable to adjust to the mediocrity of reality after living vicariously through the television, and struggling once again with the reality that no year is new and four days in even the firmest of resolutions are broken. In addition to all these common-or-garden Yuletide woes, however, I have My Health. Or rather my lack of health.

Now I am accustomed to being more than averagely wonky in the brain, but physical illness is not something I have generally – and thankfully – had much practice at. First there was the operation, and that made me feel like crap, which was to be expected. As my mother will once again testify, I did not bear the infirmity well, but I can’t say it came as a particular surprise that my body had a vehement reaction to being meddled with in such a manner. So I had all manner of unpleasantries, and then when I just started feeling better I got thrush, which I haven’t had for years and which was most inconvenient. I treated that, and then I started bleeding again. Then I was more or less well but got exhausted really quickly, and my brain caved in a bit over the whole ‘spending Christmas alone’ thing. Immediately after Christmas I had the world’s most traumatic period, the day after that finished I got thrush again, the day after that I started feeling like I did right after the surgery – pressure in my diaphragm, acidity, distended feeling, loss of appetite, etc. – and the day after THAT I spent six hours vomiting bile into Ben’s toilet. Fun times. Since which time I’ve had basically the same symptoms, no zest for food (very disturbing), not being able to sleep, general lack of energy or motivation, and I’m afraid I’m feeling rather sorry for myself. The biggest issue really is that it puts a strain on my mental health because I don’t feel well enough to go out and do anything or see anyone, which leads me to being depressed. I also can’t get myself to do anything so I stress out and punish myself over having not taken the recycling out for two weeks and there being week-old washing on the airer and cat litter all over the floor. So all I do is watch Ally McBeal and obsess over B in an effort to distract myself, and the Ally doesn’t even help any more because season 5 is utter shite (seriously people, you can’t just write out three characters between seasons and not explain it and then sideline all the good people and bring in these silly new ones and change Ally’s hair) and obsessing clearly never helps with anything, especially when it’s the kind of obsessing that is in itself damaging – who ever benefitted from dwelling on people who can’t seem to make up their mind whether or not they want you and therefore trick you into thinking you want them when actually you don’t even know yourself and all the while you know that even if you wanted them and they wanted you they are the kind of person who will keep this situation going on for five years and therefore prove themselves to be a person who is probably not capable of giving you what you need so you spend all your spare thoughts contemplating the merits of the hypothetical relationship and feeling rejected and putting your desire-eggs into this basket because romance is the easiest way of making a stagnant piece of life feel new and shiny and fun?

I am put in mind of when I was young, pre-relationship age (about 10), and suffering from my first real bout of depression (one of the Big Five in my Depression Hall of Fame), and the only thing I could think of that I wanted to do was go shopping. I’m actually thankful that we had less than no money or this might have set a precedent for a lifetime of debt (I’m assuming I don’t have to include my £30,000 student loan in this?). Essentially, though, I think it stems from the same impulse – discovering something new, filling some kind of absence, feeling perhaps a bit like a new person in the light of this new possession, this new person. When it comes down to it, what is shopping and buying if not falling briefly in love? And just as – except in the most extreme cases – shopoholics do buy things that they really want, just exercise perhaps less restraint in doing so, the majority of times I have loved someone as a subconscious plea for diversion from my unsatisfactory life, I really did love them. They were all wildly unsuitable people, of course, but that doesn’t mean the feelings weren’t real – it just means I should have shown more sense and self-respect before allowing myself to become so wrapped up in them.

I have difficulty accepting that it is possible to love people and to connect with them and it not be a good idea for you to be together. My go-to position on this is that love conquers all, that it’s worth the risk, but I think at some point I really need to realise that, um, it doesn’t. It isn’t. Or perhaps, rather, that taking a risk is not the same as walking into an utterly foolish situation with someone who shows unfavourable odds on doing anything other than putting you through the mill and taking all the flour as they leave. I’m inclined to think people a little too eager for risk-assessment, being as I am attracted to the types who wrap their hearts in several layers of metaphorical bubble-wrap – or maybe I bring this out; certainly I seem to scare people and I’ve never quite got to the bottom of why – but when I look at the battering my creaky old organ has taken I can only surmise that it would probably be grateful for a little self-protection.

Anyway, as usual my point has become the needle and my excessive self-exploration the haystack. I think what I was trying to say is that I recognise some themes coming up at the moment that haven’t been around for a couple of years and they all tie in together, which makes me suspicious. I have expressed dis-satisfaction with my life, my job – or more accurately my ‘work/life balance’ as we trendily call it these days – and have been feeling stagnant. I’ve been through several extended periods of this same frustration in past years, of feeling stuck and bored and like I want things to change but I don’t know how so I can’t do anything to make them. It’s a bit like being a rocket without any fuel, sitting on the what’s that thing called, the launchpad, knowing there are places to go and things to see but having no means to make it happen save screwing up your face and willing yourself to take off, or waiting for some astronauts to come and fill you up and show you where to go. But before either of those things happen they bring another rocket along, a cute one, and they park it beside you, and you start chatting to pass the time and the cute rocket seems to like you and you fall in love and you are distracted from this urge you had to take flight and just as you have decided that perhaps this is enough, that the cute rocket makes it worth standing here on this useless launchpad, this is okay, you and the cute rocket can stay here together awhile and maybe you will go on a journey together one day, the cute rocket fires up its engines or whatever it is rockets use to get into space and shoots up into the stars and you are left on the ground, your rocket-heart hurting because the cute rocket has left you, and you hate your life even more than you did before but you don’t even have the energy to hope for better any more.

Yes. I’m feeling down, I’m feeling lonely, I’m feeling vulnerable, I’m feeling like I have no control, I’m feeling like I’m behind on life, I’m failing at being a human being, I don’t know what I want, I don’t know what to change, but I’m impatient. Yes. I love him. But I’d be a complete twat if I didn’t look at all those things, see the similarities with the past, and make the connection. Building it all up to be more than it is is just another way of escaping into fantasy. Stagnation makes me reckless. I think it’s only when I’m manic that I’m reckless but it happens when I’m depressed too – just a different brand, a fatalistic kind of destructive recklessness that pushes things to their limits, not to have fun and see how far they stretch, but to break them. The certainty of death, the finality. Thanatos. I have to look at this man who has yo-yod me for the past five years and look at what he would be offering even if he wished to offer it – not what he could be capable of, not what I think he’s capable of, not what he has the potential to offer – and use my brain not my heart to recognise that it’s not what I want really and use my brain not my heart to recognise that even if the heart’s biggest argument (that maybe if he wanted me what he offered would be different) is true, I need to get a fucking grip because the most overwhelming reason that this is not what I want is because HE IS NOT OFFERING IT. What will it take for me to realise that an occasional half-offer of something is not a real offer, that another’s uncertainty should be the ultimate deal-breaker for me, that it is not my job to persuade someone into wanting me, that, fuck damn it, I am worth more than giving myself up like some sacrificial beast to be picked over. To be fair to myself, I have improved – whereas in the past my thoughts in these situations ran something like ‘I love him/her so much my life will never be complete all I want is them why don’t they love me ogod I am pondlife I am tadpole I cannot think about anything other than how terrible I must be for they do not want me oh how perfect our relationship would be I will never be happy again why can they not see we are soul mates surely I will die’ I am currently involved in a more ambivalent thinking along the lines of ‘why has this come up again, how annoying, but hmm there really seems to be something there and when this goes on for five years does it mean that’s a strong connection or does it just mean he’s a fuckwit who likes to keep me hanging and I am a fuckwit who clearly likes to hang, and look at all these good things that I like about him and all these things we have in common but then look at these things that make me shrivel up inside and look at the ways he has behaved poorly towards me in the past and I really honestly do not know if we would work together or not and that kind of makes me want to find out but also he scares the complete crap out of me and in all honesty if he even did turn around and suddenly want to have a relationship with me I can’t guarantee that I wouldn’t freak out about it and in some ways we fit so well and in other ways I cannot imagine us together at all and oh yes but he DOESN’T want to have a relationship with you, does he, so why in the name of all things holy and unholy are you even bothering to trouble yourself to waste your mental energy thinking about whether you would if he did when even if that happened you’d probably react completely differently to how you anticipate’. So as you can see, the thoughts are less pathetic-needy-drip and more confused-frustrated-squiggle but the fact remains: there are thoughts. And there is no place for thoughts here. There is nothing to think about. The fact that I spend hours contemplating my hypothetical response to a hypothetical situation that I am unsure if I want to stay in the realms of hypotheticality or not makes me want to beat my own head in with a club.

Right. Well. I’ve splurged quite enough for now I think. This is why I have started to use my iPhone voice memos as a therapist, to relieve the burden from you, dear Internet. It may also be one of the signs of advanced madness, being only one stop short of talking to oneself (and whilst I am happy to admit the occasional self-directed word or phrase, spending the entirety of an hour chatting away is less acceptable – although having said that, of course, it probably says something far more disturbing that I talk to an inanimate object that actually records me so I can reflect on my musings… I suppose it’s just for this feeling that there’s an audience, something’s ‘listening’…?), but my brain has been so very full recently and I have been so very unable to sleep that I find lulling myself to bed by orating the dire regurgitations of my mind is quite an effective tool to induce narcolepsy… I’ll just have to be careful that I don’t start crashing out on my desk every time I have a thought. I’m not hoping to redeem myself here; it’s crazy whichever way you look at it. Carry on…

Molly Nilsson – The Lonely

Dartmoor, 2008

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 339 other followers