A Rant. Tube Strike-Related.

As often happens, this is a Facebook comment that got out of hand (hence no paragraphs, sorry), in response to someone who accused tube workers of being ‘greedy’ and ‘selfish’, amongst a variety of other people who expressed similar sentiments. I got carried away. I decided Facebook is not the place to enter into such debates. That way madness lies. So here it lives.

It’s not ‘greed’ to use a form of permitted protest to highlight the situation most workers find themselves in in the current economy – i.e. employers dicking around with their employees’ working hours and conditions without any consideration, consultation, or flexibility. The issue is not simply pay – more pay is compensation for an increase in unsociable hours (a shift allowance – which most jobs involving night shifts have) but the strike is about far more than just the measly wage increase proffered. The night tube drastically changes working patterns for all tube employees (not just drivers, who earn a decent wage but with good reason, but everyone employed in the service of London’s transport, including cleaners, etc., who certainly don’t see anything like that income, not that the income is really the point) – this obviously has an enormous knock-on effect to the rest of those employees’ lives: work-life balance, childcare, etc., not to mention simply making their job quite a different one from the one they originally applied for and may have been doing for a significant period of time. I’ve heard people saying that those who don’t like it or can’t do it should get out and let someone who’d be grateful for the job have it but what a situation to end up in! Where we settle for the lowest standards a person will accept and let that be ok? Where we genuinely think that instead of fighting for better conditions or pay or the improvement of employee rights it’s better to fill the job with someone who can afford to earn less or who doesn’t have responsibilities that restrict them from working at night or who is simply accepting of poor conditions? The ‘take what you’re given and be grateful’ attitude is how we as a population end up quiet and compliant and ripe for those who govern us to completely screw. The strike is a message that it’s not ok to fuck around with people’s jobs and lives without any sort of transparency or consultation – and that’s a message we should ALL be behind, because increasingly it’s something we’re all affected by. I’ve heard people complaining that they can’t strike in their job (one solution to this is to join a union), or that they have poor working conditions too so why should workers in another sector ‘hold us to ransom’, or that other public sector workers have poor pay and conditions too but can’t strike because people would be put at risk (i.e. medical workers and firefighters, etc.). I’ve heard lots of tantrums about ‘fairness’ as if we’re under the illusion that things were fair to begin with, and as if those who are in a position to stand up for their rights shouldn’t because other people aren’t. THIS in my opinion is what is selfish – insisting that others don’t fight for the betterment of their position so they can be in solidarity with the people who can’t or won’t do so for themselves, to make sure everyone is equally miserable and screwed over, rather than supporting those who can and standing in solidarity with them in recognition of the fact that the fact they might earn more than you or have a better deal than you isn’t the point, that we should still be in favour of everyone having the best conditions and pay possible, and that perpetuating this idea that people are ‘lucky to have a job at all’ is exactly what enables the situation where employers hold all the cards and employees have none. How on earth did we become a society of people who think it’s the great luck of employees to be employed, and that employees should accordingly be grateful for whatever they get, however they get it? People are needed to do jobs. They get paid for their time and skill in performing those jobs. Wage distribution is not equal, sure, and it’s often not linked to the contribution made by that job, but wages are not a favour or an excuse to crap all over people. It seems clear from the enormous paddy Londoners have thrown about the strike that our tube workers do actually make a very visible contribution and are highly valuable if, sadly, not highly valued. And something that most people seem to have failed to realise is that the strike isn’t holding LONDON to random – it’s nothing to do with London, or Londoners, it isn’t an attempt to inconvenience regular citizens as much as possible, it’s about Transport for London, the employer, and holding THEM accountable for their actions, about showing THEM the value of the employees they so devalued, not only by bringing transport to a standstill but losing the attendant revenue. At worst, for the vast majority of people living and working in London, a strike is 24 hours of inconvenience – sure, it’s a pain in the arse, but it’s one I’ll happily put up with if it means that the people who invisibly keep London moving the rest of the time get a better deal, if it means demonstrating that employees will not take drastic changes to their jobs lying down, if it means staving off the prevailing idea that it’s ok to be treated poorly because any kind of job is better than none.This ‘us’ and ‘them’ divisiveness is precisely what keeps everything the way it is and is what TfL count on to make their employees look like the bad guys instead of themselves. Not everyone has the chance to strike, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support those who do, if for no other reason than that it’s one of the few small forms of resistance available, and who knows for how much longer. The attitude of ‘if I can’t have it, you shouldn’t have it’ or ‘well my situation is worse than yours so you shouldn’t try for anything better’ seems totally backwards to me – once rights are stripped away it’s almost impossible to get them back, but the more people who are in a better situation, the more normal that better situation looks and the worse others look in comparison, and other people having less doesn’t get you any more. It’s inaccurate to think of this as just being about tube drivers, and short-sighted to even consider it just about TfL – at a time when the government are out to fuck over just about everyone except the uber-rich and the public sector is being decimated, any resistance to humanity-robbing impositions, to corporations failing to consider that their employees are human people to whom they have a responsibility, to the idea that we are here primarily to work and the rest of our lives don’t matter, to the fact that employees have pretty much zero power in relation to their employers, is, in my view, to be enthusiastically welcomed. I don’t find it selfish. I don’t find it greedy. Quite the opposite – it gives ME hope. The tube workers’ strike GIVES me something despite the fact I have never even met, outside of the TfL context, a TfL employee. Because as far as I’m concerned, the strike represents something more far-reaching than the end of the Metropolitan Line (even if it does go all the way to ZONE 9). If you want to be angry with someone, be angry with the bankers who earn millions of pounds and fuck up the whole system, or the millionaires paying no tax because their money is in an off-shore haven. Don’t be angry at the person earning OOH ALL OF £45k (which is a lot in the context of most people’s wages but isn’t very high-stakes in the grand scheme of things when you consider how much people who do not benefit your life in any way earn for doing things that probably detriment the entire human race) who gets you around the city you live in and stands up for their right not to be shat on by their employer. And if your job sucks, that’s rubbish, and if you can’t strike, I’m sorry, but don’t resent others from making use of the tools available to them just because you can’t, even if you think they’ve got a better deal – at least it means there are better deals to be had, something to aspire to, and someone telling the world that it’s not ok to treat people as if they’re worthless. Yes, everyone should be able to do that, but better some than none – to insist that everyone gives up their civil liberties because not everyone has the ability to enact them in the exact same way is childish and ridiculous, and seems like a really odd point of inequality/unfairness to focus on given the state of global inequality and the life-or-death nature of it. There is a wonderful irony to people whose lives have been negatively affected for one day accusing those who affected it of being trivial or selfish for protesting about a change to their employment that will affect their entire life. Tearing other people down doesn’t make you stronger. Tube workers being paid more doesn’t mean you’ll be paid less. Tube workers’ conditions being improved doesn’t reduce yours. None of this is about you. Get a fucking grip.

Dickishness, Doormattery, and the Difficulty of Distinguishing the Difference – aka DOUBT

Sometimes people are dicks. Sometimes they’re really obvious dicks, of the kind one internally mutters ‘oh look, a dick,’ about, and sometimes they are less obvious dicks disguising themselves as non-dicks. It is often unclear whether these people are simply not aware themselves of their dickishness, or if they are more fiendishly clever and manipulative than it seems worth the effort of being when you could just be an obvious dick instead and achieve the same result. Maybe they are In Denial. Perhaps that is why a lot of the time when people are dicks they do a very good job of convincing you that actually you are the dick, or at least you would be if you were thinking of taking issue with the dickish thing they just did, and they are just being normal, so how could you possibly have any kind of problem with them? At its most effective, this is so pre-emptive and passive-aggressive that you find yourself conditioned into thinking ‘I don’t want to be a dick about this’ when someone has just smuggled in being a total bellend under the guise of lalala just going around being a person doing normal stuff that of course you don’t have a problem with because you don’t want to create an issue, do you? Oh yes, I forgot, your raging cuntery is all my fault. If I didn’t have a problem, there would be no problem, so clearly the blame lies with me and is nothing to do with your dickery at all.

And this is the bit where I have difficulty sorting out what is really going on (as much as anything is ever ‘really’ going on). It’s can be difficult to tell whether a) someone is being a dick or b) you are perceiving dickishness where none is present, and allied to this it can be difficult to tell whether a) they are intentionally being a dick, b) they are accidentally being a dick, c) they are being an intentional dick and unintentionally making you feel like it is your fault, d) they are being an unintentional dick but intentionally making you feel like it is your fault because they have projected it all on to you, or e) they are being an intentional dick and intentionally making you feel like it is your fault. Therefore, it is difficult to have an appropriate response, what with it taking quite a long time to sort out who is being a dick and whether it is on purpose and to what degree the other person has a conscious or unconscious desire to trowel all their own shit onto you. Some cases are clear cuntery, but what of the others? The ones where maybe something doesn’t quite sit right, or there is a slow dawning of realisation that maybe you are not getting the respect and consideration you assumed. In these situations, generally speaking, I am alternately ashamed and proud to admit, for reasons to be explained, that I spend what is probably an unreasonable length of time being what is commonly known as a doormat.

At first, I thought this was just about being nice and accommodating and, you know, not a dick. So when my ex-landlord said he’d sort out the fact the windows didn’t open in my new flat but it might take a while because reasons I said oh ok fine. There are REASONS. And when he came one day to take the bathroom door handle off because you couldn’t shut it without risk of being permanently imprisoned in there, realised he couldn’t fix it, promised to come back the next day, and never materialised but said he’d been very busy, what with having a business and his own house and a spouse and a child and all that, I said oh ok fine. REASONS. Poor put-upon landlord is busy man, I can live without windows or bathroom doors that close, I do not need a garden I can actually venture out into without being eaten by it, it is no hardship that the items in my wardrobe are mouldy because the flat is so damp and there are actual mushrooms growing out of the window frames. BUSY. MAN. REASONS. And I am being nice, aren’t I? I understand that my landlord is not just a landlord but also a husband and a father and a person with life things to attend to, and he is a nice man with a nice dog and he owns a bookshop and I like books and we get on well and isn’t, ultimately, all of that more important than windows that open and not dying of complications from excessive fungus? I have integrity, I thought. I am not doing that thing that people do when they don’t get what they want in precisely the way they want it and they turn purple with rage and beat their fists on the table shouting ‘I’M PAYING FOR THIS! BRING ME MY PERFECT PERFECTION THAT I AM GIVING YOU GOOD SHILLINGS AND PENCE FOR BEFORE I SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST OR EXPLODE LIKE THE MAN IN MONTY PYTHON WITH THE WAFFER THIN MINT’. I could do that, but I will not do so, because I am far more VIRTUOUS and MORAL than that. I will not be a jobsworth who quotes lines of the contract like a parrot with Tourette’s, because everyone hates it when people do that and I am an eminently REASONABLE human being who is not going to have a toddler tantrum because everything isn’t hunky dory. Life isn’t hunky dory, you see – I learnt this as an actual toddler: it’s just not fair. I am being MATURE and REALISTIC and MANY OTHER POSITIVE ADJECTIVES.

Then there is a smaller voice that says, of course, it’s all swell to justify this to yourself as an act of extreme benevolence and take the moral high ground whilst you glide towards that cloud of good karma over there and wait for it to engulf you – in a nice way, like a steam room – but aren’t you maybe being a little bit of a… well… you know. A coward? Shouldn’t you really be strapping on a pair of metaphorical testicles, or even literal ones should you so desire and have a willing donor, and going at least mildly pink and maybe just touching the table with your hand a bit and whispering ‘um, well, um, ok, well, um, you know, I sort of, well, um, sortof, I um, seethatyou’rebusyandeverythingbut, um, well, the thing is, I’m sort of, well, you know, payingsevenhundredpoundsamonthtolivehere so do you think maybe, you know, you could, sort of, um, well, FIX THE GODDAMN FUCKING WINDOWS?’

It just never seems as important, somehow, to have the windows, as it does to have the friendly. As it does to not be an inconvenience. I discussed this with my therapist and we came to the conclusion that I would rather live in a mouldy hole with no windows, for example, than make myself unpopular. Being liked, rather pathetically, and not being perceived as difficult, are apparently very high priorities in my world. I’m still undecided about what this means. On the one hand, I kind of wish everyone placed a higher value on having good relationships with people, but on the other, it’s not all that great for my esteem or self-respect to come to the realisation that I seem to go out of my way to lie down in the most wrinkle-free manner possible, so that people can walk all over me without any trip hazards, and I can see how this is something that happens in all my relationships, which is even less great in the non-business world. It also puts one at a disadvantage, because most people do not seem to operate on this basis and instead sniff out ‘weakness’ so they can easily take advantage. In our rather mercenary society, there is more of an emphasis on getting what you can for yourself than being considerate of other people, and traits like not being a ‘pushover’, treating business as business, and ‘standing up for yourself’ or getting the ‘respect’ you ‘deserve’ are valued more highly than being understanding, accommodating, and tolerant. (Although, it must be said, it would be much easier to convincingly polish my halo until it blinded all for miles around and rattle off some spiel about how I’m just too goddamn nice if I was in fact in any way nice, accommodating, understanding, or tolerant. I am none of these things. Which is what tells me that there is probably a lot less of the noble self-sacrificing going on than there is being afraid of what people will think.)

My therapist, who I suppose must be more useful than I am often inclined to think if he assisted me to the realisation of two whole things, also pointed out that I seem to think people are doing me a favour even when they get at least as much out of the deal as I do, thus leading me to feel so small and inconvenient, as if I am incumbent upon them, that I will do everything in my power to be as unobtrusive as possible. Hence my landlord becomes a poor poor man saddled with the awful awful task of having me as a tenant, with all my crazy outlandish requirements like windows and bathroom doors, as opposed to being a guy who found himself in the luxurious position of having a spare property and managing to secure a nice tidy tenant who will pay the rent in full and on time despite it being far more than a glorified shoe box is worth, and who will only briefly mention the fact it is lacking in several basic features.

I’m having a similar issue with my current landlord, whom we rented our flat from on the basis that the garden – a terrifyingly overgrown wilderness possibly laced with London’s most exotic and deadly creatures and, we found out after moving in, definitely laced with asbestos – would be cleared and prettified and made new in whatever manner we so desired no less than one month after we moved in. It got to the end of that month, and due to a persistently misbehaving sink, by this time we had seen rather a lot of our new landlord and discovered rather a lot about her traumatic experience of finding herself with three mortgages leaving her bank account, only one set of tenants (us), and her own house in complete chaos because it’s new and she’s refurbishing it. In episode two, she found some tenants for house number two! Yay! But she was so busy sorting all THAT out that she couldn’t, of course, sorry, come and do anything to our garden. Then in episode three it turns out her new neighbour is an abusive drunk, so she cannot stay in the place she has been renovating instead of sorting out our garden – which she can’t afford to pay someone to do on account of the three mortgages – and now everything is even more chaotic what with selling the house and finding somewhere else to stay so there is no chance, sorry, of her being able to do anything with our garden because it simply isn’t a priority for her right now.

This is where it becomes problematic to have a friendly thing going on with someone you are also in contracted business with. Instead of thinking of it as a business transaction, as money paid for services rendered and all that, I’m thinking of this in terms of real live life people, of friends, of favours. Our landlord is doing us an enormous favour, giving us somewhere to live! Our landlord is having a terribly hard time and we must do everything we can to make it easier! This is reinforced by the fact that right from the start she made her situation with all the empty houses clear – our flat was on the market for more than we could afford, but seeing that it had been advertised a while, I emailed her and asked if she would take an offer. She came down a bit, but still not enough. Then a few weeks later she contacted me again and said ok, the flat was still empty, she was getting a bit panicky, so she’d come down further even though it meant our rent was less than her mortgage. It was still £50 more than our top budget, but it is a very nice flat, and she seemed like a very nice lady, so we went for it, being grateful that we didn’t have to go through a letting agency. But this further compounded the idea that she was doing us a favour – she wasn’t even covering her mortgage! We didn’t have to deal with an agent! She’s losing money on us! We must not cause any problems because she has been so VERY VERY KIND making all these allowances for us.

But hang on. Hang on just a second. She isn’t ‘losing money’ – WE are paying HER mortgage. Sure, we get somewhere to live in return, but she’s not LOSING anything, is she? She’s just paying £50 per month towards her OWN MORTGAGE. And whilst it surely is stressful having three mortgages coming out of your account and a precarious tenant situation, you know what having three mortgages means? OWNING THREE PROPERTIES! All of the money paid into these mortgages, whether by us or by her, are paying off HER LOANS. Sure, she might not be making a profit out of us at this point in time, but overall she is. Overall she owns that much more of her flat each month, has that much less debt, and while we live in it, pay her mortgage, enabling her to keep it, it appreciates in value. We are safeguarding her future profit (not to mention that although people do tend to rent out their places on the assumption that they will make money off the rent, that is neither guaranteed nor right). And whilst having a friendly relationship is nice, whilst being able to communicate as human beings rather than business drones is how I’d probably say I wanted things to be, it obscures all of this. It means that we are not looking at the facts – all of the above plus that we chose to rent this property based on the fact it had a garden and would not have done so if it didn’t, or if we didn’t have the assurance that the garden would be useable within a month, and that the garden is part of what we are paying the rent for, we are not able to use it, and therefore the situation is unsatisfactory. From that point of view it is totally irrelevant what her personal life is like or whether she has the time/money/energy to do what is necessary. She is obliged to take responsibility for it and none of her other business is my concern.

But it is my concern, because I know about it now. And as much as I want to not care about those things, I can’t quite bring myself to. Yes, I might be within my rights to kick and scream all I like until I get exactly what I paid for and the terms of my contract are fulfilled to the letter, but is that really how I want to be? Do I really want to fight? I can’t just stack up the facts without also stacking up the human cost. Ok, yes, she has three properties and is in a far better financial position than me as a result, and she’s not upholding her responsibilities to me, but I know, and I can’t unknow, that the reason for that is that she’s got stuff going on in her life that is stressful, pressing, and making her ill. Even though it doesn’t seem fair or right, and even though it’s tempting to just think well fuck her and her three houses, what’s that got to do with me, I don’t want to be the person who adds to that stress. Even if that stress comes as a result of being in a more fortunate position than me, I can’t square it with my conscience to make a big issue out of it even though I’m really quite pissed off. (I think there may also be part of me that feels guilty for having the luxury of a garden and doesn’t feel like I really deserve it anyway.) But I don’t want my garden this way, is the thing. I don’t just want my garden by hook or by crook, at any cost. I want my garden given freely or I don’t want it at all, because then it is poisoned. (Funnily enough, it literally is poisoned, thanks to a broken down asbestos shed, which is one of the reasons we can’t sort it out ourselves – the others being that it is shared with the flat above, so we can’t just do whatever we want, it’s VERY overgrown and is therefore a pretty enormous job, and even if we did clear it we’d then have a large expanse of bare earth that I don’t personally want to spend the money cultivating as we’re hopefully not going to be confined to renting for all eternity. Plus, you know, I just don’t really want to, on the basis that I wouldn’t ever have signed a tenancy agreement on the place if a DIY job was the deal – not averse to a spot of gardening, but definitely averse to paying someone for the privilege of making their urban jungle into an inner-city oasis.) And, also, y’know, it isn’t just about the garden.

Now, far from being about whether or not the garden is sorted, it’s become about whether or not I’m being taken for a ride. It throws the whole relationship into question. Is she telling me these things because she wants the friendly relationship too, and she’s sorry, and she wants me to understand why she’s reneged on two pledges – the first to get the garden done by the end of June, then another to do it by the end of July? Or is she being clever and manipulative, pre-empting any protest or complaint I might have and silencing it with tales of woe? Now it’s about doubt, and trust, and betrayal. And it’s about anger – at being in a position where I have to decide how to respond to someone else not keeping their end of the bargain, whether to be the ‘bad guy’ who pulls them up on it or not. And I have a long history of finding myself in this sort of situation, contorting myself into knots so as not to be a hindrance, trying to predict others’ actions so I can solve any problems ahead of them arising, get out of the way, make everything nice before it ever gets not-nice. And then exploding with rage when the other person doesn’t do the same, or when I – eventually, after a much longer time than is reasonable – realise that I am being taken advantage of, or where I have to wonder whether that is what’s happening, and when that is eventually realised, and raised, and somehow I am framed as the demanding, unreasonable, difficult one. It’s after months or years of putting another person’s needs first, almost unconsciously, then being told I’m irrationally, inconceivably, over-the-top needy when the penny finally drops and I say hang on, what about me? What about what I need? (And, of course, what happens when I decide to meet more of my own needs, if the other won’t meet them, and put less into theirs? Oh my god! You bitch! You evil selfish bitch!)

But even taking into account all of the above, when it comes to things like this I just wonder, is it actually worth it, or do I just get the knowledge that no-one ‘got the better of’ me? And what does that mean? Because I can choose what I think is better and it doesn’t really matter what the other person thinks. They can think they’ve ‘won’ if they want – I don’t have to agree. A lot of the focus on this stuff seems to be about pride but if you decide it doesn’t matter then, well, it doesn’t matter, does it? Especially because what I might think of as a battle may barely even register on the other person’s agenda as being anything other than a small matter of business. They don’t think they’ve won. They don’t see me as someone they have trampled. I’m assuming, anyway, that most people aren’t that conniving. And also that most people who get to be this kind of dick get to be it because it’s an institutionalised kind of dickery. People in positions of power don’t see their power unless someone fights them for it. And then, of course, it’s the rebel who has ‘power issues’. Perhaps this is why it feels all the harder to try and take some power back in situations where there is an imbalance – the knowledge that it will be all the more noticeable and unwelcome, all the more a statement. It’s never just ‘fair enough, they’re fighting for what they’re owed’ – if it was seen that way, the fight wouldn’t be necessary in the first place. The only reason it needs to be contested is because either consciously or unconsciously, the person who isn’t giving us what they owe doesn’t think we’re entitled to it. Or at least, their entitlement to whatever they would have to compromise in order to give us what we’re due is more important. People who are very skilled at spinning and believing their own sense of entitlement also draw others in, so it seems natural. On a broader scale, that’s how hegemonic ideologies work. On a smaller scale, that’s how people fuck you over whilst enlisting you to help.

Now as much as I might think all this is wrong, and however strident I feel about challenging inequality and people being dicks on either a collective or individual level, I still have to choose how much energy I have for that challenge, how much resilience, and whether I can tolerate it permeating every aspect of my existence in the way that it does, for me at least, when there is disharmony with other individuals in my life. I’m just imagining what would happen if I said what I wanted to say- if I said what I say when I’m recounting a tale of some thorny encounter, where I put my thoughts into phrases beginning ‘and I was like…’, and my listener asks, agog, ‘did you REALLY say that?’ and I say, confusedly, ‘no, of course I didn’t SAY that, it’s what I was THINKING’ – if I said the thinking things instead of just thinking them. I do not think that would go well. I would definitely be a difficult customer. People would not like me. They already do not like me because I am accidentally rude when I am not even intending to be. But still, the times I am at least thinking a bad thing are probably better than the times when I do not. At least then there is a recognition of a process happening, and a choice being made about how to handle it. Which is quite different to becoming unwittingly complicit.

And the thing with becoming unwittingly complicit, is that at some point you become witting, and then you are just unwillingly complicit. That is when the resentment sets in and poisons everything. And that is when I start feeling that maybe I’m not entirely sure the nice approach works all that well, because at the pivotal moment when I realise that I am not being nice, but am in fact being a stupid, the fantasy of the nice relationship is shattered and becomes not just fraught but toxic. But you don’t know that until you find out that what you thought was two-way niceness is actually unidirectional, and that’s when you’ve already let it all go further than you can recover it from. You don’t know whether the being nice pays off until the other person’s niceness is tested, and if they turn out to be a dick it’s too late, and then it’s hard not to want to go after them with a pointy stick, or not to completely hate them, and yourself for trusting them, and decide never to be nice to anyone ever again in case the same thing happens. But that’s not the answer. Is it?

I don’t really know what the answer is. As you may have guessed. You see, I was nice about the windows and the mould with my ex-landlord, and I thought that the niceness would go both ways, but when I moved out he deducted £150 from my deposit for a mark I made on the (already completely dilapidated) floor. And I contested it, on the grounds of having lived without windows for a year, and the bathroom door going unfixed, and having sorted the garden out myself even though it was communal and he said he’d do it, and having lived with the piles of rotting furniture in the garden that he said he’d dispose of, and the mould. None of which, I understand, are directly related to the floor, but my point was that we both failed a bit in our responsibilities and as I was very accommodating of his failures, perhaps he could treat mine in the same spirit. But nope. He still took his £150. At which point I was seized with an earnest desire to knock his head off. (Even more so after I said I would consent to the deduction if he would provide me with a quote for the repairs so I could claim it on insurance and it took him over two months to provide me with said documentation. Two months! I decided not to go ahead with it in the end – the insurance company then wanted a second quote and the chances of getting it this century seem slim.) Anyway. Now I find myself doing the same kind of thing with my current landlord and it scares me a bit, because I don’t want to do that awful thing of cutting off from the possibility of trusting anyone else not to be a dick just because people in the past have been, but I find myself wondering how nice and understanding she would be if I needed her to be – if I had to be late with rent one week, perhaps – and wondering whether it sets a dangerous precedent to be such a walkover. But I don’t want to be a pre-emptive arsehole just to prove a point. I shouldn’t have to, surely? Shouldn’t people just not walk all over people in the first place, regardless of how easy that other person makes it for them? And doesn’t it then make it hard to know who you can trust because they’re actually trustworthy rather than because they know they just can’t get away with that shit with you, but that won’t stop them doing it to someone else? Perhaps that’s a question more relevant to personal than business arrangements though – maybe in business you just have to take no prisoners and be very clear, from the outset, that you are not to be fucked with.

Landlords are in kind of a unique position of power though. Even though they clearly have many responsibilities in excess of collecting rent each month and deciding how much of your deposit they can attempt to justify withholding at the end of the tenancy, they rarely seem to take them very seriously. They seem to see it as a favour to maintain the property or fix a problem, to think that tenants will live with the same excuses they make to themselves for not doing whatever needs to be done to their own houses. Except, you can live in whatever condition you like, you can choose to buy dog food instead of door locks if you wish, you can make do because you don’t have the money or want to put it elsewhere, but you don’t get to make that decision when someone else is paying you for their home. Your spare property isn’t just a cash cow that you can stick people in, collect rent on, and ignore. You do have to maintain it. To a better standard than you’d probably like, and likely than you do your own house. Things you wouldn’t personally prioritise aren’t optional in this situation. Your tenant might not mind either, may be understanding, but they shouldn’t have to be, and if they are, you should be exceptionally grateful for them saving you from having to live up to one of your many responsibilities.

The problem is that landlords are by and large pretty shit at their jobs, but no-one can afford to get into an argument with the person who owns their home. Because – well, read that again – they. own. your. home. Most people can’t afford to make waves and either jeopardise the security of the fact of having a home or at least infect its sanctity with acrimony. Landlords can be shit because tenants can’t take their business elsewhere – at least not for a minimum of six months, not without significant stress and expense, and in the knowledge that the alternatives could easily be worse. If you’re a landlord in a city like London, you can basically do whatever the hell you want, advertise a dump knowing that someone will still pay over the odds to live in it, and rely on the competitive market to do all the work for you. People do not enjoy moving house, and moving house costs a lot of money what with putting down new deposits before getting old ones back, and paying months of rent upfront, and agency fees, duplicated bills, men with ven or removal people, factoring in the time to actually move and then be in upheaval – unless you’re sharing your flat with several types of vermin, a simply unsatisfactory property probably isn’t enough to make you move. Especially if you can already only just about afford what you have, being as rent will have gone up about ten quid in the time it took to have a shower.

As far as I can tell, tenants have two responsibilities: pay the rent, and don’t trash the place. Ideally, look after it very well. I won’t say ‘treat it like their own home’ because the way some people treat their homes is enough to shock even my eyes, although it is a curious thing that landlords often seem to expect to receive their property back in the same condition they rented it in, utterly ignoring the ‘fair wear and tear’ thing. It’s a home, not a hotel. A maid doesn’t clean it every day. It isn’t just somewhere to sleep and shower. How does your home look now, compared to one, two, three, four years ago? How are your carpets and curtains holding up? How many marks are there on your paintwork?

Landlords have just the one thing to do, when it comes down to it: make sure all the stuff the tenant is paying for works, and fix anything that breaks quickly. Not having to sort this shit out, and pay for it, is the ONLY advantage to renting over owning. Except that it isn’t, most of the time, because most of the time broken things stay broken, promises to rectify issues similarly so, and you find yourself paying full whack for a place that isn’t up up standard and that you wouldn’t have moved into in the first place had you known all these magical solutions you based your decision on were never going to materialise. But once you’re living there it’s difficult to get anything done because tenants have no bargaining power. Withholding rent is still breaking the contract, even if the landlord broke it first by failing to maintain the property. It’s not worth the risk, given that to rent a place – in London at least – you need a clean credit check and decent references (not to mention an income of 30 times the monthly rent, which is ludicrous given the percentage of income that actually goes on rent).

So. The available choices are limited. But I can’t honestly say that it’s just this, or even mostly this, that stops me kicking up a fuss. It’s just a matter of low confidence. A matter of seeing myself as somehow indebted to everyone for deigning to give me any of their precious time. Ironically, I think that this is why people think I’m rude and unfriendly. But it’s not unfriendliness, it’s fear, and discomfort, and self-consciousness. It’s trying to remain as small and unobtrusive and uninconvenient as possible. I feel pretty much like my mere existence is an inconvenience that I should at all times be compensating and apologising for, but I also feel like apologising and compensating are inherently quite attention-grabbing, so in an effort to not make a spectacle of myself I do things that come across as, I think, selfish and rude. Le sigh.

I discovered this weekend that if you can’t fit in with what everyone else is doing, every possible alternative is problematic in that they all seem to demand attention when that’s the very opposite of the objective. I was away for the weekend with a group of people, some of whom I knew better than others. Groups are not my forte, which I doubt comes as a surprise, and particularly at the moment I’m experiencing such a crippling level of social awkwardness that I feel of a completely difference species. I’m not at ease speaking in large groups, I get anxious about what to say, I can’t think of anything to contribute to conversations that don’t interest me or chitchat – and in a group most conversation seems to float on the surface, because you can’t have a meaningful eight-way discussion – and nothing I can think of ever seems worth the energy of finding a space in which to say it and putting the words out there. The chattier the rest of the people, the harder it is to take the floor, and I certainly don’t feel that what I have to add is any more important than what any of the other seven people might want to say at the same time (not to mention the mortifying experience of starting to talk at the same time as someone else and having to negotiate who gives way to who, which is guaranteed to make me never want to speak again and definitely not say whatever it was I was planning, which now feels like it has to be the most scintillating statement ever made). Also I’m quite slow with verbal communication so I tend to find that by the time I’ve formulated a response the conversation has moved on. I have to rehearse going into a shop to buy something, or ordering food in a restaurant, so off-the-cuff fast-paced multi-person conversations are really not something that I find it easy or enjoyable to contribute to. I like to talk to people one-on-one, where turn-taking is a much more straightforward, or to write, where no-one can interrupt me, pressure me for a response, talk over me, and which I just find about a million times easier and faster than using my mouth.

So anyway. The weekend. In a group, I don’t really mind not talking. I’m happy to listen and observe most of the time. But not participating is generally considered to be quite rude, so I’m always aware that whilst I feel like I’m just an invisible observer, the people I’m with probably feel like I’m a sulky, possibly judgemental, cow. Ditto when all the social gets too much and I need to go away and be in quietness, I assume no-one will notice that I have gone, but of course at some point they do and then I worry that they think I’m massively rude for going away and being on my own instead of joining in, or that I’m being attention-seeky and wanting them to come and find me. Whatever I do that isn’t laughing and joking and chatting, which at times feels as impossible as reciting the Bible backwards, ends up seeming like a statement. I thought about maybe announcing that I needed a bit of space and saying hey guys it’s nothing personal but I’m going to sit in the garden on my own of a bit, but that draws attention to it too, and more than not wanting to draw attention to myself I don’t want people to think that I am trying to do so. I don’t want to be that person who refuses to join in and makes everything about them. I don’t want to not be invited to things because I make other people feel awkward, or because they fear I’m going to be weirdly passive-aggressive and demand attention whilst proclaiming that I’m not. I’m just. Not. That’s so not what it’s about. It’s not a game. I don’t run away so that people will follow me. I don’t go quiet because I’m sulking about not being the centre of attention. I’m just doing what I need to do to survive. I guess maybe it is selfish not to participate and join in with the fun, but I quite often can’t. And for me, it isn’t fun. I wish I wasn’t like this, I wish I could put on a brave face and make social chitchat and it didn’t render me so intensely anxious as to either be on the verge of panic or in dissociative shutdown, but I am, and it does, and it seems to be getting worse rather than better.

All in all, everything is a bit problematic. I spend so much energy trying to be likeable and easy for other people that I forget to ask myself whether I even like them, whether I respect them, whether I really care whether they like me or not. I’m so focused on not making life difficult for others that I fail to see, for much longer than is healthy, that they are often making life difficult for me. Or letting me make life difficult for myself. The fact that I can’t bear for people to have what I think is the ‘wrong impression’ of me prevents me from forming an impression of them. I’m so busy trying to guess and anticipate other people’s needs that I don’t consider my own – and don’t really know what to do or how to handle it if someone else does it for me. And yet, I fail in all these measures because I’m not very good at any of these things. I’m not good at being nice or charming or putting people at their ease, I’m not good at making myself likeable, I’m not good at putting shiny sparkle on everything and making others feel good about themselves. I’m not good at meeting others’ needs, only at fretting and guessing what they might be and probably doing the opposite of what they want/need because I’ve interpreted it all wrong. In the end, it’s a massive waste of energy that has me running in circles, typing myself in knots, and benefiting precisely nobody.

Anyway. I have strayed far from my topic. In short, as always, there is a problem with balance and boundaries. That old chestnut. Gauging what is ok, what is not, what is unavoidable, what is not, what is just the way things are, what can and should be different, what is my shit, what is someone else’s, what I should take responsibility for, what I should disown, what I am being honest with myself about, what I am projecting, what is healthy, what is not, when to fight, when to let go, when to give, how much to give, what is giving and what only looks like it, how to tell what is right and what only feels right because it’s easy, how to tell what is right and what only seems like it must be right because it’s hard, what is an unhealthy pattern, what is sensible, what is a pattern that is also sensible. Everything at the moment is doubt. Everything is unclear.

And I’ve written nearly 7000 words on this now, and I’ve added bits over the course of three weeks, and I’m still not really any clearer, so probably that means I should stop now. I can’t even remember what the point was any more.

Open Letter to My (Thieving Bastard) Neighbours

Karma is a Bitch

Song for 29th July. And Some More Ramblings. About Something Different.

This is from a very good and perfectly titled album (Excavation). By a band who are supporting Fuck Buttons on their tour. So that will be a good show indeed it will.

It’s probably not really the kind of music I should be listening to at the moment. It’s a bit… unsettling. And I’m feeling quite unsettled already. It would make a good soundtrack to a psychological horror film. Which isn’t quite the vibe I want to be channeling at the moment. But. It is good. So. I’m doing the musical equivalent of watching a scary movie from behind the sofa then lying in bed in a cold sweat with the covers pulled over my face.

Maybe I should listen to some ABBA instead.

At the very least I’ll provide you with one of the less creepy ditties.

The Haxan Cloak – The Mirror Reflecting Part 2

As usual I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to charting my mental state and looking at the bigger picture and being like OH, right, I’m being a bit mental, and THAT’S why I’m being a bit mental, and THAT’S why all this other stuff is going wonky, because I’m being MENTAL at it. Basically, I moved house. I know. OHMYGOD person in house move shocker. Considering how many times I’ve moved house in my life I’m not sure why it still sends me into some kind of nervous breakdown, but, well, it does.

I don’t think it helps that I didn’t move out of my old place by choice. It definitely doesn’t help that I’ve ended up in Forest Hill by default simply because I found a flat that I could afford here that wasn’t a shit hole (I say flat. I mean room. All-in-one job. Like shampoo. Well. Not ALL in one. The bathroom has a door on it. But once again I try to get to sleep at night and can’t because of the noise of the fridge. Which is one of the downsides of your bedroom being your kitchen and lounge and dining room). I mean, not that Forest Hill isn’t nice – it’s lovely, actually, and as far as having useful things like shops that sell stuff you might actually need rather than children’s shoes and Cath Kidston crockery and fried chicken it far exceeds Brockley – it’s just that I didn’t move to Forest Hill because I wanted to live here. And there’s something rather odd about just ending up somewhere and having no context for it. I’ve found my corner shop (very convenient, around three minutes from my front door), my nearest park (Mayow Park – lovely, possibly even nicer than Hilly Fields, five minutes’ walk, with picnic benches and a zip wire and tennis courts and table tennis and cricket, although it doesn’t have quite the same friendly community feel as HF), the nearest all-night fried chicken, the nearest 24-hour convenience store, the nearest night bus stops, the nearest supermarket, the nearest express supermarket. I’ve plotted in the most important co-ordinates and there’re loads of great places here – cafes in abundance, a good pub, a good bar, an amazing hardware shop, a haberdashery shop, a bunch of independent businesses, the Horniman Museum and gardens, a cobbler, a Boots – but it just doesn’t feel like home. And I’m not sure it’s simply a matter of settling in, either.

I felt very grounded in Brockley. The cemetery was a place that gave me a lot of strength, I found solace walking in Hilly Fields, my flat was bright and airy and felt like home right from when I moved in. Being within walking distance of what was first college and then work made me feel very situated in the area, as did being within walking distance of several friends. There’s a bunch of people I follow on Twitter just because we had a Brockley connection. It was a very friendly place to live with a strong community if you troubled yourself to look for it. It doesn’t feel the same here. I feel really disconnected from everything and everyone, like I’m out on a limb down here with no real reason to actually be here other than it was the only place I could afford to live and time was running out. I feel sort of plonked. Like I’ve been randomly dropped somewhere and now I have to make a life out of it. I don’t know… maybe I will settle in. Maybe it will come to feel like home. I’ve never lived anywhere where I wasn’t within walking distance of my main reason for being there, whether that was work or study, or within walking distance of friends, and it feels very peculiar. I guess I was just spoilt by living in Brockley, close to work, close to friends, close to the station, able to nip home after work and before going out, so near to transport that it felt easy to hop on a train on a whim where now I’m put off by the idea of going places even though it’s only about 12 minutes’ walk.

Argh. I know I sound like I’m whinging. I just. I don’t like it. I don’t look forward to coming home, I don’t arrive home with a sense of relief, I don’t think of it as being home, I feel tense at the thought of the place, I feel tense being in the place, and it’s really starting to negatively affect my mood. To begin with I powered on through, got myself into a hypomanic frenzy, and worked like a demon to get the flat shipshape and homely. I did. It’s as lovely as it could possibly be. I’m basically a professional maker-nice-of-places so by all accounts it’s looking pretty good for what it is. And I thought once I’d done that I’d feel connected and at home, because that’s what usually happens. And that’s why I worked so hard on it and burned myself out and had to be signed off work for a week. At which point I had the inevitable collapse, out of which slump I don’t seem to be able to drag myself.

THis is causing problems in a variety of ways. The most immediately stressful is my dissertation, which is due on 6 September and upon which I have done so little work that I start to have a little panicky cry every time I think about it. So I try not to think about it. Which means I’m not doing any work on it. Which is definitely not helping. It got shelved while I was moving, then shelved because I wasn’t well, then I made some tentative steps and began reading, but it is not getting anything like the attention it should be and I’m masterfully procrastinating my way through any available time. Yesterday it suddenly became imperative for me to transfer all my music from my iMac to my laptop. And equally important to make Spence a mix CD. And of course it was utterly vital to write a lengthy blog about rambling nonsense. Between now and the deadline I have nine days off work. 9. And maybe two weekends. In which to research and write a 15000 word dissertation that will determine the classification of my MA. WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I BEEN DOING?! I’ve put myself through two years of stress and woe juggling full-time work with study, I clawed my way from a merit in my first year to a distinction this year, and now I’m pissing it away because my brain fell in a hole. I HATE having a brain sometimes. Well. One that falls into holes, anyway. I need to get my fucking act together, but it already feels too late.

In ongoing stress land, my current state of moderate depression, overall tenseness, instability, insecurity, and disconnection is playing silly buggers with my relationship. I’m doing that lovely thing where I feel insecure so I latch on to my partner for safety, but they can’t make me feel safe because they’re not the reason I feel insecure, so then I get irrationally angry because I think they aren’t trying hard enough and they don’t love me, so then I convert general life insecurity into person-specific insecurity and basically make them responsible for my mental and emotional stability, placing undue importance on the fluctuations within the relationship and lassoing them to life crap so that rather than distinguish between what is me feeling crap about life and what is me feeling crap about something that’s going on in the relationship, everything becomes about the relationship stuff and I cunningly avoid looking at life. Which, you know, is something I have a mega tendency to do anyway even when I’m not in a state of exacerbated instability, so really we could both do without my current with-bells-on approach. This is familiar territory, the most notable example of which was when I first moved out of home, to Brighton, and latched onto The Coward, of all people, to secure me. Which spectacularly failed of course because he was about the least capable of doing that of anyone I’ve ever met. Ugh. I hate being this girl. Needy, clingy, needy, clingy, irrationally insecure and possessive and jealous and threatened and dependent. I hate being triggered by everything. I hate not being able to extrapolate what is about what and lumping it all in together. I hate the amount of pressure I put on things. I hate this constant feeling of tension that I have where I can’t even imagine what it’s like not to feel strung out and on-edge every second of the fucking shitting day.

And, in general, everything’s a bit shit when you’re in a hole, isn’t it? So I’m hating work, and I’m feeling antisocial, I’m getting scared of going out of the house and seeing people again, I’m getting obsessed with TV shows again (Grey’s Anatomy at present), I’m finding excuses not to exercise again, I’m feeling intensely unattractive and fucked-up about my body again, I can’t seem to find anything that gives me pleasure again, I can’t seem to give much of a fuck about anything again. Again. So FUCKING boring. At the moment, I’m that girl who goes out drinking and unexpectedly crashes into hysterical tears for no apparent reason. I’m the liability. I’m trying not to put myself in situations where that can happen, since it did happen a couple of weeks ago and I had a four-hour meltdown in Fabric and had to be tightly held by one of my best friends for at least three of those hours whilst I had a lengthy and uncontrollable crying fit then shovelled into a taxi back to stupid bloody Forest Hill. My moods are all over the place. And where they’re usually sensitive and volatile, sometimes only needing a feather’s nudge to pitch them into the abyss, right now all you have to do is look at them funny and they jump in of their own accord.

I just. It’s boring. And it’s hard for the people around me. And it sucks balls. It’s always intensely frustrating and insensitive of people to say ‘what do you have to be depressed about?’ as if having an illness is ‘about’ anything, but aside from the fact that the whole deal with depression being precisely that it isn’t ‘about’ something, it just is, it’s also so so so so SO frustrating simply on the level of not even feeling that guilt about being depressed when you have a ‘great life’ but of knowing that you do have some great things in your life and desperately wanting to enjoy them and not being able to. I’m so lucky to be doing an MA and I want to ENJOY my dissertation rather than feel it like a heavy tractor mowing over me. I’m so stupidly lucky to be loved by the most amazing man and I want to ENJOY that, to relax and just enjoy and appreciate and believe in the love rather than feel constantly terrified and insecure and being a person who isn’t nice to be around, who’s too busy being neurotic to fully engage in the relationship. I’m living in a new place and it’s got loads of great things to explore and I want to want to explore them, and I want to ENJOY it rather than feel completely despondent about even leaving the house. I’ve got a social network full of fabulous friends, and I want to want to see them, and I want to ENJOY their company rather than feeling distracted and afraid and like having conversations is too much effort.

I hope that this is my bottom moment. That getting off the train tonight and walking home thinking about this, realising all this, seeing the effects that my low-level feeling of homelessness and attendant contained freakout are having on other areas of my life, is the point at which I acknowledge what is going on, register it, and start to try and do something about it. Usually there is a time like this, when things have been wonky for a while but I haven’t joined the dots yet, and it’s the pivotal point, the landing point, the point at which I realise that I have stopped falling, and therefore realise that until now I have been falling, and the point at which I have a footing from which to start climbing back up from whence I came. Recognising what is happening is the first step. Seeing it. At least, that’s how it’s worked in the past, and I can only hope that it’s how it’s going to work again, that from here I will collect up my bits and pieces and move up out of the hole.

Home, and a Digression into Other Things

A month or so ago my landlord told me he was increasing the rent on my flat by almost 20%. By this he meant that he had been approached by previous tenants who were willing to pay the increased rent and he wanted to leave the rent-collection agency he was with to avoid commission, so although he pretended to give me the option to stay, it transpired, on further probing, that this was not possible. Even if I could afford the massive hike.

So I started flat-hunting. Which was depressing. When I moved to Brockley back in 2009 it was an unknown pocket of pleasant greenery and booming gun/knife crime. It wasn’t on the tube map, no-one had ever heard of it, and its situation between the less-than-salubrious areas of Deptford, New Cross, Lewisham, and Catford, kept the rents comparatively low for a zone 2 location less than 10 minutes’ train ride from London Bridge.

In 2010 the ginger line opened and suddenly Brockley began to catch the eyes of young people wanting to start families, and property developers. The gentrification of south-east London boomed in Brockley, with new cafes, bars, and children’s clothing shops cropping up apace. It was on the map, it was better-connected (although it was always well-served by buses from both the Brockley Road and Lewisham Way sides, as well as the mainline to London Bridge, the DLR at a short walk to Deptford Bridge, and the Cannon Street line from New Cross – very handy when the other mainline was down for engineering work), and the lovely Victorian houses, parks, and cemeteries, have seen an influx of more affluent professionals than were previously typical of deprived boroughs like Lewisham.

Great! It’s made it a nicer place to live in a lot of ways, and the ginger line is super-useful. Rent, though, has become completely ridiculous. I earn a reasonably good wage and it’s been nearly impossible to find anywhere I can afford to live without contemplating moving out to Croydon – although the further you go, the more transport costs you incur so it ends up becoming a false economy anyway. I have now found a nice little place in Forest Hill, but it’s a small studio (I currently live in a one-bed), it’s a zone further out, and it’s still higher rent than I’m currently paying. It’s not like it’s news to anyone that rent in London is utterly absurd and is soon going to become an untenable situation if it increases at the rate it currently is whilst wages go up by about tuppence a year. And that’s not really the point of this entry anyway so I don’t know why I’m waffling on about it so much. Context, but context with digression as always…

The point is, I have found somewhere (yay!) but as relieved and pleased as I am about not being properly Homeless, once the joy of having my offer accepted yesterday wore off it was replaced with the unsettled feeling of being, in some sense, homeless. Temporarily, yes, but still. It’s an upheaval. It’s like it suddenly sunk in that I’m moving, I’m leaving my home (not helped by the fact I didn’t have any choice in the matter). And I’m excited about being in a new place (it has a little garden! I’ve been longing for outside space for SO LONG so I’m super super super enthused about that) and I’m in many ways looking forward to exploring Forest Hill and getting to know my new ‘hood…. BUT… It’s still hard. Home, the concept and the actual place, is an important thing for me. Having a stable home makes me more stable, a tidy home makes my brain tidy, familiar surroundings put me at ease, knowing where to go for what gives me confidence. I find it profoundly uncomfortable going through change, it makes me feel insecure and unsafe and afraid. I’ll soon settle in, I know, but for the time being it’s like being in limbo – my current flat doesn’t feel like home any more because I know I’m going to be leaving it, but I won’t move into my new place until the end of the month so I don’t quite know where I am at the moment. I didn’t really prepare myself for this sensation; I had essay deadlines and my birthday and relationship crises dominating everything for a good six weeks and now all the contracts are being finalised it’s like, oh, fuck, this is actually happening.

I’ve been in my current place for nearly four years. That’s the second longest I’ve ever lived in one property in my whole life. It’s also the first place I’ve lived in since my mum upped sticks and moved to Canada; the first place that’s been my only home. You know, in that way where most people have ‘home’ – the place they go back to each day – and ‘Home’ – their parents’, that base that you know is there, the safety net, the one you can go back to if the shit hits the fan. One of the hardest things about my mum going to Canada was losing that. The idea of home. The home we made together, which was partly located in her and partly located in the dinky little house on an estate that was the first home we owned, the first place that was really ours. It made me feel incredibly alone. And then, once I’ve got over it, it made me feel strong and resourced and like I could actually cope completely on my own. No crutches. No nets. So the flat I live in now went from being home to being Home. Or rather, it was both home and Home. So losing it is kind of like losing that original home all over again as well, if that makes any sense.

The new place will be home and Home too, at some point. And it’s not even as if I especially like where I’m living now. But nonetheless, leaving it is more scary than I thought it would be.

Compounding this is the fact that my mum, who’s been on this side of the globe since April, although I haven’t seen her much as she’s had to sofa-surf her way around and spent a couple of months in Holland, is going back to Canada on the 24th. So that emotional home is going away too, a week before my physical one. When she’s away I get used to it. It starts off painful and then becomes fine. Our relationship changes to become the kind of relationship you have with someone who lives half way across the world and seven hours behind you. It’s okay. And because it’s okay, I forget that when she comes back I get used to her being her, I invest in her being here, I always think maybe she won’t go back. Then she does. And every fucking time, for a bit, it’s like the first time she went when it nearly completely destroyed me. Every time it’s like being abandoned all over again. Every time I feel like why am I not enough for you? I know that it’s better for her to be there, I know she’s happier there, I know she can’t stay here just because I’m here when she has nothing else. Yet I can’t stop becoming the child left to the babysitter, screaming and crying because she’s going out and how could she possibly want to leave me, how could she abandon and reject me like that. I know it’s not reasonable, but that doesn’t stop the feeling being there.

Let’s not get into how this hyperbolic overreaction to perceived rejection and abandonment manifests in relationships. Suffice to say, it does, and it’s a fucking train wreck. Some aspects of BPD have lovely qualities associated with them. This one absolutely does not. It is destructive and diminishing and I loathe it. Of all the aspects of my various mental illness issues that have caused me tribulation and suffering over the years, this is candidate number one. It just causes so many problems. All I want it a stable, loving relationship in which I feel secure and safe, and it’s the one thing I have never quite managed to have. I came close, with the Cunt-Thief, and ironically his dependability and the fact I felt safe with him was precisely what attracted me, but I’ve never been free of the crippling insecurity, the ludicrous and irrational overreactions to small things, my inability to translate any tiny slight into anything other than YOU DON’T LOVE ME, SEE, HERE IS PROOF. We did have a stability and lack of drama that I thought it was impossible for me to have, especially considering my mental state was very bad at the time. And that gave me hope. But then he betrayed me worse than anyone ever has, he damaged me more than I could ever imagine him capable of, so it’s difficult to reconcile those things. He didn’t know what to do when he came home and found me under the table with a kitchen knife because he’d come home an hour later than he said he would (SEE, YOU DON’T LOVE ME), but his anger and fear were always rooted in worry, in concern, and he was good at resecuring me afterwards. My doubts about his love for me were acute and episodic, not chronic, but since then, since what he did, and since the horrendous and, in terms of my ability to trust subsequent partners, more damaging breakup with The Coward, I have significantly backtracked in my ability to feel secure, to trust another’s love, to not constantly pick up every tiny thing and see it as a sign that I shouldn’t really trust it.

I had this epiphany the other day. Something that had been bothering me for years suddenly became clear and I can’t believe I didn’t put it all in place earlier. Most of my neuroses are known to me and anyone who’s read more than a couple of entries in this blog will know that I’m obsessed with self-analysis. I have a pretty good idea what my issues are and why they are, but this one thing always troubled me.

When I’m in a relationship I have this overwhelming impulse to want to practically surgically attach the other person to me. I feel an urgency to see them all the time. I feel I want their exclusive attention. A related but separate issue is a tendency to make them reliant on me so they need me and won’t leave me. But this impulse to see them all the time is the one that confused me. Because I like my space. A lot. I need it, I want it, when I’m single I have it in abundance and enjoy it, but once I’m in a relationship I find it really hard to not spend that time feeling insecure and wishing they were with me. Things I previously liked to do alone don’t look appealing unless they’re there. I couldn’t reconcile the strength of the urge with the knowledge that it’s not what I really want. The childish yearnings of my ego are at odds with what I know is actually good for me. I don’t want to give my life over completely to another person, I don’t want them to be my only focus, I don’t want to spend every minute with them, I don’t want them to do any of these things in return, either. I want to be an independent person and I hate feeling stifled but at the same time I become unable to be independent or to enjoy my independence. I’d obviously got as far as realising that this is all grounded in intense insecurity, but I was still puzzled about the importance of physically seeing each other, because of course people can make you feel secure in a bunch of ways that don’t involve staring at your face.

Then I linked it up with a more general issue that I’ve written about before here, which is the feeling that each time I see someone I have to win them over again. Like each time I see them is the first time we’ve met. That there is no basic trajectory of love and friendship underpinning our relationship; that each time we part, and the longer we’re parted for the more likely it is, they will stop loving me. If I’m not right there, they will think about all the ways I’m shit and wonder what the hell they’re doing being friends with me and I will never see them again. That when they go, especially if we don’t have the next arrangement booked in, they will never come back.

So DUH! It’s completely fucking obvious that the same thing is happening in my capital-R relationships too. If they are not with me they will fall out of love with me. Once they have gone there will be no reason for them to come back. While they’re there I can see how they feel, I can be safe in the concreteness of their presence, I can distract them from contemplating the relationship too much. It’s harder to abandon someone if you’re right there with them.

Thus although I don’t really want to spend all my time with one person, I don’t truly desire no personal space, the reason I stop enjoying that when I’m in a relationship is because I spend all that space terrified that they are going to leave. Much as it sickens me to admit it, I need regular reassurance – less as time goes on, as I get the reassurance I need and begin to trust the truth of it, but if I don’t get it I become steadily worse, worse, worse. For me, most of the time, the words ‘I love you’ expire as soon as they’re spoken. They were true in that moment perhaps but there is nothing to stop them becoming untrue in the next. I think that’s why I place such importance on physical evidence – gifts, hand-written notes, mix CDs – because they somehow anchor feelings into tangible objects. This necklace is a symbol and receptacle of love. I can relate to it as love.

I guess I just have quite a strict idea of what means love. A gift means I love you. Doing the washing up means I love you. Turning up at the arranged time means I love you. Massaging my feet means I love you. I also have strict ideas of what means not love. Things done and not done are not just things but carriers of love. Symbols of love. This point is a problem in arguments because – although I wager this is mostly wilful obtuseness – the other person usually counters with ‘all this over xxxx? All this over a tiny thing? All this because I did/didn’t do some trivial whatever?’. And it’s like no, no, all this because you don’t love me. All this because that thing you didn’t do or did do carries the message, to me, that you don’t love me, that you don’t care. An argument is almost never about what it’s ‘about’. We are not arguing about a picnic, we are arguing about what the picnic represents. We are arguing, really, about feelings. I am saying ‘I am hurt’ and you are saying ‘it’s a trivial thing, don’t be unreasonable’ and I am hearing ‘your feelings are trivial because they are about something small and I refuse to acknowledge that the something small is not small for you and that this argument is not about that anyway and I care more about being right than about your feelings and because I deem your feelings unreasonable you should cease to have them’ and, strangely enough, this does nothing to ameliorate the feelings and only makes them worse. And all that needed to be said was ‘I’m sorry it made you feel that way, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you and I didn’t mean to make you feel like that at all’. Which IS NOT THE SAME as admitting you’re wrong or at fault or taking responsibility for personally CAUSING the feeling, it’s just an acknowledgement and validation of the fact that, for whatever reason, the feeling is there, the feeling is happening, you can’t reason with the feeling by using logic or rationale, you don’t have to say sorry for doing the thing I did, you just say sorry the thing I did made you feel like that, I see and hear your feeling and I don’t need to understand it or think it’s reasonable in order to recognise that for you it is distressing and because I love you I don’t want you to be distressed. The problem is with arguments that stem from the ‘you don’t love me’ feeling is that if the other person just defends their position and tells you you’re being ridiculous it only serves as evidence that you’re right, that winning the argument is more important to them than acknowledging your pain, that standing in ‘I haven’t done anything wrong so get the fuck over it and I’m not going to dignify your feelings because I am in the right’ matters more than bringing the situation down to a calmer place because what does it fucking matter whether you’re right or not? What’s the point in ‘winning’ an argument if all it does is cause tension and disharmony and pain? It’s not even about right or wrong or winning or not winning, it’s about one person saying they’re hurt and the other person trying to find a way to help – yes, without compromising your integrity or admitting fault for things that aren’t your fault, or saying you’re wrong just to placate someone, but there are so many ways to prevent a discussion turning into an argument or turn an argument back to a discussion and none of them involve pride and right and wrong and winning. They involve compassion and acknowledgement and recognition that you don’t have to become a doormat or renounce your actions or take responsibility or blame for things you feel were correct and justified in order to validate the fact that regardless of how correct or justified or well-intended those actions were, someone felt hurt as a result. Everyone has their soft spots and insecurities. Everyone can be triggered by what seem like tiny things to the one with their finger on the trigger. It’s easy to set someone off by accident and it should be easy to apologise for an accident because you know it’s not your fault. We’re good at apologising for accidents in real life, and it’s an unwritten rule that we all know it’s not actually the fault of anyone, it’s just one of those things, but nonetheless if we bump someone’s shoulder on a crowded pavement or knock over a vase with our backpack or jump the queue because we didn’t realise there was more queue behind it,we apologise. We say we’re sorry because we realise that our actions hurt or inconvenienced other people even though we had no intention to do so and it was unavoidable.

Lessons in how to avoid certain trigger points are a whole other blog entry… but I think we can do that too, and it doesn’t mean compromising ourselves or fundamentally changing, it just means learning about people, finding out what’s likely to push them into a bad place, working out how to phrase things differently or modify the way things are done so as not to press the sensitive spots. It’s always inevitable to a certain degree of course, and relationships of all kinds are hard and painful and we hurt each other all the time. But there are ways of improving, there are things to be conscious of. You keep putting the same things in, you get the same things out. Where the same problems keep coming up, I think something has to change in order for the problem to be relieved. I guess a lot of people want things to just be easy and aren’t willing to put in the work, seeing problems, especially recurring ones, as death tolls. I think if a problem keeps arising it’s just life saying ‘the way you are approaching this is not working. You need to find a new way’. Like getting stuck in the same place on a computer game I guess. You pull the same moves, the computer responds the same way. People are not so different from computers – except for the fact that we can learn and adapt. We can find a new way.

Autumn, In Pictures

We are having a good autumn here in London. Everything is behaving properly, going from green to dead in a gradual, colourful, splendid manner. Well done autumn. The last vestiges of leafy flamery are all that’s left to stop the fact that it’s mostly dark and completely fucking freezing being entirely depressing. In celebration of this, have some more photographs of the cemetery and a tempestuous Godspeed track.