Last night, probably because there was something much more pressing I should have been doing, I started rearranging books. I get this urge periodically, but I don’t think it’s necessarily symbolic of anything other than an ordinary human restlessness – “we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper…our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread,” as Alain de Botton writes, and our house is wallpapered mostly with books.

I started to think a change of scenery might be nice. I spend so much time in my upstairs study, looking down on the frozen garden in winter, the lawn overrun with elder in summer. But the last month has been a period of intense unproductivity, and maybe, I thought, there was an unfortunate bedspread in the room, derailing my sense of purpose (also, the chair downstairs is much more comfortable than the chair upstairs). So I started the shift to the downstairs study – another periodic compulsion of mine, and an obvious luxury of space. It takes me a while to move from one study to the other, although ostensibly my only tool is a laptop, because I have to arrange the space with great care: I need to make sure I have all the books I might want to refer to, the irrational little display of shells and pens, the candle I almost never light, the box of wax matches from Kenya with which to light the candle I almost never light.

Anyway, as I was arranging my most crucial books downstairs, I looked up, at this towering shelf, floor to ceiling, 9 stories high, and I was overcome with a fear that it would come crashing down on my head if I worked here. At first I thought the fear was arbitrary: I worry about everything from whether my teeth are stained to whether the world will end in a series of nuclear explosions, so why not this, too, plucked at random from the infinite list of possibilities? But it had infected my consciousness, and now I was imagining all kinds of gruesome scenarios: what if I did light that candle, and the shelf collapsed and the books went up in flames and the house burned down? Investigation seemed not just prudent but necessary for survival, so I climbed up on a stool.

The shelves themselves are just slabs of wood, resting on small protuberances which have been drilled into the wall, and my investigation revealed that the protuberances holding up the 7th shelf had come loose. There did not seem to be any immediate danger of anything collapsing, but I was nevertheless vindicated: I had averted disaster! I removed the books from the 7th shelf, set them out in stacks on the mantlepiece and, when they began to overflow even there, next to the fireplace. And now I am literally surrounded by books and only a little less afraid that they’ll all come crashing down on me.

Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options. The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.

- From “Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?” by John Tierney, New York Times Magazine, August 17th, 2011

For the past few weeks I have been trying to capture the leaves falling from the trees outside my study window on video. This is harder than it sounds; they come off in bursts, because of a gust of wind, and by the time I realize it’s happening it’s already happened. This is like Autumn itself: I always think how much I love it, the way the leaves glow and the air goes crisp, and how much I’m going to take advantage of it this year, really go for walks, really explore and enjoy it. And then one day I am at my desk, trying to capture the last yellow leaves as they come down, and I realize that I’ve missed it! Again! Already the tree nearest me is bare, save a single red leaf on the tip of a single branch, and soon the cherry trees too will be naked.

So I still have no satisfactory video footage of the leaves falling from the trees outside my study window. I do have lots of short video clips of nothing happening. Someday I will find them and wonder why they’re there. I will wonder this for about ten seconds, and then I will delete them because they’re taking up space, and who wants ten short video clips of the view they see every day?

***

Trying to capture on video something which I cannot capture on video is just one of a number of things I’ve been distracting myself with lately. (By the way, is that the correct phrase – “on video”? It seems curiously analog for a process which involves nothing more than tapping the screen of my iPhone). The problem is that I do actually have something I need to be concentrating on (namely, writing the book which is actually going to be published). I don’t mean that I can’t concentrate (I can concentrate, I sat in the same chair for several hours on Sunday and read Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam in its entirety – not a long novel, but certainly an act which requires a certain degree of concentration). I just mean that I can’t see the connections between what I’m concentrating on very well. So on the one hand I have the thing that I’m mostly working on, the thing where all of my attention should be but isn’t, quite. (Is all of anyone’s attention ever on just one thing? At least part of mine is always on worrying about whether or not I’m paying the thing I need to pay attention to enough attention instead of the thing itself.) And then on the other hand I have these other things on the fringes, which are infringing on my ability to think clearly about anything.

***

One day, convinced that nothing in the world could compel me to do good work, so why bother, I watch an old episode of Silent Witness over lunch. I’m still at my desk, which makes it seem like I haven’t thrown the towel in quite yet, or at least, I haven’t thrown all of the towel in, I’m still clutching on to one corner, like it’s a lifeline. Last week was particularly busy, I tell myself, so I deserve this hour (which turns inevitably into three). But for how long can you honestly say you ‘deserve’ something like that? When has the debt been repaid?

Anyway, watching old episodes of anything is a dangerous game for me. When I’m in the throes of a TV show obsession I am worryingly unable to cope with real life. And as a matter of fact I’ve been spending quite a lot of time watching old episodes of Silent Witness recently. After that first sneaky hour a number of others follow, until they are not sneaky anymore. I am watching an episode at lunch, an episode after lunch, an episode before dinner, an episode during dinner, an episode after dinner. I could pretend that I’m trying to find something relevant in it; that any distraction can actually be warped by willpower into something tangentially but unmistakably useful. I’m studying character development, storytelling through cinematography, whatever. But in the interest of being honest, I’ll tell you the truth, which is that I mostly watch it for the pretty faces.

Last night (or maybe this morning, at about 2 am, just before I fell asleep and had fitful dreams about solving a crime which culminated in two exactly identical bodies lying on the mortuary slabs – not twins, just two versions of the same body) – it occurred to me that I also actually just like the show. There’s no shortage of unrealistic television dramas about people who solve crimes and cut up dead bodies and do vaguely sciencey shit – CSI, the other CSI, the other CSI, and so on – but this one, for whatever reason, is my favorite. It doesn’t make me squeamish, which it should (paper cuts make me squeamish, let alone fake autopsies). It doesn’t frighten me, particularly. It walks a fine line between being too ridiculous to be worth watching and representing very finely some aspects of the human condition – elements of the soap opera combined with elements of an Ian McEwan novel, perhaps.

Between episodes, I spend some time thinking about what it means that there are so many of these kinds of shows out there and so many people watching them. I’m not qualified to speculate on this, of course. I’m sure someone somewhere has done a study on it, or written an article. But in my concentration, I don’t think to look it up. The crime element explains some of the apparently endless appeal (a number of these kinds of series have been running for over a decade) – we’re drawn to mysteries, aren’t we, they’re easy to make compelling even in an hour-long slot. But beyond that is the question of whether it is morbid or wise to surround ourselves with all of these fictional representations of mortality all of the time. These shows may not be subtle, they may not be what astute critics would sneeringly call “good television”, they may stretch the limits of our willingness to suspend disbelief, but at the core is the simple truth of life ending in death. Blah blah blah.

But yeah. Basically what it comes down to is this: I like the show because when Tom Ward and Emilia Fox smile at each other over a microscope or a corpse, it makes me smile, too.

***

To try to trick myself into thinking about the thing I should be thinking about (that’s a retrospective excuse, of course), I start a side project. Or, at least, even though it isn’t fully formed as an idea in my head yet, I describe the latest thing that’s distracting me from the thing I really need to concentrate on as a “side project” in order to validate it (everyone needs a hobby, right? So why can’t the side project just be my hobby?). I try not to make it seem too concrete, because the point at which it becomes concrete is the point at which I need to acknowledge either that it is A Thing I’m Going To Run With or A Thing I’m Going To Put On The Back Burner or, worst of all but probably most likely, Not Really A Thing At All. I try to use words that are so ambiguous that stringing them together adds no meaning: loosely speaking, I say to myself, it’s about death, depression, anxiety, memory, and purpose(lessness). It’s really very funny to me, but I don’t know why. I haven’t yet been able to pinpoint precisely what it is that makes me laugh about this.

Then, of course, I find this piece about how to write funny by Steve Almond. “As a rule,” writes Almond, “the sadder the material, the funnier the prose.”

That’s it, that’s the thing, the idea that’s distracting me, or at least that’s the idea that happens to be distracting me in the moment I read it. Take Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which for an unrelated reason has been heavily on my mind lately. No matter how many times I read it (I’ve lost count, I’m afraid to say), it always makes me laugh. That’s a good sign: if its jokes (which seems woefully the wrong word here) relied solely on something theatrical, circumstantial – misunderstandings, Shakespearean situations – surely their funniness would, gradually, start to diminish. One can generally only be delighted by an engineered joke for so long (wordplay is another matter). But the funniest bits of Vile Bodies are the saddest bits – and the book is a tragedy, really.

There’s also Geoff Dyer, who’s at his funniest when describing – well, anything, but particularly those things which on the surface appear quite serious: anxiety, depression, aging, loneliness, ruin(s). Here he is writing about having a nervous breakdown in Detroit. It’s one of the saddest and funniest things I’ve ever read:

It was raining outside. Not a howling storm, just steady drizzle. The kind of rain that yields no sense of when it might ease up, that seems to be keeping itself in reserve so that it can, if necessary, keep going till the end of time. ‘It was raining outside.’ Gore Vidal derides someone for writing a sentence like that, feigning surprise or relief that it was not raining inside. But that day in the Clique I looked down and saw that it was raining inside as well as outside. My egg-smeared plate was becoming wet. Drops of water were falling on to my toast, moistening my eggy hash browns. As I looked it rained harder and I could not see. I was crying, not sobbing, just this steady leak of tears. And then, as I realized I was crying, I felt that I was in danger of sobbing. I got a grip on myself, stopped the leak, staunched it. I ate my wet eggs and looked at the rain outside, hoping that would take my mind off the rain inside. I’m having a breakdown, I said to myself, I’m having a breakdown while having breakfast. I said this to myself to calm myself down, to try to familiarize and render ordinary the extraordinary turn of events that had led to this internal rain. I stifled my sobs and ate my breakfast which did not taste any worse because I was having a nervous breakdown. When I had finished the eggs I wiped my knife with a napkin and spread butter and apricot jelly on the whole-wheat toast. I finished the rest of my coffee. I calmed down. I was no longer leaking tears but I was no less distraught now than when I was having a nervous breakdown, which I was still having even though I had, to a degree, managed to regain control of myself.

Why is it funny? You might ask that; I’ve asked myself that. But you might just as well ask why it’s sad. The tragedy is in the comedy and the comedy is in the tragedy. That’s right, isn’t it? Like Lorrie Moore (who Almond also mentions in his article). What makes A Gate at the Stairs so funny? Certainly not its wretched outcome – or maybe that’s precisely why it’s funny. Funny for not being funny, like everything else. When I was about six years old my best friend broke her arm trying to do a back handspring in our living room. For some awful reason I began to laugh. I ran into my room with our other friend, another witness, and we giggled inconsolably, behind a shut door. I did not find it funny that my friend was scared, in pain. But something about the inevitability of the situation, perhaps, something about the irreversibility of it, elicited an involuntarily hysterical reaction – like the scene in Outnumbered where Sue submits to a fit of laughter at a funeral.

“So why are these books so funny?” Almond asks, after listing his own favorite funny books – The Catcher in the Rye, Money, Birds of America. “To begin with, because their authors reject the very premise that suffering should be treated only as an occasion for sorrow. They view suffering as something more like an inevitable cosmic joke, one that binds us all…Their characters make us laugh because they tell us the truth at a velocity that exceeds our normal standards of insight. And because they continually violate the normal boundaries of decorum, by confessing thoughts and feelings the rest of us spend our lives concealing. We’re both shocked and gratified at their candor, and so we laugh.”

***

I wish I could connect this to what I started writing about here, but as I’ve said, the bit of my brain that makes connections between things isn’t doing its job. You could blame all the TV or the navel-gazing or the short days or the pleasantly dull routine I’ve settled into or whatever, but I don’t really think it’s symptomatic of anything; it’s just the way things are at the moment.

Anyway that’s more or less what’s been going on in my head/life for the last few weeks.

But seriously, have you looked at the internet lately?

I know the internet is not just this Thing, this big mouth-breathing monster that sits in the corner and grunts occasionally and then looks back down at the keyboard. But indulge me for a moment. Pretend it is. And just look at the state of it! Greasy hair, stained t-shirt, dried spittle at the corner of a tea-stained mouth. It hasn’t been exercising enough; it hasn’t been realising its potential or even acknowledging it has worth.

Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I don’t write rants on Sundays. Sometimes I don’t write anything, all day, which is not good when that is basically what I am supposed to be doing all day, every day. But honestly, a lot of the time I can’t actually pinpoint what it is I’m thinking, or what it is exactly that’s annoying me, even when I know something is annoying me. There’s so much noise. It’s like that scene in Arcadia (which I know I reference in every other blog post), when Valentine Coverly says “There’s just too much bloody noise!” and you aren’t sure if he means there’s too much noise around his data, or too much noise in the room, in general.

I am not going to do that thing I hate and blame the Internet Monster, and say that the reason I sometimes can’t write or sometimes can’t identify what it is that’s annoying me is that the Internet Monster has been mouth-breathing in my ear all day and I’m just so…wait, what was I saying? Because I still really, really hate that. I am not going to blame one of the greatest (for better or worse) technological and possibly sociological phenomenons of our age for the fact that sometimes I sit down at my computer and instead of banging out another 2,000 words of my book I look at photos of expensive chairs and impossibly beautiful women in Barbour coats on Tumblr. Because if computers didn’t exist and I was chained to a desk writing my book in my own blood with a stick I would still find ways not to write it. I can promise you that.

But. Part of the reason I don’t write, or I don’t know what’s bothering me, or I can’t figure out what the fuck my book is supposed to be about, is because lately – in the last year, or two, maybe – I haven’t been exercising that part of my brain that ignores everybody. Everything I read or see or hear that involves anything or anyone else in some way influences what it is I think I should be doing. Which isn’t right. And because I read and see and hear a lot, my sense of what I should be doing has been completely diluted by this sense that I’m not doing what they’re doing, how can I be more like them?

I am envious or jealous almost all the time because of what other people are doing. I don’t actually know what other people are doing, of course. The lives I see online are like little icebergs, and I will never collide with most of them, so I will never know what lies beneath. But I can extrapolate from an offhand comment – “what a great day”, for instance – and, because I like to invent things, and in a perfect world I would be inventing them on paper for an adoring public, not in my head for the sake of destroying my own self-esteem, imagine that what this means is that the person who had a great day is, at 24, already a bestselling author with a Booker nomination and a big house.

I guess the thing is, there’s just so much. Of everything. I’m drowning in everything. And it isn’t that I can’t shut it off and it isn’t that the Internet Monster is destroying the world. It’s just that I’ve lost my bearings. I’m stuck in a bad maze. I’m tired of a lot of things, which is fine, but I need to know how to find the things that excite me, rather than just encountering, again and again, in different incarnations, the things I’m tired of.

There’s just so much funny, for instance. There’s so much funny that none of it is funny anymore. It’s too near the bone, or else it means nothing at all. If I read one more girl’s clever blog about her slightly zany life (and, looked at from the right angle, whose life isn’t slightly zany?) that overuses capital letters, sentence fragments and exclamation points to drive home just how FUNNY! It all is! I will probably cry. (And am I guilty of doing this? Yes. Of course I am, sometimes. I’m as susceptible as everyone else, and I know it: that’s the point.).

Meanwhile, on Twitter, that medium for even more transient expression, there are all these jokes! These one-liners that, taken out of context, are mean or meaningless or both. And all this talk about television! Increasingly I wonder if Twitter is actually just a way for people who watch a lot of TV to feel like they’re part of a community. And they can #xfactor to their hearts’ content, and Caitlin Moran can make as many quips about the contestants as she wants, and other people can retweet Caitlin Moran’s quips about the contestants as much as they like (this is not a criticism of Caitlin Moran, by the way: she is a tremendous writer, both funny and poignant, and I have a lot of respect for her). But it’s still a Sunday evening and they’re all still sitting at home alone watching television and talking about how bad it is – or, even more depressing, how good it is.

Am I jaded? Yes, I am, a bit. I’m tired of smug people telling us what they ate and wore and accomplished today. I’m tired of self-referential Techcrunch pieces, self-referential Guardian articles, self-referential tweets. I’m tired of reading blogs about how to be more productive (why do these blogs never suggest “not spending your entire morning reading blogs about productivity” as a tip for being more productive?). I’m tired of feeling perpetually as if I’m not keeping up, even when I know that everyone else feels exactly the same way, because no one could ever keep up, even if they tried.

But I’ll say again: our imaginary Internet Monster, slobbering and abused in the corner, is not the cause of my angst. You know what the cause of my angst is? My self. My negativity. It takes a certain amount of energy and imagination to sift (or, perhaps, see) through a billion photos of well-dressed people standing in the middle of the street and a bunch of blog posts about that really awkward thing I did yesterday or that really funny thing that happened to me involving a bookcase, a dildo and a dwarf, but it can be done. No one says that books should be abolished because there are some really bad authors out there (maybe some people do say that, but they’d be wrong). And no one is standing over me forcing me to spend a few hours every day looking at things that, fundamentally, are making me depressed. I’m doing that all on my own.

What is making me angsty, therefore, is not that there is so much shit: it is that I am allowing myself the luxury of getting down about all the shit, instead of ignoring all the shit. I don’t have to read the things I read, and, more importantly, I don’t have to react negatively to them.

I think maybe a year ago I was too excited about everything to ignore anything, if you see what I mean. I think a lot of us were. But now we have the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to choose what we engage with.

So welcome to the era of accountability: in which the Internet Monster stops doing the work for us, and we have to be discerning enough to discover and promote the content we actually care about, instead of being forever mired in the content we resent. No one said it would be easy.

Oops.

So I thought it would be fun to make a list of all the things I’m currently worried about and share it with you! And then I thought that if I did that it would take me so long to write everything down that by the time I’d got to the end of the list I’d have found new things to worry about, so in fact the list would be never-ending, and let’s face it, you don’t want to read a never-ending list of things I’m worried about, and I sure as hell don’t want to have to write one.

So how about ten things I’m worried about right now? YAY! I bet you can’t wait! In no particular order except the one in which they occur to me:

1. Michele Bachmann.

2. Have I become one of those bloggers who overuses capital letters? Should I go back through everything I’ve ever written and edit out the capital letters so I don’t sound like just another one of those girls?

3. Do I have a “voice”? I went to a talk on “developing your voice as a writer” once. I don’t really remember anything about it, but I do know that it’s a thing lots of people say is important and I do know that sometimes, after I wake up feeling like the world is about to end, I write like I’m writing now, and sometimes, when I’m calmer and I’ve been reading a lot of Geoff Dyer, I write like this. Is there an overlap? Am I just inconsistent?

4. Seriously. Is Michele Bachmann for real?

5. How on earth am I ever going to earn enough money to buy the Man dozens of crisp white Brooks Brothers shirts that I can wear to lounge around the house in?

6. How on earth am I ever going to earn enough money period? I want to be able to buy a big house in the country and fill it with children and dogs and expensive shoes and artwork, or at least to not end up sleeping in the gutter wearing a plastic bag to shelter myself from the unrelenting autumn rain and living off Tesco Value white bread (that stuff isn’t really even bread anyway, it’s like chemicals in a squishy package).

7. What if writing was supposed to be my hobby, not my job?

8. What if I’m destined for obscurity? Not even miserable, spectacular, Jude Fawley-esque obscurity, but plain, simple, “I’m just existing in the margins of things” obscurity? Why does the prospect of that scare me, when fundamentally I value happiness over fame and glory?

9. Does my hair make my face look fat?

10. Should I worry that all of my worrying probably makes me more prone to disease?

BONUS #11: Was this an appropriately diverse list of things I’m worried about? Did I get the balance right? I don’t want to bring everyone down by being too serious, but also I don’t want people to think I’m not serious enough. Life is no laughing matter but also nothing but a laughing matter.

Writing takes longer than I think it does.

I used to think I wrote quickly because I type quickly. I also type a lot. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words (probably). But I use very few of them, because ultimately very few of them mean what I want them to mean.

If I had to give a run-down of the process of writing even a simple blog post, it would go something like this:

1. Read/see/hear/do something
2. Think something
3. Write something down
4. Think something else
5. Write something else down
6. Read/see/hear/do something else
7. Read/see/hear/do something else
8. Write something else down
9. Think something else
10. Write something else down
11. Read/see/hear/do something else
12. Think something else
13. HATE EVERYTHING. DECIDE THIS WAS THE WORST IDEA EVER. Eat some cheese. Drink some cider. Have a fight about the fact that there’s no maple syrup in the house and why is maple syrup so hard to get in this backwards country? Throw a fork across the room. Break the washing-up bowl. Watch 12 episodes in a row of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, even though “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” has to be the worst Law and Order ever, apart from maybe “Law and Order: Los Angeles”. That one’s pretty bad.
14. Allow some time to pass (an hour, a week, a year?)
15. Keep reading/seeing/hearing/doing, even if it doesn’t seem relevant
16. Keep thinking
17. Edit stuff
18. Find a few key points, sentences, or quotes
19. Add some new ideas
20. Construct a completely new and much stronger piece around those things

So you can see how, even if I can theoretically average about 2,000 words a day, it takes me a long time to write anything. And sometimes I don’t even know that something I’m working on is being influenced by what I do, but it nearly always is. So a 1,000-word blog post, say (on the lengthy side, maybe, but not unusual for me) that only appears to take me about two or three hours to write and edit actually took a week, sometimes two. Sometimes it took a year. You never know.

In fact, everything takes longer than I think it does.
Going to the doctor. Going to the bank. Writing a piece of copy. Looking things up in the library. Flossing.

Journeys really are “the midwives of thought.”*

Sometimes I’m stuck on something and I don’t even know it. Almost always, a train journey or a long walk will help. It doesn’t fix everything, and it’s hard to convince myself sometimes that instead of staring at a screen in the hope that something might happen, I need to get up and do something that appears to be a waste of time, but often that is exactly what I need to do. Sometimes wasting time is the best way to spend time.

I love to cook.

I spent a long time thinking I hated to cook. I avoided the kitchen (Xander has often had to politely ask if I will at least come and sit and chat with him while he makes dinner). I avoided making anything more complicated than avocado on toast. I used to say, and convinced myself that I believed, that the input of energy required to produce a meal was greater than the output was worth.

But actually, I enjoy the process and I enjoy the result and I’ve been cooking a lot. It makes me feel more human and more constructive, especially when I’ve spent the day sitting in my study watching pigeons having sex in a tree and reading five essays about David Foster Wallace (is now a bad time to admit that I’ve never read anything by David Foster Wallace?) and not talking to anyone except to say no to the guy from the WWF who comes by asking for money.

I don’t work well in the mornings.

I don’t mean to say I can’t wake up and function – I can and (mostly, sometimes) do. But I don’t think very clearly. Until about 1 or 2 in the afternoon I don’t create very well. Prime time for me is between about 3 pm and 9 pm, give or take a few hours.

For about two weeks after I left my job, I fought this, confusingly trying to establish a routine as similar as possible to the one I made a deliberate choice to abandon, trying to fit “work” into the window between 9 am and 6 pm.

And I know I’m far from the first person to have this realisation, but I no longer have to work that way! So sometimes, when all I can concentrate at 10:30 am is the fact that I’ve been at my desk for an hour and haven’t done anything useful yet, I get up and walk away.

*Alain de Botton’s phrase, not mine.

So I’ve been writing again. Not that you’d know it: the result of three straight days of working on one piece, for instance, was 3,000 words that, once finished, I wanted to immediately erase from both the page and my memory.

I’m not going to lie and tell you that I am waking up at 6 am raring to go and spending the next 10 hours at my computer writing furiously, even though theoretically I could be doing that, because theoretically – THEORETICALLY – I have time for that now. It would be unfair to give you the impression that I was doing that. I’m not doing that. I am mostly sitting and looking out my window, considering the particular Englishness of the greens and greys, wondering whether there is a way to rid a garden of elder, noticing that the hole in my favorite (or at least most worn) jeans is getting bigger, realising that I’m unlikely to replace them until they become completely unwearable, deciding what I really need is a cup of coffee: a cup of coffee will fix it (whatever it is)! And then, occasionally, spitefully, typing something, hitting the keyboard too hard because the sound of writing happening is so rare and pleasant.

I am trying to get up a bit earlier, though. That’s a lie. I’m trying to get up in a more normal way. Over the last year I’ve developed a seriously fucked up method of waking up, which involves setting my alarm for an hour, sometimes two hours, before I actually want to get out of bed, and then hitting snooze for that hour (or two). Every single day.

In a way I enjoy the sensation of waking up and dozing: of becoming aware of things, of becoming aware of the pleasure of going back to sleep. When you just sleep straight through, you don’t get to appreciate how nice it is to sleep. The flipside is that when you’re appreciating how nice it is to sleep, you’re not wanting to get up, which means you waste two hours every morning sort of sleeping but not really sleeping.

So I downloaded this app for my iPhone which supposedly wakes you up in a more natural way. You put the phone on your bed and it senses when you’re awakeish and that’s when the alarm goes off. It gives you a half hour window, and the snooze time varies. I’ve been using it for a few days. It seems to work, except for yesterday, when I was simply too grumpy to get out of bed, and the day before, when someone knocked on the door at 7:30 and I staggered downstairs in a dressing gown to discover it was a man asking if we could move our car, only it wasn’t our car because we don’t own a car, so I went back upstairs and then was retrospectively annoyed about the whole thing so went back to sleep for an hour.

But even so, even though I’m slowly and half heartedly trying to sort out my fucked-up waking up habits, I’m still not waking up and leaping out of bed and writing stuff for hours and hours.

No. This is what I do:

I say, “Oh, I’m going to write something today!” And I sit down in front of the computer and I think, “Oh, I’ll just read an article or two. To inspire myself.” And so I read an article or two, and I click on a few more links, and check Twitter, where everyone is more successful and interesting than me. Three hours later, I find myself hunched over my desk looking at pretty dresses online, deeply depressed because:

a) I can’t afford all the pretty dresses
b) I will never be able to afford the pretty dresses because over the course of the morning I’ve forgotten how to write
c) It doesn’t matter anyway, because even when I could write I was never as good as all the really good writers out there
d) So I don’t deserve all the pretty dresses anyway

So I eat some beans on toast to cheer myself up and watch Alain de Botton talk about architecture and freak out because I haven’t written anything yet and the day is almost over, even though it’s only 1 o’clock (it’s like that feeling on Sundays you get upon waking, that the day is almost over simply by having begun). So I write a few words.

And then I spend the next six hours doing it all over again.

I find everything stressful. Including things that are relaxing and enjoyable to other people. Like listening to live music, for instance.

It’s fine if I can sit down. But at a festival, say, when a band is up on stage and a large army audience is thrashing around me like a school of unruly fish, I become consumed by this thought: I don’t know what to do with my hands.

I also don’t know what to do with my feet. Or my head. Or my fingers or my toes or my hair, for that matter. So while the band plays, I just stand there and clutch my heavy handbag (I obviously have to bring two books minimum to a gig, don’t you?) and feel self-conscious.

Do you know what it’s like to be self-conscious? It feels like everyone can see inside you. They can see your blood pumping in your veins, and they disapprove of it.

So I go to gigs, and everyone watches me, even the band, and I don’t move. At all. Because I can’t move. Because I don’t know what to do with my hands and I’m not drunk enough not to care what I look like. In fact I’m not even holding a drink, because if I try to hold a drink I end up spilling it when some carefree girl* bumps into me.

It never used to matter. In my early gig-going days I was too busy trying to avoid getting elbowed in the face by wannabe punk-rock boys with blue hair, red zits and Dickies shorts to have much time to worry about what I looked like (if I was concerned about what I looked like, I wouldn’t have dyed my hair maroon).

But later, when I’d outgrown the maroon hair, I realized this: I never know what to do with myself. I don’t know what to do with myself at parties or in the pub or when I meet someone I know in the street. I certainly don’t know what to do with myself when I have the option to move all of my limbs, unfettered by the need to maintain dignity (because, let’s face it, there is not a single dignified thing about a festival).

So I stand there. Eventually maybe I tap my foot. I like the foot tap: it implies I have a sense of rhythm, that I’m really appreciating the music. But my hands are resolutely limp and until someone tells me WHAT THE HELL TO DO WITH THEM they will remain so.

Now stop staring at me and go listen to some music.

*Oh, you know exactly the sort of girl I mean. She flaps her arms haphazardly and manages to look like Martha Graham; she’s been drinking heavily since last night but her heavy mascara hasn’t run yet and she’s just so cool, she doesn’t give a shit what she looks like and she looks great.

I hadn’t been reading very much lately. I was in the process of reading many books, all at once – about six or seven of them, each of which I was quite devoted to and determined to finish, in my own way – but I hadn’t been reading very much. I was reading a few pages at a time, here and there. In fact the last thing I had really read was Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do it, which is where I had read this:

“As I sat by the Mississippi one afternoon, a freight rumbled past on the railroad track behind me, moving very slowly. I’d always wanted to hop a freight, and I sprang up, trying to muster up the courage to leap aboard. The length of the train and its slow speed meant that I had a long time – too long – to contemplate hauling myself aboard, but I was frightened of getting into trouble or injuring myself, and I stood there for five minutes, watching the boxcars clank past, until finally there wer no more carriages and the train had passed…Instead of hopping the freight, I went back to my apartment on Esplanade and had the character in the novel I was working on do so. When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things – as opposed to making things up – that did not quite happen.”

***

Once, in Greece, I got on a ferry and then sat thinking about getting off the ferry again. I was 17 and it was my first time abroad without my parents, and it was hot and when the evening wind came up it sort of sucked all the sense out of you. So I thought it would be nice to get off the ferry; to stay on the island instead of going back to Athens and then the next day back to California. But, like Dyer, I had too much time to think, and by the time I realised I was actually quite serious about it, we had already pulled away from the island, it was already becoming something small and distant, so my own slowness of thought had saved me from doing something potentially very stupid.

***

Now I found myself in a similar situation, except that it wasn’t at all similar. It was only similar in that I had to make a decision. Or I didn’t have to make a decision, in which case I would carry on in the way that I had been, which was a decision of sorts.

Anyway eventually I made the decision to leave my job. Sort of. I guess I was just fed up with writing in the cracks between Work and Sleep, which were very tiny cracks. So I left my job to go freelance. Which is what I’m doing now. I’ve been doing it for three days, and so far it is going well, though probably three days isn’t really long enough to tell how something will end up.

It’s not really a very interesting thing to do. Lots of people do it, particularly lots of people my age, I think. But it’s interesting for me because I’m very practical about things. I didn’t get off the ferry. I wouldn’t have hopped the freight. I would write about people doing these things, I would make up for the things that did not quite happen in all sorts of ways, but I would stay put.

People kept saying, well, at least you have a job! Which was true: at least I did, unlike all the many other people who didn’t. And in fact I had a very good job, working with clever people that I liked and respected, being paid fairly (and regularly) and given the opportunity to learn things and take on new responsibilities. I suppose that five or six years ago, when I was in college and thinking about what would happen after, this situation would have looked very appealing to me. In some ways it still does look appealing. But so does the view from my study, overlooking the overgrown garden.

So in a way I did finally hop a freight.

It was springtime in Oxford and the cherry blossoms were blooming and there was something not quite right. This was supposed to be the buoyant time of year, but I kept waking up in the hot blue depths of the pre-dawn with no breath, my heart beating too fast. I remembered feeling like this once or twice before, or maybe it was more than that: I remembered feeling like this for weeks at a time, but I thought I had put all that behind me. So now I thought: am I dying? Well, maybe. But also maybe I have felt this way before and asked myself the same question, needlessly, and been okay, so maybe I will also be okay this time too. But then I thought: well, perhaps this time is different. I thought that perhaps in the morning, if I was not dead, I should make an appointment with the doctor. All those vertiginous nights and I had learned nothing! But in the end I never made an appointment with the doctor, not about that, anyway, and I kept waking up, which was, I eventually decided, a good sign.

When I began to examine my situation, I realised that at the heart of it was this: I could not decide anything, but I was running out of time. I was both very young and very old simultaneously: maybe the tightness in my chest was simply the weight, the vice-grip of missed opportunity. But also I looked around and everyone was older than me. My friends were all older than me. My boyfriend was older than me. We kept talking abstractly but also very seriously about babies, each of us trying to impart some sense of urgency to the other whilst also, at the same time, trying to make light of the situation, to stop the progress in case we had misunderstood each other. He was five years older than me: that was a lifetime, it was nothing. I was still young, to have children, but he was old, even though he was young too. I kept thinking about it this way: as if age somehow mattered.

Only of course it did matter. Age had always mattered. I had always been younger; I had been propelled forward, skipped a grade, left to flounder with my patchy understanding of long division and joined-up writing, encouraged to consider myself intellectually precocious even while I struggled with basic social interactions. But now I was reading articles in the newspaper about how fragile fertility really was, which did not help things, because I was already worried, again needlessly, again powerfully, about fertility. I wanted to go to the doctor and ask, but I did not know how to, and I did not want to have a conversation about how young I was, how much time I had left, because I was not young! I had so little time left!

***

His grandfather kept asking why we were not yet married. It had been four years and I suppose it was not an unreasonable question. We asked ourselves the same thing, too, and I could never find a satisfactory answer except that we weren’t. It was very simple, really. We had lived together from the start and there had never been any doubt about the seriousness of our situation, of our strange devotion, and yet even when we did talk about getting married we talked about it as very young people are apt to do: as a thing for the future. And yet here we were four years later, the future was upon us! So we simply hadn’t caught up with ourselves. But it was hard to say this to a 90-year old man who wanted to see his first grandson married. You see? Age did matter after all.

***

But the real issue was that I could not decide anything. For instance I could not decide if I wanted to commit to children. I mean, I did, really. I thought about my own parents, who had not the benefit, as we ourselves had, of all this time and youth. My mother was 36 when she had me, but this was not, I had begun to realize, really the conscious decision I had always imagined it to be: it was not necessarily about feminism, or about putting a career first, or even about indecision. It was on the other hand at least partly to do with the fact that she simply had not met my father sooner, and so had not the same luxury of time that we, theoretically, had.

But then again I thought about how little I had done so far and how much I did not want to feel useless. I thought about how unprepared we really were. Neither of us had any money to speak of or any prospect of earning very much money ever. We did not own a house and although we had a very understanding landlord in Ireland who did not charge us very much to live in a beautiful terraced house with a big garden in East Oxford down the road from our favourite pub we had very little stability, because while this arrangement might last forever, or at least for a long time, it might also not, and if it did not, I couldn’t see what we’d do. We’d been utterly ruined by living in this beautiful house and I did not know where else in Oxford we could go and be happy as we were happy in this place, at home as we were at home here at home.

But then perhaps it would not matter: we had always said, for instance, how we wanted to move to the US at some point. I couldn’t even decide about this, now: I was so happy in Oxford (even when I was desperately unhappy), I had such a sense of community (even when I felt lonely), I rode my bicycle through the city centre every single day and every single day I was overcome with this sensation that I belonged here: or at least, that I wanted to belong here. The beauty had not gotten old and familiarity had not ruined the novelty of finding myself here, of all places. So where else would we go, and why would we go there? But at the same time we liked the idea of being the sort of people who could get up and go, who could raise children in two countries, or three. And he was deliberately setting up a portable life: a career that allowed for flexibility.

***

This was another problem: careers. I had none. I did have a job, where I spent eight or nine hours every day, with people I liked very much, performing tasks I mostly had no passion for. But anyway a job is not a career, and the real problem is that I could not do the things I really wanted to do. I could not write, much, because I had no time and no energy and then whenever I did write it came out all jumbled and depressed, or else I worked on a novel that I could not decide what I felt about. In some ways I thought it was very good but there were also ways I suspected it was very bad, and I was afraid of finding out which bits were which, in case I had to confront the fact that I would have to do something very seriously different with it to make it readable. And of course I knew that even if it was readable, it wouldn’t necessarily be what I wanted it to be, and even if it was what I wanted it to be, it wouldn’t necessarily be published, let alone read. So it seemed a bit of a dead-end, or at least, not the best way to spend what precious time I had to myself.

***

With the rest of my hours I slept and swam. And I thought about how I wanted not to have to swim every evening with the rest of the weary workers: all of us slogging through our days, slapping our arms against the water, mouths moving open like fish lips as we rolled our heads to the side to receive air. I wanted to swim at midday, maybe. Or midmorning. Or mid-anything. Just anytime that was the time I chose and not the time that had been given to me.

So then I thought that if I felt that way about my time, perhaps children were not right, because the thing I knew, one of the very few things I knew, about children was that when you had them you had no control anymore over your time. You would be awoken again and again in the night and then for twenty years you would give yourself to something else. But then I thought that this was just what I needed: a real reason to not be selfish, not a fake reason, not a salary or a fear.

***

There were certain things I did know. I knew that I was in a holding pattern, I knew that something would have to give or be given, and soon. I knew, too, that in the end we would be alright, that it did not matter if we did not have a house or even if we were not married, and that since we did after all love each other there was no real reason to think that we would not find a way to support a family if we wanted to. I knew also that I did not want to raise a family on unhappiness, and the situation I had got myself into was an unhappy one, because it was not one in which I was doing something I wanted to do. I knew that I had to write something. I knew that I had to keep swimming, because it was the first thing I had found in a long time that gave me the peace of mind they say exercise is supposed to give you. I used run, but the problem with running was the impact: I got a bad knee from it (this was why I had started swimming in the first place), my side often hurt and I would have to cut the run short (later the doctor told me that this was because of my hip and too many years of running on hard surfaces). I had liked running, and I still liked it, but not in the same way. It left me tired, which is a good feeling to have but not always as good as feeling simply buoyant. I guess perhaps it was just that the act of floating seemed a small miracle. My own mother could not swim, and yet I had been given the ability to, I had had lessons and an upbringing by the beach. And my grandmother, now in her 80s, had been swimming practically her whole life and still did it regularly.

I even knew that all my obsessive worry was irrational, and that I was waking up in the middle of the night for nothing, and that I was very lucky in very many ways, and that I was thinking too hard about too many things that were too far in the future for me to have any control over. But even so I kept worrying and I kept waking up.

***

My thinking was very circular. I would think for a time – any time, in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, halfway through a meeting, staring at a slide being projected onto the wall or at my desk looking out at the tennis courts and watching a pair of white-haired men send the ball back and forth on the grass courts. And then I would reach the place I had started: a question, a series of questions. I would find myself unable to understand if I knew what I wanted or only knew what I thought I wanted (or were these the same thing?), if I was able to move forward or not. So I would keep staring out the window. And meanwhile, all the while, time was passing me by, or I was moving with it, or anyway I was getting older, if imperceptibly.

Perhaps this is what they mean by growing up: the awareness not of mortality – nothing so grand – but simply of each moment. The ability to literally feel the length of a second or an hour, and to place that second or that hour in context, to know how much it means. But in any case I did not really want to be grown up: I only wanted to sleep through the night, I only wanted to find it not such an effort to smile at people or even at myself in the mirror. I wanted to cut my hair short, even though I worried I never would, in the same way I wanted to say, ‘I want to start a family now, because why not?’ even though I knew I would not say that, yet. I worried what would happen but also wanted to know what would happen if I did do these sorts of things.

I told myself that in a way, once before, I had done something like this: I had simply moved to Oxford, which went against logic, which was not the easy or even necessarily possible thing to do, and yet I had done it and it had been easy and we had made it possible. And it was the best thing I had done, it was one of the only things I could not convince myself, if I tried, to regret: no amount of convincing would make even my wretched anxious self think that that had been at all a bad idea, even if it had not always been good, even if I had not always been smart about it, even if we had struggled.

So I thought I should be comforted by that.