I can’t really seem to blog. I have all these things to say, I think, except that when I sit down to say them it turns out that all I really have to say is that I have something to say and I don’t know what it is. So I think, well, I will just come back to it later, when the light is tilting through the window at a slightly different angle and I am sitting more upright and the air smells softer and circumstances are Just Right. And then when I come back to it later the light is tilting through the window at exactly the wrong angle and I can’t sit up straight because I’m too sleepy to do anything but slump and the air smells of tea and reminds me that I haven’t had anything to eat for awhile, so I think I’ll have a snack and a glass of water and come back to it later and then I end up having a nap on the couch and then the sun is going to go down soon so I feel I should go outside even though I don’t want to, so that later I don’t regret not going outside when the light was good and the coyotes weren’t howling menacingly on the hillsides.

Each day has been like this, but a bit different. On sunny days I have sat outside on the bench with a cup of tea and read Geoff Dyer and Alain de Botton and admired the simplicity, the complexity of their work, and thought how if I could only clarify my thoughts enough, even for an afternoon, I could do that, too. On rainy days I have watched the windows being washed by a downpour and thought that it would be a good moment to write except not now, not just yet – and then it’s turned into another week and still it is not the right time. And then I think: the right time for what, exactly? If only I knew that, if only I knew what to begin, I could begin.

This is also how I feel about my book. I have begun it probably a thousand different times, and still I don’t know how to begin it. I keep expecting it to be like the start of a race; I will screw the spikes into my shoes and place my foot at the line and wait for the gun, and as soon as I hear the gun I will know what to do, because there is really only one direction to go: forward, around the curve of the track, until you reach the end. When I ran track I was never very good at speed but I could pace myself pretty well. I think I could pace myself pretty well with this book if only there was a track. Sometimes I try to create one; I make maps and plans, but there’s no gun, and anyway I get confused – is the line at the beginning or the end of the race, or is it actually at the middle? So I sit and think about this for awhile: about beginnings and middles and ends, and how the problem is that I think everything is a middle even when logically it can’t be. And then I realize that it’s been another year and I still don’t have this book and every year I grow increasingly frightened of it, and increasingly obsessed with the idea that if only I could write it, things would be okay, because I could move on to another project, which would be an easier project because it would not be This Project. But I must first finish This Project, only a) I do not know how to begin so that I can finish; and b) even if I were to begin, I am too afraid to finish it because I do not know what happens next. So I cannot finish This Project so I cannot begin the next. This is the art of circular thinking and in a way it is just like a race: when you finish, you are just where you began, except tireder.

So I make another cup of tea and look out the window and do not write the blog post I think I meant to write because I will write that when the light is different and the wind stronger.

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I am under the impression that a holiday should be a respite from memory and planning, but all I seem able to do, now, on my holiday, is remember and plan. Or not plan, as the case may be. I mostly just think wistfully of the inevitable return to the workday slog, think I should appreciate my freedom now, when I have it, think why am I not doing more with it?

The unbelievable pressure of freedom leads me to do nothing at all; I feel like Geoff Dyer trying to write his study of D.H. Lawrence – or rather not trying, rather doing everything in his power to not write it under the guise of doing everyone in his power to write it. The problem is that I’m sure, on a holiday, you’re meant to do both nothing at all, and everything you always mean to do but never quite get around to, simultaneously. And you just end up being caught in the middle, in a space bordered on all sides by a Great Wall of Impossibility.

Maybe it is the fact of being in the house that I grew up in. Other versions of myself – the horse-obsessed child, the secretive adolescent, the sullen teenager – keep encroaching. In a cupboard in the room we’re staying in is a stack of journals. I began the first volume in my twelfth year, although I had been making notes in a journal-like fashion for many years before that. I tried reading it, but it was too shy-making, as Agatha Runcible might have said; I did not like to think I had been (even though I already had been) a 12-year-old girl who wrote like the male narrator of a bad 1930s mystery novel because she had mostly been reading Agatha Christie and hadn’t yet learned to distinguish the past from the present, entirely.

It’s possible that this is the root of all of it; the impossibility of hiding from oneself. A holiday, ostensibly, is a space in which to briefly hide, but in so being, it becomes also a space in which it is impossible to hide.

I keep thinking of one winter on the ranch; I was still in high school, but I had a driver’s licence, and every morning I would drive to the beach at Bullito with the dog and we would walk through the mist to the sea wall and peer out at the glass-green Pacific Ocean. I always wore a thick blue wool jumper and a pair of cargo pants. I don’t know where my parents were; in my head, this was a routine that went on for weeks, but I don’t think I can have been left alone at the house for more than a few days. I would drive back home and have an early lunch of avocado on toast and milky chai and the way the hills had turned green after a rain put me in mind of England, so I would research study abroad programs in Oxford. The way this situation has been inverted is funny – from our home in England, I think of it nostalgically, but in the moment that I was there, on the beach, at the table with my chai, dreaming of foreign shores, I was thinking as nostalgically as one possibly can about the future. I was planning, now I am remembering, though I hardly know the difference.

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Today I am seriously pissed off with Anxiety.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Anxiety is a little conniving monster, and when I wake up in the morning so does it, all green-faced and raring to go. Anxiety is a very subtle monster. It never pushes me into things; instead, it places its frothing mouth close to my ear and makes suggestions. So when I reflect upon my recent bout of self-doubt and aimlessness, and think (because it sounds both glamorous and plausible, if a little ridiculous), maybe I’m having a quarter-life crisis!, Anxiety sniggers, licks its lips, and says, Maybe you are! Or, maybe, MAYBE, it’s something else! Like, say, I don’t know, the lack of medication. But I don’t know. I could be wrong! It’s probably just a phase!

And then I lie there thinking, oh great, this is just the level of stress and worry I’m going to have to live with now that I’m not on drugs (or nearly not on drugs – it’s taken me over a year and still counting to wean myself completely off of them, but that’s probably another story entirely). And in another month, I think, I’ll probably just go back to the doctor and ask to be given another prescription, which seems a bit of a shame, really.

Here’s a partial list of things I worry about:
Will I get to sleep tonight?
Will I wake up in the morning?
Am I too old to start doing anything meaningful?
Am I too young to start doing anything meaningful?
What do I want to do? What if I never know?
Is the tightness in my chest a sign that I’m going to have a heart attack, or is it just the anxiety? How can I tell?
Did I completely embarrass myself that one time at the pub three months ago when I spilled a bit of my drink?
Consequently, will anybody ever speak to me again?

All of those things are STUPID and POINTLESS. I only ever seem to worry about things that I can’t do anything about. I think this must be because it’s easier. This way, I can pour all my energy into the anxiety and not have to do anything constructive. Thanks, brain! You’re basically trying to sabotage my productivity, so that I can continue to worry! Yay!

On the bright side, you’ll notice I’m no longer worrying about things like, how am I going to pay my bills? Can I afford to buy a pair of cheer-me-up heels from eBay? And I’m never thinking, Is he cheating on me? Does he love me?

So I’ve got lots of good things going for me. Which is what makes it even STUPIDER. I’m not even unhappy! I’m actually very happy! How STUPID is that? It’s like a perverted headline: Happy woman worries about why she worries when she’s fundamentally happy. It makes my head hurt just trying to work out what that means.

Sometimes I bring it up with doctors, but I’m not convinced that this is the NHS’s strongest point, for all its awesomeness, because every time I ask if there’s somebody I can talk to, they say, sure there is! And start asking me all these questions like, on a scale of 1-10, how difficult does your anxiety make it to live your life? (And how am I supposed to answer that? On the one hand, I’m here, aren’t I? I mostly do okay for myself. On the other hand, I can’t help but thing that things would be easier if I actually just did stuff sometimes, instead of overthinking EVERYTHING.) Are you unemployed or has your work ever been impacted by your anxiety? (Because my job is obviously the most important thing here?) Do you ever feel the urge to harm yourself or others?

And usually by the time they’ve got to that last question and I answer “no”, they’ve totally lost interest because I’m not on the verge of self-combusting or destroying the entire universe, and they say, “okay, then, we’ll have somebody call you,” and nobody ever does call me and I usually forget about it until the point midway through a sleepless night when I think, huh, whatever happened with that?

I keep imagining that on my records they’ve written, overly anxious about her anxiety, in the same way the dentist wrote on the Man’s file that he was non-compliant because he refused to buy an electric toothbrush. So he went out and bought an electric toothbrush and although neither of us has ever used it, it now sits there in the bathroom like a big fuck you to the dentist, who can now change the Man’s status to something like, partially compliant, but mostly contrary.

Meanwhile the Anxiety-Monster, slobbering its way through the day, suggests to me that talking to someone probably wouldn’t really help, anyway, BUT I COULD BE WRONG, and I think maybe I should just go for a run to clear my head, except that what if that annoying pain I got in my side last time I went running was actually something much more serious and maybe I should just take it easy and curl up on the couch and worry about what to do with myself.

Fuck you, Anxiety Monster. I’m going for a swim so that I can reflect upon how happy I am. SO THERE. SUCK IT.

p.s. On a semi (okay not really) related note, the always-brilliant Heather Armstrong at Dooce wrote a killer piece the other day about one of the more annoying side-effects of certain medications, which, by the way, NOBODY WARNED ME ABOUT.

p.p.s. Am I allowed to say “fuck” in the title of a blog post? I’m never sure if there’s some sort of etiquette about that and now I’m worried that I’m going to be sucked up into the black hole of Bloggers Who Broke The Rules and nobody will ever read anything I write again.

p.p.p.s. I’ll stop now.

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When I was a little girl everybody – my parents, my teachers, people I met in the street – told me that when I grew up, I could do whatever I liked. They didn’t tell me this because I was special or because I displayed any particular talent. They told me this because it was simply what you told children.

But nobody really thought it through, and now there’s a whole generation and a half of 20 – 30 somethings who are deeply, profoundly disappointed. Because nothing’s that simple.

You know what they didn’t tell me? They didn’t tell me: you’re going to get bills every month. You’re going to have to pay rent. You’re going to have to spend more money than seems decent at the dentist because you’re going to become very vain and not want all your teeth to fall out prematurely. You’re going to lust after expensive shoes. You’re going to buy expensive shoes, and you’re going to buy them knowing full well that a pair of boots is not a responsible investment. You’re going to discover cocktails. You’re going to discover debt.

Also they didn’t tell me other things, like, you’re going to get rejected. A lot. By people, by publications. And even worse, you’re going to be ignored! You’re going to be ignored by every major newspaper in the English-speaking world! You’re going to have job interviews that go really badly. You’re not going to get an “A” in every class and when you graduate from college you’re probably not going to have a clue what to do with yourself, even though you have a degree, so you’ll move across the ocean just to make things more interesting (and consequently more difficult). And then you’ll get another degree and guess what? You still won’t know what to do with yourself. You’ll never know what to do with yourself. They didn’t tell me that you can’t control who you fall in love with, or where he happens to be from.

Not that I’d have wanted them to. The entrance to adulthood is the first time we make these discoveries, and that’s part of the fun (the first time I paid a bill with my own money, I felt a shiver of pride. It was quickly replaced by a shiver of fear and horror, because responsibility feels like that, but there was a blissful moment whereby I accepted my responsibility for myself and enjoyed it).

The reality is somewhere between what we were set up to expect and what we’ve subsequently discovered. It’s not all shit, but it is all difficult. In a way this is good. Challenge is good. And I’m glad we were set up to be idealists. This is a beautiful thing. But the problem is, we have not prepared ourselves well for this challenge. We have dreams and an undeserved sense of entitlement that actually prevents us from properly pursuing those dreams.

Oh, it’s not quite as dramatic as all that. We’re not all slaving away in drunken ruins, falling asleep every night to the cold sound of our hopes dying (at least, not all of us). But many of us do seem to have gotten stuck. I know all these talented people, and there are some days I wake up and say, ha! 20 years from now we are going to be the creative royalty. We’ll be on Desert Island Discs remembering “our strange distorted youths”, publishing our memoirs, laughing over all the times we ran out of money or steam.

And then I remember that the one thing I’ve learned is that we can never assume this. Assumption does not equal actuality. The problem is that we assumed for too long that someday (next year, next decade) we would wake up with it all. We neglected to consider how we would get there. It’s like dreaming of crossing an ocean and forgetting that you need a boat, or a plane, or a really good pair of flippers. And money for the boat or the plane or the flippers. And the strength to undertake the journey.

So this post is for all the idealists who went to school thinking they owned the world and left thinking the world owned them. Everyone out there who is, in spite of the masters in astrophysics (or creative writing, or obscure African languages, or marine biology, or whatever), still doing things they didn’t expect to do after the degree.

Ladies and gentleman, put your flippers on.

❧

Every sunday is the same: guilt-soaked.

It starts with writer’s guilt. There’s always this point in the afternoon at which I’m on the couch and I shouldn’t be. Writing is such a self-indulgent game; nobody else profits, really. If I do or if I don’t won’t matter in the long term.

Whereas, I think, the more productive things I could be doing as I sit on the couch will matter. I could actually get dressed, which would probably improve my self-respect (an old pair of boxer shorts paired with a stained t-shirt never did anyone any favours). I could buy some puff pastry so that the man can make a tarte tatin, which will later bring us both pleasure. I could do the laundry, which will ensure that I don’t wake up one morning midweek to discover I have no clean pants. A long walk along the river would be good for my health and my sanity, even if it is cold outside. Or, if I insist on staying inside and sitting on the couch, I could respond to any one of a dozen emails.

Yes, that’s what I’ll do! I think. Something nice and easy, that will make me feel more productive than I actually am, so that when I appear in the kitchen later after the man has made soup from scratch and done all the dishes I can confidently announce that at least I’m all caught up with my correspondence. So there.

Except that email is actually just another sore point. Because of that thing, where you need to reply to an email and then you don’t and then it’s too late, and you end up looking like an asshole when all you actually wanted to do was write a thoughtful and considered response. Which is a thing I do all the time. If I haven’t responded to your email, it’s probably a good sign – it means I actually really want to. And probably won’t anytime in the near future.

It’s just that email is basically too easy. And so everybody expects you to respond swiftly. A hundred years ago, a swift response might have taken weeks, and involved actual ink, melted wax, galloping horses, ships bobbing in the sea. Nowadays a swift response takes minutes, involves only the press of a button. And for some reason this just freaks me out.

So I guess I’ll just sit here paralysed by my own guilt and anxiety, and think about all the emails I need to send, and then after all that I won’t send any of them and in a week it will be inappropriate to respond anyhow. And I’ll feel guilty about it, so I’ll try to distract myself by writing something. And then I’ll think, gee, you should really go put a bra on and brush your hair. But that will seem like such a lot of effort, so I’ll think, I know! I can catch up on correspondence!

And then I’ll just end up staring out the window, watching the almost imperceptible change in the leaves and trying to decide if it’s Autumn yet or if we’re still in an in-between season.

❧