Written at 1:36pm, from a new sofa.
Posted some time later using a bus’s Wi-Fi. BECAUSE I CAN.

I am sitting in my new home. I’ve technically had this place now for three days, but this is the first time I’ve used it as a home. The place I go back to. I spent a year living in halls, and even though it most definitely felt like leaving home, flying the nest, moving on – I don’t think I appreciated at the time how limited that feeling is. Halls are among the most finite of our abodes – they are nine months of amazing experiences, great new friends, but it will be all over.

For the first time, I’m sitting on this striking purple sofa, breeze blowing through the window, and the view outside my window is not a wall of other windows, looking in on a hundred people sleeping, brushing teeth, drinking, laughing, fucking. It’s trees, it’s kids playing, it’s the echoes of home, and this, for the first time since leaving home, is a new one.

I’m not here today to properly move in – that happens at the weekend. Virgin Media got my cable installation date mixed up, so it was suddenly brought forward to today. With the delightfully specific time of 1-6pm, I have potentially hours to fill in a home with no-one or nothing to interact with. I expected it to be hellishly boring, but even though I’ve only been – home – for a couple of hours, sorting out the things I’ve been sorting out today – mundane as they are – carry with them a great homely comfort.

Buying the first food to be consumed in this house’s residence (a Tesco BLT and packet of chocolate digestives, of course), topping up my electricity key, meeting my newsagent (he’s *FABULOUS*), exchanging sheets at TJs, plugging in the phone, letters from nPower, Direct Debits to everyone and anyone, opening windows, airing mattresses, locking doors, and changing my phonebook entry from ‘Home’ to ‘Mum and Dad’ bellowed a thunderous finality.

Life starts here.

It appears I have been attagged, like some sort of rabid shoe, by Lanna. She will, of course, pay for this grievous act in the form of me whining about being in love with ‘Scotty’, but because of her endless ‘…doesn’t know’ retort, I may need a Plan B.

Rules and Pools

-Link the person who tagged you
-State the rules in your blog
-Tell 6 quirks about yourself
-Tag 6 other bloggers
-Leave a comment on the blogs of the people you’ve tagged telling them they’ve been tagged and to go to your blog for details

1. I live my life by random numbers, as I am completely indecisive. If I’m playing Halo, I have to use a random number generator to choose what map to play. If I’m playing PGR, it chooses my car. I think it started as a way to make sure I do everything, but I have become a little too dependent on its numerical whimsy.
2. If I’m lying in bed watching TV, or reading, I have to flip my duvet every 30 mins or so, because for some reason I love how the cooler side feels. Yes, this is very strange.
3. I don’t really watch TV shows on TV. Usually, years after the show ended, I suddenly realise I want to watch it, so download each season in turn and end up watching a show that might’ve lasted 5 or so years in a little over a week. As a result, this compacted exposure means I get *majorly* into these shows, ocassionally falling in love with characters (I’m currently having to fight my love for Brothers & Sisters’ Scotty. God, he epitimises my mindhusband. This should probably concern me.)
4. I’m extremely uncomfortable with being “off the grid” for any period of time. I rely on having everything I use to communicate interconnected in some extremely convoluted way. MSN, Facebook, Twitter, my RSS feeds and my phone are like some sort of inescapable mesh of tethered misery.
5. Equally, I’m a complete news junkie. I usually have a news channel on in the background of any room I’m spending much time in. I find something comforting about not missing any significant world event which has no direct impact on my own life.
6. My life is ultimately defined more by my chronic depression, social anxiety, depersonalisation disorder and fook knows what else, rather than my qualities, personality, interests, sexuality or career. Not particularly ironically, this is quite depressing.

Gosh, wasn’t that exciting?
Now onto the tagging…
I’m supposed to tag six, but I’ve tagged five. So there. Take that, you crazy fool.

1. Batman
2. Oreo
3. Spidi
4. Doofus
5. Jae

I’m recognising a few familiar things lately.

I’m spending the days in bed.
I seem to be forgetting to shower.
I haven’t played any Xbox in a few days.
I’ve watched half a season of Brothers & Sisters in two days.
I’m avoiding mirrors.
My sense of humour has evaporated.

Six, in themselves, fairly innocuous sounding facts - but combined spell the familiar sound of my all too frequent hell.

There is, of course, a seventh characteristic that I’m not supposed to acknowledge. It unnerves, apparently.

It’s all seemed a bit miserable here lately…

So, instead of addressing that, the theme of today’s bore is epiphanies - one of which I got about 1 this morning, when I learned that I didn’t get the web design job I’ve been chasing for about a month. Job rejections in themselves don’t really mean much to me, but that’s probably because up until now that’s been rejection from Morrisons, rejection from Stationery Box; rejection from places I had nothing invested in.

I really wanted this freelance thing to work, and a bit of me still does, because for once I was selling myself on merits I might actually have. Interviews for mundane shop work, all I can think is ‘I don’t belong here, I’m wasting their time, I’m unemployable’ so the result is no shock, but with this I actually had the rare motivation to say “I can do this”. Alas, it has been proven, I cannot.

Recently, I wasn’t even really thinking I would get it. The tone of recent emails was suggesting they were looking for more work up-front than I was prepared to offer without a safety net, and there it came, last night. One brief email and one very profound epiphany.

I have nothing to offer.

I don’t have the skills or abilities that I thought I actually have, and I don’t have the charm or personality to get jobs that don’t even need skills as such. Much in line with the suspicions I hadn’t given too much thought to before - I have no purpose, and everything else is dressing to try and cover that fact up.

So, I literally have no idea why I keep going on, because despite all the moments that are rather lovely, it doesn’t make up for the hours of agony, apathy, resentment and loathing.

I wasn’t quite tagged to do this - but my fabulous friend Lanna basically threw it out as an open invite, so yuss, I am obliging. In your pants.

She shared a mini-anthology of angsty poems and shtuff - and I have a lot of that, so thought I would share what I’ve been able to find. I still think a lot of these exercises were uberly important to put ourselves through. I don’t know if it helped take away any of the shit we feel, but there has to be a reason for doing it.

So I was about to post lots of truly awful stuff I wrote when I was about 15/16 (and probably at my lowest, though relative to “happiness”, that’s probably not a great distance away from now ), but suckily, it’s all sitting on my old pooter, and I don’t have much of that shtuff here. I did however manage to find one truly awful literary incomplete turd from god knows how long ago. Eek…

spread deliberately and delicately,
i’m liberated by exposure.
this mood light is the colour of my mind and
my ipod is playing what hurts.
i use the faceless to sing what is mine.

i bought a canvas and a cliché,
i told the others to do the same.
we made latent gestures of our senior generation,
based on what screens have told us.
we found plastic flowers and perched them over our ears;
we think someone once did that.

I don’t even think it’s angsty so much as the anti-angst angst. Whatever the fook that is…

Will continue to delve into ancient backups in the hope of finding more of a “i’m dead suicidal like” ilk.

The following post was written on May 16th, 2008, but was removed shortly after its publication, until now. This is why.

Dear Me,

I was skeptical about writing to you so soon. We often talk casually to each other, often so quietly I’m not even aware I’m doing it, but sometimes we lose ourselves in the trivia. Perhaps we should make what matters more concrete.

You know, there’s a void - I know you sense it - and you know others can smell its rancid self-loathing stench. It’s like two tectonic plates, with one representing life’s actuality, and the other one representing the mesh of expectation, social norms, and your own god-awful ‘hopes and dreams’. The thing is, you never seem to be prepared to completely dismiss that second one, and come to terms with what the first one constitutes. I know you think others don’t let you embrace it, but that’s bull. You know precisely what this void comes down to, but you’re too full of shit to admit it because you know just how weak it must look to admit that’s what’s really missing - the crux of the matter.

You put too much stock in what other people want, or expect. You want the dinner table and the holding hands, but you don’t want the closed doors and the truth. You want a poster - framed, arranged, centred on the wall.

Down the picture hooks fall!

You see, you just have to accept that the reason the truth is what it is, is not by whimsical design, but by the best part of two decades of shaping and gentle eroding of your ability to feel truly happy. If it is the case that we all go through this process, then it is also true that one’s disposition is determined by their ability to dodge these corrosive winds of change. You, however, stared them down with the idea that your mind could part them, but you were wrong. Your identity was lost with it, and now you latch onto anything you can to give yourself a dreadful sense of the unique, but you feel their judgement melt this pathetic facade.

So no, it’s not whimsy. It’s not whimsy that left you complaining about how fat you are from the bottom of the bag of Doritos; how tragic you are from your blood-stained bathroom floor; how lonely you are from the mood-lit bedside; how jobless you are, wallowing in your incompetence. It’s self-destruction after self-destruction, so it’s no surprise you’ve spent the last seven years on the brink of almost threatening the vague possibility of the ultimate self-destruction. But wow, no-one is seeing that coming and yeah, they’re going to keep rushing to your aid in a crisis when it looks like - ZOMG - tonight’s the night! This is not 1994. You are not a mildly successful grunge band. Just stop it.

Do I have a coherent set of recommendations for you? Sort of. If you have identified the stuff that you think is missing, then, ignoring all the terrible steps on the way, just make it clear what they are, and commit to them as concepts. Make them tangible instead of elusive, and stop designing goals that are designed to make you give up, hate yourself, and repeat a comfortable but horrendous pattern. You know they’re all SO interrelated as well, that for any one to be fixed relies on something happening with the other.

I’ve told you that, and yet I have the sneaky suspicion I know you well enough to guess you won’t heed a word of it. You’re too logical for this to be a problem of not knowing the steps to take. You’d make your whole life a fucking algorithm if you had half the chance. The real problem is that in having this consistent set of points to hinge your self-hate and self-deprecation on, you can have some constants in a scary life that is ever-changing. No matter where you happen to live, you still get to be fat, ugly, and alone. No matter where you don’t get a job, it’s because you’re unflinchingly incompetent. You knew going in you were incompetent, and you left incompetent. Nothing gained, nothing lost - just a perpetual miserable reiteration.

And you won’t change it. You never have.

Regards,
Luke

Is it important for bloggers to be honest?

I’m not talking about those covering politics, or a specific niche, but the nomads like myself that run with whatever happens to be drifting past our brain boxes at any particular point in time.

I realised today I have a number of drafts sitting here going back a couple of years of posts that didn’t quite make it. Yes, a few of them are those that didn’t quite work out as I wanted and were swiftly abandoned, but many more represent some vulnerable truth that at the last minute I decided not to publish, or pulled seconds after posting them.

Blogging for a lot of people has a therapeutic element (with a dash of ego), but I struggle to get that benefit from the process. It’s because I have a layer of self-censorship that means this can never be as open or as raw as a private journal might be. And I hate myself for it. One aspect of myself I try to maintain is my integrity. It’s not necessarily a positive thing. One man’s integrity is another’s stubbornness, but for me it’s about sticking to a set of principles that work for me. Personally, it’s about not communicating any less than the full truth about myself. It’s why I’ve never been employed (in a traditional context), because I refuse to do the dance in job interviews, and instead of entering with my carefully honed message, I don’t dress up the facts, and instead tell them of my few successes, and my innumerable failings as a person. I’m not interested in working for someone, if they’re not interested in what they’d actually be getting by employing me. It’s not fair on anyone to sell them my fake personality for them to swiftly get to grips with my incompetence, so I’d much rather lay it on the table from day one, and if they happen to be fine with it, then yay.

I endure a massive amount of criticism from my parents about this, who believe I just need to swallow my pride and do the dance, but I physically can not bring myself to. They say I should get a haircut because it looks “scruffy”, or “unprofessional”. We don’t challenge that perception, we just accept that’s how it goes and drone on. Status quo FTW.

What has this ramble got to do with anything?

This blog is not that honest, multi-faceted, vulnerable reality that I hope exists everywhere else. This drafts folder is the most honest stuff I’ve written, and for some reason it’s not put out there, and it’s happened because I’ve done what I usually refuse to do, and been worried that ‘maybe someone will realise this is about them?’, ‘maybe someone will be offended by this’, ‘maybe someone won’t know how to react to that’, ‘will this harm me professionally?’

So, finally, I’m prepared to stop saving drafts, and lay it out there. I’m a mess - maybe like everyone else; maybe like no-one. But it’s there, and it’s futile denying it.
I will post the drafts that were complete posts and merely pulled in case of embarassment very soon. Not because I expect people are thrilled to read them, but because if this is to be a form of therapy for me, I can’t break the rules.

I have decided that scrambled eggs are the greatest mystical illusion in the universe, as it is completely irrelevant how many eggs you put in at the start, you seem to end with the exact same amount at the other end…

We recently got a checklist of sorts from the people who run these flats reminding us of what to do before buggering off. There was one line that particularly caught my eye:

Please note: you will also be charged for the removal of any posters, newspapers, bottles, road signs, excess rubbish, personal furniture etc. you leave in the flat.

I’m not used to this.

I’ve always been the kind of person who thrives on a lot of time to myself, and somewhere along the line I must’ve convinced myself that I’m the kind of person who would thrive on solitude. In fact, I can remember during some of my darkest days when I was about 16 claiming that I would happily just drop off civilisation and keep myself amused living in a cave.

Oh, the naivety.

I’ve never had the chance to be alone before - coming home from school every day in my first 17 years of life, I knew there would be someone waiting on the other side of the door, and although I spent my gap year isolated from most of my friends, I never knew what it meant to be truly alone. Being able to bounce off whatever I was thinking, no matter how inconsequential, with someone else, is something I never appreciated the importance of for keeping me bobbing above water. No wonder I was so responsive to talking therapies over prozac…

Alas, I’ve only been alone in the flat now for a little over a week, and I’m experiencing some very profound feelings. I’ve lost my identity, I’ve lost the flame, and I detest the silence.

That silence is the worst. I’ve always loved music, but I’ve never had to actually pump up the volume before going for a shit just because I can’t stand not hearing anything. When you take out the noise, all you have left are the patterns which act as pillars for our lives. But, it’s made me realise that all this nonsense about how we crave patterns and routine is bullshit. Yes, we have patterns and routine, but it seems to me we do absolutely everything in our power to mask them by trying to come up with random things to do instead. We’re not creatures of habit. We’re creatures of despairing spontaneity. But I’m finding it impossible to be spontaneous by myself. If someone else was here, we’d be drunkenly playing table tennis in dressing gowns, or wandering to Tesco at 3am to buy My Little Pony - but I just can’t do it now.

I had a weird moment yesterday regarding the kitchen, which was once the hub where seven people’s lives intersected on a daily basis. It’s quite hard to emphasise how constantly alive a place occupied by seven people is, day and night. The number of times I’ve wandered in for something to eat to find someone else pigging out in the lounge outnumbered the times I entered an empty room. But now, the kitchen is nothing more than a series of appliances that I use then leave. Yesterday I sat on the seats while the kettle boiled, and then I realised that I had had no ocassion to sit there for the best part of two weeks. Eight months ago it was where all paths converged, and now a solitary window creaks against its wary latch in a chamber of no words. I was out buying ice cream today, and then realised I hadn’t spoken a word out loud in three days. My throat croaked with the resistant spluttering of an ageing shower, followed by the bitter melancholy as I realised that I am utterly dependent on the validation of others. I’m the entertainer who craves the audience more than the applause, and without either I am without purpose.

Yes, it’s been only a few days, and come Saturday it will be broken as I return home for a few weeks, but lame as it may sound, I’ve been quite shaken by my reaction to this.

My friends, and those I love, are the opiate for my self-loathing.