Transposed.
I handed in my keys to the studio in Bristol today, and took the train back to London for what should be my last time. For the past three months I have been commuting late night every Sunday and Tuesday. It has been a strange stop-start existence, a stark contrast against my packed 17 hour day lifestyle over the past year. When I have made it home to London I have felt a complete collapse, something like an elastic band gone ping. Zero discipline, slobbing about, and then last minute work on my part-time job before I commute back out west to Bristol. When I have gone back to Bristol it has it has felt like I have been hit in the face with a sledge hammer. Each time in Bristol I have been shocked at how much stress exists there. I would feel my stomach turning over. Each time I have left Bristol it has felt like a goodbye - all 12 times or whatever it is. This time was the last.
In my last post I mentioned lots of little changes, little occurrences, and a sense of uncertainty about myself. A lot has happened since. Foremost, I handed in my resignation at the start up business. It feels very much like I am leaving Bristol empty handed after a years work, after relentless late nights and weekends to try and achieve something. But I really hit a low, I have never felt so disabled and vulnerable to myself. I felt really alone. By my working lifestyle, I had reduced my set of immediately accessible friends to my start-up business colleagues, and threw all that into the furnace with my resignation. Leading up to my resignation, I was a wreck of a person. I once sat on a bench in town centre crying to myself because I wanted to finish my apple. It had somehow become symbolic to me of all the things I needed to finish, that only I could finish. Over these weeks I had become exceptionally monotone, flat, heavy, and I would cry all the time, regardless of who I was with or where I was. Something had to give.
I was going to quote lots of passages from my written journal because they were written in the moment, I think they are interesting. But it makes this post far too long and pretentious. When I look back on it, that written journal was my saviour. It is a huge thing, it amused me a year ago to make it large like an ancient tome. I carry it everywhere now, and its physical tangible (heavy) existence has become a meaningful testament to my own endurance. If I think of the presentations I gave to business investors back in January, it feels like it was a year ago or more. But even though it feels a long time ago, I can't work out what happened in between. There is a complete emptiness in my memory, which must be because of the non-stop rotation of work I was engrossed in. My written journal has it all written down. I can just flick through and laugh at myself. When I look at it, even the way I write into the journal has changed and matured. I'll keep the habit, in a self-indulgent sort of way, the largeness of it seems to give it an intrinsic value.
Shortly after handing in my resignation the start-up business won £12k in an entrepreneurial competition. I made the mistake of not attending the announcement dinner because I was exhausted and I had no money - irony! Lots of good networking and exposure, and I'm not in any of the press photos. About a week after that I received 5 chapters of corrections on my phd thesis from my second supervisor, and my first supervisor told me to submit my thesis in 4 days time - or else my exam would not be until October! Obviously this was a load of stress, but I got it handed in, and suddenly my future was starting to gain some definition. A date of resignation, a date for my PhD exam. I gave in my resignation for the cleaning job too.
Leading up to my PhD viva I had an absolute aversion to my thesis. I couldn't even open the thing. I took it places with me with the intention to read some. I kept constructing loose plans of when I would get the revision done, until it ended up as the day before. I travelled on that day, and then took a 15 mile walk in the evening. By that point, I was convincing myself that after 4 years I should know my work pretty well. When I was on the train a great burst of sunshine came and I thought that I had not seen warm sun like that for a very long time. Later, whilst walking, it rained and I was acutely aware of the droplets running down my face. I started to feel like I was coming out of hibernation, like a bear passing the seasons to meet its destiny. On the morning of my exam I opened my thesis. I was quite confused by my own graphs, and I felt a hot ball of panic spread over my body. Luckily the examiner had forgotten the paper work, so I had 30 minutes to calm myself down.
The exam was quite intense. The thing I remember most was not knowing what their general thoughts on my work were, so I faced every question wondering what would come next, or wondering how much longer we would be there for. When it was obvious we were at the end, I remember thinking they had gone easy on me, and great relief. For days afterwards I felt emotionally flat. It is not numb, like the world was silent, but as if all my emotions cancelled each other out. Great excitement countered by feeling humiliated at how anxious I have been. It was very surreal for a week. I had lots of dinners and conversations. Everyone was firm that I had achieved something, that I should not think I 'got away with it'. I even had two strangers shake my hand and congratulate me after they overhead me talking on the telephone. It is very strange to have been self-directed, self-assessed, to be constantly thinking about something for 4 years, and for it all to be examined and passed within 3 hours. I find myself with an oppressive sense of needing to do something, or guilt in not doing something, which can only come from sheer habit.
Sadly, as soon as I started to have time to myself the first thoughts I had were for Lana. It was as if there was a part of my brain that was switched on again. I had all my 'normal' thoughts rolling around, but there was this new voice that would randomly interject, “hey, I wonder what Lana is doing?”. That time when she really broke it off, made a decision, when I felt that everything was meaningless, I think at that point I switched off Lana and set myself to my tasks. When I started thinking about Lana again I wasn't sure if I was just reaching out for security, since everything else seemed to be going down the pan. But here I am, and I still can't stop thinking about her.
I write her letters, but they read as arrogant, condescending, preaching. Our situations have rotated fully, we are out of sync, out of phase. Now she is burdened with work and stress, whilst I am finding time to relax. I managed to meet up with her a few times. We have great conversation, but a topic that comes up is that she feels guilty for abandoning me during my struggles, and that she feels like she is cheating on me. I have a fear that this guilt will be the scar that can never be healed. I also have a fear that she wants to go, to be gone fully, but it is my liberal nature that makes her feel trapped. I have always thought my gift to her was absolute freedom, but saying to someone “OK, come back and tell me about it later” is incredibly dominating. I feel a bit stuck. I've always insisted that I have faith, that I won't see her as my possession, so now it is the great test. I love everything about her, from her aggression, expensive purchases, to her tendency to fall in love and desire great passions; she is a human I am deeply fascinated with, adoring, I want to share all her experiences, deny nothing. I want to tell her that she can have everything, me, lovers, lifestyle; she just needs to make that choice. I have no issues with her. No one will absolve her guilt, it is as simple as letting it go or forgiving herself. I am starting to think the great tragedy is that she wants to feel possessed.
I have been unpacking my possessions out of storage. It is a very strange experience. After a year of being homeless, all these things feel like relics from a tomb. I haven't used them, their value feels lost. I put things on the shelf, and it feels right, and slowly I grow fond of them again. The worst things to take out though, are the objects I shared with Lana. Memories. The smell of fabrics, like the bed spreads. Cooking pots, meals we made, breakfasts in bed. When I take these things out, I realise how I slowly and incrementally lost her as my focus. I began a descent into stress, anxiety, masked with a sense of responsibility. I look at all these items now, and wonder what that was like for her, and I feel shame. I want to apologise, but I have already many times. This is no time for grovelling. I think I should also take pride. I pursued something with a great passion, with courage, I found ways to survive, I have faced my fears and accumulated experiences. Are these not attractive qualities? And above all, I made her privy to it, as best I could, she has seen the worst of me, and I did my best to support her choices.
When I collected my stuff from her flat this weekend it felt like quite a sad affair. Lana said that by taking my possessions, she felt she was losing contact with me. Her current boyfriend was next door. I shook his hand, spoke to him, but he seemed pretty intimidated by me or at least not interested in knowing me. I was thinking at a thousand miles an hour, all my feelings swirling around and also aware of all her current stresses. For all the things I could of said, I felt as if I was intruding, so I decided to say little. It was no time to harass her with criticisms, or worsen her feelings of guilt by gushing my transcendent love of her. Perhaps what she wanted was for me to seize her, possess her. But that is not what I want, I am looking for the person to share the rest of my life with, someone who has made the choice to take the challenge, to avoid self-depreciation and feeling a victim of circumstance. I think the right thing for now is to let things take their natural course, we are out of sync.
Now that lots of things are coming to a close I am spending increasing amounts of time alone. This is very strange for me. Moving between houses, living in the studio, even sleeping in places like the woods, I never really felt alone. There is something about sitting in your room, with a door, that provides a solitude of mind (by a sense of security?). Also, my mind is becoming liberated. All the things I have had to keep at the ready are going. I don't have to remember all the papers I referenced in my thesis, or the justifications around my experiments, the discussions of results. I don't have to constantly plan ahead for the ad-hoc requirements of the multitude of projects I was involved in, or even small things like all the key codes for my cleaning job. I don't have to keep an ear to the ground for somewhere convenient to sleep.
Now that I have time and space I can feel my self expanding. I have started to challenge myself again. I went to a party and I was feeling out of place. There was a hot tub so I stripped off nude and climbed in first as a matter of personal precedence. This weekend I challenged myself to get a kiss from Emma and did so. The opposite side of this is that I can also feel old tendencies creeping in. Just as hunger motivates me to eat, I can feel old fears influencing me to stay indoors all day. For the past year all the hours of my day were allocated. The only discipline I needed was to be awake and my sense of responsibility took care of the rest. Now I have neither a full schedule nor external responsibilities, and it is exposing my self-discipline as non-existent.
I have obvious doubts regarding leaving Bristol, as that is where I developed my expertise, where all my contacts are, where the most accessible opportunities are, and where my heart is. I also know I need to take a break, that I need to force myself to take a holiday. But it is also a sure thing that sitting on the internet, sitting alone for a couple of months is a bad idea. I have condensed myself down to a working machine, so its time to loosen up. I always believed I needed to know myself to do well in life, before I could give myself to another person. Over the past 8 years, starting with my move to Bristol, I really felt like I began to define myself as an individual and know myself. This past year my utter deconstruction has exposed me, taught me humility, and brought into question everything I had assumed about myself.
I think I have realised that knowing anything means being rigid in thought, arrogant, assuming. I thought the expression “the more you know, the less you understand” was a joke about the infinitude of knowledge. Now I interpret it as a warning, that knowing compromises understanding. I know almost nothing about myself any more, but I understand myself better than I ever have. By accepting I know little of myself, I am less judgemental of myself, and cast fewer judgements on others. I am tolerant. I have never felt so human as I do today, never felt so able to engage with others.
So my plan for the next period of time is to meet people. I'm off to a good start, having met my Great Uncle, the closest thing I have to a grand father. I have been postponing joining an online dating site, so I will do that tomorrow. I will also get back into dancing, maybe take up a new form. I have a greater sense of personal responsibility, given how much I have sidelined my health to work, so I am eating like a horse and exercising daily. I grew up in the London suburbs and was oblivious to greater London, so I am going to pretend I am on holiday in this city until I raise funds or I am ready to live on a shoestring again. I have already decided how to pack my day bag, with my watercolours, sketchbook, journal, a book to read and a packed lunch. After the past years spent utterly focused in laboratories and studios, my life is to take place outside and with people, I want to meet people.
I am the happy nihilist.
In my last post I mentioned lots of little changes, little occurrences, and a sense of uncertainty about myself. A lot has happened since. Foremost, I handed in my resignation at the start up business. It feels very much like I am leaving Bristol empty handed after a years work, after relentless late nights and weekends to try and achieve something. But I really hit a low, I have never felt so disabled and vulnerable to myself. I felt really alone. By my working lifestyle, I had reduced my set of immediately accessible friends to my start-up business colleagues, and threw all that into the furnace with my resignation. Leading up to my resignation, I was a wreck of a person. I once sat on a bench in town centre crying to myself because I wanted to finish my apple. It had somehow become symbolic to me of all the things I needed to finish, that only I could finish. Over these weeks I had become exceptionally monotone, flat, heavy, and I would cry all the time, regardless of who I was with or where I was. Something had to give.
I was going to quote lots of passages from my written journal because they were written in the moment, I think they are interesting. But it makes this post far too long and pretentious. When I look back on it, that written journal was my saviour. It is a huge thing, it amused me a year ago to make it large like an ancient tome. I carry it everywhere now, and its physical tangible (heavy) existence has become a meaningful testament to my own endurance. If I think of the presentations I gave to business investors back in January, it feels like it was a year ago or more. But even though it feels a long time ago, I can't work out what happened in between. There is a complete emptiness in my memory, which must be because of the non-stop rotation of work I was engrossed in. My written journal has it all written down. I can just flick through and laugh at myself. When I look at it, even the way I write into the journal has changed and matured. I'll keep the habit, in a self-indulgent sort of way, the largeness of it seems to give it an intrinsic value.
Shortly after handing in my resignation the start-up business won £12k in an entrepreneurial competition. I made the mistake of not attending the announcement dinner because I was exhausted and I had no money - irony! Lots of good networking and exposure, and I'm not in any of the press photos. About a week after that I received 5 chapters of corrections on my phd thesis from my second supervisor, and my first supervisor told me to submit my thesis in 4 days time - or else my exam would not be until October! Obviously this was a load of stress, but I got it handed in, and suddenly my future was starting to gain some definition. A date of resignation, a date for my PhD exam. I gave in my resignation for the cleaning job too.
Leading up to my PhD viva I had an absolute aversion to my thesis. I couldn't even open the thing. I took it places with me with the intention to read some. I kept constructing loose plans of when I would get the revision done, until it ended up as the day before. I travelled on that day, and then took a 15 mile walk in the evening. By that point, I was convincing myself that after 4 years I should know my work pretty well. When I was on the train a great burst of sunshine came and I thought that I had not seen warm sun like that for a very long time. Later, whilst walking, it rained and I was acutely aware of the droplets running down my face. I started to feel like I was coming out of hibernation, like a bear passing the seasons to meet its destiny. On the morning of my exam I opened my thesis. I was quite confused by my own graphs, and I felt a hot ball of panic spread over my body. Luckily the examiner had forgotten the paper work, so I had 30 minutes to calm myself down.
The exam was quite intense. The thing I remember most was not knowing what their general thoughts on my work were, so I faced every question wondering what would come next, or wondering how much longer we would be there for. When it was obvious we were at the end, I remember thinking they had gone easy on me, and great relief. For days afterwards I felt emotionally flat. It is not numb, like the world was silent, but as if all my emotions cancelled each other out. Great excitement countered by feeling humiliated at how anxious I have been. It was very surreal for a week. I had lots of dinners and conversations. Everyone was firm that I had achieved something, that I should not think I 'got away with it'. I even had two strangers shake my hand and congratulate me after they overhead me talking on the telephone. It is very strange to have been self-directed, self-assessed, to be constantly thinking about something for 4 years, and for it all to be examined and passed within 3 hours. I find myself with an oppressive sense of needing to do something, or guilt in not doing something, which can only come from sheer habit.
Sadly, as soon as I started to have time to myself the first thoughts I had were for Lana. It was as if there was a part of my brain that was switched on again. I had all my 'normal' thoughts rolling around, but there was this new voice that would randomly interject, “hey, I wonder what Lana is doing?”. That time when she really broke it off, made a decision, when I felt that everything was meaningless, I think at that point I switched off Lana and set myself to my tasks. When I started thinking about Lana again I wasn't sure if I was just reaching out for security, since everything else seemed to be going down the pan. But here I am, and I still can't stop thinking about her.
I write her letters, but they read as arrogant, condescending, preaching. Our situations have rotated fully, we are out of sync, out of phase. Now she is burdened with work and stress, whilst I am finding time to relax. I managed to meet up with her a few times. We have great conversation, but a topic that comes up is that she feels guilty for abandoning me during my struggles, and that she feels like she is cheating on me. I have a fear that this guilt will be the scar that can never be healed. I also have a fear that she wants to go, to be gone fully, but it is my liberal nature that makes her feel trapped. I have always thought my gift to her was absolute freedom, but saying to someone “OK, come back and tell me about it later” is incredibly dominating. I feel a bit stuck. I've always insisted that I have faith, that I won't see her as my possession, so now it is the great test. I love everything about her, from her aggression, expensive purchases, to her tendency to fall in love and desire great passions; she is a human I am deeply fascinated with, adoring, I want to share all her experiences, deny nothing. I want to tell her that she can have everything, me, lovers, lifestyle; she just needs to make that choice. I have no issues with her. No one will absolve her guilt, it is as simple as letting it go or forgiving herself. I am starting to think the great tragedy is that she wants to feel possessed.
I have been unpacking my possessions out of storage. It is a very strange experience. After a year of being homeless, all these things feel like relics from a tomb. I haven't used them, their value feels lost. I put things on the shelf, and it feels right, and slowly I grow fond of them again. The worst things to take out though, are the objects I shared with Lana. Memories. The smell of fabrics, like the bed spreads. Cooking pots, meals we made, breakfasts in bed. When I take these things out, I realise how I slowly and incrementally lost her as my focus. I began a descent into stress, anxiety, masked with a sense of responsibility. I look at all these items now, and wonder what that was like for her, and I feel shame. I want to apologise, but I have already many times. This is no time for grovelling. I think I should also take pride. I pursued something with a great passion, with courage, I found ways to survive, I have faced my fears and accumulated experiences. Are these not attractive qualities? And above all, I made her privy to it, as best I could, she has seen the worst of me, and I did my best to support her choices.
When I collected my stuff from her flat this weekend it felt like quite a sad affair. Lana said that by taking my possessions, she felt she was losing contact with me. Her current boyfriend was next door. I shook his hand, spoke to him, but he seemed pretty intimidated by me or at least not interested in knowing me. I was thinking at a thousand miles an hour, all my feelings swirling around and also aware of all her current stresses. For all the things I could of said, I felt as if I was intruding, so I decided to say little. It was no time to harass her with criticisms, or worsen her feelings of guilt by gushing my transcendent love of her. Perhaps what she wanted was for me to seize her, possess her. But that is not what I want, I am looking for the person to share the rest of my life with, someone who has made the choice to take the challenge, to avoid self-depreciation and feeling a victim of circumstance. I think the right thing for now is to let things take their natural course, we are out of sync.
Now that lots of things are coming to a close I am spending increasing amounts of time alone. This is very strange for me. Moving between houses, living in the studio, even sleeping in places like the woods, I never really felt alone. There is something about sitting in your room, with a door, that provides a solitude of mind (by a sense of security?). Also, my mind is becoming liberated. All the things I have had to keep at the ready are going. I don't have to remember all the papers I referenced in my thesis, or the justifications around my experiments, the discussions of results. I don't have to constantly plan ahead for the ad-hoc requirements of the multitude of projects I was involved in, or even small things like all the key codes for my cleaning job. I don't have to keep an ear to the ground for somewhere convenient to sleep.
Now that I have time and space I can feel my self expanding. I have started to challenge myself again. I went to a party and I was feeling out of place. There was a hot tub so I stripped off nude and climbed in first as a matter of personal precedence. This weekend I challenged myself to get a kiss from Emma and did so. The opposite side of this is that I can also feel old tendencies creeping in. Just as hunger motivates me to eat, I can feel old fears influencing me to stay indoors all day. For the past year all the hours of my day were allocated. The only discipline I needed was to be awake and my sense of responsibility took care of the rest. Now I have neither a full schedule nor external responsibilities, and it is exposing my self-discipline as non-existent.
I have obvious doubts regarding leaving Bristol, as that is where I developed my expertise, where all my contacts are, where the most accessible opportunities are, and where my heart is. I also know I need to take a break, that I need to force myself to take a holiday. But it is also a sure thing that sitting on the internet, sitting alone for a couple of months is a bad idea. I have condensed myself down to a working machine, so its time to loosen up. I always believed I needed to know myself to do well in life, before I could give myself to another person. Over the past 8 years, starting with my move to Bristol, I really felt like I began to define myself as an individual and know myself. This past year my utter deconstruction has exposed me, taught me humility, and brought into question everything I had assumed about myself.
I think I have realised that knowing anything means being rigid in thought, arrogant, assuming. I thought the expression “the more you know, the less you understand” was a joke about the infinitude of knowledge. Now I interpret it as a warning, that knowing compromises understanding. I know almost nothing about myself any more, but I understand myself better than I ever have. By accepting I know little of myself, I am less judgemental of myself, and cast fewer judgements on others. I am tolerant. I have never felt so human as I do today, never felt so able to engage with others.
So my plan for the next period of time is to meet people. I'm off to a good start, having met my Great Uncle, the closest thing I have to a grand father. I have been postponing joining an online dating site, so I will do that tomorrow. I will also get back into dancing, maybe take up a new form. I have a greater sense of personal responsibility, given how much I have sidelined my health to work, so I am eating like a horse and exercising daily. I grew up in the London suburbs and was oblivious to greater London, so I am going to pretend I am on holiday in this city until I raise funds or I am ready to live on a shoestring again. I have already decided how to pack my day bag, with my watercolours, sketchbook, journal, a book to read and a packed lunch. After the past years spent utterly focused in laboratories and studios, my life is to take place outside and with people, I want to meet people.
I am the happy nihilist.