Some self-reflection.
I don't remember when I began feeling like this. Every time I try to associate it to a particular moment or turning point in the last few months some other memory from before that will drift from the back of my mind and place it to much later, and the thought that I have endured this feeling without ever once trying to write it down in an increasingly longer and longer time span startles me. I think it stems from a deep frustration at myself for the very thing that I am feeling, and the few times I've managed to put it into words, it has shaken me.
I'm just not happy.
I'm not happy, and I think the worst thing about it is that I've spent a long time trying to ignore it or hoping it would go away because I don't feel like I have the right to say it. I'm so utterly privileged as a British white male with the background that I've got, and in this day and age I've actually managed to secure a loving relationship, a place to live surrounded by people I care about and a job. So whenever this feeling strikes me and I find myself dipping into what has become a background melancholy I more often than not turn my back on it and say to myself 'but I'm not really unhappy, am I? For this reason, and that reason.'
In truth, I think it's the culmination of numerous things that have me feeling like this, several of which are propelling each other on to make me feel a little worse about myself and where I am. At the very bottom of the pile I'm frustrated with my work. I've enjoyed working at Starbucks, the people I work with are great and my manager has been utterly accommodating of me when I've needed it. I've had every Saturday since term started free from work so I can keep attending Saturday LARP. She's fantastic and for all of the bad times there, there are good and rewarding moments. What's frustrating about work is twofold. One, Kirsty and I are actually financially worse off because of the fact I'm working there (we were actually earning more when we were both unemployed), and two, the work has been exhausting me.
Even that, 'the work has been exhausting me', has seen me look at the words and think 'but it's not that bad, is it?' - and it isn't. I'm working somewhere between 25 and 30 hours a week, which should in theory give me enough free time to pursue anything I want ot pursue in my spare time, provided it doesn't cost much money. And, hell, I already have a word-processor, and that's the thing I love doing - writing. So why aren't I doing it?
I could lay the blame on the hours I work, the closes that see me late to things like tabletop games and VIP that do a good job of cutting right into the day without much leeway, but that in itself doesn't seem honest. There are four days a week that, outside of LURPS, I have to myself. Why hasn't the word count been wracking up? Why hasn't one of my numerous projects become manifest? Christ knows I've spent enough time dancing around each of them.
The first time I felt the wind knocked out of my lungs in this way was towards the end of Summer term last year. New Far Shores had been announced, Old Far Shores was coming to a close, and other than dipping my head into New Deal once a week I had very few commitments. Cath and I worked extensively on Far Shores. In some ways, the lore releases and players guide that have been seen so far were only half of what we had worked out. The planning sessions were feverish and delightful, raw and unbridled creativity, the momentum of ideas seeming utterly ceaseless. We were simultaneously working on bringing Old Far Shores to a close as well as our own manuscripts on the side. It was as demanding as it was fun. And I feel like I was the first to cave.
We both ended that period exhausted, but by the time we were releasing material on livejournal I felt utterly sapped. I exhibited behaviors that I am still suffering today: I would open a document to do some work and feel a lurching, hot sickness rise up in me. I was convinced that I couldn't meet anyone's expectations, that my word count was being compared, contrasted and found wanting, that there was a tangible difference in quality been my work and Cath's, that the players expected more from me and that the areas that I worked on - the beastkin and the Fringe, the Norls, Ibarran, Kordurren - paled in comparison to those of my cohort's design. One day we came to one of my releases to find that I had missed a good century or so out of the expected timeline of the Nation and, in doing so, had left too much to be revised to get the release out on time. I felt utterly wretched.
I am aware that these feelings were utterly internal. I only now, as of writing this, identify what I was suffering then with paranoia, and a paranoia without basis in reality at that. I can't reiterate enough how accommodating and understanding Kirsty, Cath, Luke and everyone involved were in that time, even if they didn't realise just how much support they were actually lending. What was expected of me wasn't difficult, and every setback was overcome without blame or severity. But as summer approached, I felt defeated, I felt like everyone around me was disappointed and impatiently waiting as I continually failed to deliver anything of quality and substance time and time again. When I grew reflective, I would compare myself to older versions of myself; the 17-year-old that got up religiously in the morning and wrote 1,000 words of prose without fail; the 21-year-old suddenly Ref of the most popular weekend LARP system run in LURPS that would deliver a linear every fortnight without fail. I remembered the week before a linear, how I would nurture an idea in my head, and by Thursday have some idea of how it would be executed.
I wondered where it had all gone.
When I had free time, I yearned for structure in my life. When I found structure, I yearned for more. When I had more, it became too much. Even now I feel frustrated at the gaping holes of unemployed time that yielded nothing productive, but anyone who has been in that position must know how utterly unfathomable it all feels. The days were hours of yawning excess that fostered a lethargy that I felt I should have been better equipped to deal with. I several times tried to foster a routine to try and encourage my creativity, but for the most part they were unsuccessful, and when they weren't, the success was short-lived.
One day in summer I asked myself, literally asked myself, 'weren't you supposed to be a writer? What happened to that?'
There were ideas that lay dormant and untouched. I had, and have, an unfinished comic script, in dire need of its plot needing restructured and its ideas made more coherent. Around the time of Alex and Kitty's wedding I, in a wine-hazed frenzy of creativity that was not entirely my own, came up with a novel set in the same universe, a viscous retaliation against a fantasy novel the plot of which hadn't met my expectations. There were ideas that my creative writing tutors said they wished they had come up with that I vowed to return to. Short stories and RP fiction were scattered around my desktop and my laptop and my pen drive. And every single one of them felt insurmountable. In everything, writing had become a burden laden with expectations I felt I was failing time and time again.
The Starbucks job, as I started it, was almost bittersweet. I had been at the time volunteering at Litfest. I loved the Storey building, I loved the feeling of being around such creative minds. At the launch of the Sea Swallow, a children's book published by Litfest, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a publicity event at a nearby school. The author, Gareth Thompson, and the artist, Hannah McGee, had sat down at the head of the children in a row with teachers and, awkwardly perched on the end of the row, myself. The children listened to the story as it was read, were awestruck by Hannah as she spoke about how she illustrated it, and then they all gathered around for publicity shots, each child clutching a copy of the Sea Swallow.
Tim, a thoroughly inspiring individual who happened to be a member of LURPS I had not crossed paths with, had seen the project through from the beginning. He had not been in the assembly hall when this was all happening. Instead, I could see him pacing too and fro through the glass of a door opposite us. It was astonishing to me, seen as it was myself, Hannah and Andy Darby, Litfest's director, that had been the ones that were late. When the opportunity arose, I snuck over to where Tim was. He was fraught, wringing his hand through his hair, cheeks flushed, and when I asked him how he was he rambled at me for a while about what was left to do. I told him to stop and look at the kids. Each one of them had a copy of the book, a fair few of them choosing to read it rather than listen to the photographer who was trying to get everyone's attention. There was a very real change in the way Tim was holding himself then - he was stricken with delight and relief, and said words to the effect of 'the book is in the hands of children. It's all been worth it.'
Tim's satisfaction was sticking with me about the time a job was advertised by Carnegie Publishing for a publisher. I found the post, applied for it straight away, then called them up whilst in Litfest's offices barely an hour afterwards to give them a better idea of myself. This, I thought, was going to be it. I would be able to experience that same satisfaction as I had seen in Tim, I would be able to immerse myself into the publishing industry, and what better crux for my writing career than that? The feedback I got during the call was so positive that when I attended the Starbucks interview I thought of the job only as a backup.
Needless to say of the outcome. I happened to find out about the Carnegie rejection the same day as Starbucks offered me a job. In accepting, I stopped going to Litfest. Tim and I have only spoken once since. I remember taking one last look at Andy Diggle's office, a room with concept art on the walls, a book shelf full of graphic novels, a comfortable sofa and a standing desk where he spends his days, his professional days, writing, and vowing that it would be mine one day - or at least, a room like it.
Starbucks have been great with me. I put everything I could into the job, I built up a reputation as being reliable and dependable. I've had it said that the manager purposefully puts me on the rota with me because I'm fun to work with, and the district manager once commended my people skills. For the most part when I'm there, I'm content in my work, I'm keeping myself busy, and I'm giving it all I can. But sometimes there are days when the prospect of going there is a looming one. I once again asked myself 'weren't you supposed to be a writer? What happened with that?'
It became a sensation that ebbed and flowed. I would some days come home from work with a buzz, a kick, an idea, and come my day off I would open up a manuscript and get to work. But some days I would feel drained and trapped, a sensation unaided by a worsening monetary situation that can only be dubbed 'financial insecurity.' One week, I bought myself a nice pocket notebook, and began writing notes at work. The next week, I put it through the washing machine accidentally, and when the rent came out of my bank I couldn't rightly justify replacing it.
A couple of things happened in sequence that really stirred me soon after.
One, I lay in bed one night and lapsed into a quiet melancholy. Them without prompt, I decided to vocalise it. I said to Kirsty 'I'm sad', and even then I was thinking 'but I'm not really sad, am I? I don't deserve to be sad'. But I kept talking, and put into words a feeling that had been haunting me for the last few days, a sensation that I was becoming a husk of who I once as, that I was darkening and my creativity was flaking off of me and dissolving, that I was incapable of finding any joy or satisfaction in my endevours, that the best of me was spent up and that I would need to abandon my dream of writing for something mundane, ordinary, uncreative. We talked, there was a cuddle, and the worst of my fears were abated. I don't know how long this feeling had been exhibited in me, but I know I had been struggling with it for a long time and Kirsty had seen it. Every time I was asked, however, I would say I was fine. Not because of so masculine avoidance of speaking about how I felt, but because I genuinely felt that there were people more deserved of feeling sad than I was.
The second thing, a random thing, was that in some video that one of us was watching a comedian (which one precisely alludes me) said that he was surprised to find that not everyone thought of death every night when they went to bed. I admitted to Kirsty that I did, too, sincerely surprised at someone else identifying this as abnormal behaviour. I explained as best as I could that for a long as I could remember there would be nights - not many nights, maybe three of four times a month - where I would be utterly thrown by the notion of mortality and that it was only within recent years that I had been able to reconcile my feelings about this subject. I say reconcile here and mean the difference between lying quietly distraught and thinking 'I don't want to die' over and over to where I am now, how I have accepted death, and still think about it from time to time, but summarise it with a mere 'won't that be a sad thing' and some contemplation of everyone and everything I will miss, and wonder if there will be any capacity for me to remember how happy this life and these people have made me.
Third, my father thought that exact same thing. This year has been a trying one for my parents. My mum grew ill and no-one seemed to know what exactly was wrong with her, and my dad hit the age of retirement. Some drama exists somewhere that I understand but shan't go into detail of about how my dad'll soon be out of work because of some exam he is refusing to take because it's widely conceived to be a means for the Financial Service Authority to make more money out of Independent Financial Advisers. My dad's sister has also been descending into Alzheimer's. It was harrowing to see it manifest when I saw her last, a woman that I could only dimly remember outside of phone calls and knew very little of other than that she had a piano, incapable of recognising her own brother and mistaking me as her son, Anthony. But this disease became a buzzword, as it were. I have had numerous calls from my mum in tears thinking she had seen symptoms of Alzheimer's in my dad and crediting her experience as a care worker at a retirement home as her authority on the subject. Similarly, some very real symptoms were showing themselves in my mum. She would develop thick bruising where she had taken the slightest knock, she was having problems with her heart, her appetite was right down and she wouldn't eat for days. What was worse, and what remains worse, is that she was inclined not to tell myself or my dad the whole story. She would go to the doctors and say everything was fine, only to reveal later that she was due more tests and everything remained inconclusive. More startling symptoms manifested when she began bleeding from her legs quite uncontrollably. She would reassure me all was fine, then my dad would confide in me later, 'it's like living in an abattoir. There's blood everywhere - there are bloody footprints on the floor from when she got up in the morning.'
My mum has finally been diagnosed with an under-active thyroid and type 2 diabetes. Whether or not that's everything that's wrong with her remains to be verified, but at the time being she is taking a ludicrous amount of medication per day. She called me up one night, however, later than she expected, in tears. She and my dad had rowed, and had been rowing for quite some time over the past few months. Supposedly my dad had been getting more surly in temperament to the point of being anti-social at the best of times and outright hostile at the worst. In the same conversation she told me that my dad had one night, whilst watching TV, come out and asked 'I wonder what death is like?' - a question quite uncharacteristic of my dad, who I remember chiding me for being 'macabre' when I asked that same thing to him in my teenage years.
All of this culminates to now, I suppose. This isn't the first time I've attempted to exorcise this. The first few times I stopped myself because the end of it I knew would be like this - sudden and without revelation. There would be no upward swing to all of this, no conclusion of 'and this is how I dealt with it, and now I am better' - because I haven't dealt with it yet. I remain in that same slump of my creativity, my projects leaving me a veritable Sysiphus in how futile I feel in tackling them. Even in roleplaying I feel quite often that I am not being all I could be, ranging from World of Warcraft, A Game of Thrones, Obsidian Arcana, Vampires in Public, leave me feeling that I cannot meet what I had intended with the character and that it is embarrassing for anyone around me to witness. I've not quite come to terms with my mum being ill - it's treatable, it's type 2 diabetes after all, but something about it remains discordant. My mum shouldn't be ill, my dad shouldn't be thinking about death. Such things aren't in their purview as parents. But the late-night talking my mum through, basically, relationship advice and unpicking the psychology of my dad was enough of an awakening to the notion of 'my parents have lives too', let alone the numerous incidents before it.
Regardless, as it stands, I do not have that upbeat notion to end on - not yet. Yesterday I fell into these feelings again as I tried to work on the linear for Saturday, and I likely will fall into these feelings again before the week is out. Admitting them here is only the start of my attempt to tackle them, and thus tackle the problem of myself, but it is a start.
What I hold on to, however, is that for every time I feel this background sadness, I do equally feel a background contentedness. I am about as sad as I am happy, these days. I am surrounded on a weekly basis by people that I love, people that I get on with, and people that I thoroughly enjoy the company of. The fact that I sometimes find myself contemplating that old Bilbo Baggins line, 'I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve', is in itself a positive to me - I am quite spoiled for good company should I ever seek it. There's a great many things that can amuse me and contain these feelings at any given time. My smiles and my laughter have never been false. Of late, when I lapse into these darker feelings, they strike hard and deep, but these things usually come to me in my privacy, and now they are lain out before me in text - albeit a rambling, incoherent and unwieldy wall of text - I can begin to reconcile them, approach them and surmount them.
I hold on to something that happened to me quite recently. In a single evening, in a single conversation, I had that old creativity sparked, a jolt of life through something that I had described as ebbing and done for. I had a friend approach me and, essentially, say that they wanted to work on a webcomic with me. There was a rough idea already there, a setting that already ticked one of my boxes in what I enjoy writing, but everything else was virgin and untouched, left utterly to my devising. It was, basically, a sandpit, a brand new one, all for me to play in and for her to illustrate on my behalf.
I felt, for that evening, bulletproof. Those dusty cylinders fired up in my brain and my world was blazing with words and ideas. I wrote over 1,000 words in the 'Far Shores Linear Ideas' document alone, as well as a sample two page script to explore the high concept of the world and even drifted into my own writing before I begrudgingly had to go to bed for work the next day. A part of me seriously considered tanking up on coffee and seizing all I could from that moment of inspiration. I wisely did not.
That incident has reminded me that I am not yet done. Far from it. It has spurred me to come to terms with this too-long endured ditch that I have found myself in and ponder the best way to begin my climb out of it. This journal entry was never going to have the grand finish, the pristine presentation of myself reinvented, because this journal entry was always going to be a step along the road. But without writing this, I would not have been honest with myself, or with others, about where I am at the moment.
I'm not happy. I'm not happy about a lot of things. But I'm wondering more and more if that means that I'm unhappy, and I don't think it does. Because for everything I'm not happy about, there's a lot of things I am happy about. For every disquiet I feel I am, somewhere else, some place else, content. I suppose this ultimately culminates in 'people aren't easy, psychology is weird, and feelings are complex'. And yes, it's not thrilling as a conclusion, but I think that's where I am right now. In a dip, not a chasm, looking up.
I'm just not happy.
I'm not happy, and I think the worst thing about it is that I've spent a long time trying to ignore it or hoping it would go away because I don't feel like I have the right to say it. I'm so utterly privileged as a British white male with the background that I've got, and in this day and age I've actually managed to secure a loving relationship, a place to live surrounded by people I care about and a job. So whenever this feeling strikes me and I find myself dipping into what has become a background melancholy I more often than not turn my back on it and say to myself 'but I'm not really unhappy, am I? For this reason, and that reason.'
In truth, I think it's the culmination of numerous things that have me feeling like this, several of which are propelling each other on to make me feel a little worse about myself and where I am. At the very bottom of the pile I'm frustrated with my work. I've enjoyed working at Starbucks, the people I work with are great and my manager has been utterly accommodating of me when I've needed it. I've had every Saturday since term started free from work so I can keep attending Saturday LARP. She's fantastic and for all of the bad times there, there are good and rewarding moments. What's frustrating about work is twofold. One, Kirsty and I are actually financially worse off because of the fact I'm working there (we were actually earning more when we were both unemployed), and two, the work has been exhausting me.
Even that, 'the work has been exhausting me', has seen me look at the words and think 'but it's not that bad, is it?' - and it isn't. I'm working somewhere between 25 and 30 hours a week, which should in theory give me enough free time to pursue anything I want ot pursue in my spare time, provided it doesn't cost much money. And, hell, I already have a word-processor, and that's the thing I love doing - writing. So why aren't I doing it?
I could lay the blame on the hours I work, the closes that see me late to things like tabletop games and VIP that do a good job of cutting right into the day without much leeway, but that in itself doesn't seem honest. There are four days a week that, outside of LURPS, I have to myself. Why hasn't the word count been wracking up? Why hasn't one of my numerous projects become manifest? Christ knows I've spent enough time dancing around each of them.
The first time I felt the wind knocked out of my lungs in this way was towards the end of Summer term last year. New Far Shores had been announced, Old Far Shores was coming to a close, and other than dipping my head into New Deal once a week I had very few commitments. Cath and I worked extensively on Far Shores. In some ways, the lore releases and players guide that have been seen so far were only half of what we had worked out. The planning sessions were feverish and delightful, raw and unbridled creativity, the momentum of ideas seeming utterly ceaseless. We were simultaneously working on bringing Old Far Shores to a close as well as our own manuscripts on the side. It was as demanding as it was fun. And I feel like I was the first to cave.
We both ended that period exhausted, but by the time we were releasing material on livejournal I felt utterly sapped. I exhibited behaviors that I am still suffering today: I would open a document to do some work and feel a lurching, hot sickness rise up in me. I was convinced that I couldn't meet anyone's expectations, that my word count was being compared, contrasted and found wanting, that there was a tangible difference in quality been my work and Cath's, that the players expected more from me and that the areas that I worked on - the beastkin and the Fringe, the Norls, Ibarran, Kordurren - paled in comparison to those of my cohort's design. One day we came to one of my releases to find that I had missed a good century or so out of the expected timeline of the Nation and, in doing so, had left too much to be revised to get the release out on time. I felt utterly wretched.
I am aware that these feelings were utterly internal. I only now, as of writing this, identify what I was suffering then with paranoia, and a paranoia without basis in reality at that. I can't reiterate enough how accommodating and understanding Kirsty, Cath, Luke and everyone involved were in that time, even if they didn't realise just how much support they were actually lending. What was expected of me wasn't difficult, and every setback was overcome without blame or severity. But as summer approached, I felt defeated, I felt like everyone around me was disappointed and impatiently waiting as I continually failed to deliver anything of quality and substance time and time again. When I grew reflective, I would compare myself to older versions of myself; the 17-year-old that got up religiously in the morning and wrote 1,000 words of prose without fail; the 21-year-old suddenly Ref of the most popular weekend LARP system run in LURPS that would deliver a linear every fortnight without fail. I remembered the week before a linear, how I would nurture an idea in my head, and by Thursday have some idea of how it would be executed.
I wondered where it had all gone.
When I had free time, I yearned for structure in my life. When I found structure, I yearned for more. When I had more, it became too much. Even now I feel frustrated at the gaping holes of unemployed time that yielded nothing productive, but anyone who has been in that position must know how utterly unfathomable it all feels. The days were hours of yawning excess that fostered a lethargy that I felt I should have been better equipped to deal with. I several times tried to foster a routine to try and encourage my creativity, but for the most part they were unsuccessful, and when they weren't, the success was short-lived.
One day in summer I asked myself, literally asked myself, 'weren't you supposed to be a writer? What happened to that?'
There were ideas that lay dormant and untouched. I had, and have, an unfinished comic script, in dire need of its plot needing restructured and its ideas made more coherent. Around the time of Alex and Kitty's wedding I, in a wine-hazed frenzy of creativity that was not entirely my own, came up with a novel set in the same universe, a viscous retaliation against a fantasy novel the plot of which hadn't met my expectations. There were ideas that my creative writing tutors said they wished they had come up with that I vowed to return to. Short stories and RP fiction were scattered around my desktop and my laptop and my pen drive. And every single one of them felt insurmountable. In everything, writing had become a burden laden with expectations I felt I was failing time and time again.
The Starbucks job, as I started it, was almost bittersweet. I had been at the time volunteering at Litfest. I loved the Storey building, I loved the feeling of being around such creative minds. At the launch of the Sea Swallow, a children's book published by Litfest, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a publicity event at a nearby school. The author, Gareth Thompson, and the artist, Hannah McGee, had sat down at the head of the children in a row with teachers and, awkwardly perched on the end of the row, myself. The children listened to the story as it was read, were awestruck by Hannah as she spoke about how she illustrated it, and then they all gathered around for publicity shots, each child clutching a copy of the Sea Swallow.
Tim, a thoroughly inspiring individual who happened to be a member of LURPS I had not crossed paths with, had seen the project through from the beginning. He had not been in the assembly hall when this was all happening. Instead, I could see him pacing too and fro through the glass of a door opposite us. It was astonishing to me, seen as it was myself, Hannah and Andy Darby, Litfest's director, that had been the ones that were late. When the opportunity arose, I snuck over to where Tim was. He was fraught, wringing his hand through his hair, cheeks flushed, and when I asked him how he was he rambled at me for a while about what was left to do. I told him to stop and look at the kids. Each one of them had a copy of the book, a fair few of them choosing to read it rather than listen to the photographer who was trying to get everyone's attention. There was a very real change in the way Tim was holding himself then - he was stricken with delight and relief, and said words to the effect of 'the book is in the hands of children. It's all been worth it.'
Tim's satisfaction was sticking with me about the time a job was advertised by Carnegie Publishing for a publisher. I found the post, applied for it straight away, then called them up whilst in Litfest's offices barely an hour afterwards to give them a better idea of myself. This, I thought, was going to be it. I would be able to experience that same satisfaction as I had seen in Tim, I would be able to immerse myself into the publishing industry, and what better crux for my writing career than that? The feedback I got during the call was so positive that when I attended the Starbucks interview I thought of the job only as a backup.
Needless to say of the outcome. I happened to find out about the Carnegie rejection the same day as Starbucks offered me a job. In accepting, I stopped going to Litfest. Tim and I have only spoken once since. I remember taking one last look at Andy Diggle's office, a room with concept art on the walls, a book shelf full of graphic novels, a comfortable sofa and a standing desk where he spends his days, his professional days, writing, and vowing that it would be mine one day - or at least, a room like it.
Starbucks have been great with me. I put everything I could into the job, I built up a reputation as being reliable and dependable. I've had it said that the manager purposefully puts me on the rota with me because I'm fun to work with, and the district manager once commended my people skills. For the most part when I'm there, I'm content in my work, I'm keeping myself busy, and I'm giving it all I can. But sometimes there are days when the prospect of going there is a looming one. I once again asked myself 'weren't you supposed to be a writer? What happened with that?'
It became a sensation that ebbed and flowed. I would some days come home from work with a buzz, a kick, an idea, and come my day off I would open up a manuscript and get to work. But some days I would feel drained and trapped, a sensation unaided by a worsening monetary situation that can only be dubbed 'financial insecurity.' One week, I bought myself a nice pocket notebook, and began writing notes at work. The next week, I put it through the washing machine accidentally, and when the rent came out of my bank I couldn't rightly justify replacing it.
A couple of things happened in sequence that really stirred me soon after.
One, I lay in bed one night and lapsed into a quiet melancholy. Them without prompt, I decided to vocalise it. I said to Kirsty 'I'm sad', and even then I was thinking 'but I'm not really sad, am I? I don't deserve to be sad'. But I kept talking, and put into words a feeling that had been haunting me for the last few days, a sensation that I was becoming a husk of who I once as, that I was darkening and my creativity was flaking off of me and dissolving, that I was incapable of finding any joy or satisfaction in my endevours, that the best of me was spent up and that I would need to abandon my dream of writing for something mundane, ordinary, uncreative. We talked, there was a cuddle, and the worst of my fears were abated. I don't know how long this feeling had been exhibited in me, but I know I had been struggling with it for a long time and Kirsty had seen it. Every time I was asked, however, I would say I was fine. Not because of so masculine avoidance of speaking about how I felt, but because I genuinely felt that there were people more deserved of feeling sad than I was.
The second thing, a random thing, was that in some video that one of us was watching a comedian (which one precisely alludes me) said that he was surprised to find that not everyone thought of death every night when they went to bed. I admitted to Kirsty that I did, too, sincerely surprised at someone else identifying this as abnormal behaviour. I explained as best as I could that for a long as I could remember there would be nights - not many nights, maybe three of four times a month - where I would be utterly thrown by the notion of mortality and that it was only within recent years that I had been able to reconcile my feelings about this subject. I say reconcile here and mean the difference between lying quietly distraught and thinking 'I don't want to die' over and over to where I am now, how I have accepted death, and still think about it from time to time, but summarise it with a mere 'won't that be a sad thing' and some contemplation of everyone and everything I will miss, and wonder if there will be any capacity for me to remember how happy this life and these people have made me.
Third, my father thought that exact same thing. This year has been a trying one for my parents. My mum grew ill and no-one seemed to know what exactly was wrong with her, and my dad hit the age of retirement. Some drama exists somewhere that I understand but shan't go into detail of about how my dad'll soon be out of work because of some exam he is refusing to take because it's widely conceived to be a means for the Financial Service Authority to make more money out of Independent Financial Advisers. My dad's sister has also been descending into Alzheimer's. It was harrowing to see it manifest when I saw her last, a woman that I could only dimly remember outside of phone calls and knew very little of other than that she had a piano, incapable of recognising her own brother and mistaking me as her son, Anthony. But this disease became a buzzword, as it were. I have had numerous calls from my mum in tears thinking she had seen symptoms of Alzheimer's in my dad and crediting her experience as a care worker at a retirement home as her authority on the subject. Similarly, some very real symptoms were showing themselves in my mum. She would develop thick bruising where she had taken the slightest knock, she was having problems with her heart, her appetite was right down and she wouldn't eat for days. What was worse, and what remains worse, is that she was inclined not to tell myself or my dad the whole story. She would go to the doctors and say everything was fine, only to reveal later that she was due more tests and everything remained inconclusive. More startling symptoms manifested when she began bleeding from her legs quite uncontrollably. She would reassure me all was fine, then my dad would confide in me later, 'it's like living in an abattoir. There's blood everywhere - there are bloody footprints on the floor from when she got up in the morning.'
My mum has finally been diagnosed with an under-active thyroid and type 2 diabetes. Whether or not that's everything that's wrong with her remains to be verified, but at the time being she is taking a ludicrous amount of medication per day. She called me up one night, however, later than she expected, in tears. She and my dad had rowed, and had been rowing for quite some time over the past few months. Supposedly my dad had been getting more surly in temperament to the point of being anti-social at the best of times and outright hostile at the worst. In the same conversation she told me that my dad had one night, whilst watching TV, come out and asked 'I wonder what death is like?' - a question quite uncharacteristic of my dad, who I remember chiding me for being 'macabre' when I asked that same thing to him in my teenage years.
All of this culminates to now, I suppose. This isn't the first time I've attempted to exorcise this. The first few times I stopped myself because the end of it I knew would be like this - sudden and without revelation. There would be no upward swing to all of this, no conclusion of 'and this is how I dealt with it, and now I am better' - because I haven't dealt with it yet. I remain in that same slump of my creativity, my projects leaving me a veritable Sysiphus in how futile I feel in tackling them. Even in roleplaying I feel quite often that I am not being all I could be, ranging from World of Warcraft, A Game of Thrones, Obsidian Arcana, Vampires in Public, leave me feeling that I cannot meet what I had intended with the character and that it is embarrassing for anyone around me to witness. I've not quite come to terms with my mum being ill - it's treatable, it's type 2 diabetes after all, but something about it remains discordant. My mum shouldn't be ill, my dad shouldn't be thinking about death. Such things aren't in their purview as parents. But the late-night talking my mum through, basically, relationship advice and unpicking the psychology of my dad was enough of an awakening to the notion of 'my parents have lives too', let alone the numerous incidents before it.
Regardless, as it stands, I do not have that upbeat notion to end on - not yet. Yesterday I fell into these feelings again as I tried to work on the linear for Saturday, and I likely will fall into these feelings again before the week is out. Admitting them here is only the start of my attempt to tackle them, and thus tackle the problem of myself, but it is a start.
What I hold on to, however, is that for every time I feel this background sadness, I do equally feel a background contentedness. I am about as sad as I am happy, these days. I am surrounded on a weekly basis by people that I love, people that I get on with, and people that I thoroughly enjoy the company of. The fact that I sometimes find myself contemplating that old Bilbo Baggins line, 'I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve', is in itself a positive to me - I am quite spoiled for good company should I ever seek it. There's a great many things that can amuse me and contain these feelings at any given time. My smiles and my laughter have never been false. Of late, when I lapse into these darker feelings, they strike hard and deep, but these things usually come to me in my privacy, and now they are lain out before me in text - albeit a rambling, incoherent and unwieldy wall of text - I can begin to reconcile them, approach them and surmount them.
I hold on to something that happened to me quite recently. In a single evening, in a single conversation, I had that old creativity sparked, a jolt of life through something that I had described as ebbing and done for. I had a friend approach me and, essentially, say that they wanted to work on a webcomic with me. There was a rough idea already there, a setting that already ticked one of my boxes in what I enjoy writing, but everything else was virgin and untouched, left utterly to my devising. It was, basically, a sandpit, a brand new one, all for me to play in and for her to illustrate on my behalf.
I felt, for that evening, bulletproof. Those dusty cylinders fired up in my brain and my world was blazing with words and ideas. I wrote over 1,000 words in the 'Far Shores Linear Ideas' document alone, as well as a sample two page script to explore the high concept of the world and even drifted into my own writing before I begrudgingly had to go to bed for work the next day. A part of me seriously considered tanking up on coffee and seizing all I could from that moment of inspiration. I wisely did not.
That incident has reminded me that I am not yet done. Far from it. It has spurred me to come to terms with this too-long endured ditch that I have found myself in and ponder the best way to begin my climb out of it. This journal entry was never going to have the grand finish, the pristine presentation of myself reinvented, because this journal entry was always going to be a step along the road. But without writing this, I would not have been honest with myself, or with others, about where I am at the moment.
I'm not happy. I'm not happy about a lot of things. But I'm wondering more and more if that means that I'm unhappy, and I don't think it does. Because for everything I'm not happy about, there's a lot of things I am happy about. For every disquiet I feel I am, somewhere else, some place else, content. I suppose this ultimately culminates in 'people aren't easy, psychology is weird, and feelings are complex'. And yes, it's not thrilling as a conclusion, but I think that's where I am right now. In a dip, not a chasm, looking up.