Angst of an aging problem child.

I want to be clear, I'm not looking for you to say anything or any response or ... anything.

I have an annoyingly high amount of suicidal thoughts at the moment. Like, the major reason I have not killed myself, or the reason that I seem to have or give to myself most often is that I got a super sweet deluxe absolute edition of one of my favourite comics ever (Daytripper which you should look up) and have been rereading it an issue a day.

And it's frustrating because this is obviously some sort of mental health crisis but there's nothing to do about it. I mean, I went to my GP about it in January where it started to be bad, as a result of which I'm awaiting a letter from a phone consultation I had a few weeks ago to see if I get put on a much more than a year long waiting list for NHS therapy. And have been told to go to A&E if I think I'm going to do anything bad.

But I've no reason to think there will be anything offered there. And, truthfully, I am unlikely to act on them at at any point. So I sit and keep thinking about how I want it all to end and trying to come up with the last bits of details of how I'll do it in a few days (while knowing I probably won't, but also being disturbed by this.

I was talking to someone months back about how (among other qualities) as a sort of recovering semi-agoraphobic the lockdown's not good for me. And it occurred to me, today that actually I do just not want to go out. 

Part of it’s that climbing walls are closed. Part of it’s that those I’d most like to see in person are too far away, part that there’s a way in which socialising under distancing doesn’t quit work, part that, as so often the issue, that I don’t really want anything. 

I had an initial appointment with a therapist a couple of months back. (As well as a lot of approaching others who didn’t have time for mel.) She said she thought she couldn’t help me. 

Part of it’s that I don’t know what I hope to get from therapy. Part of that’s because I don’t have hope.

I’m half-heartedly making plans to travel to Scotland to lock myself up for a couple of weeks before staying with my parents for the res of summer. I’m not really enthused about it, or anything. (I don’t know how much of this is anhedonia, some inability to enjoy things, how much of it’s that I’d had a few things I hoped for and was looking for which are not possibilities, how much is the baseline “I don’t know what I want. (And I don’t really want to go on.)” And I don't think I am anhedonic. There's lots of little bits I like. But, you know, still don't want to go on and find it really hard to want to go on, in this world.) 



There are people I’d normally talk to about this, that I want to talk to, but they’re all too busy or unwell, mentally or otherwise, and really don’t have time for me and I don’t want to bother them again.

(And a bunch of them are probably sick of me having been here for five-six months, after a longer period of deterioration and huge part of it is not wanting to approach other people because I get to be too much for people and, let’s face it, there’s a degree of patheticness and being stuck here, which … I don’t know if anyone can help me with and sitting to say “there’s nothing you can do” and pushing away attempts to help and feeling more isolated.)



So I sit here thinking that I don’t want to go on and making vague plans.

From facebook:

2019:
Busy, lots of heartache and disappointment from unexpected events, went to some beautiful places with great people, climbed some things (not enough), just about survived the slings and arrows.

So many amazing people I'm glad to have got through it with. I love you all.

1. Step -- Vampire Weekend
2. Rolling in the Deep (Jamie xx Remix) ft Childish Gambino -- Adele
3. I Think Ur A Contra -- Vampire Weekend
4. The Privilege -- Parenthetical Girls
5. Ice Cream -- Battles ft Matias Aguayo
6. Home -- LCD Soundsystem
7. Choked Out -- Mountain Goats [This, the above two tracks and Water Fountain are all really close to interchangeable and it's insane to me they aren't the top.]
8. Dancing On My Own -- Robyn [Dancing to this as I leafletted at 6am for the election, thought this was top.]
9. Somebody That I Used to Know - Gotye ft Kimbra
10. Water Fountain -- TuNe-yARds
11. 2021 - Vampire Weekend
12. 212 ft Lazy J -- Azealia Banks
13, Avocado, Baby -- Los Campesinos!
14. Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na) --My Chemical Romance
15. Shame -- Young Fathers
16. This Life -- Vampire Weekend
17. Get Lucky -- Daft Punk ft Pharrell Williams [Check it out. Sound of the Summer]
18. The System Only Sleeps in Total Darkness -- The National
19. Vossi Bop -- Stormzy
20. I Broke Up in Amarante -- Los Campesinos!
21. On the Regular -- Shamir
22. Bad as Me -- Tom Waits
23. Oblivion -- Grimes
24. Present Tense -- Radiohead
25. Someone You Loved -- Lewis Capldi
26. Uptown Funk -- Mark Ronson ft Bruno Mars [Wait, really?!]
27. Truth Hurts -- Lizzo
Rich Man -- Vampire Weekend
28. Star Treatment -- Arctic Monkeys
29. Alright -- Kendrick Lamar
30. WTF (Where They From) -- Missy Elliot
31. Bury It -- Chvrches
32. Treaty --Leonard Cohden
33. Do I Wanna Know -- Arctic Monkeys

[Rough draft. Some of these were in my 2010s playlist I made at the same times and maybe don't belong here. So much Vampire Weekend is because they had three amazing albums this decade, and the third one has a variety of excellent songs on it and I couldn't pick one so put three on. May trim.]

I sort of had a moment where it hit me just how rough the last three months have been.

The purgatorial effect of the Brexit extension has, I think, hit everyone at Westminster. There's a grind and uncertainty and doom among us, more than before, and our psychic defences are low.

Also my dad nearly died, I failed to get into med school again, someone I'm involved with had a baby which has meant I'm a lot more alone with all the abandonment issues, transphobia is horrendous, I'm working two jobs and volunteering about weekly while trying to be an athlete. My sister's going to move to Ruwanda. Long-term colleagues are leaving. (Every now and then I remember that my other sister's going to (at 29) have her third kid in the next month or so.) Vertigo and iTunes are going away. Friends are having kids, moving continents, getting lecture-y jobs, I'm ... needing to find a field to apply myself to, getting old, not in therapy.

It's sort of like treading water, when you can't tell if you're actually breathing air or water. Or more like treading water while not being sure whether or not you're swept out to sea.

(And then I found out I live less than 100m from Boris Johnson.)

I've had two amazing holidays. I've read good books. I don't know if I'm learning anything. I have vague leads. I keep meaning to start writing something about mental health, which is currently mentally oscillating between that and a dating profile. (I know. I KNOW.)

Right now not climbed in a couple of weeks due to finger injury. Which apparently means I can't sleep.

I feel like I should be trying to fix something.

"One divorce is a tragedy,
Two a punchline", said
Through sobbed back tears, as
Cynicism seeps
Into the remains of
A once-pure heart




Singularity

Plans run out.
Potential diminishes over time.
Our bodies rust while
Friend reproduce themselves away.

Another dream dies.
No direction let or home,
For some value, but still
There is a light that never goes out
No matter how much you wish it would.

I’m so stressed.

My dad’s … very ill. A couple of weeks ago, after he was put on home oxygen and making death rattles in his sleep, mum called me telling me to skip work and appointments to take compassionate leave and head home. (It was less than three months after his sixtieth birthday.)



He … had sort of made peace with his possibly being about to die. But wants a few more years. 



I’ve been … travelling a lot. It was something like “Wednesday night to Glasgow, Thursday go across to Edinburgh, back to Glasgow, down to London, work on Friday before flying up to Aberdeen to go to Inverness for a weekend, Swansea the next Thursday for the day (last med school interview, I almost certainly didn’t get it, need to come up with new plan sometime),Tuesday morning, phonemail from mum, up to Fife, back down on Sunday, go to wedding in Kent for a day the next Saturday, Sunday train to Aberdeen, Monday back down to Fife, — which is now — before heading down on Thursday to get a Friday flight to Sardinia for the weekend.” Work's mental with Brexit.



I complicate things sometimes.


2018 has been 12 months I have passed through.

Climbing too much, and adding as much more “too much” on as I can, it’s featured separating from and recombining with Aberdeen*, while continually being amazed the government hasn’t quite collapsed yet with backdrop a Brexit that keeps getting worse all the time, with no end or backstop in sight. My reading has been book ended by the atmospherically haunting sparse style of M John Harrison and the madly allusive hyperdense stream of consciousness of Rodrigo Fresan** meeting in the middle somehow with Simon Ings’ baffling The Smoke which, come to think of it, pulls in aspects of both writers, although I suppose I struggle to verbalise its connection to Harrison beyond “the tension between platonic Yorkshire and London”. (If you enjoy words in pleasing orders, I would recommend Harrison’s “You Should Come With Me Now” & Light trilogy, Ings’ “The Smoke”, anything by Fresan, and maybe “Caroline’s Bikini”, by Kirsty Gunn, whose glorious formalism plays about with “detachment” in some unknown number of quotation marks which is in some cases brilliant.


[A lot of frustration — partially from things I can’t say. (That I have to self-censor due to work does get to me a lot sometimes, and there’s been particular times this year.) There’s a bookending of a pregnancies, I suppose. It’s the year I’ve taken up D&D, with a number of interesting implications]


On the whole, I suppose this year might be mostly summed up to me by the fact that it’s the middle year of an oddly double-length parliamentary session — it’s all within a very gruelling ‘year’ of 2018-20. And it’s marked a decade in London. It was a year. Which unaccountably did not feature an election.



*It’s perhaps telling that this year’s the first time in maybe this decade I’ve picked up a new Discworld book.



**And while I’m pleased that two of his novels have been excellently translated to English, I’ve been waiting for ‘Mantra’ to be translated for five years.


( 2018 in review. )

What I need to do in 2019: Find something. Prioritise. Focus. Sleep. Re-focus.

I only just realisedthat there is a ball of anxiety in my gut over the next week.

On the whole, denial and resignation to the face we have been essentially irrevocably playing it by ear since at least the election was announced has been letting me roll by, and I am happy it is. I imagine this is how the PM feels, minus the self-belief.

1: "I mean, I'm not saying it's symbolic, but ..."
2: "... I mean, it's not NOT symbolic"

A discussion about the appropriateness of using "Quits" in national headlines when everyone knows they're pushed brings me to a year ago.

Arriving in Dundee (like now) exhausted, from the overnight coach (I was a slip of a lad at 30), waking up with an hour of watching and rewatching a clip of bliss, pure release of tension and sign that things would get better. And the farcical sight of the country's national press tracking a minster flying home to get fired "for espionage" as a friend put it. Then there was a trip to follow home, to my parents' old home, which we packed up this spring.

Another year, another sister with a newborn daughter, repeating patterns with a tinge of failure, decay. (In politics, there are no happy endings. Only keeping wolves from the door. (I did always excel at epitaphs over execution.)) My dad's health's starting to go. Well, continuing. He's had arthritis since his twenties, things are catching up with him more. The older he gets, the more of myself I see in him. Which might be the opposite of how it's supposed to work.

I'm good. For some values. Building a 1992 Lego spaceship I always wanted, dinner with maybe the friend who's been with me the most for the last fifteen years. Talking the world over. He loved London, once, now he hates it. We sort of moved there together. His first marriage is over, owns a house he shares with his girlfriend and a cat and a dog. I feel no closer to a family of my own. But I have friends. And fun.

We tell stories about ourselves. Swap names of people we used to know. Admire our brands. My haircut, [Professor from our undergrad], the Queen and Dundee bus station are all we can find that haven't changed in the last fourteen years. London's local news gets taken for the world. Some things didn't work out, I've been in situations I couldn't have dreamed of, some people made it with me. Some people I didn't matter enough to, some people I mattered enough to but still couldn't make it. I'm reading good books. (Soul Mountain, Bottom of the Sky, The Future Won't Be Long, The Smoke, anything by M. John Harrison.) Ten years in London, and I'm still here. Well, there.

Here I'm in my parents' new house, with a few of my oldest and hardest clinging friends to drop by and play. Just finished the last bottle of the real, sweet ginger beer. There are worse ways to age.