Untitled

I’ve started this blog entry countless times.  I don’t even have a title for it.  I have something to say but I don’t know how to say it, or at least how to say it coherently.  So this is going to be an exercise in a stream of thought; a mental spit-up across the blogosphere, so to speak.  It isn’t written pretty and it shan’t be revised.  I want it to stand as it is for me to read in the future and remember exactly how I felt.

I did the thing, the big thing that I’ve been working towards all this time.  I resigned my position on 19^th March 2013.  And I was supposed to get mad-happy – throw my hands into the air and scream ‘SWEET FREEDOM!’ but that never happened.  Instead, I find myself here, in this place of strange, on this island of fear.  I can see where I’m to go next but I don’t want to go there.  What the hell is happening to me?  What I’d like to do is smash my head on the floor like a coconut and let the contents spill out so I could rearrange my brain-bits to work properly again and push them back in again.  But I can’t, so I’ll write about it instead - this blank screen the floor and these blog-words my brain strewn and strung out for me to sort and make sense of.

I did The Big Thing much faster than I planned.  I am now leaving work on 30^th June 2013 instead of 30^th November 2013, so a full five months’ off plan.  And as I type that, I am thinking, ‘Is this what I am?  Someone who cannot exist without a plan?  Christ, is that it?’  I wanted to see it through.  If I had, I would have saved up enough money to not work for five years, albeit on a tight budget.  My leaving early now means that our budget will be enormously constrained but we can still get through four-to-five years.  However, if I am lucky enough to get funding for a PhD (which I was going to go for anyway) we will be absolutely fine.  So, it isn’t exactly the money that is causing the anguish. 

But I still failed, didn’t I?  I didn’t keep my bleedin’ temper.  I am crap at alter egos.  Batman’s just popped up beside me (see, told you this entry would be somewhat alarming) and he is nodding his head.  I can’t be anything but me – the me who gets angry and cannot make-do.  But thing is, I’m not sure that is a good thing.  Lately all I do is get angry.  And now look – even Batman’s had enough.  He’s just got up and left.  He’s just told me he’ll read this when I’m done because even he cannot make sense of the crazy.  Great – I’ve managed to tick him off.  How am I supposed to live with myself if I cannot even amuse my muse?  Urgh – so I failed.  Since deciding to leave work in November the situation actually got worse not better.  It didn’t steel my resolve or make the burden easier to bear.  Instead all I could think is, ‘ARGH!  THIS IS POINTLESS!  LET ME OUT!’  Pathetic really – just eleven months to complete and I couldn’t even do that.

But, if I’m going to be fair to myself, I’ve had fifteen years of doing things I do not want to do.  Maybe, just maybe, that was enough torment.  Cut yourself some slack, Joey.  It was time to go.

There were other factors in my leaving early.  I had fifteen days holiday to take for the whole year in which I have to complete two assessed essays, a 15,000 word dissertation, formulate a proposal for a PhD and put together a funding application for that PhD.  My fifteen days of holiday would be used on dissertation research alone as the archive only opens Monday to Friday.  I looked at all I had to do and realised that there was little chance of me being able to complete it all and hold down a full-time job. 

And I am so very scared of completing a dissertation.  I have never embarked on research proper.  What if I get to the archive and find that I am a pathetic waste of time?  That all my hopes of PhDs are for nought as I am the world’s worst academic?  That I am thick-as-a-whale-omelette and unoriginal to boot?  Christ.  That’s a big part of the reason for my bad feeling.  I am staring down the barrel of a very big gun here.  Now is the crunch time.  I cannot blag this – write big and beautiful words and get away with it.  I shall be judged on those four chapters, the make-or-break of my academic future. 

I am standing on a precipice.  There’s one hell of a drop down to the other side.  I am so far up that my feet are in clouds.  That’s my future down there, below that mist and in order to go there I have to leap off.  No wonder I am so scared.  I’ve spent thirteen years being an accountant – a bad one, admittedly.  Now I face completely retraining myself.  It is all very well planning and dreaming, plotting and imagining.  Now I actually have to put my money where my mouth is.  I’m going to try to do what I think I should be doing and no one else will be there to account for my failures.  In my office life I have the comfort of an impossible situation to blame all my ills upon.  I am doing the wrong thing and the whole set-up is wrong also, therefore, I am never going to succeed or feel good doing it.  But down there, in that place I cannot see, there’ll only be me.  I chose this.  No one else is making me do it.

Which brings me back to the place from whence I came.  No one asked me to be an accountant either.  That was also my decision – a poor one.  I didn’t enjoy my undergraduate degree, didn’t excel at it but was unequipped for life beyond it.  So, thinking that I needed to get as far away from university (and myself) as I could, I thought – ‘Let’s do something sensible and make some money’ and so into auditing and accountancy I went.  I didn’t exactly like myself then.  I do now.  (Not that this blog post demonstrates that, but it isn’t supposed to.  I am laying myself bare here, looking at the ugly).  So, I continued to choose badly, but I was young and very depressed and not the sort to take advice.  Become an accountant is what I did and have ever since inflicted my half-hearted attempts to set debits and credits right upon the world.  And I am not very good at it.

Thing is, it actually causes me anguish to say that I am not a good accountant.  Why should that matter now?  I have admitted that it was the wrong thing for me to do and that I want to go and do something else.  It isn’t my battle to fight anymore.  But that makes me feel so bad.  I’ve turned away from the precipice now to look back to the place from where I came.  I recognise the places I worked, the people I’ve known but there’s no trace of me.  No one is looking up to me to wave or to smile.  The structures, the places I entered look exactly the same as when I entered them.  If there are changes made, they weren’t made by me.  I have had no impact whatsoever.  Was I ever going to make a difference to a place I didn’t care about? Where I only ever did things half-assed?  It wasn’t my place to be: the place I am going to fly off the edge into is.  That’s where I shall make my mark, I hope.

But – what if that is my problem?  Am I the sort of person who cannot knuckle down and make a go of anything, so used to getting by and doing things half-cocked that I am incapable of giving my all?  I don’t want to do that anymore.  I did it during my undergraduate degree.  I want to do my best at things.  I NEED to try my best otherwise I’ll out my future at stake.  I am not even adequate in my studies yet and a very poor writer.  The world is filled with brilliant and beautiful people who I have to stand beside.  It’s not enough to go into that line-up looking jaundiced and unkempt.  Please Joe – do not let yourself down.

I am increasingly realising that I do not really know myself.  That is a horribly clichéd thing to say.  I mean – who does?  Self is a shifting, tricky concept at the best of times.  But what I mean to say here is how much of my current ambition – doing study full-time, writing – is the result of my current situation?  I am not grown organically.  My nursery was forced and false, not natural – like rhubarb grown in a dark shed.  I can see the light from the door of my shed but I don’t know what’s out there; what that light means. (I suspect there is something of Plato or Socrates in this analogy).  Quite simply, I do not know the reality of my situation.  All I know is the shed.  In the shed, I have to act in certain way and that way is not true or natural or knowing.  The life of the shed is dishonest.  When I unplant myself and heave my roots outdoors to grow in the sunlight, what will I see?  I have an idea of how I shall grow and what I want to do in order to grow, but what if that isn’t right?  My thinking has been shaped by thirteen years in the office/accountancy shed.  I am going to experience things out in the light that I have never before.  Real, sunlight-grown rhubarb do not think like shed rhubarb, I suspect.  I am grown all gnarly and dishonest by the power relationships that make up shed living.  For instance, when another rhubarb says something reactionary or ill-informed in the shed I tend to keep my rhubarb-mouth shut because if I speak out, the other rhubarb hit me in ways I cannot see coming because of the gloom.  When I go over to the light I shall still act like I am in the shed for some time.  But as I grow and I change and I adapt, I might find that all those images I saw in light around the shed door-  the things I imagined were writing or academia - are not what I thought they were, are not what I wanted.  I may change my mind and do something else.

I now know that I am crazy because I’ve just spent a paragraph likening myself to rhubarb.  Though interestingly Batman is back because he finds the rhubarb thing amusing.  Ah, if only Frank Miller knew the truth of you, you great big idiot.

I am going now because, strangely, I feel better.  This shall change I know because I have done a Very Big Thing.  Changing your life, committing yourself to living an honest life takes courage.  It goes against the grain to do something new.  I am actually glad to not be bouncing up and down with happiness and glee because this means I have thought about it properly.  I am a grown-up and an intelligent one.  Therefore, I am analytical and questioning.  I do not want to just go off without thinking about what I want to get out of life; without recognising the dangers and being prepared.  Yes Batman – I have put on my mental utility belt – that is very right.  Could you shut up now?  Joanne is writing…

At points in the future I shall be ecstatic and hopeful and full of motivation.  I shall celebrate this Big Thing yet and get very drunk doing so.  But for now I shall be mindful.  My life, though no write-off, has not come close to fulfilling its potential.  There is an age of hard, tortuous work ahead.  And no matter the success or failure, they are but landmarks on my very long journey.