CONTRACTUAL OBLOGATION

I’m feeling so low now that it’s almost painful. I feel so far out of my depth some days that I really don’t know how to describe it. It’s making me miserable and it’s making me feel sick. The depression I’m feeling every single day now because of simply not being able to fathom out what I’m supposed to be doing and how to actually do it is really beginning to dig into my soul.

I plod on and on but deep down I feel that I’m getting nowhere and sense that there’s simply a presumption that understanding and knowledge can somehow be plucked by magic out of the ether. I try and make light of the massive Swiss-cheese like gaps in my abilities, hoping that it’s obvious that the apparent flippancy is masking the gut-wrenching fear, but no-one seems to take the hint. Nor do they ever have to admit that any of their own gaps even exist, or even think that they need to answer my very dim and obvious questions about problems that presumably wouldn’t trouble a six-year-old. They just seem to fly along, never realising how someone could possibly be so ignorant that they can’t grasp the idea by some form of osmosis, because, after all, that’s how easily it appears that they learned everything themselves.

“Why don’t you just ask?” seems to be the popular advice I get, but, as with so many of the things of life that seem obvious to everyone else but an eternal mystery to me, I have asked. I’m repeatedly asking but none of the answers are forthcoming, or, if they do, they explain nothing by telling me everything and just assuming that I will, somehow, simply understand, despite a deluge of words and phrases and actions that purport to tell me everything and yet tell me nothing at all.

“Try going through it a bit more slowly…” I want to suggest, fearing that eyes will be raised to the ceiling and the inference of my ignorance will be presumed once again, and I start to get that feeling, as I so often do nowadays, of being regarded as the idiot brother, the tolerated simpleton, the fool on the hill. How can I possibly ever really know how that works if I don’t know that it can work? But even the things I used to do well seem beyond me now as the confusion spins into anarchy and chaos and despair.

Feeling like an idiot, looking like a fool…

“Do you know what makes you happy, and are you doing enough of it?” someone recently asked and I have to answer that I really haven’t a clue about the first part, which makes the second part unfathomable. I used to think I liked writing my nonsense every day but that’s starting to feel like a chore and most of my former fellow travellers on this strange journey we were taking together seem to have clambered off the bus now, leaving just a couple of we diehards (or possibly just unconscious drunkards) to struggle on towards the terminus. Once upon a time I thought that they were addictive, but I seem to have cured the vast majority of my regulars of that particular vice, and I find myself merely going through the motions, tapping away towards the meaningless goals I set myself once upon a long ago and fulfilling the contractual obligation (oblogation???) to complete the requisite number of days before drifting off alone and unmourned into the ether. One more nail in the coffin, one more milepost on the road to nowhere.

I struggle when I read something directed at one acquaintance by another, which is made up (to my mind) of such obvious fawning toadiness that it makes me want to wretch, but then I realise that I’m being uncharitable. It’s perhaps just someone trying to say something nice to someone else, but I’m still suspicious of their agenda and find myself wondering what it is about them that offends me so much, realising, in the blink of an eye and the thudding of a rather surprising next heartbeat, that it is perhaps their very niceness that troubles me because I fail to understand it.

Such frank transparency of happiness and joy at the achievements and successes of another human being do not come easily to me. As the poet Morrissey once wrote “We hate it when our friends become successful” and sometimes the simple basic truth of that resonates with me so very well that I loathe myself for even having the thought.

It’s very difficult to struggle along when your brain’s melting and all the joy and lightness has been sucked from your spirit. Sometimes – or is it all the time? - I feel like I’m drowning in fear, drowning in hopelessness. My hopes have become nothing but a barren wasteland… and now all hope is gone, but what exactly do you mean? See, I’ve already waited too long…

Christ! I can’t even get that right now…

Just think of this as treading water, another placeholder before we reach the end of our journey.

Goodnight, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.