DEAR ME…

Dear Me,

I decided to write you this letter to let you know that I understand how you are feeling. I know how tough you think that it is simply being you and, whilst I also understand how very few people are ever likely to take the time or make the effort to understand that, I feel that you should be made aware of the fact that there always will be one person who will be fully aware of it and will be there if you should ever need them to be.

I know that you approach your life with a growing sense of disappointment, that the life you lead is perhaps not the life you once saw yourself leading. I know all about the general feeling that is gnawing away at your soul, that you are becoming ever more aware that most of the great swathe of people sharing this world with you seem to be fundamentally ignorant in so many ways, but not only that, nowadays seem terribly proud to show off that ignorance like it is some kind of badge of excellence. You, however, already know how big an idiot you are, because we all are really when it comes down to it, and you’re living a life that proves it. It has taken you a very long time to learn the one basic and undeniable truth that you now know only too well, that you basically know nothing, and that equally, nobody else does either. It’s a hard learned lesson: “Nobody knows anything”, but some of them are better at hiding it than others.

You have tried and failed to make something more of yourself and attached grandiose and ridiculous importance to things that basically do not matter at all. Things like the words that you continue to write that mean so much to you, somehow have come to mean so little to almost everyone else. I know that you want to write messages of encouragement to other people but the courage required constantly escapes you and the right words just will not come and then you slink away feeling like an even bigger idiot for not feeling able to do so. After all, interaction is what makes the world go round. Most of the people you might choose to interact with already know what an idiot you can be, so what harm’s one more tiny crumb of evidence confirming it really going to do? But still you procrastinate, dither and fret about what is the right thing to do or say.

I also know that you remain jealous of the way some of the people you interact with are able to see the world. You envy them their broad intelligence and wide experience over your own narrow spectrum of interest and knowledge. You envy them their way of seeing abstract beauty and excitement in the most unpromising of things whilst your own worldview remains parochial and mundane at best. I know that it troubles you that you are no longer able to see the world in such a wondrous way but instead remain obsessed by things that are dull and drab and artificial, instead of being to grasp hold tightly onto the world and all of its wonders and see them for the bright and beautiful things that they are and share that sense of wonderment with your fellow human beings instead of just seeing life as hanging on with terror to the surface of this spinning ball of rock as it transports us all towards oblivion.

You envy these people their easy friendships and the fact that people, a lot of people, genuinely seem to care about them and hope that they will succeed in their endeavours, whilst your own flickering and diminishing list of acquaintances seem ever more disinterested in your own fate, circumstances and opinions. The basic mystery of taking an interest in the lives of others remains a source of much confusion in your mind, even though you know that if you made more of an effort to do so, so would they. You understand that you really do get what you give, although that should never, ever be the reason for doing the actual giving, and yet you still find it increasingly difficult to actually do anything about it, and then loathe yourself for not feeling able to.

But then you seem too frightened to engage with the world any more. It remains a fearful and dreadful place that you’d rather not have to deal with at all, full of scary possibilities, great unknowns, and things that are far too much out of your control for you to feel you can safely deal with them. The boundaries of your comfort zone seem to shrink each and every day and leave you sitting cold and alone upon a tiny desert island of your own making, and sometimes even that small oasis of relative sanity seems to be crumbling around you.

You see the very same diminishment and decay in members of your own family and it terrifies you how much DNA you share, and you fear suffering a similar fate as you watch them crumble, and occasionally consider that any alternative would be preferable to that, and you find it harder and harder to watch it happening, even as the symptoms and alterations in the crumbling edifice of your own body seem to be starting to collapse in precisely the same ways and these echoes of your own future are horrifyingly visible to you and terrifying you.

You know what a hypocrite you can be, and how utterly pompous you are. You claim to seek out knowledge but fail to actually learn anything from the process. You will, for example, make the occasional claim to love the wonders of the night skies and you will still become as excited as a schoolboy at taking a glimpse at the night sky and seeing the plough shining brightly on a crisp night as you look to the north, but only because it was the TV that prompted you. That blessed goggle box, your life long friend, that safe little window on the world that means that you can see into it and explore it, but only in a totally passive way. Otherwise, despite all the information in the books you keep constantly around you as some kind of security blanket, you would probably not otherwise have bothered. All of your knowledge is, therefore, you believe, a total sham. Everything you do and experience is fundamentally second-hand and it is other, brighter, more enquiring minds which are taking the time and trouble to put the real effort in, and you just sit in your web like a parasitic spider and feed off their efforts.

Occasionally, your pulse may quicken upon seeing a personal hero of yours, like the last man on the moon, Gene Cernan, chatting away, but you’re still too shy, or too arrogant to admit to being impressed, or accept that they are impressive because they have actually achieved something, done something, in a way that you could once only dream of and now know that you never will.

Then something like “Sherlock” comes along which you claim to have enjoyed and that you know that you thought was so brilliant, and yet you still allowed it to suck any of the joy you might have got from it out of you and let it somehow still manage to kill you a little bit inside when you realise that you have nothing of the skills required to create anything even remotely as brilliant of your own. At the same time, you started to resent it even more because of its sudden popularity making every one else consider themselves an expert on the subject now after all those years of feeling like you were keeping the flame all alone. Even the joy of trying to work out your own theories and solutions to the conundrums created started to seem tired and lame to you in comparison to the others you read from these bright new interlopers upon what you erroneously considered to be your patch, when you realised how many of the details of the story you had failed to take in. Finally you found yourself falling into the realms of despondency and despair at the sheer brilliance of the geniuses behind it all, knowing that you are not worthy to even involve yourself in the gentle art of verbal badinage in their presence, such is your own sense of inadequacy in comparison.

I am fully aware that six hours sleep a night is not nearly enough and that you sleepwalk through too many days in a perpetual state of near exhaustion which, perhaps, causes the deeper recesses of your subconscious mind to leap out into the daylight where they don’t really deserve to be, and that these thoughts are fully capable of skewing your whole viewpoint and screwing up your day. These dark thoughts can permeate everything and seep and trickle into even the most optimistic of thoughts and cause them to turn to ashes in your mind.

I think you should try to accept that perhaps the time has come to maybe try and give yourself a break, and not just in the physical sense of having some time off from some of the things you do, but also to give yourself a little slack and stop being quite so hard on yourself. Despite what you may have been led to believe, you’re really not the worst person in the world, even if you are occasionally capable of acting in ways that might appear otherwise. Certainly, from all the pressure to succeed that you are continually piling upon yourself, and that nobody else really expects of you, it becomes hard to accept something very simple, like the fact that you can walk away from the keyboard and that it really doesn’t matter if you do. I know that you think that you’ll be letting yourself down and you will start to imagine that if you actually stop writing you might as well stop existing, but there’s more to you than that, and it doesn’t define you any more than anything else you do does. You are not just your job. You are not just your words. You are far more important to you than what you do is.

From this sense that you aren’t the person that you think that you ought to be you have managed to convince yourself that you are somehow unworthy and have no redeeming features and can do nothing of any merit at all, but you need to remind yourself that this is simply not the case, and you must learn to hang on to the positives, few though they might appear to be. You might live in a crumbling pile but at least you have somewhere to live, and you have, most importantly, someone who loves you to share it with. Sometimes such simple truths might not seem all that significant, and perhaps on occasion you have a tendency to take these basic fundamentals that are around you every single day far too much for granted, but you should always try to remember that it is having these things in your life that are perhaps the most important of all.

Sincerely

M.