HAPPINESS VAMPIRE

Some days I just wake up and can feel nothing but the crushing weight of despair, so much so that I can barely find enough energy to swing my legs out from under the duvet and get up to face my morning routine. Somehow that weight just bears down upon me and the legs just do not want to move, but then I realise that they have to, and so they do.

The world is dark, and cold, and miserable and the days ahead promise nothing but a gruelling slog through tedious routines whilst trying to stop the fatigue from overwhelming me, and so I stagger through my other routines, the ones far closer to home, but the brain is pleading with me to make it stop, whilst simultaneously failing to conjure up anything that is worthwhile to think about and distract me from it all.

This, as they say, is not a good start. The words fail to trip from the mind, the ideas cupboard remains bare, and all of those glimmers of hope that I allowed myself whilst relaxing in the warm sunshine just a few short weeks ago seem to have crumbled to ash once more due to the arduous general, day-to-day slog of simply having to be.

It’s not as if the days just gone by hadn’t been bright enough. I’ll grant you that it was rather irritating that even the milkman, with whom I only communicate via hastily scrawled note, chose to simply ignore my note of strictest instructions and left three pints to fester in the unexpected warmth of a sunny spring day or two whilst I sodded off in search of a weekend of peace, fresh air and the mind-opening possibilities of being “otherwhere”, and with that act of defiance he did, simultaneously advertise my absence to anyone who might have wanted to notice which, rather luckily and, at the same time, rather perversely disappointingly, was nobody at all.

Upon my return my phone call announcing my safe return was not happily received because my safe arrival “otherwhere” had not been similarly recorded. The “happiness vampire” sank her teeth into me and the improvement in my spirits from being “away” was almost immediately gone.

Then I read a general article about the writing contest which I foolishly entered which seems specifically aimed at pointing out every single mistake that I know I made. It seems that, in my foolishness, I created the almost quintessentially “wrong” product. In fact it seems as if I couldn’t have been “wronger” if I’d tried to be, and once more that tiny spark of hope and faith in my own abilities which I’ve allowed myself to have is cruelly extinguished, and, despite the fact that I never expected to “win”, I had at least hoped not to “lose” quite so spectacularly. Instead, now visions of sophisticates mocking my ineptitudes at a distance echo cruelly along the empty caverns of my mind and I truly wish that I hadn’t even bothered.

Who was it said that they could handle despair, but it was the hope that was killing them?

Then there’s the tiny matter of my humble and rather pathetic efforts at writing my other stuff. Now, this was something that I never expected great things of, but I wasn’t previously really aware of just how bad I was. I have, after all, long accepted that I was merely averagely able at such things, but I hoped that continuous practice, like piano-playing, might make me better.

Sadly not. If anything, I seem to be getting worse.

The great and the good are actually writing their great works, and doing them rather well, without any of my own lacklustre contributions being deemed necessary or even wanted in the great general mish-mash, and they all seem to have been doing so since before they were even glints and gleams in their parents eyes.

I guess that it’s a “youth” thing.

These days you have to know what you want to be in life almost before Mr Sperm has even been formally introduced to Ms Egg, and then be prepared to “go for it” to the absolute ruthless detriment of almost everything else in your life. This means that the modern person with ambition is an eternal self-publicist with an irritating tendency to scream “look at me” with an almost desperate need for self-affirmation that simply wouldn’t be me and which I find infinitely depressing when I witness it in others, the “happiness vampire” in that case possibly being either - or both - of the parties involved...

Once upon a long ago it was kind of accepted that nobody under forty could write a half-way decent novel and this wasn’t because they were wasting all their evenings playing whatever the pre-war equivalent of “Grand Theft War Games” (or whatever…) was. Back in those days, much literary musing was expelled upon the notion of “needing life experience” and the dust was allowed to gather on a life before you re-examined it through your own literary filter.

This was always, of course, patently untrue. Some of the greatest of our literary giants were lying dead and cold in the ground long before they had even reached this middling age that I have stumbled up to, but I suppose it gave one or two of us late developers a glimmer of hope as we heard the reaper sharpening his scythe.

I was slightly cheered up recently by an “Arena” documentary about Jonathan Miller I saw, as he seems to have kept on successfully exploring other avenues for his particular brand of creativity long after reaching an age when the rest of might have given up or, at least, been content to look back on a job well done. Sadly, even this hopeful revelation was tempered by an acknowledgement of his mighty intellect, next to which my own mind burns like a birthday candle that has just been blown out.

I feel so utterly defeated by everything… The complexities and the tiredness are even making things I used to do well seem befuddling and confusing. The prospects for the weeks and months ahead don’t feel too thrilling, either. The hell that certain friendships can carry along with them, the small talk you dread having to make, the endless tales of the minutiae of other people’s lives that you have to feign fascination with despite having no real interest whatsoever in. Vain attempts at summoning the energy you simply don’t have, staying awake during the later evenings that you know that you would prefer to slumber through instead of attending the social functions that summer can bring along with it, and the endless list of projects that you already have no enthusiasm for.

I know that I will be tired, and that I’ll not want to be there, listening to all that chat. I know that I will be stressed and that certain people are likely to be at these hypothetical events too, especially those who have an uncanny knack of annoying the heck out of me simply by opening their mouth, and I always fear that the genetics that also make a “happiness vampire” out of me will no doubt resurface as the sun sets and the red fluids flow freely, even if those fluids are only coming from a bottle of a fairly decent Rioja...