FEAR OF FAILURE

I’m in a strange place at the moment. Well, nor geographically, obviously. Geographically I’m in pretty much the same place that I always am when I tap out these dreary little pieces, but emotionally, rationally and philosophically, I’m all over the place and I suspect that it’s beginning to show for even the kindest of you observers out there. Normally I’ve got a couple of posts in my back pocket, stored up for that rainy, rainy day when nothing springs to mind, but, sadly, I’ve already used them up this week and there’s nothing left. I always thought that two days was enough of a buffer. There’s rarely two days on the trot that go by when absolutely nothing doesn’t manage to annoy me in some small way, or else I do at least find something to interest me enough for me to have an opinion on it. Granted, I have scraped some barrels lately, and mulling over the history of the contents of this room doesn’t necessarily make for the most thrilling of tales to be told, but I usually bounce back with something slightly better than that, something with at the very least a slight amount of merit, but not today. Today the well is dry and the flashbulbs going off in the brain are popping so intensely that I can’t seem to think.

Sorry.

There are reasons for this, of course. Not necessarily real reasons, of course, but wholly imaginary ones that are still somehow managing to brew up and boil over and cause the darkest corners of my imaginings to coalesce into abject fear, and fear can make any of us stand there like a rabbit in the headlamps, incapable of functioning, unable to get out of the way and run for cover…

I should, of course, stop.

Sign off.

Vanish for a while.

Disappear.

I can’t do that, however, because of this obsessive compulsion to communicate, no matter how pointlessly. Somehow I still find myself drawn to the keyboard with a desperate need to prove to myself that words can still be strung together, even though it’s patently obvious that there is no real purpose or meaning behind them. It’s like I’ve simply run out of steam, or thoughts, or ideas. Even the “list” isn’t able to help me. Oh, there’s still my great long list of ideas to be ploughed through. Endless possibilities and things that I really think that I’d like to write about someday, but today, the thoughts just won’t come.

I know. I’ve tried. I’ve sat here for quite some time already, trying to conjure up a string of thoughts about anything and everything, and, like the last bus on a rainy evening, they just won’t come. I am struggling at the moment. Things do seem to be rather spiraling out of my control and, to be honest, as usual it’s with no good reason. Somehow all the possibilities and doubts and worries are constantly exploding and I find myself feeling less and less capable as time marches on. It’s like the more the panic starts to set in, the less I’m able to actually doing anything about it. Ironically I feel like I’m at the centre of a hurricane, but I’m anything but a calm centre. “Why?” you may ask, (assuming that you haven’t already scuttled back off to wherever you come from after seeing a familiar theme developing. Again…), “What is going on under that dark stone in those far distant corners of  Lesser Blogfordshire to cause this state of being?”

Basically, I’ve been sitting here fretting. Things in my life seem suddenly to be a little insecure. I persuade myself that bad things are happening, the worst things, and the stability that I depend on so much feels like it’s wobbling a little. I spend way too much time in my own company to be honest. Ask anyone who has ever spent just a few minutes talking to me and you’ll realise what a chore that might be if you had to put up with it all day, every day.

Ah, it’s no use. I really should go now. There’s nothing I can write here that serves any real purpose. The human condition remains just as much obscured as it did before you started reading this. None of us have learned anything new. I’d be wasting both your time and mine if I allowed this to drag on any longer. Of course, you know I’ll be back again tomorrow to inflict more of much the same, because it seems that I can no longer help myself. But then, that’s my problem, not yours.

As it says at the top of the page, “I’m mostly talking to myself” anyway, so why should it matter? At least I’ve done it. Managed it. Achieved something with my morning. I have actually strung some words together in a kind of vaguely coherent way. The dark shadow and the stomach-churning fear of failure has been held at bay for another day.

Until tomorrow of course…