BAD DAY

On Friday night, I was, quite simply not having a good evening.

The spirits fell, the mood crashed and I found myself feeling simply bereft for quite while, sleepwalking around the house and finding it very hard to engage with anything very much, show any interest in anything, or convince myself that anything I have ever achieved in my life had any merit or worth.

Everything, basically, just felt utterly and totally pointless, and I was beginning to think that absolutely anything I had ever tried to do ever had any actual value at all.

The timing was lousy.

After all, it's not just about my writing, but this mood crash coincided with the day's announcement of the Bruntwood prize winners amongst whose number I was never going to feature, and, in the spirit of the times, we finally got around to watching the "National Theatre 50" programme which we'd recorded at the start of the month and two-and-a-half hours of watching actors actually looking as if they were acting (it's not their fault - dashing on and doing a "bit" can't really help with getting to the reality of the moment) whilst performing some of the very best writing ever written for the stage is never going to help me to feel any better about my own humble and pathetic efforts.

In the midst of all this, I was suddenly reminded of having my mum missing from my life.

And I felt just so very, very tired...

I can't... I can't... I just can't...

It's the kind of fatigue which feels not dissimilar to screaming depression followed by a total inability to function and that sense that you can't even be bothered to walk around because it takes far too much effort, which happens alongside everything else which also feels like far too much effort. Enthusiasm feels miles away, and beyond a mountain range which looks far too difficult to attempt to traverse.

So you simply decide not to bother.

What happened last month has, perhaps not surprisingly, made me think about my own life a lot, especially as I'm still rapidly skydiving towards fifty...

By this point in my life I feel that I ought to have added up to so much more, to be something that I've never managed to become, but so many opportunities have slipped away and I've got to a point where I'm no longer sure where the me in all of this is any more...

I do sometimes think that those long, wasted years of the decade of the 1990s did more damage than I realised.

So what are the solutions?

I wonder sometimes whether I ought to rejoin the theatre group which I once used to involve myself in the peripheries of...? After all, I had some little purpose for a time when I was there, but then, like most things I've ever involved myself with, it also conspired to annoy me so regularly that it still might not be a good idea. I suspect that I'd only be rejoining at all because I couldn't think of any better options, but then I've seldom been the sort of person who wants to join things, no matter how many Book Groups or Creative Writing Groups I feel that I might have missed out on over the years.

The fear of not being good enough is almost as crippling as the mind-shattering shyness has been.

I know that there are so many lapsed friendships to be worked on even though I also know that I've let things slide for far too long, although I need to accept that it wasn't all one-sided, because their priorities changed too...

Perhaps I'm just not very good at this living mularkey...?

Of course, I know that all of this recent excitement over the recent telly and shopping stuff which I've been blathering about in my recent posts is just a classic substitution for whatever the void I perceive as being in my life is... If you want to believe in that sort of homespun simplistic self-analytical psychology anyway.

And yet...

You see...

There's a thing about not wanting to anticipate stuff too much in case it turns out to be absolutely awful... and despite the fact that I can be trying my very best to remain non-committal and as pragmatic as possible about whatever the something of the moment happens to be, at the same time I so-o-o-o much don't want to actively dislike the thing which leads to an almost bipolar need to protect myself from disappointment.

I'm in a delicate place emotionally.

I'm really not very good at the moment at dealing with disappointments...

Or even potential disappointments...

And that's symptomatic of my relationship with the wider world.

Better to hide under a rock and not engage rather than finding out how disappointing the world, the people in it, and your own self can actually be.

After all, if the world was all that bothered by my continuing absence, surely it would have come looking for me by now, wouldn't it...?

Thought not.