SUELAWLEY

This is one of those situations that sounds either too self-indulgent to be true or implies that I'm having some kind of a breakdown, so bear with me. There is, however, always the possibility that I am, in fact, actually having a breakdown, so we mustn't rule it out. Not yet, at any rate. All things are possible and, given that I'm sure that much of what follows is a direct result of not-so-recent events in my own little and inconsequential little life, I wouldn't want to rule it out. And furthermore, it will all sound so ungrateful, too, especially as there is a special someone in my life who is acting as a rock at the moment, and who, if she were too actually read this, would no doubt be very upset to find that my mind was working like this. That said, the wee small hours of the morning, those insomniac times when my brain prods me awake and starts buzzing, are the times when I feel it most, and there's nothing anybody can do about that. The problem is that, despite the fact that I do have someone with whom to share my life, and that I do actually spend most of my working days alongside m'colleagues, I've never felt more alone in all my born days. As the song by the Police goes: "Sue Lawley, Sue Lawley…" A long, long time ago, when I was a student, I used to keep a sketchbook into which I would scribble ideas for future projects that would never happen, or draw lousy drawings for artwork that wouldn't actually come about, and which would probably have turned out to be so lousy in execution that I'm suddenly quite embarrassed to be even thinking about it now. In many ways, it served for a time as a kind of daily "visual diary" and was, I suppose, a kind of precursor to this blogging life that I've found myself drawn into and wasting too many of the precious few hours of my life with during these past few years. Anyway, on one of the pages I remember there is a rough drawing of myself as I imagined that I might be seen from above, and I've drawn a black circle around me to represent a deep, dark hole, and underneath it I've written the caption "How is it possible to be surrounded by so many people and yet feel so alone?" which proves its vintage, at least. If I'd written it nowadays, there'd be at least one "utterly" in there, because my language has become more self-indulgent and flowery since then, and also very much in need of a darned good edit. I mean, it probably needed an edit back then, but now it needs one far more as my eloquence may have improved but my brevity - and therefore my wit - has not. I don't need to go and actually find this drawing, by the way, it's as clear as day in my memories this morning, and I'm not entirely sure quite why it's popped in today, but it has and, to be honest, it seemed really rather appropriate. I sometimes like to do these stream of consciousness things, by the way, just to see where they take me. It's usually to the darker covers of my mind, but there you go. If I block it all into one huge paragraph, there's a good chance nobody will find it easy enough to read anyway to be bothered getting this far and so my secrets will be safe. To be honest, I think that it's been all of this paperwork which has been getting to me again of late. Sometimes I just want to sit down with someone and ask some advice, and talk my way through it with someone who isn't going to be charging me three days salary for every hour it might take. Sometimes I really miss not having a father to chat about such things with. I mean, I know that he might not have understood it any more than me, but at least if you're rattling through these things together, you can bolster each others doubts with a quick "I'll put that then… Okay…?" and feel slightly more confident about it all. For similar reasons, I'm also missing mum. Going through paperwork with her might have stretched our patience with each other to breaking point, but at least the adrenaline kick of railing against her sense of my own inadequacies used to make me bloody-minded and stubborn enough to go "Right, well I'm putting that down, okay!!!" and things used to get done, even if I'd have to go away fuming and the recalcitrant phase would lead to the inevitable apologetic phone calls later. I also miss my sister being nearby. We've had our financial ups and downs throughout the years, but at least she's enough of a live wire to do something and wouldn't allow me to wallow in this ennui-fueled lake of apathy to mix my metaphors like a strained gearbox in a  stock-car race. There are my colleagues, of course, although I get the impression that they're getting heartily sick of listening to me drone on and on about my woes whilst taking precious little interest in theirs. Well, I remind myself, they have their own "circles" to support them, and I've got, well, them, but it seldom works out like that. I could, of course, just burble on about it in the blog… Oh look! I am! But that just tends to frighten everyone away, and then, of course, my "real-life" friendships seem to have diminished and dwindled away over the past few years to the point where I don't really feel as if there is anyone left that I could actually go and see and talk to about anything. They've all got full, active and interesting lives, it would appear, and if there ever was a "Martin shaped hole" in any off their lives, I can't really imagine that it would even give one single Polo mint a run for its money when it came to significance. So, instead, it's still the Beloved and I against the world, although I really feel that I ought not to be troubling her with this. She's done enough, really, to support me through this crisis, and I am sometimes so ungracious. We really need to start looking at that empty canvas that is life beyond the current situation, but somehow it just keeps dragging me down, holding me back like the huge weight it feels, and making it almost impossible to think beyond anything at all. Psychologically, I know that it's perfectly normal. On some level it's about trying to cling on to things, about not letting go, but… they need to be let go of. Life needs to move on. Things need to be put behind us, even if they appear at times to be dragging on and on ad nauseum. Meanwhile, there's the small matter of the fact that my online life seems so bereft, possibly because I can't fake any interest in the mundanities of others and yet feel disappointed when they fail to be interested in the mundanities of mine, and yet, at the same time, I appear to have become so obsessive about my virtual life that I'm beginning to neglect to make any engagement with my real one. I'm almost certain that my constant need to "tappity-tap" and "just check" things is doing damage to our relationship, just as I'm almost certain that I'm finding it difficult not to keep on doing it. And then there's the theatre. From time to time, in a vague effort to persuade myself that friendships might be resumed if I dragged myself back in part towards my old life, I toy with rejoining the world of the theatricals via the AmDram outfit that I once used to hang about on the fringes of. "Maybe" I reason "I could go back, but do it on my own terms so that the annoying bits wouldn't annoy me this time…" Alas, because the Beloved is not to be persuaded ever to return, resuming that would, in all likelihood, create a further schism which is just not worth the risk. I need to be at home but able not to be. It is a dilemma, as it shuts the world out, but keeps my world together. I'm burbling… I know that I'm burbling. I'm rattling on in an unwisely and all-too revealing personal way which possibly resembles the doom-stricken angst of a gloomy and self-indulgent teenager. Well, for some of us, we never really got out of that phase. Some people turn it into art and poetry and music, but the rest of us turn it into misanthropy and self-loathing and really, really, it's time that I grew up and stopped it now.