I’ve a long list of posts, which may or may not exist anymore, from way back into my 20s, documenting how hard I’ve found this time of year.
Truth be told, as I reach my late 30s I I believe I am coming to understand myself better, or at least give myself more forgiveness for the gut assumptions and verdicts I deal myself in those lowest of ebbs. I can approach my 40s with at least the intellectual knowledge of things I can do to try to treat myself better.
I reckon a lot of us found the last two years a hard time in which to work through a lot of our painful emotional knots. I went into 2020 with a clear-ish sense of what I needed to do to make a better life for myself. Then the pandemic happened, and it wasn’t the entire cause, but certainly the catalyst for a qualitative change to the coordinates of reality: ‘back to normal’ looked normal, yet it wasn’t – the structure of feeling had permanently changed.
I found myself battling against a lot of the acidy inner criticisms and defensive bitterness that I thought I’d mastered. I felt like I’d fallen backwards to when I first hit 30, with no plans for my future, surrounded by bright young graduates. It was like I was on a running machine treadmill with the gradient increasingly getting steeper.
Long story short all the worst verdicts on myself happen around Xmas. “You’ve got no life”, “you’ve got no community, no intimacy, no family” are all underpinned by a heightened sense of ageing: I believe the New Year is a much more powerful signifier of ageing than a birthday.
During the last two Xmas breaks I’ve tried to burn the oil, to double down on my ‘projects’, desperate to generate some sense of worth to my presence. Last year I had a meltdown and had to cancel the project that I’d put in all the work for in the first place.
This year I have actually got two important things I need to finish for early to mid January. They are two things that, when I feel better and well, I recognise as valuable projects. But I’m scared I’m going to burn out again.
It’s those feelings in the early hours, or when you’re waiting for a bus, or when you’ve spent a little long walking alongside a noisy road; those horrible verdicts about yourself that intensify. These cause the over-compensating self-worth substitutes to work on fumes. They accelerate the responses that cause burn out.
As I say, I’ve learnt a lot in my mid to late 30s. About the early causations of what would become an inability to embrace, embody and live with my adult self. Shame, like I was ‘wrong’, (the way I smiled, moved, but especially the intense way I spoke and behaved) which helped build an army of inner critics in my head that wouldn’t let me accept my being. And that I’ve spent my adult life trying to go the hard way round because I could never see my shape in any identifiabily worthy adult shape.
When these feelings dig down my identity as an artist is no longer something I should treasure, but beconed something I put a curse on, trying to gain a sense of human-ness through finally getting to the top of that ‘artist’ hill, where I’m crowned as a valid exercise in human-ing. But, I burn out, and I’ve pushed the boulder up that hill so many times, only for it to roll down again.
This could be the start of a life that works a little better. But I’ve got a couple of weeks where I’ve got to face the brunt of self verdicts and emotions I really don’t like the taste of.
At 5am this morning I asked myself the rhetorical question: when was there a time when you scrolled social media and felt better for it afterwards?
I’m pretty sure it’s rhetorical as the answer is “never”. I think, if I manage to say that to myself enough over the next couple of weeks I may just about make it to mid January in a decent state.
John B Ledger 