If only I’d been kept behind

I remembered something today that I don’t often think about, and, thus doesn’t feature in my personal narrative.

When I was 4 years old my nursery school teacher was concerned that I wasn’t developing to the same standards as the rest of my group, and she suggested to my mother that I be kept behind a year to catch up, before entering infant school.

I don’t know what to make of this, other than as time has gone on a know that if I’d had grown up some 15 years later, I’d had been classed as neurodiverse, or something similar.

I found it strangely comforting, on a day in which my inner monologue has been torturously relentless in the war it fights.

It goes into battle against the building feelings of having failed, it tries to justify, excuse, bide more time, against the continually injested concrete dust of social norms. It ultimately produces the most horrible of outlooks on everything.

It’s been getting worse. I’ve been trying and trying to reckon with the distressed monologue. But it just keeps going and going. The feelings of failing are so ingrained, it’s like all my life is a performance rating.

Which is why I sometimes look for an exit through an explanation that proves that it isn’t my fault: “I was neurologically unsuited to the world I was expected to succeed in” etc.

It’s not a solution. But as things stand I have no solution. I’ve once more lost the will to work towards a future within the system. Post pandemic, in a way I fear many silently understand, previous grasps on reality, on a personal right up geopolitical level, feel like they’ve been ground into dust.

I’m 40 in 4 months. And I can’t deny it’s hard to shake off the sense that so many things I maybe wanted in life will now never happen.

I’m at work.. toiling away, disturbed by my own lowly, sweaty shape. Looking in the mirrors at the straight A’s of Ageing, Anorexia, Anxiety, Alcohol and Austerity as the slowly destroy my facial features.

Hateful of my own privelage for believing I was meant to better than this. Set up by the 1990s con of perpetual Mediterranean bliss in Britain.

I now ee a world of pain without meaning; social justice without meaning; a future of hardships wwithout meaning. I am haunted by the trace of what could have been, and if this is it, I am condemned to be tortured by the bitter tattoo of high expectations