“If only this next journey unveils something.”
Chasing the idea. An idea that The idea might finally manifest itself. Chasing it for 20 years.
The infamous accusation aimed at Millennials is that they can’t afford their own homes because they spend all their money on avocado on toast – a distorted presentation of reality, so to ignore specific generational struggles.
I’m not really even a millennial. Well, only just. I turn 40 in 4 months. I was a ‘proto-Millennial’. I spent enough time in a pre-internet, analogue age, with enough time to anticipate what a post-2000 world would look like before the lived-reality.
Perhaps what I’m about to explain has something to do with this anticipation of the arrival of something. I turned 16 just days into the 2000s, and thus its arrival was deeply wedded to the anticipation of what adulthood would be.
Since then, I, reduced to an economic agent, have been a waster, wasting my future property-investment funds in a manner maybe more despicable in the eyes of cartoon-character Baby Boomers than that of the avocado eaters of Hoxton.
I’ve spent most my adult life having nowhere to head to, but no place I wanted to remain in.
I’ve always been to drawn to public spaces where I can sit without reason for being there. Their transience would sooth a deep dread of descending further down the one-way descent into adulthood, whilst simultaneously going nowhere.
Train journeys always lifted my spirits. Or, at least the idea of them; of perpetual, rhythmic motion, cutting through a society alive by daylight – occasionally the journeys would even live up to the ideal. There was never a big reason, an important journey that warranted paying the price to more far-flung cities.
After all, no matter how far I travelled I always realised what I was trying to find wasn’t located in space, and if anywhere at all, in another time. Liverpool was just another city of more shops and cafes, London had infinitely more options, but in reality every single establishment felt just like the ones in Leeds or Sheffield.
And situated 20 miles between them both, Leeds and Sheffield would become my go to cities. As long as I could find a cafe here where I could sit, and remain relatively anonymous, I would be at ease. To become overly-familiar with staff and other customers would potentially make the space feel more like the kind of space I have perpetually tried to escape: one I have to be present in.
Presence has always been what I cannot face, because I have never known how to be a body, present in a society.
All societies ask that one ‘shows up’. In older societal structures a man must show up for tough, dangerous work; for war and, to some extent, to the ever-present potential of violence descending on his family/community. A woman must show up to be enslaved to their role as a wife and child-bearer.
I spent many a childhood day peering towards the coming Millennium, relieved that this world had gone, and I wouldn’t have to go to war or work down the pits, and live a hard life.
But how does one ‘ show up’ instead?
They ‘be themselves’.
‘Being yourself’ was the golden ticket that all early Millennials were given, en-route to the Millennium. It was sold as the ‘get in free’ pass.
How did that go?
The cynical eye may argue that all that has happened is that disciplinary structures have simply been internalised. We no longer have to be forced into jobs and social roles, we must now do the forcing ourselves. Strive, push, and carve ourselves into a go-getter, go-getting a job that we may have had been made to get previously without half the stress. The despairing eye would go further, and argue that we become perpetual sculptors of our own flesh for our value on the market, be it intellectually, or physically (in the gym, in having the perfect diet, perfect sleep regime etc).
I saw no role for myself in this adult world, I was too aware what would grind my soul down in no time. And as adulthood decision-making hurtled towards me I developed eating disorders, a way of trying control the flesh’s descent towards the earth.
Not only was this a side-step from not knowing how to ‘show up’ in a world where I couldn’t see myself, it was also a side-step from the handshake with mortality that arrives in adulthood. Most adulthoods make this handshake through rites of passage, most obviously through marriage and child-rearing.
To some extent I’ve been in the waiting room for life since my late teens, wondering when it finally happens.
I’ve never been able to deal with ageing. I now frantically pluck wirey white hair from sides, because mortality can only be accepted by those who are truly in life, and not its waiting room.
My dad would on occasion express bafflement at my inability to be at ease in the domestic space. And if I’d had found ease, I’d had found life. I probably wouldn’t be regrettably still in that same domestic space as a 40 year old (despite an overarching economic reality equally playing a part in this for many).
An insect doesn’t understand the concept of glass. On a hot day it will repeatedly fly into the window trying to get out, to the point of exhaustion and death. Like this insect, I haven’t understood what I am stuck behind, and have been banging against it also to the point of exhaustion.
A little less self-awareness and a heck of a lot more self-assurance and I could’ve been an activist, fighting that which reproduces a reality I see no place for myself in. And lacking a bit of self-awareness in favour of being more self-assured, I’d keep on fighting even if my vision was flawed.
I don’t really know what will come of the next decade. All I know is that I’ve written this before, probably on this blog, as I reached 30.
I have held back on writing for a bit, because I became embarrassed at how self-consumed my writing was. I stopped commenters wading in. But this is my predicament, and this is the predicament I need to the story of.
John B Ledger 