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.

When I worked as a front of house member of staff in a nearby art institution, we had a saying to describe certain visitors who would arrive from, let’s be fair, mainly London and South East: ‘Columbusing’.

The males doing the ‘Columbusing’ would arrive towards the end of the day, and step into the gallery, like they’d stepped off a boat into a land ‘untouched’ by civilisation. ‘Wow, how could such a place exist near Wakefield?’ as they walked past the staff like a European ‘discoverer’ would walk past the savages. (This particular gallery is situated between the ex coal mining towns of Barnsley and Wakefield and the former heavy woollen areas of Kirklees).

They weren’t doing this knowingly because it’s simply an expression of the very old relationship between ‘the metropolis’ and the rest of the land.

‘Columbusing’ came back into my mind as I read an article published today in the Guardian in which the journalist describes the sense of betrayal in areas that voted predominantly in favour of Brexit, 3 years after the Tories, under Johnson, won an election landslide on the promise of ‘getting Brexit done’.

I’m not intending to go into the larger concerns of the article, although the idea that a voter response to this god awful period of Tory Rule-by-Gaslight would be to turn to a party (Reform UK) that could soon be lead by Nigel Farage, is a worrying and a depressing reminder that the quagmire of a sense of ‘abandonment’ that was being articulated a decade ago, is still being dominated by fears and angers over immigration.

I’m intending to talk about how the relationship between the metropolis and the rest of the country is not only expressed via liberal media establishments like the Guardian, but kind of reaffirmed by theses articles. It’s a concern that when a place sees itself in the mirror of the mainstream media, which after all is a manifestation of symbolic power, its formal identity is constructed – it becomes what it is represented as being.

This is very much done in how that place is framed. Today’s Guardian article visited Goldthorpe, a small town on the eastern side of the Barnsley borough that has never really recovered from the aggressive closure of coal mines in the 80s and 90s. Barnsley is by and large classed as a deprived area, and everything in this article is true. But the Guardian and BBC only ever frame Barnsley through its poverty, and hostility to immigration. You can guarantee that if they don’t visit the town centre, they will visit one of the two G’s, Goldthorpe and Grimethorpe, both of which have become iconic places in their struggles ever-since the pits closed.

I like John Harris as a journalist, for example I like his UK road trip vlogs, I think he’s a journalist who genuinely seems to care about the people he interviews up and down the country. He recently visited places like Grimbsy and Grimethorpe, to discuss peoples’ post-Brexit struggles, the picture he painted was bleak and very true.

But, due to the ‘touristy’ nature that field work journalism assumes when it comes out of the ‘Metropolis’ and into the ‘savageries’, it is always in a position of waiting to be discovered and waiting to be ‘real’. I think John Harris is a good example, because he clearly recognises this, and acted on this in his vlog series ‘Anywhere but Westminster’, but it’s very hard to break down that colonial relationship that exists in the UK between Londonish institutions and the rest of the country.

8 years ago Channel 4 news visited Sheffield for the beginning of Nigel Farage’s UKIP campaign tour. I believe that the coverage framing was all but defined by the use of two words to describe Sheffield as a ‘northern town’. Sheffield is a city, perhaps also a conglomeration of other towns, which a total population of 800,000. It is not a town to anyone who lives around here. 2 years later Channel 4 news visited Barnsley the day after the UK woke up to find out that Farage’s UKIP aims of leaving the EU had been successful. The voxpops and the tweets by the journalist were framed by a sense of bafflement with these people who didn’t think and feel like they did. To quote Jarvis Cocker lyrics, C4 news seemed ‘amazed that they exist’.

Symbolic power in the UK continues to operate through the colonial relationship London has over the rest of the country. Even in times of grass roots media outlets on the internet, the big media establishments still possess the ultimate power to make a reality officially ‘real’. This doesn’t mean this relationship doesn’t operate internally, within London. For example, Grenfel tower fire in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea; it was only through their deaths that their situation became a ‘reality’. But when it comes ‘north’, sometimes the ‘truth’ it uncovers causes as much damage as the good intentions of the journalists. Nobody is individually to blame for Columbusing, but it reaffirms the colonial relationship much of the country has with London.

OK, I admit this is kind of about one of my pet hates.

I really can’t stand phone noise on public transport. It’s kind of my problem; I struggle with noise. If there’s a interrupting kind of noise from the overall ambience on a train, for example, I’ll instantly be unable to stop waiting for the moment where it inevitably interrupts again, leaving me in a state of inertia.

I might be my problem. But it’s certainly ‘a thing’ that is different to the 2000s when noise from phones and speakers on public transport was more deliberately anti-social.

2005 to 2010 was highpoint of what Owen Jones called ‘Chavs: the demonisation of the working class’ and ‘ASBOS’ (anti social behaviour orders), or at least the media focus on them.

It’s just my theory, but a large section of society who were viewed as trash, sometimes even human waste, in the decade following Thatcherism, sometimes responded with acts that were deliberately anti-social. To provoke, and unsettle the ‘European-style cafe and restaurant’ ambience that New Labour wanted to create in towns smashed by aggressive deindustrialisation. The playing of music on trains and buses was a kind of reflexive “fuck you; if you think I’m trash then I’ll show you trash”.

Fast forward through the age of violent austerity and the explosion of social media and smart phone culture, we kind of have the New Labour cafe/restaurant dream, albeit through the some Californian Dystopian lense of a divided society of lifestyle content creating humans and invisible humans, left behind. So much so that the ‘chavs’ of yesterday exist in smaller and smaller corners of public life.

The feels like a big jump, and probably is, to get to my point. But it kind of is a background story to the New Annoying Noises of public transport.

The amount of time I almost lose my rag and want to throw somebody’s phone on the floor… But these people (and they are many),aren’t doing it deliberately, to annoy me. They don’t seem to even realise. It’s like they don’t even recognise that they occupy space with others. When I overhear a 3 second audio of what I presume must be the same Tik Tok video, again and again, wondering when the torture will end, I realise that it’s the replacement for the old kind of anti social behaviour.

But there’s no intent, because to some extent they are disengaged from any kind of physical (flesh) space. It’s not people who are now anti social it’s more that the traumatic technological and social changes that have accelerated in the 2010s has arrived us in a place where the physical world is both too painful and inconvenient to be social within.

Why do I feel so guilty for writing something which isn’t linked into with a more broader critique of society and political strucutres? As I do. But the guilt of not making a political statement can often make you write things you don’t even enjoy writing yourself.

My next big venture may be a way of asking this, as it may involve asking the question of whether self-care and the wider goals of, say, the “left” are compatible on an individual level?

But for now, I just want to write about something that’s become more noticeable on a level of self-reflection, that may or may not be of use to others.

I tried to apply for an autism diagnosis last year. I’m not holding my breath on hearing anything back. I felt bad about admitting it, like I was jumping a bandwagon or something.

But it also felt like in my struggles to live in ways that didn’t feel erroneous and littered with poor choices and habits, like there was something staring me in the face: that ever since childhood I’d be made aware that I did things ‘wrong’.

It wasn’t anyone in particular, and it wasn’t anything in particular that I recall, I just recall from an early age growing up and internalising something that made me feel like I was in essence “Wrong”.

I wasn’t discriminated against, nor disliked, even if I was often the butt of jokes (none of which is uncommon); I was generally liked, and more or less accepted. But by the time of teenage life I was plagued by the sense that I couldn’t exist normally. This, amongst other things, contributed to teenage eating disorders, as a way of monitoring a body, paranoid that I just couldn’t eat normal amounts.

As I reached adulthood, a lot of fears of being Wrong kind of became self-fulfilling prophecies, as I dealt with being wrong by almost performing it, resisting any attempts to accept adulthood on a ‘normal’ basis, as I feared I would be drowned by it.

My ‘indie-locks’ and smoother skin of my 20s afforded me a life of avoiding that I felt I couldn’t do; like, literally exist as I was. It was also a time in and out of therapy, consumed by a sense that I did most things wrong, in ways that were not going to ‘help’ me. This was channeled into my ‘artist’ persona; as in “I can’t do normal things as I’m an artist”.

But it was all just a flight from what felt like the inevitable coming face to face with being an adult that was just Wrong by default. This happened in my 30s, when the comforts afforded me of my 20s evaporated, and I was a man now ageing.

I tried and tried to “righten” my ways, learnt to drive, tried looking for better paid work, and went back to study, and even tried dating sites. Driving test and studying were doable, the other two, next to impossible. I was consumed with self-dislike about who I was, I just felt like such a Wrong entity in the cosmos. And started to be consumed with an awareness that everyone else knew it too – something I’d not experienced since my teens.

After years of trying, trying to break through compulsive behaviours that were there to combat daily feelings of Wrongness, I started to look back on my life and try to understand where all the self criticism and feelings that I was unable to ‘do human’ came from.

I focussed on class, environmental, and still think they are contributors, but it couldn’t explain it away. The only conclusion was that I’d been told from an early age that I wasn’t doing things right, correctly, in so many ways, because, by and large, I did things in a way that was never exactly how I’d be show, sometimes laughed at for it (which was always the part that is etched into your muscle memories). Consequently I spent most my life simply assuming I was wrong, and this then developed into a warped approach to adult life.

Nobody had ever really done me any harm. Not intentionally, and no more than others. But as I became 30, a sense of paranoia I had in my early life returned, expecting people would treat me with scorn (and the thing is, people/groups of that inclination are far more likely to when you’re expecting it). I attributed this to people seeing my flaws in ‘adulting’ (“he still lives with his parents”, “doesn’t know how real life is” etc) but it was underlined by a feeling of never being able to ‘do human’, being Wrong with it.

It doesn’t really matter now if I get a diagnosis, but it does matter that I try to unlearn this theory about myself, which has at times become self-fulfilling and has had big impacts on my ability to live a life.

The last time I was here I didn’t own a smart phone. It was also the day before the Brexit Referendum, and before Pandemic-anxiety began to deeply mediate how we negotiated urban space. 

But right now, I can’t yet touch base in this urban endlessness due to the disorientation caused by fighting off the intruding smart phone, with its addicting ‘Other’ space, that is slicing through, in a way that I haven’t really noticed until now, because I begin to realise how much London is an alternate reality that I’ve yet to bring my smart-phone into.

London smells…of itself. Unlike the post industrial landscapes of South/West Yorks, for example, which no longer smell of anything; sterilised into the nothingness of badly planned “Barrat-style” estates, and the once smelly soot from the mines and mills sand blasted off the old stones.

I’m disoriented in the early moments of this day, until I get into my stride. Always walking – got to walk in the city. Got to walk and walk, always wanting to walk more, sucked ever more deeply into it’s alternate world.

Within which this urban-ness that you just don’t get anywhere else in this country, extends indefinitely. Later on, in a semi-dream state, drifting off to John Foxx’s My Lost City, London cuts loose, an alternate reality to, and no longer the dominant place, of Britain. The red buses and London planes and intensiveness become politely welcoming to the rest of the country like a friend who just does things differently.

I find it hard not to love the city. Inspite of the power it wields, the power it sucks from the rest of the country. Despite my inability to live here….and the deep envy over the ‘unfinished project’ of urban Modernity elsewhere. I find hard to let go, as flawed as it may now have proven to be. I see traces in Leeds, lost on those quite Sunday evenings, in the west of the centre, when the streets are dead and no longer amidst work-status stress; But I can no longer see it in Sheffield, where its once big plans to make the “Hallamshire utopia” have faded out amidst bland student flats and an oppressively bland weekend culture.

…and all this exists here, of course it does! And I’m not a proper urban detective. But London has real, proper urban infrastructure, and because everywhere else is thwarted by the mute misery of suburban nothingness, and the weekend wreckage it does to our provincial town centres, you can suspend belief here. It doesn’t really exist here, either, only as an image, etched into the place you could never live because you couldn’t deal with the pace and pressure; the fact that most here are never not working; working to exist. But I’ve seen it; ‘the city’ and I’m ok, right now.

I’ve not been doing very well over the last year. Despite managing to keep making the work, I can’t locate a source of inner-well being.

The atmosphere feels different since the initial optimism (what I’d say felt like a pause to capitalist-realist life) of those early months of 2020, when enough of the population were liberated from work drudgery, where the motorways cleared to once again reveal how impressive they and the bridges over them are. All that ebbed, under the fractured reflection of reality through a prism of ‘back to normalism’.

I don’t even feel like I live my own in life. I think it occurred when I hit 24 in the 2008 recession, or at least that’s the coincidental point in my life where life kind of went one way, and I went the other – like a ghost watching other people live. I don’t think I changed subjectively around this point, except that I hit an age where piers began to create their own adult lives and a century defining crash occurred. The inner monologue shit that began to define the next part of my life broke my identity into conflicted pieces.

I worked from 2017 to 2019 to sort this out. And whether it would have worked, I did have plans, pre-covid, to put together a life plan, with or without the parts that have both given it purpose, a crutch, but equally have either been destructive to my life, or proven to be reflections of an undeveloped and fractured sense of self.

But since the pandemic, I have kept finding myself in my ‘coping state’ of trying to get somewhere where I may just feel like an embodied self. This admittedly is like watching the fly trying to escape through the window, but keeps hitting the glass. But like the fly, without any other option, you just keep flying into the glass, each time more frenzied and exhausted.

I should have options. It’s kind of on me to sort them out. I just don’t know how – many aspects of reality make me compulsively try to the same formula in a state of panic, for lack of other options. After ten years of austerity, and increasing inequality, we are more materialistic and judging of those aspects of others than ever. I find it very hard to take a deep breath and remind myself that ‘it doesn’t matter if other people think I’m a fuck up”; it does matter; it matters, I guess, because it wouldn’t matter if I had found myself, a place, an interior that I can exist in, but I haven’t

As I said in the last post, as much as we can try, we live in a society where political decisions can have huge impacts on our circumstances, which are more likely to weigh heavier if you don’t have the material, social, wealth resources, but also resources in your own character, to deal with. We are a society that talks about self-actualisation but we are also one with increasing numbers of homeless on our streets.

Some of us struggle to adapt to the upgrades capitalism goes through (almost like an AI-type self-upgrading macro operating system) every time it encounters (or engenders) a crisis moment. It’s not simply about us, the human agents of our own embodied capital, adapting our sense of what kind of work we are prepared to do, but that we must, if we want to keep up, upgrade our character, our interior, in order to be in key with new ways of operating. Think of social media influencers, for example, how that logic isn’t just a few super narcissistic people with 60M followers, talking about the best beauty products, it’s kind of trickled into the logic of how all of us use social media now, even if we are ultimately unable to adjust effectively to this kind of self-promotion. In the space of 10 years social media has created a cyberspace grave yard of the ‘left behind’.

These types blogs that mix self-confessionary writing with trying identify the nature of capitalist life right now, have caused me a bit of stress in the past. I think people are usually ok hearing about the ‘I’m struggling’ bits as long as it doesn’t try to zoom out too far too fast. But even if this is part of my illness (and I’m sure you’ll tell me if it is!) is conflicted with the ideas of the kind of work effective self care must take, there is a certain line I won’t cross, which is the line that tells me to stop thinking about these things – because I believe I’m right.

I don’t write as much as I used to, partly because of the mental battle to keep focus, when it is constantly at threat of being ‘stolen’, (to steal Johan Hari’s term). It’s also, partly because I get locked into an inner conflict about the validity of the point I’m about to make in that moment.

During the last decade I lost the forthrightness of my convictions about the violent ways in which capitalism shapes our interior lives as much as the exterior, at least in writing, if not in art. I got stuck into a pit of self criticism in my 30s, where I increasingly began to blame myself for my life position, without an ability to work out a solution.

And I just got exhausted by trying ever harder to get somewhere, somewhere where I could just feel ‘ok’ – and thus ideas and projects just got harder to roll out so quickly.

A fear arose that on one of my bad days, where my inner critics are causing me havoc about the validity of my life, that if I try to talk about the political causations of mental distress, there will be some people out there, sometimes even well-meaning, that will turn it into that the argument ‘it’s your perspective on reality that’s making you feel this’ and ‘it’s all your own responsibiltiy’; that the ‘not ok’ feeling is entirely subjective, and is a matter of inner work.

And of course, to refute that would be an absurd thing to do; to abdicate myself of any autonomy, or say that I have zero responsibility for my actions and feelings would be to give up on myself, which is not what I want to do.

However, with the mental conditions I battle, and the physical, material conditions I have found myself in (and, disclaimer, I’m not for one instant saying I’ve got things harder than a lot of people in this country), once I try to take a more self-caring leadership role over my life, there are so many barriers that are beyond my control. As there are for most of us. And there are also the injuries caused to us in our lives that have a big impact of our circumstances and how we cope with them.

Everyone’s traumas and things that have shaped their character and circumstance are bespoke, in some sense they shape our character – but on some level they all also all have a common cause: they are injuries caused by their position in a society that is shaped by capitalism.

Life is getting stressful and harder if the last ten years is a barometer to measure things by. A hard pill to swallow for those of us who were told life was going to get easier, and although I believe this is a huge factor in our contemporary mental health crisis, it’s not what I’m focussed on here.

What frustrates me is that we talk about mental health quite often now. But to mention that it is a ‘political issue’ like Mark Fisher said, feels like heresy. Because the inner critic is by default usually a voice developed out of disempowering social experiences, it always take the side of a perceived more powerful voice that is in opposition to something we feel, but can’t quite articulate.

I fear to say out loud that my struggles are not entirely my own fault. But they aren’t. Neither are yours.

The argument that you should only speak of or critique the world, when you have yourself healed is deeply problematic, if you’re battling against a system that is set up to make it difficult to access those things you need to heal; like time, resources, space, other supporting people who aren’t themselves in a battle, and not debilitating anxiety about the uncertainty of the near future, that I KNOW that millions in this country currently have.

I really want to do what I can to improve my life, I want a good life, in spite of overhanging issues, but the fact that these issues are themselves issues because of political decisions, makes the separation reckless. A lot of us are already battling the inner debilitators and destroyers on a daily basis, so at least give folk the liberty of saying my struggle “is not all my own fault”.

It’s “polite language” when talking about mental health awareness, to refer entirely to the individual sufferer. It’s not bad language, but at the moment I can guarantee that political decisions that, like most political decisions, are being posited as a inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow, are doing some serious fucking psychological damage to thousands if not millions of people in this country.

When do we change the “it’s ok NOT to be ok” into an argument that suggests that’s “its NOT OK, or normal, for so many people to be frequently mentally ill”? Is it not deranged to suggest that a society of people with stress, anxiety, depression, popping prescription pills, should all individually sort “get their shit together”?

Onwards and upwards to everyone who is struggling in some way or form at the moment. I want to improve my life, and I know I need to do things about this. But I’m not going to shy away anymore from saying what Mark Fisher said, that ‘mental distress is a political issue’.

PS. Apologies for how limited an argument this is, I just needed to vent at the end of the week.