I can’t recall early childhood crushes, but I distinctly remember one from the spring of 1996 when I was 12 years old.
It was the kind of Spring that lived up to its name. I was in the first year of secondary school, and after a first term of hurtful bullying I undertook a lot of (unfortunate) editing of my appearance and personality. Whether this action altered the situation or not, life in the second half of the year became far lighter and brighter.
I felt the flutter of early pubescent vibrancy that was outshining the fear that stalks those new to secondary school, and it was as if I was blossoming just like the cherry trees in the courtyard.
I became fond of a brunette girl in my class. She wasn’t the most glamorous girl, and had a bit of ‘street cred’ coming from a tougher estate, which equally intimidated me and drew me in.
I had no idea what do with these feelings other than romanticise the situation over school chip dinners and the second side of a tape recording of ‘What’s the Story (Morning Glory)’.
I’ve always been naive and sensitive in equal measure, and always erroneously gambled on a New Now where the ridicule and soft-bullying I so hate as part of life gave way to softer kinder relations. But as I walked around a nearby village, looking in every Bookies and pub to find a newly-made friend’s unemployed dad, I realised I’d made a massive mistake by telling 3 friends who my secret crush was.
As you can imagine, it ceased to be a secret. After the disclosure, the 3 friends got me to the floor on a built up street, and sat on me until I disclosed more further. By this point I felt routinely humiliated.
They promised me that they would tell everyone once we got back to school.
And as great as my memories of this summer holiday are, I also recall beig haunted by the fear what was coming.
What came was quite humiliating, as they stuck to their word, and before I managed to get to the block where our form room was on the Monday morning, they’d already told everyone.
To be fair, nothing happened, apart from the girl in question losing her shit with all the silly little 12 year old boys giggling and making rude things up. Equally she was far more grown up than I was. She was street wise, she was already dating lads, whilst I was still eating ice pops in the summer and pop tarts in the winter.
I don’t like modern dating apps. I don’t know how to communicate with photos of people. But a month ago I decided to have another go and the first person I saw was the girl (now woman) in question. Now with a life and with teenage children of her own, I found it hard to swipe left.
I swiped right. But then deleted the app 2 minutes later.
I didn’t intend to stay away from Farage and his Vampire’s Vortex as it swirled through my home town today, I just had no idea it was happening.
I feel the rush of excitement to see my home town on the front pages, and the grip of Fomo as I’m sat in the distant exotic place of Wakefield, trying to sort an art studio, and hopefully a small step towards a new life path (I’m feeling a little more myself already, but I know it won’t be easy).
But I should be glad I missed out. The Vampire’s Vortex has one aim: to suck you in and feed off your energy.
I don’t particularly want to speak about what ReformUK stand for, and try to unpack why it means one thing to some people, and something terrifying to others: “stay away from the Farage Vampire-Vortex” is the best advice I can give myself.
Of course, this only works if everyone else stays away from the Vampire’s Vortex.
All successful enterprises in our information economy have to be part vampiric: they rely far more on what we give to them than in what we get in return. If we ignore them it has no energy and dies.
In a more self-sufficient society, of strong communities, we could even ignore the General Election entirely, because we’d find it easier to do our bidding on the streets.
But on the streets all we can do is yell and lob bits of broken plaster from a construction site, from the despair of abject disempowerment. Farage Vampire-Vortex loves this.
Farage and his Vampire”s vortex love this.
It also loves the hate towards one another we project on the comments section – especially the hate towards the “scruffy-looking” lad who threw the objects, who, judging by a 5 second clip, and being from Barnsley, is a “unemployed scumbag”.
It’s the absolute pinnacle of the ‘negativesolidarity‘ that permeates such an exhausted and atomised society. And it’s the kind of bait which is hard to resist diving into the comments section for, and the kind that gets the Farage Vampire-Vortex fat on our blood and guts that I wish we could use for something better.
For when we are blind we must be led
Artwork made before the 2010 general election by David Shrigley
As the Far-right grows on the continent, the author and journalist Naomi Klein remains forever-rooted to a centre left position in a world where the Overton Window hasn’t merely shifted, but seemingly fallen into a ditch.
She has issued a warning to the UK Labour Party that if they do not implement something that addresses the most urgent needs of the country, such as a wealth tax to restribute at least some of the country’s wealth then this void will almost certainly be capitalised on by the Far Right.
The former prime minister Gordon Brown and even a former aide to Blair have stressed the same message.
Not for me to go all left-centrist, but genuine left-centrism, as in not simply more neoliberal technocrats, could save us from calamity.
Even those with contempt for small boats can still feel pain at the silent social murder of many on our town centre streets since austerity kicked in. You can appeal to people’s social spirit, or you can ignore it, and let the void be filled by the likes of the Farage Vampire-Vortex.
The artwork above is very David Shrigley, in that what looks at first like simple satire is very multilayered, and between these layers is love, perhaps even the desire to be led as if we were blind. Back in 2010 this poster almost got me voting for New Labour, even after all that had made me and many others my age so apathetic by the end of the Noughties.
Yet, as I chose to vote for a fringe left party, I can’t help wondering what the present would have looked like if Brown had remained in power.
And as we stand, after nearly half a century of Thatcherism, we are a blind society: we cannot see collectively
Because of this we still have to engage with what almost feels like the impossible mental gymnastics of voting in the hope of genuine change.
We aren’t going to do it ourselves, on the street, because we don’t know how to bring ourselves towards one another. The more atomised we become hereinafter, the more the far right will grow.
Somehow we need to be led together towards Social Sight.
What if a heart is turned to stone before it’s had the chance to be broken?
Slow trauma.
Fast trauma.
What’s the difference in the end?
You pour over maps, with the longing to finally get on the right track. Maps are both an aspect of our alienation and a comfort from it.
Whatever this mental health ‘thing’ (and it must be a disorder, judging by the way it shapeshifts every time I think I’ve sussed it out), I still feel caught by some late teenage snare, staring at that missed moment from where life branches out, from where the ambience and assets of our future are roughly predetermined, unless we hit some middle age crisis.
At this delicate moment I was in the throws of Anorexia.
I’m not bitter, and not asking for pity. It’s just been hard to move past a crucial part of my life that I believe that if I’d had it I’d had been a lot better equipped to deal the standard trials and tribulations that life throws at us. I missed an important life lesson, and it’s absence is filled by some inner Jeremy Kyle-esq figure whipping you with ‘hard truths’.
My home town is a traumatised town. The young adults who remain and don’t join the university flock, tend to be more vulnerable, damaged, traumatised. It’s something I’ve observed year after year.
Without sounding like a nobhead, I wish I’d had an experience of friendship building and recreational habit-forming with others who weren’t like myself trying to hide the emotional lesions from where pain perpetually oozed. I say this with nothing but empathy, but I needed to see horizons that didn’t reflect my interior landscape.
More and more desperate for connection, any diagnosis that I may or may not receive in later life may be no more than a conciliation prize for my own stability, and will do nothing for the consequences of my mistakes that have oozed quicker than pain can ooze.
I have been lashing out in the void. The void that exposes itself in every form but in the one that craves to scream “help me”.
I had just finished my Bachelors degree in Art and Design at the local university centre in my home town, and all I knew is that I wanted to progress and get more exposure as an artist.
That summer was messy. My entire social world in my home town revolved around an indie bar which became a more toxic and paranoid environment as a larger reality loomed. The party was over – both for up and coming indie bands and socialites and for the larger economic order.
I was increasingly in a state of anxiety over my future, infused with a growing sense of distrust and paranoia, and I agreed to go to the Leeds Festival with a gang from this scene. After 2 days of insomnia, which led me into a hyper-paranoid state I had my only ever psychotic episode.
In a moment of narcissistic hell, everybody in the entire festival was calling my name. “John Ledger, John Ledger!”. I’d only had a small bit of public accolade and exposure from featuring the local paper after the degree show, but this had escalated into a sense that everybody had eyes on me. And, momentarily, I could hear things that weren’t real.
After that, I got a job at a local gallery. Which is in the fact the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Which is only a few miles from my home.
And the rockiness began to subside, and for the next two years, I had started to build myself up as an artist and writer. Increasingly using blogging to share what I was creating.
It was originally on Blogspot. I was encouraged by a more cock-sure artist at the high-flying Glasgow School of Art, who happened to be the brother of a woman I thought I had a chance of a relationship with at the time.
I transferred my blog to WordPress in 2012, at a time when the social media giant Facebook was perhaps at its most popular.
When I began blogging in 2007, Facebook was still a bit so-so. It had no more gravitas than Myspace. I’d never heard of Instagram or Twitter. Did they exist way back then?
As we all buckled up for the austerity ride, full of misleading statements that gave us a sense that we ‘were in it together’ and that there was even a ecological morality to the cut backs, none of us except life’s chancers could have been prepared for what came next.
I imagined austerity as a great leveller, but soon I began to see a society more divided and exclusive than ever. Social media initially seemed like a tool to ignite change, but quickly became a tool to enforce high maintenance social envy, or what we’d begin to call ‘fomo’, and to enforce and escalate divisions. What once seemed like a tool to seek a better future quickly became what my late art tutor would come to call ‘the last battle ground of Thatcherism’.
Over the coming years, my work improved, but got heavier and heavier, as my 30’s closed in, and I found myself increasingly isolated and in need of a better income, but lacking any sense of how to do this. The need for connection became greater, but so did shame and self-hate. Drinking became a more lonesome and regular evening pursuit, and addictive and destructive behaviours began to play out on social media.
I cannot find a better word to describe what the experience of what has happened over the last 15 years+ but ‘traumatic‘. I wonder what my life track would have been like, without this transition towards ‘instant everything’. And with a background ambience of every thinkable catastrophe, I cannot help but wonder what shape they’d had taken, minus the collective induced-effect of social media on all of us.
The cruelest aspect of shame and self-hate is that it sets up the conditions to act in ways so that it becomes justified: if you spend most your day thinking your repulsive you’ll likely act in ways that begin to prove it. I think about this when I see certain criminal actions, and I think about my own future plight with cold-blooded dread.
Art, artist, me as an artist. This is something I have clung to for identity and self-worth increasingly more desperately over the last ten years. But it increasingly causes more pain than pleasure, I try to find self-worth keeping the oil burning, but then start succumbing to seriously negative thinking and then start drinking. All my biggest regrets in life began on evenings like this.
I’ve never been what is now called ‘normative’, I’ve never been good in competitive work environments – which is most work environments these days. Advice of all kinds ricochets inside my head, none of it makes sense anymore. I don’t really know what to do anymore, and cut and paste advice to this doesn’t make sense either.
So many ‘should haves’. Wish I’d learned how to stand up for myself at school. Wish I’d had the opportunity for an Autism assessment whilst young. Wish I’d had stayed longer at the Eating Disorder clinic. Wish I’d never got into the drinking culture. More than anything, wish I’d had recognised where all of this was heading at an earlier stage.
I’ve deleted social media. It really doesn’t matter anymore if I’m viewed as an artist or not. It all merely feels like a pantomime act for a past life now. But I can never delete this blog. Bloggers, the infamously ridiculed ‘balding middle aged losers still living with their mum’. Who cares what they think anymore? This blog will survive until WordPress dies.
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
Three books that have had an impact on me.
1. FEED – M.T Anderson.
For me, this partly satirical novel from our near-past (2002) painted one of the most prophetic visions of what would come to be.
FEED’s target audience was a teenage/young adult one, so maybe it will never receive the accolade of a more ‘grown up’ Science Fiction novel like 1984, but I believe it deserves it.
Revolving around the teenage protagonist Titus and his friends we are shown a vision of a world of constant connection to an information sphere in a consumerist society, and how this affects both the psyche and society at large.
This may sound a little bit ‘so what?’ in 2024, but it wasn’t in 2002. Our current relationship to technology didn’t seem inevitable back then.
In FEED, Titus has access to any information pouring into his head 24/7. You get the sense that everything from the most important things in history, in life, no longer has any more significance than a new brand of coke. We see a hollowing out of depth, both in society and the psyche, and as the novel eludes to a background ambience of climate breakdown and escalating geopolitical situations, it isn’t only the teenage protagonists who lack the capacity to care less, but also the parents of the teenagers who sometimes seem more infantile than the children. Sound familiar?
It is only when Titus experiences serious loss in his life that a thin vein of hope for the future of humanity is made visible.
(The image is of ‘Ill-equipped’, a work I made in 2011 which was partly inspired by reading FEED).
2. Capitalism Realism – Mark Fisher
“When I first heard Joy Division, aged 14, it was like that moment in In the Mouth of Madness when Sutter Cane forces John Trent to read the novel, the hyperfiction, in which he is already immersed…”
How Mark Fisher describes first hearing Joy Division is pretty close to how I felt when I read the first 3 chapters of ‘Capitalist Realism’ between a Cafe Nero in Sheffield, and a Wetherspoons in Barnsley, on a warm August afternoon back in 2010.
Fisher put words to things I was experiencing but still unable to express. Reading Capitalist Realism in 2010, I instantly understood my own experiences with depression, and other disorders. Reading Fisher’s interpretation of the suffering of famous musicians like Kurt Cobain helped me understand, maybe for the first time, that my own struggles with mental health weren’t merely down to something ‘wrong’ about me.
More than that the book would open a door to a world of critical theory, and in turn greatly influence the work I would go on to make.
1984 – George Orwell.
I don’t really need to go into this book too much, it doesn’t need an introduction. If anything the vision it paints often problematically provides a crudely simplified reading of our current world.
This said, when I properly read the book aged 20 in 2004 it was one of the first books I had ever read. I wasn’t a childhood reader, I came to reading later on, and perhaps already overly-prejudiced by life experience towards what reading I would do.
But this book allowed me to prove to myself that I could read a book, and not just read it to say I’d read it, but get properly engrossed in it.
In the wake of the collapse of ‘really existing’ socialism, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then the greater Soviet Union between the late 80’s and early 90’s, a state of triumphalism emanated from the Western nations who had been locked in an ideological battle with the aforementioned for almost the best part of a century.
This became known as ‘the end of history’, as a jubilant and perhaps over enthusiastic statement by the philosopher Francis Fukuyama became a story that the whole world seemingly wanted to believe in. Indeed, there was a willingness (perhaps Millenarian in nature, as we fast approached the year 2000) to ‘wrap up history, for good‘, something Paulo Virno suggests in his book Deja Vu.
And, after the 20th century, who could blame us all for collectively willing for a 21st century where nothing ever happens again? Of course, a desire for a world where nothing ever happens again largely emanated from societies with at least enough privilege to be free of the necessity to keep fighting for a future. And this is why, ten years later, the 9/11 terror spectacle had such a world-shattering impact on peoples in Western countries.
However, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, perhaps realising what was at stake, wrote perhaps the most enduring rebuff of the idea that Communism, and Marx in particular, was now merely something for history books.
Capitalism cannot exist without the spectres of Marx. And never before was this as obvious as in a moment when any tangible alternative to capitalism was being erased.
But there is one other spectre/figure that haunts our capitalist world. This spectre haunts our world in opposition to Marx, and is the only one with the calibre and capacity to stalk our society like that of Marx: Hitler.
Like the spectres of Marx, the spectres of Hitler will forever haunt a capitalist society, built, as it will always be, upon colonialist and supremacist foundations. And like Marx, the spectre of Hitler can only be exercised when the conditions created by capitalist relations are no more.
Both began to increasingly haunt us more perniciously after the 2008 financial crash. Yet I’m not parroting the lazy liberal statement of ‘two extremes’ that begin to mirror one another. Although the spectres of Hitler arise in the same spaces as the spectres of Marx, the spaces where one must ask “what is to be done?” (about the problems of poverty, alienation, war, exploitation, and now mental health and the global climate), what the worm-tongue of Hitler quietly whispers in ones ear couldn’t more different in nature.
This is because the spectres of Hitler deal with injustice as inconvenience. And this is just about endurable in a more stable time, as was the situation in most Liberal democracies both after WW2 and after 1990. But in a time like ours, defined by crises, the spectres of Hitler develop a pathology that I’d call ‘final solutionist’, named after…well, we all know what it’s named after.
Haven’t we all been feeling sick and impotent as we watch the bombs fall on Palestinians in real time over social media? I suspect it’s a collective agreement almost all of us share in silence. Yet alongside this I have also noticed that some of us have found any way possible to stand up for what Israel is doing. I believe, at heart, whether they are aware of it or not, it is a ‘final solutionist’ pathos, ‘the spectres of Hitler‘.
It is a desire ‘just get rid of the issue [aka the Palestinians] quicker’. And it’s the same attitude you see in mundane conversations over cups of tea in Wetherspoons pubs about migrants crossing the sea: “Don’t care how [even if they drown] just get rid of ’em;.
Yet it would unfair here to focus entirely on stereotypical ‘red-wall’ voters, who may sometimes say the quiet bits out loud.
It’s actually within our silence, the spaces where we don’t make some obscene utterance where the spectres of Hitler are most pervasive. The spectres of Hitler reflect off our sunglasses, as we sit so civilised and politely outside cafes and bars on our gentrified city streets. The spectres of Hitler stalk us as we escape for the weekend on cute country walks. Although it’s the spectres of Marx who call our names as we encounter the army the homeless who haunt our city streets, it’s the silence of Hitler that we find easier to accommodate as we proceed to ghost them. Because at some mute level, a level quiet enough so that we don’t believe it is spoken by ourselves, we wish they could all be erased.
This isn’t an appeal to morality, to make you feel immoral, to make you feel bad. The spectres of Hitler whisper in all our ears. We thought that history was over, we believed that the upheavals and horrors of the 20th century had no repercussions awaiting the next century.
We believed in the dream-work called ‘the end of history’, and even as it becomes increasingly untenable, as we are hit by crisis after crisis, as our personal crises start to overlap, as we struggle to keep up, the ‘end of history’ dream-work of a flattened world, where every contradiction is ironed out into another consumable equivalent seems a far easier story to live a life in accordance with. The push (by ourselves as much as the government) to get ‘back to normal’ during the pandemic was testament to this.
Yes, I am also this person; stressed, overwhelmed, listening to rainwater and coastal sounds on Youtube to try to find peace in a world in which there will be no more ruptures, even as they abound around me. But as I ‘de-stress’ I am haunted not by the spectres of Marx, but by the spectres of Hitler, who promise to ‘make it all go away’.
To maintain our ‘normal’, a flat world where nothing changes, it is the spectres of Hitler that have to perform the background work. Background work that has concrete consequences to the point, that in some abstract way it isn’t hard to see how the entire Israeli nation (for example) has been set up as a murderous meat puppet to prop up this existence in the greater Western world. And once the inconveniences become too loud to ignore, let’s remember that those ‘ugly’ people who wish to see the Israeli’s simply ‘get on with it’, are only saying the quiet part out loud.
But this is the point, existence is all that this situation enables. Life can exist nowhere in a world where active genocide is taking place before our eyes. To allow our world to be permeated by the spectres of Hitler is to maintain existence at the expense of life itself.
I am no heroic Marxist. I am you, perhaps more so. Existence is often all that we feel we can do, when we are burnout, stressed and lacking the ability to find it in ourselves to imagine life lived differently.
But I refuse to accept the given, even as I struggle to pick up a finger in active opposition. I maintain the right to exist in the faith that one day I will find that strength, and that one day I will feel the burning hope of an alternative within me once more. It must be there, somewhere.
Do you remember life before the internet?
Yes, but I largely recall it in anticipation for the thing in question. The internet, prior to its full realisation, prior even to the MySpace generation, was seen as ‘stand in’ for the future writ-large. It stood in for all things better, and thus was a conduit for a better future, until it arrived.
The reason I’m writing this isn’t an expected one..
Basically I’m pretty much at rock bottom. The life I have led for all my adult life has become increasingly untenable and intolerable, no matter how many times I’ve tried and tried afresh.
This life I’ve led has been flakey from the start, but the ideal at its core was to find a work/life balance that enabled me to be pursue my artistic talents.
Rewind 25 years, I couldn’t wait to escape lad culture; the groups, the sports teams. The general atmosphere that defined high school was one in which I felt small, often humiliated and misunderstood. My biggest fear was almost respiratory-based: I could never breathe in such an environment. The mere prospect of being in big groups, being barked at by a pedagogical bully was the stuff of nightmares. At least I would never have to go into such an environment ever again.
Fast forward to the present, and I’m increasingly dysfunctional. I feel increasingly isolated and unable to connect with people, increasingly reliant on alcohol and increasingly in despair about ever combating the persistent inner critics that mock my life.
All in all, the line my generation swallowed, that we could and should ‘be whatever we want to be’ and ‘live in whatever way we want to’ has left my mental cogs burnt out. The mental weight of having to constantly pick and choose based on individual satisfaction has left me burnt out – right now, in possibly one of the lowest ebbs I’ve experienced, I’m crying out for someone to tell me exactly what to do next.
The image in this blog is from a BBC show called ‘Ladhood’. Based in Garforth, I really connected with how close elements of this show felt to growing up in the late 90s/early 2000s, 20 miles down the M1.
If only I’d had a better encounter with pedagogical structures as a young person, if only I’d been socialised and skilled up for this life with compassion and solidarity rather than by macho downward punching, I might have become a much more well-rounded person.
The thing is, when the Tories announced they would bring back national service this weekend, they had no good intentions in mind, it is purely a political strategy to create division in Labour’s electoral base, by putting young against old. We’ve seen it so many times before. The Tories know they’ve no chance of getting the vote from the people old enough to be made to do national service. They are trying to get older people to vote Tory out of resent for young people
However, true ‘progressives’ who want to see the back of the toxically individualistic neoliberal society, shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. A variant of national service, albeit with less of the ‘national’ and definitely less of the ‘military’ to it, could be just what we need to both re-socialise society and in turn help with our catastrophic mental health crisis.
This isn’t to play into patriarchal ideas, but I could have done with experiencing both compassionate and life building male group friendships in my young life. In fact I think I would have been a far healthier and happier person now if I’d had that.
Look around at the community care organisations picking up the pieces at the moment (recovery organisations, Andy’s Mans Club etc), and you can begin to imagine how compassion and solidarity could be at the centre of another kind of national service.
It might be too late to rewire the damage for people like myself, but when thinking of the huge challenges we have ahead, especially with climate change, or even how we treat the homeless in our city centres, a society of people who feel confident to step up, for compassion rather than any jingoistic cause, cannot be a bad thing.
No more apologies for any perceived erroneous move from a continual striving for respect.
This has been the longest spell of depression I have ever experienced. And I no longer know what I have left that is worth its weight going forward.
What has made it so sustained is that previously, and partly down to being younger, I always maintained some faith in tomorrow being the day when suddenly I would no longer be in a state of perpetual self-demonisation, and this thought itself would lessen the self-demonising, in the knowledge that ‘it’ wasn’t invincible to change.
But since then a perception of the self born from constant self-demonisation feels impossible to escape, because I no longer have the energy, or horizons through which to believe it will go away.
I am fast losing faith in a tomorrow.
I’ve always been in a state of emotional arrrested development. But, on rare occasions, I could at least get to the conversation part on dating apps; I could act in that boysterous (although now red flaggish territory) of impressing women by being loud and silly – all in all I could become alive, and non-ghost.
I used to feel a future.
My own experiences with mental health have always felt like they must look like a self-inflicted joke from the outside. I can’t help but feel like it’s perceived as being my own stupid fault.
After-all, I do have this conviction from childhood that I am the most stupid, wrong, person ever to exist.
I sometimes think people think on behalf of collective energies they do not understand, and sometimes people think other people dead. Seriously, we collectively unconsciously exhale people from life, because they are ill-fitting to any script and they jot out and need to be jotted out.
“They CHOOSE to be that way” , of course.
But there is no choice when your head is literally made up of ‘other peoples’ arguing about whether of not you are justified in your existence.
Sometimes I fantasise about doing something far more destructive than my old technique of smashing a smart phone against a wall. Now I have a car, I often imagine smashing my car against a wall. Because, sometimes prison, condemnation, the taking away of normal liberties, feels like the biggest liberty I could have.
I have been granted a highly disputable freedom, but let’s just call it freedom for now. But I am not me. There is no me. The only me, is ‘fuck you’ and ‘fuck off’ to the overbearing ‘them’ in my head. And how this has grown so tiring in middle age.
I’m not really bothered that my writing will never be venerated, and at best will be noticed for its inability to leave the self. The reason I cannot escape myself is because I am not able to have a self. And I cannot see my life as a ‘creative practitioner’ overcoming this.
“Other people do it. Other people manage, Other people can, Other people can’t!!”
My biggest dream is to go somewhere where nobody knows my name, where I have no friends, no memories, no hooks back into the person I am.
What this means is my biggest dream is to be able to escape my own life; everything that reminds me of me, makes me think of me, see me, and remember me.
…it all leads to inner warfare.
The thing is, I don’t really have an identity. I am composed of ‘other people’ things, what the ever-changing ‘they’ say I ‘could’, ‘should’, ‘am’ and. ‘aren’t’.
My identity is a battleground of ideas about who I am, and I am fucking mentally exhausted.
The world isn’t an idle summer forest through which we can take our time, and listen to the earth, we are instead, locked inside a maddening house, as capitalism insanely turns inwards, onto us, attacking us, through weaponised information.
Nobody has the time to do what they need to do, because fear is always dragging them back into their defensive positions. And nobody grows in a defensive position.
Lots of people (“”Other people do it. Other people manage, Other people can, Other people can’t, nananananananaa) do it. But my head is now merely a engine that can still growl as the wheels turn in the mud of all that I’ve achieved.
No empathy is afforded to those who try to connect their own struggles with a madness bigger than themselves.
A friend said that how I describe this sounds like schizophrenia. But I know it’s not.
I don’t hear voices, it’s more that I am constantly in 3rd person. My head is interpretations of myself that critique my every move. It’s ruining my life, to be honest.
John B Ledger 