Day 251: Insignificant

My friend Mike is round to watch The Wire. "Wire boys, oi oi oi!" That's what we chant at each other. And we say, "Good Wiring," afterwards, or, "All Wired up now", or something.

We're not intrinsically cool, Mike and I. But we're happy, so whatever.

We're not happy. Of course we're not happy. Don't be silly.

Today, Mike is not happy because of his headphones.

He comes round wearing these headphones. I've not seen them before. "Nice headphones," I say, meaning it.

Mike says: "They make my head look enormous, don't they? I mean, my head is already enormous. And then you add these awful things on top. It's ridiculous. I'm very self conscious about it all." He is smiling, but he also means it, also.

So I make jokes about his massive head for a while. But you know what? I didn't think Mike had a massive head, or that his headphones were massive. Of course, if Mike wanted to present me with this narrative, then sure, I'd run with it, because humans like ready-made narratives, and this one involved someone being the butt of a joke, and that someone not being me. That's always a plus.

But if I'd seen Mike in the street, and not known him, here's what I would have thought: "That man is wearing headphones." And then I would have gone back to thinking about myself, and all the incredibly important things happening to me, like whether my head looked stupid or over- or under-sized in any way.

Or perhaps, paying the absolute maximum amount of attention possible to another human being, directing all my awareness outside of myself, I might have thought: "Does that man have better headphones than me?"

And I would have studied the man, and the headphones. And if the answer that I arrived at was, Yes, the man did have better headphones than me, then I would have felt miserable for a while, and pondered how unfair it was that I had cheap tiny crappy headphones while everyone else in the world, in the entire goddamned world, had giant powerful beautiful headphones.

If, on the other hand, I concluded that, No, my headphones were best, then I would have immediately dismissed the man from my thoughts, and gone back to the integral work of worrying about whatever it was I was I was worrying about. The weird shape of my head, probably.

What I'm saying is that we ALL think we have stupid heads. We ALL think our accoutrements, technological, sartorial, show us up to be impostors and unfathomably pathetic losers. We ALL worry that, walking around in the spotlight, at the centre of the universe, everyone is watching us and sees all our faults and blemishes, that all those bit part actors on the sidelines are staring in at us and pointing and laughing.

But to everyone else WE are the bit part actors. WE are the ones who might point and laugh. To them, it is they who are the centre of the universe. We are as entirely meaningless to them as all those faceless nobodies in the street are to us.

And they are, aren't they? Nobodies. God, how they shuffle and lurch towards us, down the high street, wearing their puffer jackets, their tie-dyed ponchos, their luminous wellington boots, their pin-striped suits. Ceaseless throngs of them. Shoving, sweating, burping. In Armani. In charity shop throws. In torn bin bags.

Whatever. We don't care. We don't give a shit. Get out of our way. We've got important business to attend to, we're incredibly stressed here, distracted, off in the glorious unique temple of our skulls, at the precise, we're certain, centre of the universe, so vital, so necessary, worrying about the things that truly matter, such as our flabby knees, our oddly hanging scarves, everything we own, wear, possess, are.

It doesn't matter, does it? It doesn't matter whether Mike has a big head (and he does, objectively; it is gargantuan). It doesn't matter whether your jeans are tight around your hips. Whether your breasts are small, or large, or wonky. Whether your tongue lolls out of the side of your mouth when you laugh, or your feet slant inwards when you walk, or you have a double chin when you are turned to profile in unguarded photographs.

You're simply not as important to others as you think you are. You don't matter to them, to me, at all. You're entirely insignificant.

And I very much hope that brings you comfort.

......

Music: Sixtyniner, by Boards of Canada. Don't /think/ I've listened to this really early stuff before. It's lush. Wide, expansive, intricate, intriguing. Lush, I say. Lush.

Day 194: Memories

Blog once a day? Stuuuuupid! I don’t wanna. Nope nope nope. I wanna lounge in bed with South Park on in the background and fiddle with photographs on my phone and browse indie games on my Switch and roll over and go to sleep. I’m too tired for this.

Ooof. OK. My eye is falling out. My eye is a putrid lumpy mess. My eye is… I have a stye. That’s what’s happened. I have a stye. There’s nothing to do but put warm compresses on it and wait for it to go down. Work today was grim though, I felt self-conscious, took me right back to days of my acne being bad. Struggling to make eye contact, scanning the faces of everyone with whom I interacted, noticing them noticing, fighting the constant desire to hide away. I told myself at the beginning of the day that I wasn’t bothered, although I’d woken up with the stye huge and inflamed and poking into my eye with a big whitehead on top of it, I’d said to myself that these things happen, I’m too old to care what people think, and mostly they don’t notice, people don’t; you’re the centre of your own world but to everyone else you’re just passing through, you barely register, if at all, and your embarrassments are tiny and external and distant to them.

But immediately once at work I was back into that mindset of the spotty kid shamefaced and looking down at the ground, keeping my head turned away from people, pretending to be distracted and avoiding conversations and closeness.

I spent years doing that growing up. Years and years. It’s no wonder I’m so screwed up now. It’s no wonder I have issues with confidence and intimacy.

My skin was always bad, so I always had to deal with the low-level anxiety and misery of knowing people could see, knowing it lowered you in their eyes, even if they felt compassionate you were still below them, knowing my pain and shame was right there plastered across my face for everyone to stare at and there was not a thing I could do about it. And I just plodded through it, tried to ignore it, tried to reframe my thoughts. But it was always there in the background gnawing away.

And then there were the times my skin got really bad, covered in pus-filled nodules and red raw and disfigured, painful to smile, worrying I would burst spots and spew yellow juice everywhere if I frowned or laughed or chewed food. And then the voices of shame ramped up into top gear, and I would do anything to get away from other people, from social events, from school, uni, work.

Part of the shame was not being able to talk about the shame, so I couldn’t just say “I don’t want to go to the party because I feel like a monster.” So I made up excuses. And friends came to know me as flaky, disappointing, a let-down. And I knew they felt that, and I knew I couldn’t say anything, and I hid in my room alone and festered.

… Hard memories tonight. My skin has been far better since going on Roaccutane when I was 25. These days the breakouts, regular though they are, are mild enough that I would have killed for them a decade ago. Yet still sometimes it’ll be a bit worse, or I’ll get a stye, or a rash, or something, and it’ll trigger that social anxiety response, and I’ll be right back there again, an ashamed and awkward creature, wanting to scuttle away along the sea floor and hide under a rock.

Our issues never truly leave us. Some scars go all the way down. I guess we just have to be as honest with ourselves as we can be, as caring, and treat ourselves with kindness on the bad days. We can’t help being the way we are.

And remember that other people seriously do not give a shit about the ways we think we're ugly. They are far too concerned with their own massively important pains and woes, of which we know little, if anything. And on it goes...

Day 168: Triviality

My leg is itchy. I have an itchy leg. The computer’s fan is whirring. The traffic is going by outside. I’m home, I’ve been sat up for hours editing photos. The initial idea of buying a camera was to have something that I’m patently not good at, something to do just as a hobby for myself, to have fun with, as a counter to the stress and perfectionism I feel with writing. But of course I’ve very quickly assimilated the basic rules of photography, started taking it way too seriously, rapidly run up against the wall of my own limitations, and found myself fundamentally disappointed in my lack of talent, in the same way I am with writing, and with everything I do.

Which is so dumb! I’ve had a camera for less than a year now. I barely ever take it out. And my pictures aren’t bad at all. Most of them are bad, but I guess most of most people’s are like that, and there are usually a few from a day out that I end up liking after they’ve been edited. And that’s not cheating; maybe there are prodigies who take gorgeous shots every time, like prodigies who can play classical piano before they’re out of nappies, or who can sit and write pure poetry straight onto the page. But for the rest of us mere mortals it’s always a numbers game - creativity involves a whole lot of creation, and a whole lot of sifting through the rubbish. You vomit out rivers of puke every day, and then you wade through those rivers looking for diamonds. That’s just the job. So get over yourself and pull on the wellington boots and stomp into that sick

I’ve been feeling icky and greasy and gross again today, spotty and ugly, sweating in old grey clothes on the train. But I’ve tried to not pay that any mind. So what? I’ve said to that negative voice. Oh soooo whaaaat? Who gives a fuck? Maybe I’m the grossest person alive. Maybe not. Maybe I am. But what difference does it make? Is worrying it might be true going to do a single thing to change it? No. So might as well just get on with living. Put warm compresses on my eye to try to head off an infection. Unpack my bags. Do social media for work. Put a pic on my own Instagram. Edit photos from the trip.

And now do my teeth and go to bed and get up for the open tomorrow. Just get on with it. Stop letting something as trivial as thoughts hold me back. Fuck those thoughts. They’ve got no power here.

Day 81: Speaks

Iya. Turns out it's easy to get up at seven in the morning. You just need to have a training session you're giving at work later that day to be awake for already and worrying about.

By the time my alarm went off I'd been sat up in bed for half an hour running through my presentation in my head. It was only some basic beer training for the staff, going over some fundamentals that I thought they should know, but still, I was feeling stressed about it.

I abhor public speaking. I spent ten years of my life growing up with really severe acne. My skin is still not good. I do not like the spotlight being on me in social situations. Even just in conversations with one other person I've been known to get sweaty and nervous when I sense attention shifting towards me. Having a group of people all focusing on me is my idea of absolute hell. It makes me want to crawl up inside myself and disappear.

But I knew I had to give this training session. I knew it wasn't objectively a big deal. So I tried to be as prepared as I could be in the time I had. I made sure I was solid on all the points I was talking about. I ran over the presentation again and again, muttered it to myself while changing barrels in the cellar, practised key parts over lunch. And in the end it all went fine. Yeah, I was nervous to begin with, but I settled into it, and I think I managed to teach a few things, and hopefully the staff had fun. They certainly didn't seem to hold the same opinions as the negative voices in my head, which like to tell me how pathetic and worthless I am every step of the way.

So it was good. And it was another test that I have faced down and made it through while completely sober. I wanted a slug of whisky so badly before starting, that moment when the staff began traipsing in and I realised I was going to have to actually do it, and I thought of my opening and how unfunny and lame it was and how I'd made the whole thing too esoteric and how I was going to lose my words and trail off and blush and spontaneously wee myself and cry in front of everyone. I really wanted some whisky right at that moment.

But I didn't have any. And in the end I didn't need any. Chalk public speaking up as one more occasion where being sober isn't just possible, but perhaps even preferable. I was present for the whole thing, alert, and I'm not going to wake up tomorrow with a hangover.

But I am going to wake up tomorrow. And I am going to wake up early (for me), and go to work, so for now I will leave this here, and bid you good night.

Good night, lovely people, and take care.