Tooling up in the struggle to live: How my view of mental health has changed

Last week was mental health awareness week. Appropriately, I was aware of this, and yet I still seem to have missed the boat on posting these choice few words on how my view of mental health has changed over the years. Ah well - since choosing to point my career* firmly in that direction in recent times (after years replete with many a "hmm" and also a "ha"), every week is mental health awareness week for me now, so let's crack on.

Figure 1 - What it's not, quite, really

When I was a young man, even after initially studying psychology, I suppose that I saw mental health and mental illness in terms of Figure 1. Broadly speaking, I thought, most people - normal people - cruise along happily untroubled by mental health issues, beyond perhaps a bit of neurotic emotional navel-gazing if they're the over-thinky type that watches too many angsty TV dramedies. Mostly, normal people (I didn't necessarily think I was one) get through life being relatively functional, happy and successful without ever having to deal with their "brains going wrong", I thought - but a minority of poor souls have periods where bad times happen or their chemicals go wonky and they fall off that normality wagon and things get all messed up. With treatment and time these poor souls can get better; though for some even poorer souls they get stuck in that messed up place of "mental illness" for life. 

Very, very generally, of course, that outline is not completely wrong... it's not that it's without a shred of truth, but it comes nowhere near doing justice to how things actually are, or how life actually feels for the majority of people - it's far too simplistic. For a start, where are these normal, functional, happy and successful people, untroubled by mental health issues? I seem to be discovering that they are a much rarer beast than I imagined, the more I get to know people in general. In fact, to me, normal people just don't appear that normal anymore - by which I mean both that everyday "normal" folks are choc full of strangeness and dysfunction (and in that I include myself); and that these fabled paragons of unwavering good mental health that you hear of in myth are just not normal. The older you get the more aware you become that your family, friends and colleagues are all a bit peculiar in their habitual ways of being, and so are you; people's relationships are even more peculiar, riddled with questionable quirks, unhealthy habits and habitual irrationality; and people's mental health is not consistent and smooth, it rises and falls with circumstance, sometimes dramatically and alarmingly.

Biology and context

I don't mean to downplay the experience of those with more severe mental health challenges here - a "we're all mad really and that's just fine" attitude is lovely in sentiment, but it really is a bit insulting to compare feeling-sad-for-a-bit-too-long-after-your-pet-died to the full-blown staring-into-the-abyss-with-the-weight-of-a-mountain-on-your-back-24-hours-a-day-for-months of major depression; or being-a-bit-of-a-clean-freak to the hundred-life-crippling-little-rituals-you-HAVE-to-carry-out-before-doing-anything of severe OCD. We have to be able to distinguish, certainly.

That said, I don't think the general public realises how uncertain - and how thinly supported by hard science - many of the current categories of mental illness that you hear about really are. Currently not a single mental illness is diagnosed solely by looking at the brain or biology. That means the assertion that we know for sure that many diagnostic labels are definitely, basically, mainly, simply just down to brain wiring and chemicals and all that, is not a safe assumption to make - because actually we don't know the mechanisms by which the biology is linked with what are by definition behavioral and psychological expressions. Certainly some conditions must have a heavy influence from things like genetics and brain changes, as the biology and the behaviour appear together - but as for how exactly the nuts and bolts of it works, a huge damn lot of that is still "black box": we know there is a relationship but we don't know exactly how it works.

For many other disorders (depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD) the role of biology is often overstated well beyond what the current evidence can tell us, and there is just as much empirical evidence that environmental and experiential factors - as well as purely psychological therapies - affect the associated biology. Many mental health issues arise in a particular social, environmental or personal history context - e.g. trauma, poverty, work stress, bereavement, bullying, childhood abuse and neglect to name but a few more obvious examples. By analogy, suggesting we could adequately explain language by looking only at what happens in the brain when we use it would be absurd - to understand language, how it arises, functions and is transmitted we need to understand social interactions, developmental context and even human cultural history - which is not to say the mechanisms of the brain involved in it are not also massively important.

Categories vs continuum

So if mental illness is not diagnosed by looking inside the brain, how is it diagnosed? Currently by tick lists of symptoms. Which, clearly, is not an exact science. If you display a certain number of apparent symptoms on this list or that, that's what you get diagnosed as, even if you don't have every symptom on the list. This means, in some cases, two people can have more differing symptoms than the same symptoms, yet be diagnosed with the same condition. The same symptoms can also appear on the lists of different distinct mental illnesses, something called co-morbidity. This is not necessarily a problem - for example in physical illness, the symptom of "fatigue" may have many different ultimate causes, and appear as a symptom in many different illnesses. In mental health, though, due to our poor understanding of the mechanisms behind mental illness, it also means people can be given a different diagnosis at different times by different professionals for expressing very similar behaviour, sometimes with worrying potential consequences - they may be given an incorrect life-affecting label that they can't shake off and may never get corrected, or they could be given inappropriate treatment that may do more harm than good. In some cases the distinction between diagnostic categories may be artificial, more a result of us clinging onto past theories than what current evidence is telling us.

I admit I'm not too keen on the "categorical" approach to mental illness, that treats labelled disorders as strictly distinct from, and of a different quality to, the common mental health ups and downs in the general population. There are serious questions over how well supported such hard-and-fast category distinctions are by the current evidence. Schizophrenia in particular has been called a “failed category” with too wide a spread of symptoms and pretty poor support for it being a single, distinct and cohesive condition. For example, evidence is mounting that similar biological, social and environmental factors may underlie the symptom of psychosis - a key symptom in schizophrenia but also a symptom of mood disorders - regardless of which diagnosis category it appears under. And importantly the same factors underlying psychosis may be involved in less severe "sub-clinical" symptoms in the general population, such as social withdrawal, unusual visual and aural perceptions and magical thinking, that may reveal a proneness to psychosis under the right (or wrong) circumstances. Basically, there is co-morbidity too between defined categories of mental illness and also the more common mental health issues of the general population - the distinction may be a matter of degree, of severity, of extremity rather than a strict fire-walled difference of type, in at least some cases. The ramifications of this are huge, as it means the relation between good mental health and mental illness is more of a constant continuum or spectrum than we previously thought, rather than a bunch of different boxes and labels that do not overlap and should be treated separately.

Figure 2 - More like how I see it at present

Anyway, enough of that guff and back to my original point. I no longer see mental health as a straight-and-true track that most people are on and a poor minority fall off of. Rather we are all involved in the same kind of processes, bombarded with pressures and having to adopt often only half-successful strategies to deal with them. But some people, for some periods of their lives at least, have a lot more to deal with than others, whether that's a barrage of seismic life events; the awful way other people treat, or have treated, them; work, money and social pressures; ingrained and damaging bad habits that they struggle to break out of; the continued effects of trauma in the past; their own bodies malfunctioning; or, most likely, a toxic combination of more than one of those factors.

Life is complex and chaotic and living it is difficult. The purpose of most mental health treatment is not to "cure" us of our "illness" and set us back on the problem-free healthy highway with all of the other mentally healthy normal people. That highway doesn't exist. The purpose of mental health treatment is, as suggested in Figure 2, to arm us with whatever tools we can get our hands on to carry on the fight and get through life - which for many involves very tough circumstances - and perhaps even be able enjoy (some of) it. That is, tools to calm the symptoms that cause us distress and stop us from living well; tools to bolster our resilience, store up our support, preempt predictable problems; tools to help us learn about ourselves and others and learn how to manage ourselves and others; and tools to get strategies to cope that work and are not dysfunctional. In short, I didn’t decide to pursue a career* in mental health to "cure" people. I decided to do it simply with the aim of hopefully, somehow, some day, helping people to live. That is all. But in the broader, long-term view, we also need to take more seriously the task of addressing the societal and environmental factors that can apparently play such a key role in damaging our mental health - and not simply ignore them because it's easier to blame each individual's condition simply on the attributes of that individual themselves, in isolation from context.

*Speaking of categories, the rather "unique" combination of roles I have thus far undertaken may be too broad to call a "single, distinct and cohesive" career. Ho Hum. 

Life goalz ~or~ 'what I found out': 2017

It’s New Years’s and also I’m 40 (in case you missed me mentioning that in every blog post this year) so I am going to take a moment to quickly review my LIFE GOALS. Now there are three that are so apparently amazeballs that we’re all supposed to want them 2 the Max, and if we say we don’t, we’re lying. Well, get a load of me:

Power

I have worked in various roles in various spheres now and have become quite familiar with the lot of managers and bosses and the ladder and all that. Working in regional news I got to see behind the curtain of a lot more institutions and organisations and came into frequent contact with movers and shakers at various levels in various hierarchies. The more exposure I had to this the more it began to dawn on me: I actually don’t want much in the way of power. I’m happier working relatively independently and certainly have no desire to tell other people what to do; in fact that’s a headache I could do without. I really, really value my independence and freedom of expression – freedom to speak my mind honestly and critically without having to toe the line; to do my own thing how and when I want to do it; to turn off from work and turn my attention to other things once I’m out the door; to go about my business fairly anonymously etc – to the point I will retreat from anything that threatens these freedoms. People at or near the top of the chain in institutions may not have anyone specifically telling them what to do, but they are hamstrung and compromised in dozens of different directions that would make me recoil, and the further up the chain you go the more enmeshed you become – to have to tether your entire being to some corporate or public entity or enterprise; to be under scrutiny constantly; to be responsible for the gripes and security of an army of people below you; to have be publically accountable for a whole range of crap that may or may not be your fault. Urgh. No, ta. The very idea brings out my soul in a panic rash.

Fame

If power could in fact end up restricting your existential freedoms, that’s nothing compared to fame – what a poisoned chalice that has turned out to be now we have learnt of it, readers! I used to want to be a rock star. Phew, eh? What a lucky break that never happened. Naw, seriously though, like a sizable majority of the population I used to see fame as the ultimate success because, I suppose, it appears to be validation on all levels – that you are special, you are talented, your skill is recognised, you have influence, you are fundamentally an interesting person. Except that fame does not actually prove any of those things, but what will happen is that you and your life will become public property that is fair game for everyone to chip in on, and you and your life will become a business commodity that everyone will constantly want a piece of. And what then? Many are tied to the desperate Sisyphean treadmill of maintaining it, others are stuck with it but desperate to escape back to anonymity. Now: I am really not a public person and I really don’t want to be one. I was not even comfortable putting my face next to news stories I’d written, or getting too much attention on twitter (seeing as it has become the place that people go to be truly awful to each other these days); I could not cope with fame. Fame sounds amazing for about the first year or so, then it sounds like a hollow victory and bubble-like existence. Ta, no.

Riches

Now come on Thomas, really? Ok, yes, I would sorely like to be considerably better off, that is a given. Everything is just harder to do and maintain when you’re poorer, and having to count the pennies is depressing and grinds you down. Yes, I want to have the money to buy nice things now and again, live in a nice home, travel more, and not worry about the expense. But, in line with studies that suggest money does not make us happier beyond a certain point where we are out of poverty and into comfortable, reasonably flush security, I have no real desire for flashy excess at all – in fact I kinda think flashy excess is pretty much always a sign of vacuous amoral try-hard bullshit. Add to that that, unless you win the lottery, you don’t just get rich without strings attached (see Power); and that there are consequences for your conscience, relationships and sense of self; and that I don’t buy for a second that wealth is necessarily anything to do with merit and... well, a friend and I had wildly divergent responses to the Scorsese black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street, thus: I found it morbidly fascinating, a tale of vile people with awful inter-personal relationships and something critical missing in their souls cutting a destructive swathe through the world of high finance. “But wouldn’t it be ace to actually live like that?” my mate said, referring to their lavish lifestyles. Well... “Um. No,” I had to tell him. Whatever bit of people it is that craves superyachts and absurd shiny rollerskate cars and a house with 15 empty bedrooms and cocaine on your private jet and gold leaf on your f***ing ice cream obviously just isn’t in my peasant-stock blood. It just all looks like so much empty swank wank, wastage of existence to me.

So, if I’m pooh-poohing power, fame and riches for their distinctly turn-to-ashes-in-the-mouth potential, what kind of life goals would I push in their stead on this dawning of a new hopeful year?

Robustness

Actually, end-state goals are a bit suspect in general I think, because the Buddhists were right – everything is temporary. I am old enough now to have seen plenty of people attain 'living the dream' status, and lose it again; to appear to have the perfect life one moment, then really not a few years down the line – and vice versa (the good news is while cloudless joy may never last, nor does lightless suffering, a mercy often overlooked but built into this 'time marches on' business). Things simply do not stay the same, and even if you can hold onto something, or keep doing the same things, the world changes around you and things go stale – so simply planning to achieve one state, one situation, one goal, and assuming that’s your happily ever after, is rather unwise; because then there’s the whole of the rest of your life to negotiate. I was once forced, at gunpoint (not at gunpoint), to watch 25 minutes of JoJo Bows, and her mum, repeatedly tell a TV camera about how she was finally living her dream and she never thought she would but she always dreamt of it and now she was living it and this was her dream and she was living her dream and this was great – and I got sad because I could only see impending child-star breakdown because what then, JoJo, WHAT THEN? No. If I am going to set a post-40 life goal a good one would be this: To strive not for any particular one end state, but for greater resilience, robustness and savvy to weather the slings and arrows, storms and changes that will be happening in life anyway, whatever. That takes an openness, a resourcefulness, flexibility, intelligence and, importantly, this...

Relationships

Because they are everything. If I stop for a moment to consider it, it moistens up my ducts because everything about where I am now is down to the friendship, support, influence and companionship of family and friends. They have been my rock, my mirror, my focus group, my bed and bread, my entertainment, education and enlightenment, my shoulders to cry on, mentors, cheerleaders, life coaches, homies and my home – and much more. They make me proud to know them and want to strive to live up to who they want or need me to be, or think I could be. I can’t overstate it – I, Thomas, an acknowledged selfish, self-absorbed loner and misanthrope, owe everything to the good people in my life, and hope I can give something back to them all. In particular (it will come as no comfort to the lonesome) but hitching yourself to another human in a relationship scenario, if it works right, just changes everything: Suddenly there is a net of support, a bed of warmth and comfort, that makes all kinds of things possible that just weren’t before and in many ways allows you both to stretch out and become more confident in various directions, while simultaneously acting as a shock absorber and balm for those slings and arrows mentioned above. I'm sorry for the yuk, but it's true. That's why nurturing good relationships is a goal in itself because there's not much more that is so utterly impactful upon our lives. Also, you learn stuff.

Learning

Back when I was a philosophy teacher I used to try to explain the ongoing drive to ask those big, impractical questions by saying: "When you are born into the world you have no idea what you are, what the world is, or what on earth is going on. As a child you ask and learn more about this, but once you attain adulthood you’re just supposed put all that on one side and turn your attention to making money, being useful, making a family, making a name. Well, I never felt I got a satisfactory answer, so I’m still asking." That was fine for a while, but when I left teaching for the more worldly world of journalism I too had got a little tired and jaded with the inconsequential and unworldliness of philosophy, thinking “What does it matter? It doesn’t help you live.” I thought I’d reached the end of the road with all that deep thinky stuff, having arrived at a kind of mellow, world weary nihilism after endless circling on the same old questions. But I was wrong.

The past four or five years have thoroughly jolted and shaken me out of that kind of slumber and shown me without a shadow of a doubt, that as clued-up and wise-ass and jaded as I got, I still did not have life, or the workings of the world, or people down at all; because there were multiple surprises, twists and turns in store, both alarming and wonderful and, man alive, there was stuff to be learnt. The past couple of years in particular have unexpectedly transformed everything in ways I could never have predicted in my personal life, and have shown me you can explore those big questions not just as well as doing the work and family thing, but because of and through the work and family thing – it's all more life, and real with it. This has left me with a renewed thirst to learn more and more – I don’t mean just the accruing of facts or experiences, but the real stuff, the how-does-this-all-work: What we are, what the world is, or what on earth is going on. I feel both like I’ve made strides in that compared to my previous understanding, but also that I am newly confident in my capability to learn more, and newly confident in the value of it, even if it’s an endless task. It does matter, because it can help you live – with an intelligence and purpose that bolsters the above-mentioned Robustness. Of course, I will only get so far before I shuffle off: The Buddhists are right, everything is temporary. But in that time I reckon I can get a heck of a lot further than those who are dicking around, tunnel-visioned and half-sentient, chasing power, fame and riches for reasons and ends they don’t even really understand; and I hope that I can in that time pass on at least some insights that might help other people in the problem we all face every day – the problem of how we can happily live.

Happy 2018 n that.

All the single fellas

At the risk of sounding like a male Beyonce (a curse I must endure in life in general), I want to say something to all the single fellas and it’s this: There is a good possibility there is nothing wrong with you, it’s just that the world of dating sucks.

Why I’ve been moved to speak on this is that in recent months I’ve caught various friends and acquaintances (actually both male and female) bemoaning their singledom – often in that “I’m just bantering” way that doesn’t fool anyone. I hear them over-analysing the situation, as you do when you’ve been alone for years and are exasperated and just want some kind of explanation: Joking about what wrong-headed unknowables women/men are; joking about how you, yourself, must be a pathetic freak. Lol jokes. Kinda. Kinda not.

I am out of that dating bear pit, thank The Lord, and now comfortably well into something strong and stable (a relationship, not a Tory government) but when I hear the just-mentioned bemoaning from my own kind – the slightly introverted, slightly intense, slightly “sensitive” kind of chap – the empathy glands start pinging away, the bad memories start surfacing and I can end up getting upset on their behalf. Having spent the vast majority of my life single, these are my people, and I feel their frustration acutely. The dating game is simply not set up for a certain kind of dude who tends towards the introverted, intense and “sensitive” – for the reasons outlined below...

Not yet

But before we get into it, I want to make it clear I’m not offering “advice”. As a single man there was nothing that boiled my piss more than someone condescendingly tossing crumbs of “advice” from the safety of the comfortable relationship that they’d lucked out by clumsily fumbling their way into back when we were young and it was much easier to hook up.

And I need to say, there is nothing wrong with being on your own, other than your own desire not to be. Actually, for me, as I got older I made my peace with the prospect more and more, to the point I was quite happy in my own company and really appreciated the freedom of being a free agent when I was. You become self-sufficient. I'd see younger types freaking out about being single after mere months and just think: "Amateurs! Get a grip."

But it's hard not to internalise society's assertion that you are something of a deficient misfit if you are on your own past 30, which is ludicrous as vast droves of society are. This meant my own recent experience shocked me – my current partner and me were both veteran singletons, but getting a relationship going was actually relatively easy and natural and straightforward. I’m not trying to be smug at you ­– what I mean to say is, contrary to what our hind brains may have been whispering obscenely to us in the long, dark nights, there turned out to be nothing freakishly wrong with us, we were not broken, nor terminally “difficult” to be with, we were just normal people who had had some shitty luck in the past. And, it turns out, most of that “dating advice” other people give you is, I can assure you, either completely irrelevant or utter hokem.

Christopher Walken

I’m sure everyone could tell me why their pain and plight is so much worse than that of my hetero-male-privileged ass, as is apparently obligatory in these times, and I know in many cases they'd be right. But I can assure you the struggle for my type is real – the introverted, intense, “sensitive” male can do just fine in a relationship, but is at a sore disadvantage when it comes to actually getting into one in the first place, or even just a “hook up”.

I don't mean a bit of boo-hooing over how women are so mean and how it's so hard to find "The One": I mean periods of years and years without a sniff of anything at all other than rebuff and rejection; long swathes of time convinced there was something fundamentally wrong with me or that I was cursed; long stretches convinced I simply had no choice in the matter because it had come to seem unimaginable or impossible that any women would want to stay with me beyond a month or two before they went cold or got bored or freaked out and ran away; that is if I could even get past a second date; that is if I could even get a date.

I remember comparing notes on singledom with a female friend who astonished me by wishing it was as easy to get a good guy to stick around as it was to get sex. “Getting sex is easy”, she said, to my incredulity. OMG, the gulf in our experience, as outgoing female vs navel-gazing male! “No, no it isn’t,” I said. Sex for me at that point was an ultra-rare and poorly understood phenomenon that had occurred in the distant past a handful of times, which I had no idea how to make happen again. She didn’t seem to understand how things could be like that for someone, her experience being that men simply rocked up and asked for it, often as a nuisance, from her teens onwards.

Meanwhile, when my shacked-up friends cringed over the now-dwindling memory of their single years, I felt like Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. In that film Walken and Robert De Niro have a shocking time of it as prisoners of war in Vietnam, but De Niro escapes and comes home, somewhat damaged, and slowly pieces his life back together and adjusts to being a civilian once more. Years later he goes back out to Saigon to track down Walken, only to find him still there playing Russian Roulette, like they were forced to do as POWs. All those years later and Walken never escaped that hell.

That’s me, I'd tell my couple-friends, that's what it's like to still be dealing with the dating scene in your 30s. "I'm still there, I've been there all along!"

So without further ado, here is how things got like that, at least up to around my mid 30s, for this slightly introverted, slightly intense, slightly "sensitive" male:

1 Opportunity

This is probably the major factor – you simply don’t get to meet a wide variety of eligibles. You live in a small town, most of your friends are male and quite cliquey with it, you were never an outgoing party animal in the first place and now you’re getting older your friends go out less and stick to their own when they do. People will constantly tell you you need to get out more, do more things, but this in itself is a problem – because you don’t really enjoy being the social butterfly, you just want to be having pleasant nights at home or with the people you know and love like many others your age do. Forcing yourself into a constant round of new faces and activities begins to feel exhausting and desperate, but if you don’t do that, you might get to have a conversation socially with maybe one new eligible female about every six months. It’s just not enough. Thank god for internet dating, though that has its own soul-crushing problems.

2 “You don’t try your luck”

This one is a revelation for you, but it’s so true – if you are a “sensitive” type you probably sneer at those sleazey, cocky, alpha-male wankers who are always thinking with their dick, pulling "moves" and dropping cringeworthy lines. But then you wonder: “Why does my delightful dry wit always miss out to the meathead who isn’t afraid to put his hand on her knee?” You write it off as women being idiots and falling for the transparent tricks of Neanderthal nobs, until a female friend takes you aside and berates you: “You don’t try your luck!” What she means is, it isn’t about slick moves or swagger, plenty of women see through that – but the meathead is at least giving a green light, and you aren’t. You are hard work. It’s about letting women know you’re actually interested and worth a shot, giving them a clear sign, an easy way in, something exciting to respond to – but no, there you are, too noble and “sensitive” to do anything but act the distant chivalrous friend and wonder why she’s lost interest when you finally ask her out two months later.

3 The laser focus

In line with your intense and idealistic nature you are also simply quite narrow-minded in what you think you want, and hung up on that, even though you think you aren't. And you've spent far, far too much time pursuing and weeping over people who it was just never going to work with. It can’t be helped, because you go a bit mad when those chemicals bite, but SMH, the wasted time! You just couldn't broaden your focus and realise what a wide and wonderful world of other lovely, fun and sexy people was out there while you spent, for example, a fucking year mooning over some dickhead you had convinced yourself was your true love even though you’d never shared much actual intimacy, they didn’t particularly give a shit about you and it's questionable if you would actually even get on as a couple. Amazing what the heart will do.

4 Intense reactions

One of the problems with not being used to a relationship is that, initially, your reactions can be a little over-intense – partly because actually getting to dating is so rare that there's a vast amount at stake and it's nigh-on impossible to take it lightly; and partly because you're so inexperienced at being in a partnership that you take your cues from films, fiction and your own imagination as to how you should be acting – and that is often way too heavy and intense, way too soon. You have a tendency to write looong emotional essays to the unfortunate objects of your affection at the slightest hiccup, and it never, ever, helps anything. You also want to talk “deep and meaningful” pretty much all the time. One ex told you: “Women just want someone fun who is there for them – not a psychotherapist!” Another revelation. The shame of it is, that's not even your everyday self, which is actually pretty laid back and goofy – but your date will be out the door before she knows that.

5 Don't bother

You give up, you stop making an effort and worrying about it. This is part learned helplessness, part self-preservation as otherwise it risks defining you, becoming an obsession and having a bad effect on your mental health. And this is right – you are a world unto yourself, there is no reason why you have to be tied to someone else and there is plenty to enjoy about being single. Ironically, of course, being desperate to not be single makes you less attractive so not being bothered may be good strategy; in practice, though, the idea "It'll happen when you're not looking for it" is sadly not true –because when you stop looking, as you do periodically for long periods of time, you basically don't meet anyone (see 1) or "try your luck" (see 2), so your singledom becomes entrenched.

Don't freak out

But perhaps I’m getting perilously close to offering “advice” here and I said I didn’t want to do that.

All I really want to say to all the single fellas (and ladies) who struggle for the above reasons is: Don’t sweat it. Don’t beat yourself up too much, don’t write off all members of the opposite (or same) sex as cruel and shallow shits, and don’t think it’s all your fault.

Being single is tough and modern dating often a ruthless and soul-destroying pursuit. People are just shitty to each other when it comes to being respectful and considerate of the feelings of their potential or discarded matches. And also, as is very clear these days, no one really knows how to do it and there isn’t a right way to do it anyway, because everyone is different – so don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

For the long-term single who doesn't want to be, your only “problem” is finding the right circumstances to meet the right someone, and being able to successfully navigate though that early awkward bit of a relationship without one of you freaking out and running away. That and the Herculean task of maintaining your self esteem through the rejections and apathy and patronising comments of your couple-friends.

When people look at you like you’re someone to be pitied and open their cake holes to dispense “what you need to do” platitudes, please laugh a light laugh and tell them, with the air of a wizened Vietnam vet: “You don’t know what it’s like out there, man.”

And if they persist, tell them, politely, to fuck right off.

Maps and tropes

In a matter of weeks I will be 40 and, actually, it feels about time – so much so that I am writing this blog post early.

The shift in world view from late twenties to mid-thirties I documented here but it’s now clear that was only half way through a decade-long process of jettisoning and upgrading youthful ideas and attitudes – and actually, that process is ongoing and will likely continue, until I lose my mind or turn up my toes, whichever comes first.

Trying to explain what feels different over these past four or five years is hard to pin down (there are hints of it here and here) though a lot is in line with the expected 'life begins' trope: I feel more comfortable in my own skin than I ever have; I know myself better than I ever have; I have learned to value and enjoy the little things more; I give fewer shits about appearance, ego and cool; I have less patience with fluff, bluster and bullshit; I am much more inclined to view things pragmatically and with a calm scepticism than idealistically and emotionally; I have less faith in prevailing wisdom and the judgment of powerful people, because I have seen well-qualified authority figures make demonstrably bad decisions a few too many times; and I have discovered jazz, dressing with a colour palette and the joys of interesting architectural design.

But there's more, something more I'm still struggling to pin down...

The slow process of disillusionment

I started this blog in my early 30s and the tag line “Life: Or ‘the slow process of disillusionment’ as I call it” has been floating around on it for most of that time, supposed to be humorously downbeat but also heartfelt ­– it did feel like virtually everything I thought was true, good, exciting, reliable or even attainable in my youth was in the process of turning out to be more complicated, ambiguous, problematic or simply more mundane as adulthood progressed. Your childhood maps and expectations of the world slowly prove to be flawed and insufficient and you have to update them with amendments in untidy, ugly scrawl or chuck them away completely. How sad, I thought, but them's the breaks.

Then I thought that was a sad thing. Now I think“Thank God for that”. If there’s one major thing I would like to point out about my 40-turning feeling it’s this – because if I hadn't got rid of those quaint old maps I'd have been stuck with them.

Because I have been noticing more and more and more in the past half decade how it’s not just me – everyone has these maps of what the world is supposed to be, ranging from basic childhood values to the received horse-sense of adult society – and all of it is a little cock-eyed, riddled with misleading myths and assumptions.

And in tandem with this I have been noticing more and more and more: The world is not how you think it is. Everything is more complicated than you are led to believe. Your maps and expectations are all wrong. Not just mine, not just yours – all of them.

Tropes

I still don't feel like I'm making myself clear enough. So: Let's talk about tropes. By which I mean recurring devices and themes in things like art and literature, especially salient today in film and television.

What happens when a car goes off the edge of a cliff in a film? It explodes. What happens when someone is dangling over an abyss but instead of climbing up to safety they try to reach for that golden amulet on the nearby ledge? They plummet to their death, the greedy nobs. What happens when an authoritarian society creates a 'game' for public entertainment, where people are forced to run or fight to the death? The participants band together and spark revolution, of course!

These recurring ideas and motifs can be anything from a common type of scene (the heroes peep over the edge of that rocky outcrop/hidden balcony to conveniently observe an evil ritual below that reveals the full horror of what is going on!); a basic pairing of things that always go together (aliens = ancient Egyptian imagery, right?); to a full-blown complex narrative (Google 'The Hero’s Journey').

These things are outlined in exhaustive and mind-boggling depth at the wonderful TV Tropes website, which says: “A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes may be brand new but seem trite and hackneyed; they may be thousands of years old but seem fresh and new. They are not bad, they are not good; tropes are tools that the creator of a work of art uses to express their ideas to the audience. In fiction, it can even be impossible to create a tropeless tale.”

In life also it can also be impossible to create a tropeless tale about how you think the world works. Because this stuff doesn’t just happen in entertainment, this is how we think in general ­– in our social interactions, our politics, our culture, our everyday expectations and judgements. Our lives are full of stereotyping, narratives we have invented or absorbed from the world around us, and unexamined 'zeitgeist' assumptions. Some are fairly overt and obvious, but others go unrecognised for what they are – nothing more than shortcuts and habits of thinking that may actually not reflect reality all that well. Because actually, in reality, the car most often doesn’t blow up; it just crunches and comes apart and that’s it.

Here be dragons

These tropes, of course, combine into maps of what the world should be like, whether dealing with politics, romance, religious belief, social shiz or even work or business. Of course these maps are useful, usually contain at least some identifiable truth, and we have to have them to get by and get around. But while some are better than others, not a single one of them is complete or sufficient (no matter what all those self help and 'get rich, happy, healthy and successful' guides may try to tell you) – how could they be? Because the world out there is more bizarre, diverse and complex than any guide-map can convey.

Treating these maps like they are complete and sufficient is often the source of endless trouble and grief. The SatNav is never the territory – yet often people seem to prefer gluing their eyes to that rather than looking at the damn road and learning to take it as it comes. I see people everywhere, all the time, sticking to their maps and coming at life full of some certain 'faith' that it is this way or that, that this will happen or that must happen... as the SatNav drives them off the edge of a metaphorical cliff.

It’s not just that this attitude sets you up for disappointment, it sets you up for crisis – because when what you thought 'needed' to happen doesn’t, it’s a disaster – the entire world is cast as a dreadful hell because you can not even contemplate an alternative. All you have is what's on the map and “Here be dragons”. So when your map proves to be wrong – OMG, DRAGONS.

But the world is not a dreadful hell, it just is. Disappointment is a bummer, but if you think one scuppered plan ruins everything, you’re not looking properly. So it turns out life is not arranged around you having fun, or being successful and fulfilled all the time as your entitled destiny, after all. Boo hoo. That doesn’t mean you can never have fun or be fulfilled or successful, just that sometimes you will, sometimes you won’t, these things never last forever and you probably have to keep working at it. And no one is immune from bad things repeatedly happening that you have to soldier though – that's not the end of a fulfilling life, it's grist to the mill of it.

The biggest misunderstanding of the field of cognitive psychology is the idea that it's all about positive thinking and telling yourself to be awesome and happy. Yes, we should regularly remind ourselves of the good things – but simply running away from reality and telling ourselves 'positive' fairy tales is not a great strategy for sustained and robust mental health. Getting a more flexible and up-gradable map, learning to read it properly and using it more in conjunction with the actual, real, road is a better one.

Raw, strange and crackling

For me, at 40, it seems life is bigger, more complex and crackling with mystery and possibility than I ever imagined in my earlier adulthood. It's huge, raw, strange and unknowable. It may be stable and calm enough to map out in the steady spots, but it strikes me as unimaginably varied and extreme at the edges. The very nastiest, bleakest stuff does happen. So does the most beautiful and sublime. A lot of the time neither makes its presence felt. But time and again, I've found, whatever you think things are like, they are not necessarily like that.

I honestly don’t know how to communicate this, and will have to keep on trying because I don’t think I’ve done it here at all. I look at younger people and despair to think: “My God, you have so much to go through, so much to do, to endure, to have happen before you can see this," which sounds utterly pretentious, I know. Maybe that’s how my parents look at me still.

Whatever, I’m now so much more wary of over-reliance on maps and tropes, especially those that other people have decided everyone else should adopt – I do not trust the judgement of those who are navigating life from an off-the-peg ideology or overly-embellished narrative, set in stone.

For me, at 40, there is no grand plan. My life’s work is now just to navigate through whatever happens, seeking out the enriching things while trying to avoid the awful stuff, dealing with what comes at me and pushing to keep the good things good or make the bad things a little better, step by step. And most importantly trying to understand it better and deeper as I go – because that is the one project that makes sense of it all to me, though a project that will never be complete, until I... stop. At which point, I 'spose, it stops with me. But let's see how far we get.

That's how I'm seeing things right now. I have no idea what is in store any more – and I really, really like that. To fall back on a hackneyed old trope: 'Life begins', indeed.

Shame. Shame. Shame.

1. Back to the playground

We were about 11 years old and queued up for something at school when one of the confident, popular lads took his digital watch off and smelled the strap.

“Urgh” he went and proceeded to get everyone around him to smell the sweaty rubber. I smelled it. And I said something to the tune of: “Urgh, that smells like your fingers do when they’ve been up your bum.”

There was a moment of silence. It was an odd thing to say. I thought it was funny (I was 11) and also thought it was fairly uncontroversial – come on, now, we all know that smell, right? We’ve all caught an unfortunate whiff when going about our ablutions before washing our hands, yeah? If I was 16 and into edgy gross-out humour I might have said “That smells like arse crack!” and might have got a laugh (we would have been 16).

But I was 11, and I said: “That smells like your fingers do when they’ve been up your bum.”

I said it. And after the beat of uncertain silence, the confident, popular lad roared with laughter and said: “He puts his fingers up his bum and then smells them.”

Everybody gasped in horrified glee and slowly it worked its way down the line – Urgh! He LIKES putting his fingers up his bum! And he LIKES smelling them! He’s gross! He’s smelly! He’s a pervert!

I tried to explain myself but it only made matters worse. They weren’t interested in my mitigation. And how could I take it back? I’d said it, it was a matter of public record. So for the next few weeks I was the “bum fingers” kid, and just had to suck it up. What had happened was that the quiet, weedy, arty guy had said something weird and it was gift – everyone was just ripe and itching to jump on it, to have someone to taunt and feel better than. I’d walked right into that role.

On the scale of bullying that is a pretty silly and inconsequential example, of course – I could have used much more extreme and traumatic examples that I saw, received or even took part in dishing out from those awkward, anxiety-filled early years, but let’s keep it light eh? – the point is that kind of situation was utterly everyday and banal in the playground.

As you grow up you think things are different and you won’t ever go back to that. While talking about introversion (here), I said: “Having spent much of my childhood feeling vaguely threatened and misunderstood by pretty much everyone except my immediate family and closest friends, I slowly discovered that communication was a kind of super-power – to be able to explain yourself, articulate your case and express what the hell was going on in that inner world of yours was a transformative skill to develop,” – and I still feel that. But recently I’ve begun having doubts about the universal effectiveness of that super-power, because I’m starting to see plenty of cases where, both online and in the media, it doesn’t count for shit.

I am of course talking about public shaming – where someone says something a little offensive or ill-advised and are met with a tsunami of outrage and anger, from howls of cackling derision, to calls for them to be stripped of their job and title, to full-on threats of extreme violence and death (often sexual, if female).

The victim's original comment may have been a bit unpleasant, a bit inappropriate, and not something I’d condone or sympathise with, so it took me a while to pin down why the outraged response troubled me so – and it’s that, up there. The playground fear. The realisation that you’re just one unwise quip away from public humiliation and ruin.

It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t what you meant. It doesn’t matter if what you said doesn’t really represent what you think, feel or who you are. It doesn’t matter what the intended tone or context originally was. Explanation or logical argument can’t repair it – if what you said could possibly be taken as the kind of thing we might imagine a truly awful person could say, then you are that monster in the eyes of the world now, with no chance of redemption.

Because those doing the shaming are no more interested in the reality, subtlety and humanity behind an utterance than kids in the playground – what they want is a scapegoat to make an example of, to suffer and then disappear, so everyone else can go home feeling righteous and superior. If the mob wants to tear you down, it will tear you down, blind to all reason, nuance and the facts of the matter.

2. The new moral majority

I remain deeply, deeply suspicious of the motivations of righteous rage – most of the time I simply don’t buy it as this pure and noble thing we’re supposed to accept it as. It’s not humble or fair-minded, it’s cruel and disingenuous. There’s always a whiff of “casting the first stone” lack of self-awareness about it. As Nietzsche put it: “No one lies as much as the indignant do.”

I was going to write something on this topic anyway, but then I read Jon Ronson’s excellent “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” and it kind of covers it – but at the same time has made the matter crystal clear in my head. This kind of mass group-shaming is just vile, and not a little bit scary.

One thing I kept thinking while reading that book is how people just love pointing the finger. They get off on having their little inner tyrant unleashed to lord it over others, while at the same time feeling that’s fine because they are justified and holy, right is on their side and everyone approves. We look to others for what is acceptable, and so when everyone starts attacking it suspends the usual social norms of being polite and forgiving – or actually considering the victim as a human being – while rewarding us with praise for joining in, egging us on. Add online anonymity and the short attention span of internet interaction to that and you can be as vile and violent as you like, with no need to consider that you don’t know the context and subtleties behind what was originally said.

And the fall-out for the victim of a shaming is not all over and forgotten quickly as it is for the perpetrators. Towards the end of Ronson’s book, he interviews Michael Fertik who runs reputation.com, a company which works to bury online shamings and damaging Google results for clients. Fertik responds to criticism that he’s “manipulating truth and chilling free speech” by saying:

“But there is a chilling of behaviour that goes along with a virtual lynching. There is a life modification... People change their phone numbers. They don’t leave the house. They go into therapy. They have signs of PTSD. It’s like the Stasi. We’re creating a culture where people feel constantly surveilled, where people are afraid to be themselves... This is more frightening than the NSA. The NSA is looking for terrorists. They’re not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you.”

Ronson himself says the early days of social media, where people thought they could be themselves and say anything to anyone, had proven to be naive: the sensible tactic these days it seems is to be as bland as possible online.

“The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. We are now turning it into a surveillance society where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless,” he said.

Certainly I don’t want a society where one off-the-cuff remark can override everything else you ever did or said and cost you your career, reputation, friends and mental well-being if the mob decides to turn on you.

The irony is that much of this is being done in the name of liberalism, as those shamed are often perceived as transgressing against modern progressive values in some way – caricatured as the worst kind of backwards-thinking, overprivileged, oppressive dinosaur whether they actually are or not. Broadly speaking I’m also a progressive liberal, dammit, and to me this just seems a complete betrayal of that – the shouty moral majority used to be the ultra-conservative right wing. Us liberals thought we’d largely vanquished that kind of knee-jerk Mary Whitehouse censorship nonsense, for a more open-mined, diverse society. But no: now the shouty moral majority is us.

3. Paradoxical behaviour

Western culture in the new millennium is deeply confused about this stuff, with weird and wild extremes going on. On the one hand we have never been more accepting of the shocking, “edgy” and extreme, and love to wax worthy about the importance of freedom of speech and the right to offend and be offended. At the same time we love to destroy the lives of anyone who says anything that even resembles something we deem “not cool”, even if the comment itself was the kind of thing you hear average people say everyday, and actually fairly inconsequential.

It’s completely unremarkable to guffaw on a week night at, say, South Park, Family Guy, Bo Selecta (back in the day) or a Frankie Boyle gig, pushing the boundaries of taste and acceptability... and yet a single slightly off-colour tweet, even if clearly intended as absurd or ironic, can end someone’s career.

Ronson covers in-depth the example of a woman who was reduced to a jobless, scared, numb, shell-like recluse for the sake of a picture at a war memorial where she pretended to shout and flip the bird next to a “silence and respect” sign (not actually shouting or intending disrespect, note, but just as a visual pun). She was so demonised and hounded online that it flooded any Google search for her name for years to come, while death threats and outrage continued unabated... and meanwhile the Sex Pistols, who wouldn't have thought twice about such a stunt and would have meant it, are currently being lauded as a beloved cultural institution in exhibitions across London for the 40th anniversary of punk.

This is paradoxical behaviour, it just doesn’t stack up. Now I know there is an argument to be made about the licence of entertainers and artists to say things us everyday working drones who have to toe the line cannot, but the hugeness of the disparity is mind boggling.

4. Telling the difference

People are often silly and ignorant, yes, and often need it pointing out that what they joke about can be hurtful and perpetuate ingrained inequalities – but they don’t deserve destroying for that. We have to be able to tell the difference between someone who proudly publishes Mein Kampf and someone who is making a quip without considering how it might sting; between Roosh V and some immature college geek thinking he’s being ironic. Or, as Ronson points out, a battle for civil rights and a “nasty imitation” witch-hunt. The response has to be proportionate, or we're lost.

People say stupid things in jest all the time. It doesn’t mean that’s what they really think in their sober moments. Neither does it mean that’s an indication of how they would personally treat actual people ­– in fact the shock of that mismatch is often the very joke itself. And yet we pretend we don’t know this. Why? Because we want someone to pounce on, point and shout at, to feel righteous over and superior to.

Ages ago I did a silly post about telepathy where I argued that if we knew the contents of everyone’s thoughts we would not be able to maintain our social judgements based on appearance and public presentation any more: “We would all have to become inconceivably more understanding and forgiving of others if we were going to be party to everyone’s inner-most secrets and feelings all the time,” I said.

To some extent social media has created a world where the kind of off-the-cuff, unfiltered contents of our heads, that previously only our friends and family might hear, can now be instantly displayed to everyone all over the world, as immortal pronouncements carved in code. We still haven’t got to grips with that, neither as writers nor readers – both those of us spewing out thoughts and those of us judging them may have to modify our behaviour. Sure, we should be more mindful about what we say, but equally we cannot judge a tweet or facebook status like a carefully-planned and edited publication.

On shaming I am now off the fence. Unless there is a genuine injustice to be urgently addressed with an actual victim, as Ronson puts it, I’m not up for this shaming lark at all – it’s not redemptive, there is no positive outcome for anyone, just vileness upon vileness until everyone is angry, damaged and numb. And if I may be so bold, I’d like to suggest we all stop and think if it’s really fair, necessary and worth doing before we lay into anyone online, or at least think about how we should go about it and why we are doing it.

Do you actually know what this person is about? Can you be sure you are being fair to them and the spirit and context this was said in? Do you really know what the effect on their lives could be and do you actually want that? Have you never said anything a bit risque and ill-advised that could be taken as a bit dicey - could the mob not one day just as easily turn on you? I mean to say, for Chrissakes, that guy that the Christians like said it 2,000 years ago: "Let him who is without sin..."

"A man who salsa dances"

Those who know me even vaguely know that dancing and I are not two things you associate. Me and tirades on dark German metaphysics, yes; me and fancy footwork, no. Me and comedy awkwardness, sure; me and serious sashaying, doubt it. Me and fluid, coherent, sexy prose, perhaps; me and fluid, coherent, sexy moves, uh-uh. So the fact that I ended up in salsa class – once and once only – was as much a shock to me as anyone.

In my attention-seeking uni days my strategy was to hit the floor with limbs flailing and feet jumping in the most outlandish display I could muster, that would inevitably descend into either fits of laughter or minor physical injury, more Dadaist protest than co-ordinated rhythm; since then I am the one nodding at the back at gigs, only putting my hands half-way up in the air, like I just do care, and pulling the terrified gurn and frozen muscles when someone suggests I need to get up at a wedding do.

It’s not that I wouldn’t love to be someone with the effortless coiled-spring poise, light touch and physical ease of a dancer, but then I’d also like to be capable of levitation ­– and the fact that neither of these things is the case doesn’t trouble me that much day-to-day.

No

The idea was first mooted on a weekend walk with some friends, when one of the group said she was thinking of going and wanted someone to go with, turning to us with the challenge “The problem is they don’t have enough men.”

“Let’s stop this right here – I am NOT going salsa dancing,” was my unequivocal response, and that was that.

I am not ready to be “a man who salsa dances”, I said. To me that means one of two things: either you are a lean, athletic, swarthy, confident, ostentatious type, who just has to let the rhythm out – which I am patently not (the rhythm is fine kept in with me, thanks) – or you are a bored, middle-class white person of a certain age who has watched Strictly and is desperate to show the ladies that you do, in fact, have some heretofore unsuspected Latin passion bubbling away under your pudgy, middle-class-white-person-of-a-certain-age exterior. I could be that man. And I really didn’t want to be.

So there

A few weeks later a second female friend, who had been on the walk, messaged me to say “Salsa tomorrow. Are you coming then?”

Hadn’t she heard me? Ah, but there "could be ladies there", she said, which was a rotten power-move. You see now, if I said “no”, I wasn’t just saying “sorry it’s not for me”, I was saying “I am a miserable hermit spinster who just isn’t interested in making any effort to get out of the house and meet anyone, so I better not whinge about being on my own ever again because it’s my own fault.” Do you see what she did there?

I said no.

A (one) sexy lady

She went along, and told me there was "a" sexy lady there – imagine it! – and also said it was really good fun and very relaxed, and I caved. What could it hurt? If nothing else I could enjoy being amusingly awkward and uptight and making dryly humorous comments throughout, I thought. It could be fun to be that man, I'm used to being him.

It was only when I told people I was going to do it that it became clear there really is something in this men are from Mars, women are from Venus bullshit. The polarity of the responses was marked. Virtually every woman I told gave me a variation of “Oooooh, you must go!” and virtually every man said “WTF? Why? Who even are you?”

When I arrived I was already sweating from the walk there and half expecting an hour or two of excruciating embarrassment, fumbling and bumbling about with various partners who would be throwing daggers at me as I awkwardly broke all my personal space rules as stiffly and sexlessly I could while failing to put anything where it should be at the right time.

Yes

But I was pleasantly surprised ­– there were a lot of people of all ages and types milling about, many complete novices, some serious enthusiasts, mostly completely normal looking. To start with it was all just footwork, first in big group as a warm up, then in sub-groups by ability. My friend was there, who reassuringly was still no dancer either – she more regularly dances like a 10-year-old at a birthday party and once got into some heat at a disco when her boyfriend had to explain to the woman next to her that she wasn’t taking the piss, she always busted moves like that.

So it was comfortable and fun and it was eminently do-able. A bit of practice and the scales fell from my eyes that this is what it’s all about, all just timing and posture, and with repetition and the right music I could feel the basics falling into place already. It was muscle memory, really, no different to playing guitar, which I can do. There was the odd moment when I had to try to explain that I wasn’t tensing my shoulders unnaturally, that’s just what they are like all the time, but my “witty” self-deprecating comments largely met with no response at all – this was serious business, and I guess they got nervous wise-guys trying to quip their way out of embarrassment all the time.

There was only one terrifying bit. In the big-group “free dance” at the end, the main guy would shout “change partners” every few minutes and I would be left in the middle of the floor flailing for someone, anyone, to grab me, feeling like I was back in PE class being the last to be picked... at which point I would have to plead with my new partner that “I can’t lead, I know nothing!” – a scenario which only needed me to notice I had no trousers on to be identical to a recurring anxiety dream – but I got through it.

What I really began to see was just how much this could help me improve things like balance, posture and physical confidence, as well as being a pleasant and relaxed social pursuit... this could be a good, healthy thing, I thought, never mind any pretensions of “Latin passion” or learning great floor-moves.

Then again, maybe not

The next week none of us friends could make it, but we agreed to go the week after. However, in that time I met and started dating someone by a route that had nothing to do with my dancing ability, to which, of course, one of my male friends’ responses was: “Well you know what’s good about this – you don’t have to go salsa dancing any more!”

It’s true, I haven’t been back. But that’s as much a matter of not having the time as anything – I didn’t feel the relief he thought I might have. It’s kind of a shame.

Sure, I also don’t have a raging urge to repeat my tiny taste of this other reality where I am “a man who salsa dances” either, but who knows – one day I might be persuaded again. Cha cha cha.

Never mind your dreams

"Will you stop telling my child to follow her dreams!" my friend snapped while telling me about the umpteenth animated film he had sat through with his hatchling.

He wasn’t exhorting me, he was exhorting the makers of the film for once again mining such an unimaginative seam for their central moral message. He had no argument from me, I understood. It’s not just that the message is somewhat overdone and obvious, clichéd and glib, it’s that the incessant drilling of such un-moderated aspirational spaff as "follow your dreams" is possibly damaging.

What? Damaging? Did I just say that? What kind of shrivelled, bitter old cynic am I? It’s a bit like saying "Yeah, love and understanding is over-rated", "Hugs are for losers" or "That Hitler guy was alright, y’know?"; but hold your Twitter-style backlash for just one sock-darning minute. It is not my intention at all to play the cynical curmudgeon here (for once) – in fact quite the opposite. I promise you, in my own perverse way, I will be working towards an arguably positive, touchy-feely message of a different sort by the time we are done here.

But first we have to wade through some hard-nosed realism, at least in a vague, cursory way, so shush and buckle up.

Side-bowl of sh*t

Young people especially tend to look at one with horror when one sneers at the "follow your dreams" mantra, and it’s very difficult to explain oneself. Because, I suppose, my position is a response to age, to having been about a bit and seen the outcome of dream-following - or otherwise - in oneself and others.

When you get to the point in your life where there is no doubt various ships have sailed, possibilities have narrowed and binding responsibilities have abounded, it really does all look a bit different, not to mention that you learn about the rather more shoddy, chaotic and still-oft-mundane reality of even the most high-powered and glamorous positions. So many "dreams" are simple fantasy and mirage – like an American tourist arriving in Peckham when they expected Britain to all be fairytale castles, bowler hats and tea. Other "dreams" come with a slew of unpalatable personal requirements and nature-of-the-beast necessities, making demands on your time, energy and integrity, that go a long way to taking the shine off. But if you’re not prepared to stomach that side-bowl of sh*t than you can’t reasonably say you "I could have been this or I could have been that".

It’s not just personal experience I'm grumbling from, I know friends and contemporaries of all permutations: Those who have followed whims and passions or those who have trod a safe, tried and tested path; those who have jumped careers multiple times and those who have stayed in the same one since early adulthood; those who have moved towns or even countries and those who still live where they grew up; those who are deeply entrenched in the corporate rat race and those who have maintained a little more independence; those who have made good money and a name for themselves and those who, well, haven’t so much...

Not one of them has an easy, uncomplicated life without compromise, stress, relationship issues, health issues, worries about "What’s it all about?", "Where’s it all going?", "Was it all worth it?", "Should I have lived my life differently?" – not one of them would say they have arrived at exactly where they wanted to be, or is vastly happier than everyone else. From the outside you may get envious looking at others, but when you talk to them properly about their problems, you quickly realise "Oh, yeah, they have their 'stuff' to deal with too." I couldn’t honestly say I’d trade places.

Every "could have" is an unknown

Because reality simply isn’t like TV, in fact TV has always done a terrible job of actually conveying what any job is actually, really, actually like, on a day-to-day basis – because it would be terribly tedious and impenetrable in its minutiae. The world of work is always infused with a little (or a lot of) strife, stress and struggle, negotiations and cut-corners, a million little petty problems to sort and demands to meet, often from unreasonable people who just don’t quite understand what is involved. This tends to be the case no matter what it is you’re doing, it turns out - even in so-called "glamour" jobs. That’s what getting things done and dealing with people is – it’s how the world muddles along.

Contrast that with the oh-so-simple dichotomy we feed our younglings with, of "follow your dreams" vs "settle for a safe and dull life". Bah! I say. Bah. For a start, I'm not even sure which I have done - I've followed some dreams up to point, I've given up and waved others on their way; I've settled at some times in some places, I've not settled at others in others...

And as if "dream vs settle" was really the only issue: What about "Is the reality of your dream what you think it is?", "Do you actually know what your dream involves?", "Are you prepared to put in the work or make the sacrifices to get there and maintain it once you do?", "If you got there are you sure you wouldn't want something else?", "How much compromise will you put up with?" and "At what point will you be able to say you’ve arrived?".

I’ve said it before – every "yes" to one thing is a "no" to something else. There will always be things you could have done otherwise, opportunities you had to let go in taking a particular path. But every "could have" is an unknown – and would come with its own unforeseen complications. And the contents of the world’s maximum security prisons are testament that it’s not always "Better to have regretted something you did than something you didn’t do".

Chronic failure issues

So here’s this black board in New York where people are asked to write up their biggest regret. And they do, and the result is rather humbling as passer-by after passer-by reveals they too have unfulfilled yearnings and missed opportunities.

But Ah! say the filmmakers, ah! (it’s actually a viral marketing vid for a university, of course, not an open-ended social experiment) – "Ah! What they all have in common is their regrets are all about not doing something." So the take-away message is supposed to be "Every passing day is another chance to turn it all around" - or to put it another way "It’s never too late to FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS! (enroll now)".

That is not the message I took away from this exercise, dear reader. No. What I took away was this: There is a whole generation of people out there with chronic failure issues because they’ve been sold the idea that life should be AMAZING all the time and everyone should be doing AMAZING things, fulfilling every ounce of potential they were ever given. If you’re not a rock star, high-powered lawyer, beach-dwelling, sky-diving scuba instructor or Steve-bloody-Jobs then, man alive, what have you been doing with your life? Haven’t you heard? YOLO, bitch! YOLO!

My God. It’s exhausting. If there is a solution to all this Sisyphean dream-chasing, it is certainly not, for my money, to renew the pressure and say "It’s not too late people, get back on the dream wagon!" I know people who do this, constantly raking over what could have been, what they haven’t got, what they couldn’t or didn’t do in the past and how it could have been different; and it's more misery-making than it is inspiring.

Stop.

My gut response is “STOP”. Stop beating yourself up about it. Life is tough and complicated and always has been. If you didn’t pursue something in the past there is probably more than good reason, even if you don't quite recall the full details – perhaps the opportunity was an illusion and never really there; perhaps you didn’t really want to do it on balance at the time; or perhaps there was just too much else going on, as life is simply not that simple.

Stop it. Sure, if you really want to try again and can try again, then bloody well do it - but if it's too much or just not possible then shrug and go "meh", and divert your attention and energy elsewhere. There is nothing you were "supposed" to be. Instead of agonising over where you "should" be or what you "should" have, start enjoying what you do have; striving for what is possible and within reach now, not ten years in the future; making the most of where you are and the people you are with; finding ways to do what you enjoy and enjoy what you do in the life you have. Start living that life, this life, not the imaginary one hanging over you like an albatross. Please.

If there is one "take-away message" from this video, it is that everyone has the same issues in their own way, so it’s normal and ok. Take comfort – most people also feel they missed opportunities, perhaps didn’t quite find their niche, perhaps don't have everything in their life as they'd like it, even if they seem to have it sorted to you, from the outside. Regrets are normal and fine. There is always more work to be done.

Not every square peg finds a square hole, and that’s ok – life would be dull and predictable if they did, and nothing would ever change. 

Moby Dick *spoilers*

Of course, I would never tell anyone not to "follow their dreams" – everyone’s dreams are too personal and deep-rooted for us to really understand from the outside, and it’s not for anyone else to say what any individual should do with them. But as general life advice, "follow your dreams" is just too simple and too ill-defined for me to whole-heartedly endorse; it has to be tempered with self-awareness, worldly wisdom and strategy – especially as it can be massively destructive and dysfunctional to pursue some things beyond a certain point. After all, it basically is the plot of Moby Dick, and that didn’t end well.

But while to me the urge to "follow my dreams" looks increasingly irrelevant with age, a less ambitious but related urge only seems to be increasing – the need to take time to appreciate things and recognise, seek out and do the things that give me joy, however small or seemingly trivial. Never mind high-powered ambition, it's following my passions in spite of the requirements of the day-to-day world that has become important to me, as a matter of maintaining robust mental heath and wellbeing - making room in my life for the continued presence of the things I enjoy and am interested in, whether it gets me anywhere in particular or not – it’s doing these things that make life better, here and now, not chasing any fantasy goal to attain somewhere in the future.

See, told you it would get touchy-feely.

I 'spose I'm an introvert, really. But I don't like to shout about it.

~or~ On being unapologetic about wanting to stay in.

Accept yourself

At the risk over coming over all “hey lets all love ourselves and celebrate our differences, you go girl!” – which I try to avoid if possible as it’s not a good look on me – I have recently had reason to accept a part of myself and, frankly it’s a relief.

No, I’m not gay (sorry about that). I have no announcement, no news for anyone who has known me for any length of time... just a few fresh (but quiet) thoughts about something that has come into focus again recently: That I am, fundamentally, an introvert, really.

Now, I’m by no means the most introverted introvert. In fact I have consistently chosen career options that have required me to communicate and assert myself, which may seem odd, but not to me – having spent much of my childhood feeling vaguely threatened and misunderstood by pretty much everyone except my immediate family and closest friends, I slowly discovered that communication was a kind of super-power – to be able to explain yourself, articulate your case and express what the hell was going on in that inner world of yours was a transformative skill to develop, and I developed it rather well.

I still think of myself as shy and retiring, which in a lot of cases I am – but I forget that isn't what everyone sees when, for example, I'm happily babbling and gesticulating away in a violent conversation, or boldly and bolshily schmoozing with strangers as part of the day job. But that I am fundamentally an introvert seems so obvious to me, a fact known practically from the egg, that - remarkably - I seem to have almost forgotten it, or its significance, of late.

"Say baby, what’s your Myers-Briggs type?"

First a couple of important things about introverts and extroverts – the terms have kind of entered everyday language to mean “quiet” and “loud”, but that’s not quite on-the-money. While shy, socially-awkward people will of course be introverts, that doesn’t mean all introverts are shy or socially awkward – any more than all extroverts will be loud and un-thoughtful. Invented by Carl Jung, the terms would more accurately be defined as “internally focussed” and “externally focussed”, and are key in a lot of more modern theorising about personality (not least the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator which, nauseatingly, appears to have replaced “what’s your star-sign” as the dating-compatibility question of choice for the "rational" set).

An introvert is most comfortable when immersed in their own “inner world” of thoughts and feelings – and likely to be uncomfortable and unhappy if they’re not regularly allowed to spend some quiet time “there”. Meanwhile an extrovert is most comfortable focussing on external things – objects and events in the “outside world” – and likely to be unhappy if they’re not regularly allowed to go out, find stimulus and do stuff “out there”. Clearly very few people are all one or the other, and we all experience both modes depending on our situation, the company we're in, activities required of us, etc – but the idea is that most people tend more in one direction than the other.

Underwhelming revelations

Now, I’m wary of labelling and pathologising myself as anything - this “Oh I'm an Aquarius which means I'm just like this and everyone just has to accept it” kind of business is both self-fulfilling and limiting - but in this case I am so very clearly an introvert there is nothing remotely controversial about "diagnosing" me thus.

That is not the revelation. The revelation, in two parts, is this:

A) That somewhere along the line in the past couple of years  - without realising it – I seem to have "internalised" the idea that being introverted is probably a bad thing and I should fight it because when I indulge my introverted tendencies it kinda makes me a loser.

B) That F*** THAT SHIT, in the most robust possible terms. The above unconscious attitude has been contributing absolutely nothing to my life except a vague sense of sense of guilt, vague self-esteem issues (as if I needed any more) and a party-pooping pall over stuff I enjoyed.

Actually, this is less about "accepting myself" in a warm, airy-fairy way, and more about rather selfishly saying: "Screw it - I'm not apologising any more, I'll do what I damn well like". I had allowed myself to become convinced that solitary, internally-focussed activities were kind of worthless, directing one away from the practical and worldly stuff one should be doing. But recently I've indulged myself in a couple of projects unashamedly on my own - and the knock-on effects have made me realise I have been missing something of late.

Purpose is key – this is not about mooching around idly on your lonesome, but using the fabled “me-time” in a focussed and productive way to do things you really want to do. To my surprise I’ve found a sense of re-engaged purpose and achievement that lasts well beyond the activity itself and casts a life-enhancing, optimistic halo into other areas of life – a benefit that was obviously there before, but I must have previously simply taken for granted, and then forgotten.

As alluded to in previous posts, one becomes more "worldly" as one gets older - the practical concerns of society become more and more salient as you get more “adult”. Of course extroverts are much more naturally focussed on both practical concerns and society – it’s their home turf. So society values extroverts more immediately and obviously – despite the fact that society benefits just as much from what introverts produce with their thought and creativity, away from its glaring eye (which, I gather, is what this book is all about, though I rather shoddily don’t seem to have read it yet).

Prejudice against my people

The upshot is, in everyday modern living, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking “I must be more like those extroverts” at all times. Which is a crying shame.

Having gone through an entire childhood and adolescence being constantly asked “Why are you staying in? Why aren’t you out playing football like a normal kid?” one comes out the other side and breathes a sigh of relief, with a vindicated “See? I turned out a reasonably normal, functioning, well-adjusted individual, after all - and there are plenty more like me who are now very successful and cool and stuff cos of their staying in and being a bit weird as a kid". One finally shrugs off all that crap you had to put up with, just to get your drawing done or your book finished, as the well-meaning but ill-informed bluster of people who just didn’t understand...

...only for it to come back, in another form, as one drifts towards middle age, FFS. I’m 37, and again people are going “Why are you staying in? Why aren’t you out travelling, sky-diving, marathon running and downing cocktails, like a normal adult? Life is for living YOLO.”

It’s the same shit. And it’s basically prejudice against my people, dammit.

Yes, maybe I should have got out more when I was a kid – but it wasn’t me. I was never going to be any good at, or interested in, football. In the same way “getting out” and forcing myself into social situations when I’m not in the mood can leave me feeling more distracted, bored, anguished and disconnected than if I’d stayed at home. Extroverts have no idea how much effort it can be for an introvert just to maintain "normal social face" when they just want switch that side of themselves off and be left alone. There is only so much socialising an introvert can take before they need a battery recharge of quality leave-me-alone time. Forcing them out of that doesn’t wean them off being introverted - it just makes them miserable and uncomfortable.

A healthy, balanced diet

I do understand that there is a danger for any introvert of locking themselves away too much, of being too wrapped up in their own world to get things done and grasp all the opportunities the world has to offer. But I at least have some sort of natural barometer of this – I do feel it when I’ve overdone the solitary stuff. I, too, go stir crazy, feel down when I've not spoken to anyone properly or left the house, and sometimes really need to get out. I love socialising and frankly sparkle with it when I'm in the mood. At work I'm almost always happier for having got out of the office, and feel bereft on days when it's empty all bar me - so I'm not a without extrovert needs, and really not the misanthrope I sometimes pretend to be.

But I do have a vivid, active and varied set of introverted interests, too, thank you very much. And when I indulge them, far from feeling like a sad hide-away, I actually feel  more alive and engaged with the world – because my mind is active and I am experiencing, learning, exploring the world in a different way; and doing that means I feel sated, invigorated and fired up with new discoveries and passions to go back into the more social sphere with. It is a balance - a hearty helping of introversion is just fine as part of a healthy balanced diet, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

There are vast rewards to spending quiet time on things alone, that simply cannot be gotten by any other method – whole vistas of intense, mind-expanding experience. But you don’t get introverts telling extroverts “Why are you going out? You need to stay in more, read a book, whittle some wood or something”... Extroverts are always mouthing off, judging us introverts.

Actually, of course, introverts are always judging extroverts too. But we keep it to ourselves.

This did not go so well

I was going to write something tonight.

Because I felt I couldn’t come back after six months with something so thoroughly downbeat as the last post, and just leave it at that - or you, adorable, sage and dexterous reader, would think “cripes, he’s gone a bit shocking”, or even (bless you to the point of sycophantic weeping) be vaguely concerned.

As an aside, what is slightly misleading about the previous post is it makes out that when I was younger I was having a whale of a time as this dynamic free-spirited creative force – when in fact, while yes, my lifestyle was somewhat (but not unrecognisably) different, and all manner of produce did indeed issue forth from my furtively over-active brain and fingers, all the while I was still constantly bewailing the loss of youth, the awfulness of the encroaching world and the certainty of a grey, empty future. In fact, from roughly about the age of 17, and in fact that is what drove quite a lot of the ‘produce’.

I’ve always had a tendency to long-nights-of the-soul about nothing. I look back and think “Jesus wept, you were 19 or 24 or 31 – if you’d just spent less time brooding about what you thought you’d lost or were about to lose or would never have, you might actually have appreciated what you'd gained, got and might yet attain - and enjoyed yourself more.” And of course, I’ll look back on now, when I’m 45 or 60 or 79 and think exactly the same thing. One does grow and change over the years, but there are core elements of personality that remain, and this recurrent wan, nostalgic pessimism, unfortunately, appears to be one of the less palatable ones.

So I was going to write something tonight as I thought I’d better follow that last post up with something light or positive or at least interesting and engaging, but now it’s too late to write anything really, except more of this guff, and that has only gone and given me the ennui.

Mmn. *Sigh*.

This has not gone so well.