The Return - in scattered parts
I’m opening my blog app on my phone for the first time in yonks, and this time with purpose. At a dimly lit station somewhere beyond Bridgend, I’m starting to write. I had an epiphany a couple of weeks ago that made me want to empty my thoughts out into the world in a way I otherwise hadn’t. And whilst I’m aware ‘Man endorses Booker Prize winning novel’ maybe isn’t a revelation, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has become the heliocentre of my creative mind. Her style is sparse, plot lines so faint they give way to this wondrous poetry on the world and beyond. It’s achingly wonderful, it will demand rereads, not least so I can capture the quote that brought me back here in the first place.
‘There are no new thoughts, just old thoughts born into new memories’.
One of the reasons I was put off writing this creatively, this personally, for so long was that fear of unoriginality. Many people know what the final year Uni strains are like, many of you have likely already read my articles from years before about my slightly directionless summers and early brooding autumns. Suddenly I was back to the student life some place else (Cardiff), and the head was both full of life and empty of motivation. Besides, the line being thrown at me from all my new teachers was that ‘I was a journalist now’, no longer a student or student journalist.
If I have bestowed upon myself the title I have spent years wanting to pursue, surely I need no other outlet? Besides I’d already done journalistic stuff, sometimes earning money in the process. The teachers’ words were therefore a final step. The personal blog needed nothing more from me, for nothing else needed to be said. But here I am.
Today I’m maybe the busiest I have ever felt, not so much in pressure but in the box-ticking responsibilities I now feel. Twice a week at least I wake at unstudent-y hours, bring a reusable cup and become a commuter on a bustling train. I sit for hours in front of a computer, prancing around the building wearing a jangly lanyard, musing which wretched meal deal combo will become my crutch. Afternoons either peter out into an abstract description of ‘news gathering’ or culminate in an exhausting afternoon bulletin that seems to demand a debrief with pints and peanuts.
This I suppose is to work, to sink into a certain routine that gives any creative outlet some added weight. For those who know me closely, or who have been reading on this site for far too long, you might figure that's not entirely a bad thing for me. I was the pupil and student who demanded structure, the safe bedrocks of normality. But now I have a semi-working timetable, I’m somehow inclined to repel these conventional working hours. It explains why I found myself in outer Bridgend when I began to type. Working.
Life moves on, surroundings constantly change, but you remain staring out of a familiar window, cleaning up crumbs, conducting your work supposedly in the name of improving humanity's prospects. There are worse ways to be away from home and studying a Master's than that.
This weekend, spring's arrival was marked with a rare trip clubbing, dancing up and down with friends and colleagues between insulated rooms of Charli XCX or One Direction. Conveniently, I had sunglasses to put on and earplugs to put in, for barely a song was recognisable. One hand pulled the loose skin of the other in a nervous tic, unsure how to move or mask myself. Surrounded by sounds I simply hadn't heard, I didn't feel in a position to know if I liked it at all. Suddenly, a fear of missing out - something that too often guides my actions - felt silly. I can sit at home, I can bail before reaching this strange dark world that felt so alien. For a little while now I've felt content enough with myself to not be overly concerned with others' perceptions. I suppose it's liberating, providing that same self-image perseveres through varying stages of sobriety. It's better than trying to imagine that same self-image in the future.
Today saw the third or fourth example in the past couple of weeks of someone asking me my plans come the autumn, to which I pitifully made a joke out of the repetition of the subject matter. Indeed, in repeating this anecdote I'm maybe buying up time to deflect those thoughts of beyond.
In truth, I viscerally cannot imagine myself in the future. I remember crying over one school assignment that asked me to write a story doing exactly that. With my mum's assistance I remember scraping together a page of dialogue between myself and two of the 'outside-world' anchors of my life at that time, Winnie-the-Pooh and Richard Hammond - James Alexander Gordon was presumably spared.
Since selecting GCSEs at the tender age of 12, I've taken the view that I will do the things that I enjoy doing and hope that it all works out in where it leaves me. So far it's been a solid plan, but it is all supposedly a la-di-da simulation of a far grittier world. One where money is not passed down as future student debt but instead demanded upwards to pay for the overheads of my life. To fund such a lifestyle I will have only my worth.
My strategy, as much as one exists, is minimalist: work out the stuff I reckon I would like and apply for them. It's betting that my own self-image of contentment and competence can be projected across a cover note and LinkedIn profile - both oddities which I have now regrettably absorbed into my life. Any end ambition or five year plan just does not exist in my head. I don't like to sink into the weeds of my own prospective fortune. Instead I stay up late and write down a paragraph of past introspection whilst my housemates revise late into the Sunday night with nearly every aching ambition for their future medical careers. It's exhausting.
Maybe there's something journalistic in this scribed soul-searching, thrashing out thoughts to offer shitty, cliché but almost coherent life analysis. It at least gives me a window from which I can better consider my own place in the world as I fall constantly around it. The same old feelings that surround these posts (of doubt or heightened self-awareness) are not new. Indeed, in reading the last thing I wrote here, which I now wince at with its pompous language, I'm intimately reminded of my fear of an overexposed ego. It's an old feeling. But there are new memories now, reiterating the same old feelings into tonight, into now. That's no bad thing.
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