I was sat there staring at a blank text box, no idea what to write, just as in yesteryear. So I found myself scouring the internet for topics, just as in yesteryear. And I did what I always do; I thought "these things aren't what you want to write about. What you're doing here is searching for a topic that can be steered back to whatever it is you actually want to write but for some reason daren't." Very true, so next I thought, "ok, but what is it that I want to write but daren't?" No idea. So then I remembered that time when I had had a beer and suddenly you couldn't stop me writing, but what I was writing was drivel (even moreso than usual). And then I thought, "what beer have we got in?" Probably just bitter (bleurgh) and anyway, is it worth cracking a tinnie every time you get writer's block? That way alcoholism lies, or - at the rate and severity I experience writer's block - that way severe liver failure within three months lies. Many great writers have found inspiration in a bottle, but they were great writers first, probably. Either way, I don't even like beer that much and drinking myself silly over my dying dreams seems much more a 36-years-old thing to do than a 26-years-old thing. And then I thought the biggest question(s) of them all: "Why is this even your dream anyway? Can you identify the moment you realised it was? What led to it? Which childhood experiences steered you this way? How come it's such a big deal to you? And since it apparently is why are you too crippled with (totally justified) fear of your own inadequacy to do a damn thing about it? Isn't this more likely to be an expression of some deep seated longing for something else you can't define?" Probably. And then I remembered how I hated writing as a kid. I may not be totally made up of that kid any more, and he may have never experienced life the same way I do, but surely we share some things basic to us that have to inform our wants and tastes? Apparently no, the only thing we know for sure about kid me that corresponds to present me is that we both remember bits of even younger kid me's life (kid me remembers more than me me does, of course). So who are we to each other? We might as well be two completely random people who have never met but have been implanted with similar memories. It's part of the society that I live in that you have to be all about your work (even when you hate it), so it follows that which job I want must be a big part of my personality. How can a desire so fundamental to me be to do something I used to hate doing? Why do I love something I'm shit at? Why do I feel an unabating need to not be shit at it and yet an almost physically intense fear of trying to get better?
My next thought was, "why am I writing this down?" Unclear. My next action was to have been a positive one but time's passage had sapped my energy and so I simply added a conclusion, posted the gargantuan, unstructured mess of a paragraph on the internet and got back to anxiety and despair, my only true talents.
Saturday, 17 September 2016
Monday, 12 September 2016
Success Feels a Lot Like Just More Socially-Acceptible Failure. Or, why natural selection suggests that I am a Gorilla trying to swim the Atlantic.
So, tomorrow sees the start of the next phase of my life. Employment! I've had jobs before of course but in this bullshit post-2008-global-crash world getting a job that I can stick to has proved tough for me. Actually, I'm starting yet another temporary job tomorrow it's just that for once there's a permanent position at the end of it (hopefully!). A lot of the difficulty I've had has been self-inflicted of course; I left university 4 years ago with no idea what I wanted to do next (and if I really think back properly I reckon I might have been depressed as well, which didn't help) and with no plan (and even no goal to plan towards) it's hard to really get anything done. Being a pathological procrastinator really did not make this situation any better, either.
Anyway, this hopefully momentous occasion in my life seems a good time to just blog a little. Well, sort of: Mostly, I just wanted to write and with no imagination to fall back on, this is all I've got to talk about and if a horrendous sleeping pattern and a big event tomorrow mean anything it's that I'm not going to be wasting any time tonight on anything like snoring or dreaming so I might as well write. Also, writing might help me work through whatever it is that usually keeps me up at times like this.
In the usual format of this blog I've started typing general updates about me with no clear idea of what the hell I'm going to be writing about. By the time I'm two paragraphs in I usually have a thread I can pull at for a few more paragraphs and somewhere in there a topic can be teased out in the edit (although - again - procrastinator, so editing's never that likely and what usually gets teased out is a title that I can sort of pretend gives the whole thing a theme). Anyway, tonight I'm two and a half paragraphs in and all I can think is that I've been watching too many YouTube videos the last couple of days because as I type the words are kind of echoing in my head as though read in the voice of John Green. Which is just weird. Also I notice my sentence structure and syntax and stuff seems to have changed to become more like that of someone giving a kind of informal speech rather than my usual style of ... me; pompously pontificating about some crap.
So, I guess I should just keep talking about this whole job thing. I said earlier that I had no plan for after university and that is not entirely accurate. I had a plan, it just kind of died. I had all sorts of ambitions that I was never going to follow through on and I had a fall-back which was become a teacher. Let's face it, teacher is the best fall-back; you get great holidays and if you can get work as a supply teacher rather than a regular, fixed member of staff you get a lot less of the extra work that normal teachers get. Of course, you bring out the worst in the students and there's a lot of stress that comes with that. Whatever, I had an epiphany at some point where I realised I sometimes unintentionally come to regard some people who don't know things that I know as idiots and also I dislike idiots. This makes me sound terrible, and probably I am, but just so you know it works both ways. If someone knows something I don't know I try to admire their knowledge but what I end up doing is thinking I'm an idiot. So in my worldview, apparently everyone is an idiot. This is a bad attitude to have in life, never mind in teaching, but at some point it has become ingrained in my psyche and I can't seem to get rid of it. If I really like someone or I can be bothered to put in the effort I will do my best to overlook my perception of them as an idiot because I know it's stupid but mostly it's hard to do that and that's no way for a teacher to behave (actually, it's kind of exactly how a lot of my teachers behaved, but it's no way for a good teacher to behave). Anyway, that was that plan out of the window and I very quickly discovered that what I'd been told about Religious Studies degrees helping you get a job was a lie so I took like two years to go: so... retail?
I'm not going to name the company who have hired me here because they have a strict social media policy and until I get the training on Tuesday I don't know exactly what it is so better safe than sorry.
What I will say is I have a month and a half of training to look forward to and this shouldn't really lead to blog-inducing anxiety because at least a portion of it is classroom-based and the classroom is where I excel. If I'm honest I think I was almost too good, academically, at least until GCSE level, possibly further, because it was never a struggle for me to understand stuff I wanted to understand. Trying to understand stuff I didn't care about was usually easy too but I didn't care so it didn't matter how easy it was, I would show that I had grasped enough to make the teacher think I'd pass the exam so they'd focus on helping someone else and then I'd coast. Anyway, this might sound like it shouldn't have harmed my development but because I never had to try in school, I was not prepared for how tough real life is. Honestly, I'm still not. Also, it's really hard to learn stuff now. Partially this is because a 20-something brain is less capable of absorbing stuff than a younger brain but mostly it's because whenever I try to learn about a thing, I will learn enough to know that if I wanted to, I could be pretty good at the thing and once I've proved that much to myself, instead of proving it to everyone else by actually getting good at it, I simply abandon the thing.
I guess this is why I'm nervous about tomorrow (I think I'm nervous, anyway, I haven't really examined my feelings but I'm fairly confident I won't be sleeping tonight and that what I'll be doing instead is thinking about how I need to get to sleep so I'm ready for tomorrow, so I'll go ahead and call that nervous). Point is, am I going to listen to just enough about the social media policy to know that I will easily understand the social media policy and then switch off and as a result fail to actually learn the policy? And that wouldn't be too bad, I can just never talk work on the internet, but what if I do the same with a more pertinent aspect of the training? It's not like I can avoid doing parts of the job to hide the fact that I coasted through training, is it? Also, as previously discussed I struggle to learn stuff nowadays and anyway I start to regard myself as an idiot if I need, want or try to learn stuff, which doesn't fill you with confidence for your upcoming month and a half of learning.
In truth the training will probably all go fine but could that be even worse? What if I get all the stuff they're trying to teach me with a little bit of effort? That would suggest that rather than being stunted by a lack of challenge early in life I am simply not as smart as I think I am or not as smart as I used to be, either of which is terrifying because my life's goal is to use my brain, which I've always considered to be slightly awesome, to do something slightly awesome, like get a job doing something creative or at least learn a few languages or something to justify a slight sense of awe at my capabilities. You could argue that the difference between school, my goal of inspiring brain-awe and training for a retail warehouse role are all so different that aptitude in one has no significance for ability in the others (like that meme that purports that Einstein said we're all geniuses but you can't judge fish on their tree-climbing ability - it probably wasn't Einstein who said this, by the way). But I think that being challenged by this training but eventually grasping it would not make me a pseudo-Einsteinian proto-amphibian learning through struggle to climb a tree, it would make be an ape that has been disabused of his deluded dreams of swimming 'round the world and living amongst the coral.
And that's the worst thing in the world isn't it? (Well, no, but you know what I mean.) To have, or believe yourself to have, a little bit of talent for something, just enough so that you want to be better, and yearn to use this talent in some way but then finding out that actually you're probably kind of useless at the thing you want to do and there's actually more chance of a guppy mounting the summit of a giant sequoia than you contributing anything to society would crush your soul. I don't think the consolation of meeting fellow apes in the high branches would help much either.
Wow, that got maudlin, again. It's kind of a good job no-one reads this or they'd think I was insane. Anyway, thanks for letting me spout nonsense at you again, blogger. See you next time I can't sleep.
Anyway, this hopefully momentous occasion in my life seems a good time to just blog a little. Well, sort of: Mostly, I just wanted to write and with no imagination to fall back on, this is all I've got to talk about and if a horrendous sleeping pattern and a big event tomorrow mean anything it's that I'm not going to be wasting any time tonight on anything like snoring or dreaming so I might as well write. Also, writing might help me work through whatever it is that usually keeps me up at times like this.
In the usual format of this blog I've started typing general updates about me with no clear idea of what the hell I'm going to be writing about. By the time I'm two paragraphs in I usually have a thread I can pull at for a few more paragraphs and somewhere in there a topic can be teased out in the edit (although - again - procrastinator, so editing's never that likely and what usually gets teased out is a title that I can sort of pretend gives the whole thing a theme). Anyway, tonight I'm two and a half paragraphs in and all I can think is that I've been watching too many YouTube videos the last couple of days because as I type the words are kind of echoing in my head as though read in the voice of John Green. Which is just weird. Also I notice my sentence structure and syntax and stuff seems to have changed to become more like that of someone giving a kind of informal speech rather than my usual style of ... me; pompously pontificating about some crap.
So, I guess I should just keep talking about this whole job thing. I said earlier that I had no plan for after university and that is not entirely accurate. I had a plan, it just kind of died. I had all sorts of ambitions that I was never going to follow through on and I had a fall-back which was become a teacher. Let's face it, teacher is the best fall-back; you get great holidays and if you can get work as a supply teacher rather than a regular, fixed member of staff you get a lot less of the extra work that normal teachers get. Of course, you bring out the worst in the students and there's a lot of stress that comes with that. Whatever, I had an epiphany at some point where I realised I sometimes unintentionally come to regard some people who don't know things that I know as idiots and also I dislike idiots. This makes me sound terrible, and probably I am, but just so you know it works both ways. If someone knows something I don't know I try to admire their knowledge but what I end up doing is thinking I'm an idiot. So in my worldview, apparently everyone is an idiot. This is a bad attitude to have in life, never mind in teaching, but at some point it has become ingrained in my psyche and I can't seem to get rid of it. If I really like someone or I can be bothered to put in the effort I will do my best to overlook my perception of them as an idiot because I know it's stupid but mostly it's hard to do that and that's no way for a teacher to behave (actually, it's kind of exactly how a lot of my teachers behaved, but it's no way for a good teacher to behave). Anyway, that was that plan out of the window and I very quickly discovered that what I'd been told about Religious Studies degrees helping you get a job was a lie so I took like two years to go: so... retail?
I'm not going to name the company who have hired me here because they have a strict social media policy and until I get the training on Tuesday I don't know exactly what it is so better safe than sorry.
What I will say is I have a month and a half of training to look forward to and this shouldn't really lead to blog-inducing anxiety because at least a portion of it is classroom-based and the classroom is where I excel. If I'm honest I think I was almost too good, academically, at least until GCSE level, possibly further, because it was never a struggle for me to understand stuff I wanted to understand. Trying to understand stuff I didn't care about was usually easy too but I didn't care so it didn't matter how easy it was, I would show that I had grasped enough to make the teacher think I'd pass the exam so they'd focus on helping someone else and then I'd coast. Anyway, this might sound like it shouldn't have harmed my development but because I never had to try in school, I was not prepared for how tough real life is. Honestly, I'm still not. Also, it's really hard to learn stuff now. Partially this is because a 20-something brain is less capable of absorbing stuff than a younger brain but mostly it's because whenever I try to learn about a thing, I will learn enough to know that if I wanted to, I could be pretty good at the thing and once I've proved that much to myself, instead of proving it to everyone else by actually getting good at it, I simply abandon the thing.
I guess this is why I'm nervous about tomorrow (I think I'm nervous, anyway, I haven't really examined my feelings but I'm fairly confident I won't be sleeping tonight and that what I'll be doing instead is thinking about how I need to get to sleep so I'm ready for tomorrow, so I'll go ahead and call that nervous). Point is, am I going to listen to just enough about the social media policy to know that I will easily understand the social media policy and then switch off and as a result fail to actually learn the policy? And that wouldn't be too bad, I can just never talk work on the internet, but what if I do the same with a more pertinent aspect of the training? It's not like I can avoid doing parts of the job to hide the fact that I coasted through training, is it? Also, as previously discussed I struggle to learn stuff nowadays and anyway I start to regard myself as an idiot if I need, want or try to learn stuff, which doesn't fill you with confidence for your upcoming month and a half of learning.
In truth the training will probably all go fine but could that be even worse? What if I get all the stuff they're trying to teach me with a little bit of effort? That would suggest that rather than being stunted by a lack of challenge early in life I am simply not as smart as I think I am or not as smart as I used to be, either of which is terrifying because my life's goal is to use my brain, which I've always considered to be slightly awesome, to do something slightly awesome, like get a job doing something creative or at least learn a few languages or something to justify a slight sense of awe at my capabilities. You could argue that the difference between school, my goal of inspiring brain-awe and training for a retail warehouse role are all so different that aptitude in one has no significance for ability in the others (like that meme that purports that Einstein said we're all geniuses but you can't judge fish on their tree-climbing ability - it probably wasn't Einstein who said this, by the way). But I think that being challenged by this training but eventually grasping it would not make me a pseudo-Einsteinian proto-amphibian learning through struggle to climb a tree, it would make be an ape that has been disabused of his deluded dreams of swimming 'round the world and living amongst the coral.
And that's the worst thing in the world isn't it? (Well, no, but you know what I mean.) To have, or believe yourself to have, a little bit of talent for something, just enough so that you want to be better, and yearn to use this talent in some way but then finding out that actually you're probably kind of useless at the thing you want to do and there's actually more chance of a guppy mounting the summit of a giant sequoia than you contributing anything to society would crush your soul. I don't think the consolation of meeting fellow apes in the high branches would help much either.
Wow, that got maudlin, again. It's kind of a good job no-one reads this or they'd think I was insane. Anyway, thanks for letting me spout nonsense at you again, blogger. See you next time I can't sleep.