I haven’t written in a long time now. After a few years away penning only quotes or invoices the words don’t come naturally. It’s difficult to choose the best phrase or structure to express how I currently feel and not just because I’ve forgotten the craft, but that I’ve lost much of the understanding of my own self that comes directly from writing about my feelings. So I’m having real difficulty weighing my words… Apologies as well for this is just internal, self absorbed and probably contains little in the way of expose, but it’s necessary.
I have of late been pin-balling between the bumpers of misery and rage. Neither of which are good aids to clear, thoughtful writing, though they’d doubtless produce a delightfully in-cohesive rant with a fair few decent zingers. But reading other people’s pain is strange, often awkward and it’d be a struggle to fully articulate myself in any case.
I need writing at the moment. Writing, when alone and far from home, or when particularly low, bailing snow out the tent, is really good company. When left alone my internal monologue drives me spare, but somehow the process of reforming those thoughts into something others can read, maybe even enjoy, and then pushing them into the online void orders my mind and passes the time more than enjoyably. As I’m alone, in an empty house on a cold Monday evening in December, in a county where I know literally nobody, talking to myself in this manner is one of the easiest ways I can come to terms with this world and the many strange people in it.
The relationship I’ve been in for 8 years has just broken down in a fairly horrible manner, leaving me isolated and insecure to put it mildly. That it imploded due to wholly unforeseen issues concerning her desire and her loyalty has fairly fucked my self-esteem… Though not crippled it. Unfortunately for the people of Worcester I do still take the bins out in a too-small yet so-comfy kimono I nicked from a hotel in Japan.
I could blather and mope about waves of loss and the pain of memory, that I find her in the Polaroids slipped between pages of the books, or in the blog where I’m writing. I could lecture about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Which is embarrassingly apt as the genesis of this relationship was during another, in which I probably inflicted the same pain that that I’m currently enjoying… There’s some neat phrase for this no doubt, to do with things ill borne or conceived in deceit… But that the wheel comes full circle is little comfort when it’s resting on your back after you’ve been dragged along the road.
But.
I’m not, I repeat NOT, going to let my life become an actual car crash. A bitter and self obsessed car crash, where my failure to smell a rat when it was lying to my face comes to define me car crash. A pulled over by the police for doing 10mph on the A47 while having a coke induced panic attack that the defence will insist was due to the relationship breakdown while noting my previous exemplary good character kinda car crash. That’s not for me. Nor is it for me to continue to be critical of somebody whom I realise I never really knew.
So, as the decade ends, I’m left only with new opportunities for the next. There are friends in this city as yet unknown, old connections I’ve neglected and new adventures to occupy my mind and ease my spirit. It’s high time I focused on myself and re-learnt the strengths, not lost, but forgotten through long term reliance on others.
Not this coming year, but this very week just begun, I’m beginning the journey that will lead to my best shot at the health, wealth and happiness I deserve. I’m putting all thoughts of retaliation or reconciliation aside, accepting the past and starting the difficult job of moving on.
To new beginnings.
Joe Stuttle's Blog 