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I need to talk to someone. I need to talk to someone about my business, I need to talk to someone about my life.
I am lost and bewildered in a disorienting landscape, with decisions I must make - and my compass is broken. Part of the problem is, I don’t know what I want.
I have a lot of things that other people want, and I worry that there is something wrong with me for not being happy with situations that many others profess to long for: good job, good health, plenty of money, nice house, nice cars, nice holidays, good friends. It sounds ridiculous to say it’s not enough.
And actually it’s not about enough. It’s about instead. I have a good job but what I really want to do is write. I don’t know whether I can be good enough to do that as my main activity, whether there is any point. With a little more effort, I could push forward with my business, my career, to the point where my financial future is completely taken care of and I am free to do what I like after that, including writing for 25 years without ever earning a penny from it. That has a certain appeal, but there is a delayed reward and in the meantime my writing output may have to remain at its current level rather than increase. I don’t know whether this will have an impact on quality, or just quantity.
There are some big decisions to be made on the business front, and I don’t have anyone to talk to. All my friends who would understand the professional issues are drowning in their own work and we simply don’t have time to unpack the situation and go through the pros and cons of the thing without collapsing from exhaustion or indeed boredom. Far better to do what we do, a wry grimace at how was your day? then a glass of wine, talk about something else, try to forget about it for a while.
Same deal on the home front. I’m a giver. Kindness, friendship, support, love, attention, gifts, affection, hugs, kisses, really horny sex. I want to give these things, I need to give them, it's what I like to do, it's what makes me happy. Easy enough to find people who will pick from the list as if I’m an a la carte, a pick’n’mix, the salad bar off to the side, with all the Proper Couples sitting down in pairs for the main meal. Sometimes I feel like that’s ok, it’s modern, it’s fun. Then I realise no-one has ever wanted the whole package.
Sometimes I just feel like the all-of-me has somehow come together wrong. I need to talk to someone.
It would be a great job, wouldn't it? And someone, somewhere, must have it. Official inventor of words for new things.
I don't mean the natural evolution of language and the emergence of new words, absolutely fascinating although that is to me. I'm talking about the purposeful naming of something new. As our language is already formed, we tend to use compounds for this (moon-walk, handset, mail-order).
I saw a beautiful illustration of the power and impact new word-combinations can have, in one of the Poems on the Underground recently called Whalesong. Do click through and read it: it made my day. There are also the irritating, lazy ones (Brangelina, J-Lo, Tom-Kat) created to keep the character-count down in a world which feeds on vacuous celeb-goss (see, anyone can do it!) that will fit onto a mobile phone screen.
The one that's intriguing me lately though is waterboarding. See, this is wrong. It sounds like it's going to be fun: some sort of combination of snowboarding, wakeboarding, water ski-ing. How can something that sounds so fresh and sportive and outdoorsy be so hideous and sinister? It doesn't hint at any of the threat or terror. Call me cynical, but I reckon it's a deliberately inocuous term so that it can be discussed and used as if it were something quite reasonable.
I had a client once who had a warehouse on his site full of barrels. What's in these unmarked barrels? By-products from the nuclear processing industry. But you don't have a license to keep or transport nuclear waste here, do you? It's a decommissioned site. It's not nuclear waste, he said. We don't have a license for that. It's strategic material. See?
It's supposed to signify something, changing your hair.
At least, it says so in the women's magazines. Hair is important in fairy tales too. And when I googled "what does it mean when a woman cuts her hair?" just now, there seem to be all sorts of old wives' tales and urban myths about power and sexuality.
I don't think it's that, though.
I reckon it's something simpler. There's no question that women get new hairstyles at significant times in their lives, watershed moments, times of crisis. The end of a relationship is a typical example (Diana), the end of a period of your life (Emma, looking UnHermione, above). In my opinion, a dramatic change of hairstyle is an easy way of saying to the world: "Look, I've changed".
So what does it mean that last week I had my hair cut and coloured at a new hairdressers, and came out with a shorter, blonder style? Which I then decided I didn't like, so went back to my old hairdressers today to have it re-coloured? Going local turning out, in the end, to be a false economy of epic proportions, as I have now spent £366 on it in the last fortnight - unbelievable.
Was last week the pivotal moment? Or this week? Or both? It's been a time of leaving things behind and moving on to new stages. It's left my hair feeling confused, but underneath the reddish, blondish, and sometimes greyish strands, my head is in the right place.
I wrote a poem, and for once I was pretty pleased with it. I've decided to put it forward to a publication though, so I can't publish it on here after all. Blink and you missed it (or ask me nicely and I might email it to you).
Despite the workwhirl and busyrush, the alwaysnoise and the smilefake, I was lonely.
I'm not too busy, in my frenzy of work, to check my emails a hundred times an hour. It's the 21st century equivalent of the lovesick teenager standing by the phone, I suppose. I don't have the patience to wait for it to refresh every ten minutes. It's like a nervous tic, an OCD. And all day the music blasting through the headphones. And all the while, time is passing: at different speeds in different places, the way time does.
