FUCK IT

Perhaps I should check my privilege. I live in an affluent part of an affluent country and for years I've managed to make an above-average amount of money by doing nothing harder than speaking words, writing words and pretending to be someone else. My physical health is generally good. Between the four walls of my house, I am coddled with real love. I've not long come back from two expensive weeks of warm sunshine, pleasant idleness and fun activities in the United States. But I am restless, discontented and brittle. I pass from brief, inexplicable highs to longer periods of morbid introspection. I rarely escape the clutches of a mental state which involves feeling like an imposter in one's own skin, always close to palpable paranoia, rattled by the prospect of finally being found out at any moment. I grapple daily with a self-destructive urge to drive away even the closest and most trusted of my few friends. So I turn my gaze away from myself and out towards the squabbling, mediocre cunts cheapening and coarsening public life in this country. It makes me feel sick. So I turn to hobbies or pursuits and I find them pointless, childish and dull. I turn to books and paintings and ideas and they rarely move me. So I wonder if I'm no longer capable of being buoyed up by beauty. So I consider big, complicated changes to how, where and why I live this life. Maybe an answer lies there. But it's not like I understand what kind of question it is that I am seeking to have answered anyway. There are moments of respite, though. Putting one foot in front of the other where the air is a little fresher and where a city full of shit is within sight yet somehow out of mind. Looking, still none the wiser about what (if anything) it might mean, at big piles of Henry Moore. Then it seems as though I might feel alright for a while. But then I have to make a phone call. Or get on a train. Or tie my shoelaces. Or load the dishwasher. Or look at a human being. Or tell a guy that I don't want to buy what he's selling. Or live with the fact that I don't get to walk around in another body. Those two most dangerous words are never far from my lips: "fuck it".