“I don’t want them, I don’t want them, I don’t want them”

I wrote this text two Friday's ago, I've yet to achieve those modest ideas...

I'm 2 weeks off the Fluoxetine, a little energy regained, more extremes felt. I don't really know what to do or how to do it.

I lie in bed on a Friday afternoon, that white winter light coming through the curtains just after two. I’m agitated, I’m lethargic. Always these days, restless and fatigued. “I don’t want them” rings around my mind as I stare fearfully at my telephone, my upturned laptop (I don’t know if lying face down is bad for the machine, but it gets so warm I like to show the back some air when I can – small misguided kindness to a faithful tormentor).  I don’t want them, the things, the words, the people. It has been much remarked that ours is a generation of networkers, permanently connected, company and comfort always a click-away. What were the things that I did, where went my time before them? I used to paint, I used to look, I would read, listen, sing, watch, avidly, voraciously, tenaciously, anything I could lay my malnourished imagination on. Now, theoretically, I have all the world’s words at my fingertips, the great works of art, the new, music, of any imaginable genre, and people, from almost everywhere, are there for me to ask, to tell, to share – and the tools of interlocution. It’s here, and most of it free.

But it’s too big for me. I’m drowned in it.

Once when I was younger, there came a pen through the post, free from Friends of The Earth, it was a pen made of paper. How it made me smile. Rolled up newspaper, coated in thin cardboard, ensconcing a slim cylinder of ink. At it’s end, the holding end, characters of black on white were visible, curled in on themselves in a tiny wave. It was Chinese. A Chinese newspaper through my letterbox, 40 Station Road Ystradgynlais! I’d often upturned things, eager to find their places of origin, imagined the hands that had handled, the roads traversed and warehouses camped in. This was somehow more real though, text, image, stories and people, all there once I’d unfurled the pen and smoothed them out. I felt like a spy! Someone in the know. I’ve always wanted to be ”in on something”.

I didn’t have an email address until I was 17 or 18, and it wasn’t until I met S that I used it to send and receive messages properly. I used the computer to look at things, maps mainly, photographs of exotic birds, those saccharine montages of “the worlds most unbelievable housing locations” tree houses in the rainforests of central America and the like.  Don’t get me wrong I know everyone dreams in their youth, and has ideas about the world and what life could mean, but for a lot of kids they have pop bands, sports teams, video games, weekend shopping trips, McDonalds and young loves to distract them. For me unfortunately dreaming was my only real distraction.

I don’t paint now, because I’m always tormenting myself with questions like “what will it be for though?!” with echoes of my mother’s “yes it’s fine but where are we going to put it??” I’ve stopped taking photographs with the frequency and intensity I used to, I can scarce concentrate on a film for more than 10 minutes, and more and more I’m becoming blasé about music (time was I couldn’t be without it, now I forget it’s there mostly) and I haven’t read a book in months. In great contrast to my younger days, I have all the painting materials I could have use for, a few cameras, half a dozen rolls of film, 10,000 tracks in my itunes library alone, and a room full of books and dvds.  Gone are the possibilities., though, I feel only paralysed.

Last week I made a graph, in my utter pathetic indecisiveness (though CBT might tell me it’s more positively endearing than negatively pathetic, or, simply, neutral). I wanted to say something, to come out of my closet, to share anything, so lonely did I feel. I made a list of some of the more tangible mind-whirrings of recent weeks, and then I narrowed down the list to almost half, and made a graph of those things, to determine both which would be easiest  to compile a blog post about and also which I’d prefer to write about, regardless of ease. So, that was over a week ago now. Predictably my needs have changed (yes, in just a week, grand eh?!), the things that seemed easier last week now appear more difficult, or perhaps everything is more difficult on a Friday afternoon when you’re still in bed and you’ve no longer an excuse not to leave the house because there’s a break in the rain and the winter sun’s got its game-face on…

It’s likely that I’ll just ramble on about some of the things on that list, and probable that I’ll thusly not go into nearly as much detail as I would have had I dedicated a separate post to each, as was my lofty plan last week. In which case, in the interests of saving time, those 2 of you that have continued reading up to this point have my permission to “jump ship” now, as it were.

I thought I would quit before reaching this far, as I have many times before in the previous months. I feel about to burst at times with the things I want to share, but am so damn easily deflated. I’ve been taking a different medication and it’s reduced me to a listless bag of sleep, so have decided to discontinue that. Humans need love and companionship to survive, loneliness kills, but the internet is filled with people we care about but never quite have the time to fully offer our attentions to, for the duration of composing a reply say. Yet how many hours do we waste, ogling old school bullies,  sharing strange videos and “liking” things before we’ve even finished reading them…. I don’t want them, I don’t want “that”. I want the real things, having a real-life conversation with someone, showing them a physical photograph or drawing instead of an “attachment”.  Actual laughter over “ :D “. But it doesn’t matter what I want, the world has other ideas.