An End of Year Reflection

It’s the end of the year. Soon it will be a new one. So I just thought that now would be a great time to think back over my year and try to make sense of it, you know, starting with the question:

“Where the hell did all that time go?”

This time last year I was having a nervous breakdown. I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean an actual nervous breakdown. Last year, and most of the two or three years before it, had been something of a denial period – in every sense. I was doing my PhD, whilst juggling a continually morphing eating disorder that vacillated between bulimia and anorexia. My PhD wasn’t going very well for a really long time, but I kidded myself all through that it would turn itself around at some critical point and I would just get it, and everything would be fine.

Anyway, cut a long story short, that didn’t happen (boo hoo), and by the time it got to the end of last year, when I was supposed to be finished with it all, I was about ready to crack up. This, especially, became clear when I was then told that I couldn’t submit my thesis as it then was because it was just not good enough. Cue several more months of fighting and arguing and rewriting to get to the point where I could submit it.

So, in November last year, I remember being at breaking point. I was crying all the time during the day, driving around in my car like a crazy person whilst screaming obscene things at myself and generally just plotting my own demise. I thought that if I couldn’t get my PhD and be deemed some sort of genius with an accolade then I would no longer have anything to live for and that, basically, my mother would have been proved right all along in her, largely unspoken, opinion that I was just never going to amount to anything and I would end up just like her (bitter, alone and mentally ill with an unwanted child that never said thank you for anything . . . you get the picture). Right before Christmas last year I was desperate and suicidal and, basically, that whole breakdown culminated in my trying to starve myself to death – not an easy thing to do and, as I soon discovered, bloody painful. I had first thought of overdosing, but I couldn’t face the prospect of it not working and I didn’t know how badly I might screw it up. OD-ing, when you’re trying to do it, is actually quite hard; I’m told it’s very easy when you’re NOT trying (maybe that’s where I went wrong?).

Anyway, I’m getting off the point, I know. I was supposed to be writing about THIS year, not last year, but I guess, because I’ve been thinking so much about where I am now in relation to where I was then, I wanted to set the scene a bit. You know, because it’s not obvious if you don’t know me and you don’t know all the whys and the hows . . . but then you probably don’t want to, ok, moving on.

This year. This year kicked off with me coming out of my anorexic phase, whilst still trying to rewrite my thesis and figure out how I was going to pay for extra tuition fees at university to cover the time I was going to need. All I remember very clearly from New Year’s Day 2013 is that the highlight, for me, was staggering, bleary-eyed and sleep deprived (due to insomnia rather than anything actually fun sadly), across a freezing cold shopping centre car park to go and buy a box of breakfast cereal which I then ate, completely and straight from the box, while I wrote a book review for my friend Gillian. I wrote the whole review and, in fact, read the whole book on New Year’s Day, and then was awarded major brownie points from said friend for doing it in such a rush. It wasn’t actually necessary for me to do it for months, but I really desperately wanted to do something with my day rather than sitting around doing nothing and twiddling my thumbs and generally just going mad.

I hate having nothing to do now, that’s one thing I have learned, work stops you driving yourself nuts thinking about all the shit that you don’t want to think about, like how fat you’re getting or how much money you owe people or how much your mother drives you crazy. It’s good to have a focus.

So that was New Year anyway. Not fun, exactly, but fruitful (and fibreful too, thanks to the cereal, so that was good!) Then all I remember after that is several weeks of cold and snow – which was still around in March, if I remember correctly. I didn’t think it still snowed in March, even in this country (the UK, for those not in the know). But, yep. Snow on the ground, ice all around, and me stuck at home because, for numerous reasons, I couldn’t go outside. Well, ok, three reasons really: a) I hate the cold, b) I can’t walk on snow and ice because I fall down A LOT! and c) I had some kind of strain injury going on with both my hands so that, for the life of me, I couldn’t do anything even as simple as opening a letter or stirring a cup of tea. I mean, it was actually really bad, I woke up one morning and it was like my hands had been bashed with hammers – I suspect because of all the typing that I’d been doing although I also suspect that it had something to do with the lack of nutrients that I’d had for such a long time while I was anorexic. I’m still actually worried now that I might have done some damage to my tendons or something, but the doctor couldn’t find anything majorly wrong with me and, anyway, it got better in the end. I can operate all my fingers now and I only have very marginal twinges in my arms and hands (so I guess I was lucky). But I remember I had this problem on my birthday, which is in early March, and even I, who am not remotely into birthdays and usually don’t care what happens, could see that this was not a good thing.

Anyway, that happened. And passed, despite the constant worry of my mother and the absolute ignorance of my PhD supervisors who had no idea, and did not bother to ask, how I was.

[Incidentally, I may, at some stage, write a blog post on the unsupportive nature of my PhD supervisors and the awful experience that I had during my foray into academia, but I feel that this might also seem a bit vindictive and moany and, with the benefit of hindsight, I really don’t think there’s much to dwell on there, so perhaps I won’t.]

I was still writing my thesis up until the end of April, and I was bloody glad when I finally finished it. I knew it wasn’t going to be any good, I think, but nonetheless I was quite proud of what I’d done with it since it did, in the end, make a logical and coherent argument . . . or so I thought. I submitted it in May and then waited, dutifully, throughout that month to be told about my Viva.

By the way, a Viva, or Viva Voce, as it’s called in full, is the final exam for a PhD; it’s where you go to meet with two or more examiners (who you’ll probably never have met before) in order to defend your thesis against the grilling that they will inevitably give it. I was nervous about this, of course, but I was prepared for it, I thought, and would have been totally fine to go through with it, until I was told, albeit rather belatedly due to an admin cock-up, that I would not be Viva-ed at all because the examiners had read my thesis and decided it was crap and they didn’t see the point of giving it the credence of an examination.

Needless to say, at this point, I gave up. I wasn’t upset and I was just really pissed off with the whole thing; I mean I was tired, you know, and I felt like I’d been treated badly, so I sort of rode the wave of righteous anger for a while and then forgot it. I had other problems at this point, anyway; life was getting in the way. My uncle died in June, which really upset my mother and left us in a little bit of a mess. And I just didn’t feel like I could go on with writing a thesis that, fairly obviously, was never going to be any good when I’d already re-written it twice and nearly lost my mind (and the use of my hands) in the process. No one at my university seemed to appreciate this, but there we are.

By August I was signing up for the dole (otherwise known as social security), at the behest of my mother who would not allow me to live under her roof and not have some sort of status. “If you don’t study and you can’t get a job then you’ll have to join the ranks of the unemployed and stick your hand out for money like the rest of the losers.” Or something along those lines anyway. So, it was during this time, while I was casting about looking for actual jobs doing anything from cleaning to home helps to admin workers, that I started to write.
It was always something I had wanted to do and I knew, even while I was doing my PhD, that creative writing would be something I would eventually move onto when I was finally finished with my not so great thesis on Iris Murdoch. My plan, initially, was just to take the novel I’d been tinkering with on and off for years and put it up on Kindle.

But then I decided to try to do things properly and, not only did I put up my novel, but I also wrote quite a hefty amount of short stories and a few other things besides that, and put them up too. This all happened in September and I’m thinking now that it could, with a bit of hard work, become a career.

I didn’t rule out proper work, and I still haven’t now. But this is what I want to do, so there we are.
It’s now the end of the year and I’m thinking about where I’ve come to after all of this. It’s weird, isn’t it, how the beginning of the year and the end of it seem so different – the person you are in January, looking forward to the blank slate of the year, is always so different from the person you are in December when you’re looking back and wondering just how the hell all that happened in just twelve short months. I remember myself in January this year, being thin, sulky, miserable, cold and desperate to prove that I wasn’t stupid. Now, in December, I’m . . . well . . . no longer thin, I’m angry rather than miserable, and I really don’t give a damn now what anyone thinks.

When I was at university, I was convinced that that was the only way I could prove that I was worth something. I didn’t want to be out in the world because I didn’t think that I could handle it. University was all I knew and I guess I’d just spent too much time there. I did a PhD because I thought that staying at university forever was the only thing for me, because I’d never be employable in the real world. But what I found there, really, was that, although there were people who were prepared to accept me for my weirdness and specialist knowledge of books and movies, and while there were people who were quite happy for me to read all day and learn everything that I could in the anticipation of some great and wonderful accolade at the end, all I was doing was kidding myself. I didn’t really belong there either, and in the end it was just embarrassing because I could see people looking at me, feeling sorry for me, willing me to just get on with it and do something so that they could get rid of me too. They could all see that I didn’t fit.

Academics are kind of a closed group, you see; they’ll let anybody in, in theory, if they want to learn badly enough and have the ready wit and the keen attention to do it. But it’s a bit like being a politician in the end; if you don’t play the game then they shun you. They like people who hold the same opinions, who uphold research standards and who band together and agree with each other on important points that, in actual fact, are pretty miniscule and irrelevant in any real life context. There’s a code of practice and a mode of behaviour that you have to sign up to, and I was just the wrong fit. I didn’t want to change myself and I didn’t want to morph into some sort of myopic middle-class freak. Because that’s all most academics are really. Some of the ones I hung around with were really awful to talk to actually; I mean, I thought they were great to begin with, and I was attracted to their glamour because they were so different from the people I usually mixed with – I just couldn’t believe they’d let me into their world. But that soon wore off. I hated them in the end for being so ignorant and theoretical and, basically, just detached from real life.

I wanted to get out in the end.

So now here I am. Not giving a damn. I’m writing. And I’ll keep writing. And I’ll write whatever I want. If people don’t like what I write then they don’t. But I think that people, REAL people are better placed to judge what they do and don’t like for themselves and, for the most part, if they don’t like it, they just won’t read it. I’m not scared about that. If I find a few people who like what I write then I’ll be happy and, even though I don’t know what the hell next year is going to bring me (and really don’t want to right now), I still think this is what I want to do.

I’m still dreading New Year though so stay tuned for another blog-post of “AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!! IT’S ANOTHER YEAR WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO WITH IT HELP ME” on January 1st.

Adios amigos and thanks for reading. See you again soon! 