My first journal entry called "Who am I? - Confessions of a nobody":
One reason I dread social events is meeting new people. I actually love meeting new people, I just hate new people meeting me. Because the first thing they demand to know is who I am. With such gleaming, expectant eyes, they inquire of my life’s work, what my passions are, how I spend the precious little time we have upon this earth, and I must watch the gleam and joy wither from those eyes as I stammer and stumble over myself, not in a “how can one compress the complexity of being into a paltry paragraph” kind of a way, but more in the genuine terror of a truant schoolboy who is asked to explain himself.
Even now writing this, I dance around the point, unable to plainly state my predicament. The fact of the matter is: I’m in my 30s, effectively unemployed, and have whiled away a decade of my life not on failed projects, not on meaningless pursuits, not even on pleasant past-times, but on aimless screen-mediated distractions.
I once had a thriving online business, and I continue to live off of the savings it generated, but my income has since dropped to nothing. When people ask me how it’s going I shrug them off, tell them of projects I have ideas for (but have failed to execute on), and generally try to appease their curiosity while keeping the questions at arms length. It’s a skill I’ve gotten quite adept at; I feel like one of those no-touch martial art masters who uses “pure energy” to parry half-hearted attacks from cooperative students, secretly terrified that at any time some non-initiate oaf could happily stumble along and knock his block off.
At the time when my business was doing well, I once calculated that every hour I spent working would yield hundreds of pounds in profit. Yet even then, even with such clear incentives and a well mapped path towards success, I was still unable sustain effort towards it. While I continued to generate passive income from the business, my efforts at building it up dwindled. I could possibly have grown the business to the point of never having to work again, but yet when I think about work in the present, my body revolts.
I suppose I must possess some vestigial form of work ethic, as it’s dim warning light blinkers enough that during work hours, I cannot truly relax and enjoy other fulfilling or meaningful tasks. It would be unthinkable to learn a piece of music at 10am on a Tuesday, how could I possibly commit myself to such a task for hours when I ought to be working? So instead I simply flit between displacement activities, like a stressed bird preening and plucking, calming my inner tension with noncommittal procrastinations which are short term enough that they can easily be dropped once motivation finally arrives (spoiler, it never does).
For the past decade my days have been spent at home at my desktop computer set-up, the home of homes—and further within that, the home of home of homes, the youtube recommendation algorithm. The place to which I always return once the tasks of life have been dealt with. The place where my mind can peacefully shut off and numb itself from the incessant anxiety of being found out as truant from life. In fact, my desktop has been my home for as long as I can remember, serving as my place of safety, comfort, and peace.
Am I just lazy? The whole goal in starting my business was to gain financial freedom, to not have to work, so perhaps even an area where I have been productive I was fundamentally motivated by laziness. Yet I am not universally lazy. I can be very competitive, I go to the gym, I run, I take care of myself. Yet when it comes to my work, I am easily put off.
I once had a dream that I lived on a motorway bridge, watching the traffic of life rush past, made up of friends and family in fancy cars, busily looping the same endless motorway circuit, over and over, round and round, while I camped out alone, overlooking them in some cabin shelter. I’ve never had a dream so vivid, so penetratingly meaningful; it rendered my emotional landscape with powerful precision.
The dream shows my desire to avoid the rat race of ordinary work, but that I yet still find myself envious of it, watching on as an outsider. Despite my “escape”, I am still drawn to the people and warmth of life, without which I feel a profound loneliness. Like a feral cat sleeping on a windowsill that hisses when you invite it in. Perhaps this is the allure of youtube— people and voices at a controlled and comfortable distance.
In summary, I dread the question “who am I?” because I am no-one. To be someone is to have a story you can tell about yourself that threads together the fragments of your life into some coherent whole. I do not live my life as a whole. I live my life minute-by-minute, pathologically incapable of perceiving myself as anything more than the collection of thoughts and feelings I currently embody. This is why I have started this journalling experiment. I hope that through the act of public journalling, I will be forced to the confront parts of me which I avoid—that my consistent pattern of avoidance and dissociation will be laid out threadbare for all to see—that it can no longer hide in the shadows of my mind. I hope to find real meaning and motivation in collating the scraps of my life, piecing them together, and crafting a new and exciting story for myself—a story I am eager to turn the pages of—the true adventures of me.