2024 was a bit topsy turvy for me. firmly a year of transition. i was most of the way through a sort of period of reflection and rebirth. psychologically unmoored as i examined and reinvented myself. i found myself a bit stranded from time to time. doubting the process. and just when i needed it, i’d get a sense of that feeling of rightness in the world. that its all for a reason. that life gets better with understanding. that sometimes you have to hurt to heal.
have you been through a period of transition in adulthood?
our attachment to reality is not as strong as we believe it is. we live in the permanent now. we can’t really trust out memories. they could be fake. we make plans for a future that we assume will happen, but based on what? all there ultimately is are the sensations we feel and the stories we tell ourselves about them. but, as a practical matter, it is helpful to just believe reality is as you see it. otherwise we’d never be able to brush our teeth and drink our coffee in the morning.
do you believe in reality? do you trust the sun to rise again tomorrow?
i have alexithymia. basically i spent most of my early life feeling desperately anxious without really knowing it. just learned to ignore the signals my body sends. i often don’t eat until late in the day. i would probably die of thirst if it wasn’t for the fact i need caffeine to motivate me to do anything in the morning. but eventually the stress breaks through in a way even i notice and i enter burn out. i was getting close to that point when i wrote this line.
have you ever suffered from burn out? are you burned out right now?
this did happen but it wasn’t actually traumatic. i’m not entirely sure if F was really mum’s BEST friend. but a friend of long standing anyway. anyway, F just collected me from primary school and took me swimming. i think i had fun. but it did spell the end of that friendship for my mum. and was probably a symptom in the unwinding of F’s marriage.
i’m not good at swimming. i don’t think i could have swam without arm bands when this happened. i’m still crap at swimming. i hate cold water.
can you convince me to join the cult of ice cold water?
i consider myself to be good with numbers and knowledgeable about business type stuff. i know about politics, law, finance, accountancy, tax. and i’ve read quite a lot of self help re self-management. absolutely useless at telling people what to do. panic and nasusea at the idea of writing my own to-do list on a monday and never plan more than like three days ahead. but nonetheless, confident that i understand business generally. and anytime i see ‘ebitda’ i wince. you may as well be telling me turnover. it’s an irrelevant metric. it means ‘earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation’ – but so what? apple computer’s ebitda may be 100 billion dollars. but it can’t achieve that without paying taxes, paying interest on its debt, replacing out of date hardware (depreciation) and developing new intellectual property (amortisation). apple needs to keep incurring all those costs or it will go bust.
do you suffer from executive dysfunction? how do you cope?
my love got back from her sister’s and we ran across town to view flats and eat the best pizza. it was a very salty evening. she ended up buying one of the flats, so it was nice that i was there. i didn’t go to that many of her viewings. one of the estate agents we met mentioned he was training for a half marathon and we casually told him our pbs, which were quite a bit faster than what he was aiming for. hopefully we inspired him to try a bit harder. its not like we are in the olympics or something.
it was never part of the plan, but on one of my many diversions around life i happened to learn double entry bookkeeping. it took an afternoon or so with a textbook. i was on holiday, sitting by the pool. credit this, debit that. i remember wondering: if there is a debit for every credit, how does anyone make a profit or a loss? well. i read the textbook. so now i know. and there are lots of ‘timing differences’ in accountancy. i definitely prefer poetry to accountancy, but there is a poetry about numbers too. i quite enjoy bookkeeping once i get going. but the inertia is hard to overcome.
well this was quite an autistic line. i felt quite a lot of shame about writing it down at the time. and for what it says about the company i keep. but now i know i am neurodivergent i feel a bit safer in saying it. i am trying to learn to live on my own terms. to embrace my inherent weirdness. to understand myself a bit better and to judge myself from a perspective of generosity. and to extend that same courtesy to everyone else.
and in fact, i’m sure a lot of the people i love are neurodivergent too, although not all are or would want to be diagnosied. and do you know i even love some neurotypical people!
i was going through a process of self-understanding. a bit late, to be honest. i guess i’ve known for a while that it takes me a lot of effort to react well to things. i now know that i’m autistic, and a highly sensitive person. i panic when i’m surprised, i hate criticism, i don’t even like compliments much. a few deep breaths. ok maybe this email is just an invitation to a seminar that i can accept or not and there is no underlying passive aggressive message to be offended by.
we want what we want because we want it. to some extent. not much more advanced than a flower turning towards the sun. but because we have so many complicated ways of expressing our desires, and because it can be quite hard to be sure what our desires are (am i hungry or am i anxious?) we can trick ourselves into believing that the ‘me’ from the internal monologue is running the whole show from a place of reason. when actually its just a chatbot that calms you down or riles you up or whatever.
i guess what i mean is that reason gets us what we want, if we use it well. but passions aren’t rational. hunger and horniness can neither be summoned or subdued with reason alone. (food and sex will do it though)
i spend a lot of time in the bath. at least once a week but ideally more. i’m always sort of faffing about, never quite relaxing, reading with the radio on while starting out the windows and rubbing my eyes. so i like a hot wet environment to sort of slow me down every couple of days. immobilised in the bath, i have a tendency to be quite creative. so much of the poem is written in the bath. i wonder how many creative works were conceived of in a hot bath. how many bars of music and novels that only exist due to the miracle of modern plumbing.
the love epochal. n.n. benn 