It's true that looking back on myself even six months ago, never mind a year ago, I had no definite sense of what I wanted. A year ago, I was perhaps the most distraught I've ever been - deeply depressed and on the wrong medication, which made me both unable to keep my eyes open and full of restless anxiety at the same time - there's even a name for that kind of anxiety, akathisia. Here's what the Innsbruck University Clinic says about akathisia:
Akathisia is a frequent and common adverse effect of treatment with antipsychotic drugs. This syndrome consists of subjective (feeling of inner restlessness and the urge to move) as well as objective components (rocking while standing or sitting, lifting feet as if marching on the spot and crossing and uncrossing the legs while sitting).
Sounds like fun, right?
Anyway, a year ago I could barely make it through the day. Six months ago, I was in a much better place - immeasurably better - but I absolutely knew I needed some time out from teaching to figure out what it was I needed to be doing with myself. Did I want to write? travel? study? teach? I thought I could just take the little money I had saved, put all my stuff on the sidewalk next to a sign that said "Free" and get on a plane.
Well, it turns out that life isn't that simple, folks. I mean, DUH, but there you have it... you can call it naive, you can call it retarded (in the sense of delayed, as in held back; come on people, you know me better than that) - either way I had no idea that real life was about to hit me, and hard. You can't just move in with family you barely know... DUH! You can't go travelling and gallivanting about when you don't know what you're going to be doing - or, as it turned out, where you'll be sleeping, but that's another story - in January. And you sure as fuck can't count on other people to be nice and supportive in light of all these mistakes you keep making. DUH.
I often have moments where I feel that I'm part of an interconnected human web (go ahead, you can swallow the little bit of throw up you just experienced from reading that), and then I have moments where I'm convinced I'm floating in a great, universe-sized mound of aspic, completely separate from all other living creatures. Yes, alone. Family is supposed to make you feel connected, friends are supposed to make you feel connected, but life's a bitch and you never know when she might stab you in the big toe. She won't kill you, but she'll make you wonder what the fuck you were thinking...
If I were a rational, intelligent human being, I would have saved enough money to move to London, rent a room for six months, and then fuck around deciding where to live or work or study or travel. Then, at the end of six months, I would have reevaluated the options and moved on. My parents would have cooed approvingly at my every move, and encouraged me to find myself before marriage and offspring and a bad back forced me to stop looking. My friends would have written me email updates regularly, and I would have responded with long, slightly show-off responses about what a good time I was having.
I am clearly not that human being. Maybe no one is, but that's small comfort at six pm when it's dark outside already and your dad just made you cry like a baby for twenty minutes. I mean, I am barely more than a year away from being 30. That kind of behavior is clearly unacceptable!
On the good news front, I have a few interviews lined up for next week. Also, I have finally discovered the great American author Elmore Leonard, of whose books I have read maybe ten in the last week alone. The one I'm reading now, Bandits, is pretty damn good, combining an ex-cat-burglar and an ex-nun and an interest in Nicaraguan politics. But the Western I read a week ago (yes, he has a wide range of stylistic and literary expression), Valdez is Coming, was fucking outstanding. Seriously, if you bothered to read all this, you should go read it.
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