Untitled Unmastered

(published 2021/10/26)

Perhaps my one lifeline in this world is my eloquence and general ability to vividly express different situations and emotions, to help other people to understand me or handle collective problems. I’ve always enjoyed writing and been good at it, and it’s gradually gone from being a power with which to understand and wonder about the world, to my main defence against my life closing in on me. I’m eager to start exploring my feelings, comforted by the prospect, but suffer the same nervousness of finally setting pen to paper and starting the journey, as always deadly afraid of writer’s block. :)

I think a lot of the things I’ll discuss will resonate with many people, but it’s more the extent and breadth of the problems that make me feel as low as I do. There comes a point where things get so out of control that you don’t believe in the capacity of the people in your life to help much, but it’s a comfort nonetheless to have that innermost turmoil out in the open for all to see and learn from.

The Glorious Land

I wish there were a bit more of a universal phrase for the American dream. For while on the one hand, it does make light of an extreme, of a country purposely designed to offer opportunity and new horizons for the brave, at the expense of some native people they didn’t care about of course. But the experience of an immigrant looking for a better life, and being somehow enamoured with the culture of the destination, is a quite universal one. For example, one experience an English person would never see coming that I read about today is how colonised black people are imbued with a sense of belonging in the colony – they think the English will treat them with respect. Then they come over and are given a rude fucking awakening. It takes art and activism for them to break free and understand this, from being forced into such a helpless and servile position.

I was born and have spent my whole life in London, but my parents are both ethnically Serbian, born there and with grandparents hailing from towns and remote villages in the Serbian parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. My name is Filip, spelt what I’ll go ahead and say is the right way, because, “piši kao što govoriš, čitaj kako je napisano” (“write like you speak, read out how it’s written”), said the linguistic reformer Vuk Karadžić, whom literally every Serbian kid is told about. I carry strong senses of both identities, from fluently speaking both languages and having a sense of belonging both in the family I visited every summer there, and in the schools I grew up in here. I’ve been in England with just my mum, plus my somewhat estranged dad whom I don’t have a great connection with, with her pretty much starting afresh with not much money about 6 years before I was born – unable to return because of war.

Yugoslavia was a quite communist place, tho not a Soviet one since it escaped the Eastern Block. It was moreso a comfy socialist republic that had a good standard of living and lived off national debt until inevitably foundering. But my mum’s dad was somewhat involved in that, being the boss of a fishery trade union IIRC. I’ve always felt senses of duty and collectivism; they’re how I was brought up. I wonder sometimes if people see it as an act of inexplicable self-sacrifice that my reaction to seeing a weakness in a community is to improve it myself, because what could I be getting out of it? Pride, clout, fame, etc. No, it’s because I benefit from things the community offers me, am part of the whole, so it’s my duty to contribute to it. Every time I’m a part of something, my natural behaviour is to contribute to it in that way, and combined with how much free time I tend to have, it leads to me being labelled as the person who does the most. I think for most western people, it’s inconceivable to erase your individuality to this extent to be part of a collective, which is how we’re left with such self-interested societies and people.

Your identity as an immigrant is your struggle, particularly for those of us who have a background of strong academic achievement. That’s why we have all those memes about Indian and Chinese parents lol. My mum had to do basically everything herself; your economics “degree” from this shithole “country” doesn’t count so take this qualification again; work a couple of jobs, kid goes in aftercare; fuck about with the housing association and see if you can find a safe place to live; battle mold in the flat your whole life, flooding from the upstairs flat, 5am drug bust in the one above that one. But the entire concept of this is that your kid will become a success. The focus is on sacrificing yourself to get em into a good private school on a scholarship, a top university, a career.

But I’ve found that building up an entire life on a premise, it doesn’t take a lot for it to come crashing down. I look at where we are now, our lives spent with our backs against the wall, and I can see the successes and failures, and the little things that swayed our timeline into where it is now. But it always walked a tightrope where the natural outcome is desolation. Right now, I live in a small room next to a huge construction site, and have been unprotected from being tortured by noise for over a year. Everytime there’s a reprieve, I know that I’m on the precipice from being put back at any time into actively wanting to die, because Hitler will send no warning. I’ve been unemployed for 2 years, and have felt like I’ve fallen off the wagon of life progression, and that something’s been missing my entire life socially. My mum has no friends anymore and doesn’t leave the house, losing a good deal of health and friends thanks to her constant battle to work hard in an toxic environment with a manipulative boss who would steal her phone and turn people against her, as well as managing exams and raising a kid. We have no other family here, and the flat’s so small that I’ve almost never been able to have people over.

I said to my mum straight up that my birth and existence in these circumstances is a big mistake and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone to have to grow up with so little normality and security in childhood, or in such dismal ongoing living conditions. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, but class oppression has always been at the heart of my life.

In The Castle Of My Skin

I was primarily conditioned into being academically successful, and it feels like it’s somehow the only thing my mum and I have ever known. I know that she was also all about sport in her childhood, but it got lost on me somehow, maybe because I was so interested in computers up to age ~14, and lived extensively in my own mental world until around then, but also no doubt because I was always put in the situation of having to punch up academically to get into good schools and unis, and once I had a stellar record of achievements, my competitive side wanted to keep it up and keep it as the focus.

At around 14 tho, I started to change a lot, and my personality and conditioning started to clash with each other considerably. It took me years to shake it off. I remember at 16 finishing a French GCSE early and being told to do Italian, and resenting someone else for dipping from that and having free time, because he was unsuccessful academically. It’s like, the reward for doing well was more work that was meaningless and I didn’t wanna do. Me blaming the other person shows how twisted that shit got in my head. I also tried way too hard in this Economics A-Level that was irrelevant to my future, cos I was always being pressured to fill up my time with work. And then I picked a uni that was clearly too hard, where better alternatives existed, just because I could. For years I’ve had a reverence for an old acquaintance of mine who was in a similar position and deliberately picked the easier option, which in his case meant doing PPE instead of maths, cos I felt like he boldly stayed true to himself in the face of this pressure. I stuck out the degree, passed it on time, and then crashed as I came to terms with how I’m not about this life. My mentality then becoming so reactive to self-sacrifice is one of the reasons my career failed.

That stuff engulfed so much of my life that removing it left behind a huge abscess as I came to terms with what was missing from my childhood. I wonder about people who grew up as archetypical nerds, if they’re comfortable with it as adults, because this is massively not who I was. The parts that did fit back then are that I was often introverted because I enjoyed spending time in my own world, which always seemed so elaborate and inexplicable to others, and that one of the two meanings I’ve ascribed to life has always been improving at skills, which is always an individual thing. Even for the latter tho, I didn’t spend my time as a kid on the right things, particularly just letting go of the huge talent for music I had and missing the entire developmental progression on that, only to realise years later that it was my favourite thing in the world. There is a pattern of music in the family begetting it in children, which I usually see in my fave musicians and is what was missing for me. But it’s still become a part of me not being able to be myself.

Improvement is one of my meanings of life, but bonding is the other. I guess it starts with my excessive intelligence and autistic characteristic that were never explored by psychologists – my therapist years ago was really keen to do that, and I suppose I see why now. There’s a lot of reasons I just don’t fit in, and that’s one for the next section. But the consequences of this were, at the start, 4 years of bullying, aged 8–10 and 12–14, to the extent of fully oppressing my social life. And there was one year in between these where I lived as an extrovert and had friendships, predominantly with girls, that were plenty good and gratifying enuff for me at that age. But these traits of mine always sat in the shadows, waiting to retard any progress I made towards living as myself. It’s strange to even phrase it that way when those things are also a part of you, and there’s an enduring clash between them and your conscious personality.

The bullying and isolation abated and left behind a domino effect of poor relationships and isolation from age 14 to today. I’d not had a single close friend before this year and have always been the last to be included in a group, after years of being a part of it but not really in the eyes of others. It’s happened three times so far. A child needs social protection in order to form a sense of self that takes into account its place in the world, not just its inner world. It starts from having a strong family presence, where you’re accepted no matter who you are and how you behave, and then you take that with you to try to form close bonds with other people, at first fairly vapid and volatile ones that 11yos etc. can handle, but improving in tandem with maturity.

I just never had any of that. This year was the first time I actually fell out with someone, and 3 or so years ago was when I finally started actually feeling visceral emotions relating to bonding and the people and places of my past, rather than just enjoying company because it kept me occupied. I walked past my primary school this summer and saw that the headteacher had become my old friend’s mum, from that year when I was an extrovert. A couple of years later, that friend went out of her way to catch up with me, and we met in a park. But I was so oppressed in my head by the bullying that I couldn’t process that I had value as a friend, that I had this healthy relationship with someone, that I should hold onto it and not let it slip away. I never met with her again. Most of the other friendships I had during this time also lived outside my secondary school, where I was getting oppressed, and were with my mum’s friends’ kids. This is the closest I ever had to family friends, and they slipped away as my mum got oppressed with home and work problems.

I think most of these feelings just needed to happen while I was actually a child. I needed to feel wanted in some contexts, to have really emotional connections and fights with close friends. I needed to really belong in an integral way to some groups and periods of my life, to be able to call them my comfort zone, a part of myself. I needed to have organic and low-stakes explorations of sex and intimacy, and of romances of whatever bullshit quality they usually are with kids, rather than always being unwanted and on the outside. Because essentially, all of that stuff is who I was, rather than the lost-in-my-own head life I was forced to live in those teenage years, which stopped fitting me after I hit puberty. I never shied away from being personal and intimate, but I guess I was always petrified in the face of my autistic and anxious qualities, always unable to find the words.

I hate that the primary focus in parenting is to set up the child to have a sustainable existence as an adult, rather than to make sure the child can live like a real person in those years, as in the rest of eir life. Because for most people, myself included, I think that that’s all they need to be happy. Not having the other thing, improvement and being a master of your craft, in your life is also very demoralising, but it’s not even close to feeling like you have no place among the people in your life. Once all these emotions had caught up to me, I found myself walking around where I grew up and seeing ghosts all the time, of things I was around but never truly a part of, and seeing other people outside who almost always had someone by their side. Most of my memories are suffused with this sense of being outside them. Many houses I was never invited round when I was small, cos I was alientated so didn’t have these connections, and couldn’t fit them in my flat to invite them round myself. This little garden I went round once where people would smoke weed, but I wouldn’t join, since it took me so much to break out of my work pressure mentality and realise I was the kind of person who would join, and once I did realise, I found myself picking at a rusty clique that had no care for me being there.

Maybe the most striking and summarising manifestation is this… my attraction to girls always seemed fairly natural to me, but I remember once when I was 14, watching a boy in an English lesson, being somewhat attracted to him but thinking of it more as wanting to be him, as someone I perceived to be in a healthy social situation, despite me thinking his character was terrible. I wondered about his sexual life, characteristics, interests, and I feel like the two aspects of attraction and vicariousness got entangled in my head, and ever since then I’ve been attracted to guys younger than I am, in a lustful sense but also tinged with this idea of them representing a well-rounded childhood, being who i wanted to be. We could never grasp the truth of why someone turns out some way in terms of sexuality and gender, but I do feel like my bisexuality is quite pathological.

And the other side of this is that my interest in girls has steadily waned because they’ve largely ceased to be a part of my life entirely. They’re underrepresented in all my hobbies, and those oppressive social divisions I underwent in secondary school kept them out of my life back then as well. Everything came together in an unnatural way, and it’s reflected in my history and sexuality, in the way my personality and ability to express myself have strayed so far from how I feel inside, and in how I repressed emotions for a whole decade.

From all the worlds I’ve made for myself alone, particularly when I was very young and needed nothing else in life, from all my creativity and ability to engage in things on a deep level… ever since I was 11, it’s been like I’ve been carrying around this fire in my head, which I could never let out because nobody cared for it. There’s only ever been one person who’s really taken an interest in my personality I feel like, and I’ve become sheepish, unwilling to push it onto others and more inclined to live in their worlds instead, inevitably getting little in return. So often, if there’s something cool I did or thought about, or I had a particular experience of something, it just never left my head. Or it went up on my Twitter, fruitless attempts to let people get to know me on the forlorn hope that they wanted to.

In the way I lived and in the eyes of others, I could never be myself.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

I’ll segue from how I’ve felt around others, to how I think others have perceived me. There’re many bad, well-known dynamics that led to my enduring non-acceptance, like me being an easy target for children’s propensity to turn people against others to cover up their insecurities, or the heavy amount of cliquism in my school and social engineering on the internet. But the root triggers of all these things always come back to my personality.

The one aspect of this that I’ve seen validated elsewhere is the confluence of being really intelligent and Asperger’s-y. There are traits and ways of thinking that are a huge privilege if you observe life from the outside, but become baneful when you’re trying to be among other people, to the extent that nobody wants that and I wish I could rout it out. It’s all to do with how it affects my communication and how I come across, but it’s so hard to pin down exactly what’s going on. People get jitters, extremely polarised, and I’m dogged by conversations where someone gets triggered and others are saying “I don’t think that’s what he said”, again and again. I come off threatening, or at the very least, there’s some intangible vibe that people discern and decide it’s wise to not get too close to me. There’s an unconditional acceptance I yearn for that almost never comes, and leaves me by myself.

Some, but not all, of this has concrete reasoning. I think my interpretation of being principled is unique. I’m very candid, very sensitive to injustices, and see it as my duty to defend people when nobody else will. I expect people to accept my stances without them compromising a friendship, so will say what I think, not automatically defend a friend. I expect people to have the patience to ask questions and give me a chance if I said something unclear or wrong, and for us to work towards an understanding. And I always had conviction in my ethics, and that they’d be acceptable to others. But these are all lofty ideals when humans are so tribal. People often unashamedly hold the opposite ideals I do – they defend friends no matter what, they spurn people without giving them a chance, and then there’s a meta layer, whereby people will react to these two things by avoiding confrontation at all costs for their own protection, and just let injustices go.

I have long been saying that I don’t care about having principles and only care about fitting in. I’ve long wanted to ditch this personality that’s so reactive with people’s insecurities. But I eventually started to give up and concede that it wasn’t in my power to change, because my efforts to put things right always ran aground and left me with severe consequences, and no amount of acknowledging that others were at fault would change that. From the point of view of someone like me, there’s no recourse when people don’t tell you what they think and don’t give you a chance.

There’s another way in which my stance when communicating is just rigged incorrectly. I’m a humble, tho not modest, person, which is to say that altho I always respect my virtues and achievements, I also largely lack grandiosity and am egoless. I know that there’s a lot of cool stuff for me to shout about, but I prefer to largely not do that, or at least keep it to sharing my own excitement to invite people to enjoy it too, rather than trying to instil a sense of myself and my importance in other people’s minds. Instead, when I’m talking to others, I like to depersonify myself so I can be a passenger in their world, take an interest and make them feel valued. And I’ve forlornly desired that in return far more than I should have.

I suppose this is also a conditioned behaviour, arising from my own childhood alienation and lack of being valued. I internalised a kind of submissiveness, shyness, general sense that it was a lot of work and an uphill struggle to establish myself and what I wanted to discuss in a conversation. But I came to understand that there’s no comfort or point in having a hidden personality that has to be divined from all the noise, and that this was nothing more than an unsuccessful strategy, if a conditioned behaviour can be thought of as that.

When people think of egocentricity, I think the conscious reaction is that it’s a bad thing, because it’s extremely ungratifying to bond with someone like that because of the continual feeling of getting sidelined. But I wonder if people ever see it as a counterpoint to what I’ve just been talking about, in that making yourself the centre of attention is probably the best strategy for fitting in, being accepted and defended from being ostracised. Things do change once strong friendships are established, and listening becomes a stronger tool than enforcing ego, but, what if things don’t reach that point? If people just don’t manage to get to know you, thanks to your submissiveness and objectionable way of communicating. I’ve faced so many skewed interpretations of myself in my life, been attacked by so many people based on them, and come to accept that I am one among all the animals, and my social strategy is just not good enuff.

If I am even one among them, because I feel like I’m less than one. By rights, I often feel like I’m only a person in an official sense, as I take up space in the Tube or Jobcentre or take things off the shelves in Sainsbury’s. I think all of my writing likely comes off very dismissive towards the friends I do have, because I know people do feel things towards me. But for whatever rationalisations I can contrive, the patterns have always seemed firmly rooted, that I don’t fit in, that I impart a sense of wariness that isn’t confronted, that my ways of thinking about and behaving in social situations are completely removed from what others do and I always bear the impact of it. I’ve always missed an unconditional support network, close friends, intimacy, and been on the outside of groups and events in my life. This irreconcilable difference and tension is very palpable in me and lingers in my relationships with others, and I wish I could just separate myself from them all without enduring the feeling of loss.

Childhood’s End

In the past few months, I had to end a friendship in which the other person stubbornly refused to accept me, despite keeping me close and using me for various things. I had to uproot the concealed negativity that lay inside. And in doing so, a whirlwind of manipulations and power structures came down on me and cost me a group of friends I’d been dependent on for hope amidst all the darkness I’ve been recounting. I was very vulnerable to people turning their backs on me, and it took nothing for this group to be revealed as one and the same.

The burden of regrets and problems has been gathering steadily since this juncture I can make out from around when I was 11, maybe the point from which I wish I’d lived differently. The problems don’t get resolved but rather are absorbed into a general stasis that stands there out of sight while I try to move into new pastures and find a different source of positivity – or coping mechanism. When this most recent one turned out to be a sham, the amounting burden finally toppled into something I didn’t want to run away from anymore, but rather a cause to give up entirely.

In the past month wherein I’ve been coming to terms with this most recent loss, I’ve been dogged by reminders of the stages of life and where I fit into them. Particularly from seeing my school friend’s wedding, and an Elbow concert. I’ve always been resolute about being myself, no matter my circumstances and where I’d be expected to be in life, accepting that it can take a lot of mental fortitude to overcome adversity on that front. I have been gradually compromising more and more, telling myself that there’s no way I can have children given my class circumstances and lifelong lack of committed romantic relationships, and that the latter is something to forsake as well while there’s a dearth of casual relationships. I’ve considered just how far behind I sit when it comes to career and living arrangements, but none of it bothered me because I’d built up a life that had many things going for it and was very much my own. I was self-confident and happy with who I was.

But things changed last month when I looked back and felt there was no place for me among the other humans. The regrets had piled so high, and I’d failed to attend to them despite trying so hard. They’ve always behaved towards me in ways I couldn’t relate to or understand, and I developed this rancour for everything I’d been put thru, the manipulations, factionism, class oppression, capitalist working culture, dating culture, and more. I have no love nor trust for anyone.

But the same feelings have hovered over my attitude and actions since childhood. I don’t fit into the stage of life I should be in now, because I didn’t fit into childhood either, and never moved on. The things I want are the same things teenagers want, because I was on the outside of my own life then, and the void lingers. Those are the eyes that I watched my friend’s wedding ceremony with, and all the existential symbolism of stages of life washed over me as something I’m not a part of. Elbow have written many songs about these things, and one that I think of a lot is called The Takeoff And Landing Of Everything. It’s a look into the future 10 years ahead of me, when settling down is a goal, and there’s a flux of beginnings and endings, to relationships, parenthood, careers and such like. There’re many associations to the comfy ways the adults I’ve been around have lived in the land I grew up in, and a lot of emotions I can feel in their music, but it comes to me thru a filter, like I’m an alien who has a concept of it due to being adjacent his whole life, while not actually being a part of it, not having had it in the past and not going to in the future.

I think I’ve said it all already but I’d do well to summarise… it comes from having a weak family base in England, weak childhood friendships and awful social circumstances in school, and no close friendships or romantic things from that period. I was never able to make things work with the people I was actually interested in, and the friends I did have were either distant or mired with some sort of exclusionary bent, and then it stopped mattering when everyone started doing different things and I started doing nothing. Other than in my fleeting visits to Serbia, I never had the warmth of feeling like I belonged somewhere, like I “designed these buildings I walk by”. Most feelings of belonging seem to be my concocted romantic view of parts of my history I wasn’t really a part of. My images of all the people in my life stir feelings of longing and a desire for intimacy, but I feel like it’s with a fake, that each image has nothing underlying it, that people aren’t really for me.

Every sense of belonging and comfort I have feels solipsistic, and I’ve habitually lived in my own head ever since I was forced to by being made a chronic outsider since school. But the things occupying my head are these images of people, which seems unhealthy now I think about it. I was comfortable for years and years like this, but the older I got, the more I felt like these ghosts needed to be real. Many of my problems this year, I’ve coped with by running away into my favourite field, drawing upon my experience of living in my own head to be happy. Each time I observed myself from the outside, I saw I was alone and somewhere outside of how I’d be living if I fit into my stage of life, like if I were at my job, or with my mate after, rather than lying in a field. But the worse things got for me, the more unable I was to rely on my inner world, and the more my feeling of not being part of the humans started to become inescapable. I’d been living a life of perennial coping and am confronting its untenability.

I noticed last month that I have a shitload of grey hair growing. And I find it symbolic for where I stand right now, where life is inexorable and fitting in mandatory, but I feel only like something from the past is missing, that I’ve been left behind and so have no will to move further into the future. I can’t be this old because I’m just not there yet.

The Last Leviathan

At the end of the most recent Super Mario Sunshine tasks competition, I felt like I was starting to wind up the last few things that gave my life purpose, so it felt right to include this song in my final tasks video, from Kit Downes’s Obsidian. Obsidian is beautiful black volcanic glass, which commemorates a flashpoint a long time ago, when something exciting happened so ephemerally, and the result has been gathering dust since, forever and ever. The album is based on explorations of the singular textures and timbres that arise from these organs that had their fleeting lives in parish churches of the middle ages, and have been mostly neglected since then. The particular one heard on Last Leviathan is from a little church in the village of Snape, Suffolk, which is otherwise an area of outstanding natural beauty, a rich tradition of music events, and is likely what the Harry Potter character is named after.

I’ve spent countless time in these liminal spaces and mindsets, removed from other people and focused on the minute details of my inanimate environment, often a piano, in much the same vein of stripping away the higher-level abstraction of music, meaning the catchy melodies, harmonies, patterns that remind of different cultures and peoples and are the common language humans use, and instead looking at the lower-level of just the raw sounds without context, which sound like the natural world or the cosmos. That’s the philosophy of ambient music. The comfort I take in that partly comes from being removed from people and the associated pressures of alienation and getting hurt by all the cankers that live within them. But I have to confront that I can’t flee to the little church in Snape and hide from people forever.

And the other thing that Obsidian reminds me of is my own role as a distant observer into something that had life once but is completely intangible to me now, behind a barrier of time passing much like the ghosts that escape me when I walk around where I grew up. But it cuts the other way, too. I kind of see myself as the last leviathan. All those sounds in Kit’s song, crystallised into obsidian a long time ago, and barely comprehensible to anyone hearing them now. There’s a sombre, placid majesty to them, but not a real feeling of connection from the listeners. I feel like I lived a life that didn’t pan out. There’s some fundamental level on which I was never understood or made the connection with the humans, and hardly ever really lived or was accepted as one. And never fit into the important things like the stages of life. I’m communicating my whale-song right now, evoking a sense of intrigue in the listener, contemplation from afar, and maybe some lessons that can be learned for the future children following in my footsteps to not go too far down this path. And evoking solace in myself… while stagnating, floating around in aimless circles like Levias in the Thunderhead.

I get so deep in my head thinking about these things, and it’s all most likely an absurd babble. But it’s the burden I carry. Usually when a plan goes tits up, we can step away from it. But life as a whole isn’t built that way, at least not yet in our development as a society. There are a couple of immutable truths that govern life – you’re born without your consent, and you continue to exist without consent too. Being born is a grudge I bear because it seems so clearly like it wasn’t the move in my parents’ situation, and I didn’t ask for all of these consequences. But people are born all the time for the least thought-out reasons you can imagine.

Staying alive is the same. There is almost no say a rational adult can have in when to die, and it goes all the way to terminally ill and tortured people who have to crowdfund euthanasia drugs from the dark web in spite of the medical profession striving to keep them alive at whatever cost. But that slides all the way down into depression, where it’s still beyond the pale to consider life as being a choice, as if staying alive has some intrinsic value, like a salvation from God at the end if the cause of your death is a plague or diabolical cancer rather than by your own free will. Or maybe the real reason is an extreme selfishness in wanting to keep people you love or even just know alive to feel emotionally stable, in so doing one of the things I revile about people the most – making someone else’s suffering about yourself. Either way. It takes a lot to wear down someone’s will to exist, and there’s plenty of scope for saving someone who’s going thru a ruff patch; things may feel too far gone but actually have a way back. But to make this assessment of every suicidal person ever seems egregious to me, and I must bear the consequences of that daily. Knowing that there is no comforting option to humanely die; I’m supposed to be trapped among the humans forever. It’s the last gasp of society after a lifetime of making a life miserable, making it so hard to leave.

While death may well be my favourite option right now, at least in a utopia where it’s actually reasonable, it’s not even close to a decision I’ve made, and my life is a status quo of clutching at fewer and fewer strands in search for coping mechanisms. My aim was to just set out how I feel as best I could, and there is no plan from here onwards. Have to see what happens.