by A couple of weekends ago my friend from the tennis club came over for dinner. I don’t often host people who aren’t related to me. He brought some weed but I declined since it was only my second day on Citalopram and it didn’t seem wise to muddy the picture at such an early stage. A pity really; I’d only ever tried marijuana a handful of times, all of them in France back in 2001, and the experience was positive. We talked for a long time and I must have been unusually engaged in the conversation because I didn’t look at my watch. At one point he said, “We’re not conventional people.” Last year I was taken aback when someone suggested that I don’t conform to society’s norms and until I stop playing the fitting-in game I’ll continue to be unhappy. Those words hit me hard: people don’t like to be told they’re not normal. But he was dead right. The fitting-in game wears me out and makes me unhappy, even though I only play it at a basic level by, for instance, attending work functions only if there’d be a particular loss of face if I didn’t show up. And I’ve been playing it for decades, at school, at university, and at work, by attempting to be invisible. By trying to fit in I’m in danger of becoming nothing if I don’t act fast.
Not being normal, in any of the forms that can take, isn’t easy. It means you probably didn’t have many friends at school. It means you almost certainly didn’t make the first rugby team at your high school, with the immediate confidence boost that comes with that and all the connections and job opportunities that are likely to accrue even 20, 30, 40 years later. Jobs of any description will be harder to come by and to maintain. Ditto relationships. It means you’re less likely than average to drive a car, to own your own home, to get married, to procreate. The kids you do have are quite likely to have the same problems you do. The house you do have is likely to be poorly insulated and get little sun. (D is probably not the only vitamin you aren’t getting enough of.) It means you’re less likely to vote than the general population (who cares about me anyway?) and if you do vote, the party you vote for probably won’t win. It means you’re likely to suffer from mental health problems, to have trouble with the law, to commit suicide, and to die at a young age. It means that even in 2016, life is generally a bitch and a short bitch at that.
Luckily I was born with a certain facility for maths and for language. I come from a loving family for whom education and employment matter. I learnt (I hope) to be warm and polite, and how not to offend or annoy people. I went to university (though it was far from easy for me socially), I got a good degree, I embarked on a career, I did all the normal stuff. And so I’ve been insulated from many of the bad things in the second paragraph. But I had no foundation to underpin any of that normal stuff – no sense of home, of purpose, of belonging, of attachment to anything. It was no surprise that it all came crashing down. From the moment I moved in, my apartment, spacious and conveniently located though it is, has felt like a monument to a past life that itself was pretty meaningless. In the last few years the insulation has worn thin, the veneer has cracked. Pretending to be normal, to please my parents or society at large, is no longer working. It’s about time I decided to be me instead. (That’s pretty much what I said when I started this blog last October, but it’s as if I forget.)
I’m glad I went back on Citalopram. I have absolutely no problem with taking antidepressants if they’re going to be of benefit to me.
Last night I gave one of my last English lessons. He still struggles with short words but does better with longer ones. Went and want posed problems but different and important were no bother. When I asked him if he knew find, he said “I’m find, thank you.” (I went through a list of words with two final consonant sounds, to try to get him to actually pronounce the ends of words, but had little success there.) He still recognises whole words only; he correctly identified hand and stand, but couldn’t then correctly pronounce land. The short-words-hard, long-words-easier pattern reminded me of my attempt to learn basic Chinese; lots of similar short words became a murky mess in my mind.
I still haven’t got anybody to rent my apartment. A group of three people were keen but only if I would guarantee their tenancy until February 2018 which I wasn’t prepared to do. That’s my biggest hurdle right now.