end of year ramble

practically a diary entry

There’s something about the end of the year that sends me into an introspective or even existential spiral. Maybe it's the darkness of the days, each one cupped in its own vignette with only that small orb of light to live in – the hands of blackness creeping in closer and closer, shortening the borders. Spending so much time in the non-light, hibernating. Rotting.

I know that for me personally, it has a lot do with the end of term – the sudden severance of routine and purpose. I wake up every morning and wonder what do I do with all my time? which scares me because it’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years. Sometimes I feel like I returned to university simply because I never did figure out what to do with myself when I had nothing to learn, nothing to work towards.

So here I am again in that limbo space. Briefly this time, just hanging out here until the new semester begins – although I fear it feels like a taster of things to come. The robot shuffle between bedsheets and shifts.

I’ve found myself of recent swept up by coexistent feelings of total wonder and wrenching sadness. When the light prisms through the trees in such a perfect way or I watch the slow ooze of people squeezing down the cobbled streets, I am overwhelmed by a sense of deep awe. But there is a secondary feeling beneath it. It’s if I am already mourning it, already existing in the moment After. It's a hard feeling to pin down; hard to splay out its anatomy like a mounted butterfly and know it by the shape of its wings, its thorax, its crown of antennae.

I don't know if it's the feeling of time. Perhaps, at this point of the year, it is. There's something suffocating about the compacted experience of the end and the beginning. How so quickly, we must simultaneously grapple with the feelings they elicit, and the overall realisation that – in some ways – they are not so different: how the door that is half open is also half closed. It's a nauseous turn, a sickening straddle of past and future all rushing, rushing by.

I am not afraid of being older. But I am beginning to feel older. I look in the mirror and I recognise that I am no longer girl but woman. And though I am older and far happier in myself and in the world than I have ever been, I do not always feel like I have made it There. By that, I mean I don't feel that I have totally arrived at my life. That I am still somehow lingering at the sides, that I haven’t quite jumped in. It's what makes me so achingly happy-sad when I walk about, seeing people in motion, seeing constructed, routined, devoted livelihoods. Community, workplace, home. They have built something. They have found a centre to orbit.

I know that this panic is merely neuroticism. It’s something that feels grandiose and poetically tragic, but is instead merely a desire to know What I Want To Be When I Grow Up. I hate pencilling my life down into bullet points and targets. But I would very much like to have a plan, an aim, a goal. And I would like to have one that doesn't just feel like a pipe dream, a wild hope struck down by the realities of the world I exist in.

Possibly this has all come on because I find myself (thankfully) employed again but (regrettably) back in hospitality. Being a waitress again has reminded just how much I really don’t want to be a waitress for the rest of my life. The intensity of this always makes me feel incredibly guilty, as if I have some delusion of grandeur that I’m simply ‘too good’ for menial work.

Is that a fair criticism of myself? Don’t we all dream for something a little more? Does that make me a bad person?

I suppose what this is is just a reflection of how millions of other people feel. And there is comfort in that. But it is frustrating, bewildering, and painful. To feel like the avenues you desire are inaccessible. To feel as if the changes you want to make to the world, the good that you want to do is nothing more than a mewling cry into a screech of white noise.

I want to be helpful and kind above all things. I want to live for other people as much as I do for myself. I want to write. I want to get off my fucking phone and be in nature. I want to feel like my life is always new and refreshing. I want home, belonging, comfort.

Do I want too much? Too many contradictions?

Who knows.

In the coffee shop, they’re playing The Zombies. The first pink of the setting sun is beginning to slant over the Talbot Rice gallery. I have always been too harsh on myself. I don’t have to know anything just yet.