I’m having trouble knowing how I feel. I’ve felt like this since I came back from my recent holiday. You know, when you try to live a simple life it seems that letting go of the complicated stuff somehow empowers you to peel away a few surface layers and peek into life, seeing deeper and harder into layers you never thought existed. If you’re at all tempted to follow then let me warn you that there may be terrible consequences to this. Akin to some kind of cosmic spreadsheet a balance has to be redressed, even if that balance upsets and disorients you. I was going to make my next blog a happy one, recanting the holiday and the wonderful woman I left behind but instead I find myself in a waking nightmare. Am I being immature, selfish and/or indulgent? Well, truthfully yes, I think I am, but all self-critical reflections are like that aren’t they? As for being self-indulgent, well all of this has happened because I was left to my own devices to seek something more and looking back it was, and still is true, that there is simply no sufficient distraction or entertainment in my immediate surroundings.. nothing except a country and culture which is paper-thin and myopic.
I knew there would be a bit of a drop in my morale when I got back from this holiday. I have plenty of experience of the “holiday blues”, and so I totally expected them. To help Hazel, I warned her that there would be this feeling. So many times have we said that we missed and loved each other, but leaving a loved one behind is always a hard thing to deal with. Still I wasn’t prepared for the attack I have felt on my soul - a feeling of being dislocated and unable to reconnect with the life I put on hold. There is something more.. something different about this return which is sat above even last year’s victory of surviving the harsh reality of being isolated in a strange place so far from home. I feel like I’ve looked into my own personal Pandora’s box, and connected with the realisation that maybe one’s life does have limits.. limits which once crossed will do you irretrievable harm. It’s natural to yearn for more in life – that’s only human, but is it possible that in doing the unusual I have overstretched my perception of life, like an elastic band which gets stretched beyond its ability to return to its normal size? Is this why I cannot settle again? Let’s face it, looking from the third person perspective of all the people who know me best, I am likely the last person in their minds expected to have had the adventures I have experienced over the last two years. Am I feeling a depression, or even desperation from over-experience, like the come down from a natural high? It’s recognised that a lot of the men who landed on the moon had an incredibly hard time readjusting to life here back on Earth after their experiences, and although it’s true that I haven’t exactly been to the moon my last two excursions to the Philippines have been a close equivalent for a previously meek soul such as myself. Maybe I have been chasing a dream so closely that I have been ill-prepared for any personal growth gained from doing something so outrageous. For a good while I’m stuck with an inability to replicate what I have done, on the tether of a romance which because of society's own paranoid stupidity cannot progress, and at the same time on top of this I’m stuck with the feeling that I cannot live within the small confines I have returned to. Is this similar to the feelings that caused Neil Armstrong to become a recluse? I always been lead to believe that growth was one of the principle points of life, but what do you do when you feel you cannot pick up the threads again and carry on?
Maybe I have to let go of my old life and go walkabout, but in recognising that I was ill-prepared for this whole backlash I also know that I am ill-prepared for such a venture out into the world, even if I am so overwhelmingly compelled. Perversely, in spite of all this change in my persona I still find my meek, normal side reflecting that there is still so much I am afraid of. Without the help of others I still feel crippled by a lack of self-confidence and uncertainty. Damn it all, this same old feeling of inadequacy permeates everything I do. I’m hate feeling simultaneously over-enriched and weak. Having read "Catcher in the Rye" recently, I can't help but feel that this all feels like a Holden Caulfield moment to me, lashing out at the world because of my own weaknesses. Why can’t I just be normal and boring? Why can’t I just have the “trainspotting” mortgage, wife, car, a job I’m semi-happy in and a twisted and all-absorbing interest in football, mainstream TV and beer? I look around me at all the people here as I write this. Students, families, the elderly.. How many of these adults here present have experienced what I am feeling? It’s true that everyone’s life is different, but like a teenager who thinks they know it all, Iwould be naive in thinking that I’m alone with these feelings. How did they resolve these emotions? It’s reasonable to assume that some must have gone through this, after all to look at them they look quite normal and from the outside I expect I too look relatively normal. If I was one of those people and I was looking at me through their eyes then I can’t imagine that there is any mark on my exterior which distinguishes me from anyone else they see, other than perhaps the weary expression I’m wearing at the moment. Maybe if they knew me then they’d know my life at least seems to be far from normal. I think this is how I really feel.
Peace (!?)
