Another day, another self diagnosis…

I realise this blog has degenerated into a tedious mumble as I pursue various self-justifying fictions into my past. Forgive me. Everyone hopes there’s a dangerous alchemy of childhood experiences that explains why they are such a fuck up, right? There’s an alluring simplicity and neatness to that narrative, so, please grant me five more minutes on the philosophy and origins of boredom.

Could it be the result of some mild attention deficit disorder? My immediate response to this question is disbelief, to accuse myself of pretention. My default position is to assume the unreality of my inner states. And I’m certainly not manic. I’m gently, indolently jittery at worst, not a full-blown climber of walls.

But I ought to weigh up the evidence before I dismiss the idea completely.

Take, for example, my rubbish reading and concentration. I am the slowest reader of anyone I know who reads. I don’t seem to be able to screen out competing data, and I’m constantly losing focus, going back and back and back to the top of the page. With each repetition it makes less sense, not more, but I’m hoping to use the re-reading as a run up to the next bit, which, if I just keep going, will make more sense, overall, will build up to a general impression of sense.

Blocks of text, paragraphs, seem to have a surface tension that resists me. Every time I try to penetrate their depths, I get bounced back out again. I’m staring at black marks on paper. I can translate those marks into jabbering sounds but they’re just as meaningless, so I keep reading, scudding across the surface like a small boat in a slight breeze that’s barely troubling deep waters.

Or maybe a better image would be of somebody running across thin, cracking ice that covers a deep, cold lake of incomprehension, knowing that, if they slow down, they’ll fall through.

You can see the anxiety in that image, how closely it mirrors the impetus for my actual compulsive running, the sense that, if I stop moving, if I stop doing, I’ll simply evaporate – become as insubstantial as water vapour in hot sunlight, because my latent, resting selfhood is non-existent.