Sometimes I can be really down on myself. You might want to stop reading there if you’re not the sort to like the odd bout of chronic self-loathing-criticism.
I don’t entirely know why I’m so down on myself today. It’s one of those days where I just feel like a non-person, a fake, a fuck-knows.
I lay there, reading my book, candles going, lava lamp lava-ing, listening to XFM; basically my perfect night, apart from the obvious absence of my girlfriend. And as I listened to XFM (the station I repeatedly say “I used to love listening to”, but which actually, when I check, only came about after I left the London area; I think it comes from my trips to London driving my mum’s ropey old Peugot and tuning the radio in when I went. That and when I went to Birmingham and I couldn’t hear it it seemed the very epitome of everything I wanted to listen to…only having Chris Evans and Virgin Radio to listen to) I felt this vague feeling of completely lacking roots.
I wanted, all of a sudden, to be in a place of my own in London. A place I claim to hate with a passion; and I have no fucking idea why. Like a lot of things about me it seems to be an opinion picked up from someone else; an opinion which I’ve clung to to maintain some kind of stability of ‘self’, an opinion picked up when I didn’t really have a ‘self’ (beyond music, reading, cinema and engineering); and one to which I now seem beholden.
Why? WHY?! I don’t hate london, any more than I hate the frozen North; Jesus fucking christ, I don’t hate anything, really. I make myself angry; I let my tastes be changed by the people I care about; I’ve not listened to my fucking music for so long. Why? Because I’m afraid that my partner-at-the-time won’t like it, I have to introduce it, make comments about it being “crap but I like it”. I’ve got films that I describe that way. I am so fucking afraid of people not liking me, or taking the piss, or something; something I don’t even know what it is that goes so deep into me that I can’t seem to escape and just be myself. I have to introduce things I like with some kind of apology.
Why am I so terrified of my opinions? Why am I so terrified of me? I don’t understand. People (seem to) like me when they get to know me, for who I am; crap music taste and all (so I like No Doubt, and Father Brian and the Fun Lovin’ Cardinals, and Menswe@r (even with their hideous abuse of the at sign)).
Of course London’s just another shit excuse for ‘not having made any friends’. London seems so lively, so full of people, it must be possible to make friends; although everyone I know has described it as difficult to make friends there. Fact is I could perfectly well make fucking friends here; I just don’t seem to. I hide, I lurk, I get scared and want to hide in a fucking corner under a fucking rock.
I am me; I need to get used to that fact, and I need to accept that and I need to stop being so afraid of who I am. I need to talk to people. I need to get a life of my own, and not vicariously though my girlfriend. I mean, what kind of sad, pathetic individual am I that I’ve not made any friends on my course. Gah. I’m a fucking useless bitch, that’s what.
No. That doesn’t help. I’m not fucking useless, nor, really, a bitch. I’m just frustrated at myself.
By the way, you should check out the Mylo song, sans questionmark the name of which graces this hideously self-indulgent post. But hey, it’s my journal, if I want to fill it with shit then that’s my perogative.
It’s funny how, tonight, I really wanted my records. Not my CDs, no, my vinyl records. Something about them; I know what I’d’ve done. A bunch of singles played one after another; possibly even some of the rare, limited edition stuff that I really shouldn’t play, and then on to some of the albums. Probably some The Smiths, and then eventually Dvorak (Symphony #9, From The New World). But yesterday I rearranged the lounge, and though it’s much nicer, much more lounge like, having removed my amp I removed my means of finding solace to calm my mind and stop it playing such evil fucking tricks on me.
I would have been down, yes, but in a different, more relaxed, less angry at myself way. Anyway, so there it is.
