Troubled Waters - Art, Poetry, Chronic Fatigue and Job Hunting

As the days roll on and the hours tick by I am more aware than ever before that I will soon be tipping my toes into the bubbling troubled waters that I have managed to elude for so many recent months. The signs on the way to the lake steaming with the unresolved demons of my perpetually trapped predicament are not good. The symptoms of what may be Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, symptoms that I displayed vigorously last October 2008 and were the final push over the edge of the boat of employment, have come back in a sudden pincer attack from the left flank. I did not see them coming. After what must have been 5 to 6 weeks of a never ending cold that turned out to be hay fever after all I have been left drained of all the energy and possibilities I had worked so hard to build up during these last few months since the last days of my wife’s Doctoral Thesis and Clinical psychological course. I had endured the hardship of living a series of lies and coating myself in a brocade of thin facades that differed according to whom I was lying to.

The lies were over and so was my wife’s course, which I had quit my job to help her complete, whilst she battled against the opposing forces of motherhood and academic/ career achievement. Yet the problems that lay calmly floating beneath our newly polished edifice have started to boil again and I am being psychically reminded, through impossibly difficult and unpredictable bouts of fatigue and unexplainable lethargy, that my problems have been left unresolved in the period between leaving my last unhappy, soul destroying, painful job and the new job that I must now devote all my precious time and little energy to finding. I have no choice anymore. No amount of career coaching and soul searching or arithmetic gymnastics on colourful spreadsheets can hide the one simple truth that I am trapped in. I need to bring home over £2200 after tax every month for us to no longer erode our final tranche of rapidly diminishing savings, which, when they have gone, will never be replaced. Once the buffer is blown and the dam breaks our pseudo independent lives and being able to live in the house we struggled so hard to make a home will be put in jeopardy. This is a real drama, not some moral mind game created within the depths of my imagination and its machinations, twisting the lives of my protagonist and the tortured souls trying to find themselves in a storm of self destructive passion that will not leave anyone untouched or let anyone escape. The storms of my reality have come to get me, and the psychical strength and energy I had come to take for granted in the last few months, the renewed sense of vigour that I felt was my reward for months of balance dieting, eating lots of fresh fruit, vegetables, spinach, not drinking beer, avoiding smoking cigarettes, going to the gym and walking whenever a tiny gap in space-time appeared, all that hope is lost once more, and all the efforts were in vain.

I can barely find the energy to type. I struggled to go to the British Museum to take my wife and daughter to see the Shah ‘Abbas exhibition which closes tomorrow. I was out of breath, could not focus or concentrate, and kept bumping into doors, walls and tables. In the end, by the time we came back home, a journey made even longer by my procrastinations at the Marks & Spencer food store in Waterloo station, where I calculated frenetically on my bulbous silver weight watcher points calculator the calorific values of a wide variety of overpriced yet highly tempting high quality sandwiches In the end I realised my daily allowance of calories was a slow as my daily allowance of financial possibilities and so I picked the lowest value sandwich in terms of calories and fat and the cheapest priced one that I could find, Suffice to say it tasted like cardboard wrapped in a recycled cardboard package that ensured me I may be on a diet but that does not mean I have to sacrifice tasty food. Packaging always lies to you. The sandwich was awful and I do not wish to count on them or the “Count on Us” range any time soon. Being poor and on a diet is not fun. It is downright depressing, and maybe that final push into my constant dark brooding depression, that is permeating every part of my waking and sleeping psyche, was what made me fall asleep on the sofa at 4.00 in the afternoon, as if I were an old man who had come back form year s of war. I am 30 years old and I eat spinach every day. How can someone so young and with such a healthy diet be so perpetually fatigued? I only woke up by 7.30 because I wanted to have dinner and not miss the Waldemar Januszczak documentary on BBC2 about Manet, “The Inventor of Modern Art”. I have just finished watching that programme and as ever it was fascinating and Mr. Januszczak and his enthusiastic, rapid walking style managed to punch away the globules of fatigue trying to coagulate around my eyes, and I stayed awake.

The programme inspired me to fight my fatigue and at least try and write something. I find it easier to blog than work on the novels as at least a blog post will get published, whereas the novel will probably lie buried in the dark recesses of my rotting mind as my brain becomes worm food when I finally depart this arduous and petty world. What depresses me even more, and many things have begun to depress me even more, is that many of my blog entries are still unpublished. I have not had the chance to finish them, edit them, or even post them.
They are just blog posts. Little rants I feel the need to type and then post onto the binary sheets of cyber space because I have too few people in reality that I can be honest and open with. My wife started a new job recently and as ever is always too busy and stressed herself to take any more of my rants. They are not irrational rants. At least they don’t seem irrational to me, even if I am losing focus and perspective day by day. They are based on real life problems. Like the inequitable distribution of wealth. That may seem like high minded economic theory that should be reserved for great minds like Marx, but it affects me on a very personal level and daily basis. I have done nothing but give up every dream I ever had and force myself to study for and endure years of mind numbing number crunching so that I can earn a decent living and someone may want to marry me, to help me get out of the wretched emotional hell hole that was my childhood home. I never believed that a girl would take me seriously unless I was a qualified professional. Certainly all my in-laws respect me far more because I am a charted management accountant, yet my wife assures me it made no difference to her. Whatever the truth it certainly does make a difference to her whether I can pay the mortgage or not and that is where my problems link in nicely with the problems of inequitable wealth distribution. I will explain further in another blog entry, to keep this one from becoming as long as War and Peace.

I am typing this blog post frenetically and I am sweating. It is as if I will never get the chance to blog again so must let out as much of what is going on inside me as soon as I can. I have been job hunting and there is nothing out there I want to do. That is not exactly true. There are many cool jobs and careers out there but I am not qualified for them or they pay too little to cover my mortgage. All the jobs I do not want to do, but will end up applying for, do not even pay the amount of money I need to break even every month. I eat Tesco Value bread for lunch every day and I can find no more ways to squeeze the budget. When I do start working it will drain me of my already depleted energy levels so much that I will have no desire to do anything after coming home but fall asleep on my bed and be fed intravenously with glucose liquids. I know this to be true because I have no energy already and I don’t even have a job.

I wonder what the protagonist in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From The Underground” will end up doing to himself, considering that his life is so meaningless and painfully lonely. He sees only stress and pain when he looks outward so he decides to find solace through introspection and cutting himself off from the rest of society. I have a wife and child so I do not have those luxuries. As if there is some higher being listening to my typing and reading these electronic words as I type them, my wife bursts into the room right now, at 8 minutes past midnight, and I can hear my daughter wailing in the background. I need to help my wife put away the baby food she has just been cooking, late on a Saturday night for our daughter. Oh what a glamorous life we lead. I look into my wife’s eyes and as she apologises for interrupting my creative flow I sense she is resentful towards me. She denies this. I am getting more paranoid as the days roll by.

I work hard for my wife. I may not have a job but I pass my less fatigued hours in the days doing all the chores she would otherwise feel compelled to do. When I go back to work who will hoover the house, or sweep away the thick, grey layers of dust densely coated over the rows of unread books we dream of reading yet will no doubt become nothing more than family air looms donated to my descendants, to whom I hope better fortunes are realised.

The future is not sunny. It is bleak, and like a character in a Dickens novel I am in a miserably depressing predicament. I need to find a job. I have no desire to go back to the soul destroying jobs I was doing before, and I am still not healthy enough to even search for one. I am also job hunting in the middle of the worst financial downturn since the great depression. I can only offer potential employers less energy and motivation than every other candidate I come against, and I have no desire to beat them and get those jobs. What am I to do?

I do find a certain degree of solace in the strangest of places. Celtic Poetry. Certain long forgotten and cast out parts of my soul were highly stimulated and brought to life by the episode of “My life in verse” that I watched yesterday night. It involved ex Catatonia singer Cerys Matthews travelling around Wales, Yorkshire, Ireland and Scotland, tracing the influences on Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes and the likes of Yeats. For some strange inexplicable reason I felt connected to the last stand of Celtic England as the brooding Windswept Dark Stone columns of the Yorkshire Moors stood alone as testament to the power of nature and its cruelty, be it in the elements or man’s actions, against anything that stands in its way.
I am standing in the way of Natures reality and it is battering me with daily bouts of IBS and Chronic Fatigue. I will have to go back to work soon, and when I do all life will be sucked away from me. No More blogs, no more novels, and no more psychological journeys into the minds of all the flawed heroes I have created. All that will be left for me to do will be to smile artificially and thank the gods that at least my exploitation and lack of opportunity to pursue my dreams comes in a more comfortable form than it does for most people in the world, many of whom live in the conflict zones in the land of my father.

It is not much of a consolation as I start slipping into the boiling troubled waters pulling me into their wretched domain.

Relevant links:

The Distribution of Wealth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_distribution

Karl Marx:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx

Dylan Thomas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Thomas

Waldemar Januszczak (Amusing and engaging Art Critic and TV presenter):

http://www.waldemar.tv/

Manet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manet

British Museum:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/

IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irritable_bowel_syndrome

http://www.theguttrust.org/

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome:

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Chronic-fatigue-syndrome/Pages/Introduction.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_fatigue_syndrome

Dostoevsky:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dostoevsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_Underground