I’m about to crash.
I’m not. I’m in control. I just want to crash, so I can reset.
Today is a pea-souper. A relief from the interchanging torrential rain and blasts of sun. Driving through the drizzle-mizzle-rain home. The sky is white-grey. I add to the queue of cars on the slip road. The colours of the traffic lights are incongruously bright. Looking left, I watch a flock of rooks held by the wind from their roost. Headlights on at half past four in the afternoon; it could be late autumn already, not mid-August. Above the fly-over, the shocking, sudden sight of an aeroplane coming into land; the white of the metal blurred into the white of the sky by the rain. The air is thick and heavy. I’m struggling to see; struggling to breathe. The lights go through their cycle, but no one moves. On paper – or, rather, on screen – everything shows normal, because the programme is running. But we’re stuck here, powerless. What’s happening? How long do we wait like this before someone does something? We trust in the programme. We trust in routine.
Even when it doesn’t feel right.
I am buying my toiletries from Gruum as the ingredients are natural, vegan, and the packaging is cardboard. I am buying my cleaning products from Smol for similar reasons. I am almost vegan again. I am buying my clothes from independent, cruelty-free places. Only to find that as I am choosing vegan options, I am wearing lots of polyester clothes, which means I am wearing plastic, and thus supporting the manufacture of fossil fuels, even though I’m going out of my way to avoid buying and using plastic. The most ecological material to wear is linen; but to buy linen clothes costs lots, and the clothes I’ve seen that are made of linen don’t express me as a person. They also take ages to dry, and I don’t have a tumble drier. I’ve stopped shaving, so I can do a four-minute shower, and use less plastic and water. I bought a wooden-handled crystal hair-eraser, but as it doesn’t work on my armpits, I’m using my old electric shaver. So instead of the water, I’m using electricity. I have no idea how the electricity that gets to my house is produced. It might well be nuclear. Is there no escape? Is it possible to do no harm? My eyes ache from searching for the beam of a lighthouse in the fog.
I don’t eat meat, obviously. Mainly for the animal rights issues, but also because it is the single best thing you can do for the environment as a whole. Apparently. I need a new belt, because my body doesn’t seem to be in the right proportions for clothes. I search the internet for vegan ones. Most are made of plastic. My mum always worried that if people didn’t eat meat, there would be no need for farmland, so the whole world would be concrete. I used to think she was bonkers. Now I’m not so sure. But do we deserve the green if it depends on fear and death? And how can I buy a plastic belt when I know full-well it will end up in landfill once it’s worn through? My friend said I should buy a leather one, because if a cow’s been killed, then it’s only right to use every part of it. But the thought of wearing someone else’s skin makes me retch.
I know I’m easy to manipulate. I have no gut instincts. They’ve got smothered by all the possibilities. The only way to avoid it is to go into exile. And, let’s face it, most people probably don’t realise they’re doing it. Or they’re doing it out of self-defence. And anyway, humans manipulate each other all the time. It’s how we get things done as a society. I went on a customer care course. They said that we should always take into account that if we get a ‘difficult’ customer, that person might be having a terrible day, and we don’t know what’s going on in their personal lives. True, and well worth considering. But where do you draw the line? Everyone has some problems in their life; and there’s always the ‘final straw’. So, do we accept abuse, people-please and doubt our opinions the whole time?
Butterflies and their hurricanes. Sand is made of rock.
I want to come of Twitter, or X, or whatever we’re supposed to call it now, because it feels like I’m just messing around in Elon Musk’s playground. But where do I go? Isn’t Meta the same? Is it naive to presume I can escape from being anyone’s puppet? And it’s full of inspiring quotes and memes that say that it’s all good; keep going.
My website used to feel like it was my little corner of the internet – a place of freedom where I can say what I want – but whatever I say is interpreted by the number of people who read it. And The Algorithm is essentially controlling who – if anyone – reads it anyway. And I’m not really sure what the algorithm is – I can’t envision it.
I love Muse and the Manic Street Preachers. I ‘always’ have. But look at the lyrics. Songs written a quarter of a century ago resonate today. It’s the same issues, all the time. I saw Muse in Plymouth this summer. They’d constructed their Will of the People tour picking songs and images from all their albums back to OOS, and the theme stood as a piece of Art. Same issues; different day. Same fights and rebellions; different century.
Richey’s been missing since 1995, but his lyrics are still timely.
And what about Richey and his life and disappearance? I’m never going to get over the things I read in Withdrawn Traces – Searching for the Truth about Richey Manic. At one point in my life, he was my anchor. He was the only other person I knew of who self-harmed (although that wasn’t a phrase back then). I was in the front row at the Uni of Exeter Great Hall gig in 1994, I think it was, and we made eye contact, and I pulled back my sleeve to show him my scars – to kind of thank him for making me feel unalone – no one else knew – but now I realise I might have scared him, or he might have thought his message hadn’t got across; that he’d failed; that I was one of those ‘Cult of Richey’ girls. There I go again. Stop.
I’ve always worn a lot of black, but now nearly every piece of clothing I own is black. My hair is black. My nails are black. My car is black. Every moment is a Schrodinger’s Cat moment.
I rescue animals in my real job, yet this means confining them, if only temporarily. There are ethical, veterinary, monetary issues involved that I never considered before. Is utilitarianism as good as it can get?
And what would we do with a utopia, anyway?
The only thing I feel I can do to change the world for the better, is write, but in spite of my best efforts, I haven’t achieved the level of success I’d aimed for. And it’s only words. One day this blog will be like hieroglyphics are to most people. Art really is for the elite, I see that now, sitting in my car, the windscreen wipers off, allowing the droplets of drizzle to blur my picture of the world. It’s why I’ve upped my hours in my predominately manual, physical, low-paid job. I need financial security. And Art is pretty useless and wanky, really, isn’t it, in ecological and particle-physics terms. You can’t stop global warming, or save someone’s life with words, can you?
I’m listening Lipstick Traces by the Manics. Close My Eyes. People with old cars like mine are switching their engines off. We’re not going anywhere anytime soon, so I close my eyes, just for a second. I think of all the song lyrics I’ve wanted tattooed on me. I know that no lyric spewed up by AI would ever make it onto my body. It would be meaningless. Much as people like to use the analogy of the human brain being like a computer, it’s not. You cannot reduce human consciousness to 0s and 1s, no matter how many equations or whatever make patterns and predictions out of gravity, thermodynamics and all the rest of it. Yes, the answer to life, the universe and everything might well turn out to be 42; but even I think there’s something else going on. Ironically because something can’t come from nothing. I feel my mind unravelling. Keep calm, and …
I hate memes. I hate emojis. I hat inspirational, motivational quotes. I hate adverts. But I join in, in the attempt to sell my books. I don’t want to have a load of internet pen-pals I don’t know who might not even be who they say they are – I want to spend my free time with the people I love – my family and friends – not end up having a what seems to be a decent conversation about #writerslife, only to realise that I am being played, and that yet another Instagram PR ‘expert’ is trying to sell me their services. But even I’m not who I say I am. I write under a pseudonym. I do this because when I wrote my first novel, I didn’t want anyone to connect the novel with me, and my family. I also didn’t think my real name would help me sell books. And I like my pseudonym and feel like my pseudonym suits me more than the name I was given. It’s supposed to be empowering, isn’t it, naming yourself? And isn’t that what we’re all supposed to be doing now – expressing ourselves? Living our ‘best life’, whatever the fuck that means. I’m a hypocrite, hating the bullshit, entrenched in the bullshit, adding to the bullshit.
I always thought I would be dead before I was 20. But the natural world is beautiful, incredible, awe-inspiring, and I don’t want to miss a sunrise, a concert, my little boy chatting for hours and hours non-stop about Jurassic World. I want to travel. I find people and their theories fascinating. I have responsibilities. Loyalties. Even the midst of the nadir, I can’t deny that I have had fun.
‘It’s all in your mind’. That’s my ‘tagline’, and it has been since day one of this Morwenna thing. There was an article in the Guardian the other day about how we can bolster our mental immunity by being ‘mindful’ (I fucking hate that word), and by looking at everything in a light that makes me feel better. Essentially lying to yourself. Editing your past; directing your future (as I wrote in my first self- and now un-published novella, Bottle Garden). Because it IS all in your mind. We create our own realities. That’s why people do the DARVO thing. It’s all survival instinct and self-preservation.
Maybe the only honest thing I can do is kill myself. But would it be throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Maybe all this is just another painfully beautiful part of the human condition. Or maybe I’m part of another Reset and someone is making money from my misery. Maybe none of it matters, and the world is fucked already, so I should just wear my new plastic vegan belt and have a Haribo when my son wants to share them with me. Maybe it doesn’t matter that the grass on Mum’s grave needs cutting again. It’s become another thing-I-have-to-do : I don’t just go and sit and chat to her anymore like I used to. I don’t have time. And – much as I’d like to – I don’t believe in an after-life. So, the upkeep on the grave is just another task. Another thing to complete so I can feel better about myself. Fill the days. Libraries gave me power, ostensibly. But history is written by the winners, and the books that get read are the ones that someone has decided to publish and mass-market and put on school syllabi, for reasons best known to themselves. So, what am I actually doing here? Screaming into the void? It would be nice to think that maybe all the chemicals I’ve allowed into my system have made me think this way, but I’ve been thinking this way since I was seven years old, at least.
I can’t see them, but I know there are cows in the fields surrounding the concrete arteries of the world we’ve created. Look at what we do to the cows. I think of my belt. I think of microplastics and sand eels. I think of Lolita, the whale who died this week.
We overlook, or rethink, or redefine abuse for all kinds of reasons. But then, as I said earlier, what would we do with a utopia? People are the only creatures that don’t enjoy boredom. Fear IS the cause of all activity. Would we all get lazy, and just die? Those well-fed rabbits in Watership Down. They live in luxury and make art because they can. But every so often, one of them disappears, never to be seen again. And they all pretend it hasn’t happened, because if they acknowledge it, they’ll have to leave and lose their privilege. Is this where I am now? On the edge of leaving this writing game, out of some warped sense of right and wrong? Or am I going to go ‘Big Five’ or bust, with the name I was given by my parents? Play the game, because there is only one way if you’re not born into the privileged classes? Or is that just my excuse for my perceived failure? Should I give it up altogether and totally focus on my real job, where I do make a difference, and I do get paid? But will that be the intellectual equivalent of wearing linen and letting my body hair grow? Or, of just not eating and staying in bed so I’m not causing any harm to anyone but the people I care for the most? Will I be happy? There’s no knowing. But I’m not happy now, so something has to give. Morwenna’s not working, in any sense of the word.
There’s some reel floating about on one of the platforms. It shows the veins in a leaf against the veins in a human lung; a healthy meadow with tall grasses waving in the wind, against the hairs on a human arm. We are part of nature, it says. It’s uncanny and undeniable. Therefore, we have as much right to be here as that woodlouse I’m telling my little boy not to squash because it has as much right to be here as us.
The mist is all-encompassing, and the lighthouses are blinding me and they have been put there by someone with an ulterior motive. But at least they are there. But there’s always the possibility that none of this is real anyway.
Eventually, time resolves the traffic jam and we’re moving again. Wipers back on, I drive home. I can see more clearly now I’ve taken some action to help myself. Like I take my meds. Get some exercise. Drink water and have a healthy dinner. Take a break from social media. Watch the birds and the squirrels in the garden. Be in the moment, don’t think about the journey.
I’m having a rest because, as it says on the intermittent signs on the motorway, tiredness kills, take a break.
Who knows, maybe this NaNoWriMo I’ll actually finish my WIP. It’s called Cover Your Tracks. Ha!
#writer #author #existentialism #mentalhealth #amwriting
Morwenna Blackwood, Author 