F*king awful (title censored)
By Simon Barget
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Today I wanted to talk to people in the street. As soon as I’d got down the front steps of my building and crossed the road, my attention was diverted to the few stragglers along the pavement, the few passers-by. Who are they, I thought?
In that instant I wanted to talk. I had that natural and spontaneous urge to commune with another human. I could just about sense that desire for closeness bubbling up in me, a desire buried under all the bitterness and surface grizzliness; I couldn’t deny that I wanted to communicate and establish a warmth. I wondered why there had to be such a barrier between apparent strangers, why it was so reinforced that you were not meant to speak, why we all had to remain cordoned-off unless it had somehow been countenanced.
I thought that at some point, or back to some obscure level of ancestry, that the woman with the sloping face turning the corner or the bulging man with the fat gait and his awkward overloaded plastic M&S carrier bag were always and had been related to me, but then I recognised that this was fanciful because I didn’t feel remotely close to them; in fact I felt inside how they appeared to feel from how they looked on the outside, alien, I felt like I hated them with intensity and wouldn’t want to talk to them in a million years. I felt more like spitting on them. I didn’t want them to come close.
I don’t want to carry on, I mean I don’t know why - and these things go hand in hand - I don’t know why I should hold myself back and not just say what it is I want to say as if there’s something so prohibited about me, about us all, that we have to shuffle along noiselessly in mistrust on a London side street when we have all these wonderful things in us, and yet we’re bowing under the weight of all these unbearably heavy and unwieldy thoughts all the time as we walk down Haverstock Hill, guarded, ever so guarded, good old Haverstock Hill, as we pass the WAC or the old town hall and Euphorium and the pedestrian crossing and the two benches and the pretentious fuckbag Everyman cinema.
I do not know what I am scared of. What do I think is going to happen? What is this ultimate judgement I feel is coming?
It’s like when someone asks me how I am and what I really want to say versus what I do say. What I really want to say is ‘fucking awful’, when even that’s an understatement and doesn’t quite capture it, but I don’t say fucking awful as if, of course, by not telling the truth, by not at least alluding to something close to depicting the real situation, that they’ll think better of me and won’t know that I’m depressed or lonely or perverse or unlikeable and we can all go on our merry way.
Maybe I can’t just say fucking awful because fucking awful would be a quantification of sorts, a description, and things are so bad and confused and difficult to pin down right now, things are in flux, that I don’t even know or have the confidence to express the belligerent certainty of fucking awful. Its like I don’t want others to think the things that I don’t want to think about myself, the things that I’m resisting, the things that might not suit me to admit to, the things I have some judgement somewhere about, that they’ll repeat these things back to me, mark me out as a bad person and that I’ll be even further cast aside than I am at the moment.
When someone happens to ask me how I am, I want to say: I have felt so fucking terrible for as long as I can remember, not because this is completely and utterly true - whatever level of truth we can ever successfully convey in conversation - not because I can absolutely and irrevocably know that for every moment up to now I have felt bad - clearly that can’t be the case - not because I can fully trust my memory, my biases and my moods, in sum, knowing that the question is vague and unanswerable and calls for more than a momentary response, but because it has such a full and beautiful kernel of truth in it; it holds much more truth than an evasion or an attempt to put a positive spin on things, it holds the most hard and liberating bulwark of truth, truth that you feel deeply and that sweeps away something inside, that saying it, and saying it like that in such emphatic terms conveys much more of what’s really going on than any other rubbishy watered-down, let’s-not-go-there deflection.
It’s not because I want to shock anyone, far from it.
But you can’t really say ‘fuck’ because it’s a bit jarring. But fuck is an integral part of the answer, I suppose, conveying anger, and the sentiment wouldn’t be carried properly without it, the importance is that there is a resentment underneath that needs to be sent over and that only caustic words can do the job.
There is something about another human being hearing you which validates you and when you’re uncomfortable sharing you don’t get the validation. All you need to do is give an honest answer once in a while and the resentment dissipates. But you have to acknowledge that you are this person here responding to something and that the first thing that comes to your mind is good and fine, that you feel really fucking bad and you don’t really have to think about it for one second to know it and that you don’t flinch from saying it and you just say it right now, here, how it is and it’s released, because you have told another human being, you have responded, and it doesn’t matter how that person takes it. And then you might be surprised how they respond, you might stop trying to manipulate and edit all your responses to every thing people say because you’re worried that there’s something deep down you don’t want to let them get the scent of.
Sometimes I’ll just stare at people in the street as we pass each other as if to challenge them to make good account of themselves, to prove to me that they’re not feeling fucking awful either. I want us all to convey why we think it’s ok that we all go around not saying anything until it’s someone we know and we feel comfortable enough or we feel that we ‘can’ and because there are rules and you just don’t talk to people on the street unless there’s some sort of stimulus. Or we can just pretend we hardly noticed them, each other, we can eradicate these moments from our consciousness.
Sometimes I stare at people to show how much love there is within all the anger to challenge them to show the same love and every so often someone will smile but most people are guarded.
I do not see how we can deny and negate all those moments which don’t happen to fall into our neatly-drawn categories so that anything that isn’t in our social and work situations and our safe spaces, our pre-arranged meetings, subject to our questionable habitual ways behind closed doors with known family, tacit agreements, contexts where the lines have been drawn and the rules laid out, I do not accept that everything else has to be made nugatory and blank as if it never existed, tell me that I’m wrong.
Sometimes I’ll see someone say something to someone else, stranger to stranger, and I’ll think how dare they, I didn’t think people did that and I had so much invested in claiming that it never happens and it will surprise me and put my nose out of joint like: I ran by a young woman and her great big unkempt beast of a terrier - it might have been a lurcher or an Irish Wolfhound - and then I passed another woman who the dog had approached and the second woman just said: ‘what a lovely dog’, and I was a bit surprised that she spoke to the first woman, and I had to make sure in my mind that they didn’t actually know each other and that there had been free spontaneous speech and my judgment of myself is that I would have loved to have said that to the first woman, but it hadn’t crossed my mind that I could, and I would not have been able to say that, and that that inability to say it was a scourge, and I was envious and annoyed and I shouldn’t have to suffer it, such is the awful shameful crap that is going on in my head.
I want to be the one breaking the silence, piercing the veil and I don’t want anyone else to do it either.
But then I can see that the dog remark was on the Heath and that people feel more relaxed and it’s ok and encouraged to say something dog-driven and so I could countenance it a bit more, but I still don’t think I would have been open and free enough to make such a heartfelt remark.
The level of self-judgment is enormous. It’s all-encompassing.
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Comments
Haven't read yet (will do
Haven't read yet (will do shortly) - but all titles need to be U rated so could you please do something about that? Either asterisks or another word?
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I think it's something to do
I think it's something to do with our website being public? As in not needing registration to access the front page? I know it's a pain - sorry!
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Far from fucking awful I
Far from fucking awful I think this is rather great.
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That's a lot of thinking. I
That's a lot of thinking. I relate.
I find it hard to sit with those ideas for too long because I have an internal voice saying "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone". The best thing to do is to break the silence with some cynical humour that allows you to say what you think without seeming to be on the attack.
I am a big challenger with the stare. I am always willing folk to make eye contact. It opens the door to simply acknowledge a raised eyebrow at how bad, crazy, beautiful dull this shared experience of life is.
A good piece of introspection.
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