I have never been one to write a journal or diary. I tried when I was younger and discovered that my organisational skills were too limited to handle the follow-through and general regularity of anything let alone a book containing my feelings that nobody was forcing me to write. I also laboured under the illusion/delusion that it was the forum for the self absorbed and the conceited, and rather less snobbishly I found fiction far more entertaining to write about than rehashing my day. As a result my blog has been a haven for some of my most precious poetry but not all. I think on some level I would love it if people were reading this but at the same time I rather prefer that they aren't as I feel that I can write this with the idea of exorcising the thoughts out of me more than anything else.
So where to begin - so far. The story goes: young female disillusioned in Oxford. My emotions tend to swing sharply between feeling inspired and feeling inadequate. For a minute we will leave aside the universal albeit petty hang ups that plague all females at the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood. Coming back from the Christmas holidays felt rather like untangling a noose from my neck. No particular reason behind it, merely that having headed straight from the freedom of university to the adventure of Edinburgh and hub of culture that accompanies it I had been thrown straight back into the cosy comfort of a life I was no longer used to. Furthermore I get bored easily, so a brief sojourn back home needed to quickly be over so that I could once more be challenged and intrigued by my surroundings.
Once again at Oxford post-Christmas the ambitions I had loftily and idealistically set for myself seemed feasible right up until they weren't. The novel I had wanted to continue writing this term was suddenly impractical - possibly due to the fact that last term I had shut myself in with my thoughts to warm me and this term I was attempting to be my sociable self. Similarly the politics of the world, one of the things that gave me a reason to live, to read Albert Camus, and to want to do something, anything at all, with my life was trickling out of my periphery. I was back in plays again, at clubs again, feeling empowered again and yet I wasn't. There's this mass of people - and they are all... living. Breathing, laughing, loving, fucking, shopping, working and soaking up the earth. They look happy. They look happy as they wander round my college and I stare at them through the invisible glass that separates us. They look happy when I shatter my glass in order to join them, to be part of the breathing laughing loving lot. Yet when I do join them...
They seem inane. Uninteresting, or rather interested in nothing at all that intrigues me. On the surface we can just about get by - I like to fuck and shop and can just about handle work and I'm definitely down for soaking up the earth. Yet we are different. So very different. That invisible glass is glistening and glinting in jagged awkward shards on the floor. I pick up every piece, every cut on my finger, every slice on my hand is another lesson that I am having to learn. Slowly the pieces fit back in place and I wall myself in, wall myself away, wall myself apart. You would think having just traveled into their concrete world and loathed it that the green would have been stripped from my eyes.
It still hovers.
The number of idealists are really few and far in between, so I hover in limbo hoping to find someone to understand me - to understand IT. This thing that I have, this lust for life in more than the physical sense, in the possibilities and the ideas, in the dreams and passions that can be fulfilled. There appears to be no-one. So I wander through this ghost town of hard workers and creative types, brushing shoulders with the intellectuals who stride confidently between. All the while I am thinking... I relate to those intellectuals, I understand the creative types and when impassioned I work hard. All the while I am thinking... I am these people, but I am none of these people and none of these people are me.
All the while I am thinking... I love Oxford, I am thankful for my blessings and yet dare I say - that I don't quite get what I am doing here. Hanging on by the skin of my teeth? I'm not interested in deadlines and I don't care for being forced to read. It was passion that drove me to apply here, it is passion that leads me dancing into the Bod to read what was written by the Greats and their modern admirers, it is passion that has me leaping from audition to audition, passion that thrills me when I act on stage, passion that ignites my soul when I connect with people. Yet passion is not taught, cultivated or encouraged. It is stifled by limits, deadlines and timetables.
Who are these organisers and where is their passion?
Yet here I speak with an irrational mind for I know objectively what use these deadlines and timetables have, they keep our world turning, keep using providing.
But all I want to do is fly.
