I actually wrote this a little while ago, intending to post it on time for this letter, then failing to as I'd decided it was a little too personal (and quite frankly, doesn't really make me look too good). However, on reflection I've figured that, partly inspired by Zoe's piece about standing by what you write, that inevitably things won't always look great, so it will do me good to post this regardless, trusting that you will be able to see this is an isolated moment (and not some demented cry for help). :) Also, it's the first bit of prose I've written for a while, and I'm not even sure I've ever just freewritten like this for the blog until now, so going back to the original purpose of the blog... here's something I wrote one day when speculating on the letter R.
Katy sat across from Bea, her tea steaming between them. Bea
was another rogue acquaintance, part of the process of meeting new people and
accepting every invitation, and like each of these occurrences she found
herself experiencing the vague sense that she had nothing to offer. Bea was
older, with a shock of red-gold curls, and had the assured confidence of
someone who’d battled workplace sexism and lived to tell the tale.
‘You just need to tell them what to do,’ Bea was urging,
while Katy nodded agreeably. ‘Don’t let them dictate to you. George doesn’t
really know what he’s doing when it comes to telling a story about his company
– he needs you to tell it for him. So step up and take charge – he’ll thank you
for it.’
Katy felt like she was sitting on the bottom rung of the
protégé ladder, when in actuality she had been pretty successful once – as
successful as she’d ever wanted to be, anyway. But living in a new place had
stripped her of years of confidence, leaving her pink-skinned and naïve before
every challenge, naked as a mole-rat. She didn’t really know what to do,
couldn’t remember how she’d ever cultivated those years of friendship, nurtured
a life filled with depth. Sitting there before Bea she was a novel amateur, maybe
just tolerated because they had to work together; it really could be little
more than that. Katy couldn’t see how friendships grew from such intangible
beginnings, how they took root. She didn’t have a handle on any one of her
‘friends’ so far – who they really were, what their favourite books were, where
their politics resided, what guilty-pleasure film or tv series cheered them up
after a shit day... the kind of things she felt defined so many of her
friendships; that intrinsic knowledge of somebody. She couldn’t slip into a conversation easily anymore, and she
always wondered when her calls home would start to become stilted, when she
would begin to feel herself becoming untethered from her remaining comfort
zone, the familiarity of the long-distance phone call.
Bea had ordered them another drink, taking charge. Katy felt
a small voice in her well up to start explaining her anxiety, and suppressed it
quickly – it was neither professional, nor appropriate, to expose herself as
too weak, plus she had a feeling that her shy demeanour to date had already
done enough damage on that front.
An hour later they left the café, and Katy trailed to her
car, armed with a new to-do list. She couldn’t face returning to the office so
she drove home, planning to write her notes up there and make a few plans for
the following week. That evening she had her first book group meeting, with
another new friend (and not even a friend through work – this was someone she’d
discovered on the internet through the library) and she was yet another person
she hadn’t quite fathomed, though reassuringly they had a few things in common
(books!). There was also going to be another new person there, who she’d never
even met – which she knew was a good thing, but the thought of more
introductory chit-chat made her feel instantly tired. She suspected she wasn’t
embracing the opportunity of the new in quite the way she should be.
The truth was, she didn’t see a way past the perpetual
conflict within her – she wanted to feel at home and surrounded by the comfort
of friends, but at the same time she felt as if she were betraying her ‘real’
friends back home by seeking new ones, as if to replace them with a caricature
army of trusted confidantes. She knew this train of thought was dark and
tainted with all her worst qualities, a twist on her fear of change, and not
for the first time she wondered if she had severely overestimated her ability
to build a new life – all for the want of a country vale.
Guilt was her new companion – oodles of people had it worse
than her, and she also knew that, quite frankly, she was being a coward, a
wimp, and potentially a failure. She was part of a cosseted age where feeling
unhappy about seeming trivialities was commonplace, and yet she knew that it
wasn’t as simple as lecturing herself that at least she wasn’t in late-70s
Cambodia, or trapped behind enemy lines in the last desperate throes of WWII,
or an Indian with a spear in a sea of Cowboys with guns. She hadn’t stood on a
land mine, or been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the sea or the
earth behaved out of character and wrought bloody havoc on the nearby populace
(though arguably she was treading on that front-line a bit more now). Maybe
depression was the 21st century malaise, and maybe it shouldn’t be
that way, and maybe she simply had too much time on her hands to contemplate
scenarios that fed her ruminations like a relentless ouroboros, but her
feelings were real (to her at least). Perhaps her stamina was failing her.
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