Category: Personal (Page 2 of 9)

Here we go again
Now I’m not looking back ’cause that pain is dead
If history’s repeating
It’s worth it for the feeling

Earlier today, for no particular reason, I trawled my computer and Facebook photos to find one specific picture of myself. I’m not that much of an egotist (honestly!), but this one certainly speaks to me.

I’m on holiday, standing in front of Blackpool Tower. I’ve got one hand in the air, striking an impressive pose. The wind is blowing back my hair and a bit of the T-shirt I’m wearing. This is the first time I’ve actually worn this tee. I wore it about three times before it mysteriously vanished, lost somewhere in the milieu of clothes I still have yet to be washed.

On my face is a rapturous, euphoric expression. At the time this was taken, I was feeling free.

This is, of course, history. I can look at this picture and remember the time it was taken; I can also look at it and see things long since gone. Youth I have long since passed. A tee I loved and lost. A place I no longer go to, in a group I no longer speak to. I’m even noticeably slimmer in the picture than I am now. Should I wish to, I could look at this picture and mourn the past, wishing I could recapture that feeling.

But I shan’t.

There’s a lot of pain in my history. Whether of my own making or not. I have issues with school bullies, the mental anguish I went through with the villainous conductor of the band I was in, and the tedious drudge through 2008 – 2010, doing a course I hated at an institution I despised, the only high points being sex and cuddles with my girlfriend.

I’m not very good at letting go, either. The smallest thing can pitch me into a spiral of traumatic memories and sneaky self-doubt. I’m meant to be working on it – of course I am – I’m just not very good at that.

But I think I’m getting better.

Maybe there’s something that makes the past more of a friend. Perhaps there’s a funny blog post I wrote about it – there are plenty of those – or a pleasant memory attached to the otherwise-hideous situation. The school bullies who ended up as friends. The conductor leading a round of applause for me specifically because of my contribution to the contest we won. The time I cried because of what happened at college while my drinking girlfriend stroked my hair and told me that she believed me.

It requires a lot of effort on my part – filtering out what I want to focus on. Bits and pieces are there; it’s just finding them that’s the problem.

But I’m working on it. And, if I really can’t do it – if there’s far too much else there and history is too much to bear – then there are always alternative realities to slip into.

And there’s always porn.

Oh hai, sex drive. There you are. Where did you go? It’s been a while, friend. Let’s catch up. Fancy a cup of tea?

It’s funny that you should turn up, sex drive. I think I saw you briefly the other day, when I saw something on Twitter that shouldn’t have turned me on, but it did. Fair enough, it wasn’t my kink but something about the way it was presented got me feeling things. Something about the guilt-free abandon and amount of glee involved. I noticed you then. You were just sitting quietly in the corner, but you were there. I could have sworn it.

Maybe I had you with me last night, sex drive, when I got up from the nap on the sofa to transfer to the nap in bed. I didn’t see you, but when I got up and stretched, I felt the familiar twinge between my legs and had a fairly sizeable bulge to deal with before I could get to bed. Maybe you were there then. I don’t know.

Sex drive, you are very difficult to pin down. Ask me two weeks ago if I’ve spent any time with you and I’d say I had. Ask me earlier this week and I’d say that I hadn’t. I know that I should be a better friend, sex drive, and that’s my fault. I say that I don’t have the time, or the energy, or the resources to meet up with you. But you always have the time for me, and sometimes you turn up even when I don’t expect you.

Like that time three weeks ago when you said hi partway through the staff meeting at work. Or two months ago when I fell asleep on the bus and woke up very hard and very wound-up. You’ve appeared on long journeys and in my dreams. Sometimes you’ve even been more awake than me.

But I haven’t seen you anywhere, sex drive, at least not recently. I miss you and what your company brings. They say that I don’t need you, the voices in my head. They say that, because I’m not having sex, your friendship isn’t at all necessary. But that’s not true. I love you, I miss you, and I wish you weren’t so difficult to find.

And now here you are once again. Hello, sex drive. Let’s be friends forever.

Yesterday afternoon, just after work, I went for drinks to celebrate one the birthday of one of my colleagues. I found myself, although not for the first time in my life, surrounded by women – as they got progressively more drunk, their conversation varied from the size of their boobs to different methods of contraception.

(At one point, one of them may have had said she hasn’t had sex since December. I didn’t quite hear, but…)

While I did my ILB Thing™ of sitting quietly in the corner making no noise, I did pitch in with a few conversations (I’m not that much of a pariah), especially when the topic turned to autism management and the different ways in which people stim. More discourse happened about the way to centre yourself when you feel overwhelmed.

“I suck my thumb,” said one colleague. “I know I shouldn’t, but I do. It helps me calm down.”
“My ex used to suck her thumb,” I said without thinking. “She did it every night; I rarely saw her sleep without doing so.”

I shouldn’t have said that. Not because it wasn’t true, but because I’d forgotten it up until then.

As much as things remind me of my second girlfriend (second chronologically; I don’t have more than one girlfriend!), I do have to wonder if there’s anything that reminds her of me. I have a scarily accurate memory, so I can recall things and events from the past with some amount of detail – you’ll know this if you read my blog – but I’d forgotten about this.

I’d forgotten about this although I know so many things I shouldn’t. I know her married name and I know the name of her son. I’ve read her MA essay and even her Ph.D. thesis (I’m not acknowledged, even though we had sex on the floor while encoding some poetry readings, but then again she doesn’t mention her husband either, so…), both of which are very good. I even know where she works now and have to wonder if she is still as angry as ever.

But I’d forgotten about the thumb thing.

The seamstress used to try to justify this to me. It was a comfort thing, carried over since she was little. It happened while she was asleep and she couldn’t control it. Maybe it was a way to centre herself. It once happened when she had a cracked tooth and she couldn’t stop. Once she even told me it was because she wanted to feel like she had a cock in her mouth. The excuses kept coming, and coming, and coming…

But I didn’t care. I liked it. I thought it was cute.

In fact, I thought a lot of what she did was cute. I liked the patterns on her underwear. I liked the way she pronounced “Ph.D.”. When helping her pick a dress in the shop, I chose the one that showed off her boobs and she giggled. I liked that too. I liked how filthy her sense of humour she was and how she insisted that she used to be cool. When I noticed a chunky pair of sunglasses she had, she lent them to me and I liked that.

But I forgot about the thumb-sucking until yesterday afternoon.

And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Maybe I’ll never quite move on.

Blam. Blam. Blam blam blam.

I blearily opened my eyes. My digital alarm clock showed a time of 02:30. That was chucking out time at the union bar plus half an hour for a kebab and possibly some more drinks. Usually I’d stay at the club until 01:45, duck out before everyone else and get chips and cheese before heading back to my room alone.

Always alone.

But this was the night where I’d decided to go back to my room at midnight and get some sleep. (If there was one thing I needed, I reasoned, it was sleep.)

Blam! Blam! Blam!
“Oi mate, got any porn?”

Evidently, however, some people had other ideas. I was in my pyjamas – a rare occurrence, but a fortunate one. I thought, vaguely, of making no noise and pretending I didn’t exist – which would have been easy, since most people on my corridor seemed to assume I didn’t – but, since the knocking would have probably broken down my door eventually, I opened it.

“PORN!” shouted a very large, very drunk boy I had never seen before.

I blinked. There in the corridor stood an assemblage of large, drunk boys. The only one I recognised lived in room 1, which was the large room on the corner where we usually watched movies. I was in room 3, which was about the size of a matchbox.

“Hey, ILB,” said the boy I knew. “We were wondering if we could borrow your Emmanuelle porn disc.”
“I have an Emmanuelle porn disc?” I said. I wasn’t fooling anyone – in fact, I had two. One of them had been fast becoming my favourite thing to watch. The other less so. (In fact, one of them had arrived while my parents had been visiting. I said it was a book and didn’t open it until much later.)

I didn’t know how he knew I had one.

“PORN!!!” shouted one of the other boys, in a voice which probably woke up most of the city. Maybe all the lights went on at the same time, like in the last scene of Diana.

“Sorry about him. Could we borrow your Emmanuelle porn disc?”

Obviously the answer was no. Last time I’d lent someone something it had come back broken. I’d even paid for a £30 flight to Germany for the guy in room 2 who brought back a different girl every night. I never got that back either.

“Uhm, no…?” I ventured. “It’s not, not, not… good,” I lied. “It’s very baaaad porn; I think I’m going to… sell it…”

And I shut the door before any of them could say anything.

“PORN!” somebody said.

I went back to bed wondering how anyone had managed to find out I owned any porn.

And I sold it in the end anyway, so…

It was my birthday yesterday, and as a result, I’m now officially in my late thirties. I’m feeling very old.

Last night I had a nice meal with my parents; tomorrow, there is a family thing in the afternoon. I got a book from my wife and I’m assuming there are more presents forthcoming.

Is what I assume. What I’m also assuming is that I’m a relatively difficult person to buy for, insofar as I never really know what I want. Younger ILB never had this problem, as every Christmas and birthday was an opportunity to get a new Nintendo game. This is still a nice thing to get, but when one considers that I have five unfinished Switch games on the go and there are many more being added to the retro console emulator thingies, it’s more or less apparent that I don’t really need one right now.

I sometimes get things that I might use, but more often than not they become little more than ephemera. I’m more likely to use a stick of glue than I am my Stylophone, but then I like the fact that I own a Stylophone. I am a contrary boy.

I’ve decided, in these calm moments, that what I want the most is some quiet time. Time like this, with no distractions, no noise and no other responsibilities. The time to sit in silence and write my blog, or read a book, chatter on Twitter or play the aforementioned Switch.

Time, in short, to just be.

And, since you can’t package that and hand it over as a present, I’m having to find it for myself.

Or, if not, new porn is always welcome.

Sometimes I have these moments.

They’re not all good moments. Case in point: last night I had a dream in which I was having sex. The person I was having sex with (my wife, truth be told) told me it was boring, left, and just sort of wandered off, sending me into a sneaky hate spiral.

Is this really the reason? Dream ILB wondered. Am I the problem here? Is this why all my previous relationships ended so badly?

And then I flashed back to how my previous relationships ended, and how traumatic they may have made me feel at the time. I remembered being cheated on, and working it out beforehand but never saying anything. I remembered being jettisoned, without warning, unceremoniously – just before a year in which I was going to work on my life. (If I think about it, I still don’t have a reason for that one. Part of me thinks it boils down to “I don’t have a car”.)

I was responsible for how badly my third relationship ended. I still feel guilty about it, and I wasn’t honest about how our relationship had been ending for a long time before it officially happened. The train ride home was one of the worst times in my life, and she made sure I paid for it, too.

In all these cases, my brain tells me, the repeated factor is me – I am the lowest common denominator and I am genuinely not good enough. Why? Is it because I don’t have a six-pack, or a high-paid job, or a driving license, or an intact trapezius muscle? If I work hard in a job I like, does it really matter if the thing I take most pride in is a blog that makes no money, and music with no discernible talent?

If I have to use a stick to walk and say “Oof!” when I stand up, am I even capable of having sex? On the off-chance it ever happens again, will I be able to perform? Or will it be something else to add to the sneaky hate spiral?

Dream ILB wanted to talk about all of this to his wife, who had just left because the sex was boring. When Real Life ILB woke up this morning, he also wanted to talk to his wife about this. But then he also wanted to stay in bed. He wanted some quiet time to himself, just to think, to reboot, to decompress. Maybe just be alone for a while.

In the light of the day, it all doesn’t seem so bad. The worry is still there, of course – maybe there is something genuinely toxic about me? – but, with the sun peeking through the window, it all seems a bit lessened. Easy though it is to say that “everything will be better in the morning”, there’s a certain degree of truth in that.

I can’t look in the mirror and see something I like. I can’t even do that on self-reflection, even in the most positive of moods. Part of me will always feel like things are made a little worse by having me involved. People have told me this, and who am I to disbelieve them?

But sometimes, I forget. I forget to be unhappy with myself. I forget that I am a completely unsatisfying person. It might be someone saying something, or doing something, or even something I’ve seen or read which takes me out of everything for a while and gives me the space I need to forget how I feel about myself.

And that’s all right. That’s okay. For now, that will have to do.