How do I start?
I feel helpless and disgusted with myself for my laziness and blinkered attitudes. The thought of these blank pages is enough to fill me with a leaden sense of my own futile striving and hopelessly lazy temperament, whereas once I would’ve just picked up a pen and just started to write . . .
It’s almost as if I see myself as an empty shell, devoid of any colour or depth . . . This household has a grip on me, and I can’t shake it off. Brain like jelly, words wafting by, just beyond reach.
Individuality is eroded in this environment of 24-hour lethargy, chronic inability to rise from bed in the morning, interminable TV hours red-eyed till close-down. My work suffers, and I’ve missed two successive tutorials for Harrison’s European Modernism course, for which I hate myself (the course is actually rewarding), and I’ve still to finish one of Faulkner’s novels let alone the dozen or so we should have completed by now.
I keep shoring myself up with the familiar, weary promises: “Always tomorrow . . .”
I submerge myself in the collective nihilism of our little world here at Westdorgan Road and I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to be alone and to read and to feel body-mind-hand suffused with power and shivering excitement at an idea.
I partially blame my cell-like room, although admittedly my lifestyle can hardly be called austere, but I still think that the absence of any private space into which I can retreat occasionally is responsible for my steady decline.
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