Because there always is one…

Looking back over the previous entries in this blog (apologies for the bad/sloppy spelling and punctuation) I’m left with a strange sensation. The ‘me’ in those past entries seems like a wholly different and remote person (and probably is). I was reading an essay by Adrienne Rich (When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision) the other day where she says:

What frightened me most was the sense of drift, of being pulled along by a current which called itself my destiny, but in which I seemed to be losing touch with whoever I had been.

Looking back on those old posts now I can see in a sense that I was drifting along on my own current that I too felt powerless to control or affect. What strikes me is the incoherent anger in so much that I had written; that and a pessimism and cynicism for everything (did I really hate Agyness Deyn that much?). It is certainly the case that I was undergoing a number of life-experiences in my twenties that I don’t think many people experience, but I’m not sure if I can wholly attribute everything to this.

I think a more likely explanation can be found in the town I grew up, a nothing-y, nowhere place: a seaside town which seemed inescapable and which seemed to indoctrinate its populace with low expectations of what to expect from life. A friend put it to me not so long ago as: “Where we came from; we didn’t stand a chance”. Anyway, I find it all very reminiscent of Lynsey Hanley’s “wall in the head” and while I perhaps still struggle with the “wall” in my own head, currently I feel on my uppers.

I suppose then, that this is some kind of statement of recalibration and renewed purpose… the personal is political and all that…