The Ouroboros of Hate

Old ground mostly, from an email to a female friend:

Since talking with a neighbour on Thursday night, a pleasant old irish guy who was a professional footballer ruled out of his career by a severe injury , a self-described drunk and stinking of beer, I've been feeling ever more sad, to the point of choking up and crying again. He said of himself and a friend, who had asked him why they had failed to prosper while other friends made millions in the building industry and football "they took their chances, we didn't take ours"

I dreamt about my Mam last night, and had a conversation with her about what went wrong with me - almost the last thing she said to me in life was "you're as good as anyone here [the doctors and the nurses] I don't know what went wrong".

I found myself thinking of JS, and of other people I've known including you, and I remembered Melanie saying around 1991 that back at college she and you and Lorraine (and Lynn?) had discussed my unattractiveness and Melanie had mentioned it to her mum, and her mum had replied "you're wrong, he's the only attractive man amongst your friends, and you're all too immature to see past his baldness".

I thought of JS, how ordinary he was in looks (OK he had nice hair and could look quite sweet and boyish from one particular angle), how needy he often was in personality and yet how oddly confident he was, insofar as he threw himself into situations, and was convinced even at college that he was talented enough to hawk his writing and illustrations round London publishers. He found himself a crowd when he moved to London, he found himself a crowd in Tokyo. He made himself so attractive to women that he had two pretty wives, three children, and a very successful career.

I suspect if anything it's about being at ease with other people and feeling comfortable and unashamed around them, and so enjoying being with them.

There's a line in the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK" (I shouldn't have to explain this to you, you should know it, given your age and art school background, but I suspect I do).

"Don't know what I want but I know how to get it"

I think that sums up most people, they don't know what they want but know how to get it. You've told me you thought you didn't want children, but it turned out that you did. You thought you didn't want to be bourgeois (I don't use that as a term of condemnation) but it turns out you did. You thought you wanted to teach the underclass illiterate (I know you did because it came up too much in your conversation over the last couple of years, even as a possible option for me) but found out you didn't.

I pretty much knew what I wanted but didn't know how to get it, or couldn't, or felt I couldn't, or all three.

JS knew both.

I know a guy, R, who has more or less got himself a PhD, two MScs, and several BScs, a property portfolio, a sometime job as a professional builder, and had long term relationships, largely, he's told me, because he didn't know what to do with his life.

Rh is strange, she claims to regret the only things that clearly make her happy, like her family, and claims to have always wanted and loved the job that plainly made her feel miserable and resentful, as if she doesn't know what she wants or wanted. But anyway, she knew how to get them.

Most people seem to get the things I wanted by accident and lack of thought, like our Jess, unmarried and expecting a baby at 19, when she was such a bright ambitious child, or my neighbour L, five kids with three dads, a gran and not yet 40, and yet not stupid or lazy, or even promiscuous, my cousin J's ex-husband, who falls in to affair after affair, is paying alimony to two ex-wives, and is now two-timing his present partner.

People seem to be unable to avoid getting the things I wasn't able even to get started on but ached for.

I get trapped in this mental loop of hate. I find myself thinking "I'm better than most people, so I should at least have what they have, so there's something wrong with me, I can't get what these people have, even though I long for it, so I'm less than these people, but they're stupid and thoughtless so I'm better than these people, so I should at least have what they, have so there's something wrong with me, so..." ad infinitum. I have these flashes of blazing white anger where I don't know whether to kill myself or gun down everybody on the Precinct.

I knew what I wanted from my early teens. I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to have a wife and be married, I desperately longed for children, and had no idea what to do to get any of them, and got none of them, even the basic things most people, even the thick ugly manage, a partner and children, which I consider the core of a life lived.

I needed to be amongst people like me, to learn from them, to learn social skills, and life skills, and career paths, and options, and apart from those few years at college, which I consider the only even half-happy time of my adult life, I've been on my own since puberty, pretty much at the bottom of the societal pile.

Having worked with doctors and medical students for ten years, I know they're mostly not extraordinarily bright, but are overwhelmingly middle-class.

Is it any wonder I'm unhappy?

This "mental health worker" said the other week "from the thought diaries I asked you to compile, the underlying things that make you depressed come down to the same very few themes".

It occurred to me only the other day that she thinks that I'm vaguely depressed in mood, that this is some kind of passing mood disorder rather than what I believe it is, a reactive depression that has become long-standing because I have a small core of big problems that are long-standing, and some of them are due to that cliché "circumstances beyond my control", such as that very rare thing, being an unrecognised gifted child brought up in real poverty.

And more than anything that I'm probably past getting anything I wanted and valued. I'm old without ever having been truly young.