repairs

So, our boiler is broken. 

It's not completely dead - we still have hot water, but the heating isn't working at all and it's eight degrees below room temperature in the house right now. We have one small portable heater which is effective over a small radius but also sucks all the moisture out of your eyeballs if it stays on for more than ten minutes, and I am bad at cold. (I'm also bad at heat. I have an extremely narrow range of comfortable temperature and can't function outside it. I'd be a useless survivalist.) 

This used to happen all the time in our old flat. The landlord used to live there, about ten years ago, and operated under the assumption that time had somehow frozen since he left. It was a gorgeous place but after a decade of no maintenance, the landlord ignoring as many issues as he could get away with and doing the absolute bare minimum when he couldn't, it was fundamentally rotted.

Things that genuinely happened over the course of four years in our last flat:

- no hot water and no drainage in the kitchen for nearly the entire month of December

- plumber came over, said he knew what to do and would be back with the parts, never seen or heard from ever again

- open waste pipe in the cupboard

- closing said pipe broke the whole kitchen again

- the fence blew down

- all the lights went out

- fixing the lights broke the rest of the electrics

- leaks through the light fitting in the main room

- leaks through the light fitting in the bathroom

- leaks through the light fitting in the bedroom

- landlord attempted to refuse to fix bedroom leak because he'd paid money to have the ceiling done once

- less than two weeks later the entire bathroom FLOODED WITH SEWAGE

- boiler died completely, spent nearly two weeks with no heating or hot water

- completely different plumber said he knew what to do and would be back with parts, never seen or heard from ever again

- third plumber got booked and then never turned up at all, never heard from again

- fucked-up drainage warped the floorboards until they were sticking up like a steeple

- cabinet randomly exploded

- first ever attempt at routine maintenance broke several things beyond repair

- so much damp in the walls I became asthmatic

- just assume there are constant recurrent leaks happening throughout all of this

When we moved out it was uninhabitable. Only the bedroom leak was ever fixed, the plumbing and drainage were never sorted, the wiring remained literally illegal, and the walls were growing mould. Rather than spend the 10-20k it would take to gut and redo the place, the landlord opted to sell it for literally half what it would have been worth otherwise, and I would happily bet that he still tells people we were the ones who fucked up his property. We were so excited to find ourselves in a position to buy our own place, where we wouldn't have to deal with any of this figurative and sometimes literal shit anymore. 

Turns out plumbers can still ghost you. It's happened to me so often that I've started to wonder whether I inhabit some kind of weird Plumber Bermuda Triangle. I feel bad when I complain about it because it used to be worse, it used to be so much worse, and being able to buy somewhere to live in London is a ridiculous level of privilege in this day and age, but also I'm very cold and that makes me grumpy. We've been assured it's definitely getting fixed tomorrow morning, for real this time, so catch me back here on Wednesday complaining that we turned all the radiators up and now it's too hot to sleep. 

steps

Hahaha. Two back-to-back meta posts on the importance of regular and consistent writing and I then promptly forget about the entire thing for several days. In my defence I wasn't feeling great and we had the in-laws here for the weekend, but it's embarrassingly typical nevertheless. 

The weather this month has been stupid - sun and rain and gale force winds and temperatures all over the place - and it's been driving me bonkers as the kind of person who needs a daily walk the way a dog does. I never used to be that person. I really never used to be. I was firmly Team Move As Little As Possible and I would have taken any excuse not to leave the house. There have been plenty of periods in my life where I was exercising a lot, but it was always motivated by learning how to do something or a social aspect, where I would go to a specific place to do a specific thing. Up until two years ago I've never been someone who just goes for walks for no reason, and I'm still not really used to it. I went for my usual walk yesterday, in high winds and occasional mocking glimpses of sunshine in between random lumps of rain, and I could feel my past self watching me like I was some kind of zoo exhibit. 

A lot changed when I got diagnosed with ADHD and started taking medication. For the first year or so it truly seemed like every single problem I'd ever had had been fixed; the difference in my ability to function when medicated was so stark and so unfamiliar, and I was so excited by being able to just exist the way I'd always wanted to. When my medicated state became the one I was used to I realised nope, there's still a bunch of shit to unpack from the previous three and a half decades of being an undiagnosed neurodivergent person. I also realised that I'm still the person I've always been, with the same foibles and the same ingrained patterns of behaviour, and even when medicated there is still work I need to do in order to keep functioning on a day-to-day basis. I'd just started to work on that when the Elvanse shortage happened and I couldn't fulfil my prescription for eight months. It was rough. A lot of things I'd become used to slipped away from me. But for some reason, the daily walks stuck. On this point at least, my brain has re-wired itself. Brains are weird and I really wish I didn't have to spend as much time thinking about mine as I do. 

Sometimes the walk helps me think, if I'm in a receptive enough place to begin with. Sometimes it helps me with writing or planning. But honestly, most of the time it does nothing of the sort. It's just there. It's sustenance. It's like a sandwich. I'm not inspired by it, but I'll feel like shit if I skip it. Maybe most people feel this way about going for a walk, I don't know. Maybe this is the least interesting thing I've ever written (it is not. I used to have an America's Next Top Model recap blog). But I'm not used to thinking about it like that. There's so much bullshit grafted onto mundane things, so many ways in which health is just a code word for what will other people think of your body, that I'm genuinely not sure the idea of its being a basic self-compassionate need had ever occurred to me. 

I honestly thought when I decided to restart a blog that it would be more "here's some stuff that happened" rather than "I've had Thoughts again", but this is where we are and this is what you're getting. Maybe tomorrow something really stupid will happen. 

writing on writing on writing

I'm writing a second post immediately, because coming up with a lofty mission statement and then immediately abandoning it is a particular skill of mine. Also the longer I leave it the more pressure I put on myself for the next thing to be objectively good, whatever the fuck that means, and frankly it would be nice if I could just Do Stuff sometimes. 

Trying to write honestly is weird, and it's a large part of the reason I've kept everything private for a long time. Putting any authentic emotion into fiction requires giving a little bit of yourself to it, and I've often stalled in the middle of something because my brain starts needling me: people are going to think this is just you. They'll think this thing happened to you. If they know this thing didn't happen to you, they'll go on the internet and tell everyone you're lying about it. I'm aware it sounds silly. It is silly. It's not entirely unfounded, though. Some writers openly say that this is how they do things, and people have projected onto my work like this before, admittedly most often because they'd quite like to be in a story and they assume I must have put them in mine somewhere. So often my anxiety takes priority over what I know to be the truth, the potential judgement of an imaginary someone becomes more important than telling a story I want to tell, and I stop writing it. I need to get over this, because the emotional kernel is the thing that makes my stories flow. When I try to do without it, for this reason or because my needling brain has told me that real writing is Plot-Heavy Hard-Hitting Bleak Shit and nothing else, I can maybe squeeze out a few pages of vaguely competent mulch before I get too bored and annoyed to carry on, and I get nothing out of rereading it. My writing is best when it's exploring a complicated bond or strange dynamic between characters, and I would like to feel free to write about an abusive parent or unrequited love or too-intense friendship without my brain compelling me to preemptively project shit onto it before anyone else can. 

Blogging honestly is a different beast, because this is me and everyone knows that. On OpenDiary and LiveJournal and DeadJournal and all the other places I was writing in my teens and twenties, there were two or three readers max who knew me in real life, but the internet's changed. People will only find this if I tell them it's here, so anyone who reads this almost certainly knows me already. (Hi.) Which leaves me in the weird position of trying to work on my stated goal of chilling out, expressing myself more freely, not second-guessing myself, while avoiding crossing any invisible lines into Oversharing or Creating Drama. I'm already having to fight the urge to leave this one in the drafts, telling myself I'll come back to it when I've posted a few things that aren't so angsty. (I will not do this. I will post the angst, and you will read it.)

It would be nice if I could learn to treat writing like I treat my other hobbies. I'm currently working on my second ever corset, which I am fully and happily expecting to be shit as a learning experience. I am not putting off working on it in case it's shit, I'm not imagining paranoid scenarios where it's shit, it will turn out the way it turns out and I'm excited for the valuable information I'll have for next time. A couple of weeks ago I was in a truly terrible improv show which even my friends and family in the audience couldn't find a good word to say about, and in a few months I'll get right back up there and do another (improv! But musical! The worst nightmare of so many and I'm itching to get started). I give myself grace in those things because they're not my lifeblood the way writing is, so in practice they end up being more fun than the thing I really love and by this time next year I'll have fourteen unnecessary corsets and still be trying to coax a coherent sentence out of my brain with a biscuit. 

I'm going to try and remember to write again tomorrow. Preferably about something that's actually happened. 

some sort of rationale

So at about 1am last night, I decided I wanted to blog again. 

Blogging was my first real introduction to the internet. I had a bunch of different diaries on a bunch of different sites, sometimes posting multiple times per day. When OpenDiary, the place that hosted my first and longest-sustained blog, finally shut down, I downloaded the whole thing into a Notepad doc that now sits on an old hard drive somewhere in the house. Twelve years, and over a million words. I was sixteen when I started it, so obviously most of that million is borderline unreadable now, but it means something to me to have it still. 

I still write a diary every day (or as close to every day as circumstances allow), but it's a very different kind of writing. My ADHD brain struggles to get to the end of one thought before branching off into seventeen others and tying itself in a knot, and historically that's been crippling for me. I start to think about going into the kitchen to load the dishwasher and tune back in four hours later to find myself still sitting on the sofa thinking about the horror of spontaneous combustion. It's rubbish, and it makes it really hard to get things done. But if I write down "I am going to the kitchen now to load the dishwasher", the thought is allowed to exist by itself long enough for me to actually go into the kitchen and do the thing. Keeping a diary where I actively narrate all the mundane daily shit I need to do has made a huge difference to my life, and I want to carry on doing it, but at the same time it feels like wasted words. I start a new Word doc for it at the start of every year, and at the end of the year I just delete it. Anything of value I might occasionally write there is buried so deeply in lists of daily tasks that searching back for it becomes an insurmountable chore and makes me annoyed with myself for being so tedious. 

Some people would probably judge me for saying that I like to go back and reread things I've written, but I think there's value in reflecting on one's own thoughts and one's own work, and in being able to appreciate it. Openly stating that you enjoy something you created yourself (as an end product, rather than just the process) and that you believe it to be good is often considered poor form, which is deeply stupid. Throughout almost forty years of regular self-esteem crises the one thing I've never questioned is the fact that I write well, and when I can't do it - particularly, when I can't create things I might enjoy reading again - everything else in my life suffers. 

If nobody reads this, it doesn't really matter, though it's also critically important that I not be afraid of people reading this. I've written tens of thousands of words of fiction over the past couple of years, stories I really want to tell, and I keep it all to myself because I feel too insecure, too fragile. I've been too afraid to share for too long, and I know it's making it harder and harder to keep writing. At some point, it all starts to feel like wasted words. So I'm starting small, with a low-stakes personal blog where there's no real pressure to impress. I'll just write things and hit publish, putting them out there into the world where they may or may not be seen. 

My plan is to write very regularly, at least to begin with, so I don't just forget about it entirely. I have a bunch of blogs tied to this account, some public and some not, and when I came here to start this one I was reminded that three years ago I'd had a Really Good Idea, started a new blog for it, written a couple of draft posts, and then blanked the whole thing out of my mind before I got round to posting anything at all. I'd rather not end up with even more of a weird blog graveyard than I already have. 

Writing. I like it. I want to remember that.