I've been unwell for a long time, mostly in mental health terms. I've
been away from working life and scarcely social, though I've had what
looks like a social life, immersing myself in a shallow fashion to be
numbed and obtain forgetting. I went teetotal in mid-October after two
years of unmanageable and repeatedly shaming, exhausting binge-drinking
habits and their consequences, including being assaulted and robbed, but occasionally slip as I did last night into blips of drunkenness. I
didn't use caffeine for fifteen years but at present I think in the
absence of alcohol am using it more now.

I had in my 30s the beginning of a writing career that I had aimed for
for many years, but was overwhelmed by bad treatment from people I met
through that life - seemingly unimproved by their arts interests,
morally and in terms of their behaviour and apparent values - and walked
away from my own would-be future. There were a few problematic
friendships, which faltered and failed.

Things have come to a head, I think. I need a new life and a healthy
income, and changes need to be made in the next four or five months, a
deadline imposed by a particular force and set of circumstances I need
to present as objective here without elaborating on them.

But I need the opposite of regular life. I can't emotionally manage the
pace and aggression that seems asked of us. This isn't a posture but
instead something I'm profoundly and vividly aware of. I can see from
steps I have taken that I could only experience regular life as a
madness. I hate how I've felt this week as a result of a moderate amount
of human contact, in an aggressive town, and as facilitated by an amount
of caffeine that's somewhere between just about negligible and average.
I've overeaten, too, and spent more time among people than I can manage emotionally or financially.

My will feels poor, in so far as someone might suggest I give up
caffeine, and choose to have an amount of solitude that was once normal
for me. I seem to be waiting for something or someone that/ who is
unlikely to come or who/ that can't last otherwise. Maybe I had so much solitude before that I exhausted its possibilities and now am stuck, or
feel I am, trying to minimise the time I spend alone, even though it
leads to bad habits with caffeine and alcohol, and simply with the
unproductive wagging of tongues in unsatisfying social scenes.

Other than some kind of art-making, I don't know how I can have a
healthy life that gives me an income and that allows me to be myself. I couldn't and won't consent to becoming an economic cog, and I won't
allow myself to become inured to biochemical and emotional discomfort.
It would be a meaningless sacrifice. I tried to bring about my own death
in my late 20s. I'm no one's father or partner; I won't be a father now
- vasectomy - and am very unlikely to be anyone's partner, and am
beginning to feel a lack of a need for sexual contact, and a distaste
for it, whether just through ageing or through fear and adapting to unsatisfacory experiences to prevent a recurrence of those. So as I have
no one to support there would be nothing to gain from getting a thick
skin and relinquishing 'my own' wants. I use scare quotes there because
I think my wishes as they now are point to something that the species
needs or that it would be healthier to have as a norm. I'm not being
selfish and I'm not being perverse or middle class. I'm not after
anything luxury-like, though to someone who is fighting each day for
survival my existence might seem that way.

There are useful, good things people can do in life as work that I can
approve of while seeing that being in those lifestyles and working
environments would be unmangeable to me, and would lead to me losing
myself, and not in a good, humbled way, but in a way that would entail
losing my moral compass and the basis of my values and aesthetics. I
respect medical people, and carers; but these are professions which
require still a thick skin, aggression, the bearing of others'
aggression, a fast and stress-filled pace of reaction, and facing people
who'll practice misconduct and who'll have the mechanics of society on
their side. In the last two years I've seen corruption in several
institutions that has shocked me and reinforced my awareness of the care
needed in finding a right livelihood.

I'm quite burnt out and wish I could walk away for quite a while to some
desert island-like existence, just at the point in time where this is impossible, where I feel obliged to walk back to the world. Or maybe
it's not impossible? Maybe I've overlooked healthy livelihoods?

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