Day 27. Hang on to your ego (27/1/19)

(Soundtrack: "All the people I like are those that are dead" from Felt's masterly 'Forever Breathes The Lonely Word'. It's on an Apple playlist covering the further corners of the career of Lawrence, the lonely Birmingham pop maverick magician. It's not a statement, it's just on. And great. Obviously.)

I have an ego.

That's probably fairly obvious to anybody who knows me. It's probably fairly obvious to anybody reading this: 365 days of talking about 'me'. Kind of screams 'ego' doesn't it?

(But does the 'me' you read about actually exist? Is there actually ever a definitive 'me' for any of us? We're all only ever the people other people view us as, unless we're alone. And then we're a creation of ourselves dictated by the lack of reflected opinion. Or something like that. The 'me' you see on here is a creation. He gets to think about what he's saying, delete sentences he doesn't like the look of, give 'his' slant on the events he's talking about, add or omit for effect. It's like writing a play. For those who saw 'Half The Sky' it starts with an admission that a character once killed a dog. It's based on a blog from the first version of this that starts 'I killed a dog'.

And there's truth in that. I was once the cause of the death of a dog. The full story genuinely lessens the blame on me, shows it's an accident and is much less shocking than that sole sentence. But 'I killed a dog' is a hell of a start to anything. You're hooked. It's all smoke and mirrors. Identity is all smoke and mirrors)

And that's a sidebar, isn't it? A tangent.

I'm good at tangents. You know that. My entire writing style is predicated on tangents. Anybody who has ever been in a meeting with me will know that there are tangents. To explain myself, sometimes I need to refer to unrelated subjects. Which lead to other unrelated subjects. And so on and so on until I'm not entirely sure how to claw my way back to the point. I do though. That's my magic trick: I always know where I'm going, I just like to make it look like I don't.

I have an ego.

That's where we were going.

It's not always been that way.

I used to be notoriously, cripplingly shy. I was terrified of anything, terrified of conversation, terrified of authority figures, terrified of confrontation, terrified of women (well, girls, let's be honest, I was in my late teens), terrified above all other things of rejection.

We've talked in the past of how, on the night we met, J's initial impression of me was that I was cool, aloof, mysterious. Shy. Ridiculously, stupidly, shy.

The girls I knew in my late teens I never asked out. Because not asking girls out was easier than being rejected. This is how we torture ourselves.

'I didn't know what I wanted to do. Well, that's not true; I knew what I wanted to do but there were so many things that I never focussed on any.'

That's (kind of) from Venus Rising (I'm misquoting from memory). And that's me. Obviously. Your first thing is your most autobiographical. Although, really, all you're ever talking about is yourself isn't it?

(That's also Venus Rising, that's definitely the quote. This is me getting meta-textual.)

There were stories I wanted to tell, comics I wanted to create, books I wanted to write. But I didn't. Because not doing is easier than failing. If you fail by not doing then it's only the fault of circumstance. It's not the fault of not being good enough and nobody can ever tell you that you weren't.

And this is how we torture ourselves.

It takes time to grow out of this. It takes moments like the moment in Leeds when J pointed out that people enjoyed my company. I had no concept of this, had no idea it could be something that existed. That's sad, that, isn't it? True though.

Honest to god, I don't actually plan to write sentences like that.

A friend pointed out to me, first time round that I did this, that she'd known me for years but only got to know me when she read these pages.

Consider this getting to know me. Getting to know the things I don't talk about. Consider it exorcism if you like. Consider it anything you like; you're the reader, it's down to you to decide what all this means. That's the deal we have here: if this means anything to anyone then it's what that 'anyone' decides it means.

I have an ego.

I decided at 50 years old, at the start of writing all this, as the absolute purpose of writing all this, that I would reinvent myself. That I would reinvent myself as the most interesting person in the room. Whatever room I was in, I would believe I was the most interesting person in that room. And I've been in some very interesting rooms. And I've found, in those rooms, that people who I would never have believed would be interested in anything I have to say have genuinely been interested.

That all smacks of a touch of arrogance, doesn't it? That's not the intention. It's not like I believe I'm more interesting than anybody else there. Just as interesting. The intention is to let you know I did this. The intention is to let you know that, if you're ever where I was, people are more interested in you than you could imagine. And that failure is a myth. There is no failure. There are only the choices you make.

I no longer consider the years where I didn't try through fear of failing to be failure. They're just the moments it took to get me here, to put me on the path to where I'm supposed to be.

I have an ego. Now. I know it. I built it. I'm glad I did. But it might not be as real as you think.