Reclaimed Spaces

I was watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty tonight and marvelled at the initial scene where Walter, played by Ben Stiller, is balancing his checkbook. That someone might have $7000 in savings - that, in fact, one could be well-off enough to have the impulsivity to take an impromptu trip to Greenland whenever they wanted - is simultaneously exciting and infuriating to watch.

Greenland was the first place, other than back home to the UK, that Arden and I set our hearts on visiting. There’s this unremarkable little town called Kangerlussuaq that has 98% visibility of the northern lights between November and March, and it’s one of those natural wonders that falls into Serious Bucket List Territory for me. All that said, I’m resigned to the fact that this might not happen for a few years - I am unlikely to land myself with a high-paying job anytime soon, and the first opportunity we get I want Arden to see the places I grew up. I am resigned to putting sentimentality before wonder.

Maybe that’s all a little internalised, though. I am not Ben Stiller’s age; by the time I get there, I hope to have seen considerably more than Greenland. I’m also lucky enough to have already travelled a great deal, even if the vast majority was within European boundaries; really, I don’t have anything to complain about. This all likely comes from the insecurity of pursuing another job hunt, and only having the sort of income that can sustain basic luxuries in the meantime.

I’m still figuring all of this stuff out, nearly nine months in. How to be part of the American workforce, which functions in a different way to the British workforce (here, the pay is lower and yet everyone seems to be smiling); how to absolve myself of the guilt of living rent-free in a house that is not my parents’; how to be a good husband; how to deal with the strange, unbidden dreams of people and places back in England that bubble up at night and leave me feeling uneasy.

That last one is more recent. The truth is that the sudden cutoffs I experienced in the UK happened long before I emigrated. There were plenty of people whom I stopped pursuing socially, then realised that if I wasn’t pushing, no-one was stepping in to push for me. It was jarring. There were some really close friendships that ended that way, and it makes you question yourself; how much of that closeness was just perception and one-sided sentiment? 

Does anyone like me?

These are the kinds of crazy questions that sound laughable when stated soberly, but take on a deranged sensibility when you’re approaching them through the haze of sleep. I don’t have childhood demons, but sometimes there are ghosts.

All of this is to say that I wrote tonight, for the first time in weeks, and it feels great. I’m not sure what was stopping me. Writer’s block, I think, is more a case of finding whatever excuse you can to put something off; in the past, it might have been the terror you get when sitting in front of a typewriter and seeing a blank page, but nowadays I think it’s more a problem of knowing that you can tab over and see multiple feeds full of the words of other people, or open Netflix and watch any of hundreds of movies and TV shows, or start to clear a backlog of (and I am not exaggerating here) 400 video games you somehow legally accumulated over less than four years.

There comes a point, I think, where you have to quietly and deliberately put all of that stuff down. Yes, the backlog will increase while you go away. I opened up Netflix after I finished writing a couple of pages, and discovered that Richard Ayoade’s second film, The Double, is now available to stream. I will watch it, but I need to abandon the idea that I have to somehow clear it out of the way. Media is just stuff - it’s fulfilling, and it’s art, and it’s hundreds of thousands of people making things with resources you could never hope to gather, but there has to be a line between their stuff and your stuff. You have to allow space for your stuff, otherwise there’s nothing that contextualises their stuff. You just absorb all their color without reflecting anything back.

So I carried on writing my outline, and I think it’s getting somewhere! I am, in theory, up to Chapter Nine of maybe around Twelve, and once it’s done and redone I will sit down and actually try to write this bizarre first novel of probably two. And I will keep at it, even if I find a job that forces me to work sixty hours a week. I will make the time. I need to try and remember that even though anxiety about writing feels terrible, when I actually sit and write, it feels golden.

My legs ache. It’s the sort of ache that begins to feel good as it wears off. It’s similar to when I used to run - I would get home, and feel like hell, but an hour later this glow would spread from every joint. I spent eight hours standing behind a counter in a supermarket’s meat department today, and aside from being paid money I also earned myself a pair of sore calf muscles.

The money is really the thing. I don’t want to spend any extended period of time working in a supermarket’s meat department, but I’m at a point where the lifestyle I want to sustain - one where I have a cellphone, and can buy myself the occasional video game, and go out to restaurants every now and then - is unsustainable without regular income. And all of this is in a country that effectively hamstrings you if you don’t have a car and a driver’s license, and I don’t have either, yet.

It balances out, though, I know that. The work becomes easier - not because it changes, but because you do - your legs toughen up, and you learn the shortcuts, and your rapport with the people around you improves. And I’m at a point where it’s too early to reap the rewards - I won’t be paid for a little while longer, so for now there’s a sort of void to the work. That’s not to say I’m not grateful for the job - I am - but you’d have to be insane to do something like this for free.

I’ll keep moving forward. I’ll try and be an adult. I will, at least temporarily, abandon the ingrained elitism that tries to tell me that because I have a degree, I deserve a job where I can sit down. While I serve sirloin tips to wealthy suburbanites, I’ll try and move my life forward in a thousand small ways.

Today in Tomorrow

I’m going to move to America.

Let that one sink in for a moment. Remember that for the last few months, I’ve been futilely attempting to bring Arden, my fiancé to this country. That the last time I had considered emigrating was around the age of eighteen, long before I had even heard of Arden or met most of the bunch of native USA-ians who I now call friends. Bear in mind that this plan is so new that I haven’t even told my Dad yet.

Got a sense of what I’m dealing with yet?

I say “dealing with”. This is exciting, as it should be. And I’ve been on a strange high for the last few days that I haven’t felt in months.

Putting it simply: my main priority right now is getting to be with Arden. It’s for a few reasons, and not just the short-sighted “I love her” one. Arden motivates me to be a better person, be more proactive, and - contradicting the age-old cliché of neutering one’s personality to fit a partner - express myself more and be an individual. I thrive around Arden, and I want the chance to do that.

Doing that by bringing her here was always going to be hard, of course. I’d need to get to a point where I was 100% self-sufficient, having moved out and earning enough to fully support two people. I am an English and Philosophy graduate. I might have a nice little temp job until the end of October, but I’m not even close to that. Add in a family willing to put ethical principles in front of short-term suffering, and it was always going to be rough.

And then things got worse. There’s currently legislation being drafted that’d bump up the minimum salary requirement for a UK citizen moving their fiancé or spouse to this country to around £23,000. I’m not going to earn that for a while unless I’m extremely lucky. And by “a while”, I mean years. And there are peripheral reasons, too - while the employment situation anywhere is dire at the moment, there are a lot more small presses in the USA and a lot of video game companies. And in the US, there are people willing to offer their generosity so that I can settle in. It’s still a long road, but it’s something that feels within reach.

It means that the low-wage, low-stress job that I’m doing at the moment counts towards a savings goal that’s lofty, but not so daunting that it doesn’t feel within reach. (I’m uncomfortable saying what that goal is, as I’m not looking for yet more offers of money, but I feel confident that Arden and I can reach it.) Even if/when I’m getting a pitiful sum from the government while I look for a new job, I can add it to the steadily-growing pile. This is all stuff I couldn’t really do before. There wasn’t any point - what’s a few thousand saved now when it’s just going to fester until I’m two or three steps up the career ladder?

I feel like I have agency for the first time in months. Maybe even years - granted, I was studying, but there’s nothing like an arts degree to make you feel like you’re not doing anything with your life.

This feels like a new chapter, rather than a really slow page-turn. On Monday morning, I’ll be going into work with just a little more energy, because I know that what I’m doing is worth something. I’m looking forward to living with the person I love, and having the breathing space to make a life together without collapsing under stress. It’ll be months until we can even put the next step into effect - beyond October, I have no planned employment, and welfare payments only bring in so much - but the end has turned from something in whose direction we’re blindly sailing to a faint glimmer on the horizon.

I turned 22 last week, and after a few very long months, I feel like I’m finally getting things on track.

Big Scary Future Plans

No, not my brightest title, I’ll admit. Still, it’s honest - I’m making plans, and they’re for my future (immediate, near and distant), they’re pretty big in terms of the whole “life narrative” thing and yes, they can be scary sometimes.

If you know me and/or have come from that blog where I was considerably more popular/infamous/vilified, you’ll know already that just under six weeks ago, I got engaged to the funniest, kindest, most openly lovely person I’ve ever had the chance to meet (who also happens to be a total hottie and shares a lot of my interests). All good so far… except this is a little complex.

My partner lives over in the good ol’ U S of A, and I’m stuck here. So in addition to the whole thing of, you know, planning a wedding, there also some stuff with visas that we need to sort out, which means that there’s also some stuff with me figuring out how I’m going to support myself (and, until she finds her feet in a big new country, my wife oh wow that sounds cool to say).

And turns out, there’s a lot of stuff to learn! Being a full-time student, whose job never rose above minimum wage, I’ve never paid income tax or council tax before and had no idea how it worked. I’ve never insured my belongings (besides an iPhone, which turned out to be a waste of money). I’ve never been the lead tenant of a property. I have had the odd official paycheque here and there, though they were largely for short-lived work - working on enrolment at my Mum’s college, auditing room occupancy at the university, that sort of thing.

So, you know, it’s scary, but only until you put everything down on paper. That’s the thing - money tends to be this big source of stress for people, but I find it hard to see it that way. Maybe it’s because I’m a privileged middle-class idiot. I’ll accept that risk. But I’m not so sure. When you consider that I spent an entire term pretty much living off sandwiches so I’d have the cash to visit Arden for the first time, and it didn’t bother me (I can make a killer sandwich), I think I have a rough idea of what living on a basic income entails. I’m living in what used to be a box room at the moment, and while I might have gone a little stir crazy in those early weeks, now it just feels familiar.

Money issues, for me, just become matters of problem-solving. Some people put off looking at their bank balance because they don’t want to know what it is, they conveniently “forget” to pay their taxes because they don’t want to think about how much money they’re supposedly losing (although, as long as you agree with the concept of taxation, that money was never yours to begin with), and it ends up coming around to bite them in the ass. I tend to get pretty methodical.

In the last few days I have learnt the methodology of income tax and how much I can be expected to pay; a rough idea of the council tax bill I’m going to face; how much of my student loans I have to pay off per month; my liability for Arden’s student loans (none, which is good); and the cost of living, all those weird costs included, for two people in a little terraced house or a studio apartment.

And you know what? It’s not scary. I’ve also been looking at jobs - though admittedly not applying for many, because I need to get my references in order - and the salaries of all but one or two are more than what we’d need to live comfortably. Not much more, admittedly, but we wouldn’t suffer. Getting a job is another matter, but I’m going to throw myself into it - if every job is supposedly applied for by around 38 people, I should end up with at least one offer if I apply for a hundred. And at the very least, I know how to be persistent.

What’s the point of all of this? Ah - maybe this. I’m seeing in my less-than-mentally-great friends at the moment something we might call “graduate paralysis” - this fear of starting, of getting on some sort of path, whether it’s to wellness, or a career, or even something as simple as creative ambition. And the thing is, that sounds so familiar. I consider myself lucky to have so strong a motivator - that at the end of this, I get to live with the person I love for the rest of my life. Others, I understand, don’t have that - the motivation is usually in the work itself, or for the sake of getting better alone, with a blank space after that first achievement. The key, though, is that actually doing that stuff feels good, but only once you’re doing it. Taking that first step can be hard unless you have someone behind you nudging you in the right direction.

Needless to say, I feel wonderfully, remarkably nudged.