Blue Saturday

feeling p. autumnal this evening and not in the good way (there is a good way, I felt it on the walk home last week) but in the it's got dark at teatime and I feel sick and jittery and I've wasted my life kind of way.

I get this every year really bad.

spent 10 mins in a proper pub tonight, just seconds away from my house but felt like another universe, going outside in October evening felt and smelt really strange, kind of nice. I have not properly been in a proper pub since my old life (pre-baby).

Imagine a scenario whereby every young
person in England thinks about routes to
success from an early age in the knowledge
that they are continuously gaining some
form of relevant experience and exposure to
working life. Also, imagine what it might feel
like to know that you will be given careers
and employability support from a wide
range of sources — maybe some beyond your
wildest dreams.
People who inspire you, places that
invigorate and motivate you to connect
your day-today learning to future work
possibilities, projects that stretch and
challenge you to achieve more. Finally, think
about what success would look like when it
comes to a ‘careers offer’ for all young people
in our cities and towns across England?

http://ash.notearthday.org/images/n2x.jpg

what's going on nv?

just keep coming across deathly depressing "how can we funnel children into a life of drudgery most efficiently?" propaganda this week

steady background anxiety: check
fortnight's worth of casual suicidal ideation: check
restlessness that stops me settling to any reading or other project: check
dunno if this is winter, poverty or loneliness or if those are 3 faces of the same hulking fact of life

i can deal with all this but can't help wanting to do more than just always be dealing

Trying to transform into a pair of ragged claws scuttling etc

Idk nv but your job seems like poison just from your posts. I feel like you just get some of the holes patched in your outlook and then work brings you back to somewhere you don't to be. And yet, dire povery = ALSO a place you/no one wants to be, so I do see the difficulty there, believe me. But, like, I often feel like the root of the problem is not you or your past or your choices or whatever you are counting as your not-successes, it's the demand for emotional labor & fronting like you believe in the cause at your workplace.

Thx io. I feel like inasmuch as my job hurts it's the hurts of working under Capital. The day to day and the people I work for are pretty inspirational for me. But here we are in a system that turns all relationships to money/shit. The abiding sadness I moan about on here is...some poison of my own, I guess

a further point: i have been a monster. everything from now on forward is fully earned payback.

they are and have been monsters in the world and you are not one of them - p much regardless of circumstances that's the case. if you're anything like anyone else you will have made some poor decisions, sometimes small ones, sometimes big ones, and have been selfish or lazy, and alienated people you shouldn't have alienated, or not made effort where effort should have been made. none of that makes you a monster though. in fact having a low opinion of yourself is, in my experience, the surest possible way of continuing to make poor decisions. again, in my experience, having a low opinion of yourself also creates an underlying impression that bad things should happen to you, and that other people also have a (justifiably) low opinion of you, and therefore the less you're in their lives, or the lower profile you keep the better. and anyway even when you're in their company it's nothing special for them, even if it is for you.

all of that is very unlikely to be the case. people who you are close to, sometimes even those you are not, will almost certainly want you in their lives, but not as someone who has a low opinion of themselves, but someone who looks after themselves much as you might look after something important and precious to you, like a valuable heirloom or even a bike. That is, something to be maintained, kept in good working order, to be looked after. For me, perhaps because I'm English or because I'm a type, it can take an effort to remember to value myself and realise that my presence in other people's lives is or can be valuable to them, and therefore I should make the effort to seek them out and also to look after myself and ensure I do things that are good for me. I did terribly at this this year. I lost relationships as a consequence of not valuing my part in them, and my interior life became moribund as a consequence of too much focus on work and not enough effort ouside work, but that only serves to remind me to redouble the effort.

That said my bike's in a bit of a state too.

thx:) never knowingly undermelodramatic

thank you for that post fizzles

yes thank you

i am about to go into my university's tuition collection office to discuss how the hell i'm going to pay them $7000+ and whether i'll even be able to register for classes next quarter, so that was v good to read

gl clouds

fizzles https://iamlinah.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/big-tick.jpg

yes, good luck clouds. and glad the post went down well. never hurts to renew these sorts of positive thoughts even if they're hard to maintain i guess.

fizzles u are exemplary imo

so many friends visiting whom i haven't seen in years and wanting to do things when my heart's desire is to not see another living soul

5.00pm Promise self I won't lash back if my dad starts up with traditional spiteful criticism of my parenting and all-round personality

7.20pm Lash back when he starts up

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

what is the world/my brain coming to that I am even feeling this feeling at the start of the weekend?

(work-related angst excised bcz hey, Friday evening, put all work thoughts out of the mind. going to buy some fruit & veg, mostly to get out of the flat for 20 minutes but also I've just realised how crisps/Coke/vodka-centric my diet has been lately)

love your post Fizzles. hope other Blue Saturdayers are well.

I just got my shoes on and torrential rain started out of nowhere

more vodka and Coke instead then

i got faggots and sprouts and Oblivion and that'll do i guess, this feels like a sentence i cd've written with several different signifiers

vodka and coke trumps torrential rain def yes

's funny i was going to post earlier because at the end of work the sky was an astonishing sunset blue fading out into whiteness before it started to darken at the horizons and there was a kind of low key ecstatic peace

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

I still feel Sundays have their own qualitatively different order of gloominess ("Sombre Dimanche"), which is of a higher order than Saturday - especially in winter months.

Sundays are the worst, sure.

the Saturday i sat down to write this was a very subjective blueness at the time.

and now I sounds too blue to fly

bad shoe cripplefeet, shambly Smiley demeanour, anonymosity writ small, a perfect little background filler removable from the scene at any point now, waaaay out in the steppe, wineskin-empty

You're lucky, these auditors have me front and centre and seem to find me absolutely fascinating

one day we shall all be called to account

I was rather hoping it wouldn't happen until I'd finished probation yknow

"Under the sword lifted high, There is hell making you tremble. But go ahead, And you have the land of bliss....." Zen Wednesday

not really humblebraggin', maybe, but why when people say nice things about me is that hard to hear, almost a gut-kick, and why do i wanna instantly spin it into "but i am terrible in all these other ways"?

it's a small sort of pleasant relief to know ur not burdensome to society even if u don't particularly respect its judgement and thus feel more isolated from it imo

Not really bitter, but in a weird place and feeling conflicted, but:

At least people say nice things about you, regardless of what you choose to do with them.

I was having a hard time the other day, and it was around your birthday, NV, so I thought "hey, you know, I used to have a birthday thread back in the early days of ILX, maybe if I go back and read people being friendly to me, that will cheer me up." So I searched for my birthday thread. And it turned out that it had been locked. Because during one of my extended absences, one person revived it to say "where is branwell?" which prompted a whole slew of people to come on my damn *birthday* thread, and start clusterfucking about me - in my absence - to the point where the thread was actually locked.

So no nice things for me.

Does that make me angry? Well, of course. But 2 years of therapy has taught me other things to do with anger, to turn my version of humour on the things making me angry, how to not-respond, how to walk away and just let the anger go. I was in seriously not-a-good-place when those clusterfucks were happening, and people, instead of accepting that I was not-in-a-good-place genuinely thought clusterfucking was the way to go. I guess it seemed like a good idea to them at the time.

But there is, at the moment, a guy tearing round ILX, who is very obviously not-in-a-good-place, venting his mental illness, and being drunk and out of control and super-aggro in ways that look unfortunately very familiar to me. And watching how people respond to him, with genuine attempts at compassion and understanding and, well... coddling. It makes me feel ... Well. It makes me feel. I'd like to take a positive view, and think that ILX has maybe changed and become kinder and more understanding of mental health issues? But it's really hard to take that point of view. I remember how *I* was treated, when I was in that not-a-good-place (and how I am still treated, in some corners) - and I can't help but compare how ILX treats this guy, to how they treated Marissa - who was also venting mental illness and out of control and kinda aggro in a lot of the same ways - with bullying and banning-on-sight.

So I really don't know what to tell you about your "people say nice things about me and I don't know how to take it." I am sorry if that sounds aggro or self-pitying or whatever else other people are going to project onto me for saying this. If you think I'm an asshole for saying this, then fine. I'm an asshole. Yup. (Who cares what a cartoon thinks!)

People say nice things about you, and you don't know how to take it. But really, think about what the alternatives are. Would you honestly prefer to have people routinely saying awful and terrible things to and about you, and you to have to train yourself to say "but I am actually OK in all these other ways"?

(I have second thoughts about this post already, but it's too overt aggressive even for the other thread.)

i don't think you're an asshole Branwell. and i'm really sorry about all of that shit that you've described and for any part i might've ever played in it.

NV yr too hard on yrself and possibly on the world and yr one of the greats imo and if that makes you either squirm or just think of ways to discount the sentiment or the source of it then eh don't care really man tough.

i'm not bemoaning my fate tbh, it was more a sudden revelatory glimpse i got last night about how uncomfortable i get in a situation and what wrong-headedness i probly still need to work on so's i can just listen to other people's feelings and accept them at face

i don't take compliments well either. i like to think of ways i can flip it and compliment the other person as 'revenge.' i'd rather get to that place in a conversation where you're both comfortable and just talking about whatever.

god you know what gives me the major anxiety is 'group' conversations where you're all in a sort-of-circle and there are various little alliances and you have no fucking idea what to say ever.

i guess a lot of us are taught that big-headedness is a bad trait and that's part of training yourself not to take credit for things or to feel comfortable hearing other people's estimation of yr value. on the other hand i guess these things will definitely happen when you've had a few drinks, and i guess self-criticism is also sometimes a form of narcissism maybe

it is. not taking a compliment and moving on is a form of big-headedness imo. the issue isn't whether or not you truly deserve it, it's that the other person is making the observation.

i do thank people in the end and accept it in that sense, but the kick in the gut says something like "you'll prove them wrong and let them down somehow, eventually"

Yeah there's that but idk you have to value/trust at least some of these ppl and then acknowledge anyway the ?vanity? in always thinking you know better from a position of solipsism or w/e

right, the 'history' part of it, i mean i think it's ok to be sad about it but it's there to be proven wrong imo, or however you want to make a space for alternative outcomes.

the 'kick', i think i know what you're talking about. ok to feel that way.

yeah, i shd've called this thread "all is vanity" :D

it's easy to take compliments v personally, but they probably tell you more about the complimentor than complimentee ime. compliments are chill though, it means there is or was some goodness in the world

I would like to issue one (1) compliment to all blue saturdayers