Documented on my iPhone between The National Portrait Gallery to The Southbank Centre.
I don’t know what to do when I’m at galleries. I feel like I must commit everything to memory and that I’m a failure if I don’t.
I remember feeling like the years stretched out in front of me when I would run around Leicester Square and central London in the thick of it. It’s not the same now. All sweet shops and strange touristy touts.
I envy those who’ve already made it or made it in a time where social media wasn’t stringent upon success. I am bad at it and so it will impede me. Followers and engagement sells. Book deals follow. If I fall behind on technology it’s expected that I’d know how to survive by other means in an apocalypse. But I don’t.
I have a feeling that I’ve missed out. That I’m too late. That world destruction is inevitable and I’m on the precipice of it, watching the horrors behind a smart phone my empathy dulled by the plethora of gut wrenchingly devastating things I am shown daily.
Increasingly my dreams and desires feel ridiculous to me. Either because they were formed in the blindness of excessive capitalist achievement and productivity culture - who wants to be an underpaid employee at a company with a solution to something that was never a problem? B2B business to business helping other businesses do business things that are, in the grand scheme of being alive, meaningless - but importantly, they generate revenue. It’s all become nonsensical to me. I don’t want to move fast and break things! I want to fix things.
This week I listened to a Today in Focus podcast that looked at the changing attitudes towards after work drinks. On balance yes, it’s a good thing that people are no longer drinking themselves into oblivion multiple nights a week. But socialising is yet to catch up. Most, it would seem, avoiding it entirely. I’m guilty of it too. I have become even worse as time presses on. The anxiety of meeting new people or immersing myself in new experiences are increasingly difficult. The first thing for me now has to be doing something that scares me alone to build up my confidence. I’m not sure when that happened, or whether it even was a thing that happened and was simply something that has always been but I hadn’t noticed until later. It’s somewhere in that small overlap of being an extroverted introvert. I am an introvert. I get my energy from solo, soft, cosy activities. But to my friends, I could be extroverted - this is what my Myers Briggs type INFJ tells me anyway.
I have had to learn and am still learning by that it’s okay to be me. To show up as who I am and that if I am not liked that’s okay. This has to happen by myself first. I can’t cling to the validation of others.
So, I sat down on a bench.
I listened to birds chirping in the trees and the sloshing of water from a fountain nearby and tried to figure out if my catastrophising was because of technology and big tech and how much it’s scraped the colour and taste from our lives. Or if it’s just because I’m aging. That I can see and feel the years going by and the doors to paths closing that I relied on remaining open, not because I wanted to enter them but I found comfort in choice.
Maybe it’s because I’m aging out of a generation that once mystified others. Now I’m the one clutching and grasping at the truths of today’s youth with disbelief. That the experience of young girls could look the way it does. That things haven’t continued in linear fashion, getting better and being improved. It’s devastating.
Maybe I’m jealous because I’ll never get to see this city again through fresh, eager eyes. It can’t happen. Maybe if I moved away for a considerable amount of time it would eventually become strange to me but I still feel certain that a piece of familiarity will now never be dislodged.
But I continue to seek out the new.
