Story -

A LIFE TURNED INWARDS

He stood- as so often, coffee in hand- looking out of his lounge window- a view from a second floor flat.  Occasionally people would walk past and sometimes cars would pull up.
            Looking out, he pondered on his life so far.  He saw it as a series of failures interspersed with moderate success.  He had long concluded that he was inadequate in many ways.
            Even from early childhood the point had been made that he was over- dependent (“They won’t do this for you at big school” he recalled being told).  The pattern of dependency had repeated itself nonetheless.
            More than over- dependency, he was vaguely aware that he lived in his own little world.  Only vaguely because, as he saw it, he only had his own mind to measure and observe his own mind which made it difficult for him to be objective.
            He remembered from secondary school frequently coming bottom of the class when it came to sitting tests.  Now at work, he was frequently the least successful when it came to telesales- and knowing this made him feel uncomfortable with his bosses, even though the point that he was the least successful had not been mentioned, at least not as yet.
  He felt as though there was some sort barrier between his mind, or his eyes, and the outside world.  Was he living life on some sort of autopilot?  He was not sure.  Somehow he found it difficult to engage in the world- found it difficult to grasp that “This is it.”
  Part of it was confidence (or lack of), not wishing to make mistakes, yet inevitably making them anyway.  He felt down, speaking to his manager who would say things like “You should know this” and “You should be doing that”- again, inevitably he had failed in some way or ways.
            Taking a sip of coffee he thought back to his days as a civil servant.  The pattern was similar there.  Sometimes he was good at his job, but more often he was either adequate or inadequate in terms of performance.  (“He wasn’t even switching on his email account” he had overheard his boss say when he first started- true, this was back in 2001).  His boss had been nice enough but he suspected that she was glad to see the back of him when he resigned and, in an uncharacteristic spirit of adventure, gone travelling.
            Some of the comments his father had made over the years seemed quite telling too.  He recalled him commenting years earlier that when he and his siblings were sent upstairs to get ready for bed, they would do so, then they would come downstairs for a bit and when he and they came back upstairs he would himself be still in his underwear, still getting ready for bed.  He was unsure exactly what point his father was making there- perhaps that he lived too much in his own world- though he was pretty sure of that point now.

            Then there was of course, the time when, rather belatedly, it became apparent that he should no- longer be living under his mother’s wing.  He had no girlfriend (of course) and so moved into a home on his own aged nearly twenty- nine.  He had- he realised now- led a sheltered life until then and was now suddenly and abruptly responsible for finances, paying bills, shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing up, washing clothes, hoovering and all the rest.  This had proved too much for his unaccustomed mind and following two days in bed with a severe migraine he had a prompt psychotic episode and spent two weeks on a psychiatric ward feeling generally odd and needing considerable support.
            He believed now that this was related to this feeling that there was a barrier between his mind and reality; somehow he was not fully connected with reality.  He did not grasp it.
            After three years of living alone and with minimal attention paid to income and expenditure he came close to bankrupting himself- and very probably would have done had it not been for his grandparents “lending” him £8,000 and his father helping him get his finances in order…
            Looking out of the window, with the coffee starting to go cold, he thought:  How closely do others monitor their money?  Probably very, he thought.  Every day?  Every other day?  He stopped ruminating and logged on to his bank account.  He’d not done this for several days.  He recalled his early complacency when, in his early twenties, he had started earning.  He had, in both a naïve and blasé way, assumed that his income outweighed his expenditure and spent several years in a fool’s paradise spending, spending, spending until one day…he had nothing left and he was unable to withdraw money from the cashpoint.  The bank promptly contacted him and he took out a loan.

            And now here he was.  Coffee finished.  Facing (potentially) another day of criticism at work.  He felt like a failure- failing to live up to expectations.  Maybe they would lower their expectations.  Maybe they would try and get rid of him.

  And today was the first day of the rest of his life.

MDC
 

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author
Ibidun

Gee, man. I'm very sorry.

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