In the last two weeks, I have become more like myself than ever.
More like myself than ever: scared to make progress from where I currently am, and yet thinking about very little else.
So, with the deadline of April 15 to get in the second of seven Open University assignments, it was at 5am on the day itself when I finally sent it off to my tutor.
It went, as did the first one, not with a feeling of relief that it had been completed at all, but with a sense that it's a matter of time, just a matter of time, before one of them doesn't get submitted. It isn't that I lack the willingness to do it, or arguably even the talent - it is instead the case that I am paralysed by fear.
I can no longer write, am incapable of study, and find myself thinking so much that I end up exhausted, and I hold that it is the result of being scared.
Scared of what, exactly? I could write for hours about the things that terrify me, if only I had the energy to actually do so.
There is a sense of shame when I send off a piece of work which is less than perfect. If it fails to astonish and delight, then I want nothing to do with it. Not in my name.
I return to the point of departure of a thousand, a hundred thousand, depressive thoughts: I am not a machine, and am thus unable to turn out perfection, over and over, without apparent effort.
Why demand perfection from one whose species persistently demonstrates inbuilt flaws, from nasal passages which fail to drain correctly, to faulty decision-making?
There is a lack of confidence in your author, attenuated by a paradoxical arrogance - as usual, the two contrary ideas co-exist quite happily in the mind. There is utter certainty that I was born for a purpose, and the simultaneous tension which states it was all an unhappy accident.
I am one who feels that everything must, at some point, come to an end. Like Kundera's poor Teresa, I am indeed scared of heights.
