Loneliness

I identify, Robert.  I often feel more alone at work, surrounded by people who are ignoring me, than I do at home on my own.  School was the same, too.

It's funny, too, how small things can catch me out.  After my divorce, I got on with my life quite well.  Although I still felt love for my ex-wife, whom I no longer had any contact with, I felt more settled as a single person.  One day about 6 months later, thinking of nothing in particular, I was driving with Classic FM on.  Suddenly, a piece of music came on that we'd had played at our wedding: Faure's 'Cantique de Jean Racine.'  On impulse, I switched it off.  Then I had to pull over.  I was in bits.

13 years later - last Saturday, in fact - I was going through YouTube, as I often do, looking for nice music to play.  I happened upon Annie Lennox's 'No More I Love Yous'.  This was a song I'd played a lot in the year after my divorce - usually when I'd had a few drinks - and would invariably end up in tears.  Now, in the light of no longer having my mum, it takes on an extra poignancy.  I played it... and was soon in tears.  It occurred to me that there really is no one left on earth to say 'I love you' to me - or even just to think it. 

I mainly work from home these days, which is better by far than being subcontracted to a company to work. But there is still a school where I work and that can be isolating. It might be because of the difference in language and culture though, alongside the fact that I have a part-time status that means I don't have to stay on the premises and attend meetings. That latter is no loss because I loathe meetings!

I wish things could have been different regarding my own school days, especially at secondary school. 

My Dad died a couple of years ago too and my mother is now in a home, after a stroke that seemed to bring on full-on dementia overnight. It did not take long after that for other family members to continue the tradition of casting me in the role of black sheep and blaming me for everything though. 

It can certainly be hard to find people on some kind of wavelength, though there are one or two. I am still in touch with some of the old artist friends from a community we had in the UK. Others are dead though, one jumped off a train way back, another died soon after my Dad after drinking herself to death. 

In the art world here, things have opened up as many creatives have got sick of the closed doors here. I find it is a question of checking to see what kind of agendas other people may have and what sort of hidden snobberies and projections. Apart from the summer, most of the time the day job leaves me too exhausted to want to meet new people much anyway. 

I mainly work from home these days, which is better by far than being subcontracted to a company to work. But there is still a school where I work and that can be isolating. It might be because of the difference in language and culture though, alongside the fact that I have a part-time status that means I don't have to stay on the premises and attend meetings. That latter is no loss because I loathe meetings!

I wish things could have been different regarding my own school days, especially at secondary school. 

My Dad died a couple of years ago too and my mother is now in a home, after a stroke that seemed to bring on full-on dementia overnight. It did not take long after that for other family members to continue the tradition of casting me in the role of black sheep and blaming me for everything though. 

It can certainly be hard to find people on some kind of wavelength, though there are one or two. I am still in touch with some of the old artist friends from a community we had in the UK. Others are dead though, one jumped off a train way back, another died soon after my Dad after drinking herself to death. 

In the art world here, things have opened up as many creatives have got sick of the closed doors here. I find it is a question of checking to see what kind of agendas other people may have and what sort of hidden snobberies and projections. Apart from the summer, most of the time the day job leaves me too exhausted to want to meet new people much anyway. 

I like your taste!

Yes, that's a favourite. 

Do you like Coffee and Cigarettes? It was a pretty different concept!

Boris Johnson sounds like he is on the spectrum. The sociopathic one. 

Well said.  As for the class thing, I agree.  Money, power, the right connections, etc.  Look at the case with Boris Johnson, when he set fire to some restaurant toilets as a 'jolly jape' in his Bullingdon Club days at Oxford.  Wheels turned behind the scenes and the matter was dropped, and he was allowed to continue with his studies.  Anyone else, not so connected, would have gone to prison for arson, criminal damage, public endangerment, etc.  Been marked for life.

I'm working class.  My family is working class.  Unfortunately, some of them have a social climbing agenda, and have essentially turned their backs on their roots.  I wish they could see how they don't quite fit with aping their 'betters'.  Their class status is all demonstrated through property and possessions.  Nothing else.  The 'nouveau riche'. 

As for me - I've long felt psychologically displaced.  I was born in a vibrant working class neighbourhood in London.  It's now Millionaires Row.  The same with the Devon market town where I spent my teens.  Hardly a native voice is heard there now.  It's more like Richmond-upon-Thames.  It feels like there's nowhere left to go here anymore.  I'll never understand concepts like 'national pride'.  I just happen to have been born here.  I don't really know the place now.  I'd like to go somewhere where the social ethos is different.  More inclusive.  At least then, even if I'm alone, I'll feel I'm in a congenial environment.

Agree, too, about toxic people.  I find it very hard to differentiate people sometimes.  I never really trust anyone.  It's probably the safest way.  The only person I ever implicitly trusted - it went without question - was my mother.  Now... I trust my cat!  She never lets me down!

Yes.  I was so pleased when the writer/director Martin McDonagh (whose 'Two Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri' did so well at the Baftas and Oscars) pulled a grimace when asked for his opinion on Robert McKee's 'Story' - the supposed film industry Bible.  I've always hated that book.  As he said, it's fine if you want to write formulaic stuff like super hero movies.  He went on about how much he struggled with studio heads and producers in the making of his earlier 'In Bruges' - the changes they wanted.  The bits they wanted left out, or put in.  These people are largely idiots, it seems.  And they get it wrong all the time.  Look how they got it wrong with the Harry Potter books.  'You won't make much money out of this', she was told.  Hm.

Jim Jarmusch is another artist I greatly admire.  I haven't liked all of his stuff.  But he sticks with an independent vision.  Only 'Ghost Dog' and 'Broken Flowers' have enjoyed some mainstream success.  But that doesn't interest him.  And he always gets the funding to make his movies, and the great stars to appear in them, because there's a big enough minority of people who love them.  I don't think he's ever recouped production costs at the box office.  But thank goodness that doesn't stop him from making his films.

'Withnail and I' is another prime example of a film everyone expected to fail - and it did, at first.  But we'd be so much the poorer if that one had never made it through.

I refuse to 'adjust' to suit the 'demands' of the market - whatever they are.  I've stopped reading a lot of contemporary fiction because you can nearly always read what's gone on behind the scenes. The formulas and tropes.  I'll write what I want to write, not what someone else wants me to write.  If that means I never get anywhere, then so be it.

I used to lament loneliness massively. There can be all sorts of reasons for it. At least three people important to me pinpointed one factor - we did not fit in because of a class thing. You can be talented, you can be educated up to degree level, but if your family is essentially working class, you will not really fit into a more middle-class culture. Certainly in one town that was very bourgeois, I was never happy there and always felt a bit pitied and patronised - that is what all these nice people do when they are pleased with themselves - then I moved to a city with a different culture - it was much easier to feel more in a level with other people there. 

There was one girl at my uni who was full of 'helpful' advice, telling me if I wanted to fit in I should be more conventional and look at least approximately in the direction of the person talking to me. 

Nowadays I am inclined to think there are worse things than loneliness - drinking from poison wells. I mean toxic people. Mind games, full of ego and unstated agendas. I will not have anyone look down on and pity me now for seemingly being on the outside, I have standards too!

I think loneliness is not so much being alone, it can be about the need to find the right kind of people 

'Helpful' comments can be just plain irritating and definitely not helpful. The first art course I attended, my work was slated for being decorative. I still have doubts over my work because of that. 

I saw nothing wrong with the piece you showed us here, with your petty tyrant teacher. That ought to hook anyone. Have to say, after reviewing, and occasionally proof reading too, a few manuscripts, that criticism can be helpful too. I suppose it depends on how it is done and if it is intended to package you into some kind of commercially viable mould.....forget it. If the two Blade runner films had followed that advice, the film world would be all the poorer for it.

nexus9 said:

In the art world here, things have opened up as many creatives have got sick of the closed doors here. I find it is a question of checking to see what kind of agendas other people may have and what sort of hidden snobberies and projections. Apart from the summer, most of the time the day job leaves me too exhausted to want to meet new people much anyway. 

It's a bit like I feel now about the publishing world.  I'm heartily sick of the way you have to shape your work to fit in with what they want - which is basically, of course, to do with 'marketability'.  My book about my seven months caring for mum in her final illness is, in my view, very much a story of our times.  The dilemmas people face over what to do when loved-ones can no longer look after themselves - and the lack of suitable alternatives, with social care pushed into a corner.  But one 'editorial assistant' said to me 'What's the angle with this?  Was your mother famous for something?  Are there dramatic twists and turns in the narrative to keep the reader hooked for 150k words?'  This is the kind of fatuous nonsense you have to deal with.  As you say, too - agendas.  Always something, wherever you go.  Cliques, etc.  I enjoy my day job, but only inasmuch as I'm working with autistic people.  When they arrive in the mornings, my lights go on.  When they go home, so do I.  I get along with the other staff.  But I'm not part of their circle, and don't want to be.  Once I'm home, I only go out for exercise or shopping.