I'm currently reading Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. It’s certainly a page turner but I wouldn’t exactly say I'm enjoying it; it’s bleak and a bit creepy, with a lot of violence, not much kindness and the women characters, even when given interiority by Greene, are pretty archetypal and pathetic (In the case of the character Ida he seems obsessed with telling us how large her breasts her each time she makes an appearance in the story) I don’t normally read novels like this – I have a running joke with certain friends that I only read books written by middle aged women about their divorces – so I guess Brighton Rock is me trying to get out of my comfort zone. I got it on offer on my kindle and thought it would be a nice palate cleanser after the last novel I read -Kudos by Rachel Cusk, an intense, chapterless, yet somehow compelling read, just like the preceding two novels in the trilogy.
These days, if I'm not enjoying a book I tend to just stop reading it - there are certain literary worlds I don’t want to spend time in and this is okay! I mean, obviously it’s okay – look outside at the state of the world, who cares whether you finish a book or not – but this has actually taken a lot of practice. In spring 2022, realising I was actually quite cripplingly depressed, I temporarily dropped out of my life in Belfast to go and stay with my parents in Cardiff for a few weeks. I was locked in an incredibly self-punishing cycle of feeling shit all the time because I hadn’t written enough/ read enough/ networked enough / capitalised on my PhD/ applied for enough jobs. I discussed this every couple of weeks with my therapist, about how I'm just not on top of anything - if I can just get that one thing done, then everything will get a bit easier, but of course I never get the thing done, whatever it is, because I’m not coping, and so the pattern of just never ever feeling okay about anything continues. Do you need me to give you permission to stop? she asks me in one session. I say yes, feeling a bit silly, because I do. I need somebody to tell me that I am allowed to just give up for a little while. Okay, she replies. I give you permission. Phew! Afterwards I go back to my flat and book a flight to Cardiff, one way, no pressure, no decisions, I can stay as long as I like, or leave as soon as I want. I am unemployed which is, in a way, part of the problem but is also at this point a kind of blessing (along with access to a safe comfortable place to escape to)
While I am away, remembering the words of my therapist, I try to cultivate a practice of extreme self-forgiveness in almost everything I do but particularly reading - so I read in a kind of random, scattergun fashion according to how I'm feeling. One morning I pick out a copy of The Old Ways by Robert McFarlane from the shelves and read a few pages in bed about an island somewhere in the Outer Hebrides; there are some gorgeous descriptions of the wild landscape but I come to a very detailed passage which bores me so I put it aside, telling myself this is okay. I read a lot of New Yorker restaurant reviews – these are perfect: short, well written but also completely useless to me – and I also reread Conversations with Friends in a day because I feel like it, a few chapters of novels by Dorothy Sayers and Dolly Alderton, a whole Daisy Buchanan novel after I read this nice Guardian piece about managing anxiety, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy and various bits of poetry. I don’t post about any of these things on social media and remind myself always that none of this matters: it literally does not make one bit of difference to myself or the world if I don’t finish a book and says absolutely nothing about my worth as a person.
That sense of failure when I give up on a book still sometimes lurks though and it might also be there when I don’t carry out some other part of a daily routine that I've convinced myself is necessary for a good life. My PhD is to blame for a lot of this neurosis I think - an excess of unstructured time to complete a big sprawling project means you have to create and internalise a powerful super ego, as it’s not going to come from anywhere else. When I was in the final stages of writing my thesis I adhered to a strict morning routine: tea in bed while reading some non-fiction (never fiction!) followed by some yoga and then breakfast while I sat at my laptop and started the day’s work. It worked for me then, so this sequence acquired a kind of superstitious, mystical quality and two years later, when I was really not coping at all, it became a source of utter paralysis, as I would sit in bed in the morning, looping silly thoughts round my head like oh god I need to do yoga but I'm really hungry, but I can’t eat until after I've done my yoga, but I can’t do yoga while I'm this hungry, and so on, occasionally for up to two hours. This routine was clearly not serving its purpose anymore but I couldn’t see that, I just thought I was failing at everything. When you’re mentally unwell you lose perspective and imagine that certain things matter a lot more than they actually do.
I think about this stuff a lot right now, with all the new year’s resolution discourse that’s around. January is bleak, life is hard, don’t deny yourself, has always been my perspective, and there is undeniably a kind of unpleasant self-punishing orthodoxy in the ‘new year new me’ cultural rhetoric which says that you need to atone for all the over-indulgence of the festive period with a period of self-denial. Alicia Kennedy’s latest newsletter arrived in my inbox this morning as I was writing this and she writes insightfully on the subject. Funnily enough her jumping off point is an exploration of her breakfast routine, but she also discusses the unhelpful New Year self-denial/ self-indulgence binaries: the rejection of ‘capitalism’s demands for endless optimization’ but also how ‘sometimes we’re wildly unhappy with how things are going for us’ and do want to do things differently. As she says, ‘both the imperative to change things and the notion that that’s silly create different demands on people’ and can cause their own anxieties; rejection of one orthodoxy can become an orthodoxy in itself. But more importantly, these decisions often sit within wider structures, which we might also want to figure out how to use our individual agency to change.
Movement is good, though, I think? It doesn’t have to be movement in any particular direction and it certainly shouldn’t mean punishment, or even perhaps difficulty. Maybe it’s just about something changing or loosening, though it could mean sitting somewhere slightly uncomfortable for a little bit. (I wrote about my need for ‘edges’ in my last newsletter and I think this fits in somewhere with that.) One of my favourite voices on all this right now is artist and performer Scottee who recently trained as a yoga teacher and has also got into running, and who, along with inclusive yoga teacher Lucy B, creates spaces in his practice for ‘fat, queer, neurodiverse, weird and / or mad people often sidelined by yoga spaces, white wellness and thin superiority’. Scottee posts so much reassuring content on Instagram about how to move your body in a way that makes you feel okay – how in certain yoga poses, for example, you don’t actually have to hold in your big belly or zip up your thighs tight together, and that it’s absolutely fine to stop in the middle of a run for a bit if you’re not feeling it.
And so back to Brighton Rock. I have persevered; I didn’t give up on it when I got to that first slightly nauseating passage about the kind-hearted, big-bosomed lady who is just on the side of what’s right, even though it would’ve been okay if I did. I am enjoying Greene’s prose, it’s action-driven and punchy and unlike what I read most of the time and I'm curious about this slightly different reading experience. So I've carried on and I will read until the end. This could be a sign that I'm mentally stronger than I was in 2022, it could be a sign that Greene’s a good writer, or it could be a sign of not very much. It doesn’t really matter, does it? It’s nice to try something new.