Being realistic was killing me because to accept that I was nothing, would never be anything but nothing was so depressing that I no longer wanted to be alive. It meant that I no longer had to consider my appearance, since nobody cared what I looked like, I had no interest in it and didn’t look in the mirror anyway. It meant that I no longer had to consider doing any work, since I was too depressed to do it and there was nobody to do it for.
Being realistic killed my mother because a bunch of terminally stupid people, including her own children and three hospital consultants thought that every piece of bullshit they had been told by an imaginary authority was correct and I was wrong. From having the healthiest immune system she had ever had, drug and pain free, she went to dead of pneumonia within two months, drugged up to the eyeballs with poisonous drugs that she only needed because they insisted on feeding her a crap diet.
Is being realistic killing you?
Take a look at your life. What relationship does it have with your dreams or self-perception? My self-perception has changed quite radically of late,although I cannot say it has changed significantly over the long-term. I always carried the whiff of scandal everywhere I went. When I finally discovered just how big the impending scandal was, I was shocked into wondering why I had the information, questioning the source of the information, questioning my emotional motives for embracing the information and wondering whether I was the right person to handle the information.
All this created years of delays. I cannot honestly say it is Wolfe’s fault. He has relentlessly run with his particular ball despite horrific setback, errors and many events which would have seen lesser people run a million miles rather than carry on.
Is he an angel? No, but neither was anyone of note throughout history. Is he original? Not particularly, however he has taken a bunch of elements and almost accidentally created a rather messy foundation for something far more interesting.
Is he perfect? Hell no.
So, all in all I think out of the nine years, it has taken probably seven years of full time thought, and I am a pretty intense worker, to even to get to the point where I felt safe to proceed with the work. My emotional state complicated this further, since the inevitable self-doubt was seriously amplified by that horrible feeling that one isn’t going to be able to think one’s way out of it this time, and wondering what implications this has for the overall project.
The project itself was always bigger than us, so it was more of a question of what form it would take and how to go about making it work properly. I think we are on the right track now. In terms of timing, we will be lucky if I can make this happen by the time we are sixty, but I am fairly happy with the strategy now that my personal distraction tactics have taken a more useful turn.
In terms of the No Glass Walls project, I had a very interesting conversation with a friend last night, when she tried to gently remind me to ‘be realistic.’ Her idea of ‘being realistic’ is forgetting about Wolfe, mainly because we choose not to directly communicate (we both have good reasons for that) and presumably ‘moving on’ in some weak and spineless way – to something significantly more boring and tiresome.
Being realistic involves being dead to the core.
Fuck being realistic. I am not nothing. My mother wasn’t nothing, and the world is FULL of terminally stupid people who don’t deserve to have the slightest bit of consideration for their appalling ignorance.
True love has no shame. Reality kills.