What did you think I was going to do? It’s not like I know how to fit a toilet or fix a car.
I must say, leaving university with few to no monetisable skills came as a giant shock. At uni, I was busy for four years. It didn’t really matter what I was doing, because I was busy. I worked hard. At no point did I have to wonder whether I was doing the right thing, because I was paying an institution to tell me what to do every day. I was at university, an activity which has been universally deemed an acceptable thing to be doing. I’m a student – no further explanation required. In reality, I would spend six hours a day in a library reading 19th-century articles written by repressed homosexuals about slightly less repressed homosexuals who died 2000 years ago. I would sit and translate into German and back out again for the benefit of no one but myself, I would regurgitate other people’s opinions about topics studied so relentlessly for centuries that I couldn’t possibly have an original thought.
At the end of four years, my institution gave me a certificate confirming I had done what I was told sufficiently often and well, and sent me off into the world. I had spent four years reading Greek; I was not ‘prepared’ for adult life. But at the ripe old age of 22, I had completed my studies, and as far as everyone around me was concerned, I was trained, ready to forge my own, and the communal, future.
For the first time in my life, no one told me what to do. So I got a job at a women’s lifestyle magazine.
I did so because I knew I liked writing but also wanted to travel and live abroad, so a short-term job where I could write, build a portfolio and earn some money seemed like a good idea. It didn’t seem like an earth-shatteringly good idea, just, sort of, fine. Which was odd. My entire young life adults told me to dream big, and the moment I had the opportunity to realise my huge dreams, everyone thought it was great that I, a 22-year-old man-child from London, had landed a job at a women’s lifestyle magazine catering to 30-55-year-old women who live in the Home Counties.
This turned out to be another form of ‘institution’, more or less. Another authority structure to tell me what to do, this time in exchange for money, and I realised once again that it didn’t really matter what I was doing. It was something to occupy me between 9 and 5:30 and that, broadly, was enough. I moved home, woke up every morning in my childhood bedroom and worked at a laptop at the same desk at which I revised for my GCSEs, drinking 6-8 cups of tea per day and gradually losing all respect for myself.
In the recesses of my mind I held an idea, now imagined, unreal and fabricated from the past, of life abroad. It was based on my experience of living in Germany for a year as part of my degree. I had lived in Munich, studying (but not really), travelling, speaking German, making new friends, going to the shops, going to the pub, each day waking up hundreds of miles from everyone I knew and doing something truly new. I loved my year abroad, not because of what I did but because of the person it made me. I spent a year ticking off things that had formerly made me anxious and reshaping my ideas of what I was capable of, and I returned to England with a lust for life and a genuine belief that I could do something decent with my own.
The further behind me I left that feeling, the fainter it became and simultaneously the closer I cradled my imagined idea of it. After six months working remotely for the magazine, I was unrecognisable. No vestige remained of the person I had been not eighteen months previously, save for this patchwork notion of life away from home.
Long story short, I quit my job and went away for half a year. But now I’m back, in exactly the same position as before but without a boss to keep me busy. I did not come back for anything more than to surprise my mum on her birthday (which I did, and that was great). I’m living with my parents, tutoring wealthy 11-year-olds for beer money and I have no idea what’s next. I don’t want to start building a life in London because I don’t want to stay, but I don’t know where I want to go. My frame of mind would best be described as follows: if an acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen in a decade sent me a text saying he was going to cycle round the world and wanted me to go with him, I’d do it in an instant. It’s quite tricky to get something started when that’s where you’re at.
So: a blog. A blog seems manageable. I want to find something I care about, something I genuinely want to do without a foreman barking orders. I want to make an informed decision about my future, and I believe that to do so I should spend some time out of ‘institutions’. Just to find out where this ship goes when I’m the one sailing it. I’ve beached the bastard, but you have to learn somehow.
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