The Dry by Jane Harper

Sneering commentators occasionally point out to me that over the past couple of years I’ve read an increasing quantity of low brow books. And while, yes, that’s both true and something I probably shouldn’t be as ashamed about as I am (I am ashamed about it, but I’m ashamed about everything, especially about how functional I am while so apathetic I am towards myself), there is a very simple explanation for it. The reason is that – with a busy schedule of working (sometimes), doing childcare (often), writing for and doing performances (at least once most weeks), writing this blog (I don’t know when that happens as I never feel like I’m typing it, even though I am right now, but later on I will probably forget this has even happened), and doing assorted other household chores and tasks, the most frequent moment of the day when I have a bit of time to read is the 30 minutes or so before I go to sleep, when everyone else I live with has already gone to bed. And at that time, in that mood, in that zone, I rarely feel able to be challenged.

I’ve read the first page of many interesting and complex books of prose and verse at 10.30pm over the past year, but I’ve then almost always put them right back on the shelf (I say “shelf”, it’s piles at this point) and instead reverted to something easier. More bedtime.

Maybe, yes, this is a sign of intellectual decline. Maybe this is evidence of a psychological and literary calcification, a wandering away from meaningful engagement with the arts towards more of a… More of a personal, soulful, death.

I’ve written here before how my mood is always deeply tied to how I feel about the book that I’m in the process of reading. So, when the books are disposable and frivolous, I feel redundant and vacuous, too. And, I suppose that I am.

I suppose that I am vacuous.

And what needs to happen is that I accept that and stop caring.

I should have a sturdy sense of self, at my age.

I should be able to tie my sense of worth to something more solid than the paperback I happen to be carrying. But to what else can I attach my self-worth? What else???

To this blog, this catalogue of oscillating psychiatric unbalance?

To my writing practice, which peaked in terms of critical engagement most of a decade ago and peaked in terms of audience reach years before that, too?

Should I hold onto the small family that I have, an accomplished spouse, an objectively good small child and a wonderful dog? Well, I can’t do that as the personal home isn’t the whole of the world, right, and leaning too much on any inter-personal relationship almost always collapses it… And, yes, my child continues to grow and so will eventually become, like all people, mostly annoying or dull (I have fallen towards dull, at least it seems to me that I have, and I regret it, but not enough to do enough about it, both compounding the disregard and evidencing the validity of it as a reading of self), and my dog is now in the double digits, agewise (he’s always been in the double digits in rankings out of ten), so my fear of his loss is something that grows and grows and grows.

Sometimes I lean on the perseverance of this blog or my perseverance of my meat-free diet as things I could try to build a sense of self around, but those seem more like failures than successes…

This blog has not lost me money during only maybe three or four years since I started it, and though on occasion it has gained me acclaim and positive attention, it’s also pissed a lot of people off, sometimes (I would argue) deservingly, but sometimes not so… Right now, if you Google “scott manley hadley review” (which obviously I do on the regular – I’m bored and disinterested in myself but not totally checked out yet) one of the first things that comes up is an intentionally mean Substack post from a writer whose book I was politely critical – though far from damning – of last year. I’ve read the header but not the whole thing as I can tell from non-public communications that we had at about the same time that he didn’t like me (and he also fails to they/them me in the opening, so I’m already uncomfortable reading on) and also that he knows more words than me, so it seems like a foolish thing to look over that would be likely to upset me without any positive side, other than knowing what it says and no longer worrying about what it says. And I know I should read it, to know what the damage is (and also to know if there are accusations there beyond ignorance and stupidity and lack of critical engagement, which are, alas, fair enough), but it doesn’t make me feel better about myself knowing that I’ve made a negative impact on someone else’s life, but I also have a deeply low opinion of myself and don’t want to read someone agreeing with my low level of self-regard, however they articulate my faults. I don’t want to know about it. But I think about it, that review, sitting there, and sometimes I want to ask people who know me well to read it and see if it’s something I should be upset by, if it’s worse than the private communications that we had… But that feels like a self indulgent thing to do, too. I shouldn’t be thinking about it at all, right, I shouldn’t? But I do. So, yes, there’s no positive sense of self to be found in the blog.

And re: not eating meat, that feels less a success and more a reminder of a failure to be able to maintain a [morally right imo] diet totally and consistently free of all animal products indefinitely. I don’t feel like what I have been doing is so bad that it isn’t even worth trying, but I don’t really think I’d be able to hold a serious sense of myself as “good” based on diet unless I was 100% vegan for a long time. So that doesn’t work either.

The performance practice, yes, that is going well and steadily and I’m enjoying it, yes, but I’m playing catch up on doing something I knew I should have been doing for fifteen years, during which time I was mostly spending my evenings binge drinking and crying and then, later, just doing nothing at all (and crying). So when I think about the minor yet meaningful successes I’ve had here, I feel sad about what I’ve missed, not buoyed up by what I’ve got. (I’ve actually booked my first paid spot at a fully professional comedy night since typing this paragraph a day or so ago, lol, so maybe I have a little more of a sense of success than I did then.)

Outside of self, performance, writing, home, I have very little, too.

I don’t have a rewarding or even engaging professional life – I continue pissing around for money in the deeply uncomfortable and unwelcoming hospitality sector, often going weeks and months without engaging with someone I have remotely similar values to in a work setting. And that’s fucking depressing, too.

I don’t have a rich and rewarding social life, I don’t spend a lot of time with other people, and often when I do I just feel more alone and out of place.

The warmer weather doesn’t make me feel better, it just reminds me that more time has passed and I’ve failed to get myself to a mode of life where I can be outside and comfortable in the sun, living somewhere where the financial cost of living doesn’t outweigh the psychological cost of working.

Just ticking along, treading water, waiting for a significant change that I just don’t feel comfortable or confident in ever being able to deliver.

Waiting, once again, for death. But not caring enough, this time round, to be self destructive.

The hangovers and the bruising and worse from poisoning myself or attacking the body with force just aren’t worth it. And a medical reading might well be that my lack of self destructive behaviours is a positive sign, but I don’t think it is.

I used to care so deeply about my hopelessness, my lack of clear escape or development or change that I couldn’t sit with it, I had to scream and/or hurt myself.

But I just don’t care very much any more.

I don’t care enough to be covered in bruises and reeking of yesterday’s negronis at lunchtime. And that doesn’t feel positive to me.

I’m not careening towards an early death (I exercise, I eat well, I’m well behaved, etc etc etc), but why???

If I want to live better, more impactfully within my own scope of the world, then I need to not waste time reading murder mystery thrillers, like this one.

Sure, The Dry is fun and atmospheric and engaging and pacy and well put together, but ultimately it’s just distraction, like so many things.

Christ, I’m sorry to myself for the lack of anything of heft and for the lack of mess to revel in while I sit in the crumbs of a life barely lived.

Gotta make a plan and make some movements. But it just doesn’t feel like something that’s gonna happen soon…

(Though, again, as I interjected above, since typing this post I’ve hit a very exciting and meaningful performance career milestone, so ignore some of the negativity. Only a tiny bit, though…)