I turn 29 tomorrow.
I genuinely don’t care that I am getting older. In many ways I look forward to getting old and am certainly interested to see how 30 feels in a year’s time. All together though, its just a fucking number lets be honest. The amount of time a planet revolves and circles the nearest start is a pretty inexact and fairly arbitrary method of gauging time and could be easily thrown off by the slightest alterations of our planet’s axis.
What does depress me is my life I have lived in my 28th year.
I quit my job nearly exactly a year ago due to my desire for change and the fact I had accomplished little thus far in my life and had no future prospects. After quitting however and as money ran dry, predictably I had to move out of my lovely lovely flat in Manchester and began to sofa surf with some very patient friends. This lasted from November 2012 till February 2013 when I realised I could no longer strain my relationships with my friends any further and it was time to return to somewhere I might not be booted out of: Mum’s. To put this in perspective Manchester is in the North West of England and Kent is 200 miles south in the South East of England. So I left all my possessions, all the projects I had been slowly building and all my friends far behind to return to my old home town where I had not lived for any length of time in 5 years.
And here I have remained since.
I made a deal with myself however to return to Manchester if I was still here by this time. A deal I have adhered to. As such I will be returning north on the 10th. I am still unemployed and skint but you cannot just wait for change as you might be waiting a long time or else it will probably not be the change you desire.
In the last year the main thing that has kept me going has been the discovery of what I actually want to do with my life which seems to have been what this whole year of my life has been in aid of. After dabbling in Music, Acting, Photography, Directing and much more besides I realised where my real passion and probably my greatest strenght lay: I want to be a writer. Sadly I want to write poncey things like poetry and novels which it is very hard to make money from but the satisfaction that came with that discovery was no end of delight. Sadly this all seems to have come at a price. I have written non-stop since this discovery: poems long and short, a whole website, a novel, a couple of essays, several posts on here, a play and other sundry nonsense besides but other than this I have achieved nothing.
My friend referred to this as “an interesting experiment in social depravation” which I think is pretty accurate. I am unemployed, no home to call my own and living out of a rucksack, skint, no social circle to see, nowhere to go and single. There is literally nothing other than job-hunting to fill my days with so out of necessity I write. Whilst productive it is also pretty wearing. Humans need interactivity and being starved in this regard does funny things to you. The last few months have been quite a slog and in no way cheerful but in an attempt to form some sort of communication I started posting more regularly on Vine and became basically addicted to it as a result. You can see and talk to complete strangers who (generally) are very positive. I wrote a whole post about it on here that you can read.
So with something of a little bit more cheer in my bones I will be returning northward next week and hopefully 29 will mean greater things now I have stuff written I can tout/sell. The arbitrary line in the sand of a person’s age is less meaningful to me than the fact exactly a year ago I took a bold and not really successful step but I am still glad I did no matter how dull this year may have been or however many friendships and relationships therein I may have put under strain. I accomplished one great thing this year and hopefully next year I will accomplish many.
This Written River 