The kids are all back at school now, despite the pandemic and the concern that there will be an outbreak again and lockdowns. There are rules in place everywhere, but they are changing back and forth — the girls didn't need masks in the corridors and then they did. They are reliant though and all of the discourses of confusion, if you want to call them those, the things that older people say about not understanding what the rules are and why they are changing, don't seem to be picked up by the children in the same way. They accept it and do what they're told and like every September for the last seven years now, they leave in the morning, up the different roads to their different schools, needing less and less help every day it seems.
My third book is finished and I've been working through the proofs while the project editor emails me like I'm a child completing a homework assignment. I've missed the deadline, but only because I put the wrong date in my diary, not because I'm trying to be obstinate. The proofs are late and I feel guilty, but am distracted by everything else. This week it was all my photo files on Flickr and the feeling that someone could have just downloaded every photo I have ever taken over the last 15 years. The children are now not children really, and have opinions about what others can see about what their past lives. They have friends I don't know about, friends who found some embarrassing picture of them as a baby. I read back through the things I've written and feel a sense of terrible dread, that I treated them the way I promised I never would: like they were just characters in some novel about me.
These are distracting, unuseful thoughts, the result of the same narcissism where I worry about the effect of my actions on others because of how it will make me feel if they are disappointed in me. Everything is about you, Stephen, isn't it, I hear some antagonist say, the same one that says jump when I run over a bridge in the early morning. None of this is about me anymore: the book, the family — it's about the project, the artefacts made up of all these words that come out of me when I was soothing myself and coaxing those words out by saying, Don't worry, you can fix it later, just write now, just let it happen. All I can see is the errors and clumsy sentences. I get angry with my manic self for lying to me. You said I would have time to fix this, you said I would be better in six months. The manic me borrows from the depressed me, and never pays the time back. Here, I've left you with this mess — it's not like you could have done any of this yourself. I find a passage where I am writing confidently about Bhaktin, but I think to myself, what do I even know about Bhaktin. I wrote about him when I was doing my PhD, I had some grasp of it then, or at least I thought I did, but why do I think I still do. I reread the same sentence five times and although I know what it says, I can't tell if it makes sense.
I've been going for long walks, long for me at least, an hour or so to do a loop around the edge of Harborne, to avoid getting fat and feeling like I'm stuck in the house. I think irrationally that I should quit academia, or get a job in market research, or move back to Japan, or become a community organiser, or just take any job I can that doesn't require me to think all the time. I go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night inexplicably, hungry. I go downstairs and eat my breakfast with the morning still hours off. I try to meditate and repeat the routine I have since 2016 when it started to get worse. I mark some essays and wait for the sun to come up. The sun is coming up, of all the things that seem to be displaced this year, at least here in Birmingham the sun is still coming up and not obscured by smoke the way it is in California now, or how it was in Malaysia when Sumatra was burning. The sun has come up and the book is still due.