Why I Called My Memoir Love Shy

Picture:  Tambako the Jaguar

My memoir, which I first self-published back in 2012, is called Love Shy. As a confirmed commitment phobe I only settled on this title after going through a string of others, starting with the first one, Splitting.

I settled on Love Shy because it suggests my main disorders while acknowledging that there was a familial and psychological aspect to my illness, a basic problem with the formation of self – it wasn’t a case of a fully formed ego being hit by a breakdown out of the blue, which is how mental illness is sometimes represented in memoir.

But the term 'love shy' is now mired in controversy and I feel the need to explain why I used it.

Love Shy is the name of a forum, now notorious, that is the voice of the Incel community – a group of primarily men who are, to put it primly, unable to ‘get any’. Incel stands for involuntary celibacy. These are men who try their luck with women, and get nowhere.

The forum received worldwide attention following the horror of the Elliot Rodgers mass murder in Isla Vista, California. Not that he was on that forum as far as I’m aware, but there is a strong anti-feminist movement associated with particular Reddit groups that some men on the Love Shy forum subscribe to. Before the shooting spree that he carried out on 23 May, Rodgers had aired his revenge manifesto in a chilling video. In the video he expressed disdain for the women who had rejected him sexually over the years, and his intention to punish both them and the sexually active men whom he despised.

The misogyny of Rodgers’s thinking would have fitted in perfectly with those of many on the Incel forum. (Which is not to say the Incel community are potential mass murderers – in the light of the murders the internet exploded with debate between those blaming the murders on mental illness and those pinpointing the structural misogyny that made Rodgers’s views mainstream thinking. It’s worth mentioning that Rodgers killed five men, including himself, and two women.)

I’d looked at the Love Shy forum before the Rodgers murders, of course, but not analysed it in any depth. The forum seems to equate love shyness with involuntary celibacy. But my own definition of love shyness is the opposite of involuntary celibacy. The difficulty in making a distinction between the two terms indicates the difference between the unconscious and the conscious minds.

My memoir details how I ran away from love and emotional involvement. It’s not that I didn’t have opportunities – of course I did. And if asked at the time I would have said that of course I wanted a relationship. But I had a phobia about love and sex, so everything I did ensured that I obtained neither. The unconscious forces within me were stronger than my conscious wishes.

Committed relationships are quite different from casual sex. In fact as a young person I was very phobic about the latter too. There was an inner saboteur (which my psyche saw as a protector) that kept me away from both love and most sex.

Those who grew up with the internet won’t understand how much harder it was then to negotiate sex in real time, without the mediation of electronic devices to let one’s wishes be known at one remove. Before the rise of the internet, when you had to have some social confidence to negotiate casual sex, involuntary celibacy was the consequence of love shyness but for me they were not the same thing.

For me, the internet made it easy to get around that saboteur because meet-ups could be neatly arranged. I can now cope with the anxiety around casual encounters, although I’ve pretty much lost interest in them for various reasons. But the internet didn’t change the fundamental problem. Nevertheless I became more open over the years, and have begun to believe that fate itself has played a role in my more recent lack of long-term relationships. I had rejected the major loves of my life over a period of years and before the advent of the internet as dating platform. Perhaps these earlier rejections of love have created such bad karma that, willing or not, real relationships do not come my way.

As I've said, I found the internet amenable to ‘hooking up’ – although unless you’re at any age where a large pool of your peers are unattached, actually finding suitable candidates for even casual encounters is not that easy. But what I realised from these experiences, as well as countless celibate ‘pre-dates’ with both men and women, is that whether you find a relationship or not is ultimately out of your control. Sure, you can increase your chances by frequent dating, joining interest or hobby groups and pursuing ‘personal growth’ (using your intuition to avoid time-wasting and dangerous situations) but, at the risk of sounding hippy-dippy, it’s really up to the universe.

My date-to-relationship ratio has been about 60:0 (this excludes casual short term relationships). Sex may seem available at the drop of a hat, but bad casual sex can actually reduce your chances of a future relationship because not only will you will need time to emotionally process the negative experiences, but they could damage your level of trust in the future. Which is not to say all casual sex is bad of course – intuition is the key here.

Some people are simply frightened of their own inexperience, or just very shy, and have been able to use the medium of the internet to start off with casual sex and then move onto relationships once they got the chance, without having any deep-seated fear of involvement. Good luck to them.

It may even be true what the male incels say about women – that most can get sex if they really want it and therefore can’t rightly be called incel.

But to my mind a phobic fear of love, intimacy and the often wordless courtship rituals that surround those things is not the same as the fear of casual sex, a fear that may be more controllable now that sex can be neatly arranged beforehand via dating sites, email and texting.

Despite what some incel men believe, it’s therefore quite possible that there are love shy women out there (using my definition)  who can get casual sex if they want to, but flee potential relationships – not that I think my level of phobia was or is very common.

I doubt very much whether most of the men on the Love Shy forum have the kind of problem that plagued me. They seem to be willing to approach women, and to ask for what they want. In their own narratives, they just keep getting rejected. Instead of thinking their own approach might be the problem they therefore conclude that women are castrating bitches.

But in a great irony, this is itself a form of self-sabotage. Patriarchy is a psychological construct and never just a social one, but male power is contested these days. Patriarchal masculinity and its manifestations, ranging from old-fashioned views on rape to the extremities of domestic violence, are often evidence of crippling psychic terrors to do with fear of abandonment and fear of female sexual power that are beyond my powers of analysis (and may also be related to early trauma).

Clearly it is not just the misogynistic views of these men but the psychic defences that underpin them that are the problem.

So perhaps these men are in fact closer to me than I would like to think, to the extent that both they and I employ psychic defence mechanisms (albeit very different ones).

Patriarchal machismo is a powerful psychic defence – but this is not immediately clear because in so many circumstances it is socially sanctioned.

The more embittered men on the Love Shy forum might do well to go into therapy with qualified psychologists who could help them to challenge their fears of genuine involvement with, and commitment to, people of the opposite gender – as well as the distorted ideas about women they have picked up.

As for me I can rail against fate all I like but the fact is that what we have done in the past always affects the present. My rejections of love have helped make me the person I am today. Being in Grow has enabled me to adopt a more philosophical approach to life, and to accept that if I follow my path I’ll be okay. But my past actions with significant others continue to haunt me.

Love Shy: a Memoir of Social and Sexual Terror is available as a Kindle e-book on Amazon. It's available on  the UK Amazon site here and on the Australian or US Amazon site here.

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Things that Go Bump in the Daytime: The Spooky Fun of Ghost Videos

Some people consume amateur porn on line. I am a sucker for amateur fright night videos.

I only properly discovered YouTube a couple of years ago. It wasn’t till then that I fully understood the power of the internet to effortlessly dispose of time. Here you’ll find every pleasant television memory, every edgy advertisement that didn’t get aired on TV, every pop song that held special meaning and that you had previously thought could only be called up from your own internal hard drive, every possible interview featuring your favourite celebrity and every single amateur video, however lacking in basic intellectual or artistic merit, ever uploaded by Josephine or Joe Average.

The amateur ghost vids are a genre unto themselves. The first question we lovers of the paranormal are supposed to ask ourselves is: ‘Is it real?’ This question is often unintentionally answered in the negative by the makers themselves: the urge to go overboard is just too tempting. The orbs are pleasantly spooky (orbs are surely the ecotoplasm of the twenty-first century), but then the light of the bathroom turns on by itself, followed soon after by the faucet doing the same. Sleeper ‘wakes up’ to investigate. I didn’t come down in the last shower, along with the restless spirits of the dead.

Other times, as in the imaginatively titled Ghost Children in Our Basement Caught on Tape, the video looks genuine at first. These ghost kiddies slowly move toy cars around, rock chairs, gently throw a doll to the ground and then turn the tele on. They seem slightly sedated, and one commenter notes that she would much rather have these polite ghost children than her own brats who would probably trash the joint. The greenish tinge of the infrared light adds to the understated air of authenticity.

But this impression is soon spoilt by onscreen messages like ‘subscribe for more ghost children videos’. Would someone who was genuinely under assault by a poltergeist have the emotional fortitude to create a YouTube channel with 112 videos? And once you start reading the comments, which pick the video apart, you lose the forlorn hope that, despite your misgivings, perhaps this really  is a genuine depiction.

While the majority of these videos reveal themselves to be fake, for would-be believers like me it is the liminal area between the likelihood of fakery and the dim hope of authenticity that makes these tapes so compelling. Perhaps that’s why the comments calling out the fakes are sometimes so vitriolic. We’d rather remain uncertain than know for sure that someone's trying to pull our collective leg.

This one, which is obviously faked if you look carefully, shows a speeded-up version of the reason a couple supposedly argue about whether he makes the bed every day after she leaves for work. Delightful shivers up my spine before the trick became obvious.

And here is a ghost that does the vacuumming. I wish I had this type of ghost.

I found this one very creepy at first, not because it couldn’t be doctored – anything can be doctored – but because imaginatively this seems unlikely. If you were going to create a ghostly effect, would you do it like this? But then too many commenters declared that this was a speck of dust moving over the lens, and I reluctantly conceded they were probably right.

Even if the trick isn’t obvious, a sure warning sign of fakery in the majority of examples is that so much of the poltergeist action takes place squarely in the vision of the time lapse camera that the makers supposedly leave on for hours at a time.

Sometimes there is a dog involved, barking anxiously and staring at something the video maker can’t see. The makers always seem compelled to ask their dogs over and over again ‘What is it, Fluffy?’ (or Sid or whoever), perhaps expecting their dog to be shocked into speech by the drama of the moment: ‘Dog speaks for the first time after being asked “What is it?” twenty times during poltergeist episode’.

Dog See's [sic] a Ghost! is a good example of the ghost-and-dog subgenre. Featuring  a creepy attic ghost, it attracted no accusations of fakery, and the dog is genuinely terrified. If the authenticity of these videos should be judged purely by the comments, this one could be authentic (she says hopefully).

What scared me most in this video, though, was the terrible use of apostrophes and unnecessary commas. ‘See’s’? What’s that about? Can a verb possess something? Perhaps the apostrophe indicates that the verb is itself possessed by the ghost of bad punctuation.

The videos recorded on security cameras  seem by their very nature to be more authentic because of  the low pixel rate and the fact that they're often in black and white. What do readers think of this one, which is set in a video store? The person putting the videos away seems genuinely startled, but perhaps he’s just a good actor?

But in the final analysis, for genuine lovers of thrillers it doesn’t matter whether these are real or not, any more than it matters whether the people in amateur porn movies are really into each other. Because this is really a replica of an existing genre – the thriller that apes reality, pioneered by the brilliant Blair Witch Project, and carried further in the Paranormal Activity series – the first of which was pretty good, with the quality dwindling further with each sequel. We knew Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity weren’t real but it was the similitude that made them scary, not a mistaken belief that one was watching a doco.

The same goes for these amateur videos. When they don’t overreach themselves and you avoid reading the comments, they provide great cheap thrills. It’s the carefully timed depiction of boring domestic reality, with its combination of natural and technogical sounds, followed by sudden, inexplicable events at unpredictable intervals that produces the delightful eeriness. And of course the overly serious intertitles, which are usually white text on a black background, feature lots of full stops and are often accompanied by nothing but an ominous silence.

A decent supernatural thriller comes out only once every couple of years, so I am chronically thriller deprived. Amateur fright videos fill the gap in the meantime.

Ghost videos and the uncanny

Wikipedia tells us that the state known as the uncanny was first identified by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay, ‘On the psychology of the uncanny’. According to Jentsch, the uncanny is the result of ‘intellectual uncertainty’; it is always ‘something one does not know one’s way about in’. He goes on to say:

... one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.

This explains why splatter porn is horrifying but not thrilling, and why its consumers require increasing amounts of gore to get their kicks. Good supernatural thrillers play on this uncertainty rather than revealing the source of the fear, or at least putting off the revelation until late in the day.

Freud goes further, arguing that the uncanny is basically about taboos like sex and death. Because these taboos are traditionally not dealt with directly, we end up projecting all our ‘stuff’ onto them; the uncanny thus reminds us of our own repressed desires. It doesn’t bust the taboos, though – it plays on them. A decent thriller uses all this psychic possibility while not spoiling the effect by exposing the taboo. Thus ghosts should be either invisible or indistinguishable from humans, and gore should be kept to a minimum.

But for someone with anxiety there is another dimension. Anxiety means a constant fear of chimeras – the next social event, the next work assignment, and even stretches of time ranging from the next five minutes to the future itself. Watching a scary video is a way of controlling the way one is exposed to fear of the unknown, enabling the viewer to mediate their fear in a safe environment.

But as well as immediate fears, perhaps the uncanny also helps us mediate those unnamed fears that supercapitalism and the threat of climate change cultivate in the most balanced personalities. Given the Russian roulette we are playing with finance, people and environment, the future is terrifying. Much safer to be terrified by chimeras that we know probably aren’t real.

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My new non-human companions

A birdie

For about the last three weeks, almost every day, a plain brown bird, probably a female common blackbird, has been tapping on my bathroom window intermittently throughout the day, fluttering away when I rush to intercept her. I’ve christened her Mabel.

There’s a wisteria against the back wall of the house, and I thought for a while Mabel was trying to pull off wisteria stems to build a nest. But now I don’t think so. I’ve learned to creep up to the bathroom door and peer at it in the mirror on the right-hand wall, which is at right angles to the wall with the window, and when I do this I can see Mabel knocking on the glass with her beak.

The insistence of this task suggests that she’s worked out that the glass is a genuine substance, not mere air as those unfortunate birds who knock into windows think it is, and has decided that if she knocks for long enough and hard enough she can penetrate it.

No matter how quiet I am, Mabel knows when I creep up, and she stops her tapping and stares at my image in the mirror with trepidation. When I creep quietly through the door to look at her square on, she flaps away.

I glimpse before she flutters away a look of curiosity and interest on her face. She seems fascinated by the sheltered foreign world behind the glass, even eager to enter it – perhaps it seems like an incredibly safe and obvious place to build a nest? On one morning recently she’d brought what was probably her mate along, a much darker blackbird, to observe her efforts.

Why this one bird? Why is she so fascinated by the glass? Why don’t other birds of the same species act this way? Is Mabel dumber than her peers or more intelligent? If more intelligent, could she breed a series of superbirds that might become more intelligent still?

But if she seeks the strange new world she glimpses in the shadows behind the glass, why doesn’t she fear it, knowing that a huge human lurks behind it?

She’s tapping much less often now, down from her maximum of perhaps four or five tries a day, but she still hasn’t given up. On one morning she started early, while I was still in bed, and I even thought I heard her a few nights ago, but peering through the darkened window to see if she was still there was futile.

My writerly brain is always trying to find a symbolic or spiritual meaning when there is none. Does Mabel’s urgent tapping mirror my own attempts to rejoin the human race? Is that also a futile task? Or is she a spirit in human form trying to convey some vital message from the other side?

More importantly, how do I explain the scratches on the window to my landlords?

A computer

I’ve just bought a new computer and the whole thing cost me a lot more than I was expecting to pay – almost a thousand dollars more, if you count the $240 I spent for the nice computer man to come and set it up for me. This decision felt incredibly indulgent at the time – the technician who fixed my computer last time quoted only $70 to install the new software and copy the files over, but he would only do it at his shopfront.

Given the things that went wrong with the set-up (my old printer incompatible with Windows 7; the surge protection power board activating the safety switch for the circuit, causing the electricity on the circuit to turn off) I’m just relieved I chose the more expensive route. I thought I was pandering to my chronic fear of things not going right but it turned out to be a necessity; simply having these problems occurring with someone there to comment on and diagnose them was important. I bought a new cheapo surge protection board, and I’m adjusting to my dad’s old desk jet printer, while he’s been promised my seven-year-old HP laser printer as he’s on an earlier version of Windows.

It infuriated me that my old printer was still going strong but was being forced into unnecessary obsolescence – HP have created some Windows-compatible drivers for some of their older models, but not this one, and I was told that the older the model the less likely they are to do so in future if they haven’t already. I mean no offence to users of desk jets, my dad included, but it feels like going back in time after a laser printer! I’ll buy a new laser printer at some stage, but HP has lost my vote for good.

This is the first time I’ve bought a new computer in five-and-a-half years and I’m noticing a similar situation to the one that occurred last time. I’ve tried to avoid unnecessary bells and whistles (no blueray DVD player for me) but I have the same sense I did last time of a whole lot of new features on the standard programs, many of which might be helpful but that I’ll probably never get around to finding out about, as if an ideal technological life (that I’d paid for) were passing me by.

I’ve also been keeping Norton busy with some glitches while using its anti-virus program with Explorer, and was in danger of becoming a nuisance caller. Luckily I’ve cleverly worked out that I can easily test if the anti-virus program is to blame just by turning it off temporarily. And simply observing as the Norton techies temporarily take over my computer and do their swift and magic checks with their invisible hands has been both weird and instructive. Through sheer necessity they seem to know far more about the glitches that Explorer can cause than Microsoft ever will.

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In the land of Minor Mishaps

Recently I entered the land of the Minor Mishap. Those experiencing Minor Mishaps belong for a short time to a very unexclusive club.

A Minor Mishap doesn’t involve serious illness or death, and is not annoying enough to be soul destroying, but it usually requires that SOMETHING BE DONE. It demands to be given priority.

When you’re in the throes of a Minor Mishap you’re in a slightly different space from everyone else, floating a few inches above them. When you are speaking to anyone about the problem your voice carries urgency, purpose and a touch of desperation. You are driven by an overwhelming need to restore the world to exactly what it was once was. You no longer want a partner or more money or world peace. You just want what you had before – your version of normalcy, which, since it has been snatched from you, has suddenly become incredibly precious and sacred.

Minor Mishaps often involve parting with money that one would rather spend on fun and frivolity. Action is important, sometimes just for the sake of keeping the momentum going, even if it achieves next to nothing.

Minor Mishaps that can’t be fixed right away gradually stop being mishaps and become absorbed into normal life – in this case, the experience of ‘normal life’ changes to incorporate the Minor Mishap. I rent a crumbling semi-detached flat, so house-based Minor Mishaps in the form of needed repairs are incredibly frequent. If it’s not an electricity power point needing replacing it’s the hot water system in the roof calling it a day or the guttering on the garage detaching from the bricks and hanging down in a very undignified way.

But basically after I’ve reported the needed repair someone else has to sort it out. This doesn’t always happen straight away and if it drags on the Minor Mishap loses that urgent quality, and I stop noticing it.

A computer-based Minor Mishap is arguably worse than many others because sometimes, although you know something must be done, you don’t know exactly what. You’re like a detective hunting out the clues. You can call on experts but there’s no guarantee they will know either.

The Mishap strikes

One day last week at about 7 am, I turned on my right arm, I mean my computer. The green light went on but, apart from that, nothing happened. It was no longer a computer but a worthless box of tin. Or so it seemed.

I had reason to be devastated. A similar incident had occurred when I first moved into the place I’m in now, five and a half years ago. Back then, when I first set my computer up and switched it on, a flame briefly leered from the top back section where the fan is, and my computer died in a puff of smoke. I still have the disk drive, but such was the damage that it wasn’t apparent whether or not the files were retrievable – a specialised company charging a megafortune would have billed me for even investigating the drive to see if they could retrieve the files, and I wasn’t going to risk it. So when this second computer malfunction happened, I assumed at first that computer Armageddon had occurred for a second time.

Because I knew the nearest library had plenty of computers for public use and I had a file to send to a client (luckily saved onto a USB key), I planned to go there tout suite. But the library didn’t open till 10. In the meantime, I went to mum and dad’s, where my technologically challenged father, currently using a hard drive so ancient it is a priceless antique, has had a slightly newer hard drive sitting in his ‘study’ (storeroom) for a year waiting to be connected. My brother-in-law got it free from his work when they were upgrading. None of us had a clue what state it was in.

(As a bonus, I saw my recently born nephew Billy, as my sister from the country was staying with my parents. Last time I saw Billy he was too new to make eye contact: this time the bald-headed angel looked straight at me with friendly curiosity before his face crumpled as if he was about to burst into wails.)

I lugged Dad’s heavy hard drive to my place and set it up, hoping I could use it to send my work file. The screen came to life in a blaze of incomprehensible text. In my Windows-primed brain, I had simply assumed that I would see the familiar aqua screen with the reassuring software logos on it, good old Explorer and Word. Nothing of the sort. It was speaking to me in computer language I didn’t understand. At least I now knew that the problem with my own computer had nothing to do with the monitor, seemingly nothing to do with the external electricals, and was almost certainly in the hard drive.

In pouring rain, feeling alone and sorry for myself, I managed to get to the library and send the work file with a great deal of fuss and panic; so scrambled was my brain I had to make two trips because I’d left the email address at home.

Luckily my dad knew a computer man in a cheap part of town who’d sold him a monitor and also did repairs. It turned out to be one of those reassuring small shopfronts with disembowelled computers and equipment strewn all over table tops and the floor, a bit like body parts in an operating theatre. The very nice man, Mark, told me it was a simple electrical part in the hard drive that had died and he could fix it in ten minutes for only $75 – he actually showed me my computer firing up using his own electrical equipment: my files were safe! Normalcy, sweet normalcy, beckoned.

But then. When I took the hard drive home after Mark had fixed it, it did exactly the same thing as before. I rang Mark back, carefully presenting the scenario as an incomprehensible problem and not his fault. He told me to bring it back and he would test it again.

He tested the drive twice while I watched, using his own monitor, and it fired up beautifully. He was genuinely bamboozled. The plot had thickened.

Luckily, waiting to be served in the shop was a tall, solidly built man wearing an old blue singlet and shorts, with greying hair skirting his shoulders and the intense but calm gaze of the computer literate – the sort of man that you just know loves both computer games and a beer. He could hardly ignore the desperation in my voice as I spoke to Mark and to the concerned woman who I think was Mark’s wife. I can’t remember who said it first, but either he or Mark said something like ‘Have you got surge protection?’ The penny dropped. I did have surge protection – a power board that would presumably cut out in a storm surge. For some reason, it must have decided the power from my computer was a threat, and shut off the electricity to it while allowing power to the other components.

‘Just get a normal power board’, the blue-singleted man said. ‘You don’t even need surge protection unless you live out of town or in the hills.’

I thanked them all profusely and took my now rather scratched hard drive home again. This time I didn’t actually believe it would fire up – and it did. I’m now typing on it, but I’ve noted something else about a Minor Mishap – when normalcy returns, it takes a while to actually feel normal. My whole world had swayed and threatened to collapse. Without my computer, I now realise, I don’t feel quite whole – and I’m still recovering from the shock. Sad but true.

(I’m fine about spending the $75 – the part Mark replaced was five years old and usually dies after two, and he kindly removed all the dust from the insides as well – and there was a lot.)

Throughout my semi-ordeal my friend Simon was a calm voice on the other end of the phone – I rang him at least four times. He kept directing me to find out what the problem was rather than assuming I had entered the computer stone age. I think he has missed his vocation – with his sane, logical approach he should definitely go into counselling (he can practise on me any time!).

The other thing I learned from this experience, as I contemplated the possible need to get a new computer, is that I am a hopeless Windows junkie. No matter how alluringly the Apple shop beckons, with its blue-T-shirted, smiling dudes coolly offering me their insanely customer-focused tuition and support options, their impeccable and reasonably priced back-up software, and no matter how the pearly surfaces of the iMacs gleam as they power silently and wirelessly through their beautifully constructed programs, I cannot change, not yet anyway. I am yours, Windows. Another unavoidable if regrettable truth.

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A cafe rendevous: my internet dating adventure continues

Slightly Nutty recently got back into the internet dating saddle and wrote in this blog about a prospective meeting with an unattached Gentleman. I promised to provide a ‘date update’, so here goes!

The Gentleman and I arranged to meet in a café in the inner eastern suburb of Camberwell last Saturday morning. His choice of café was inspired: it was quiet, with upmarket but soothing décor, a fire in a closed grate that emanated a silent warmth, next to an intimate, cushioned conversation nook. A delicate morning sun outside. Blessedly no upbeat, irritatingly superfluous music to batter the ears.

Even the timing was good; he entered seconds after I’d sat down, and put out his hand for me to shake. All four people in the establishment stared and must have realised immediately that it was some kind of pre-arranged and probably internet-inspired first date, which I jokingly told him off for, but really, who cared?

Another good sign: he ordered peppermint tea. That’s exactly what I’d been planning to order and I’d been determined not to mention my food intolerances, initially at least. Such relief not to have to explain why I was not scrabbling for a coffee hit.

The Serepax was working beautifully. I’d taken it the night before, planning to capitalise on the double advantage of a good night’s sleep and the anxiety reduction that, for me, continues well into the next day. (I’m an extremely strategic user of benzos and may write a blog entry about this in future.)

I knew the Gentleman had a South African accent and, as it’s not my favourite accent, I was (at the risk of sounding racist) worried that I’d find it too strong. But it was a soft version that sounded almost English.

So what actually happened? How did we get on?

The Gentleman and I are very different – he’s a ‘financially secure’ executive who devours books on world politics and economics, I’m a delicate would-be writer struggling to carve out a living as a part time editor/copywriter. But there were commonalities. I love solving the problems of the world, as he does, and we wrangled with that for quite a while before going into detail about the kinds of films we both liked and why we liked them.

He sat opposite me with his half-smile, a sureness and strength there that I liked. He had solid, meaty shoulders I could imagine cupping my hands on. A goodness of heart, and no anxious desire to impress. Perhaps he is too strong for me but maybe I can throw some conversational punches at him that he won’t be fazed by.

Throughout the chat, in my benzo-induced calm, I struggled with feelings of disappointment: acknowledging them, and wondering what they meant. He was clearly not my soulmate: there was no perfect click, no pure and joyful meeting of minds. I had not found the ultimate home of my soul and my heart, the place at which I could finally rest my head, metaphorically speaking.

I’m embarrassed to read that last paragraph. My last post suggested that because I’d met the Gentleman on a dodgy site, my expectations were going to be lower and I would not be disappointed if we did not find ourselves so dizzily in love that locating the second date at a registry office would be an inevitability.

Bullshit. I brought to the meeting all my deepest desires, and every single girlish hope and fantasy I’d ever harboured.

But here’s the thing: they were tempered with the realism I’ve painfully acquired. I’ve come to a point in my life when I am prepared to compromise to a greater degree than ever before, but only if my intuition – my gut feeling – wills it. I can finally let myself follow that flow in matters of the heart, but I’m also intellectually able to recognise the reality of what’s out there for me now, what someone at my stage of life, and in my work situation and state of mind, can reasonably expect. If I can bring these two things together, intuition and a realistic outlook, it may be possible for me to strike a balance between my youthful dreams and the reality of some kind of relationship, even if that relationship does not live up to society’s current ideal, and cannot fulfil every single need I harbour.

But that’s all still just a possibility. The Gentleman and I will probably have a second meeting. And that’s as far as things have got at this juncture.

One step at a time.

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My life as a blogger

It’s about four months since I started blogging and though this is hardly a long time I have been thinking lately about the effect it has had on my life.

I’m hardly Robinson Crusoe in turning to blogging. An article about blogging in the Age newspaper, written two years ago but still worth reading, estimated that 1000 new blogs are created every day. More recently it’s been estimated that a new blog starts every second.

I remember reading more recently about a survey which found that blogging improves your mental health and reduces depression. That’s not why I started blogging. It was because I had something to say but had failed as a short story writer and as a freelance writer for local broadsheets. I wanted an audience. But I also just wanted to get my constant political gripes out of my system. Modern life makes me angry. I wanted a forum to express my anger, goddam it!

And I wanted to stop pretending, as a writer, that I was completely sane. I’m not, but at the same time I’m not completely un-sane (I don’t like the word ‘insane’).

There are things I have discovered about blogging that I don’t like. It would be wrong to romanticise it. Despite the stories you hear about canny wunderkind who seek fame by crashing celebrity parties and then blogging about it (Julia Allison springs to mind) there are things I’m too scared to talk about.

This is due to low-level paranoia as much as anything else. For instance, I have written a couple of entries about my regular walks to the park with my sister’s dog Jordan. But I have had a couple of crushes at the park and I’m simply too paranoid to go into them.

But because my blog is anonymous there are things I can talk about – namely, my family. I can’t tell you how it has helped me to – well not just bitch about them, but try and put their peculiarities into words. I think in these instances the often silent blogosphere has acted like a wise therapist who simply nods sagely and looks understanding. My family are weird, no doubt about it. And getting that into the ether in black and white has been incredibly liberating.

What I love most about blogging is the looseness of the form. A blog entry can be a sentence, a poem, an essay, an article, a diary entry. And there is no compulsion (except in my case, self-induced) and no deadline. If I stop blogging tomorrow it won’t matter. No-one will stop paying me. No-one will email me and demand copy. This is a form that cuts a huge amount of slack. It’s perfect for someone like me who is blocked as a writer.

Although it wasn’t my primary aim I think blogging has helped my mental health. When I’m not working (which has been too much of the time this year) it gives me purpose. It keeps my brain going. It forces me to order my chaotic thoughts. It makes me aware of my shortcomings but somehow more tolerant of them. And it makes me feel heard, even if the most enthusiastic visitor to my blog is – yours truly (did I mention I was narcissistic?)

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