In Motion

When I say "I'm just a girl.." this is what I mean

Photo by Jon Barrett.

I wake up with the dull thud, it’s starting again. The millstone wheel is turning, but this is not the feeling of progress, it’s the feeling that I’m on the back foot. What haven’t I done now? I’m in trouble. My first thought in the morning is, “I haven’t done enough.” But it’s not anxiety, it’s precarity. It’s not “it’s a new day I’m going forwards”, it’s “I’m going backwards”. How can I wake up and already feel like I’ve failed?

Precarity is a plague. It makes artists listless and frantic, reaching for straws to clutch. I find it hard to articulate just how it makes me feel, for when I’m in it I am frozen and planning in my head, and when I’m out of it I am enjoying not worrying so to reopen that box would be folly. I’ll be back there soon anyway, because all my thoughts are heading there. Like a dog who runs to her crate at end of day. Familiar old neural pathways. Worry, don’t eat, and then chasing down the stressful thoughts ‘til I hit the sea bed - in my case it’s two options - death or prison. Prison being worse. But slightly hopeful because there’ll be women with wisdom in there. And plants that grow between the flag stones. And books. And a gym. And just like that I realise it won’t all be bad. I’m gregarious enough to survive. Okay. One more day then. And I settle off to sleep.

I wake up. I’ve not earnt enough. I’ll immediately check my emails for opportunites of work that might have come in overnight. This is only heightened with possibilities because I’m in Aotearoa and the English have had their full work day whilst I have slept. The whole reason for checking the emails dissipates. I now feel guilt for not replying to emails I received 2/3 days ago. “I must do my emails today.” They hang round me but not on me, so I can still put them off for a couple more days. Weeks when I’m really struggling.

I’ve been thinking more about scarcity mindset and this is leading me to write this down. It’s scatty because it’s an unresolved issue for me. I am suffering from it with no end in sight. I live within my means, I buy clothes from charity shops, I go out for coffee, I buy my friends gifts, I go to gigs, I get the bus, I buy petrol. Still I feel guilty. I’ve taken to comparing my feelings of guilt - of someone who pays tax and feels it but makes it work.. every time - to those who are in the Epstein files. Those who actively live destructively and don’t care about it and don’t pay tax and don’t get Sheffield Council wrongly chasing them for unpaid council tax via a courts summons and have to pay it off before they can begin explaining the misunderstanding. Why am I so addicted to caring for the systems that do not care for me. I love acts of service, to the gaffer. Makes me sick! My fawn response will kill me.

I feel watched and I draw the line at surveilling myself. When I’m thinking this much about it, that my subconscious is changing my behaviour and shifting my world view, I have to do something. I put WhatsApp and Instagram on my laptop so I’m not enticed by the streamlined luxurious experience on the phone. I remove myself from the object that is oppressing me. It is a boggart. I gain what feels like 10% more brain space from this breathing room. I start to realise and reframe thoughts that I don’t need to check my phone every 8 minutes and get sucked in for a further 15. Ok, now I’m holding onto the side of the emotional swimming pool, feeling this and taking note that it’s happening.

I decide that I will start writing out the songs I want to sing into my repertoire. Yeah, I already do this but now I am seeing why I am doing this. It’s now a protest action. Direct reclamation of my time. I am spending my time writing out the songs, not just blindly doing it because I like writing in my book. I’m spending the 15 minutes I’d be on the phone doing my work. I begin to believe I am an artist again. The prophylactic power of the phone is broken by this magic. If I can live in this way and earn a living as an artist then why am I not spending more time in my practice? It’s taken me a while to pierce the brainfog around this issue to actually act.

The more I write the songs, the more they return to me in other ways. The rhythm of the poetry greets me in physical tasks I do. When that car went over that speedbump too fast it had the intonation of “sword up to the hilt, sir” from Martin Carthy’s rendition of “Dominion of the Sword.” My brain is making links that now serve my artistic development, instead of noticing similarities to locations in Instagram reels. I am becoming a new kind of free. I feel the world working with me. I’m reclaiming my humanity.

I’ve been so scared and reticent to begin this process that I have only just realised that I can do it. Now I’m doing it I hear a little voice in my head going, “don’t forget this, keep doing it, don’t go down the hole.” That reminds me of the final line of the 1932 music hall banger Rawtenstall Annual Fair, “Daddy! Don’t go down the mine.” Yeah, I think I’ll be able to keep this up, I’m too well equipped.

Rosie said, “What you're talking about is the bait & switch whereby systemic stuff is personalised & internalised,” and it makes me crill. To crill is Lancashire dialect for that feeling when you shudder when someone walks over your grave, Crilling in the name of [authority]! I’ve amended my language around this, and now I say I am feared of authority, instead of “I dislike authority.” I don’t know much about what the rules are and I feel the smoke thicken every time I wonder about what the worst case scenario of a situation might be. That’s why I’m getting to prison and death so quickly. I can rely on them for final options.