Soon be the middle of the year. I’ve been blogging pretty consistently for almost 6 months now. How many words have I written in that time? At a rough estimate... about 90k, I suppose. Enough for a decent-sized novel – but a bit lacking in other requirements for a novel, such as structure, theme, plot. Characters – there have been a few of those, sometimes their presence has been implicit, rather than explicit, if that makes sense. Not just the people in my normal life whom I refer to now and again, but the fellow bloggers who drift in and out. Some of them have become a presence in my life, in ways I never anticipated. Suzee talks about her ‘vanilla’ life and her ‘kink’ life, and in a way that’s how I feel, that I’m leading some kind of bizarre double (or triple, or quadruple) life. The boundaries become blurred. Though I rarely think explicitly in my daily life that I’m acting as ‘Belinda’ or ‘Melinda’ or ‘Cassandra’, I’m conscious sometimes of their presence or absence. This sense has been exaggerated over the last year by my other other life as part of the trans-European project I’ve been involved in, by the trips to Brussels, Paris and Cyprus, and soon to Hungary. What happens after that? Will the ‘vanilla’ life reassert itself? Or has something changed inside, some Rubicon been crossed, have I reached a new and different territory yet, Terra Incognita?
What will it take to make another step, and where will that step take me? The disorder in the garden is symbolic, perhaps, of my disengagement from the vanilla life (I’ll carry on using that expression for now, because I can’t think of a better one). Could I imagine leaving this house, and what would that mean? As soon as I start to think on those lines, I start shrinking back, it’s just too big and strange to contemplate. Other things in the outside world have to change before that can happen. But what would it take?
Might the completion of my novel be the barrier, the dam, (I’m struggling with the metaphors here), the valve that would free life up and break the stalemate? But it seems farther away than ever. Often I think that it will never happen. And all my academic work has fallen by the wayside, when I go to Oxford in a fortnight, I’ll have to admit that I’ve done nothing over the last year, didn’t even write up last year’s papers and submit them to a journal, as I was planning to. The two things in my intellectual life which mean more to me than anything else are just sidelined because the thought of throwing myself into either one of them seems too… what? Difficult, dangerous, over-whelming?
Change requires two conditions – motivation and opportunity. Put like that, it sounds like a crime in a bad detective story, ‘which of the suspects had motive and opportunity?’ In blog life, it feels as though the motivation is so strong, it seems bizarre that I’ve done nothing about it before now. And blog life, surreality, appears to have taken over. I spend too long here, far too long. I need to get out more.