Socrates is often quoted as saying: ‘the unexamined life is
not worth living’, but what if you’ve examined your life to the nth degree and
realised that it’s STILL not worth living?
Actually, although this reflection has come to me quite
independently through my own experience of life, it’s not exactly original.
Just this morning I was delighted to find this version from the great Kurt
Vonnegut:
‘Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?’
(Notice that he attributes it to Plato, and it variously seems to be attributed to both of them by different people, but given that what we know of Socrates mostly came down to us through Plato, I guess that’s not too surprising).
A similar version which I like is from Ruby Wax, who said: ‘Self
knowledge isn’t always happy news’. Well, you could argue that that’s slightly
different because it’s about knowledge of the ‘self’ rather than the ‘life’.
But I guess self-knowledge is what one hopes to gain through examining life, so
in that sense they’re directly comparable. And it’s that sense of an examined
life implying an examined self that interests me. Is it the events of life
which construct the self, or is it the nature of the self which determines
choices and actions and hence the way life works out? A bit of both, probably.
Why am I doing this? When I woke up it seemed like a good
idea. But I don’t know. Been wondering for a long time about whether it’s worth
trying to write again. In my heart of hearts I know it’s all pretty futile.
What else would I rather be doing? Right now? Listening to the radio and
crocheting or weaving? Playing freecell or Killer su doku? Walking on the
seafront? Eating breakfast? All pretty futile, apart from breakfast. Washing
up, hoovering, sorting out washing? Clearly, I don’t want to do any of those,
and am an expert at procrastination when it comes to all of them, in fact I
carry it to such an extreme that I prefer not to have friends so that no one
comes into my house and sees what a shit-hole it is. (Actually there are other
reasons why I don’t have friends, but that is quite a significant one.)
So, examining self/examining life. Begs the question of to
what extent there is a single ‘self’ to examine. Clearly, the ‘self’ that I
know (and hate) is quite different from the person that other people perceive
me to be, which is frustrating at times, but on the other hand, is probably the
only reason anyone has anything to do with me at all – if they knew the me I
know, why would they bother? If I could get away from myself I would – in fact,
I have tried in different ways at many different times, but it never works. One
of the repeated motifs that has appeared though my examination of my last 60
years of life, the impulse to run away and keep running, which is continually
thwarted when I realise that nothing inside has changed, and being in a
different place is only superficially preferable to what went before. Now I
have reached a place where I really feel I have nowhere else to go – that’s wisdom,
I guess. No point in wishing for anything better, looking to the future and
hoping for a change. When I moved here I was reminded of the Eagles’ song The Last
Resort: ‘There is no more new frontier/We have got to build it here’. I came to
the end of the country, with nothing beyond but sea (and the Isle of Wight, of
course, let’s not forget that). My last dream, my last throw of the dice, and
here I am.
Yesterday I saw my shrink and read her this poem, which I wrote in 2017:
The Awkward One
I never learned to smile.
I never learned to play the happy fool,
to put them at their ease,
to read their minds.
So I became
the awkward one,
the difficult one.
I learned to be alone.
I never learned to make a friend,
I never learned the way
to make them love me.
I hated mirrors, and cameras,
I hated the plain, sulky face
they showed me.
I knew that face,
with its curtain of straggly hair,
and that skinny body,
would never be loved.
I never learned to turn on the charm.
I had no charm.
I never learned to play the game.
I turned inside myself,
became invisible,
played my own game.
Afterwards, she said: ‘that last line is quite hopeful. You played your own game.’
Really? I suppose I felt I had to put something positive at
the end, but I’m not saying that’s how it was. I didn’t choose to be that way
(except maybe in some very deep self-hating, self-punishing way), I’m sure that
as a child and teenager I would rather have been accepted by others, liked
even. It was just an adaptation to the reality of not being the sort of girl
anyone wanted to be with. I did say to her ‘it’s a kind of sour grapes’ and the
more I thought about it, the more that seems to be true – ‘Nobody loves me,
everybody hates me, I’m going down the garden to eat worms’. When you have no
one to play with you have to make up your own games or do nothing at all (of
course, what I did a lot of the time was the classic lonely-child thing of
retreating into books). As I said to myself when I was alone in Paris in
February 2012: ‘I’m still the woman nobody wants’, and that is just as true now
as it was then and as it was 50 or 60 years ago.
Ah well. The examined life. Maybe I could start a new blog
with that as the title. And what am I going to do with this? Where should I put it? Somewhere
where there’s a possibility of it being read? Or where there’s a theoretical
possibility, but I know no one will bother?
