It’s 9:40 on a Monday morning, and I have a few days off, after some weeks of back-to-back shifts at work.
I woke up ten minutes ago, and am lying on my side in bed, staring at the wall. I don’t have a plan for the day, really, just a messy mental list of things to do - six or seven really urgent things, and around ten or twenty less important things, plus probably a few more that I can’t remember.
Nearly thirty things to do - but I’m not worried. The day stretches out before me, hours and hours of it. There’s no need to rush, or think ahead too much - it’s your day off, remember. Have a day off. There’s no need to think too deeply about it, or venture too far into a plan just yet: it’s better to just go with the flow, and do things at your own pace, anyway.
Why make a plan, when a) it's boring, and b) we ultimately have no control over what life throws at us, so what’s the point in laboriously preparing for the future, when we could instead just focus on being in the here and now?
In the here and now, you can go and get a bag of crisps from the kitchen, and eat them all in one go and feel a bit better - no planning required. I fold the empty crisp bag up and place it on my bedside table, making a mental note to move it across to the bin later.
Technically, yes, I have the “day off”, but my work doesn’t currently pay me enough to live off, so there are lots of things I need to do in my spare time in order to make ends meet. For the last few weeks, I have been feeling stressed out and overwhelmed - but then again, when a ball is being thrown through the air in a game of catch, it, too, probably feels quite stressed out and overwhelmed. It doesn't know it's going to be caught. Would there be any point in the ball making a plan to ensure its eventual safety? No, right?
This is just one thread of the winding thought process which has led me to still being here, in bed, at 10:05. What was it that Eckhart Tolle said? "Being in the present moment is really cool", or something - I’m paraphrasing a bit. I ponder the idea of getting another bag of crisps from the kitchen - but, I think to myself, two bags of crisps before 11am surely crosses some kind of line.
Then again: what line? There aren’t really any lines in this planless life of mine - only oscillating conceptual blobs, and the soft curve of my duvet. This formless space is what I call home, and usually when I'm feeling calm and content it's because I'm inviting other people into it. Sometimes, though, like now especially, it’s quite a scary place to be - “a complete unknown,” you might say. Left brain VS right brain: my sister worked hard at school, and now she has a stable 9-5.
When I wake up in the morning, there are a few precious moments where I’m just existing, and my brain hasn’t caught up to my body yet. As the seconds pass, this window for existence begins to close: it’s imperative that I get out of bed as quickly as possible, here, because once it’s closed the pressure to get out of bed begins to mount. With each passing minute, it feels like a pebble is being placed on my chest, and each pebble makes it harder to pull myself up and out. I’ve been in bed for forty minutes, now, and my body feels heavy.
Usually, it helps if I know what I need to do when I get out of bed, otherwise I fear I’ll just be standing beside my bed like an idiot, not knowing where to go next. I need a plan - but throughout my life I have resisted concepts such as organisation and planning, much like a child refusing to eat its vegetables.
This resistance manifested in lots of fun ways: not doing any homework, ever; failing all my exams; not showing up to things I said I’d show up for; not knowing what’s in store beyond the next twenty-four hours. A disorganised life hasn’t really worked out for me, and yet, still, I find myself yearning for abstractness, scared that adding rigidity to life goes against my human instinct to experience beauty (or, perhaps, scared that I’ll put a laborious plan in place, follow it to the letter, and still be sad).
If I had inherited wealth, I might be able to get away with a transient, beauty-driven approach to life - I’d probably get really into papier-mâché and have a tea strainer that I carry around with me. Like, I’ve always thought I’d be really great as the male lead’s sister in a Richard Curtis film - ‘Oh, I never really know where I am, these days. I just float about from one place to the next, finding home wherever I lay my hat - and, d’you know what? I rather like it that way’, etc., etc. At the moment, though, my income doesn’t cover my cost of living: the pressure is mounting, and so, like clockwork, fear and shame begin to creep into this abstract headspace.
Fear is a harsh ruler. It doesn’t care whether or not I’ve made a plan: it simply punishes me when I don’t do what it says. The fear begins building walls, setting lines and rules everywhere, and berates me when I don’t follow them. Get the fuck out of bed, Iona. It’s been over an hour. Last night, you found solace in the idea of starting anew tomorrow, in finally getting the things done which you failed to do today. Every second you spend in bed could be spent up, out of bed, ticking things off the to-do list, on the journey to financial stability, and yet you’re still not doing it. Not doing it. Not doing it. Still not doing it. What am I doing? What am I doing? I can’t do it, I can't; I’m too scared.
Last night, I watched the Sunday night weekly planning session of my girlboss-adjacent dreams slip from my grasp; I watched, seemingly unable to take action, as I chose instead to spend the evening chasing escapism. It wasn’t even particularly sexy escapism, either - I was in the Holloway Odeon, watching that film about Bob Dylan.
I came out of the film thinking Fucking yeah! Stick it to the man! Young, beautiful Bob Dylan wouldn’t have spent his Sundays inputting next week’s essential tasks into a gamified little app, which would then notify him of the tasks as they needed to be done throughout the week. He’d probably have spent them smoking joints on his motorcycle, then foraging in the woods for wild garlic or something. I rode the fantasy wave of an elusive, creative lifestyle through the rest of the evening, past when I said I’d sit down and plan my week, all the way through to Love Island at 9pm, then bed straight after.
There is a scene in the film where Timmy’s Bob Dylan is playing his new, electric album to a crowd at a folk festival, most of whom are folk purists and dislike this new creative direction. They begin throwing things at the stage, and he keeps playing, even though the crowd hates it, and the song he’s playing is Like A Rolling Stone, so as viewers we all know it’s going to be a hit.
I roll over to the other side of the bed, close my eyes and let my thoughts run away with themselves, feeling how I imagine Bob felt as food and beer cans were thrown at his face, and he kept on singing, because he believed in what he was doing. I know what society wants from me, and I refuse to conform. I refuse to conform. They’d all love it if I made a plan for my life and stuck to it. That’s exactly what society wants. “You’re a contrarian, Bob”, says Elle Fanning’s character. I, lying on my bed at 11:30am on a Monday, am the essence of contrarian. How does it feel?
What am I supposed to do, get a planner from papier.com and fill it out every Sunday afternoon with different coloured fineliners? Start wearing Chelsea boots and denim jackets, and go shopping at Battersea Power Station? Move to a new build in Hertfordshire, marry an account manager and make an Instagram account for my golden retriever? Although, actually, that does sound quite nice. Maybe I could have one of those matching microwave and kettle sets from Russell Hobbs. Also, if I lived in the countryside I’m sure I’d wear that mountaineering jacket I got in the North Face sale more often.
If I become the type of person who plans things out, I’ll end up selling out: sacrificing my beautiful abstract soul for cold hard cash in a corporate marketing job, paying my rent on time and writing press releases for Shell, or something.
If I don’t, I’ll end up here, in bed, in fifty years’ time, too scared of the future to move a muscle and eventually dying from bedrot. Either I sell out to the corporate machine, or I die.
This is part of my problem: I think in black and white, and all my thoughts end in bleak, polarising outcomes. Either this will happen or that will happen: both terrible, no escape, no compromise. Fear attaches itself to a train of thought and speeds it up exponentially, and it gets faster and faster until eventually it drives into a cliff and explodes, like something out of a James Bond film.
My brain polarises itself in this way so it can remain in control of the situation (the situation being the outcome of life, which, obviously, we don’t really have any control over). It’s trying to calm itself down, bless it.
If I rule out the prospect of writing a to-do list for fear of becoming a corporate sellout, then yes, I might stay in this bed forever and eventually die of bedrot - but on the plus side, I’d get to stay in bed, where nothing bad or scary can happen.
In a Substack post I wrote last year, I said I need rigid structure and organisation in my life in order to facilitate the beauty: the structure acts as a telephone mast, around which I can then dance like a fairy on its way up into the clouds. In the months since then, this structure has weathered some storms, and parts of it have fallen off: the rent’s gone up, the cost of living’s gone up, my hourly wage has stayed the same, and I’ve lost some hours to daydreaming about various boys, all of whom I imagined might save me in some way.
In months like these, it feels like I’m going backwards on my journey towards functioning within capitalism without drowning. This can make it easy to lose faith in the journey: if I’m achieving less than I was before, then surely the only logical conclusion of this trajectory is down at the bottom of the graph? An explosion in a pit, where nothing ever gets done, where chaos reigns?
In fact, this is not how it goes. I have set myself a goal of being a functioning human who feels happy and good, but unfortunately I don’t get to glide seamlessly towards this goal on a steady ascent through the decades. In fact, the line is squiggly. “Progress is not linear”, they say, but I don’t think that sentence does enough to convey the cold bleakness of the downwards parts of the graph. A bad day, at the end of a bad month, and the inner critic is loud and the to-do list is longer than it’s ever been, and we’re still in bed - and then, just as we’ve convinced ourselves this thing won’t end, it does, and the graph starts going upwards again.
I need to make a little plan - because if I don’t, the committee of evil goblins that lives inside my head will make one for me, and it will only end in pain. Truthfully, for as long as I can remember my brain has been hard at work manufacturing attempts to control the outcome of my life. It uses all the classic tools to execute the plan - intricate foresight, constant appraisal, shame-based punishment, etc - but it’s disorganised, mean-spirited, shot through with a hundred different forms of fear. Much better for me to get a head-start, and plan something out that ends well, even if ‘well’ today means making a list of three things, doing two of them, and brushing my teeth in the morning and the evening, because I am a grown-up.
To do:
Get out of bed
Make bed
Write gnarly anti-establishment punk rock Substack post that Bob Dylan would be proud of
Really resonate with this, thinking in absolutes and ending up at “everything is pointless and I should stay in bed” - but the graph will go up again!! Thank you for the little boost of realism and hope today.
Needed this one desperately