With hindsight, I’m quite glad that my encounters with psychiatry in recent years did not result in any sort of formal diagnosis. I am in no position and have no desire to say anything about anyone else’s experience, but I’m pretty sure that acquiring a pathological label would have been more hindrance than help to me with regard to what we might colloquially call “getting my shit together”—which, not unrelatedly, is something that I’m coming to see as being a practice rather than a project.
I have been obliged to learn a lot of things about myself which—oddly, given the relentless extent of my introspection—I’d never really confronted at all. Among these discoveries is the realisation that I really don’t deal well with the disruption of my chosen routines. This would have come as a great surprise to a younger version of myself, who had assumed that his resistance to routines imposed arbitrarily by others surely meant that he had an affinity for uncertainty and the unexpected. (There may well have been an attraction to uncertainty and the unexpected, but that’s not at all the same thing as an affinity.)
Knowing and embracing this need for routine has been a big part of the reinvention of myself that has unfolded in fits and starts over the last seven years or so. However, I still struggle with what we might think of as unavoidable temporal obstacles: disruptions which no amount of planning can dodge or deflect, due to the large number of moving parts and externalities.
Point in case: from the start of next week, the bathroom1 of my apartment is being renovated. In many ways, this is a good thing (it’s not been done since perhaps the late 90s), though in others, less so (neither my landlady or I are particularly keen on spending the money right at this moment, but we have to bring the thing “up to code” to meet the requirements of the insurance of the building as a whole).
But the worst aspect, for me at least, is the various uncertainties and inconveniences. There will of course be a very noisy and messy stage at the start of the process—powertools, dust, rubble &c.—which is not only incompatible with the fact that I work from home, but also incompatible with the presence of an increasingly geriatric Katie-Jane. So she and I need to be somewhere else for most of the day, if not for the whole day, for an unknown number of days starting from Monday.
The worst part of that is the “unknown number of days”. If I knew the number, I could plan around it.
The uncertainties are compounded when it comes to the total duration of the project. How long will it take? That depends on the state of the existing tanking layer, the speed with which the replacement layer is installed and fully dried, and the promptness with which the project as a whole is wrapped up by the builders. Could be two and a half weeks, could be more like a month… during which time I will have to go down into the basement to use the spare toilet, and take my showers at my climbing gym (which, mercifully, is only three minutes away by bike).
Again: if I knew how many weeks, I could make a mental notch-stick and look forward to counting off the days. It’s the open-endedness of the whole affair that’s the problem—in fact, I would even go so far as to say it’s deeply distressing to me.
(Yes, yes, hashtag firstworldproblems, thanks for that.)
The image that keeps coming to me with regard to this is the old visualisation for gravity where your science teacher—or, more likely, some chap with wild hair and a lab-coat on BBC2, back when a lot of the weekday afternoon content was Open University material—would put a heavy weight on a rubber incontinence sheet stretched between two tables. The weight forms a well, an indentation in the sheet which inevitably distorts the trajectory of any tennis ball or marble rolled past it.
The bathroom project is distorting my personal sense of timespace in exactly this way. In practical terms, this means that I’m finding it incredibly difficult to do anything, start anything, because i can’t plot the trajectory reliably enough to dare to set the thing rolling.
There is, of course, little I can do about it. Experience dictates that, for reasons I don’t quite understand, it will become easier to deal with once it’s actually started? (This is perhaps related to the way in which my anxieties around travel give way to sort of blase fatalism once I actually set off.) But it’s got to happen, and I’ve got to deal with it, and that’s that.
I dare say this sort of stuff gets to everyone, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not… and so I wonder if in my case the conscious awareness actually makes it worse? A lot of my anxieties boil down to a fear of the loss of control over my immediate circumstances, but knowing that to be the case grants me no new power or leverage over them.
A buddhist (or perhaps just a better-adjusted person than myself) would likely advise me to learn to accept that some things—many things!—are out of my control. The thing is, I do accept that! At least, I accept that it is a fact; the sense of powerlessness that accompanies that acceptance of fact, meanwhile, is rather harder to accept (for what I now understand to be biographical reasons).
The necessity of working on that more abstract acceptance—of confronting a perceived need for power and control which can never really be fulfilled, other than by illusory means—would have been papered over with a pathological label, had I been granted one. Indeed, the label would have been one of those illusory means, I think.
As such, I find myself oddly grateful that I was passed over, and left to confront not a pathology but, rather, a part of myself. Can it be changed, or merely managed? This remains to be seen.
Practice, not project.
- “Bathroom” is a bit of a strong word here, really; shower-and-toilet room would be a more accurate label for this 1.5m by 1.5m space. ↩︎
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