LONDON - So you got through the adolescent temper tantrums with most of your friendships intact. You have survived the pimples and your first shag didn't laugh. You even managed to find something interesting to do after leaving school. But just when you think you've cracked this maturity business, you hit 20 and get a kick in the head from the biggest issues of all.
Turning that corner overthrew everything I had ever known, and forced me to re-evaluate my place in the world from first principles. I felt compelled to try to define living. Where did thoughts come from? What were inspiration and concentration? But most of all, reason. What the hell was it and why was it all tied up in words?
It was a hellish year. My first year of university life was mental stupor compared to the months of travelling free in Buddhist lands before that. Anaemia and scabies didn't help. The eternal dual existence I believed in implicitly had come crashing round my ears, revealing itself as merely a first love affair. All this gave me the shuffling gait of a paranoid, transparent worm. But on 18 September 1993, just before my second year, childhood ended for me. I quote:
"I think I have made it ... the tide has turned ... Over the last few months, I've gradually broken down many aspects of my communication with other people: dividing instinct and emotion from words and rationality."
It was such a secret investigation. The little voice in the back of my head scared me at times and made me feel I was actually losing it. It spoke in words, so logically and persistent, analysing everything that it came across.
Maybe it was because I believed all logic to be wrong that I grew to hate that voice. In one way, though, it seemed to be the voice of truth - another misleading way to view it. I was torn between these impossibilities (total imposition and pure essence of truth) and felt I was driving myself mad.
It's only recently that I learnt two things about this voice:
- 1) It was worth paying attention to. I could trust that if I actually allowed it to follow its course of logic, something which made sense would probably be the conclusion, however bizarre, frightening or petty the path it took to get there.
- 2) Many of its statements were incorrect assumptions. (I had thought they were the Truth.) This was especially the case with the more frightening ideas it came up with. So it was especially important not to block it off.
Only by examining an idea can you believe your gut reaction of 'that's right.' Gradually I realised that this voice was me and not something to hide or run from in terror.
I had been very confused knowing that if I said out loud the thoughts in my head (as yet not worked through), they sounded appalling (arrogant?), yet I believed them to be true.
Not so - we do have a fountain of truth within us but you must dig down to get it ...
Now I do alter these initial thoughts until I really feel happy with them. And then it's a great feeling! The process will probably become quicker and quicker until I no longer notice it ...
"Suddenly everything I do or say does seem to be instinctive. It's wonderful. Words really have meaning."
The trigger was matter of confidence, of course. But what a simple trick!
The night before writing that, I had tried for the first time to imagine people having a positive response when I spoke, and it worked. I felt so happy and sociable. That was enough to bring me out of a one-year void and to start building foundations for adulthood.
Learning to think was the hardest thing I ever did.
I taught myself to apply the paranoid, relentless insecurity of an adolescent brain to external subjects such as political theory and history and, now, how to plan for the future and write scripts for broadcast.
Logic and rationality is what separates us from the beasts, apparently. It is also what separates the self-aware adult from the instinctive child. But what a lonely way to learn. I used to call them my mind games, and would try to believe that they were leading me not into madness but towards wisdom.
It may have worked. Life has become more and more fun since those dark months when I was a terrified void. And I still feel as though all my thinking is based upon those simple foundations.
LONDON CALLING!: FLISS USSHER proclaims that Childhood's End is learning to THINK.
ON DRUGS: ADAM J. SMITH on a rational way to deal with the "Substances, Substances" which are part of our lives.
STONEWALL VIEWS: PHIL MARTIN on the childishness of "SALAD BAR RELIGION."
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