Lament for a Generation

I am young, intelligent, educated, experienced. I have passion and ideas, vision and insights. I am gifted, beautiful, resourceful, refined, gracious and compassionate. I am strong and resilient, hard-working, motivated and empowered. I am intellectually and emotionally attuned. I respect diversity of background and opinion. I embrace change and technology and look boldly to the future, but recognize the lessons of history.

I am a number, a statistic, irrelevant, invalidated. I am unemployed, underemployed, unpaid. I am tired, weak, broken, fragile. I am homeless, wandering, searching, not finding. I am broke, in debt, past-due. I am losing hope, hopeless. I photocopy, staple, file, Excel, but I don't excel. I am undervalued, disowned, shut out and shut down. I am rejected, dejected, forgotten. I am lost.

"My Body's a Zombie For You"

There are only stories with pain. We need pain to learn, and a story needs lessons to matter.

Screaming and crying and broken glass and broken hearts - it's not worth it. It's too much. Love is as much of a construct as any ideology or religion or cultural custom that is qualified and deconstructed in every university classroom. We know better, but we still believe. We have to believe.

If there's anything in the world we believe in purely and truly, it is love. And we believe over and over and over again, even when love shoots us in the face and we lose so much blood that we almost don't make it.

It takes months - sometimes years - for the wounds to heal, and the scars never completely fade, but fuck, we still believe.

And worse: we hope. We desperately reach out our arms with tears in our eyes and pain in our chests and a rush of blood to our crotches, and we grab for that tortuously elusive someone that will fill our hearts and our holes and makes it all worth it.

But is it? Is it really worth it when so often in the end at least one of us decides that it is, in fact, not worth it at all. Not anymore.

Sometimes it makes for a good story. Good, perhaps only if we still believe. And deep down, we do believe, don't we? Don't you?

Learning

There's no starting over, no going back. Our lives stretch forward before us endlessly and heavy with promise only once. I am not that fifteen-year-old boy anymore. I won't be him again. I'm myself now, only.

But the future still stretches on, long past my dreams and fears, and far into a future that I am not a part of. But some 15-year-old boy will be a part of that future. And if I play my cards right, maybe he'll read my book.

Maybe he'll read my book and realize his life is already sand through the hour glass, and that he must run and fight and love and make beautiful mistakes with goodness in his heart, before his time runs out too. So much sand falling forever, forever, forever, until...

Another Year

Keats Island, September 2010

I've spent the last few weeks cozied up in Dalston at K and O's flat. I love them so much, and am so thankful for the hospitality they have shown me. I spent the Christmas holidays alone, for the first time ever. More out of choice, than necessity - there were people in London I could have spent it with. Instead, I spent the days cooking, drinking nice wine, going on snow walks, watching films, reading, writing, prioritising. It was a working holiday, in a sense, and I think it laid a good foundation to move forward from.

Being in Hackney has been a godsend. I've been waiting so long to live here, and it just feels so right. Staying with K and O has also been part of that, because I love them so much, and they really did welcome me into a 'home' for the time I was here. I'm leaving tomorrow, though - subletting a friend's room in Waterloo for the month of January.

After that, who knows, really? It is scary not knowing where one is going to hang one's hat a month from now. Or how one will pay the bills, stay afloat. I've been living under that sky of uncertainty for a while now, and you sort of surrender yourself to it, to a blind hope that things will work out. But it doesn't get any easier. You just learn to have faith and to not think too much about how scary it all is, about what happens with opportunities dry up and the generosity of friends runs out.

Not that January is going to change anything, just because another year has clocked in, but I do have hope that the new year will be a good one. The time for playing games is over, and I've got to grab life by the balls and press on. I think I'm less inclined to the bullshit and timidity I've had before about my talents and abilities, and that's a good thing. I know that life doesn't get handed to you on a platter. The idea that success and progress come quickly and easily is long lost in the idealism of my youth. I know it all comes down to work hard and making your own opportunities. I'm ready.

I know now, more than ever, what I want, and what I can do. I know sacrifices have to be made, and occasionally compromises. I also know that - as a passionate being with a highly moralised view of the universe and my life - I'm more inclined to sacrifice than compromise. That's something many people in my life can't understand, but I do think in the long run that may make all the difference.

2011 is going to be, hopefully, about hard work, about being truthful - to myself, to my talents and passions, and to the people in my life. I spent half the year being tortuously in love with someone I couldn't tell because I have always lived my life with unnecessary conscience. Conscience is important, but sometimes, when push comes to shove, we've just got to live.

Things I want to do less of this year: medicating, hiding, procrastinating, smoking, doubting, complaining, settling.

Things I want to do more of this year: writing, reading, networking, socialising, earning, corresponding, learning, running, risking, loving, succeeding.

Fighting Words

How do you channel so much passion and anger into a cause? How do you pick a cause when there a million things to be passionately angry about?

How do we focus on fighting for the things we believe in, when our world is so fucking expensive, and paying the bills is a battle on its own?

I need a venue for my talents that uses them fully, that develops them and moves me forward.

I need a venue for my passion and anger that channels it towards something constructive and powerful.

I want change. I want to learn and study and know. I want to know what the fuck I am talking about. And I want you to listen.

I want to connect with people that are subversive not for the sexiness of rebellion and the coolness of alternativeness, but because the engrained badness in the world needs subverting.

Can you help me? Can I help you?

We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

My sister gave me 'The Handmaid's Tale' for my birthday. It's been ages since I've read Margaret Atwood. Her prose is inspirational. It makes me happy to read good Canadian fiction, like it does to listen to good Canadian music. It means something more, like eating nice food grown in your own backyard.

"I lie in bed, still trembling. You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone."

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

It's November - half way through November, actually! I completely missed October, due to the London Film Festival; missed the leaves falling and the autumn-y romance of London parks.

I turned 25 last week. It wasn't a big deal. I remember 24 seeming like such a THING: I was no longer in my early 20s; I no longer had the excuse of being so young; the years were getting away from me now, and I was no closer to being where I wanted to be.

24, on paper, was a year with more failures than successes. But in reality, it was a year filled with so much trying and fighting, and with coming to terms with what I want, what I need, and getting comfortable with myself in the process. I think I'm a lot more comfortable with everything, actually: more resigned to the ebb and flow of the universe, but increasingly aware of things that will and won't move me further ahead, and more committed to fighting my own personal battles.

I wrapped up my position at the 2010 BFI London Film Festival at the beginning of the month. It was one of the most emotionally and physically exhausting experiences of my life, but I can't begin to say how much I enjoyed it. I've met incredibly inspiring people from around the world, made many friends, and pushed my own personal limits. Hopefully some of the connections I've made will blossom into future opportunities. We'll see!

Last week I was marvelling over the fact that my plan for the autumn - getting an internship, and then going to Algeria to do my novel research - was actually going ahead perfectly. My plans never actually go ahead! Just a few days after being baffled by the realisation that things were working out, I found out my tourist visa for Algeria was not going to be completed in time for my flight this weekend - if it even goes through at all. So I won't be boarding that plane on Saturday.

I'm okay with that. It's thrown a kink in my plans, but the fact that I've actually booked tickets, made the preparations, and put things in motion, means so much on a personal level. I know I'm going - eventually - and that this project, which I believe in so strongly, will be completed.

All in good time, Trent. All in good time.

Now 25, let's do this thing.