My therapist has said I need to get comfortable being lonely, so this week I’ve crowbarred in as many people as it’s physically possible for me to see, within zones 1-5 of London (I mean, come on, let’s be reasonable here). Yes, I’m commuting all over town, like Santa with a sleigh full of trauma, all so I have the absolute minimum time alone time with myself.
I’m in a non-ethically non-monogamous relationship with loneliness, because I’m compulsively seeing literally anyone else apart from myself.
If it seems stupid that me, a woman who cannot follow advice, actually pays someone to give me advice for me to not follow, that’s because it is.
I had the proper worst week of my life last week, my god, and I can’t even go into detail as to why, but it came from all fronts, from my tatters of a love life (boring, talk about something else for once in your life, Kat), to the fact I need a new laptop, to the fact I got scammed by the post office. I think maybe the universe caught wind that I was getting better and decided someone had to step in, cos things were looking just a little bit TOO stable.
But, you know, if there was no disturbance in the force, Luke Skywalker wouldn’t have had to step up and become a jedi, creating a multimillion dollar franchise for the poor, hardworking souls at Disney. (I’m rewatching Star Wars at the moment, chained to my friend Abbie’s sofa, her dutifully asking me every few hours if I’m still alive.) If Luke didn’t become a jedi, he’d probably still be on the sofa, impotent lightsaber at his waist, watching Masterchef or something. Wait, that sounds really nice? Fucking hell, I’ve fucked it.
It’s my fault really – earlier on in the week I’d been saying that I always have to be a little bit miserable to write my best stuff, and I’ve manifested exactly that, so maybe I’m actually a god.
Conveyor-belt-ing my friends has been fascinating; every self-indulgent speed-date consisting of telling the same story to a different face, and collating the information together in the blind hope that I will one day make sense of the timeline I’m on.
It’s like I’m sat, alone in Yo Sushi, somberly watching the food on the conveyor belt pass me by, grabbing small plates of whatever resonates from my friends’ offerings.
Some reactions to the story have been bad, some really good. It usually depends on the genre I’ve decided to tell the story in – whether it’s the sanitised version for my friends who are less close and agreed to the date to be polite, or the one woman show I’ve forced my best friends to sit through, in excruciating detail. They sit, sipping their latte, lemon drizzle cake hardening on their plate, baffled frown drifting across their face, as it slowly sinks in that they might have bitten off more than they can chew in agreeing to see me, blindly hoping they make faces at the right moments, lest they experience my wrath.
With my love life, I’m not sure what I’m looking for, forensically foraging through all the texts I wrote into my notes app but didn’t send. I worry if I die right now, and years into the future someone tries to create a version of me through artificial intelligence based purely through what’s on my phone, it would just be a very angry combination of different women’s birth charts and passive aggressive monologues written bleary eyed at 4am. In my head, it looks almost exactly like the album art from Radiohead’s The Bends.
Being alone is okay, but isn’t it so much better when you’re with other people?
Some people are born with the feeling that they’re good enough for the world, and some people have to spend their entire lives trying to justify their right to exist. I like spending time with people who make me feel like I have a right to exist through osmosis.
I don’t know how to create a right to exist on my own. My therapist says that it’s my hero’s quest to create one, to find that within myself. I think it’s my quest to abandon the need for one entirely, and just vibe it. But you try telling a 50 year old man that.
Kat Sadler 