I suppose this is part two of my
Isn't autumn shit? post from a few weeks ago, and with that in mind you might just want to navigate off somewhere else without getting into it. I'm sure there will be others who've said what I'm about to say more eloquently, and made more sense of it, but I'm going to give it my best shot. So here's what has really hit home this autumn: that over the last five or ten years, I've become more and less certain at the same time. More and less certain that I can trust my instincts, and more and less certain of what decisions to make.
Things I'm more sure of now: that if you give me a map I can find anything; that I don't need to impress people I don't respect; that as a freelancer sometimes you have to accept jobs that you're terrified of, and turn down the ones you can do with your eyes closed. Things I'm less sure of: where to lay the blame when things go wrong, and how to cope if you can't lay it anywhere; how to 'fix' things for friends and family who are struggling; and where the hell I'm going.
Recently a male friend asked me out. We've known each other many years. Nothing has changed recently except that he has spent more time being single. I have no way of knowing, but I wonder whether he is experiencing what so many of my friends are going through. I wonder if he's started to question his own instincts, and make decisions based on a worry that he might've got things wrong before.
I might be projecting my own experiences onto him, because I've spent the last year or two questioning my feelings about some of the people closest to me - those I've loved and those I've wanted to love. As you settle into being an adult you find yourself becoming resigned to people's flaws, and being grateful and amazed that they can put up with yours. Things become more and more a mass of moral and emotional greys. When they go painfully wrong you muddle through the process of learning who you should and shouldn't forgive, and how the hell you go about that anyway.
Of course this isn't a new thing - I remember dealing with the same things as a teenager. But it just keeps getting more complicated. Things don't work out in the crystal-clear way we thought they did. Nowadays the closer I look at a problem, the more it expands and develops, and this autumn I've found myself surrounded by problems that
don't have solutions. That's what's new: this total bafflement about what to do. I used to have a feeling, and trust it and act on it and never regret it. Now I have ten feelings, and they're totally inconsistent with each other, and I can't put my finger on any of them.
