Still talkin' to myself

I wish it wasn’t so important to me for my ideas to be valid to other people.

I’m really fascinated by individual political minds. Political biographies are always cool, but more than that are things like the political concepts defining an age and the mechanisms going on within political history. For some reason, the Conservative Party comes up a lot, just because it’s curious like no other. It’s got a lot of big, significant, influential names. I want to branch out from it, but it presents some of the most interesting psychological puzzles.

I need to try to remember that my interests outside of academic applications are still valid within them.

I decided a long time ago that I should live life for myself. Yet I don’t seem to be doing that and it’s hard to achieve when life won’t let you into most things anyway.

I need lots of explanatory depth.

I also do better with detail to be working on.

I just have this fog in my head all the time. I don’t know where I’m trying to get to with it. I don’t even have much to say here. There’s just nothing.

Yet within those nothings, there is something. Every now and again, I see something which pulls a reaction from the depths of my mind and for that one moment I have something to contribute again. But I don’t feel as sharp as I need to be. I need to be able to research and learn new things and put them to good use. I just can’t seem to find anyone who’ll let me do that. In the sense that I can’t pass an interview and I can’t decide on a way to achieve that by myself. Whether it should be writing a book, or just writing articles for no real career aim, or... journalism, I guess? 

It’s been the same question for months.

Journalism was almost an answer but I wasn’t really able to have the conversation about funding. I couldn’t solve that myself and I gave a couple of very light hints to my parents but they didn’t respond to them. I’m not sure they even noticed. I just wasn’t able to have that conversation.

I think my blogging really went downhill after the Institute for Government rejection and the rejection from DCMS. I’ve just completely lost faith in anyone hiring me for a job I actually want to do.

I’m taking another angle of attack at the moment in applying to Ministerial Contact Units. But those aren’t research-based. They aren’t policy roles. What they are is an opportunity to observe minister / politician / constituent interactions first-hand.

The more things don’t work out, the more I get scrambled and the less I’m able to make any sense of things or coordinate myself to achieve anything. I should be one of those people who picks something and works to achieve it but I just have no idea what that realistically is. Everything seems out of reach. I truly don’t believe anything will come through that I actually want to do. I also feel that it really should. That those places are where I belong. So I feel this dissonance that I’ll never get to where I’m supposed to be and my life will be a waste. So I should go for some second-rate option. But then what? So then I just end up back at nothing, in my own world, doing things within my control.

It’s such a fucked up state to be in. I mean, I really don’t know what to do with it.

I should probably be in a think tank. I just feel like I’m eroding, slowly but surely. A useless blot in the eye of society.

I just feel at the bottom of a pit. A useless, horrible pit. A pit from which there’s no escape. I’m just speaking to the void for eternity. It’s so horrible.

I feel like taking a couple of years out will have ruined my PhD chances. But maybe if I contact people I know they’ll be able to help me out?

I’m just so useless. Without a structure to follow, I have no idea what to do to make life work for me. I never have. I just fundamentally don’t understand how to make sense of it all.

As always, Durham makes more sense for me than others.

If I ask, people might be able to help.

I guess it just tends to be by keeping going and hoping you have someone to support you.

I really don't want to go back into temping. I don't think I have any useful skills to learn from that and I don't want to waste my time.

It's not even that I'm an arts graduate. Even the science graduates I know have had it hard. The only ones I know to have been successful did business or economics and went into accountancy. I couldn't do something like that. I also feel like graduate schemes would take way too long and be completely the wrong fit.

The answer is we need better employment legislation for the modern age. The UK's current laws are pre-internet.

I've been working on journalism so far this year, so I reckon that's my best bet. I love academia but a PhD is as difficult to get into as anything else if you aren't willing to pay your own way. I think I'm actually ready to start submitting to papers and publications, etc. Kind of excited about it. Hoping I actually get paid for it.

At least I got actual results and feedback from this one. I failed on social skills. Quelle surprise.

It was a really weird interview. They didn't use the normal structure. I've realised that maybe one of the reasons I keep getting extra socialising questions is to try to get me to give a better answer.

There are lots of other musicians putting quiet emotions beautifully, but I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone so completely capture raw, difficult, tumultuous emotions quite as powerfully as Guns N' Roses.

A couple of songs really stand out to me as examples of this. One is Coma, which uses the entire band but especially Axl to get across the inside experience of impulsive suicide. Another is Estranged, which really gets across the difficult process of isolation from what you found meaningful and finding the strength to carry on. Then there's Civil War, Welcome to the Jungle... even Right Next Door to Hell.

Guns N' Roses, like no other band, get across the raw, visceral, lived experience of difficult times and deep emotion. In all of their songs, they get across that feeling clearly, whether it's dealing with a rowdy neighbour, an irritating partner, a long-held friend or life in the backstreets of Los Angeles. Guns N' Roses recognises when life isn't pretty but you have to get through it anyway.

The reason I picked Coma and Estranged as some of their very best is because they truly take you through the entire experience, from beginning to end. The songs are long enough that you live that experience with the band. Whether it's going through a suicide attempt, the short and long-term factors driving it and what it's like on the front lines of being pulled back from the brink in Coma, or losing meaningful human connection and going into isolation whilst knowing you have to keep living through it, both of these songs take you through the entire emotional trajectory from beginning to end. They're truly masterpieces.

This isn't always the case with Guns songs. Sometimes they're just about something really silly or selfish. But selfishness is in some ways what makes Guns so great, because they have a really deeply-rooted understanding of what it means to be trapped inside yourself and having to stick it out, through all the pretty highs and ugly lows.