The amount of unsent emails I write is bordering on ridiculous levels. I get on my high horse far too quickly and type out some seriously lengthy paragraphs, and then think to myself: “this person doesn’t want to hear this. Why are you writing to them as if you know them?”
And you know why it is? It’s because I think I do know you. I think I’ve read enough of you over the last couple of years to have an opinion on your life and the way you live it. I won’t criticise, never, but I’ll try to help you in any way I can, even if I’m the wrong side of the Atlantic, the country, or even just London.
But I never send these emails.
I don’t even save them as drafts. I just write the few hundred words, bang them out as if I was some kind of motherfucking agony uncle, and then delete them before anyone can read them. It probably helps me more to write them than it ever will for the potential recipient to receive them.
It’s me working out my demons, putting my thoughts into words and sentences. I’ve not yet faced the situations which these people find themselves in, but it’s as if by giving them advice I’m also preparing myself for the same situations at a future stage in life.
And then I don’t give them that advice, sentiment or opinion. I keep it for myself, I hoard it, I bottle it up.
How can I then judge the worthiness, the practicality, and the effectiveness of this advice? I’m operating on a closed-circuit, feedback loop. I think that by considering these situations, I’m prepared to face them.
But yet I’m not. I’ve got no fucking clue how I’d cope with a marriage, a divorce, a child, a death. I’ve dealt with some of these things in my 25 years on this planet, absolutely, but there’s no way I can even begin to scrape the surface of human experience.
Yes, I’ve had to deal with a parent battling with cancer (and ultimately surviving, thankfully). Yes, death has been an ever-present facet of my life since I was around 18, and I’ve been to more funerals than I would have liked to have been to at this stage in my life, but this is nothing. It’s fuck all.
And yet I find myself wanting to write, to opine. It’s cathartic, it really is. I’m trying to help someone else, but it’s really me whom I’m helping. I’m looking to experience the gamut of human emotions without facing them myself. I’m living my life vicariously, for fuck’s sake.
And I wish I had the balls to send these emails, but I figure that people can sort themselves out, given time and space. And they do, generally, from what I read.
And I know that I can sort myself out when I inevitably come to face these situations, because I know that people have dealt with them before, and that they have come out the other side, positively.
Hope springs eternal, as they say.
