I thought I'd be somewhere else by now.

Hey thanks for joining me, pull up a chair…

How am I? That’s nice, I appreciate you asking. Well to be honest, I thought I’d be somewhere else by the time I was this age. I had an idea that life would be… different. Not just about surviving the parts where I’m not actually asleep.

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This is about being lost. About feeling that you don’t know which way to go. You know you need to move. You can’t stay where you are but you have to go. The map you had has gone blank. There’s no help there.

You’re the cartoon character walking out into empty space off a cliff. But the twist here is that you don’t fall. You expect to fall. You think that any moment gravity will assert its hold. But instead you continue walking. There’s nothing holding you up. But you don’t fall.

Maybe something changed recently. A break up. A health diagnosis. A loss. Maybe there was no reason at all. You thought you just woke up from a really vivid dream in which you didn’t know where to go any more but unlike those dreams, it didn’t fade, because being lost and awake is your new reality.

So yes, I thought life would be different now.

If you ask me “different like how?” I couldn’t tell you. But I know in my heart of hearts that I didn’t think it would be like this.

I don’t identify as a failure. I regret nothing. There’s no point in regret. You did what you did with the resources (psych, emotional, physical, money) available to you at the time.

So this isn’t a ‘pity me’ article. This is about how to get through when you get stuck. Scratch that, I made it sound like a guide. It’s not that. This is about how I am getting through the days. The endless fucking days.

Yes, yes gratitude. I’m not in a war/ famine/ natural disaster zone. Having spent a year unemployed after my not very successful business stopped making any money at all, I’m very very grateful I can choose what I buy and absolutely delighted I can pay my bills. This isn’t about entitlement. If you’re thinking “this guy… entitled much?” I suggest you keep quiet or just stop reading?

If you’re still here then here’s how I survive (your mileage may vary)

• I exercise. I am not a fucking fan of exercising. I am, however, a HUGE fucking fan of after exercise. And I like not being a fat, complacent “it’s all bought and paid for” fifty-something.
• I play music. I’m OK at it. I was in a relationship with someone who asked me “why are you learning that? You’ll never be really good at it” and, at the time of utterance, that made me want to spend more time with my harmonica and jaw harp and less time with them. Why am I doing it? FOR THE HELL OF IT, BABY! I’m doing it because it makes me feel alive to bang out the notes of House of the Rising Sun or to jam along with Generic Blues Backing Track in G on Spotify (and yes Spotify, it REALLY bugs me that there’s nothing I can do to stop those backing tracks appearing in my Spotify Wrapped™)
• I write. Yes. I write for myself. Not for you (but my sincere thanks for reading this). I publish to put out a signal. Sometimes no signal comes back. That’s OK, I like to imagine my message/ substack post/ linkedin update travelling infinitely through space. Always in motion.
• I meditate. And I really struggle with meditation. You’re asking me to sit still when I feel like I’ve got all this stuff to fix? Impossible. I NEED TO FIX THE STUFF! But I realised, I can spend time fixing the stuff and the damn stuff remains resolutely un-fucking-fixed. Whereas if I do my meditation, I feel OK in the slowness, in the just being. I’m just sitting there and that’s OK. I’m where I should be.
• I do improv comedy. Am I funny? Who cares? The funny isn’t the point. The point is to express myself. Be vulnerable. Collaborate with other humans. Stop reading this and turn off your device, leave it in another room. Go join an improv comedy class, tell them Si sent you. They won’t give a fuck but you will know you’re doing it because this rebel yell woke something in you.

So that’s about it.

Work isn’t the answer so don’t ask me about my job. My answer to that is “I have one. Which is essential because I live in late-stage capitalism.” Luckily, since I stopped working in retail over 30 years ago, I’ve always had a job that lands between “I don’t hate it” and “I’m really into this”. (Take that, grati-dudes!)

Plus something I know about myself is that either I have a job or everything is even more difficult than my head already makes being fifty-something and not fitting any of the generally accepted win conditions for my age.

Also, “generally accepted win conditions” are bullshit. Play the hand you’re dealt. It’s easier said than done. But a proper player always beats someone who sticks on something safe and low rather than twists for a higher prize. It’s not about winning or losing. Play the fucking game, son.

In case it helps, I’ll finish, by the authority vested in me by abso-fucking-lutely no-one, with my list of Things That Aren’t Playing The Game:

• Staying with someone long after the connection has gone.
• Waiting out a job you hate until your pension kicks in.
• Buying cars, houses, material things because you mistook life for a game of Monopoly.
• Bitching about other people when it’s really about envy. You don’t want what they’ve got but you so badly want to make other people feel about you like you feel about them.
• Thinking win conditions are the ones movies or TV told you. They just want to sell you stuff. This is not a game, there is no end. Yes, I know there is an end. And when it does end, you won’t care about whether you won or lost any more.

This one goes out to all the survivors out there.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.