Jan 30th, 2024.

I’m starting this blog as a way to vent some frustrations. I at thirty one years young am having a bit of a mid-life crisis, or would it be a one-third-life crisis?

Life has lost all meaning to me, every day feels like the same badly written script on repeat. Wake up, stumble into work, make forced small talk, being careful not to deviate from the script, exchange time for food and housing tokens, stumble home, and consume the latest mind-numbing “entertainment” with just enough time left for me to stare vacantly at the ceiling for a while before slipping into peaceful unconsciousness. 

I don’t think I’m depressed, I’m certainly not suicidal at least, but how can anyone expect to be happy in this dystopian nightmare? It’s like the world leaders took 1984 as a guidebook and not the warning that Orwell intended for it to be.

I could never share these thoughts with my family, least of all my now ex-wife. That’s probably part of the reason we’re divorced. I’m supposed to be a man after all, and just get on with things without complaint. That’s what dad always did and despite being a little distant and heavy-handed with my brother and me, he was a good father, in the traditional sense anyway. 

I try to be as present for my little girl as I possibly can, to be a good role model and show her how to play the game we call life. I wish I could just whisk her away to some other place, somewhere she feels safe, loved and cherished at all times. Somewhere she doesn’t have to fight tooth and nail just to exist. Somewhere that isn’t here.

The only time I feel any semblance of happiness now is when I’m walking in nature with the dog, far enough away from “civilisation” and the mindless rats chasing their elusive cheese.

I was probably just tired from work earlier, but while I was out walking Alfie this evening think I saw something like a meteorite fall into the tree line not too far from where we usually hike. It was getting dark though and I forgot to charge the headlamp last night so we went home without checking it out.

I’ve stuck the headlamp on charge, so we’ll go and investigate it tomorrow evening, though it was probably nothing anyway.

If you’ve somehow found this blog in your travels, I apologise for the negativity and anger, but I want you to understand that I have nowhere else to share these feelings. I’ll try and work on it for my next entry, I promise.

With thanks,

Alan Lean.

Poetic Catharsis.

Scary as it may be to bare my soul to the world through my poetry, it is most cathartic and genuinely helps me to understand my emotions more deeply. Quite often I’ll have an overwhelming cocktail of feelings that once put to paper, are much simpler and easier to categorise, and therefore deal with in a healthy way.