"Is it not the prolegomena to another?"
Sunday ramblings on a pandemic youth, my dearest friends and my poor goddamn therapist.
I had a conversation with an old friend yesterday.
We started university together in 2019, and I found him to be challenging because he was smarter than me. That had not happened much before, and frankly, I was unimpressed that he had the audacity.
After a colourful few years of psychiatric history, pandemic trauma and [IMAGINE SOMEHOW MORE HIGHLY PERSONAL DETAILS HERE], I dropped him a message via Mr Zucc, on Facebook Messenger.
We had a conversation that I had been having many times over the past couple of months; about UK youth in a world on fire. How do you feel you’ve got a grip on anything when there’s no housing, no money, the climate’s in freefall and fascism is on the rise?
For me, specifically, how am I meant to remain calm that if this is my lived existence, with all the resources available to me as an extremely middle class white person with an Oxbridge degree?
How do I not give in to the fury, rage, or anger about all of my comrades’ existences who do not have the resources, social, economic and other, that I have in battling the state failure in the NHS mental health ‘system’?
Spoiler alert; I don’t have an answer here. That’s not actually surprising, because no-one else seems to either. It does make me think about where I am in life, though.
Somewhere in this conversation with my friend, I congratulated him on being a “boss boy”, and he dropped the banger of a phrase, "Is it not the prolegomena to another?".
This resonated with several conversations I’ve been having recently.
When I sent my therapist the first draft of Sectioned: Three Years On, he said something along the lines of this motif. At the end of the first draft of the original article, it read, “I am done talking about this”.
This poor man said, essentially, “what are you talking about? You are not even done beginning to talk or recover from this! This is the start of your life, not the end!” And, unsurprisingly, he was entirely right.
After a deeply manic career path so far, people have kept saying one thing: slow down. You have time; breathe. Vienna waits for you etc. etc.
Maybe it does? Maybe I, even if quoting Immanuel Kant is deeply wanky, am the prolegomena. Rome wasn’t built in a day. By the way, neither was BlueSky, which you can find me on here.
This article was in part inspired by Lucie Eleanor’s You Have Time, linked here.
Inspired by @Lucie Eleanor and her recent article on having time. That piece is linked at the bottom of this one.