Sometimes, Mister Lipwig, the young you that you lost many years ago comes back and taps you on the shoulder and says, “This is the moment when civilization does not matter, when rules no longer hold sway. You have given the world all you can give and now it’s the time that is just for you, the chance to go for broke in the last hurrah. Hurrah!”
Sometimes, dear reader, the right passage comes up and thwacks you over the head just when you need it most. Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett, is a good book. Raising Steam has sections in it, just as Thud does, that make the tears prickle at the back of my skull, behind the eyes. And Raising Steam has, near to the end, this little quote. Because sometimes, that younger self has to come back and knock again, and again, in order to get your attention.
I forget, sometimes, that when I regenerated into my Edinburgh self, one of the things that was killing me the most was my need to put everyone else first. My complete and utter inability to do anything just for myself. Fear of selfishness overtook the need to look after my own health. I gave up, and worked my self into a crisp, and beat myself up over every mistake, and in my exhaustion and in my pain and in my little personal vortex of self-loathing, the mistakes started flowing more and more fiercely. It was, in itself, a self destructive cycle.
When I came down here to the big city, I needed to put myself first. I needed a little time to focus on my own self-confidence and self-love. To do that, I needed to let out the Showman, that little fragment of my self who I’d turned away from, viewed with distrust and anger and fear. In doing that, the world suddenly started balancing properly around me. Letting the two sides of my life in harmony – the flash and the studious. The miracle-worker and the monk.
Sometimes, I still slip off that balancing act. Sometimes, one side or the other gains the upper hand, and the tightrope slips out from under my feet, and I am dropped unceremoniously onto the floor. And equally, sometimes, rather than doing the sensible thing, and standing back up, and getting right back on the tightrope, I trap myself in my own little prisons of self-hatred. “You fucked up. You are such a fucking idiot. You will never amount to anything, and everyone is going to be fucking disgraced.” I nail one foot to the floor, and wonder why I’m walking round in circles.
The tightrope is tricky. It’s chancy, and it can’t happen overnight. But when you fall off, it’s better to just run around and climb back on, rather than berating yourself for hours for falling off. Over the last couple of days, I have wrenched the nail out of the floor, and climbed back onto the tightrope (Note to all my readers – I do not actually advise tightrope walking with nail injuries to the feet… That could be somewhat dangerous!) and now, it’s back to the old game.
Because I can’t just walk that tightrope… Not me. That would be too easy. So to return back to the start there…
“Run before you walk! Fly before you crawl! Keep moving forward! […] Because if we fail, I’d rather fail really hugely. All or nothing, Mr. Groat!”