It's Not Me, It's You

by Jon Richardson

  The walls of the bath box me in and I can just get to grips with the small area I am in before I start to think about anything else. It smells nice in here, like soap, and by curling up and tucking my knees into my chest and clutching them into position with my arms, with my eyes closed I feel like nothing can get me. There are no problems in the bathroom so everything immediately around me is fine.

  I think back to a technique I developed at university for helping me cope when there seemed too much to sort out; a technique I called ‘zooming’.

  University is where people go to ‘find themselves’ which is all well and good, but it should not be assumed that you will like what you discover there. I moved away from home only to find that I was a fastidious misanthrope who was more concerned with the cleanliness of a cutlery drawer than finishing an essay on the rise of Fascism and its role in the Spanish Civil War.

  Whilst at university I would sneak out onto the balcony of our apartment block with a can of cheap lager when the stress got too much, and out there I developed a coping strategy I called ‘The Zoom Technique’. I would begin by focussing as intently as I could on everything that was bothering me, in as much detail as possible and listing everything I could think of, before speculating on what things might be bothering the four people I shared an apartment with at the time.

  Pressures of work, family, relationships that I knew of and others that I didn’t. After that I would imagine how many problems must have been on the minds of all the people in our building, before once again zooming out to include everyone on the campus. It seemed impossible that someone on the campus didn’t have far bigger problems to deal with than I did.

  After that I would consider everyone at Bristol University, then everyone in Bristol, everyone in England, and then Europe and finally the whole world. By this point I swear I could feel the collective weight of violent relationships, famine, war and illnesses forcing me down into the ground. I would then remind myself that none of the problems outside of my own was my responsibility; they were not my fault. All I had to deal with were the things that were bothering me in the first place, perhaps a bit of mess, some deadlines and the fact that I missed my family. It all seemed so easy to fix then.

  I would carry out this exercise whenever I felt the need and it never once failed to help me feel better. I suppose this is the same theory that nowadays stops me from switching on the news in the morning because I have forgotten that I am not responsible for the problems of the world … but am I doing anything to help alleviate them?

  I am not unaware of the unimportance of what I do for a living. Comedy is not an essential job – it does not save lives or protect people. I do what I do because I am allowed to and I am well rewarded for it, but I feel guilty that I am not doing anything more worthy and so I cannot bear to hear about the problems that used to alleviate my stress.

  Back then I was just a student, still finding my way and still unable to express any influence over my own decisions, let alone suspect I may have influence wider afield. Now I am older (though not nearly old enough to feel as weary as I do!) but I have moved into the category of ‘dream achiever’. I have the job I dreamed of as a child and I thought it would bring me eternal happiness, but if anything it has made me feel worse.

  Dreams are an excuse for unhappiness; they allow us to think we would be happier and healthier if only we had what we were looking for. Once that thing has been found and eternal bliss remains as unattainable as ever, then unhappiness takes on a life all of its own, unconnected to any one possession or person. It is an entity that cannot be controlled, cannot be defeated and comes and goes from your life entirely as it pleases like a drunken guest at a house party, staggering from room to room and bringing with them only chaos.

  Though the Zoom Technique may have helped me get through some tough nights in my teens, looking back now I guess I can identify it as the planting of the seeds which would later become my perfectionism and lust for complete control over my life. University itself represents the first time that you are put in control of your own life and possessions, away from the family home. Until then most of the things at home had been simply the way they were – that was the remote-control table, that was where tea towels were kept and so on. It wasn’t that they were right or wrong, but just how they were.

  At university however, in your own flat, everything has to be put away for the first time and therefore thought has to be put into the proper way to do this, as the system to be used, once implemented, would maintain itself. These were not just tea towels – these were my tea towels! I remember feeling somewhat guilty about the excitement I felt about this prospect. Of course I was nervous about leaving home and sad to be living so far from my family, but I was also excited by the thought of owning my own chopping boards, of doing my own laundry and of having my own systems.

  For my mum, there was no consolation – she was simply watching her son leave home and I will always find it difficult to forgive myself for making that situation worse by making her feel unable to help me set up my new home. As she began unpacking clothes and putting them on hangers ready to go into the wardrobe, I must have unintentionally given her a look of discomfort that stopped her from going any further.

  ‘You probably want to do this yourself, don’t you?’ she asked through quivering lips, eyes set back behind smeared mascara. ‘You’ll only end up having to do it all again if I do it.’

  ‘It’s just … They need to face forward in the wardrobe with the hooks going over the front,’ I said, ‘and T-shirts with T-shirts. You know?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  And with that she sat on the end of the bed and focussed her energies on trying not to look upset in case it made me feel guilty about leaving home. Families that are sensitive to each other’s needs can sometimes be a mess of inactivity as nobody wishes to offend anyone else by making a decision they fear might be motivated by their own desires. There have been times when my sister, mother and I have gone back and forth for hours trying to second guess the secret desires of the others before reaching a conclusion that pleases none of us, simply to avoid only pleasing one of us!

  I knew at the time I was making things worse but I couldn’t seem to control my urge to have things organised properly getting in the way of not hurting people I cared about. If she had put books on shelves she might not have done it alphabetically, and if she had put the jam away the labels on the jars might not all be facing the front; so because of my stubbornness she felt helpless and did nothing.

  I hated upsetting my mother over something I knew to be trivial, but I didn’t seem able to help myself. To this day I put my mother under undue pressure to do things the way I have decided they should be done. She is someone who thinks nothing of digging her knife into her margarine when she is making toast, whereas I slide my knife gently across the top of it, scraping off what I need but leaving the surface smooth and intact.

  The rational part of me knows that there is really no difference and certainly no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way of buttering your own toast, but I have reacted with such pain when taking the lid off her spread that she now smoothes over the top of her margarine when she knows I am coming to visit! It is absolutely insane to think that I could have made her feel so self-conscious about the appearance of the inside of a tub of hydrogenated fat in her fridge and worrying as to how much else she might alter in her own home to prepare for one of my visits.

  My mother is a small woman, and as kind and generous a person as you could hope to meet. She deserves to live at peace in her own home and I hate the thought that a visit from her own son could drive her to feel even a moment’s discomfort.

  I have gone on to annoy and upset friends and girlfriends in much the same manner, but I stand by my systems, even if other people refuse to stand by me as a result. I can’t seem to want to change enough to actually do it though and despite all the arguments I still believe in the old adage ‘a place for everything and everything in its place
’. When I come home at night exhausted by the world outside, the least I expect is that all my things will be where I left them on my way out. If I wanted my things to move at random without my touching them I would live on a boat.

  One thing of which I cannot accuse my mother, and which I will go so far as to say is definitely wrong, is leaving crumbs in her margarine. That was a horror I discovered in my second spell of shared accommodation, living with three other comedians. Opening a jar of marmite and thinking that someone had accidentally dropped half a scotch egg into it is not an experience I wish to repeat, not to mention opening a jar of pickled onions that I had been saving for a special occasion (don’t get me started) to discover that it is actually a jar of onion-flavoured vinegar, or clearing away a mug from the living-room floor that had been used as a receptacle for some toe-nail clippings. The logistics of even getting them into the cup baffles me and I almost wish I knew how it had been done, but when I think about it in detail I start dry retching.

  All the time I lived with other people the cleaning still seemed to come down to me. I suppose it was largely because I didn’t see cleaning as something that either could or couldn’t be done – I saw it as something that had to be done. There is, I now understand, an alternative view that cleaning is something that some people enjoy and others do not, like olives, and that those who do not enjoy it can simply live without it.

  In this latter world, cups simply find their way back into the kitchen and teaspoons, like bacteria, are able simply to reproduce at will, dividing and multiplying endlessly to fill the void left by the disappearance of their brothers and sisters. I may sound as though I am being patronising here and I hope that is the case, because I mean to.

  If you have reached full adulthood without learning that if you enjoy and use milk, then at some point milk must be purchased and kept in cold storage somewhere within reach of the user, then you deserve to be spoken down to. Of course people are aware of these facts but it is easier to pretend not to be than to admit, ‘Well, of course I know I haven’t bought milk since 1988, but the shop is always outside and my desire for a cup of tea is always inside, so I find it easier just to use yours!’

  There really are only two solutions to this problem:

  1. Accept that you will always be the one who buys the milk. A sad admission of defeat but ultimately, almost like Buddhist teachings, it is better simply to accept the way of things and focus your energies on other tasks than to try to change the direction of the wind by blowing against it with all your might.

  2. Refuse to buy milk or tidy up until someone else does it, with the result that you will end up living in a milkless hovel and die of scurvy or something similar.

  On the few occasions that I tried to hold out longer than my old flatmates, a period I came to call ‘my fairy liquid embargo’ during which I kept the basic essentials for existence hidden away in my bedroom and left communal areas to descend into whatever state was deemed appropriate by the mob, it was still me who caved in first as they found ever more ingenious ways to get round the problems, from the very simple decision to effectively move back in with their parents, eating all meals there and sleeping there, to making a game of finding more and more ingenious ways of getting food from the packet and into their mouths.

  Of course only a mind as rigid and inflexible as mine would assume that cereal had to be eaten from a bowl, and that when there were no clean bowls one would be washed up. Oh, how naive! Cereal can be eaten just as effectively from a measuring jug, soup can be poured into 24 different shot glasses and knocked back like tequila and tea can be drained slowly into the mouth through an old, dirty sock if the situation calls for it.

  Takeaway food provided another avenue for escape and I ended the war when empty pizza boxes covered the living-room floor entirely. It began to look a little too much like crating for me to feel at all comfortable, and since I was also refusing to buy toilet roll I feared it was only a matter of time before they began to defecate in the corners of the room and bury it there.

  A recent discussion with one of my old flatmates began with him asking me if I remembered the incident with ‘the note’, which I am sorry to say that I didn’t.

  ‘Oh, you’d remember this one,’ he grinned. ‘It was a real work of art!’

  I began writing notes at university, and fell into the trap of trying to sound like I really wasn’t as concerned as it might seem by beginning each one with the words ‘Hey guys!’

  Hey guys! It’d be really cool if we could all do our washing up when we have finished our dinner, as it’s not really fair on those who get in late if there’s nothing clean to use. Hope everyone’s well. Jon

  Which in reality roughly translates into: Oi, pricks! If I get back from the gym and find that all the fucking pans are dirty once more, I’m going to start pissing on all of you while you sleep. I hope you are as miserable as I am here. Jon

  Maybe the second note would have had more of an effect than the faux-friendly, hair-ruffling tones of the first, but I suppose I was trying to retain the moral high ground. The fact that I had to write one of these notes every week should have been enough of a sign that nobody was paying any attention to them. I am not proud to admit that I have written a number of terse notes in my time, so much so in fact that no one incident seems memorable.

  The note that my former flatmate was referring to had been written after a particularly gruelling evening’s cleaning while the flat had been unoccupied by anyone but me, perhaps at the end of a long-term cleaning embargo. Before going to bed I apparently wrote a detailed note outlining all the cleaning that I had done that evening, how long each task had taken and a sum total of my time spent. After researching the current minimum wage I calculated a fee for my work, divided it by three and issued each of them with a bill for my services.

  I wish I could have shown you a copy of this note, but even I will admit that had I written this note and then also kept a copy on file in my private records for future reference, I shouldn’t be here writing down the details of the incident for you but should be in a secure unit somewhere taking the green pills at breakfast and the red ones at lunch.

  Always the green pills at breakfast, isn’t that right, Mr Richardson? He used to be a comedian you know? Yes, in London! He’s on that there youtubes, not that you kids will remember that.

  The most upsetting part of this story is that I can’t for the life of me remember doing it. I can only assume that I entered some sort of maniacal state beyond consciousness. I picture myself in an apron on my hands and knees scrubbing a bathroom floor cackling to myself in a way not unlike Muttley from the Wacky Races and conducting full conversations with the cartoon on the front of the Mr Muscle bottle.

  After a year spent living that way I could only conclude that it was me that had the problem. Eventually the maths seems simple: three messy-living men with girlfriends (how they had girlfriends I couldn’t understand) against one note-writing lunatic loner put me in the minority, so it must be me who needed to assimilate with them rather than the other way around. I hated the fact that my friends were seeing me as someone even I couldn’t stand to be with – a moaning, pernickety twat who bears grudges and harbours resentment – so I left.

  It was at that point that Swindon seemed like my best option, away from everything. You only get one chance for people to see you as perfect and the longer and longer you can maintain that image the greater the pressure on it. I could never go back to being a person they could respect so I had to get further away and try to rebuild slowly. It was my inflexible perfectionism and black and white understanding of things that isolated me from my friends, and continues to this day to do so.

  When, only a year into my studies and inexplicably miserable, I dropped out of university in what I was sure at the time was the worst decision I had ever made and would surely commit me to the scrapheap for the rest of my life, I had to pack up all the things I seemed to have only recently put in place. Every item that I boxe
d up was another brick in the wall of my failure and placing each item allowed me another moment’s reflection.

  A book in the box. Are you sure this is right?

  Another book in the box. Are you actually going to put this away and leave here altogether?

  A third. Really, Jon? It isn’t too late to take it all back.

  The task seemed to go on for ever and I longed for it to be over so I could start again somewhere else. When it came to emptying my wardrobe I put my open palms at either end of the wardrobe, facing one another, and brought them firmly together lifting out every item in one satisfying movement. Clutch, up and out. A clean break. Perfectly clean. Worth upsetting your mum over? I’m not sure.

  If my personality has cost me my place at university, my relationship and the chance to live with my friends, it was this third failure that hurt the most. I had proved incapable of finishing university, but there were thousands like me every year, I was sure. I had failed in love, or at least with my first ‘proper’ girlfriend, but that was somehow beyond my control – something higher and beyond reach was in charge of that. But the fact I had been unable to live even with my best friends really hurt.

  Friendship was something that transcended physicality; it was almost purer than any love you could feel for a partner. The friends you make as a child who stay with you throughout your life do so not because they find you attractive, or they gain financially from your time together, but because something deep down connects the two of you. Because you have stayed with each other through more than one period of your evolution. The fact that my thoughts and ways had sullied even that meant that I would have to learn to depend only on myself for contentment, that I would have to learn to cope with being totally on my own.

  I moved away to a place where I knew nobody and where I thought nobody would come. I switched my phone off and didn’t respond to messages. People would ask what was wrong and I would tell them I had a problem with my phone; I just wouldn’t tell them that the problem was that having it turned on made me feel frightened and sick. I had to learn to find happiness for myself, but is that even possible?