Choose Life

When I was 29 I decided that the world was too much with me, and that I needed to purge myself of everything that made me feel that way. So I gave up watching television programmes, listening to the radio, reading newspapers and clever-sounding books, engaging in chit-chat, shopping ‘as leisure’, answering emails, going out to bars, taking drugs... I emptied my life of itself.

What I needed was space to think, to breathe, to be able to savour the textures of life, to not let my precious days on earth piss away or get knotted up with aches and worries. Just to be and to appreciate the moment, that’s all I wanted for myself. To watch aeroplanes flying over my head, to watch the flowers grow, to enjoy the peace and quiet, the simplicity that life should be…

So I gave up all this stuff. No more iPlayer, no more Breaking News, no more Taste the Difference, no more ‘coruscating visions of the human condition’, no more pissed-up thrusting on sticky dancefloors, no more 'hi, how was your weekends', 'best regards' or 'all the bests'. I gave it all up…

I grew lonely and depressed. 

The silence that I’d wished so hard for started to drive me mad. I started to hate my own company. I’d look in the mirror and think, oh fuck me, you again. 

Suddenly I hungered for all the stuff I’d abandoned. Especially Taste The Difference. Going to the supermarket became a religious experience for me. Television, too was a salvation. Gok Wan became an angel. An orange-hued, redeeming angel with divinely white teeth. I’d go out on the piss with all the people who bored me so much before and I’d love it, love them, even the most boring of them, so grateful I was for the responsiveness of another human being. I’d delight in asking people I hardly knew how their day was and whether they’d ‘been up to much’, and when they said ‘Oh, same old,’ would respond with hysterical enthusiasm. Anything to get away from myself...