cai_
cai_
Jul 24, 2017 · 7 min read

Being Idle

I remember looking out of my apartment window to the quiet cobbled mews. Sometimes if I am lucky, I might get glimpses of the horses in the stable. In the summer, the horse flies are murders. Many days I stood in front of this view idling inside my own body.

During my deepest and darkest depression, the most regular punch delivered to whatever cobbled up self-esteem was the guilt and shame of being idle. The hours seem to pass between each blinks and the seconds felt passing between days. Thoughts and sensations jumbled up. Swirling ear to ear were hatred and contempt towards my own being solid enough to crack a diamond.

Nourishing your own misery will grow too wearisome, the failure of escape and the tedium of helplessness can lead you to a point where you will do anything to stop it. No one can live on pain alone. Pain is often all seem to left during those times.

There is also the disappointment from being idle endlessly. The world around you seem to grow increasingly demanding. The secret of your shame is exposed publicly each day you are absent socially and unproductive professionally. You swing between primal rage and total defeat, walking the tight rope between each sleep if it comes, and sometimes if it ends.

You stop noticing days of the week, what use of paying attention to months of blurred edges, years can go by, and you look in the mirror at a stranger who took your face. Everything you touch is either cold or clammy, or both.

It is not surprising I made an enemy against idleness both in habits and philosophy. I hated myself for my inability to have logical and consistent mood longer than a few days. I resent people who train for sports and learn languages. I could only watch in envy for their freedom to follow through a plan. The inner Asian also looks down my self-inflicted exile from the homeland. I wasn’t tough enough for life in China. I can’t get behind the notion of punishing people out of pain. My childhood peers seem to glide through each year at school effortlessly managing social group, sports and boyfriends with their consistent mood and steady characters. All the while I was just idle, cast frozen in the amber of failure and self doubt, transfixed by relentless storms in my skull. Yet, they told me I am the smartest of them all. I never was able to live up the impression I give to people. I am a trickster and an idler in one.

The landing strip to destination childhood memory was lined by failures.

I failed as a good student at school; being a good daughter; being a friend; knowing to how to stand or sit right; knowing how to fight; how to talk properly; how to ride a bike; how to swim; being too thin; being too fat…

Summer vacations meant more idleness. I would hide in my room fiddling with book spines and arrange them in a sequence of width and height yet maintain a chaotic appearance. I populate my surrounding with secret codes that only known to me, so I can feel more in control. I preferred my pets who never mind if I didn’t brush my teeth. I would notice passing of the day only by the final slam of the front door each day at 6:30pm. I would scratched my arm involuntarily and my ears would started to ring, anticipating the footsteps on approach and I would receive my daily dose of brutal beating and/or retort from my mother. She was impressively imaginative with reasons why I deserved this from her. I seldom listened past age 8. All roads lead to her conviction that the world is much better if I died. At least, I was achieving something by not able to do anything I justify to myself. She seemed to get a moment of ecstasy and escape from her miserable life of being rejected by my father in her marriage which she failed to give herself the permission to leave.

“ I am only staying here for you” she often said, “ if it wasn’t for you, I’d be much happier and freer”

Total bullshit. I always knew.

Like all the bullies and beaters, she is merely a fucking coward who is afraid of quitting anything.

Being idle became my biggest shame. To conceal this, I learnt to lie well, lie convincingly and lie fast. It was pure art in performance and a tool of survival. I was outgoing and confident on the outside. I flaked at parties because I had better options for sure, not because my mother hit me so hard, I lost half a day again and too much blood.

In 2010, I spent a year totally idle in Beijing accompanying my husband’s study. I confided to a childhood friend about the idleness and the violence. She sat with her back against the double ceiling glass wall overlooking to the apartments woven together by endless grids of roads. The skyline danced in the heated air under the midday sun in August. She carefully put one word in front of another: Everyone, I mean, literally everyone just thought you were really cool, so effortlessly bright and fascinating. We all thought you were just aloaf, because you know, your family, we can’t compete.

She begun to sob, and between tears and snotty sniffs, I made out this: how can this all went on, you just walked into the classroom and being funny and kind. I had no idea. I can’t believe this. How can this be possible?

I wanted to say something to diffuse the situation,but nothing came out. she never kept in touch after. I also decided to never tell anyone again. My shame apparently hurt other people. It was not till 2015, I came out properly with my mental illness and abuse. I still lost people and was accused of lying, but I am not going back to silence again.

One rainy day in 2016, I told an homeless man under the bridge by Shoreditch High Street station that I attempted suicide recently. He looked down to his knees and mumbled he wished he had my courage to try himself. I explained that the action is not sufficient to the cause. Though the elimination of pain is nuclear, but you don’t get to rip your own reward of serenity. You’d be dead. “Would you at least want to feel the release promised after doubtless much havoc of physically ending a life?” I argued discouragingly. He chuckled heartedly.

We must resist judgement towards idleness and how people act in and around depression. Not to call the suicidal weak; the disappeared selfish; the displaced incompetent, and shame the most idle ones as quitters. Also never blame the caring parties surrounding the suffers for abandoning hope and leave. It is a chronic disease that rust the fibre of humanity. Withering and nibbling away any sense of hope it finds on its path and expand pain into it. No one is invincible.

Some isolates and sabotages self. Others are isolated and abandoned.

My mania is always a sign of a big fall to come. It is as if am trying to make up time yet to have been lost. Maybe an effort to counter the helplessness proactively before its arrival.

I am always struggling to keep a job during my depression. Each time something settled, I grew uneasy and looked for confirmation to sabotage. The work environment is like another school. Since my time at all the schools I went through traumatised me thoroughly and those times were when my deepest belief of unworthiness was solidified. I resisted relentlessly to give away the power of determining my self-worth to another institution.

Unemployment breeds depression and anxiety, you sit in idleness and spin the bottle. The inferno behind my forehead churns my thoughts into muddy ash of broken vowels,leaking out my eye sockets in streams of slime. I thought I would never able to escape the trap of poverty post -graduation.

The smell of horse waste in the mews while I lived in Lancaster Gate made me feel comfortable. It is a jest towards the tyranny of central London life. Surrounded by the unobtainable activeness and results of actions of my neighbours, the smell was a parallel of how I felt inside.

During my time in my Clapham flat with Sean, I found myself a small crack of a breakthrough from this idleness that meandered the length of last four years of my life. A way out of the lameness of my thinkings, the drudgery of despair, and my flawed body of fat and farts, wrinkle and warts, and brittle bones. Most potently, the bad breathe caused by lack of sleep.

This new feeling is called calmness and I am currently brave enough to consider it normal. Reluctantly, I am trusting it and beginning to relax.

I want to protest against something that is always said to me when I open up about my struggles. I am not brave. I am only doing what I have to do to survive, like many. I live with pains daily that feel impossible to heal, and I endure them like many privately and silently. I crumble so easily and so often. But I still hope and I still notice the grace of life, and I open my palms wide and catch them all again each day. I have the will and I will find the way to see the tenderness and believe one more day that kindness does prevail. This idleness is possible to make peace with and I am making strides.

So I guess I am probably going to be ok.

cai_

Written by

cai_

fibbing and feeling words borrowed and created; artist and thinker based in London

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