22.07.26
Making a life change is like recovering from addiction
I’ve been wrapping up on my epic archive and materials run before departing for a short holiday, and it looks like mission accomplished. I’m about 90% there with everything I wanted to achieve, and the full record of what I need for the project is taking shape.
I corresponded yesterday with a leading human rights lawyer, very well-known internationally, who has done work in the area which the film is about. I learned that he’s putting together a project to catalogue some old human rights related cases, where there’s still more to be investigated and where there may have been miscarriages of justice. I found that very interesting - it may be something that I look at off the back of this project.
I’ve really been putting the hours in recently, starting early and working into the nights. It feels like I’ve been working more intensively than I have done for several years. I’ve always worked fairly intensively, but it’s ramped up over recent weeks, and I find the hours go past without me really knowing where they’ve gone. I’m enthusiastic and excited by the work I’m doing, and, yes, a little bit apprehensive at the same time, but that is a sea change from the preoccupation which I have had over the past number of years, and the dogged sensation that I needed to escape.
A chunk of my day was dedicated to thinking about, fantasising about, escape. It’s an amazing sensation to feel that preoccupation lift, feel myself restored to being engaged in my work, back in the world. And thinking optimistically about the future. The escape obsession used to manifest itself in all sorts of strange and subtle ways - I used to routinely track the lottery, for example, “if I could just get a lottery win, then everything could change”. That kind of crazy utopian thinking, when I didn’t need a lottery win, all I needed to do, as I’ve written before, is to say “no” in order to say “yes” to the alternatives.
I spent most of my life as a heavy smoker. I gave up over a decade ago, which was something I thought I would never do, no-one who knew me thought that I would ever do; it was so intimately tied to my identity - that’s what I did, I smoked. It was only after I stopped smoking that I understood how much of my life smoking consumed, and I don’t mean physically, as in the damage that it does to your health, or even the act of smoking, I mean the mental energy that was dedicated to smoking. Smoking was such a pervasive part of my life and unconscious, which would seep into my conscious thought throughout the day. Anytime I went out, anywhere – to a party, the pub, a barbeque – right before leaving the house my thoughts would run, in a state of heightened anxiety:
“Do I have enough cigarettes? If not, I need to take a route that passes a shop where I can buy cigarettes. Do I have cash to buy cigarettes? If not, I need to go past an ATM, and then past the shop to buy cigarettes. Do I have a lighter? Let me check. No, I don’t. Let me hunt for a lighter. Okay, I’ve got the lighter. But what’s the lighter like on fuel? It might run out. You can never have one lighter. Let me have a backup lighter. Have I got two lighters? Let me check both are working.”
That would be a ritual before I did anything. And then I would smoke all the way to the tube station, and when I exited the tube at the other end.
Same thing if I was flying:
“How much time do I have to smoke before I get on the plane? I’m going to Los Angeles, twelve hours on the plane. I’m gonna need to smoke heavily before that. Where can I smoke in the airport? Do they have smoking areas in the airport? Do I have to be outside of the airport? How long have I got to be outside of the airport before I need to go through security, realistically, how late can I leave it? I’ve just landed - where’s the baggage reclaim? Is there a smoking area before I get to the baggage reclaim? Can I have a cigarette straight away when I get off the plane? Or do I have to wait for the baggage first?”
The smoking noise was constant. But I only really became conscious of it once it lifted, once I’d stopped smoking. That was when I realised that, Jesus, I have all of this headspace back that was being squatted in by tobacco.
That’s the sensation that I’ve started to notice over the past week or so, it’s a form of recovery from addiction. My headspace has returned, my enthusiasm has returned, and I have the time to think about and enjoy what I’m doing, because this preoccupation with escape has vanished. It’s a remarkable thing. It shows you that you can’t be half-stuck, you need to commit wholly to change before you will experience the effects of that change.
In any case, the project is in a good place, and I depart on holiday for an interval. Seaverses will resume, for my readership of three guys, (all of whom I appreciate - thank you, guys) upon my return.