NOT QUITE RIGHT

It’s late. The clock ticks. It has a lovely gentle click: soft, regular, familiar. The rest is silence.

I’m tired. Specifically, I’m tired of being ‘not quite right’. I don’t feel like myself, more like a sort of shadow tonight - a person resembling the composite version of me the world expects, but inside, not really me at all - a different me, a sort of older, more anxious me - who doesn’t like it very much, but can’t do anything about it.

That’s not the only benchmark though. I feel like I don’t live up to people’s expectations either. I want to live adventurously, radically, out there, doing the stuff. But I sit behind a desk and blog about Mars Bars. I want to write songs and psalms and poetry that moves and sparks and soars like the sound of inspiration on the wind! But I just mess around on the piano and slide into blues more often than not.

Then there’s the thought that I might have wisdom, which is often tempered by me doing something so unwise I can barely believe it.

By the way, Sammy told me that I could have swiped any of my four things with my gloves still on, and the machine in Sainsbury’s would have recognised it without me needing to press the ‘Start’ button. I tried it today. It’s true! I didn’t know. I’m so far inside the box I’ve forgotten that there might even be an outside.

Then there’s being a bit nerdy. A month or so ago, in a town that’s not my own, a person leaned across a table in a restaurant, right in the middle of a big group chat, and asked me about what I watch on television.

“You’ll think me a square,” said I, smiling, “But I don’t actually have a TV!”

Before I could process the eye-rolls, one of the ladies around the table looked me straight in the face and said,

“You’re not a square, Matt; you’re a nerd.”

And she might be right! Lost between ‘wordy’ and ‘needy’, too old to be cool enough watching Doctor Who, not cool enough for graphic novels and anime. Listens to Vivaldi and The Lighthouse Family, while unable to move from help instructions and the rigmarole of agile documentation - geeky, but by no means Millennial. Longing for justice, freedom, and adventure! But apparently looking for a quiet, safe and easy life too.

Well. I’m tired of all that. I am dissatisfied. I want to be an adventure person, much braver than this timid exterior would have you believe. I don’t want to be colourblind or squeamish or silly or hypocritical; I want to be watching sunsets, climbing mountains, breathing in the fresh morning air of the pine forest, standing under the crisp pink dawn, fully knowing, and being fully known, like men of strength and integrity always are.

Well. The clock is still ticking, soft and low into the small hours of the night. There’s so much more in me than all of this. I just have to figure out how to let it out.