Part One: Which Watson?

So here I am, feeling like Dr Watson. Not Lucy Liu’s sober companion or Jude Law’s rollicking adventurer, or even Ben Kingsley’s master detective… no, I’m talking about Martin Freeman’s understated veteran, thrust reluctantly into cyberspace by his unrelenting therapist as she works to help him overcome what she believes to be PTSD, but what the good doctor soon discovers is actually rooted in boredom and the complete absence of danger.

I suppose boredom and the complete absence of danger have also been roots in which I have been entangled for far too long, although not in the literal sense. I mean, I could play videogames and binge Netflix for the next two decades and never get bored, and I am yet to find the appeal in actually risking my life (or indeed risking horrible injury in the pursuit of some thrill or another), although if I were to limit myself to the confines of my bedroom I wouldn’t really be able to consider myself alive – at least, not in the sense of having a life. You know things aren’t great when The Walking Dead has gone from entertainment to metaphor. No, my problem has been the total lack of challenge through my own choice to just give up. Take a break. Sit my ass down. Tell life that I think we need to spend some time apart.

I was tired of striving to attain this mythical state called “happiness” that some seemed to inhabit so effortlessly, of attempting to locate “contentment” in whatever mundane job I had happened to land in this time for the sake of those little bits of formerly paper now polymer that so many are willing to do absolutely anything for, of meandering around the potentially endless labyrinth of incremental achievement in search of that elusive destination known as “success” that everyone seems so keen on arriving at. After over two decades of trying and failing to untangle the mass of bile inside me, that self-replenishing ocean of rage and hate and despair, whose waves of anguish would crash mercilessly onto my shores at the slightest sign of a breeze, I decided enough was enough. What was the point of any of it? And while I elected – I told myself to spare the feelings of the people who for reasons beyond my comprehension seemed to care about me, yet always wondering if I’m just too big a coward to take that ultimate leap of faith into the abyss and declare this reality not worth persevering with – not to die, I sure as hell didn’t have to live either.

So for the next few years I simply existed, mostly suffering, occasionally finding some fleeting moment of gratification to distract myself from the tedium of my self-imposed limbo, (living-)dead set in my one-man protest against existence and all it entails, until eventually – I suppose – I got bored of that too. One day I found myself putting away my protest signs and deciding I should probably start making some kind of a semblance of some manner of appearance of some form of an attempt at having a life again, at least enough to dull the ache of all those deathbed regrets with what could easily have become my epitaph: “Well, he tried.”

But then, to my horror, as I began to piece this devious fraud together, the tiniest wisp of hope began to form, rising up like smoke from a campfire thought by onlookers to have long been extinguished, and I found myself doing the most stupid and reckless thing I could possibly imagine: allowing myself to entertain the ludicrous and frankly outright insane notion that this time might actually be different.

With hope now kindled and my desperate attempts to waft it away only fanning the spark into the ghastly apparition of an actual flame, it was a matter of mere days before I happened across not only a profound source of guidance but also an entire community of aspirationalists, and forced by this foul spectre now haunting me to entertain the possibility of receiving both new and known concepts in open embrace, I quickly found myself kitted out with the fanciest tool belt I had ever possessed, truly a 21st-century amalgamation of wisdom spanning from bygone aeons to cutting-edge psychological research. And at that point I really was in terrible trouble, because it was seeming more and more as though if I didn’t stop playing my former role of a lifetime – the victim – it may end up that I actually could find no one and nothing else to blame. And try as I might to concoct a truer deathbed nightmare, none would come.

So now, as an aspiring writer who has neither read nor written anything of substance in years, what was I to do? I was out of excuses. Stripped bare for all to see (which, given that all those years of comfort eating will take more than the past three months of training hard and eating healthily to reverse, is at present not an alluring vision), it seemed that the only choice left to me was to… start reading and writing again. Way to take away my freedom, reality! And not content with procrastinating indefinitely, I found myself asking for trouble as I sought counsel on turning calling to career, which is when the suggestion was made that I should start a blog.

I instantly hated the idea, so I knew it was a great one and that I had no option but to do it immediately.

Thus it is you find me, cast adrift upon the infinite waves of the cyberseas, a bedraggled raft-rider who cannot decide whether it would be worse for no one or for someone to peruse his musings. I suppose there is only one way to find out, and it lies in the little blue “Publish” button taunting me from the corner of my eye.