The Art of Being Boring

Perhaps the answer is to pack your bags and move to the city. 

As a somewhat shy and partially introverted twenty-year-old, recieving the opportunity to complete an internship in Central London felt like a gift straight from the graceful fingertips of God, like I’d finally been looked down on with something less pitiful than disdain. I quit my tedious retail job in the middle of an industrial retail park, so barren a piece of tumbleweed was a regular, without so much as a regretful smile. My manager had begged me not to leave, but, no matter, for I was a city girl now! Plastic smiles and paper bags were beneath me. Pinching pennies was a moment of the past, as, in some wild stroke of luck, I’d acquired a paid role. Sure, it paid the equivalent of a barista's salary for a Londoner, but I’d be on a salary before I’d even finished university. Finally, I could say with certainty that I was too good for my small town. 

I had jumped on the tube from St Pancras station with a suitcase and a backpack (seems minimalistic, but my parents were due to deliver an entire car full of my hoard of belongings in just a handful of days) and a fleeting smile, and made the unnecessarily long and swelteringly hot journey all the way to West London. It felt like somewhat of a cheap metaphor to make the move in the middle of a heatwave, perhaps the hottest London had seen in years, but as a bright-eyed newbie, I accepted the rare sun like a prophecy. The sweat the tube had dumped on me felt almost like I was shedding my skin, washing my hands of the monotony of the life I’d lived as a student for a colourful, vibrant way of life in the capital city. 

Stepping out of my local tube station for the first time, I must say, was impossibly underwhelming. When you build a tower of loose twigs out of imagination and hope, it barely even takes a cough to have it topple. 

Don’t get me wrong, West London has some great hotspots, from the affluent but clinical Kensington, to the utter simulation of Hammersmith. I spent many weekends on what I like to call a ‘café crawl’, which involves spending far too much of my wage on overpriced iced lattes and unnecessarily complicated baked goods for the sake of a couple of good spots to swallow a book. It just so happens that, when you cheap out and move to a place that’s just within your affordability (which I had to be quite lenient on - the London housing market is the closest humanity will get to the Hunger Games), everyone else seems to have the same idea, and it becomes a cluster of people hanging onto London like it wouldn’t spit them out at the first hiccup. My small neighbourhood was overrun with people just scraping by, and it seemed like our surroundings weren’t even scraping by at all. 

My house was on a cul-de-sac smack-bang in the middle of a construction site. The nearest corner shop was a good ten-minute walk away, and the road was completely isolated from any other residential areas. The local tube station was fifteen minutes away, which wasn’t too bad if you weren’t running late to work or coming home from a club at three AM, which I was most of the time. The house itself was absolutely nothing to blink at, and, on some days, I barely wanted to look at it at all. The oven let out an odd gas smell whenever it turned on, concerning, but not enough to do anything about it. The bathroom ceiling was painted with specks of mould which the landlord promised to fix, and instead just scraped off the paint and left the exposed plaster. The sofa collapsed whenever you put your whole weight against it. But, in some respect, I suppose that felt quite exciting. A dingy, run-down house was just what I thought the Typical London Experience encaptured, and I wanted it all. The struggle, the rag-tag group of friends for life, and the world at the tip of my scuffed Doc Martens. 

I met my housemates the day I moved in. Both older than me by a few years, but it felt more like they were old grannies passing wisdom to their naive but lovable grandchild. They’d seen the world in technicolour, and I’d seen it from my bedroom window with sunglasses on. It wasn’t that I was sheltered by my parents, though. In fact, one of my housemates had come from a town far smaller than I had, and yet they always had a relationship on the go, an event to attend, or a new piece of clothing for me to be jealous of. I often found myself wondering why people like them got to live so much earlier than I had. I felt like a prisoner who’d only just finished their sentence. 

After I’d settled in, I realised that when you get an internship, you actually have to go to said internship. I’d kind of forgotten this part. I spent my whole week before it started inviting my friends from university over, showing off how Cool and Desirable my life was, parading them around Soho and the like. When it came to my first day, I’d genuinely forgotten that I hadn’t moved to London just for some holiday. I was on the old nine-to-five, a working girl, serving lackluster corporate core with my highlighter pink hair and uncoordinated and impulsive tattoos. The office I interned in felt more like a cage than my small town, which, I know is such an eye-roll thing to say. Of course everyone hates office work, you stupid girl. What did you expect? I expected nothing. I’d thrown myself right into the maw with reckless abandon. 

In honesty, it wasn’t that bad. I did feel largely out of place, yes, but the team was welcoming and encouraged me to develop my skills and shape me into a lovely employable future graduate. But, as someone taste-testing a career, I found it really difficult to comprehend how these people could be satisfied with blinking meekly at a computer screen for years until they’ve made enough to retire. This is something every twenty-something-year-old goes through at some point, yet this feeling felt like something I’d molded with my own hands, my own, unique. I spent my evenings cooking and cleaning, and my weekends catching up on the sleep I’d lost in my terrible attempts at regulating my sleep schedule. Time didn’t belong to me anymore, and nor did people. Friendships slunk into dormancy, and I became mechanical. 

I let this feeling simmer for a few months, unarticulated, before I realised that all of my time had evaporated. Already, I was six months into a nine-month internship, and I’d spent my whole time in London like a married man with a wife and kids, except I had nothing like that. I was chronically single, never having more than unromantic acts of intimacy, and my life was as plain as my office’s cafeteria food. Another year, in the most culturally rich city in the country, wasted just watching the clock and waiting for things to happen to me. 

At this time, I’d slowly begun to recognise the art of reading. My best friend possessed a whole library in her tiny student bedroom in Oxford, which I raided regularly. As a child, I’d read ravenously, but this hunger had dissipated as a teenager when I tried fruitlessly to align myself with people who would always be much cooler than I am. Spending at least an hour and a half on the tube on my daily commute meant I had a lot of free time to just sit and twiddle my thumbs, which felt more poignantly like a waste of time than when I’d stared aimlessly at my inbox on my work laptop. So I made this my designated time to read. 

Quickly, I fell back into my old ways and began to consume more books than I’d probably read in the past five years combined. As a teenager, I’d taken a philosophy course, which I loved passionately and left heartlessly in favour of other things. This became my favourite subject to read, since I now lacked the academic pressure of literate comprehension. I stumbled into existentialism, which seemed like a small ditch at the time, but, looking back, I’d practically flung myself off a cliff with that one. My simmering feelings of pointlessness boiled over into a blooming existential crisis at the age of twenty-one. 

I’d done nothing with my teenage years except chase the tails of my peers, missing out on all of the juicy prey. No relationships, barely any travelling. One time, I met another intern at a social event, and when he asked me to ‘tell me something about you that I never would have guessed’, I genuinely had nothing to say. He tried to press me, but I had an empty canvas, so he grew bored and went to view some more detailed paintings. The cliff I’d thrown myself off had a bottom, and it was rock hard. How do I not have one good story? Not even from my months of living in London. I couldn’t come up with anything. 

The real kicker was when I returned the question, and he replied: ‘I once did fire breathing to an audience of a thousand people’, which made me actually laugh out loud at the irony. He stared at me like I was a dog defecating in a park. 

After this interaction, the boiling pot seemed to have overflowed all over the floor. I spent several days trying to pinpoint quite what I was feeling. It wasn’t quite dread, or regret, or fear. It was more of a quiet acknowledgment that I was unremarkable. Someone has to be average, and I was doing it excellently. I felt like an empty page of sheet music, sitting there, waiting to be filled. Idle. 

Hearing the fire-breathing story, as well as other equally strange stories from my housemates, helped me to realise that London is not a cat, sitting regally and awaiting a cuddle. It’s a boisterous dog; you have to chase it if you want to grab the lead. So I swallowed myself down bitterly to become the Londoner I felt I should have been. I attended poorly thought out exhibitiions, mediocre galleries of stolen goods, amature but loveable performances. I read, I walked, I forced myself on some effervescently lacklustre online dates. I tried vehemently to add colour to my life, treating the city like a paint-by-numbers. I listened to classical music. I became the sort of Londoner everyone knows and kind of resents a little bit.

One of the books I’d come across in an attempt to throw some glitter at my monochrome life was Nausea by Jean-Paul Satre. This is quite a staple in existentialist philosophy-fiction, so it’s not like I’d uncovered some unknown literary gem. I was just playing catch-up. In this book, the main character spends the majority of the story so horrified by the meaninglessness of living that he actually feels sick. By the end, he’d realised that the only way to get a grip on watery existence is to create. To write, to paint, to sing, to dance, to do anything so wonderful that it makes people ashamed to exist. I’d felt this shame, at the fire-breather, at the novels I’d read, at my best friend for having such a long list of read books. I felt it was about time I was on the other end of it. 

Honestly, I had always been writing. I made my own (admittedly awful) children’s books as a child myself, excelled in English class, and wrote a semi-successful fanfiction about a topic I shall not name. The thing about writing, though, is that you’re terrible at it until you aren’t. And I definitely was, am. But I decided that this was my Interesting Thing, so now I had a new life to dream about. London? I’d been there and done that. Now I needed to be an author, to write the next classic that will fill curriculums for years to come, that will have my name in flashing lights in every bookstore. 

I wrote relentlessly. I evaded sleep in favour of my keyboard. I spent all day staring at a computer screen in an office, and all night staring at a laptop screen in my bed. The passion was bubbling over, laying a film over my behaviour. When I wasn’t working or writing, I was thinking about writing, dancing through daydreams, and wandering about the city with slightly glazed eyes, not quite there. One time I was walking around Chinatown after work when I received a text that said I had just walked right past one of my friends who was visiting London for the day and hadn’t even blinked. I was buried in pipe dreams not knowing they had leaks. 

After pouring myself into almost two-thirds of a novel, I realised that what I was writing was absolute garbage, and, at best, a scrapbook amalgamation of all the great authors I’d been reading in a desperate attempt to find my own voice. A cheap remake. In my effort to become someone notable, memorable, I had masked myself in mimicry and become more unrecognisable than before. This was a little more than a minor setback, since I’d decided that writing was my Calling and the only way I could justify the twenty-one measly years of my life. 

I told my best friend, the reader, about my endeavors in writing. I expressed that I found it difficult to settle, that I’d constantly go back and rewrite old chapters to avoid actually writing the story. She pointed out that ‘there’s a metaphor there somewhere’, which is true of most things. Often, I’d go to her for advice, since she’d give me a good cocktail of what I need to hear sweetened with what I want to hear. She told me not to worry too much about perfection, that: ‘you’re not trying to write the next Nausea’. 

This stung a little, because that’s exactly what I was doing. I was so enthralled with being great that I’d forgotten why I’d even liked to write in the first place. To create, to be, unconditionally. 

One great book I stole from my best friend's bookshelf is Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. While it’s difficult to articulate quite what happens in this book, each sentence seemed to pull together a thread that strung into the most intricate and gentle tapestry. About halfway through this hefty novel, the supposed villain of the book suggests that ‘you can’t look too far ahead. Do that and you’ll lose sight of what you’re doing and stumble’. 

And there I was, tripping at the first hurdle, jumping straight into writing the most poignant full-length novel while balancing an internship and a degree. I’d forgotten the most important part of the present: enjoying it. 

When you’re up on your high horse, sometimes the view does give you a bit of perspective. I realised that the more I knew about life, the less I understood. This is not a new concept, and I’m not pretending it is. My philosophy teachers from years ago had practically shaken my shoulders and screamed this to my face, but little naive teenager me let this idea slide ride off the smooth surface of my underdeveloped brain. After actually trying to figure life out, I’d realised that those philosophers all the way back in Ancient Greece might have actually been onto something. Fancy that. 

Philosophy became my temporary fixation, and I let it seep into the cracks of my life. I saw beauty in new things, like the frayed backpack hanging off a commuter's shoulder, or the blank space on the wall in Shoreditch where a popular singer’s concert poster used to be before it was stolen by an avid fan, or the shake of the voice of a busker in Covent Garden. Nausea, while still rumbling my stomach, became just one perspective that made up my own tapestry. Sometimes, you have to run a whole marathon just to appreciate the beauty of the hundred-metre sprint. I felt this way about Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, when Camus dutifully suggests that ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy’. Sure, I was no fire-breather, I was no Sartre, but I did make a stranger laugh on the tube last week, and I did buy my best friend that book she’s had her eye on, and I did travel for three hours just to attend a friends’ birthday party for one night. I found substance in the nothingness. I’d found London in London. I’d got up from rock bottom and started pushing it up the hill. 

Writing became a way to decorate my life. It was a wave in a calm ocean, rocking me further up the shore. London wasn’t a closed book anymore, it was an instruction manual. Sartre suggests that, in creation, I might succeed in accepting myself. Perhaps I’ll never be a memorable writer, but at least I’ll have remembered writing.