I’d been depressed for a month. I might have been feeling that way for a long time and not known it, I don’t know; accepted it as the lot of someone who works because he has to, not because it allows him to say something with his life. Day in, day out, two years into my own business and still trying to be a businessman, but still sucking at figuring out why it is that I’m working constantly and earning good money and yet never actually have any, and never see the light of day for lack of time, or anyone to share the day or the office or a cup of coffee with.
All this, I thought, would pass. I’m a pretty hard worker and self-tinkerer, tinkering, tinkering at my chinks until this task, too, is easy in the end, and this, and this, and I’m better for it. I was working on two tax consultants at once: one was on my 2007 return and in the middle of filing season when she had a stroke. Nobody could talk to her to find out what she’d been busy with or at what stage things were. I had sent my tax invoices to her in the post – someone had signed for it, but nobody knew who. I pored over the PostNet slip with its uptight little female or teenage signature, worked out the surname wrong and phoned everyone by that name in and around the neighbourhood in this remote town where this obscure tax consultancy operated, a company that a friend (now dead) had said was “good, maybe too good, but for that reason probably a safe bet”.
With all this happening to me, I’d fallen more than a year behind filing deadline by the middle of this year. It was time to start working on the next (2008) return, so I got another tax consultant, this time local. I figured I was in trouble – I probably owed the revenue service a whack of money, and through a weirdness of my self-unemployed tax status, I owed all of it now. Meanwhile the business papers were taking an interest in a billionaire businessman who was being hounded by the tax commissioner. I was starting to feel physically sick with worry and lack-of-closure-overload. But I was working on things – one way or another (either paying the tax man much less than I thought or landing in jail), soon all this would be behind me and I could move on to current things.
Suddenly, it was behind me. I didn’t owe nearly as much as I’d thought, but nothing changed. I couldn’t sleep. I woke up in the mornings feeling like death, even though I’d quit smoking and drinking months before. I went to bed depressed, wondering what disfiguring antisocial programming I was planting in my kids’ brains without knowing it (everyone else is doing it), what fears they already harboured that I hadn’t resolved in my own life. What kind of a son and grandson I’d been; what a complete bastard, my entire life, to every girl who’d ever given me affection. Normal stuff, if you don’t block shit out.
Then, one day, as I put the finishing touches to an article I’d written, painstakingly perfecting it, I realised where all this unhappiness-turning-to-delusion was coming from. I had written something that was way more than it ought to have been, if not a work of art then at least a thing of modestly beautiful craft, and it was going to end up in the sponsored section of an IT trade rag as a laptop feature. That’s what the hell the matter was. All my life was like this. It was meaningless. Anyone would have hated it; dutifully, doggedly, doing their best for – what?
So I decided to change my life, and the first thing I did after that was to look for a self-publishing space on the Web. Hence Everymag. It’s where I come to be myself after work. Next thing I did, even before I wrote this article, I wrote an entry called ‘No direction home’. But that’s for next time.
Meanwhile to all the other poor working stiffs out there, here’s my advice: work even harder. But make it something you want to do. And don’t quit the day job.
Next instalment: No direction home
