Kafka's Bug

reflections upon turning twenty-seven

In just a three days, I will be turning twenty-seven years old. For most people, this will make me sound young, but my exterior is deceptive, for my mind is much older.

Ever since I can remember, I have walked through life by the looking glass. I once described this feeling to a therapist as, “living amongst the clouds while I observe everyone below.” This detached and dissociative feeling has followed me through many years. When I use those terms, I may come across as cold, but that is a misread. While we associate feelings of detachment with sociopathy, my feeling of disassociation is quite the opposite.

My ability to feel emotions deeply can be quite frightening. Just watching people cry, even cartoon characters, will immediately make me tear up. My sense of emotion is far more heightened than your typical person. That floating feeling only added to my being an outsider. Despite being ostracised by my peers, I didn’t brew any feelings of misanthropy. My only question was: why don’t they like me?

Intellectually, I gelled with adults easier than those my own age. Running the risk of sounding pretentious, nobody I knew was reading the books I was, nor were they researching the history of Britain or doing deep dives on mummification. At family functions, I loved sitting with the adults. I bounced off arguing politics and hearing their stories. Over the boiling pot of potatoes, my uncle would give me a lesson on different insects.

My thirst for knowledge cannot be quenched. I am always looking for new information to learn. Listening to podcasts is where I get a lot of useful facts from, and of course my first love, books. My go-to fact when I meet new people is to tell them that Anthropodermic Bibliopegy is the binding of books using human skin. It’s probably not the best ice breaker, I know, but what can you do?

In terms of my career, I’m far from where I envisioned I would be at this age. I just had my first play performed this year, and that is after writing them for the last three years. In terms of poetry, things are going quite slowly. Response times can take months! I’ve lost more writing competitions, but that’s not much of a surprise. I have the worst luck when it comes to writing competitions. If I am being totally honesty, I sometimes feel my career is failing. Having dreamed of being a writer since I was six years old, I feel as though I never left that small spot on the carpet in the bookshop.

When your career makes up your identity, life can become tricky. The knock backs often feel personal, thus leading to feeling devalued and unappreciated. A lot of us were encouraged to share how achievements growing up, and I believe this paved the way for our future validation seeking. My writing often feels worthless if people haven’t read it and / or commented on it. As one might expect, this can cause quite a crisis of identity. This sense of inadequacy grows and grows until the bacteria overtakes the Petri dish.

The big 3-0 is quickly dawning on me. Simultaneously, it seems centuries have passed and none at all since I first had the dream of being a writer. In primary school, any time we were given a creative assignment, I almost burst from my chair out of excitement. In Year 6, we had these yellow journals and we would be given a creative exercise to do before school officially began. This was 2008, so it’s been a long time of dreaming, writing, and dreaming some more.

There have been many career choices I’ve considered over the years. At one point, I wanted to be an archaeologist, but that’s simply because I wanted to discover tombs in Egypt. I was fascinated by Egyptology. When I found out that the Egyptians used to pull out people’s brains through their noses I was certain I had found my calling. We went to my town’s museum lots of times as they have a little section for Egypt. These days, I like to incorporate my ever increasing knowledge of history into my writing. Watching documentaries has been something I have done since being a small child. When I would complete my homework on a Sunday afternoon, I’d find the history channel and watch a documentary on the war.

I’m mostly quite a loner, rarely social, so my books and my work keep me afloat. Becoming twenty-seven is a unique turning point in my life. This time next year, my Saturn Return will happen. I am looking forward to the clarity to come. In the last year, I have overcome a lot of things mentally. I am learning to be happy with who I am, after having spent many years despising myself. I am not 100% there, but this has taken a long time, and with being mentally unwell, things become difficult on occasion.

As I turn the wheel of time once again, I want to reflect on the person I am. Kindness is something incredibly important to me, and as the world seems increasingly cold, I find myself feeling angered by the lack of empathy shown towards others. Hatred and prejudice is on the rise once again, blatantly encouraged by our weasel of a PM, Rishi Sunak. I am an ambitious person with a great drive to succeed in what I do. Ever the careerist, I have been passionately working towards this since I was seven years old. I’d lie awake at night and picture myself winning the Pulitzer.

I have fallen victim to silence too many times. Society has ignored my many qualities when all I have ever wanted to do is be somebody worthwhile. In the spirit of isolation, I have had my name used against me: “I’m not sitting next to Courtenay Gray.” Then comes that cloud feeling, floating at a height, observing all that is below.

I am Kafka’s bug, ostracised, on my back.

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