Volunteering & Volunteer Students

My counter is sitting there, as it's been sitting, for a few weeks now, without being updated. I've been pretending to work on it, with a sentence here or there, with two chapters open, waiting to be finished. This must've been the situation for about three weeks. I might email myself a chapter, promising myself I'll work on it during my lunch hour. Then at lunch I find a reason to go upstairs and sit in the conservatory reading or meditating. I come home, and I find this, that or the other that I should do rather than sitting in front of my laptop writing.

I go through these periods of utter intimidation and stop writing. I keep thinking, "I'm not good enough!" or "I'm just a failure!" Out comes the big stick in my head, and all my confidence drains away. Sometimes I can come up with excuses, like I'm researching or doing something really important, or just looking for the right music. Mostly I just lose my nerve again and even if I open up the Word files, I just sit and stare at them blankly, maybe alter the odd word or two. Still, I don't feel like I deserve the title of writer, even though I'm trying to find my way to the end of my eleventh book. The editors and H can say all they like, in my head I still seem to be a failure.

LW tells me that I'm like the world-famous record-breaking cyclist, who sitting with all his medals around him, breaking those records in minutes not seconds, still shook his head and said, "I'm a failure, I'm not good enough." We see what we want to see, and re-spin our lives according to what we want to see, what reassures us, not what's actually true. LW lists all the things I've done so far, and what I'm doing right now, and I can still see it as failure. I didn't get my PhD in three years, or without a lot of stress, and that's therefore failure. In a sense, it's my conviction that I'm a failure that keeps me going. On the other hand, when it comes to writing it's a stranglehold. It's been bringing me down a lot, and bringing out all those nasty little neuroses once again.

A while ago, I signed up to become a job coach. A job coach mentors homeless people who are making the huge step from living on the streets to finding a place to live and getting a regular job. The scheme puts people who are in the right sort of place to do this on a course for two weeks in some basic skills, then gives them a mentor who helps them with the difficult task of finding jobs, getting a CV together and surviving interviews. I originally signed up for it because I wanted to be the kind of person who helps people less fortunate, perhaps feeling quite grand about myself for doing it.

The email arrived this week asking me to confirm my place on the training course that prepares us for mentoring. I looked at it and immediately thought, "Oh, I'm busy, I'm going through a hard time right now, I'll just say I can't do it anymore..." For a day I left the email where it was. On my way home, I walk through the Triangle every day, with the huge outdoor TV screen, and the drunks gathering under the great Wheel. They have bright red faces and dirty clothes. They talk loudly and rudely because it really doesn't matter who hears them. People ignore them, or walk around them, give them a wide berth.

I realised as I made my way home and carefully didn't look at them, that I was actually very scared of them. Truth be told, I was an addict once, and I could've gone that way. I could've run away from home instead of working my way out. It's only a matter of choices, I thought. I read this week of a guy who works with the homeless in New York, who says he does it because he wants to face the parts of himself that he tends to reject. I think I'm doing it for the same reasons. They're selfish reasons, wanting to walk into the mouth of a crocodile, deal with people that my middle-classness wants to reject and blame for all society's ills. I'd like to face those parts of myself, my desire to give up and slump in a corner. I think of the last few days of my thesis and how I drank to survive it, because it felt like torture. You don't like to look at those parts of yourself, or those parts of society.

I'll admit, I'm very scared. I don't know if I can make a difference to somebody's life. I know how to do CVs, and I've never failed an interview, but I don't know what it's like to live on the streets. Fortunately, I do know what it's like to have a history you don't exactly want everybody to know about, and to feel like you're struggling against a massive tide. I worked for two weeks at a drug outreach clinic when I was fourteen, and I know how people feel a deep sense of inadequacy about anything they face, whether it's writing their eleventh book, completing a thesis or getting their first job after a lifetime on the streets.

Today I have a day off, and I think I'm going to try, very hard, to get myself back to writing again.