A Self-Portrait of Delusion
From East London to Bristol, a journey towards the ever-receding finish line and life beneath a veil of delusion.
I was staring at the flaking paint on the ceiling while lying on my bed made of wooden pallets I had salvaged in the street. With slap-dash partition walls and MDF shower cubicles, there were ten of us on each floor sharing one kitchen, two showers, and a toilet in a half-converted building in the heart of East London. When my best friend moved in a few rooms down, we started calling our home, The Squat. Before pandemics, furloughs, and lockdowns had taken up residency in our everyday vernacular, this was my home - living on the top floor of a disused red-brick Quaker meeting house in Shoreditch with 30 other people. It was a scarcely converted building managed by a cash-hungry property security firm that leased out rooms for folks to live in.
Smart property managers saw an opportunity after the 2008 recession. Instead of paying expensive security firms to secure empty buildings 24 hours a day, you could lease the buildings out for people to live in. The hive of daily activity would prevent squatters, vandals, and looters. Leaseholders could live in vast rooms in the likes of Victorian Schools in Bermondsey, former banks in Bloomsbury, or ex-youth centres in Notting Hill, with the freedom to paint walls and put up shelves. Everybody wins. Except: they don’t. Leaseholders weren’t tenants. You had no tenant rights. There were no rules on how habitable these properties had to be, and you could be kicked out with a week’s notice. They used to pay people to do it, but as London rental prices soared, so did demand for these property guardian schemes. Huge waiting lists for the most sought-after locations meant that by the time I lived in the dilapidated building with a homemade letterbox on Quaker Street, I was paying £500 a month to live in a mice-infested room with a leaky ceiling, and I only got in because I knew someone on the inside. But at least we didn’t have a rat problem like the ground floor. One Sunday morning, a photo circulated the building WhatsApp of a rat curled up, asleep on a rucksack that had been left out in the corridor. A few hours later, someone sent an update: it was dead.
I lay there in the soup of my own sweat, sweltering in the heat of the Summer of ‘19, listening to the low hum of my beloved 18-inch fan that I bought for fifty quid from Leylands down the road two summers earlier - best fifty quid I ever spent. If I let my mind drift, the whirring fan filled my head, leaving the arguing crackheads on the street below barely audible. There was a time when I fucking loved the Squat. My second year in, I still couldn’t believe my luck. I was living in E1(!) with my best friend. We smoked spliffs on Friday nights on the doorstep of our giant house in the heart of one of the greatest cities in the world, watching the City Boys, Essex Girls, and Hipster Couriers scurrying about the cobbled streets. They had to travel to get here, but we lived upstairs. We were winning! Five hundred was cheap for the area! We told ourselves. But after three years of cleaning mice poop off the kitchen surfaces every morning and trying to identify which of our ten flatmates kept peeing on the toilet floor, London was too hot, and I was suffocating. I spent every weekend getting up at dawn on a Friday to drive three hours to the coast to get some outdoor climbing in, returning late Sunday night, exhausted, starting the week off with an aching body and a fading smile.
Still staring at the ceiling of my stuffy four-by-four-meter abode, now listening to the scuttling mice beneath the floorboards, I dreamed of a living space I could afford that was more than just my bedroom. I wanted a place to shelve and hang my growing kit of camera and climbing equipment. I no longer wanted to share my pasta shelf, and I longed for an enclosed cupboard where my muesli wasn’t subject to regular mice attacks. I wanted a river to swim in after work and to be able to visit real nature in less than an hour. I vowed to never sacrifice my soul to the Blackwall tunnel or the North Circular for a day trip out of London again. These were the things that I wanted so intensely in my soul that even thinking about my life without them made me deeply unhappy.
And then it happened. A hop, skip, and a pandemic, plus a short but sharp bout of family trauma and a not-so-insignificant relocation to another city: I found myself lying on a different bed, staring at a different ceiling, listening to the same fan (no mice this time). Four whole rooms in this Bristol bungalow for two average-sized people, and I’m still dreaming of more. Delusional, as ever, that the perfect life is out there, I’m just not living it. But this time, because I’m listening to a bite-sized chunk of wisdom from my latest meditation app, I’m asked: when did you move the goalposts? I pause. My half-asleep, half-listening inner voice pretending to meditate sits up, suddenly now wide awake, listening ill-at-ease to the truth bomb about to be laid out: There was once a time, Veronica, when you wanted everything you have now. And the glaringly obvious hit me like a tonne of bricks.
There was once a time I wanted everything I have now.
Confused, was my first reaction. How did I miss it? At what point did I stop wanting the things I now have, only to desire more? And how, exactly, did I not notice the shift? It wasn’t the insatiable, unrelenting, endless appetite for more that surprised me, but the fact that I missed the moment - or any of the moments - of acknowledgement. I don’t recall a single second of satiation, despite spending my entire life meticulously planning and working towards major goals, complete with intermediate milestones and incremental steps against which I measured my life’s worth. Why did I not pause for just a jiffy to revel in self-love, gratitude, and fulfilment, and all that other stuff you should do when achieving one’s goals?
Contemplating the stark realisation that I was never going to find fulfilment on the current trajectory of my deluded journey of milestone leaping, I felt kind of stupid. Seriously bewildered at how I had let myself fall into the trap of perpetual disappointment, chasing an ever-receding finish line. I can’t believe I fell for it, a classic consumerist ruse: I let myself believe all I needed was that next ‘thing’ for everything to be better - and more crucially, I had never stopped to notice that I was moving the goalposts before my very eyes.
What happens now, I wondered. I had broken the fourth wall between my conscious and subconscious and I was staring into the vast emptiness where my goals once stood for direction, purpose and meaning. I felt vulnerable and a bit deflated, like I had lifted the veil and peeked into the inner workings of my mind to reveal the exciting mechanics behind the magic trick; yet there was no magic after all and it was all a bit… unimpressive. But in the back of my head, I became aware of another inkling. If I listened carefully and whispered quietly, I noticed a sense of lightness. While it took a lot of concentration to hear above the surges of erratic noisy impulses from elsewhere in my psyche, the moment I recognised it, it loomed large and definite. The inkling of lightness transformed into a great wave of understanding. And for the briefest of moments, I saw through the abyss of futility and glimpsed the singularity: this was it. There would be no material object, experience or metaphorical level of life that would tick the box of satisfaction. And for the first time, though it’s hard to recall now, I felt unafraid.
I should’ve felt lost really. Without a goal or milestone to light the way, how was I supposed to know what the hell to do with my next waking minute, hour or day? But that’s the thing isn’t it, these summits, challenges and races that we feel compelled to subject ourselves to, they’re pretty arbitrary. They could be anything. While useful in their giving of direction, it’s only the process that can offer a sliver of fulfilment. If these goals could be anything, I no longer had to tether my self-worth to their completion.
With the memory quickly fading of that lightness of being, I could feel my grip loosening on this newfound knowledge. Aware that I probably didn’t have much time before I would fall back into a deluge of delusion, I wanted to press pause, to take stock of everything I had, to preserve just one moment of acknowledgement. So I did just that in the only way I knew how. I scuttled off into our spare room and gathered all the various bits of climbing paraphernalia that lay in disarray across the floor from our last climbing trip. Piece by piece, I carefully hung up each bit of equipment on our gear rack. I arranged our quickdraws and trad gear by colour and type, I neatly coiled our ropes and slings, ordering them by size. I hung all our belay devices together and stacked our trusty crash pads side by side. Then I perched myself amidst my collection of long-accrued climbing gear, as a symbol for all that I had garnered, and photographed a self-portrait to immortalise this moment of recognition.
Like a photo from a wild night out, I can look at that image and know it happened, but the feeling of freedom eludes me. Maybe it’s worse now, now I know there’s a place outside of my delusion, just beyond my reach. But I don’t think so. I think it’s given me a different kind of goal. One I can attain in any waking moment. It’s not that arduous, nor too insurmountable. It’s just a kind of test to see if I’m paying attention. A chance in every instant to catch a fleeting need, before it passes in a blur, metamorphosing into the next desire. An opportunity to see if I can press pause and recognise this moment’s single frame.