Bildungsroman

Previously, in ‘Resolve’ I explored and lamented the fact that there was no answer to why I was depressed and that I did not have the wherewithal to overcome it. I discovered, almost immediately after I finished writing it, in conversation via email to Andrea about the blog, that there was a very big reason (though only one reason of many) why I was depressed. And I had missed it, for years.

I became much more severely depressed, in a way that began to interfere with my daily life, sometime around 2012. 2012 was a bad year for me. I had just finished my university degree and discovered that I had thrown away 3 years of my precious youth applying myself way too hard to something that was in the end useless, pointless and highly unlikely to ever gain me employment. I had also had a mental breakdown in 2011.

But the start of this story goes a long way back further than that… back till about the time I started high school at age 12. It was around this time I imagine the idea of traveling to London entered my head. It became the centrepiece of my bucket list, and by the time I had finished high school and started university I had decided that I wanted to spend a semester studying over there. Unfortunately at the time I had been swept up by a most deleterious relationship with a regrettable boy called Damien, and he insisted that if I went to London it would destroy our relationship. Which, at the time, we both thought was one worth keeping. So, I never went. By the time I was free of him and his anxieties, I was coming up to third year. And no lecturer would sponsor me to go overseas. So I saved up all my money from all my scholarships and benefit payments and at the end of third year I decided to go to London under my own power for a holiday.

There is only one word which expresses what going to London meant to me. It was going to be my Bildungsroman. It is such a perfect word, and it so neatly encompasses the scope and complexity and gravitas of the concept I am trying to convey. A Bildungsroman is “a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is extremely important… (It relates the story of) a sensitive person who goes in search of answers to life’s questions with the expectation that these will result from gaining experience of the world.”^[1] This is what I hoped to do. I was going to find myself in London. I was going to go to a place free of the expectations of my family and schooling and friends (what friends?) and lovers and find out who I truly was. I was going to discover myself as much as I was going to cultivate myself. I was quite possibly going to come back with a British accent… more of a British accent… an excuse for having a British accent. I'd be cool, calm, collected and worldly. I would be a woman I'd like to have a relationship with, and that many other people besides would like to as well. Quite possibly English men, who looked like David Tennant and spoke like Neil Gaiman. I was going to have photos and stories, the kind that would begin to bridge the gap between me and people like Damien, who was 19 years my senior, and had visited every continent while I’d only had high school to talk about. I'd never even been allowed to have a gap year. Even Prince William and Malia Obama were allowed to have a gap year. Truth be told, if I had been given a gap year, I would have had nothing to fill it with. My family was poor and we lived in the middle of nowhere, and I had no friends and only a very meagre supermarket job. I never learnt to drive, and I was only 17 anyway. It would have been the shittest gap year ever. But the point is, that year is often a vital part of a person's coming-of-age, and I hadn't been given that either. I felt like I had this incredible capacity for positive change inside me, but I wasn't being provided with the opportunities to access it or permission to embrace it. I didn't want to change myself for the sake of anyone else or improve myself in the eyes of society. In a lot of ways I specifically wanted to avoid that and go against the grain and break the rules. I wanted to make myself into someone I wanted to be, someone I would be proud to be. I wanted to realise my potential and start on the path to my destiny and every other beginning of a hero's journey cliché you want to throw at it. I wanted to forge myself into my true being, alone, in a brand new country.

But, I didn’t.

And the start of that story goes a long way back further than that… back through many groups of friends and people I have never met and never will meet, and scars even deeper than the ones left on me. But that story is not mine to tell. Suffice to say that, in the end, I was the one who broke the promise to myself, and it crushed my Bildungsroman. It’s like when you go to make a big jump over a gap, but you waver in your approach and fall on your face.

Cat jumping and falling from roof GIF

That GIF is pretty much the story. And it hurt me, so much. And the people around me hurt because of it too. And I continue to regret it with a shameful amount of vitriol and sorrow. But I can’t change it, and the chance has passed me by. I never knew how important it was to me to make that journey. I never seized the opportunity to become the person I wanted to be. I never had my Bildungsroman. And now I see my desire for it cropping up sporadically over and over, like an angry snake punching through the earth, manifest in my desire to run away, to change my name, to leave my family, to speak with funny accents, to suddenly sing well, to not be depressed, to have crazy coloured hair, to have famous friends, to write about myself on the internet. The quote on my old blog, widely attributed to Marilyn Monroe is “I want to be who I was when I wanted to be who I am now.” And in some ways I continue to live my life in the shadow of that. Continually grasping at these markers of chaotic individuality, yet just wanting to be happy with myself.