Took the decision to be more humane with myself. Lower expectations to meet reality. No painting when I don't want to: it makes me miserable.
Mental health tenuous. This project noxious and making me ill. Can't go on but can't entirely conmit to being free of it. Lay in bed.
Long conversation with dad about my griefs: not being as good as I thought I was, being conceited, being delusionally convinced of my unique superiority, entitlement, indolence, snobbery, laziness, divorcement from reality, need for a helpmeet. Feel like I'm travelling a path that try as I will I cannot deviate from. Feel like a monolith of faulty programming, unfit for purpose, no longer supportable.
Counselling recommended. I boastfully feel like I would be too subtle and wiley for it to work. Exhausting constantly thinking, brain constantly chattering away, a useless reasoning layer on top of feelings, which seem to decide everything independently of worded arguments. Waking thoughts this morning, 'oh great, I'm me': tired of being trapped in my own diminishing thought spirals, constantly unproductively harrowing over the same barren ground.
And so the poet's vanity was flattered by this woman as it had been by his mother, his sister and David. All those about him persisted in lifting him higher than ever on his imaginary pedestal. Everything, the adulation of his friends and the fury of his enemies, fanned the flame of his delusions and ambition; the atmosphere he moved in was bright with mirages. The imagination of young people is so inclined to eulogize, to foster such notions, and circumstances seem so eager to serve a handsome young man with a future before him, that more than one bitter and chilling lesson is needed to dissipate such illusions. Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions
Almost all the trees have their new coats of bright green leaves now. The cow parsely is out on the verges.
Partly it is the shock of coming from Paris to rural seclusion that has cast me yet again into turmoil.
Floundering, drowning nowhere-going struggle. Caught between doing what I should be doing (work or painting) and giving up and doing something fun. Left with anguished non-day, thrashing around in black misery achieving very little.
Worked hard on painting.
Goldfinch, starlings, bean shoots, sweetpeas, kids next door fording the river and exploring the field, just like I did when I was a boy. The restorative feeling of eternal renewal; that springs happened before me and will happen after, and it is universally wonderful to have been a part of it all, written forever in precise four-dimensional co-ordinates never to be altered: I was here, and I was part or this magnificent web of life.
Eight hours of painting, doggedly, stubbornly starting again and making new errors and misery for myself.
Eight hours of Middlemarch and listening to George Eliot show off that she knows about science, politics, business, writing just as well as any man.
Wholly perfect spring day. Cloudless, warm but not hot, light blossom-scented breeze, birdsong, light green new leaves, willow wafting, quiet, stillness, old horse staring.
Reading, sitting, not thinking. Turning off and dampening the constant chattering inner monologue and following the current of life without agency.
Cambridge to Winchester and back. Family. Beautiful cloudless day. Mottisfont, swarming with middle class families of Theos, Saskias and Archies. Trout. Blur of the fleeting visit.
Joy of leaving a party of normal people early: impossible to tolerate without drink to intermediate.
Paris to London, brief pause to burn some money entertaining a wellwisher at a brunch establishment. Cambridge, Suffolk. Cowslips, sun, growing broad-leaf weeds. Regaled father with half-baked plans for a café. Taking three days off from painting, which I will rue later.