Content warning: suicidal ideation and sad shit.

It’s been a long time since I wrote one of these. You know that thing when you have a task to do or a message to send and you’re delayed initially for a valid reason - you’re sick or depressed or too busy with other things? And then, when you have the capacity to do the thing, it’s just been too long so you feel overwhelmed and you keep putting it off until it feels like it’s too late to ever complete the task? Yeah. That.

But I’ve wanted to write for a long time. I’ve tried a couple of times but I couldn’t make any kind of shape out of what I needed to say. Then, I started a Master’s and the only writing I had the time and headspace for was coursework. Nothing else felt urgent enough, worthwhile enough. Honestly, even most of what I wrote for uni last year didn’t feel that way.

Today, I’ve had anxiety churning up inside of me, dragging me down towards a despair that’s been plaguing me for almost a year, a despair I haven’t been able to reckon with properly until the last few weeks. I’m writing not because it feels particularly worthwhile but because absolutely nothing does and I need to get this out. I need to hold onto something.

This last year has been difficult. I’ve started experiencing symptoms of a new chronic illness - physical this time - and I’ve received only dismissal from healthcare services so far. I started my Master’s, in a different discipline to the one I graduated in, with basically no institutional support for making this change or for my clumsy interest in pursuing a career in academia (sidenote: the concept of a career still terrifies me; something else to write about, if coursework doesn’t eat me whole again.) I’m about to start my second and final year with nobody at my academic level to discuss my research interests with, or to navigate racist, transphobic, ableist institutional structures with. I’ve been working, I’ve been dealing with ongoing and residual trauma, I’ve been floundering on my issues with addiction. I haven’t felt so isolated in years, not since the Nightmare House.

While I was trying to stay on top of coursework and classes and work, I wasn’t able to fully process the fact that my return to academia has been disappointing, lonely, and a constant fight that I seem to be alone in. Here’s the fear that haunted me the entire academic year: I am doing a Master’s because I wanted to work within academia, and now I don’t know if that’s going to work out for me. I’m struggling to make sense of ‘the humanities’; I don’t care enough about theory without real-world application. My university is full of white people studying non-white cultures, both students and staff, and it is exhausting. I am not happy with my grades and I’m worried that my research topic, which I only finally figured out a few months ago, matters enough. I am trying to be sensible by allowing myself to proceed through my final year, feeling it out before I decide whether to pursue a PhD (and an academic career) or not. And if not… well, I have no idea what comes next.

I know that this sounds ridiculous to a lot of people - I see it in their faces when I freak out about my plan not working out. But I am the eldest (and, let’s be real, femme, with all the gendered expectations that that brings with it) child of a Pakistani migrant, and I need a plan. This isn’t even my original plan. When that one crashed and burned, this was the thing that glistened in the dark. It was what I’d fantasised about two years into my undergraduate course: switch to literature, the subject I’d actually wanted to study but felt wasn’t a ‘good’ enough degree (read: had enough employment prospects) to make my mum happy, and make a career in academia, the one place I’d always excelled. But the theory of literature that my current course taught me does not click, and I realise I no longer have the capacity to read enough actual literature to do well. Let’s add the crisis of my subpar grades; at this level, in the humanities, academia may no longer be the one place I excel.

A plan is not just about having a picture of my future; it’s what has always motivated me. When I’ve had no other reason to keep myself alive, I’ve been able to hold onto my plan. Just get through to the end of this academic year. Just get through to graduation. Just get through to starting my Master’s. And now? I have held onto the idea of finishing my Master’s because I don’t want to be a quitter. When I commit to something, I am committed, but this commitment doesn’t feel like a stepping stone to purpose. It doesn’t feel like a milestone to pass, just something that costs too much money to abandon.

There is a small part of me that hopes this year will be better. I’ve switched from literature to Postcolonial Studies and while the theory is still frequently bullshit (please, it is 2019, can we move beyond the total fabrication that is psychoanalysis), it is at least based in the real world, in real contexts and situations and structures of oppression that I give a shit about. It is flexible enough for me to pursue research in film, something I consume and write about routinely anyway, and maybe I can include more social sciences-y data in there as well, to tie it back to reality, to escape the neverending wank circle of pure theory.

But I also know that I won’t be able to survive in academia without a support network, and without explicit validation that what I’m writing about matters. I know I won’t be able to survive if I’m as alone this year as I was last year, not with the constant misgendering (and all the binaries and essentialism present in what we’re studying) and the racism and the absolute lack of support for disabled and chronically ill scholars.

And I don’t have a backup plan. I don’t have anything else to aim for, anything else to hold on to.

The last couple of months, everything has felt utterly pointless, and it’s not a feeling I’ve been able to shake off. I turned 27 a few weeks ago, an age that has felt significant to me since I was six years old, long before I learnt about the 27 Club or any similar cultural references. Something has always felt meaningful to me about this age and later, in my teens, I decided that it would be my year of reckoning. Either I’d made it by now or it would be my last year.

It sounds fanciful, I know. And there’s always been a part of me that suspected that when I actually reached 27, I would shrug off those feelings as an arbitrary adolescent deadline, and I would just keep doing what I’ve always done: move forward, try my best. Instead, here I am, facing down my year of reckoning, and with each day, it just feels more and more inevitable that yes, this will be the last year. Every day, I hope to wake up and feel invigorated, excited about something. I know I have a lot of work to do this year if I want to feel like it’s worth living another - and I’m willing to do that work, as much as my brain and body will allow, but nonetheless, it feels pointless. It feels like lying to myself. It feels like an excuse to not have to face reality: that I am stuck, that I have failed too many times already, that I don’t have the skills or the ability (or money or time or capacity) to gain the skills needed to do work that makes me feel content with myself. To find my way to purpose.

I don’t know how to get away from this despair, which feels unlike any I’ve experienced before. Normally, when things get really dire, I feel either that tiny glimmer of hope to cling on to - something I can do is worthwhile, it does matter - or I feel anger. I have stayed alive out of spite more times than I can count. This time, I feel neither of these things. I feel like I’m going to do the work as best as I can only to find out, however many months down the line, that I tried really hard but I am just not cut out for this world. I have no place here.

I don’t have any answers. I have had moments of pure joy since entering the year of reckoning, and I treasure them. I keep returning to this grey place but I am trying to appreciate those moments of happiness as they come. They don’t quite offer hope but they are a reminder that I can feel things other than anxiety and heartache and emptiness. For now, it is enough to enjoy the warmth of the early-autumn sun on my skin. It is enough to see the way a weird, grimy city a quarter of the way across the world treasures its communities, and to feel pure love for this place. It is enough to sit by a raging sea and feel truly whole, just for a little while.

Heavy Machinery is written by Zainabb Hull and powered by Go Eagles!!! and unfiltered cigarettes.

Like my work? Buy me a damn fine coffee.

Rusty machinery.