Miscellany

Exercise 1 from The Fiction Class

Five obsessions

1. Money.
2. Worms.
3. Writing.
4. Knowing things.
5. Understanding the past.

Money is my metaphor for madness, and that is the obsession I intend to explore. As for the others – worms – an extreme phobia, which I have found is not uncommon. I think of them as creeping up on me and I find it difficult to understand intellectually their value in the world, and the feeling of horror, terror even, that strikes me when I see one.

Writing is an obsession that has got misplaced, because the writing process seems to fascinate me more than simply getting on with some writing that will bring me fame and fortune. Knowing things – ah, yes – I hate to be out of the loop; I hate secrets; and I hate not understanding why people withhold information, or fail to explain themselves and thus become a mystery I can never unravel.

Again, I do understand intellectually that we all have a right to our privacy, but I fill up their silences with my own confused and psychotic ‘explanations’, and the unknowns seem to get in the way of a true knowing, and therefore liking or loving. This is linked with understanding the past, because as much as other people puzzle me, I puzzle myself and often do not understand how I came to do this, that and the other which has stranded me where I am – a place I do not really want to be.

But it is money that obsesses me most – the lack of it, a strange contradiction in that I despise and detest it, hate profiteering, cannot understand why someone like Athene Thierry (‘the Onassis heiress’) has $56 billion – it seems obscene – and why I cannot hold on to or respect money that belongs to me. It as if I want to disdain it, and yet so doing puts me in positions of extreme poverty, limits my choices and causes extreme stress. I know I should manage it better, and yet a curious fatigue comes over me when confronted with the ‘necessities’ of personal financial management.

Yet by a strange contradiction, when I was working, I was noted and praised regularly by the auditors for my excellent budgeting and balancing skills. Expenditure never exceeded income and I got more for my buck than many other departments in-house or in similar organizations. This neglect of my own finances has a detrimental effect on my emotional and mental health, and yet I cannot seem to break free of both obsessing about the lack of money and doing nothing to better manage what I have got or what I could gain, with some application.

Too much of the work I do, for example, is voluntary and unpaid. What is all that about? I wish I knew. And how mad is it to only feel right with yourself’ when you have no money and are in crisis because of it. So unhealthy – as I believe all obsessions must be. All that money confers is choices.

Yet who would I be with ‘enough’ money. As a person who believes too much is enough, when would there BE ‘enough’ money? And how would I tell – ever again – that someone loves me for myself alone and not for what I do, or give? I already have doubts about that …

posted by Jenny Argante @ 12:38 AM