Years ago, a teacher of mine told me that 'your twenties are ok, your thirties are awful and your forties are much better than anything you've ever experienced before'. I asked her what it is about turning thirty that seems to plunge people into the depths of life despair, some of them entering a mid-life crisis even though they have not reached the supposed mid-point at all. She said: 'Well, it just feels like you haven't accomplished anything'.
I didn't know what to think of that, especially because we had that discussion when I was 21 and she had just turned 42 and when my thirties seemed like a lifetime away still. And they were a lifetime away because even now, I do not feel like only nine years have elapsed but more like twenty or thirty. It feels like that conversation took place in somebody else's life span, not mine.
And well I am exhausted. Exhausted by a lot of things that are in my life and by a lot of things that are not. And isn't that funny, even a little bit ridiculous to be exhausted by lack of? I could launch myself into a Lacanian lecture on lack but I will leave that for another time. In fact, I may never get to give that lecture on here, for I think that few people know Lacan and even fewer would be interested in hearing about his long-winded, unintelligible theories.
I am writing a piece about Batman's Joker in comparison to Jorge from The Name of The Rose. I had this brilliant leap of intelligence a few weeks ago, when I was scribbling notes on The Dark Knight and it all made splendid sense. Now... it still does but I cannot be asked to flesh it out, as they say. I cannot be asked to put it into coherent paragraphs that would make an examiner go: 'Wow, isn't she good?!'. And so it's easy to feel exhausted. Exhausted by the lack of definition that the final stages of a PhD instill in people; exhausted by lingering in the no man's land of the writing up stage.
