A Listicle Letter Addressed to Me, Containing An Itinerary of Things I Really Ought to Improve About Myself in 2021

Dear Jack (a.k.a. You, a.k.a. Me),

I think you know all too well that it's high time you upgraded your metaphorical physical and psychological OS settings. You're filled with bugs that need fixing, and you can't wait for others to help do it for you, so maybe give a hard reset and reboot a go?

I don't know, I'm mixing and mangling metaphors here, but you get the gist.

In no particular order, here's what's in need of repair and maintenance within - as Tim Minchin might say - your "tortured internals".

The Eponymous List

• Take down the Christmas tree. It's February as of the time of you writing this. Come on now. Sure, I know your justification to yourself is "well, we're probably going to still be in another lockdown in some form or another by the time the next Christmas comes around, and it's providing some small measure of magic and whimsy and decorative flair to my otherwise dreary confined environs, so whatever"...

...but c'mon. If you don't take it down soon, it'll lose whatever rarified novelty it'd usually possess if it was only unearthed once a year, and then what's the point?

• Use that damn exercise ball, and do some damn yoga. It's what they taught you to help ease the fibromyalgia pain after all, and these cold winter months will be murder on your muscles and bones, so get to it.

• Wash the bloody dishes. Don't let them keep piling up, and putting off washing them 'til later. It takes 10 to 15 minutes at most, and then it's done, and you can get back to wiling away your time on your phone, playing Candy Crush Soda and Candy Crush Jelly and Coin Master and...

• Stop playing Coin Master. You know it's a worthless, pointless, stupid, money-grubbing, repetitively rubbish app that's barely a game, but definitely a total time vampire, so why keep it on your phone? It can't be good for your psyche to constantly horde and accrue billions of virtual coins to spend on virtual villages and virtual prizes that don't translate to any real-life material worth or income during these times when you struggle to afford enough food week to week. And besides, I think we both suspect all those animated caricatures often tip over into the realm of the vaguely racist sometimes, right? Just cut it out of your life, and be done with it. Remember: if the Kardashians enthusiastically promoted it, that means it's probably terrible and bad and maybe a scam that someone's getting rich off of, including them.

• Stop staying up all night looking at your phone. You may turn on Dark Mode, and the Night Shift mode, and turn down the brightness, and all that jazz, but it still hurts your eyes, gives you a headache, disrupts your sleep patterns, and let's face it, you're probably addicted to it, because you have an addictive personality when you're not careful. Using the myNoise ambient sounds app, or your various sleep-inducing Spotify playlists, as a means to help you drift off? Fine. They're about the only things that calm your bustling brain in the dead of night, and help cover up the various sudden but innocuous sounds of the weather and the pipes and the other inhabitants of your building living their lives around you. But resist the urge to look at Twitter or Instagram, and just turn the phone away, okay?

• Finish more of the books on your "Currently Reading" list. Some of them have been on there for over five years at this point. It's getting out of hand. Complete them, or abandon them, and move on to another book. You've certainly got plenty to choose from.

• Eat better. At least, as much as is possible for you to, anyway. This is contingent on you actually being able to afford decent meals, or the ingredients that go into making half-decent meals (and hell, shirking cow's milk in favour of soy and/or oat milk is made all the more tricky by their increased expense, and comparatively limited availability), but imagining that you could afford such a thing? Branch out your palette more. Go beyond the quote-unquote "beige food" your sister gently cajoles you about. Obviously, the "beige food" of chips, bread, rice, noodles, chicken, fish, and whatnot are the most affordable things you can buy in just enough bulk to last you for multiple days or weeks, until the next Universal Credit payment arrives in your bank account. And obviously, surviving on mostly two meals a day, with what you call "breakfast" (i.e. cereal, maybe with toast?) and "dinner" (i.e. a ham sandwich, a packet of crisps, and an apple) being what you've had the most these past couple of years, has gotten you this far. But that's surviving, not living. You're consuming food for just enough requisite energy to get you through the day, rather than for the taste or culinary value. This is not a good thing, but what else can you do with the little that you have?

• Try out some CDB, maybe? I know you tried trying it out with that £10 vape pen you got in that local shop last year, but the pen was busted and didn't do anything, and before you could go get a refund or replacement, the big nationwide March lockdown happened, and the shop was closed for months, and now it's far too late... but those low-strength apple-flavoured gummies you got from Holland & Barrett were pretty good, and seemed to be mildly beneficial to your focus and concentration, so if you can get some more of something like that, that might be awesome. (If you have the money for it, though, because damn if those products aren't expensive as fuuuuuuuck.)

• Stop procrastinating on your writing. You know that once you get into the swing and the rhythm of it, it's not as hard as you make it seem for yourself. You've got so many unfinished article drafts on this site alone that you ought to get round to finishing. Like, you've had that Tenet analysis gathering dust in there since you started writing it last August. So either finish the article, or turn it into a video essay script; just do something with it.

• GET THAT FUCKING TOOTH SORTED. It's not as if you have much control of when it does or doesn't flare up, it's infuriatingly unpredictable, so this is more of a direct address to the upper left-hand side of my dental layout: DECIDE WHAT YOUR ISSUE IS ALREADY! Are you a misplaced or rotting nerve? Are you a wisdom tooth problem? Whatever it is, hurry up and make it obvious enough for my dentist to see what's wrong when he does an x-ray next, because I've had more than enough of you randomly starting your bullshit in the middle of the night, with your pain that feels like I've been repeatedly punched in the jaw keeping me up all night in throbbing agony. You had the sheer audacity to get an infection last year just as the March lockdown began, and all the bus schedules were cut down, and getting that amoxicillin prescription was a ginormous hassle, and frankly, when you're at your worst pain-wise, I always feel like I'd be better off pulling a Tom-Hanks-in-Cast-Away, and doing some self-dentistry to knock you right the hell out of my mouth to release me from your toothache stranglehold. BE GONE, TOOTH-PAIN SATAN!

• No more run-on sentences. Run-on sentences are one of your worst writerly habits. In the words of John Grant, it's "a nasty crutch", and in the words of Michael Jordan from that one meme: "Stop it. Get some help." (Install Grammarly or something, I dunno.)

• Figure out what you want to do, and more importantly, what you can do for a living. All those years you spent being your mother's carer full-time, after you finished school, robbed you of so many opportunities in your life to lay good groundwork for your future. She wouldn't permit you your own money, the time to learn to drive, the freedom to find a job during that early-20's period employers are most keen on, and once she suddenly and without warning died, you had very few options moving forward. You knew you couldn't be a carer again, you had more than your fill from the 13 years you gave up doing it already, and regardless, no carer jobs would have you, because you weren't officially trained and officially certified. You had no work experience, nothing on your CV, you were too old for whatever placements were out there (and getting older every day), and your fibromyalgia greatly inhibits what work you can physically do. Now you're on Universal Credit, on just over £400 a month (with only a little over £150 left after all the bills to tide me over for buying groceries throughout the rest of the month); it's the middle of a pandemic, and seeing as you couldn't get any work before COVID hit, it's pretty much impossible now, and especially in the economically deprived area you live in; the JobCentre and Remploy have done everything they can (which isn't much); the only steady job you've ever had is an unpaid volunteer position at a charity shop that's currently closed because of the Tier 4 lockdown that's been in place since Christmas. So what's left to you?

Your body always failed you, which is why you spent most of your life sharpening your mind instead. "My brother has his sword, and I have my mind. And a mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. That is why I read so much." So said Tyrion Lannister. In your case, you can do art-related things - writing, photographing, acting, videoing, editing, music-making, voice-overing, and whatever. You want to be an author, a film critic, a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker, a composer, a voice actor, a regular actor, a podcaster, a streamer... you want to be all things to all people... but like Diana said in Wonder Woman 1984 (which you still need to finish that article about, btw), "you cannot have it all".

You have to choose something. You're caught in your usual analysis paralysis, weighing the pros and cons of everything without actually putting any action behind your multitude of intentions. Whatever decision you make, just make one.

• Get some therapy. Once again, it's a matter of cost, but in the hypothetical imaginary parallel reality wherein you could afford therapy... you know you fucking need it. You've got so many decades'-worth of demons bottled up inside you, it might as well be Spengler's nuclear containment unit contraption they use to house all the ghosts in Ghostbusters. And if you don't talk to someone specifically officially designated for the purposes of listening to people's problems... if you don't heal what hurt you... you're going to bleed on those who didn't cut you.

You can't pent it up and eke it out bit by bit, story by story, to friends or family or strangers or (god forbid) any future potential partner you may wish to have, because you'd be using them as canvases to paint your inner miseries upon, forcing them into the role of absorbing some of the darkness you've experienced, when they don't deserve such a thing. That's not their role to fulfil. You can't wait until you finally find a woman who likes who you are, and confess your tragic back-story to her, because there's too much to tell, too much for another person to bear or share the burden of. It wouldn't bond you together in this romanticised idea you have in your head, whether you like to admit it or not, that having some shared or similar emotional baggage each of you can empathise with would help form the basis of a healthy relationship, because you know it wouldn't. You'd be supplanting the role of therapist onto someone who should be the love of your life, turning yourself into a person who takes more positive energy than he gives, and that wouldn't be fair or good for either of you. These should be separate roles for separate people, a real "church and state"-type deal.

But you also can't let that darkness just roil and fester away in your head. The lingering trauma and PTSD from the day you found mum's body, and all the way back through the years you spent under her control, enduring her abuse, her toxic narcissism, her manipulations, her brainwashing, her cruelty, her gaslighting, her emotional incest... these are all behind that door you try to keep closed in your mind. But little snippets of that darkness seep out all the time. The flashbacks to things she said and did in life, the snatches of imagery of her bloodied face in death, the nightmares where she's still alive, the small but persistent irrational fear every time you finish a shower that you'll see her vengeful spirit staring at you when you pull back the curtain. You're like Hugh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House - your back against the door, arms outstretched, holding it closed from the monsters waiting on the other side, holding so hard you don't have arms left to hold the ones you love, and the monsters get through anyway.

You need therapy. You need it in order to spare yourself, and everyone you know, from the horrors you dare not face head-on.

And finally:

• Just do the basics. Drink plenty of water. Remember to breathe. Wear a mask every time you go out, and never take it off until you get back home. Listen to your body. Watch more movies. Talk to your friends and family. Wash your clothes. Hoover your floors. Take your medication. Be sensible with your spending. And... um... just maintain good personal hygiene for your own sense of wellbeing.

(Oh! Bonus to-do item! Get a diagnosis about whether you have OCD or not. All your pre-existing pre-COVID personal cleanliness and hand-washing and intrusive thoughts and so on? Bite the bullet, go to your GP, and find out once and for all, jeez.)