Alasdair Gray, from a photo used
in his obituary in the Paris Review.
I haven't drawn much this month.I haven't written much. I haven't updated this blog. I haven't done much of anything. Early in the month I had to go through a brutal two-hour telephone interrogation as part of my
PIP application. Then less than a week later I learned that a fellow poet had taken their own life. This stirred a whole bunch of complicated feelings, not least around my own almost constant desire to do the
same. In the past few weeks my sleep has been all over the place - long nights lying awake looking at abstracts of overdose autopsies, dropping off midafternoon, sleeping either too much or too little.
Then this weekend I got my decision letter -shockingly early, given how long I was advised to wait, but the reason for that became clear when I realised it was a refusal apparently written to be as insulting as possible. Not a rational surprise - they almost always refuse initially- but still an emotional blow. And all this against the background of the Starmerite regime's ongoing war against trans and disabled people, and the fact I need to find somewhere new to live by July.
I've been rereading Gray's 'Lanark' lately. Gray is forensic and unstinting in showing what a horrible place this world can be for those on the wrong end of it-how utterly and unrelentingly it destroys, body and soul, those of us who can't mutilate ourselves into something adapted to mesh with its cogs, and who instead wind up being slowly, painfully ground down. That's been on my mind a lot this month.
'Stay alive out of spite!' they say, and it's true that part of me, knowing full well that there are people out there who would happily see me dead, wants to keep going to cheat them of that victory. But it keeps getting harder. And increasingly I just want it to be over. I want the peace of knowing there's no more of it to come.