I’m not feeling it. That’s the truth. I’m not feeling like ‘celebrating’ the ten-year anniversary of the independence referendum. I’m barely even feeling the desire to mark the date. I’ve written so much about moving on that I just want to, well, move on. But I kind of feel obliged to write something, so here goes. Three short pieces on where now.
In the first I want to explain why what I feel and what you feel are of exactly the same relevance (none). In the second I want to remind you that all the fights and confusion are always to be found in the era before there is change, mostly to point out how change actually happens. In the third part I want to scream and summarise how to escape this dreadful era where we’ve been stuck in our own belly buttons, shouting at each other ‘quick, come and look at this!’.
If you want to skip this (which I’d understand given how much there is on the subject right now), then all I’m going to say is: what you feel doesn’t matter, your personal grudges, feuds and bitternesses don’t matter, our silly little fights don’t matter, our sense of self importance doesn’t matter, our ‘bonus points’ for being right or wrong, dissident or loyalist don’t matter. None of that matters.
All that matters is what we do to leave something behind that someone at a much later date writes about because it does matter. Of that we have done very little.
So let’s talk feelings. That’s what anniversaries are about. We choose arbitrary times to carve out space to engage with long-term feelings and thoughts and hopes. It is how we process our lives –via birthdays, Hogmanays, wedding anniversaries, school reunions. It gives us opportunities to take our experiences and give them meaning, to weave them into something more than just moments.
But this is all just psychobabble nostalgia. We all need it, we all do it, but it is purely an internal act of making our own stories appear to make more sense than they really do. If we had nine fingers we’d have done all of this last year; eleven and we’d be doing it next year. It really is arbitrary.
So let me get this out the way, say it out loud (figuratively speaking) and then leave it there to never think about again until I’m an old man in a rocking chair asking himself ‘what was all that about then?’. I’d encourage you to do the same.
Those two years of 2013-2014 are easily one of the most important times in my life. It changed everything for me. It changed me. It changed what I believed could be possible. It changed my horizons.
I met so many people, had so many experiences, hoped so, so hard, got swept up in it, felt every bit of it. I’m in love with 2013-14. It is what you hope for once in your life. You hope that you’re in a place where you can do something that matters. I will never forget it.
I watched as rampant egos destroyed a movement that achieved so much when it was largely leaderless and so little when it became about one or two people
Now I want to forget it. The moment passed and we didn’t change anything much. It took a little while for my hope to fade completely but by the end of 2015 I knew we were not going in the direction we needed to go and by Brexit morning and that fateful, premature posturing about a second referendum that wasn’t going to happen, I knew we’d screwed it.
But there was still hope. Right up until the late summer of 2017 I still thought we might just about find a way to do the hard work that we really needed to do. It was only then that I knew for certain that nothing was possible until there was a change of regime in the SNP. Last year I hoped that time had come. It was prevented. It is still being prevented.
All of this means I got my anger in early. I was furious about what I saw being squandered in front of my eyes. That, of course, was a total curse. At first I could persuade almost no-one that this was happening. Gradually people came to see what was happening, but it too late for me. I was designated the ‘mad pariah’ for being right before others were.
I’m angry about that too. I was punished for warning you that we’d arrive exactly where we arrived. So go me! Amn’t I brilliant! No I’m not, because I failed so it counts for absolutely nothing at all. I did absolutely nothing successful to prevent us reaching this place so I have nothing to take from this.
So my anger has faded and what little sense I had that ‘I’m the man to save everyone’ evaporated a long time ago too. As a wise man once said, the graveyards are filled with indispensable people. I watched as rampant egos destroyed a movement that achieved so much when it was largely leaderless and so little when it became about one or two people.
As my hope left and my anger followed it, I was left with frustration. That’s what I feel now, frustration. I feel the feeling someone must have when a great opportunity passes you by and you only realise it afterwards – that relationship you should have never ended, that job you should have applied for, that house you should have bought.
More than that, I feel the feeling you get when you can see the damned destination but you can’t work out for the life of you how to work the one-way system. It’s right there, I can see it, I can see how to reach it, I just can’t see how to get to the place it can be reached from.
Anniversaries are a curse – they give you an excuse to look back and to avoid the job at hand
But… that’s me again, isn’t it? That’s me thinking I’ve got the answer. I don’t have the answer. Parts of the answer yes, a decent sense of what the answer definitely isn’t, yes. But if I have lost faith in messiahs I can’t let myself believe for a second that I am one.
That has been my personal mission for a while, a quiet fight you don’t need to know about where I look for my ego popping out anywhere and I try and bash it with a stick and remind myself how little a part of all this big thing we’re trying to do I am, I will ever be.
What I felt, what I feel, what you felt, what you feel, what anyone felt or feels or will feel is neither here nor there. It will change no voters’ minds, it will do nothing to provide us better answers on currency or borders, it will put no structures in place that will achieve any of this. Our importance is an illusion, a mirage.
I feel lots of other things too – pain, regret, fear, moments of hope, moments of clarity, moments of despair. I think and I think and I think – what can I do with all this stuff? What good is it? What can I build with three square feet of despair and a box of quarter-inch hopes and fears? Nothing useful.
Yet they’re there. The despair kicks in rather too often now and I can’t pretend it isn’t real and nor can I pretend it’s useful. So what to do? Personally I’ve only ever found one helpful answer to that question. I can do something with it only if I can can convert it into something useful. So I do.
Everything I feel I acknowledge (because I read the Guardian and that’s what you’re meant to do), and then I do everything I possibly can to turn it into determination. You see determination I can use. It helps me to get me out of bed, to write this stuff when I’m not feeling it, to keep pushing for solutions I know remain blocked in the immediate future, to keep going.
You’ll have your own feelings and you’ll deal with them differently. Some of you will need to indulge in a bit of nostalgia to motivate yourself. Some of you may need to really inhale your despair for it to kick in enough to motivate you. I’m getting too old to offer you any advice on how to navigate the inside of your own head. You’ll need to do what you’ll need to do.
But dear god please get out of that place as quickly as you can. It’s just self-indulgent and it achieves nothing. We’ve got to get over how we feel and start focussing on what each of us individually can do. No-one ever dug a hole or built a wall by feeling it.
Anniversaries are a curse. They give you an excuse to look back and to avoid the job at hand. So how about we agree on this; when you have done what you need to do and you boil it all down, it’ll amount to ‘decent effort but you failed so you must try harder’. So how about we stop being so bloody Scottish and stop congratulating ourselves on a glorious failure. How about we try harder?