I leave my soul at the door.
It’s not just autistic people pretending to listen to yet another morning rant about how rain makes the road wet and wetness makes roads wet and wet roads cause traffic and wet roads happen because of rain but also sometimes puddles but those are caused by rain as well - no, we all ‘mask’ at some point in our lives.
You might present differently when you’re with your partner’s family.
You might lie and say you’re late to work because of… traffic? when in reality you have ADHD and are biologically wired to be shit at mornings.
You might not be who I talk to at book signings. Those might be loud and scary (they are sometimes).
I have a day job, and only one or two people out of the hundreds I have interacted with know that I am a writer. I think that’s too many.
Fewer still know that I’ve got books published. None of them know that I am technically doing better than most authors, but that’s because ‘better’ is a meaningless metric.
I know authors who are very happy where they are.
I know authors who are being crushed by algorithms.
I know authors whose original ideas are suffocated by the trad pub giants.
And I know authors who have gotten to one of the many existential filters (a topic for a future post) and given up. I gave up once, but then I gave up on giving up because I got sick of seeing a miserable bastard in the mirror.
Ultimately, you have to be a bit odd to think you can build your own small press and publish books by innovators around the world, and make a career out of it.
Luckily, I am a bit odd.
But I still have to mask sometimes.
When I was at university, not many people knew I had a non verbal autistic brother. The reason behind this is perhaps depressing: I tend only to talk about things I find funny, and I don’t have many funny memories of him.
Sorry mum.
Well, I guess I do, but what I find funny, people with other upbringings might find confusing or upsetting. I’ve tried before, a long time ago, and people thought I was making stuff up.
Later in life there was some deliberate omission. I didn’t want people involved in my personal life for reasons too meandering and too dull to mention here, but I can cut it down to this: I wanted to start afresh, as a writer, as a comedian, as a poet, when I started uni. This meant abandoning my old stories as well. But I got to play dress up while I lived on campus, having a different outfit for each module and genre, and that worked well for me. I could even do eyeshadow back then.
I could be anything. Anyone.
Later, when I was asked by a tutor how much I’d written over Christmas, and I said “Oh, about 25,000 words” people were offended that I had that much free time. Someone asked if I didn’t have a family, such was the shock of my productivity. I thought I hadn’t done enough.
Now, years later, those 25,000 words are an abandoned prequel to THE STEPHANIE GLITCH.
So an aversion to mixing personal and work was a strategy that made me much better at my work. Which brings me onto an important point.
Knowing that I had the EARTHLOOP TRILOGY (which has four books) on the way, as well as at least two poetry collections, and then the WHO BUILT THE HUMANS series was getting another installment, I set my sights on a PR firm in 2024 and then got me a nice shiny job so I could afford it.
I have been saving up, and have NOT done the following to do so.
various nights out
about 300 open mic comedy nights
a holiday with a friend
another holiday with another friend
an Edinburgh Fringe gig (these are really expensive)
another Edinburgh Fringe gig
I am glad I didn’t do all of those things (yet), because I’ve managed to do a few other things around my work anyway. Most notably, that time I met Richard Dawkins and thanked him for inspiring some of the central ideas in my expanded universe (some of my earlier books (unpublished) were very much about evolution, and the control religion can assert over entire planets, pervading even interstellar societies).
(I’ve since lost a few pounds, thanks to going part time at my office job).
About that. I am writing this post at 03:41 am because I am sliding back into my old and very comfortable vampire routine. I do most of my writing between midnight and 4am, so going part time means I can finally have the time to polish up WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? before bothering that PR firm again.
But I am also here for escapism. The world is a big, serious place, and I am just a small and silly part of it. I do not like that authors now must have opinions on every single issue on the planet, not least because we already have those opinions, we just don’t wave them around in front of people for the same reason we wear trousers.
I am not a politician, I am a guy who can flip flop between painting an acrylic space pigeon and doing jokes about the end of the universe without hesitation. I can be serious and Earthly when I need to be, but I would rather not.
Also, arguing with strangers on instagram takes up valuable time I could be spending figuring out if Lax Morales has kidneys. I need to know if he has kidneys so I can work out if someone might threaten to steal them.
It is important.
My decision to aim more for escapism than topical stuff means that I don’t do much topical comedy, either. And that’s good because topical comedy has a sell-by date, which I dislike. I saw a Frankie Boyle gig a while back, and whilst I do like much of his work (the early episodes of New World Order being a personal favourite), I found myself having to look at my phone to google who he had just referred to. We don’t all read The Guardian, I don’t know who Osmond Bingbang Squirrelwaffle is, but I appreciate you’ve told me he looks like if a cheesecake molested the other foods in the fridge when the door was closed. That was fun, but I know it would be more fun if I had that first image to connect to the second.
When I am talking comedy, or aliens, I can be myself.
Unfortunately, the engine I use to fund my (at the moment, unprofitable and therefore switched off) book adverts is something which requires an entirely different character, one who I openly dislike.
I call him Phil with one L.
My name is Phillip with two Ls.
This distinction is subtle, but massive.
Phil with one L enjoys sportstalk and he agrees that rain is wet (see, that bit before was foreshadowing for this bit) and he likes it when it isn’t wet because then the road isn’t wet and you can drive and stuff and that means it isn’t wet and wet roads make cars slip and all that.
Phil with one L does not have opinions because opinions are an affront to conformity and Phil with one L only wants to conform. He’s a people pleaser, is Phil with one L. He makes noises during meetings so people remember he is alive, but he’s not entirely sure he is.
Wait, that’s a bit of Phill with two Ls slipping out.
Let’s tuck him back in.
As I was saying, Phil with one L is a good character because I can wear his face whenever someone tries to get too close. He’s a buffer, a backup, a customer service version of Phillip.
He’s the face spray painted on the metal shutters of the starship window.
Phil with one L thinks the customer is always right.
Phill with two L’s doesn’t think the customer is truly sentient.
Back in the pilot’s seat, Phill with two L’s is screaming, pulling levers, that sort of thing. The oxygen mask dangles from the metal panel in the ceiling, and he’s reaching for some ridiculous sunglasses instead, preparing for the supernova.
But he’s not really there. And he’s not really here.
He’s got pattern recognition so potent that sometimes he is accidentally clairvoyant, seeing flashes of exposed brickwork, the sound of sirens, flashing lights. Phil with one L can’t listen to these supposedly extrasensory blips of inspiration and information in the day time, so he plugs himself into the matrix and nods along to the beat. He immerses himself in the weird culture he’s a part of, coming across as uninteresting as possible as a survival strategy.
But the brickwork and the lights and the sirens come true, and Phill with two Ls is annoyed he didn’t listen to himself. But what if you’re in an environment where you must switch off your instincts in order to get by?
Never switch them off.
Listen to them.
People politicise this sort of thing all the time, but if you don’t feel right in a situation, you have to listen to that feeling even if you’re called names for it.
Long story short, I stopped listening to the big Phill with two Ls in the cockpit, and the result is that I went off sick for an entire month last year due to stress. There was a disconnect, a schism between myself and the mask, and somewhere along the way I fell into it.
Now, as if that is itself a qualification, I’ve been talent scouted to tell people at my very normal day job about what mental health means to me. I said yes to this proposition because there’s clearly something wrong with me, and now I sit before you at 03:58 with not very long left until I am to deliver my little thing about stuff, and I’ve realised something.
I am beset at times by a sort of tidal wave of grimness. There are many days where the beach of my mind is clear (I say clear, there are fourteen crystalline sand castles representing future books, and several thousand Lego spaceships lodged in the air, and several planetoids and also my favourite characters are walking around and arguing about free will and time travel) and I can walk and think.
And there are other times, like right now, where the chattering tide is rolling in, and I realise that to survive I have to put the mask on again, over each one of those spikes and characters and buildings, and I look at Phil with one L and his mask that covers it all, and I hate him.
I hate him because he is what I can never be.
I hate him because it is easier than accepting him into myself.
I hate him because he is not really a mask at all.
I hate him because he is scar tissue.
When the water rolls out, I will still be here, under the giant grey mask, like always.
And the mask is not me, and it never will be.
But sometimes I leave my soul at the door.
Sincerely
-Phill with two Ls.
END
Perhaps a touch darker than my usual stuff, but I thought it was fun so I am hitting the send button at 05:24 after staring at this for far too long.
Goodnightmorning.
This was a first draft. Most of my Substack stuff is.
The better stuff goes to print.
If you like the dark, weird, funny, poetic stuff I write here, you might like WHO BUILT THE HUMANS. It’s a mix of existentialist science fiction, dark comedy, and surreal alliterative poetry about sentient slime. Everyone who has read it has loved it.