The Missing Years

I suspect your experience with what I’m about to describe will probably vary quite a bit according to your own age — but speaking as a forty-one year old man, I have to say, I find it mildly disconcerting that a number of years just sort of seem to have gone missing.

I don’t mean that I’ve forgotten them or anything, or that I’m suffering some sort of debilitating brain injury (not to my knowledge, anyway, ayooo, etc.) but rather that there’s a definite period of my life that feels like it just sort of passed by in a flurry without really very much to show for it.

Said period covers pretty much from the end of my time at university up until right now, which is a good twenty years or so. That’s a not-insignificant amount of time to feel like you’ve just sort of “lost”, which is why it occasionally weighs on my mind like this. Are there better ways I could have spent that last twenty years? Almost certainly, but at the same time that twenty years taught me a lot of helpful life lessons that have enabled me to just about survive to where I am now.

I think therein lies the core of why I feel like many of those years sort of “went missing” — the fact that I’m unconvinced of their value to my life as a whole.

Out of those twenty years, I spent several attempting to make a career out of teaching, before a nervous breakdown convinced me that probably wasn’t a great idea.

Then I did some retail work with a mind to building up both my creative and technical skills in the computing field, which was going great until the management of the job I was working — and loving, up until that point, I should say — decided to ruin the lives and careers of several of us for no apparent reason.

Then terrible things happened in my personal life that I’m keen to forget and mostly have at this point. That took a good year or so, probably a little more, but as I was coming out of that I started developing what looked like a promising career in online games journalism. That eventually came to fruition… until the publication I was working on (and getting paid well for) closed down relatively without warning, leaving me adrift once again.

After that, I spent some time writing about mobile and social games, which was utterly soul-destroying but paid astronomically well for the amount of effort it took, so I wasn’t going to complain too much about that. Then came USgamer, which was great until I was, once again, fucked over without any control of the situation. A brief stint working a “normal” job for energy company SSE, who — again — completely boned me to such a degree it had a severe impact on my mental health and, after a bit of a tense period… well, here we are.

So I guess that accounts for the last twenty years or so, just about. It’s just strange how a lot of those years have just sort of all merged into one another; I can’t remember a lot of specific details about many of them, at least partly because I probably don’t want to. That would make sense.

It’s just a little odd that I can still vividly remember, say, something like my mother happening to see me at playtime on the primary school field (aged about 7, probably) thinking that I was hitting a girl in my class with a stick when we were actually playing make-believe and having a thoroughly lovely time, and yet what should theoretically be more “important”, defining periods in my life are becoming almost “lost” to me.

I guess you hold on to the memories that are actually important to you for one reason or another. And what your subconscious thinks is “important” doesn’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense. Maybe it’s not worth trying to understand it; just enjoy those memories that your mind has decided to hang on to!