Waiter!

 A couple of weeks ago I received news, in short order, that I had finally obtained two things I had been waiting for for three years or so: an allotment of land I can tend; and official confirmation that I have ADHD. To get an allotment and an ADHD diagnosis, you have to put yourself on a waiting list and then bide your time, while various people ahead of you die. It's not really a joke! When I spoke to the doctor in charge of assessing me I said that I felt I had been waiting an eternity, and she told me that in some wards in the UK, the wait can take up to seven years. I said: "Oh man - we must be losing some of those people, along the way." She looked up: "Are you asking if they're killing themselves?" "Yes." "Yes." 

Getting both things in such a short space of time felt strangely serendipitous: here, after months of waiting - when waiting is officially one of the things I am least good at! - was a diagnosis that my mind was justified in being so fucked, along with a big green space in which to alleviate some of my befuckedness. The two things felt so similar. My allotment was a tumbledown, ramshackle thing: when I got it the grass was overgrown everywhere; the shed was falling to pieces and had been desperately salvaged with nails and string; in the middle of the plot stood a knobbly fig tree and a spindly plum with masses of fruit rotting on the branch. Brambles, string, stones, slugs, bits of tape and wood and miscellaneous junk were here and there, and the ground was rock hard. I had hopefully bought a trowel and a pair of gloves, some plants, some seeds, and brought along two small, cheerful helpers with me, with their own pairs of gloves picked out, who walked around snapping secateurs and peering at snails in buckets of brackish rainwater. We stared at this space and wondered where to begin. "I was thinking it would be more... earthy," my 10-year-old observed, stabbing thoughtfully at some weeds with a broken garden fork we had found. I had also thought that we would be given a gleaming new stretch of soil, in which to politely rake over some cucumbers and whatnot; but this whole place needed to be burnt to the ground and built up again from scratch. And yet, here it was: ours, and beautiful in its own wild way. There was so much work to do: we set about pulling up great fistfuls of weeds, revealing stark patches of earth here and there. I chopped away at the trees. We were trying to create space! Space in which to do something. We were scrabbling away at something that was really nothing yet; at the idea it contained, of potential. 

And so it was (not to be too corny) with the revelation of my ADHD. I had been expecting to get it, in much the same way I had been expecting to own a garden - with some degree of certainty, but no great hope that it would happen any time soon; and here it suddenly was, I was standing inside it, and it wasn't fully what I expected; rather than an empty space, it was cluttered and wild, and there was more fucking work to be done. Here too I would have to cut things back, scrap away at the aggregated shit and crap, make a bonfire of all the nonsense that had built up over time, and finally get around, perhaps after a great long time spent preparing the badly nurtured soil, to planting.

After getting both things, I found that I would need to do more waiting: wait, over the course of the changing seasons, to be able to plant things; wait seven months or more for access to the drugs that would soothe my constantly racing, restless mind. I would have to be patient, and learn new coping mechanisms, new skills; I would have to make do with what I had been given. 

The doctor asked me how I felt about the diagnosis: my answer was that I felt  numb, as when I had received the results of my baccalaureate, which were good. I had been expected, then, to be joyous; perhaps to jump in the air like a teenager on the cover of a national newspaper - but what I felt was not that, it was a hollow anticlimax, relief combined with disappointment and a more remote gladness. The fact that it was over, that was it - it had come to an end; and now what? With the ADHD diagnosis, on top of feeling all this, I had something else flooding me, which would only grow over the following weeks - a feeling of consummate embarrassment; a crushing sense of fraudulence and stupidity, that I might be seen to be claiming a new identity in some triumphant way; a gauze-thin feeling that I now had this flimsy affirmation to hold on to, not even a piece of paper but instead a doctor flatly confirming the bleeding obvious to me, over Zoom, in some dreary locution that made the whole moment seem even more banal. I felt - and this I had not expected - more burdened than before, by the fact of now having this disorder to deal with, in ways that felt more heavy and exhausting. And a further feeling - that, of course, as a writer and as someone who tends to lay things bare, I would obviously have to write about it, and live it publicly. In short, that I would need to out myself all over again. I had already not at all enjoyed coming out as homosexual, in the years when I did that - another thing that was supposed to provide relief and contentment, but which only procured me pain, in having to use ugly words, in needing to define myself and shrink the entirety of what I am; in voicing the otherness to people who didn't themselves have the thing in order to claim an acceptance of sorts. 

But some of the waiting was now over. I can't begin to describe the waiting - and the long, long wait that my whole life now seems to be. For the last five or six years, I've partly earned my living as a writer: and what they don't tell you is how practised in the art of waiting you must become, how you need to learn to sit with delays and promises and postponements and deferrals, making constant accommodations with time. I pitch an article or write a book, and I wait; an email arrives, accepting or rejecting the pitch, and more work begins, of creating or amending, or of thinking up more ideas; and then more waiting; and then waiting for money; and waiting for publication; and then waiting for money, again, while people ask you what's happening in your life. Well... at the moment, right now, I have written two articles and three picturebooks, and of those, one may appear this week, another next month, another next year or the year after, another fuck knows when, and another possibly never. 

So I wait - what more can I do, but wait? Fill the waiting hours, the days and nights of sameness, with more bustle, more merry-go-round of cosmetic activity to fill the time, while I hope and wait, while I crave some results, a conclusion, anything! Not to bring everything back to MY ADHD DIAGNOSIS, DID I MENTION???!, but one of the big things about the condition is that I am not at all good at waiting. I find it hard to wait until the end of somebody's sentence to start saying one of my own. I do dozens of things at the same time, badly, so that I won't have to prioritise any. And so my favourite thing, as a writer, is to bash out an article in response to a piece of news and have it go online that same day, and watch reactions roll in. The bliss, the bliss! And then (if the article was for the Guardian) getting paid three days later without filling in a form? My sweet lord, it simply does not get any better than that. But this is an outlier - the rest of the time, writers have to plan ahead, bide their time, and keep abreast of an ever-changing slate of ideas and projects with vastly different or non-existent timelines, until such time as we are beckoned by the bony finger of ever-loving Father Death. 

The only part of being a writer that I enjoy, and which I am half-way good at, is writing. And that - to me at least - is the smallest, most negligible part of being a writer.

To make my writing viable, and ward off getting fingered way too soon by greedy Daddy D, I have taken on work as - someone bring out the irony tuba and play five deep notes! - a waiter. Being a waiter, to me, provides solace because of the immediacy of the job. I arrive at work at 12; sometimes customers are already there, and I take their order right off the bat, writing furiously on my pad; I bring them water and wine, bread and olives. I enter their food order into the system, and immediately hear a ping in the kitchen, where the order is printed onto a ticket; immediately Hamza and the rest of the lads get a steak or artichoke heart out of the fridge, call out the order to the attendant staff. Soon the dishes are ready, and they ring a bell for me; I dash over and get the food at the pass; and the food is real, I can smell it, and the plates are pleasingly hefty in my hands, a lid rattling in its socket as I ferry out a cauldron of mussels. This is real, and it's happening now, and when I bring the food to the customers they are immediately delighted, and they exclaim "ooh" and "lovely" and "thank you" and "my goodness, I can't manage all that!" when I deposit the food, and then they eat and enjoy the food  I have brought to them, and they pay for the food straight away, leaving boozily cheerful comments. They depart, and we bid them farewell. Now I gather up their glasses, the bill and its silver tray, a dessert spoon and espresso cup, spritz the table and give it a slow wipe-down,  enjoying the stretch and a moment to empty my head, before laying napkins and cutlery for the next lot. At the end of the day I receive my tips, actual coins would you believe it, straight in my pocket! The last customers leave and I close the windows, reel in the awning; we turn off the music and lights.

The restaurant is a reminder of what I need and cherish in life - connection, immediacy, and a sense of my work, whatever that may be, having some sort of result that I am able to discern; a feeling that I have a part to play in the world, in some way - that I have been noticed, and have helped out; have been appreciated. 

Then it's back to the writing, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting: today I have some time to myself, and have elected to write, for pleasure; I'll put this piece up on my blog right now, to feed a quick pleasing burst of hormones to, I don't know, my synapses or whatever?, and then go out into the day, head buzzing as usual, and then it'll be back to the waiting, and waiting, and waiting. My garden is waiting for me now though, its beds watered, the trees pruned back; it lies there in pregnant expectation, turning itself over, growing in patches here and there, the fruit ripening at its leisure, leaves falling as they must. The garden is for now and for the future - a future dependent on nothing but rain and heat and the care I will bring, and I think that, for now, I can manage the expectation.