Frustration: a vicious cycle.

It’s hard to describe a crippling lack of motivation to anyone who has never felt it themselves, but in my case, it’s something like this:

You understand completely what you need to do, how to go about it and when it needs to be done by. When you actually come to look at it, everything drains out of your head except a faint numb feeling of “no”.

You procrastinate. You re-order your sock drawer. You delete people off Facebook who you haven’t spoken to for years. You play and re-play Temple Run 2 until you beat your high score. You donate money to charity and stare at blazers on ASOS. You paint your nails. You take a long bath with a glass of wine and tell yourself to relax, that you just need to de-stress. You do everything you can physically think of to avoid having to do what actually needs to be done.

You look at it again, load up the document and stare at it for hours. You convince yourself you can magically transfer the words in your head onto your computer without having to actually type anything. You check Twitter. You close Twitter. You disconnect the internet. You check Twitter on your phone. You try again.

You find your mind thinking about all the other things that need to be done, the other projects you’ve been putting off, and the plans you haven’t yet confirmed. You realise you are behind in every sphere of your life. Then you remember how all your friends are going out on Friday, and you didn’t get invited – and that’s okay, because it’s not like you could have gone anyway, you just have so much to do – but you’re bitter, and you spend a good ten minutes planning your micro-aggressions and carefully choreographed responses in case they mention it in passing. Then you realise that's stupid, and bitchy, and you have things to do.

You realise you’ve been feeling this indolent for two months. A week, people can understand. More than that, and they look at you funny. You’re not depressed; you still function properly in all other areas of life. You still laugh and go on dates and watch television. But you just can’t work properly.

The more you think about how much you have to do, the more wound up you get, and the less you actually do – and suddenly it’s one in the morning, and you’re writing a blog post because it seemed easier than trying to find seven hundred words about something you can’t bring yourself to care about. You get frustrated and irritable, and snap over the tiniest transgressions. Then you feel guilty for being angry, and add that to the guilt over not being able to work, and you end up too mired to stress to do anything but brood some more.

You tell yourself to stop being stupid, that this work is important and your future hinges on it, but you find it very hard to think about anything as big and abstract as the future being pinned to anything as mundane as an essay.

You stand up and make a cup of tea. You sit down and drink the tea. You stand up and get a biscuit. You sit down and eat the biscuit. You wander into another room in the house and sit there instead to see if you feel any different, and then feel guilty for wasting ten minutes that could have been spent working.

So you load up your computer again and tell yourself that this time, you will concentrate. For real! No distractions! You can do this, and it won’t be as bad as you think it will, you promise! And you manage to write something – a whole seven lines! You reward yourself by putting on your pyjamas! And then you return to your computer, and realise what you wrote is irrelevant, and you delete it, and you once again have no idea what you’re doing or where you’re going.

And you’re so, so sick of feeling like this, because it’s getting in the way of doing things. You want your motivation back. You want your sense of purpose. You want to do anything that will make you finish this essay. Except, you know, actually write it.

You stare at it for another hour before going to bed. You go about your daily routine the next day looking awful, because you didn’t get enough sleep, and you say you were up late working, when really you were up late worrying about the fact you can’t work. You tell people you're finding it hard, and they just tell you to take a break and try again, and you promise yourself that is exactly what you'll do.

Then you get home and have a nap, and tell yourself you can do your work now you're better rested, and you realise you could really do with a cup of tea…

An accident of genetics.

I am always surprised when someone compliments my face. “You have fine features,” said the French mother of one of my friends. “You have lovely cheekbones,” said a girl in my Politics class, stopping me on the staircase to impart this knowledge. She said it in a rush, like she had to get the words out before they stopped being true. “You’re gorgeous,” said the first person I kissed. I didn’t trust him then, and I don’t trust them now.

Appearance is all an accident. My face is a mess, a random collection of biology and genetics that spawned from the freak meeting of an egg and a sperm. By all accounts, I should not exist. But by some fluke, I do, and how my face looks seems pretty irrelevant to me.

I stare at my reflection in the window of the train. We’re passing through a tunnel. I’m on my way home from the fourth day of my week of work experience, which is generously called an “internship”. It has been four days of writing blog posts and wondering when I’ll be told to do some admin.

I’ve spent the past two hours at a book panel for the company, listening to assorted people talking about LGBT representation in Young Adult literature. America is the spiritual home of YA literature, opined the only man on the panel, and his four co-panellists nodded and laughed. I liked him. He was camp and had a Yorkshire accent. I wanted to be his friend.

One of the panellists was a student at York University, a third year, and writing a dissertation on LGBT issues in business. She was surprised at my age, said she thought I looked older than her, at 21. It's not my face, apparently - more my confidence, the fact I hold up my head like my brain is full of helium - but I can't help but feel ancient. Betrayed by my own aesthetics.

The chairwoman gave me her email address and told me to stay in contact. I’ll email her tomorrow, once I get to the office, sending her a message from the sluggish Macs that need updating. It’ll make me feel like a proper adult contacting her for work reasons rather than a teenager typing away behind her laptop. 

Tomorrow is also important because I will have a date. The first date of my life which is a real, proper date, where I was asked out with the specific caveat that it was a date and I said yes. With my two ex-girlfriends, we never saw each other one-on-one; it was always as part of a group, where it was easier to pretend that our relationships were based on actual feelings rather than a shared interest in webcomics and a habit of texting late at night.

There was one other time I went out with a boy, but I'm not sure it was a date. He was hardly a boy - a foot taller than me, 23, with a job in publishing. We ate Chinese food in Camden and discussed how Tolkein presented evil, and I pretended like I'd read Lord Of The Rings and knew what he was talking about. That was three weeks ago, and I'm still not sure if it was a date. We put one kiss on the end of texts to each other.

We were meant to go bowling, me and this new date of mine (“of mine” – so selfish – like a person is a possession, like I already own a piece of him) but everywhere has already been booked. I imagine we’ll wonder round London instead, trying to make small talk that means something big. I will want to hold his hand, feel something warm and solid against my frozen fingers. If we don’t get dinner I’ll scream.

I’ve somehow fallen into the habit of not eating lunch this week, instead just snacking on biscuits and endless cups of tea throughout the day. It’s too cold to leave the office in search of food, and I have to walk half a mile every morning from the train station up a gentle incline anyway. Today the wind was blowing in my face, forcibly thrusting the scent of North London’s rubbish into my nostrils. I couldn’t breathe.

I’ve lost three pounds since Friday. It’s like I left them under my pillow – I haven’t noticed their absence.

If I mentioned my weight to my friends, I can imagine them complimenting me. “You’ve lost weight!” they’d say (when they mean "mass"), approvingly, followed by, “You look good!” as if those things were logically sequential. As if by losing a tiny part of me, I’ve somehow improved. Really we ought to applaud each other when we gain weight, knowing that there’s more of them to hold onto. Is a 143-pound girl realer than a 140-pound one? There’s certainly more of her, more atoms banding together in the shape of a person. Does quantity equate to reality?

My iPod has stopped playing, but my earphones are still in. To everyone around me, I am in my own little world. I could be listening to anything, Bach or Beyonce or Bright Eyes. Like Life by Lorrie Moore sits open on my lap, but I have stopped reading because there’s a quote I want to put on my Facebook page when I get home, about how guns are boys’ things because they boom, the way boys wished they boomed when they orgasm. Maybe I’ll tell that to my date tomorrow. Maybe he’ll laugh. More likely he’ll look at me quizzically, wondering why he asked me out. He studied biochemistry at university, where an unexpected result probably means you did something wrong.

The train leaves the tunnel. My face remains in the window, pale and drawn. My hair is bleached blond, murky at the roots where my natural brown is growing back through. Perhaps I should let it grow out, get long, fall to my knees in princess waves I can use to wrap myself up. Perhaps I’ll shave my head down to a soft dark fuzz, getting rid of all the dye and artifice.

The face looking back is still mine, but I’m seized by the notion that one day it won’t be. One day I’ll be on the train home from a job I hold as an adult, commuting to and from some shabby flat I can barely afford to rent, and my face will have been taken from me, worn smooth and featureless by a few years of mediocre labour at a mediocre job.

We arrive at my station, and I stand up. Nobody seems surprised when I drop my phone, and have stoop to pick it up. They’re too busy thinking of their own faces, their own emails and waistlines and dates.

On Monday I’ll be back at school, I tell myself. I will be back in a bubble where I can talk about dating and jobs as abstract concepts rather real things which really happen. Being a grown-up can wait. My face has some youth left in it yet.