Life Advice to Self
15 March 1990, Thursday, Glasgow
[Blank1.]
What advice would I give my twenty-one year old self?
This is one of those therapeutic writing exercises that I’ve never enjoyed.
Because I know my younger self wouldn’t have listened. And so, even as I write, I am not paying attention to myself.
Young-Toby, your main fault is impatience. You are impatient with almost everything. Spending time, say, walking up a staircase really frustrates you — because you feel you could be doing something productive.
This works in your favour, most of the time. Because you have a sense of urgency in what you do. However, you don’t really allow yourself to see where it works against you. You don’t feel you’re writing overhastily, but often you are. And occasionally, especially with poetry, you write for the sake of writing. It’s better not to do this.
Young-Toby will reply that he expects to be dead by thirty, and so he needs to do whatever he’s going to do now.
Okay, young-Toby — your second main fault is arrogance. This has been trained into you by your education. Private School and Oxford. When it’s positive, it’s confidence; when it’s negative, it’s crappy, selfish thoughts and behaviour. You have a great deal to learn about compassion, and you’ll only learn it slowly, and this — as George Saunders would insist — is one of the ways a writer improves. They expand their capacity for empathy.
Young-Toby will reply that if he has something worth being arrogant about, then it’s not really arrogance.
The main thing I’d say to young-Toby is, Soto Zen Buddhism — that’s the way. Don’t be impatient about discovering it. That’s getting everything bassackwards. But do start zazen, start meditation. It’s your best weapon against impatience and arrogance.
Young-Toby will smile and reference the writers who, he thinks, suffered a drop in writing quality after they adopted ‘Eastern philosophies’ — Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood. They went a bit hippie, and no-one likes to read that stuff.
I give up.
He’s not going to take it in, whatever I say.
P.S.
Speaking of advice, next week — 17th to 21st March 2025 — I’m co-tutoring an Online Writing Week with the brilliant Kirsty Logan (replacing the brilliant AL Kennedy).
If you’re looking for support and guidance, partway through a difficult book, that’s what we’ll be giving.
You can still, I think, sign up here.
I am loving the Young Toby journal.
Maturity is wasted on the old.
I sometimes try to guess what my future self will yell at me about by the time I become him. That arrow of future timeline strains always to arc back onto the past by an interval of N years…the N remaining more or less constant as I age. What changes is the line segment: the age of future me, the advice he wants to give that I both can’t and won’t hear, and the age of me in the present, N years younger and healthier and stupider, maybe not happier. Usually not happier.