I was caught up with the self-image. I was in fact completely and utterly entangled with it, completely and utterly enmeshed with it. This mightn’t have been such a bad thing if it had been half-way decent but it wasn’t. Not by a long chalk. It was as crappy as hell. It is terribly crappy, freakishly crappy. I am actually amazed that a self-image could be as bad as this, as sketchy as this. There’s nothing to it. It’s actually embarrassing – it’s worse than embarrassing, it’s humiliating. I am mortified by the damn thing.

How to explain this? How to get it across? Suppose you were throwing a dinner party (if you were the sort of person to do that, which I am not as it happens) and all you had to offer your guests were two cans of Heinz macaroni cheese followed by a packet of stale tea biscuits for afters. And your guests were used to the finest fare, the most exquisite cuisine. Michelin star stuff. What I’m talking about is something like that – that’s how embarrassing it is. Or suppose you’re putting on an art exhibition in some kind of a highbrow place and all you’ve got in your exhibition is a few pages torn out of an exercise book with crude stick men drawn on it. Stuck up with big lumps of blu-tack onto the wall. Or maybe that doesn’t work as an example because you might actually be able to carry that off as art. You know what the art world is like.

Anyway, you get what I mean. But not only is there this brutal godawful hideous impoverishment going on with the self-image that I’m caught up with, there’s also this complete, total weirdness associated with it, this type of outright wrongness that keeps coming across. It’s just not right, no matter which way you look at it. It’s like a bum note that you can hear a mile away. It’s a ringer, a phoney. You can see right away that it just shouldn’t be there, that it just doesn’t belong…

So can you imagine how hard this is, trying to get on in the world on the basis if this appallingly deficient self-image? Can you imagine what a dreadful grinding ordeal this must be? Maybe you can’t. Maybe you just don’t get it. Maybe you’re just sitting there with this blank expression on your face, as if to say, “What the hell is this guy talking about?” I don’t know. Maybe you can’t be bothered to try to imagine what I’m talking about. Maybe you’ve got better things to do! As I say, I just don’t know. I suppose I just want someone to have some sort of an idea of what I am going through. But maybe that’s too much to ask…

You see, what I have to do every day is bluff it. I have to make out that I’m not this freakily weird and embarrassing self-image at all because if anyone susses it they’ll judge me. I’ll be a pariah, an outcast. This is really hard though because I don’t really know what I’m pretending to be. I know what I’m pretending not to be, but I frankly don’t have the slightest clue as to what I am pretending to be. I’m just faking it, I’m just chancing my arm. I’m taking shots in the dark, hoping against hope that no one will spot what I’m doing. Hoping that no one will catch me out.

If you are still following my story then you might be wondering how in God’s name I have managed to get myself in this mess in the first place. How did I ever get caught up with this appallingly deficient self-image? How did I manage to get so entangled in it, so enmeshed in it? How did this happen? How the hell could I end up with a self-image as freakishly weird and abnormally screwed-up as this?

That’s just the thing though – I don’t have the slightest clue…