Living in Bits

We all lead such busy and hectic lives that it’s easy for them to escape our own scrutiny, to forget to reflect. Life’s what you make it, we’re firmly told, often by bronzed influencers sat against artificial Dubai backgrounds. I do largely agree with this sentiment; that this one life of ours, this embryo that might only see one lifespan, can be largely morphed and sculpted into whatever manifestation we so wish. You could choose to move from Hull to Highgate, abandon your highly-skilled job as a Firefighter for an equally skilled role in the Cirque du Soleil (both deal with large quantities of fire). Decide you’re a runner. Make your personality exclusively and unconditionally about trying different mustard types (not that I’m writing from experience here, of course). And why not do it? We even have the free will to do so. What many of these Molly-Mae devotees fail to remember, or perhaps misunderstand, is that such a lifestyle requires a strong, foundational level of wealth and privilege to be able to enact such decisions. Moreover, this very ideology itself is rooted in class; to think that this is ‘for you’, that you are indeed capable and worthy of living in such a self-determined way. To live… the good life?

For the Westerners who largely enjoy such privilege, we are told there are an endless number of things we may wish to do with it. Life’s what you make it, remember? And so we reach the clichéd and endlessly pressurising question of how exactly to live. It’s a question that arrives almost as soon as its accompanying decision, the decision that you, we, make perhaps in haste, or with firm conviction. Choose to be the traveller, the spirit that flits between continents as most flit between home and work. To follow the well-trodden path to London, its sultry call audible from most northern towns; buckle-in to a job that promises a career, a life held steady by routine. Or commit your life to that of another, to a small bundle who cries and coos, whose life for such a time becomes yours, and vice versa. The past year is one I’ve described as largely ‘bitty’. It’s not the most eloquent word you’ll find in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it’s the one that feels most appropriate. What is it then, to live ‘in bits’?

The past year has been one of extremes (for context, I still find using the school year of September-September a greatly comforting metric). For me, the end of last year constituted of three months in Berlin during the Autumn, enveloped in a hedonistic haze of perpetual nightlife, queerness and dissidence. In true post-Brexit promise, my visa-free days melted away slowly, then all at once. I unwillingly swapped the city for the country, as I made my return home, to Yorkshire; nightclubs were quickly replaced with nightcaps - soothing cups of tea, dissidence now meant not picking up dog poo, instead of attending a gender non-conforming anti-gentrification rally in Friedrichshain. Oregano, not orgies, you get the picture.

Then came three months in the swelter of the Middle East, and a life that almost embodied the chaos of the region. These were days dedicated to Arabic, consumed by obscure case endings or endless grammatical deliberations - was it spelt with alif hamza, or just regular alif? (I still don’t know). The intensity of this time was not limited to the Arabic course I was doing but was also found in the scale of social interaction and activity; an endless stream of new and exciting faces, conversations that were either rigidly the same or refreshingly surprising and inspiring. A time of new experiences that felt seminal in their own way; travelling to Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, navigating the geopolitics that plague land borders and entering countries only newly breathing since war.

To coming back now, once more, to the sleepy haze of Yorkshire, with its secure borders and stable supply of Yorkshire tea, where the biggest risk might be walking to a Morrisons local that’s already closed. And while joy can still be cultivated, must be cultivated in such circumstances - in strikingly beautiful dog walks in July evenings that dwindle, in the Holmfirth Duck Race (a real thing!) - it is nearby impossible to find the person you were the last time you were here. It is the exposure to other, outside things that has rendered it a metamorphosis irreversible, a process complete. And, suddenly, problems arise out of things that never once revealed themselves as issues, doubts occur in values and opinions you always thought ironclad. They still are, right? And the new world that you’ve been busy building, have chosen to now live in, seems scarily fragile, like it could slip into the old one you find yourself temporarily inhabiting, at any moment. For living in such a bitty way is not always a choice, it is in fact often an economic, social and temporal necessity; with the best will, most of us could not maintain rent on a city property and rent a second one for several months in the Middle East. Or sometimes we must wait, wait for the confirmation of a job rejection, the offer of enrolment. For a golden visa.

And for many of those who wish to travel, sometimes in perpetuity, bitty living becomes a normal part of life. While people of course can make ‘friends for life’ or meet their ‘soulmate’ whilst travelling, more common is the act of making friends for the stay, those with whom you share a special experience of a particular place. It might be the motorbike trail you followed together in Chang Mai, that you both had your first threesome in Rome (respectively, of course!). While such interactions are indeed bitty, fleeting even, I’ve often looked upon them with a special fondness; that you both happened to be in that exact same place at that exact same time, and that that particular experience of said place can never be replicated in the same way. There seems to be something romantic in it, whimsical even, that such interactions do not have to possess longevity for them to be important, meaningful even. I still think this to be true. Yet there is surely another side, the trade-off that comes with living in such fragmented and inconsistent ways, which in the absence of longevity arrives loneliness. For if we value community of all things, we need longevity to create and sustain it.

Ultimately living in bits is just another way to live. You could even go as far to say that there are different variations of this - someone who moves around often but at a slower and more gradual pace might be classed as living in chunks. Or perhaps that’s splitting hairs a little. At its best, it’s a way of life that surrenders to risk, ambition, adventure and, ultimately, a freedom which seems to be largely unrivalled. At its worst it can be precarious, scary, daunting and perhaps, extremely lonely, too. Bitty living isn’t just in the mind, it’s in acclimatising to different mattress shapes and sizes, realising the books you want to read are in storage elsewhere. It’s in the clothes you can no longer find, or the ones you do that you forgot you owned. It’s forgetting your toothbrush. It’s in almost always carrying a bag somewhere. Whether its a manifesto for a new and irreverent way to live, whether it lasts as long as youth does, or even just a transient Summer; how to approach bitty living, with all its highs and lows, its revelations and repercussions? Bit by bit, I suppose.