The Vile Voyeur

What’s worse than Neuroticism? Nothing.

diary exam term neuroticism revision revision notes vanity

‘Oh come on, we’re at Cambridge.. We’re all a bit neurotic!’ clichèd the charming girl in the Ugg boots and Jack Wills gilet, tossing her not-quite-breast-length hair. I regarded her with unconcealed disgust. Of course she’s not neurotic! She eats mackerel for breakfast and paints her nails ‘greyge’ because she read about it in Elle. That’s not neurotic. But then, I sighed, nor was I, really. In fact, none of us are neurotic. We just wish we were because otherwise we’d have to be normal – i.e. chewing our nails un-neurotically in neutral nothingingness. If nails are to be chewed, creating a D.I.Y. version of Chanel’s ‘greyge’, then it should at least be out of excessive paranoia, guilt, or self-inflicted Crohn’s disease. Never boredom.

There are lots of ways that you could actually be neurotic. They can all be worked upon, practiced, analysed, until you become worthy of the epithet. Neurotic vanity is one. The type that might infiltrate your every waking movement, so that when you going for a run you wear American Apparel gold spandex and red running spikes complete with Ferrari logos, but have to abort when you realise it looks like you have applied your fake tan with a fork. The type of vanity which prompts you to put a flower in your hair because it matches with your eyes (yellow), but then throw it away because you might look like a gimp. Such incidents increase in exam term, when vanity is the only thing left to lull your tutored brain into an illusion of your being culturally acceptable. Because, everyone knows: beauty simply doesn’t mix with brains.

Another way in which you can apply neuroticism to your everyday life is in obsessive documentation. If you write too many revision notes, you are wasting your time. You have the opportunity of doing the same with your life, just by following a few simple steps. Diary writing can be extended to copying down each text and email you ever receive, maybe creating a spreadsheet of the way you spend your day, separated into 15 minute units. Some people even take photos on every night out, making sure that the frozen proof permeates Facebook within the following 24 hours. Their meticulous documentation holds the annals of Cambridge life, and future anthropologists will thank them for their unprecedented keenness.

A friend of mine used to document her every action by dictaphone. Everything. It acted as a type of time efficient diary. But then, would she listen over the last few days on the dictaphone, checking, noting, gaining perspective? If so, would she then have to use another dictaphone to record her day’s activity of listening to the first dictaphone? Would she later be confronted with the problem of a shortage of days on which to catch up on the previously recorded days, whilst also having to ‘do’ something so as to have material to listen back on? It would be strange to die whilst listening back on your life. You might die at the exact moment that you were boiling a kettle 30 years ago. Never watch the kettle boil.

Once again, I collapse into morbidity. Where is the girl with the Jack Wills gilet? Come back, Camilla! I need your jaunty smile and hopelessly short-circuited outlook on life! But she has gone, and is unlikely to come back, seeing as I have earlier dedicated several sentences to her unethically insipid habits.

An online resource states that ‘individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than the average to experience such feelings as anxiety, anger, guilt, and depressed mood’. ‘Score high on neuroticism’? Sounds more narcotic than neurotic. In the same way that LSD didn’t actually inspire The Beatles to write ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, neuroticism can similarly inspire a type of inverse creativity. That’s why tortured artists and those who pose as English students often try to suggest that they issue an involuntary ‘edginess’, synonymous with neuroticism. Dictaphone-girl once turned up at my door late on a stormy night, wearing ski gear and a paper party hat (with a feather), baying for money and asking my opinion on the perspex shoes she had bought that day (‘But I must never wear them. They’ve got flowers on the soles’). I humoured this as a perfect expression of creativity in neurotic statements, and offered her a biscuit.

The same online article (okay; its Wikipedia) also claims that neurotics ‘may have trouble controlling urges and delaying gratification’. This strikes me as inconsistent with their supposedly retiring and abortive mentalities. To return to my initial nail-biting theory, this statement seemed be related to how someone once informed me that when you see a girl with chipped nails, you know she’s definitely a ‘goer’. So: neurotics are ‘puritan goers’? This contradiction in terms epitomises the enigmatic undefinability which adds to the charm of the perfected neurotic.

Carl Jung wrote that ‘Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.’ Therefore, there’s hope for all of us to have neurotic tendencies, perhaps resulting in exam success and enhanced levels of innate sexual attractiveness.

Never bask in nothingness. Neuroticism is the original eroticism.