Brussels diary
Caught in a trap
‘Any idiot can face a crisis, it’s day to day living which wears you out.’ - Either Anton Chekov or Bing Crosby
In 2021, I took for the first time the EU simultaneous interpreting test, working from my passive languages French and German into my native English. I failed and it wasn't close. In 2024, after years of work and moving to Brussels to take up a job as an interpreter, I took the test and failed again. I now have one go left at the tests; I am 43 and living in Brussels on a work visa.
The pressure begins to feel unbearable.
I take a day off on a Wednesday in February and realise there is no longer anything in my life that would make me feel happy. There is nothing that I want. Nothing that feels possible, nothing that feels under my control. I want to make a success of this interpreting business, which I have come to late, but the way forward feels so narrow now. I’d like to have success with my writing – my novel is with an agent, a state of affairs which only years earlier would have truly gladdened my heart. But right now it feels like nothing could ever make me happy. I am upset and sometimes cry, but not from being unhappy but at the fact that I am so unhappy. There is a distinction there.
I have so much going for me, as I am regularly reminded. I come from a loving family and have never doubted they love me for one single minute of my life. I run, regularly, and am in good health. I have an amazing partner who adores me and I her. I am financially solvent and debt free, and have no addictions more harmful than writing.
Yet somehow I don’t feel any of it; my delight in life is like a car engine that refuses to start. It just doesn’t take. Perhaps in my youth I played up sadness or wallowed in it, but this isn’t that, this is something claiming me. I resolve to make the best of things, and yet almost every Thursday I am tired and my nerves tingle with pain. Is this just the reality of having a job?
It’s safe to say I don’t like Brussels all that much. Does anyone? It’s grey and the streets are covered in dogshit. Belgian jokes about lacking a government are funnier from a distance; on the ground, it means sclerosis, apathy and the defeat of ambitious people. There are things I do like; the wonderful cinemas, Le Coq and Merlo, the superb adult education centre where I learn Dutch twice a week at a bargain price.
Yet somehow the city keeps killing my optimism, and I note the irony of being desperate to make a career in a city I don’t like all that much. So the obvious choice is to leave – go elsewhere where I’m inevitably happier within hours of arrival. In the past years I’ve visited Rotterdam, Manchester, Saxony and Galicia, and I’d rather live in any one of them than where I do now.
But then there is a little word called Brexit, and the fact that my presence in the city is inching me towards Permanent Residency and a right to reside in Europe once again. If I got a job elsewhere, even in Europe’s bigger and funner places, my EU residency visa clock would be reset to zero. Nor does the New World have much appeal. I can always go back to the UK, or rather London, but I’ve just done ten years there hammering away and got nowhere – not well-paid work, nor my scripts produced, nor my novels published. Nothing but nos.
So I decide again and again, weekly even, pep talk by pep talk, that my best option is to continue where I am, but then I am squarely back to the problem of my unexpected quotidian unhappiness. Months of my life pass by going round the contradictions above, a problem without a solution, which doesn’t seem to stop my mind trying to.
I listen to music and make playlists. Again and again, I find new music I love, more than ever even, and make playlists for my partner and my friends. But what is the music that appeals to me now? I like classic Italian pop, Cate LeBon, film soundtracks, The Cure, ‘I love the sound of breaking glass.’ This song by Low gets what I’m feeling; momentum without hope. That being happy and proudly keeping on are two different things.
