#2: Humanism

I am not the sun. The Copernican revolution may never knock me far enough off centre as to make a difference to this world in which I live, but if there are things more divisive and corrosive than blind religious faith, bigoted humanism is among them. I am an animal, not the animal, and even in this I assert my unhelpful humanistic isolationism. Humanism stands as a place against God, and good for it, for that. It stands, however, as the one place. It is a faith, and it would leave me standing against the world rather than in it: rational, knowing, deluded in what I believe I can be or might control, rather than acknowledging my moments of energy amongst so many millions of others.

#3: Coining

Drop coins, all your loose change, outside buildings housing those you despise. In dropping money I am not littering. In time those who need money will come to collect (the homeless). These buildings will become beacons for the poor. Pick a Trump Hotel. An Esso HQ.  Let them be surrounded by the disenfranchised. Give them something they can’t forget.

#4: Speak

Each text that you get, every email you receive, try first to reply by speaking. People thrive on speech; they suffer in silence. We have a culture of systems and convenience where the wealthy thrive on the industry of our electronic communications. Speech is free and hard to stop. It takes effort to make and comes with emotion you can’t control. It’s volatile. 

#5: Get Angry

If you can’t get angry you are fucked. Either you’ll do it sideways, annoying the hell out of people without being clear that you really don’t like something, or you’ll somatize it, start throwing up on it, get sick on it, fat on it, sleep on it, or whatever else your body thinks is best. If you can’t assert yourself in life you won’t get what you need – that’s obvious. But what most people don’t know is that life’s indescribably better if you’re able to say what you think. Resentment is so corrosive. In some situations you need to assert yourself powerfully, without losing it, going too far or attacking. Know how to harness your anger. 

Tom Tomaszewski is from Polish extraction and grew up in South London: I regularly find writing in the third person intolerable. Some days, everything I think seems conflicted; and all that I feel seems either too little or too much.  I work as a psychotherapist, mainly with addicts at a clinic in the middle of London. I love to write. Today though, only in the first person. I love to write because in writing anything is possible. I would, for example, like to hit the leader of the English Labour party and I would like to entomb the leader of the Conservative party in concrete and roll her into the sea but I accept my desire to hit and entomb are not good things, for me or anybody else. They do, however, sufficiently express some of my outrage. These people need to be addressed in ways other than reasonable speech, and I cannot imagine what that would be other than in writing. My debut novel, The Eleventh Letter is published by Dodo Ink, is a way for me to get real. Follow Tom on Twitter.