Trouble

Let’s imagine a person called Trouble. They’re not actually called that; nominally they go by Holly or Freya, Jason or Yaw – but the name, months down the line, after the recovery, turns out to be the most fitting of all.

You match on an app or bump into them at a party and, from the first, it’s obvious this is not your regular person looking for cosiness and calm and paragraphs that make sense – things go differently around here. There’s a lot of energy, delight – and disorder. A taxi to the other side of town? Let’s collect some vintage clothes for the party. A friend coming in from LA? Let’s meet them at 3 a.m. in the jazz bar. The medication? We’ll pick it up from the doctor’s office after the set. The workshop? Breathwork and meditation in the imprisoned billionaire’s basement.

Trouble is very beautiful indeed. From an early age, they charmed anyone who came into the room. It’s like being extremely rich – but even more powerful (they might be that too). It helped to make up for the parents’ neglect (mother was awful, father even worse, of course). From this have come certain habits. Why finish sentences if suitors will always do that for you. Why make sense when you can ask sense to bend to you?

Everyone is turned on; everyone wants to come along.

The normal career strictures don’t apply. Trouble tried out art school, then DJing. They started a business importing a natural sugar supplement from Sri Lanka. Probe too much and they start to cry. So many suppliers have pulled out on them. Now they’re extremely interested in therapy. Not the regular kind (that’s white and misogynistic), a special kind worked out by an Indian thinker in the 70s (have you heard of Akon Shwami? You haven’t? Well, you must…). It’s a combination of yogic practice and Jung’s ideas on the transpersonal; it’s completely revolutionary, you have to try it.

Trouble is interested in astrology: Libra in relation to Aries. Not everything is obvious, not everything can be explained in standard ways. Western reason misses so much. It’s missed Trouble, for sure.

There was a dog, but it died – perhaps of dehydration – in the apartment. They love pets so much.

Trouble was, last week, diagnosed with ADHD. In their eyes, it explains the four schools, the university career that ended after a term – and the three businesses that didn’t quite take off.

Trouble really wants a stable relationship. There was an ex: they were completely ‘mad’; the relationship was ‘toxic’. There was another one who was ‘narcissistic’. But there hasn’t been anyone since J. Apart from the brief thing in Munich, and that person in Denver, and the coke addict in Sydney. That’s why you’re so interesting. They want exactly what you want: stability and order. They’ve had enough of the mess. They want a home, a traditional set-up. Maybe children. They want to live in nature and throw away their phones. They crave wholesomeness and profound commitment. They want goats. They’re so keen on you.

It seems sensible to consecrate this vision of a new life by going to bed. Sex is very special.

Unfortunately, the next day, some more people are coming in from Ghana; and then there’s a party and a shoot. So Trouble can’t meet till next week, or the week after. The texts start off regularly and are effusive: six of them, including two voice memos, on the first day. But on Tuesday, the beloved goes silent – they may be travelling. On Wednesday, they send a little comic meme, which is hard to understand. On Thursday, there’s a call from the airport (they want phone sex, till someone else pings). By Friday, you are disintegrating. You complain but… Frankly, these texts of yours asking when you can next see me are putting me under pressure. You’re controlling. Let’s just play it by ear. You know how much I like you; I don’t need to keep saying it.

By this point, you’ve returned to therapy and are considering a silent retreat. Three best friends have been on almost continuous duty.

The older friend wonders: is this a generational folly? Is it to do with having grown up with phones, living through Covid, never being able to own property, watching the settled political order collapse and the mad take over the asylum? Is it to do with too many options, with ruptured attachment styles, with polluted air and soil? Might this be why they can’t call on time, change their minds, scroll without end, never read books, want love but prefer chaos – and will make the calmest person question themselves?

Trouble and their friends are some of the most delightful souls ever to have walked the earth. We deeply appreciate their virtues; we should, nevertheless, remain careful not to lose our hearts too quickly to these beguiling, restless, neuro-atypical children of hypermodernity.