Dear Agony Aunt,
I am living in a dystopian future, it’s really rather repressed here. Everyone keeps running their words together and I’m really not comfortable with the grammatical implications of this, I find myself using words like “thoughtcrime”, “doublegood” and “hashtag” in everyday conversation. I have a poet’s soul but in this dark and dingy setting I really can’t see any way to express myself. There’s this fit girl who keeps eyeing me up at work, but I can’t tell if she’s into me or if she just has a twitch.
Also, we live under a strange totalitarian regime, it’s all very politically charged and I’m really hoping that at some point soon there’s going to be a revolution and we will all be freed. But I don’t want to find myself caught up in a complex but ultimately fruitless and depressing storyline. I’m not sure anyone will relate to me as a protagonist when I can’t express any of my real feelings.
Please help me to find an outlet for my emotions; I have a lot of them.
Distressed, unknown address, 1984.
Dear Distressed,
I am not going to lie to you: dystopian fiction doesn’t yield a whole tonne of happy endings. The fit girl is in fact eyeing you up, but I have skipped to the end, and unless she’s some kind of crazy hot mix between Megan Fox and Scarlett Johansson (with the unyielding allure of Chris Hemsworth thrown in) then she really isn’t worth the trouble. It’s probably better to divert your attentions to something relaxing – Sudoku, embroidery and knitting are all good options.
The revolution you’re waiting for really isn’t coming, so I should just stick it out and wait for the whole thing to blow over. If you need an outlet for your emotions, start yourself a blog or perhaps take up writing a haiku poem every day, summing up the most difficult emotional ups and downs of the day. Try and make these poems as complex and metaphorical as possible, you know, just in case
someone reads them and then arrests you.
And about the horrific grammatical situation where you are, I’m sorry, it’s like that in the real world too, there’s really not a lot I can do about it. Don’t worry about being relatable, it’s such an iconic novel that people would probably read it if you had the personality of a small vole.
Best wishes for your dark and dreary future,
Agony Aunt