Geoff Dyer’s Out Of Sheer Rage is about a young writer trying to settle into a writing project.
You don’t need to be a writer to recognise his agonising indecision:
I had thought about subscribing to Canal Plus as a way of making myself feel more settled but what was the point in subscribing to Canal Plus when, in all probability, I would be moving on.
A few pages later:
If I felt settled I would want to leave, but if I was on the brink of leaving then I could stay, indefinitely, even though staying would fill me with still further anxiety…
Round and round I went, making no progress, resolving one thing one moment and another the next. ‘I can’t bear it any longer,’ I would say to myself in the way that people always say ‘I can’t bear it any longer’ to themselves, as a way, that is, of enabling them to go on bearing the unbearable.
He makes a decision, informs the necessary people, who acknowledge it curtly. Then:
I wrote back changing my definitive decision to leave to a definitive decision to stay but it was too late, I had to leave.