On fear, Panic Attacks and Overcoming Them.
Being vulnerable is important as an artist and storyteller. Being able to speak "from the heart" and express yourself honestly, like an open book, gives the things you write and create a heart and a soul and brings people into them in a way you can't otherwise. All the great creators say that. And I know it, intellectually, logically and from that place in my gut that tells me whether or not I'm doing the right thing or not.
But I can't, for the life of me, actually apply this.
I'm terrified. Absolutely, completely terrified by this idea of putting a part of yourself, expressing vulnerability, on the page or in the picture. And it's affecting my life. Because it's not just in my creative work that this is a problem anymore. I'm afraid of opening up to people.
I had the worst panic attack I've ever experienced a few days ago, which ended in me crouched over the toilet attempting to calm the feeling of nausea. All because I couldn't open up to my boyfriend about why I was afraid of talking to him about why I wanted to wait for a while before I moved straight back in with him.
Even right now, writing this I can feel the fear creeping up like a vine, saying "Don't post this. This is over emotional BS. No one wants to read about your issues." But it hurts NOT to write it.
I want to pour everything I have into something I create. I want to have people read something I write and cry from heartache because they love the characters so much. I want to create something that gives people the same feeling I do when I watch a show that hits me like a tonne of bricks, a story that makes me sit up and think "I can do anything", something that touches people at their very core.
So I'm figuring this out. Bit by bit. I've been hiding in a corner for a long time, fighting harder and harder for the right to stay there. But the walls of the corner are coming down, bit by bit. I won't have anywhere to hide soon. And instead of looking for the next hiding place I'll need to turn around and face the things that are scary.
Whatever those things are.
Knock, Knock
This blog is two years old today. Happy Birthday Blog!
To celebrate the "terrible-two" birthday, out of curiosity, I'm asking you - that's you - to tell me something about yourself. It could be anything at all, as long as it's about you!
I'll go first...
I have a strange fascination for turning cardboard toilet rolls into little people. I might even make a puppet show out of them one day.
Your turn!
Common Sense
Common sense is a myth.
Everyone I've ever met has some sort of sense. None of that sense is very common with another persons sort of sense. One persons common sense is another persons act of stupidity.
I've heard these three sentences in the past few months:
"I only ever use first class stamps. The letter arrives quicker! It's common sense!"
"Unless it's for something important, using second class stamps is common sense. It's cheaper!"
"It's not common sense to send mail when you can just send an email. It arrives instantly and it doesn't cost a thing!"
So what's the deal with telling other people they don't have common sense?
I suck… BUT that’s about to change!
Acceptance isn't the end. It's part of the process.
I used to think "I want to accept myself as I am." Then I realised I wasn't changing. Why? I thought, Why wasn't I changing? Was accepting myself really that bad? I even half wrote a blog post about it (without publishing, thankfully), a shit whiny thing about the war between self acceptance and self improvement.
Half way through writing the post, I went off to think about it and read a bunch of blogs in the process. One of which was Mars Dorians post "The Bitter Truth You Have to Embrace (IF You Want to be Remarkable)". I love reading Mars because he always gives a fresh perspective on things, and usually a huge kick up the arse, too. This time I read it and it hit something in what I was writing about. Acceptance, I figured, was idiotic! If you accept yourself, you'll never change, and so the idea then is to not accept yourself and be happy with yourself because you're improving yourself. Acceptance is bull shit! I raved about how accepting yourself was an idiotic thing to do. Accepting things was a cop out! I said.
Deluded?
But you know what? This still felt wrong. It felt like I was missing something, like half of the equation wasn't there.
Eventually I realised that, you know what? I've been looking at it wrong. Acceptance wasn't the be all and end all, it was a stepping stone in a three-part process. Unless you accept something as the way it is, you can't change it. I'd always heard that, but something hadn't fit with me because I hadn't been looking at acceptance in the right way.
Here's what happens when something goes on in your life. Let's use a bull as an example;
A bull is in front of you and it's storming towards you extremely fast!
The first thing you do is have some sort of instant feeling: Fear, for example.
Then comes acceptance. We accept that, oh shit, there's a fucking bull storming towards me.
That's when most people stop. Most people at this point stick around in "oh shit, there's a fucking bull storming towards me" and get hit by the bull. They accept that there's a bull there and we accept that we're wetting our pants but they don't do the next, life saving step:
Decide to do something about it! For example: Get out of the way of the bull! Or grab the thing, or you know, do something that means you won't be in the way of the bull any more.
But you can't do something about the bull until you accept that the bull is there. Maybe you think "Oh, there's no bull, it's just my imagination," and pretend it's not there to make yourself feel all warm and cosy. (This was my favourite tactic. 'What problem? There's no problem.') Maybe you think you can't do anything about it. "Well, there's a bull coming. Guess I'm about to get hit by it.") ACCEPT it. There's a bull coming. Now you know that you can do something. You're overweight? ACCEPT it. Now you've accepted that instead of pretending you're perfect and there's nothing wrong with you, you can change it. Or you can get all whiny about it like I used to. Your choice.
Using the past to build the future
Happy New Year, everybody!
I was going to write a big lengthy post about my 2012 goals, and my 2011 recap but... I realised I generally hate reading those things. I'm not one for writing new years resolutions anyway, but still... Writing them is always fun and educational from where I'm sitting, but you know, kinda boring to read when it's completely unrelated to you. (Unless you're a friend, in which case your blog about your goals and lessons learned last year will be devoured!)
Instead of talking about my goals for this year, I'm going to instead talk about different ways of keeping my motivation up in order to get me there. I realised that, my problem isn't really the lack of motivation, but lack of self confidence in my ability to get me there. Most of last year I put photographs up of things I wanted to achieve, magazine clippings of where I wanted to go, and I didn't really get anywhere. Now, instead, I've got a whole wall in my bedroom covered with things that make me happy, photographs of myself with friends, certificates of acomplishments, a whole wall dedicated to reminding me what I can achieve and the things I've done in my life. It's already done wonders for my self confidence, a constant reminder of my abilities. I still have the pictures of things I want to do as well, but that's on a different wall.
If you'd have asked me a week ago whether or not this was a good idea, I'd have laughed and said "Don't be stupid, looking in the past is a terrible idea", but now I know better. Now I know it's important to display your achievements as well as your future goals. Otherwise it becomes overwhelming, displaying so much of the future, when it's our memories of the past that help us build the very future we're walking towards.
I wish you all the best of luck in the end of the world!
Feminism sucks
I can't stand feminism. It completely offends me. The idea that women are better than men, or that all men are wankers, it's just complete bull.
I know, I know, I've spoken about this many times before.
But things keep popping up around me that simply drive me crazy. Woman who insist that they get treated badly by men, and blame it on the fact that they're a woman. Men who get completely slandered by women for doing something nice, such as holding a door for a woman - even if he'd do that for anybody. And even women who get criticised by others for conforming to gender stereotypes, when all they're doing is being what makes them happiest.
Why use all these excuses for not performing to your best? Someone I know recently told me about her experience in business school - it was a mainly male dominated course, and two of the four women who took the course dropped out, because they thought they wouldn't be able to get by in a male dominated environment. That's a lame excuse.
The overall message I wanna put here is that, if you wanna do something where you are a minority, like a woman in business school, don't let the fact you're a minority stop you from doing it. And don't blame the majority for not letting you in, either. Just go out and bloody do it, and stop looking for things that could stop you.
Gender Identity
I apologise for this post in advance. It's here because I want to explore my own understanding of being transgendered, and what I've been trying to understand about the feelings and confusion around the subject. I've reread it and rewritten it several times and I still feel like it comes off as a badly written daily mail article, which I hated the idea of. If I've written something offensive, or inaccurate or simply stupid and ignorant, please leave a comment or email me to correct me, and be as mean and as nasty as you want. Thank you 
ON TO THE POST!
It'd odd how life sometimes throws you things to think about and understand. I've recently been really interested in gender identity, and a whole heap of things all relating to that subject sort of fell into my lap.
There's a comic I was recently introduced to, Khaos Komix, which is about a group of teenagers, most of whom are gay / lesbian, and two of them are transgendered. Then, an online friend started posting about their own gender confusion. His posts helped me better understand the feelings of not feeling comfortable in the body you were born in. And then there was a documentary on Channel 4, "My Transsexual Summer". I took an interest mainly because I didn't completely understand how it must feel to be transgendered and I wanted to get a better idea. At the end of the documentary, I came out feeling a lot more confident about my own gender identity and sexuality, but also frustrated that so little people really seem to try and understand it themselves.
I know so many people who think being trans* has no point to it if you're also gay (ie, a MtF who likes women), and people who think that all trans* people are just unhappy with themselves and need to gain more self esteem in order to be more comfortable in their own skin. I have to admit that before I really explored gender identities, I also thought trans* people were uncomfortable in themselves and worried that if they had surgery done to modify their bodies to become their most comfortable gender, they would still find themselves unsatisfied and later come to regret the decision, feeling more like the gender they assigned at birth the more comfortable they became in life in other ways.
That also made me think about when I was growing up, and my first encounter with homosexuality. I'm ashamed to admit that before I had any real understanding of it, I thought gay and lesbian people were, again, not entirely comfortable with themselves. But then a few of my friends came out, and that got me thinking about their feelings more in depth, and I started realising that, hang on, they're perfectly comfortable with who they are. They are truly confident, wonderful people, and also people who are incredibly brave. They shouldn't need to have to be brave, by the way. Coming out shouldn't be something to fear. But that's a topic for another post.
Going back to the aforementioned TV show, My Transsexual Summer. After the first two episodes, I was feeling pretty upbeat about the show. It seemed to really give people in the trans* community a real voice, showing the real struggles of the "cast". Wanting to find out about the reaction to the show, I looked around online and was surprised to see that, while a great deal of every day people really liked the show, loads of transgendered folks hated it. A lot of people who took part in the show hated it, even though they really loved the experience of the show itself. They downplayed some stories, up played others, and exaggerated some personalities more than was necessary. I learnt that there was a lot more issues surrounding transsexuality and transgender other than just "feeling like being born into the wrong body", none of these were really looked into.
However, after watching the final of the series and reading the blogs of some of the participants (most of whom I've grown to love deeply, and I have a serious crush on Lewis), I've come to the decision that the program was a good first chapter into the issues of being trans*. Perhaps in another series they could expand into deeper issues, deeper than just the simple every day problems people have.
But ultimately, I think acceptance of transgendered people is the next big transition that will need to happen in the UK. The last one we had was for gay and lesbian rights and acceptance, and while that still has a great deal of issues surrounding it, the trans* community has waited long enough for their own issues to start being addressed. The fact they have to wait at all... but... yes, that's another blog post.
Even though we all have to go through issues and suffering in our lives, nobody should go through the rejection of being shunned by your families and friends just for being who you are. At the end of the day, whatever you identify as, whether that's male, female, a little bit in between, no gender at all, or even not even human at all, you're a living, breathing creature who has been put on this floating rock. And that means you deserve to walk down whatever path you choose.
“The Truth”
I don't care whether you're Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Jehovah's Witness, Muslim, Seek, Mormon (insert name of any other religion here), I will feel incredibly uncomfortable and rather irritable if you say you believe you have found "the one truth".
That includes people who say "There definitely isn't a God".
I don't believe in any God, but I've never considered myself an Atheist. It seems a tad too arrogant to assume that, just because we believe (or don't believe) in something, that makes it definitely true.
The Joys of Unemployment…
I wrote this last month, because this month I'll be working on my NaNoWriMo novel and won't be blogging as much. Enjoy it!
Quitting my job at Sainsbury's has been one of the best things I ever did. Yes, it would probably have been more responsible if I'd gotten a decent income before I handed in my notice, and yes, not telling people I quit my job was probably not the most sensible thing I've ever done in my life. But the actual act of being unemployed as been a very educational experience.
I've learnt that there's a very painful social stigma attached to being unemployed. When people ask me that evil, horrible question "What do you do?" (And by the way, that question should be stripped out of the usual conversation, put in a vat of hot oil and fire and boiled slowly to death, in the most painful way possible, while being watched by people singing "We hate you, you evil question", which is sung in the same tune as "We wish you a Merry Christmas", and the whole tune should be video taped . Then someone should burn the tape in a similar way, possibly with more singers) they react with a look of horror when you tell them you're looking for a job. As if every unemployed person around my age is an evil, money grabbing, lazy leech who will never amount to anything and should be treated in the same way I want to treat the question they just asked me.
I've also learnt, that I'm not the only one who feels as though their confidence takes a huge hit every time someone reacts this way. And it's really hurting a lot of people out there, who are unemployed for reasons that aren't anywhere near wanting to leech of the rest of the country. The social pressure to get a job; any job, even jobs that are seriously below their skill and / or comfort level, jobs they're really overqualified for, jobs that make them want to cry when they go to bed at night because they're not using their unique talents to their fullest extent, it's heartbreaking. I've spoken to some people in that situation who have gotten so depressed in their work situation that they couldn't bare to go out and look for more work, or feel so ashamed of where they work that they want to quit the job all over again.
I say we need to change the social stigma there is to being unemployed. So people don't react with surprise and annoyance when they hear it, or act like the person is something awful they wouldn't want to step in. Some people lost their job unintentionally; some people, myself for example, quit their job to get out of the industry they were in; and some people are just leeches who want everyone else to pay for them, but we shouldn't be all shoved into the same category.
If you're reading this and you are unemployed, I'm not just going to tell you "Get a job!", because I've been under that knife before and it makes me cringe. What I will tell you though, is that you're in an excellent situation. I know that's not what everyone wants to tell you. But you suddenly have the freedom to start something fresh. If you've wanted a career change for the past few years but have been afraid to quit; if you wanted some spare time to start up a business (which you can do on no money) or if you've felt like there was more to you then just a crummy supermarket job then figure out what you want to do and take it. Maybe take a job that pays the bills, but that doesn't have to be your new career. Use it to find out what you don't want to do. Use your freedom to create the life for yourself you always wanted. I figured out a lot about myself through my unemployment. One of those things was, that I figured out I was trying to hard to be something I'm not suited for. Now I'm steadily working my way through things I don't want in my life, so I'll gradually find out what I DO want. And I would never have done that if I hadn't been unemployed.
Since writing this, I've managed to get another job which I'll have until the new year. I'm still grateful for the experience and wouldn't change it for the world!
Hi, I'm Sarah and thanks for checking out my blog! I'm currently taking photographs of a Bunny sitting on various peoples heads, trying to figure out my life and blogging about it as I go! Join me for the ride, it should be fun :) You can learn more about me by reading my About Page...
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