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.

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!

I've been sat feeling sorry for myself for the past god-knows-how-many days because I don't have a direction in life and I can't sit on something long enough to actually get anywhere with it. And it's reeeaalllyy been embarrassing me! Of course it's not the best time to even think about what I want in "the long run" right now as I need to work on the getting-a-job thing first, but with all this sudden free time I'm finding that all I think about is the pure lack of emptiness I feel without a long term direction.

Of course my priority-short term goal is simple - Get an income in order to move back in with Mike.

I've never had a long term goal that stuck around for more than a couple of months - that's how I know I'm a scanner and why I took up the endless-30-day-challenge (this month is Sewing, in case you were wondering). But it bothers me. Obviously it bothers me as 80% of this blog is me going on about not having a long term goal. So I have to keep reminding myself - just go for short term goals. Just keep focussing on the small projects - getting a job, moving in with Mike, learning how to record a song on my Dads mac, finishing my novel and my script and... you get the idea.

Screw the 5-year-plan. Embrace the short-long term goal. My long term goal is to move in to a bigger place with Mike. My short term goals are; getting a job, moving back into the flat, learning how to record a song, finishing my novel, starting my script and... whatever the hell else I like!

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 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.

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!

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.

Is everyone having a good Christmas? So far, I've spent the day playing with balloon animals, eating too much chocolate and being attacked with a remote controlled helicopter. A good Christmas? I think certainly think so!

I always stress out about Christmas; have I bought good presents, are the cards ready in time and hoping everyone is going to enjoy the day. But usually, despite my worrying, everything turns out nicely anyway!

In terms of Christmas cards, (I was supposed to be making one every day this month) I have... failed spectacularly! I was supposed to have made 25 by today, and my grand total is actually... 6. I'm actually pretty impressed that I managed to do 6 at all! But after the greatness that was last month, finishing NaNoWriMo I'm a bit disappointed that I've done so terribly this month. However I've learnt a valuable lesson from it, that might not necessarily be true, but will be tested in the coming months. That is, I need a project that I can see the progress on.

So, next months project is going to be to finish the first draft of my novel. I'm aiming for 80k for the first draft. Once I've edited it down, I want to try and get it down to 60k as a final! A plan of action, I have it!

So now it's near the end of the day, I'll curl up with a cup of tea and feel relaxed because I don't have to worrry about Christmas for another year!

Merry Christmas everyone, and I hope you all had a good one!

Also, Merry Christmas! I hope your day is shiny and magical as Christmas ought to be.

(random afterthought: It's kind of hillarious to me that the title of this post is bigger than the most itself.)

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.