For Red Nose Day - Warning - not for the sensitive or the tasteful
Sylvia Plath: never met her, never wanted to. Miserable cow. First she writes a bunch of grim poems and then she sticks her head in the gas oven while the kids are sleeping.
For this very reason I’ve never published my poems or had a gas oven. That way I feel in a position to judge her for being an inconsiderate blight on human hope.
If life doesn’t lift and enlighten then at least art should.
Which is, of course, a slight problem nowadays. For some reason the English speaking intelligentsia (and/or those who pretend to that status) actively hunt out the sad, the grim, the haunting, the horrifying, the scandalous, the tragic. Hanging out your dirty washing in public isn’t regarded as bad anymore. In fact, do it publicly enough and you’ve got a good chance of being nominated for a major public award and offered a weekly column in the Sunday Observer.
I’ve been building up a lot of dirty washing lately. I’m wearing some of it as we speak. I’m considering wearing my clothes ‘til they’re stiff with cack and the stench reaches New York from a breeze in Birmingham. And then sticking a label on them and launching them as ‘Underdog Designs’. By delegating outfits for customising to the poor and needy (like myself eg) I will be bringing Designer Fashion into a neat interface with charity. I shall register it as a Social Enterprise.
It was some while ago that I first began to consider a statement I heard made at a mental health conference in 2000.The speaker was Ron Coleman, notorious orator and business man in his own circles. He announced that in the 1990’s he was diagnosed with Schizophrenia. ‘It was a bad career move,’ he said.
It stayed with me. Particularly since, judging from his regular speaking appearances and his expensive workshop brochures I suspect he’s managed to get round his career jolt well and truly by now.
Also because, vis a vis the above, I was horribly jealous. I most definitely noticed that being diagnosed with Manic Depression in 1997 was a bad career move: I was forcibly pensioned out of teaching in 2000.
And what really didn’t help was that from my point of view I’d already made a bad career move by going into school teaching. It hadn’t taken me long to discover that teaching in schools was as ghastly as ‘learning’ in them. I was better at teaching than at learning in them but I hated both.
So I hardly wanted a further bad career move..
I spent years and years being so p**d off about it that I didn’t even try to do anything about it. Every now and then ‘Ron Coleman’ would float into my mind (often via an advertising mailshot) and I’d think ‘lucky buggar, why can’t I be more like him’. Then down I’d go again into my thick thick blanket of hopelessness.
It wasn’t a sustainable lifestyle choice. It was like cryogenics for the incompetent. It was like taking a seat in the waiting room at the dentist and waiting there to have all your teeth out at once without anaesthetic.
Waiting, that’s to say, for about 5 years or so…
At last dear reader, I finally decided to start living again. Watch this space…
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What a brilliantly written and astute post. You have given me my first smile of the day! I like your style x
ReplyDeleteHi there connecthroughart :-) I got your email and was delighted to hear from you and hugely encouraged by your kind words - while failing to have picked up that you had also, bless you, written a public comment to me... thank you thank you and thank you again
ReplyDeleteKeep it coming, nudge your friends - the greater the interactive energy of this blog, (and of the blog missionmiraculous) the more powerful becomes the shareable building healing development tools shared, revealed and created through it.
Today my reflection of the ten or more years I've spent within the culture and identity of 'severe and enduring mental illness' is that it has been tantamount to 'going out into the wilderness' : it has been terrifying, I felt alone, in despair, in terror; my belief in myself and everything else deserted me on and off for several years.. As I began to emerge I spent another few years distracting myself in various ways, repeatedly straying from the path my inner instincts were leading me to though I wasn't fully conscious of it at the time.
I'm a rambler by nature with little sense of direction and a tendency to procrastinate over decisions and to bend and turn too much in order to please those around me. I'll stop and change focus mid-stream of a prior purpose if I notice something that concerns me or impresses me or pulls my heart strings. Sometimes I simply stop in my tracks, keel over and start snoring - I can sleep for days on occasion. It makes me feel guilty and I begin to beat myself up for being lazy when that happens. It gets me back on my feet and effective again though, much more quickly if I just relax into it and enjoy it. I think it's called 'recharging your batteries'.
connectthroughart I am wanting to meet up with you at a time and place of mutual convenience to discuss art, recovery and a creative media project collaboration between MissionMiraculus and connectthroughart. Would you be interested?
Over and Out for now, Hugs Calamity Jane ;-)