Chasing the Only Meaningful Memory…

I think I might just have reached the point where I’m ready to start climbing back up the mountain again.  Dusting off and moving on.  I’m not all fixed but it’s recovery time.

The inevitable slide reached it’s absolute depths around about the beginning of the week where the only option was to have a good old full on flat out weeping breakdown.  I’m a great believer in cathartic weeping and as a fully blown graduate in the school of depression I know quite well these days how best to handle my worst episodes and that’s sleep and not having to behave like a functioning human being for a little while.  Luckily I also know that I’m exceptionally tenacious (or just bloody stubborn depending on how you look at it) and that these things will come in troughs and peaks.  The plunge is followed by the long walk back up.  The disassociation and strange disconnectedness of a full depressive episode gives way to starting to feel part of things again.

Depression is a difficult thing.  It can be triggered by something obviously distressing or it can be triggered by not getting the bus in time.  Sometimes you can be absolutely rational and somehow end up listing ‘end it all’ amdist your to do list or you can be an absolute broken mess. Sometimes there’s no telling what’s going to come spilling out when it strikes.  Sometimes that darkness is so overwhelming that you’re pretty sur there’s nothing you can do to get out of it, or that it’s all hope is lost.    To be fair, I’ve had a fairly traumatic year.   I’d like to write more about being inside the depressive mind looking out at some point.

The funny thing is, anyone who knows me knows I’m not an eternal miserablist. I can be perfectly optimistic, excited and passionate.  I like levity in my life and I’m more than keen to make sure other people have it in theirs.  Most people would have no clue chatting to me that I have any such issues.  Shyness yes but otherwise chipper.  For me, recovering from these times is a battle and it’s an exhausting one but it’s one I’m grimly determined to keep on fighting until I reach points like today.  Tomorrow might be another bad day, but it then we just start over again.

The depressing, tortured songs give way to something a little more grrrr, a little more…well…me.   Less mopey more interesting.  The bad poetry gives way to wanting to draw stupid pictures of silly zombies and take photos of amusingly constructed works of children’s imagination.  Work starts to become interesting again and I start to feel excited about what I’ve got to do and what I can do.

It’s been a long, tough, difficult year, that’s for damn certain but there have also been infinitely amazing moments of brilliance too.

The passion for Holocaust Education is returning and the realisation that I have an astounding opportunity to do something pretty amazing if I get my arse in gear is sitting right before me.  The Holocaust Fellowship is something I earned through hard work and determination at one of the most cripplingly sad times of my life.  I need to do it justice.

The excitement about the innovative Lead Practitioner role is all abuzz in my brain.  I just have to get, y’know, rehired in that role now, but I have so many ideas about what to do with it and plenty of things that I could use as a focus for my Masters dissertation.

There are really thrilling writing and creative opportunities and if nothing else, having a depressive episode is usually really good for stirring up ideas.  I have all kinds of things swimming around in my murky little brain.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I’m doing okay.

Writing is cathartic.  When I’m processing things it doesn’t matter too much if what comes out is bad, good, derivative or unique.  It’s a form of dealing.  The last post was something I just wrote – woke up from a bit of a fevered dream during a nap and it came spewing out.  This is something I wrote a while back…stimulated not my own feelings but by a postsecret picture where someone had blanked themselves out.  I used it as a stimulus but re-reading it now..it touched a nerve although it wasn’t about short term loss but something more terminal and deeper and shouldn’t be taken for some kind of easy metaphor for myself.  I may be sad…I’m not that bad.

Remember to allow for dramatic licence…if one can’t heave and sigh in your own lame angsty crap, then when can you?

She longed to be blissfully ignorant, to erase something she’d held so little and longed for so much.  The old adage that it was better to have loved and to have lost, well, it simply wasn’t true.  It wasn’t better, it was excruciating – it was so painful that it hurt to breathe and every remembered moment caught in her throat and strangled her.  It kicked her when she was off guard and taunted her just as she’d allowed her mind to turn to other things.  It hurt to feel and to be, as if every living pleasure of life had been ripped out.

There was an absence there now, a vacuum.  She had become the white space – the shape of a human being scratched out of a photograph, life continuing around the absence but nothing ever filling it.  There was nothing there to fill, it would leak out in to the void that had once been a hopeful human being.  It was unfillable.  It was the opposite of fullness.

Ignorance, by comparison, would not just be blissful, it would be merciful.  ”Merciful ignorance, clasp me to you and soothe away my pain.”

The last desperate prayer from one who no longer hopes for anything but anaesthesia.

I think that I can suffer this sadness.

I’ll wear it like an overcoat,
it fits me just fine
it’s been well cut,
but I find I need to make myself dagger proof,
to protect myself from these professions
of diminishing importance;

I miss you!
I want you!
I’ll see you,
take care…
then silence…
then nothing.

If I’m not careful,
I think I’ll bleed sadness,
not wear it.
It’ll never come off
It’ll be inside me
always.

Bet you’d want to be with me in a zombie survival crisis! Oh yeah.  At least we’d be minty fresh when we were being disembowelled!

click for larger version

It’s silly, it’s badly drawn…it’s a random thought that popped in to my head during Night of the Living Dead, it really made me giggle.

Yes, I am that childish.

Okay…so everyone has to vent too…can’t be philosophical all the time.

I don’t actually wish death by zombies…well…maybe a little bit.  Fuck off with your judgemental face!  It made me feel a teeny bit better.

click for full sized

So here we go again. Back to square one.
The inevitable questions. The inevitable self persecution. The inevitable ache. The inevitable what if…

And this will pass…and you build yourself back up all over again…trying to wax philosophical in the face of the plain fact that you hurt and you even feel a little bit ridiculous for feeling so bad, because that’s what happens…trying hard not to build walls where there weren’t any before but inevitably protecting yourself just that little bit more this time and shutting just a little bit more of yourself off…just in case. Promising that you wont make the same mistakes again, fall for the same lines or get mired down in any more bullshit, because god knows you have enough of your own. Making your resolutions, building your resolve.

…inevitably that will be 100% true, until the next time, if and when it comes.

http://www.lyric.co.uk/pl497.html

Punk Rock – Lyric Theatre Hammersmith 25/09/09

The library of a grammar school. Dialogue tripping of teenage tongues sharp as whip cracks, finding their marks and leaving the audience to watch the results unfold, raw and bloody before their eyes.

The bleak emotional underworld of teenage angst, isolation, discovery and sexuality is painted in visceral colours by Simon Stephens assured and unblinking text. It is testament to his skill and moreover his accuracy in portraying the teenage experience truthfully and brutally that the fifteen teenagers that watched the play with me left the theatre saying ‘That’s us. That’s exactly how it is.’ They were thrilled and breathless and terrified but most of all felt like someone understood what the hell was going on.

There was no feeling of overly sophisticated fakery, of adult kids saying adult words that have been placed in their mouths because it’s suits us to think that’s how they think. The dialogue is brutal, crass, vulgar, hilarious, terrifying and heartbreaking. Truth and lies mix wildly against the backdrop of the mundane school day and the relentless plod of exams and lesson. There is a conflict between the pre-ordained, grammar school future of Oxbridge and academia and the very real sometimes painfully ‘normal’ wants and needs of the kids. I’m pretty sure it took many audience members right back to their own teenage years and the turmoil of rampaging hormones, of thrashing about trying to figure out who the hell you are, of wanting to experience everything right here right now just because you can and just because you want to know how it feels.

Even the terrifying conclusion doesn’t feel forced or soap opera dramatic, but more the understandable outcome of kids who are not quite allright trying to live in the chaotic world we’ve given them, trying to fit themselves in all the boxes we’ve told them they have to fit. Trying to have a normal and trying to be remarkable all at one fell swoop.

The performances are remarkably self assured from the cast and you never feel like you’re watching older actors pretending to be kids. It would have been easy to take the vividly drawn characters and turn them in to caricatures – the sporty all rounder, the bully, the victim, the weird kid, the girl who has it all and so on and it’s a credit to the finesse of the actors that this never happens. Instead you end up seeing people you recognised from school, the kids that you knew. The kids that you were.

Tom Sturridge, who makes his theatre debut, is astounding as the disturbed and yet compelling William Carlisle but the highpoint for me was the ever bullied Chadwick Meade’s (Harry McEntire) bleak but brilliant rebuking monologue as he calmly rails against the vicious ‘hillarious’ bullying of Bennett Francis (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), pointing out that there are many, many more things to be scared of in this world than a silly sad little boy.

A brilliant play, starkly honest about how things are. I highly recommend it.

I’ve recently acquired a sexy new HTC Hero.  I was busy going through the memory card of my old phone to see if there was anything on there I desperately needed to save/back up etc and I came across a few random photos that I meant to post on here.  There’s no discernible theme or reason to them…so…I won’t pretend I have one.

I had a weeks worth of these from the seminars. There's something pretty exciting (if you're a big history geek) about being allowed to have the run of a museum after the public have gone!

One of the things about living so close to Pinewood Studios...you get to play 'what's that film?' in Black Park

I think there was a good 3 minutes of lolz over finding that there's now an entire 'Painful Lives' section in my local bookshop. Pain Porn is a big industry, question is, who the filp is buying it!!

The canal boat ride at the Black Country Museum. Third year of going on the school trip there. Not as thrilling as it used to be, but it still has beautiful moments.

Pretty flowers that were a gift from the Headmaster for helping run the school production. Almost makes up for the endless nights of The Deadwood Stage running on repeat in my head!

I got bored when I was staying in a hotel for a week. Days Inn's can be a soulless hell when you're on your own. Is it any wonder I had to resort to this?!

Hehehe. It's a salad what done gone look like a face.

Ah, the Memphis Belle section of my cousin and I's Sean Astin Retrospective night. So here's a picture of...Billy Zane. Yeah. What? Shut up!

My sister & cousin on the beach at Felixstowe. Probably one of the best days out when I was visiting Suffolk. We ate many seaside foods and watched old people be brilliant.

Well, it’s certainly been a while.

To be honest I’m not quite sure what happened.  That is to say, Summer holidays happened and then term started to happen again and before you can say ‘holy exam results batman’ we’re right back where we started.  Onwards and upwards in to the new school year.

My grand plans to write furiously over the summer never quite seemed to come to fruition.

I did do wonderful things.

A week’s seminar at the Imperial War Museum London studying the Holocaust was a highlight.  Intense, thought provoking and astounding.  It’s caused me to completely re-appraise my approach to the whole subject.  I’m still not quite sure where that leaves me right now though.

There was time to contemplate endings, and enjoy new beginnings.  Time to rest and re cooperate, gather thoughts, shed tears, laugh and all things in between.  I needed time and that’s pretty much what I got.

I have plenty to say though and I’m sure I’ll be back in to my usual full steam ahead waffle-tastic crap spouting mode as soon as possible, but until then, have a break.  Have a zombie.  (I’ve been thinking about zombies a lot lately.  It’s  a thing…)

It's a zombie. Obviously.

I was asked about my classroom…so here’s a few edited highlights.

I think we can safely say that it’s fairly representative of myself and my personality as much as anything else.

The sexy desk.   It’s been there at least as long as I have.  It causes much amusement…especially if I say………hehe….. SEX in front of the year 7’s.    It’s ground in there now.

The heater that spews out hot air regardless of the season and would bake us all alive if I hadn’t craftily climbed under the table with a pair of scissors and found the secret twisty knob of off-ness…..I suspect, from the gaping holes, that many others have done so before me.

So on to the display boards…

Identity maps.  You draw round your hand and then you write about your identity, your culture, your hopes and your fears on it.  Voila – unique piece of artwork and a good jumping off point for stereotyping and racism.

The Jack the Ripper project.  My most favoritest lesson ever and the one that seems to get the best pieces of independent work out of kids working at a whole range of levels.  You see I’m sneaking them handling sources skills and extended writing – explanation and analysis skills by masking it with fog, mocking letters to the police and buckets of blood and gorey crime scene photos.

Talking  of buckets of blood….here be pirates…

Pirate flags, based on a study of historical flags.  I taught a unit of work on pirates and the kids were all in different ‘crews’ – the Barbary Corsairs, The Pirates of the Spanish Main etc etc.  One of the crew challenges was to design a flag to represent the crew using traditional symbols.  It had to be annotated and presented to class accompanied by a sea shanty about the crew.   So much fun!  (Yes I do teach things that I find thrilling…what’s the point in teaching something you’re bored by?)

It’s…uh…the rock penguin.  Yeah…I don’t really understand it either, or quite what it had to do with our African-American music project…but it seems to have become a permanent fixture and everyone likes him.

The nifty blinds….no more squinting at a sun drenched screen in my classroom.  Yes my desk is buried in a mount of paperwork…welcome to the world of teaching….also I’ve been away for over a week on camp….tidying up after cover lessons didn’t seem to be deemed necessary.  I’ll get right on that.   Ahem.

In my desk drawer I have all the essentials…glue…rulers…pencils…sharpener….small action figure.
Actually, you’ll be surprised how much Eomer comes in useful for lessons….seriously….and worryingly, how much a particular sixth former enjoys playing with him.    Generally the boys spot him…have a little play…make him fall over and die and then he goes back in the drawer for a while.

A note from some students a couple of years ago…I like to keep it around…little things like that…keep you going.

so….any questions, raise your hand.