“There's no reassuring ceiling over you, Moneo. Only an open sky full of changes. Welcome it. Every sense you possess is an instrument for reacting to change. Does that tell you nothing?”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
I've been thinking about the time Smeagol was given back his name; Frodo tells him and its like a light is switched on. He remembers not just his name, but his identity. He's given a significant key to who he is and it's a gift.
I've often thought, through many readings of The Lord of the Rings that the One Ring is power over people and that's a drug. I've seen the parallels there and have mused and contemplated my way through it a lot. But that part when Smeagol says, "That's what they called me," or the part in the movies when Andy Serkis is expressing Gollum saying, "My name... That's my name." Every time I read or see that part I weep.
There's a reason (several, actually) why Community is important. Like everything, now, it has become a commodity, broken down into component pieces and harvested for growing numbers: users, views, sales, likes, conversion rates. We used to call it "bums on seats". Having a community, developing community, has become a part of marketing. Research has become a subset of marketing. Marketing has subsumed everything that is good and right in the world and turned it into cake.
I used to think that money was the greatest evil. "Follow the money," we'd say (and that's still a wise way of getting to the bottom of a thing), "Follow the money and you'll find the evil." Bribery, corruption, greed, misuse of power; the money trail can lead you right to the door. There's an acronym used in storytelling for defining a motive in The Bad Guy.
MICE:
Money,
Ideology,
Compromise (or Coercion),
Ego.
I used to think education and learning were like a ladder to climb. Up, up, up I go into the tower of knowledge, into the airy heights and soaring utopias of mastery and expertise. But now I'm thinking it's more like excavating or diving. Plunging, sinking deeper and descending through layers, with weight and pressure increasing incrementally.
At this point in the year I have something like alternobaric vertigo; and maybe there's an allusion to climbing again there. Don't look down, don't look up. "When I look down, I just miss all the good stuff, and when I look up I just trip over things," (Ani Difranco, 'As Is')
Immersion, maybe that's where the sense of oceanic depth is coming from. That first piece of the northern hemisphere school year is harboured between the faded bunting ends of summer and the pine-straight, unbending ice and crackle of winter's Christmas with the undercurrent of dread that New Year has carried with it since about 2012, (the question of 'What fresh hell will present itself this time?' is a dull, repetitive thud). Those three months of the beginning of the school year are the initiating leap into the waters; the first flight of the stairs. Immersion; acclimation.
Then comes the two week break that feels like time overstuffed. There's the time that moves the hands of my watch and measures the beats of hearts and drums. And then there's the time that stops and starts like horses at a racetrack waiting for the gates to be released. Anticipation, anxiety, joy, love, hope. The baking and breaking of bread. This is the time that holds its breath and waits for phone calls and parcels, smiles and tears and news. Time that holds its hands out and waits for them to be filled with other hands.
Emotional time stuffed into a bag of ticking clocks and calendared days. Too much and not enough.
Then, in no time at all, or stretched like a chord on a wave, I'm back into the water and wondering at the margin of uncertainty. Christmas break is:
A quadratura is a type of trompe-l'œil described as sotto in su, "above, from below", and, now, looking mathematically at adding errors in quadrature I'm seeing them through a bokeh haze of drift and murmur.
This is our margin of error. This is the uncertainty, calculated. A sense, that I was missing a couple of months ago, becomes clear. Error and uncertainty aren't an off-the-beat, around-the-beat, close-enough-for-jazz guess. They're arrived at through careful consideration of all possibilities.
When I was in my last year of primary school, we had lessons to prepare us for secondary school. They were quite gentle and my 6th grade teacher, Mr Gibson, was a lovely, kind-hearted man who genuinely wanted us to do well. He had two desks in the classroom, one at the front that he'd teach from, and one at the back of the class in a corner of the room under two large windows with a pot plant and bookshelf creating a distinction from the rest of the class, but still being a part of the room. This was his talking desk and he'd go there each* day after lunch and we'd all have a chance to go and talk with him for a couple of minutes to check in, ask any questions and hear some feedback or advice.
Years later I realised that it could've been modelled on the idea of office hours. It was a brilliant idea - there was just enough privacy that other students couldn't hear the conversation (and nothing was ever talked through in these sessions that was serious enough fro complete confidentiality - that would've been taken up elsewhere and with other protocols) but there was still the security of not having to be in a different room. It was all a part of the learning process, and he held it so well.
One afternoon I was at the talking desk and Mr Gibson was talking with me about some advice and feedback he'd given to the class the previous week, about moving into high school. He'd said that learning wasn't about being the smartest person in the room or reading the most books. It was about being able to ask questions. He was being jovial and friendly and kind and the rest of the class laughed and thought that was great. But between you, me and the fencepost, I might've cried a bit when he said that. I'd already learned by that age that I had to earn my right to be here and the only tools that I had at hand were being smart and reading a lot.
So, here's a small lesson. This is what misogyny - or any power imbalance does:
The people who belong to the group that has the power don't have to earn their right to exist. They're entitled to it. That's what entitlement is. It's not entitled to have a job, or have loads of money, or live in a castle or have all the land. It's the entitlement to be alive. Entitlement to existence. They don't have to earn it or strive for it or prove they deserve it. They just get to exist without any discourse or question. It's an unquestioned right to be alive.
The people who aren't in that group are raised believing, through a thousand micro-aggressions a day, that we need to prove that we deserve to be here, that we deserve to be alive, that we deserve to breathe. Over and over and over. This constant gnawing feeling that we should contribute to society, explain that we're special in some way, have a necessary skill. Not because it's cool or useful or a nice thing to do. But because if we don't, then we don't have the right to be alive.
So, that creates frustration, anger, depression, sadness, lack of control, unworthiness, and anxiety. And that's just the starting point, before all the rest of life occurs.
I don't think that sense of entitlement should be taken away. I think everyone should have it. We should all know that we're utterly entitled to be here, no matter what and you don't have to prove yourself to deserve it.
I knew this already by the time I was 10, and I knew that I had intelligence and I had books. They were my super-power. I knew that with these things, the people in charge would be happy with me. So, when Mr Gibson said what he'd said, I heard that what makes me special doesn't even matter and the things that they could provide - belonging to a place where learning was important, which was my special place - that could be given to anyone just by asking questions! I was devastated.
But I was also determined. So I began asking questions. I asked all sorts of questions and made sure I was contributing to the dialogue and ongoing learning experience with my whole face.
Mr Gibson was a good teacher and a kind man. So when we had some time at the talking desk, he made a point of complimenting my ability to be more vocal in class, but he also said, "I've noticed something. Do you mind if I share it with you and give you some feedback?"
Tell me the things, Mr Gibson! I'm ready to be a better person!
"I've noticed that you only ever ask questions that you already know the answer to. You know a lot of stuff, a lot more than most of your classmates. But you don't know everything, not even close. Because you're just a little kid and there's a lot of things to learn in the world. It's okay to not know things. That's the fun part."
That took me a long way. I think I've tried to share that with young people I've worked with. He made me want to be a better person, but also started a long process of healing and learning that I didn't have to be.
Now, being back in fulltime study I feel a lot like that kid again, and I'd give just about anything for a chance to sit down at the talking desk and share how I feel and get some gentle feedback.
* it might not have been every day. It was a long time ago...
For a while there, social media was getting like chocolate cake at an 8 year old’s birthday. That age when you want all the cake and the sweeties and the soda pop and the presents and the stuff, stuff, stuff. Massively online everything got/gets like that. A glut of greed and need. This, “I have all the numbers!” and the hearts and the smiley faces or wotnot. It’s nuts.
It’s a bit like everyone starting making rafts and heading out to sea. People starting stringing their rafts together, and then someone came along with a boat that other people could tie their rafts onto and then the boats got bigger. And then someone had the idea of everyone being on the same boat and that sort of boat got bigger. And then people turned their boats into large slightly floating landmasses and then someone had the idea of moving everyone onto land. And now everyone’s making rafts again and heading off into the ocean. (The Potted History of the Internet, by Freyja Seren).
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There’s been a huge amount of research into resilience and how people become resilient. The word itself comes from the Latin resilientem meaning to leap back. It was first used in the 17th century, probably for physical sciences and is usually used for material objects to describe the elasticity of an object and its ability to recover its original shape. Of course, it is also commonly used to describe people, humans, and their ability (on a continuum) to recover from trauma, or difficulty.
In a professional capacity I first came across it as a youth worker looking into how resilience is developed and what I could do as a practitioner to implement and affect positive change that was founded on good quality research, rather than platitudes and urban myth. Which isn’t to say that there was a lot of work that was being carried out based on platitudes and urban myth, but it isn’t to say that there wasn’t either.
While carrying out a literature review I came across the University of Minnesota and the work of Norman Gamexy, Ann Masten and their colleagues. It’s immense. It was a beautiful thing to discover and the work that continues on their is incredible. Look them up, read their stuff. It’s worth it.
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Essentially and in a very tiny nutshell, resilience comes from hope, care, compassion, good relationships and role models. It doesn’t come from “schools of hard knocks,” or some “university of life” -style additional hardship. It doesn’t come from dangling people out of the edge of what they’re capable of with no sense of safety net.
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In this, though, and in so much of my writing these days, I can hear my own bitterness, my own loss of hope, my own anxiety and resentment. It’s a big part of why I stepped away from the work (there are so many reasons, so many parts, and they’re all big):
I could no longer find the line between challenging an idea and fighting the person who expressed it.
That’s burn out. It’s like being punch-drunk. There’s fog and exhaustion and all you know how to do is come up swinging.
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Which arcs back to social media engagement. I quit all the massively online socials because it feels like wearing neon pink and screaming in a warehouse full of 10 million people. They’re great if you’re healthy and well and have hope. But they can’t build it if you’re not well. They aren’t (and aren’t meant to be) therapy.
This time of year is strange. I see time in a shape, so the year curves out ahead of in a mostly almond-shaped curve, skinnier at either end and then wide in the centre, with some lumps and bumps along the way to take in a variety of anniversaries and significant dates. Days, weeks, months, are all tessellated within this curve. It's also colourful, in viridian hues, from a sort of bottle-green through various teals and aquas to bright gold in the centre and then arcing around to the deeper, bluer greens at the end. Right now, we're in a sort of deep peacock blue, at the sharp end of the year. This end, the final stretch, always feels overstuffed.
And for the last few years the Northern Hemisphere's school year, stretching from September to June, trying to be a wheel but defenseless against the tradition and structure of the Gregorian Calendar, gets bottle-necked and twisted like a cheap, pop-up festival tent, figure-eighted and broken. Large, highlighter-coloured, paint-splotches of exams splatter against the teal-blues, and this yellow-brick road of knowledge is curving out endlessly, relentlessly before me. Mountains between me and any kind of end in sight. What looks at a distance like a gentle climb is, in reality, harsh, nearly vertical walls of demanding information-gathering and skill-acquiring.
I want to love it, but I don't know that I'm allowed. I'm not sure I belong, and I don't know if I've gate-crashed a party that's way above my league or if I'm just whining.
I waste more time than I spend, in second-guessing myself. I sit for days trying to figure out where I was wrong only to discover I was right all along. Like knitting a scarf and then picking it apart to find the stictch I dropped, only to discover once I have a lap full of wool that I hadn't dropped a stitch in the first place. Knit it all back up again and then unravel it, over and over again. As if Sisyphus was his own Hades and decided his own fate.
This time of year in the North, the nights eating chunks of the days, storms wrapping the house in an ever-tightening grip of cold and blistering wind, the ocean hurling itself at the shore, I want to curl up under a duvet in a warm cave of bed and sleep it all away.
I am a writer. I have always been a writer. I can't remember a time when I wasn't reading or making up stories. It goes as far back as who I am. Possibly, I should've been a writer by trade; I should be a published, touring, signing and selling author, by now. I did try a bit. I went to classes and did most of a creative writing degree (all the creative writing parts of it) and I've written, oh dear lord, I've written. I have boxes and cases and folders crammed full of stories, poems, scripts, novels. I have drafts and plans. I have old hardrives (that will never see the inside of a computer again), and pen-drives, USB sticks, floppy disks (both sizes), and cds storing digital equivalents of reams and reams of writing.
But I never quite made a go of it. I self-published a couple of books and they're alright, but certainly not my best work. I sent a couple (literally two) drafts off to publishers and heard back meaningfully promising rejections. You see, publishing is a business, so if a writer is a complete unknown then it's ugoing to be pretty impossible to sell work that is off the beaten track. I'd sent in a novella, and collection of linked short stories that added up to a whole novel but were distinct stories. It's great, they were both really good pieces, and I heard that back, but they wouldn't sell from an unknown with no following. Which I understood. One of the publishers asked for a standard novel once I'd written it. Twenty years later, I haven't quite got there.
For a long time I had excuses and blame. I'm too busy, I don't have the time, I don't have the space, I'm a dumbass, I self-sabotage, I'm too something something something... And it got exhausting. I just got tired of it. So I decided I wasn't really a writer. If I was going to be, then I would. If I wanted it badly enough that I needed it, then I'd do it. I would've done it.
So, I packed it all away; all the boxes, the floppy disks and the folders. Shoved it all under a bed (well, two beds, a sofa and a hidden bit behind a couple of bookshelves) and told myself to get on with who I really was.
I couldn't quite figure out who that was though. I never actually stopped writing. To be fair, I love the idea of being a published author. It'd be a blast. I don't have a problem with the rejection slips and such, that's all part of the process, and I'm a bit lazy when it comes to completing a project or a piece and, genuinely, actually crap at editing and making things look pretty and final draft-ish, but I'm just not certain why I never got to the point of being a writer as a business. It's a mystery and trying to sove it hurt me. Because, without fail, if I try to figure out why I'm not quite as good as I ought to be I will - every single time - just utterly abuse myself with derogatory internalised comments about what a dreadful person I am. And I'm old enough now to know that it's all total bullshit. All the negativity and self-loathing is a load of balls. It hurts, it's not nice and it's a lie.
So, somewhere along the lines and in and out of all of that, I worked for years as a youth worker and a manager and my job was telling people to believe in themselves and follow their heart and let their talent shine. I worked with a lot of young people who were homeless and had a lot of stuff going on. My job was to make complicated, messy, brutal life be manageable and simple and hopeful. I sent so many young people to Open University - they could study from their rooms in hostels or from internet cafes (back when they were a thing - I've been around a while, in case you missed the boat on that - well after punched cards but I saw floppy disks come and go). I supported their study and helped write essays. I've supported PhD students do their thing, and read over many a thesis.
And then one day while I was going through a leaving interview with a staff member, we were talking at the end and saying our goodbyes and good lucks, and they asked, "Don't you ever want to go back to school? Have you thought about doing a Master's?" And I felt like, genuinely, like I'd been punched in the chest. I hummed and hawed and made it through the conversation and then wept, like I'd been broken open. Like something had snapped inside me. Snapped, not like fingers, not like a-ha! That's it. Snapped like the plastic lid on a cheap peanut butter jar. Like a piñata and everything came pouring out, all the miss and the sorrow and loss and the grief.
I missed academia, I missed studying and all night cramming sessions. The adrenaline of getting an assignment in. The dopamine hit of getting it back. I missed learning and reading the latest research. I missed conversations with tutors and lecturers and students, in that way of being a colleague of the experience. I missed science. My first degree was in maths and physiology and I've never been far away from school, to be honest. I've studied pretty much everything at one time or another. Mostly vocational for youth work, facilitation, and charity sector management, but also creative writing and French, photography and fine art, naturopathy and biomed. I just love learning. I love science like I love writing. I've never not done it. It's always been there in my life, like my arms are, or my kidneys.
But since adulthood I've always tucked studying into a corner and studied part-time. In all that spare time that's left after full-time work and everything that goes with that and with being an adult.
Once you're broken, you can't be fixed back to the way you were. You can't be un-broken.
"What has been seen, cannot be unseen," The Internet.
Once that rip had started I couldn't tape it back up. No matter how much I tried to grit my teeth and get on with it, I couldn't stop breaking open, and eventually everything started falling out - everything, that is, that didn't belong to me. All the I'm a dumbass and not good enough stuff just started falling out. I could see it all, all the crap I'd been carrying and believing for years, decades.
It got to the point where I couldn't work through it anymore. I couldn't continue in jobs where my bosses would call me stupid and blame me for all the things. I just cried a lot. It hurt, it was not nice and it was a lie. (That's a call-back to eight paragraphs ago. Because it was the same as the hurtful way I'd spoken to myself). So I stopped. I quit and I went back to school. I called up Open University and had a lovely long chat and started doing a master's degree in physics. Promptly.
Stay fabulous.
© Copyright Freyja Seren. All rights reserved.
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