One of Them

Last year was my first pride, the first parade I'd attended in my new skin, in my new guise. I ignored the commercialism, the sponsorship from capitalist companies that attached themselves to buses with rainbows strewn from mirrors. None of that mattered, because I wasn't there for that; I wasn't, as it was suggested by some work colleagues, imposing myself on 'their' party. They meant no malice but somehow they didn't know not to assume, not to read me in their default way: straight.

But that's not what I am, I'm not straight.

Standing on the side of the road with my friends, an amnesty international sticker plastered to one breast, tears sprung into eyes not previously fully opened.

It was the flag that did it; the pink/blue/purple striped one waved loftily by marchers smiling enough to make their cheeks ache - smiling so wide it reached to the edges of the road and spread to everyone in the crowd,

In the wake of a tragedy like the one that occurred in Orlando, solidarity and community is needed. Given that many of the people I know still read me in the way my colleagues did a year ago, I couldn't be as open about my sorrow as I wanted, couldn't without explaining, without coming out. I was still scared, still unsure about being myself.

But the time for fear is over. The time for pretending, for passing without resistance, is over. Visibility is what our community needs, to be louder, prouder, for those of us who live in relative privilege, able to express ourself with a higher level of freedom, to shout from the rooftops about our love and lovers, about our desire no longer to hide.

I am, and have probably always been, bisexual. It has taken so long for me to be able to be open and proud about this fact, due, in part, to a lack of visibility and representation when I was growing up: all our sex education was strictly heterosexual; bi characters in popular culture were categorised by the gender of their partner, not their own definition; language and stereotypes portray us as attention seeking or greedy, put us into binary boxes based on comfortable narrow definitions.

Through meeting people who've shown me that gender and sexuality are not as clear cut as the world wants us to believe, I have learned more about myself than I thought possible. I have been able to love myself in a way that I haven't done since I was a child. I am happier, calmer, I am part of a global community that gives support and companionship, that signals with rainbows and love. I am a queer woman, and I love myself for it.

So when I say I have crushes on women, I don't mean that they'd be an exception to status quo; when I call out people using homophobic, biphobic and transphobic language (and many other slurs), it's not just as an ally; when I attend a pride parade, I am not crashing their party. I am one of them.

I am Bi. I am me. And I'm not going to hide anymore.

What a jagged little pill...

Today I took an enormous step. I talked to my GP about my depression and anxiety, both of which have been a part of my life for a very long time. And I came home with a filled prescription, for antidepressants.

Over the years, I've considered this step numerous times, but always talked myself out of it. I know that some of the reasons behind my symptoms are things that have happened in my life that still affect me in ways that I don't want to admit to myself, let alone to medical professionals. I've convinced myself that I'm better without help, but, as I've come to realise recently, this is another symptom of the depression. It tells me that everyone else is fine, why can't I cope, I must be useless. I know, logically, that everyone is not fine, but that doesn't matter to the voice in my head that tells me I am not worthy, not good enough, weak. Its a horrible voice, when it goes away for brief periods, its like it's never been there and I can go on with life, imagining I will be fine. Another lie, but its hard to want to think about how awful you've felt when you finally have some respite from it.

I'm writing about this for two reasons. For one, its depression awareness week, and if you haven't yet, check out the Blurt Foundation's hashtag: #whatyoudontsee. Those who have tweeted using the hashtag are giving a glimpse into the minds of people suffering from depression. They're extremely moving and so accurate it hurts.

Secondly, I feel like I'm on the cusp of something. Whilst SSRI antidepressants take a few weeks to start working, being about to take the first pill in the packet is momentous for me. It might just be swallowing a tiny capsule of chemicals, but to me it represents taking a step towards not feeling completely awful all the time. It may not, but I owe it to myself to try.

What I have always thought of as a jagged edged pill, one with more bad consequences than helpful effects, may help me to live my life more fully, to feel less stuck, to breathe easier. I hope that it will do all these things, and allow me to see myself as I should: not scared, not trapped, not inhibited by negative thoughts, but someone who has done and can do amazing things without fearing the inside of my head.

Away Laughing on a fast camel...

I'm sitting at the table this afternoon listening to the radio and crying my eyes out. I'm listening to 'Last Word' on radio four, on which Holly Bourne is talking about the wonderful, hilarious author and comedian Louise Rennison who died last weekend. 

Rennison's books, the Georgia Nicholson series, were the subtitles and manual to my teenage years. They were where we would go to look for advice and to forget our problems by reading about a group of girls like us who made up snogging scales and traversed their teens with hilarity. 

The excitement that we felt when she came to our school for world book day (many years ago now) was enough to make us go to the piddley-diddley department right in our seats in the tiny damp school library. We listened to her reading during the day and came back to hear the same talk and same extracts in the evening, so huge was our love for her and her stories. When she read from her work, she brought her characters off the page in an incredible way, a memory which I have always kept with me and which has influenced my own spoken word style. 

She was an incredibly lovely woman, who signed my book with a shocked face thinking I'd said my name was Jas and not Jess, laughing her wonderful laugh and not worrying about sucking in her nose or placing her tongue behind her teeth like her teenage book-self Georgia was always doing. We asked her about the characters' real-life counterparts and what happened to them after the books (at the time there were only 3 or 4 books in the series, which now has 10), looking shocked at the Sex God's choice of life partner and awwww-ing at Jas and Tom. Her performance is still clear in my mind, and I've been calling on it a lot in the last few days. 

When I found out she'd died, I was shocked. I'd just been thinking about her and how important her books were when I was a teenager, and how important they still are. She was one of those people who seemed to go on and on and who would always be there, laughing and writing. She is a huge influence on me, and on my YA writing. Importantly, she showed us a world where girls weren't there to be sophisticated and chilled out, they were people like anyone else. And perhaps most importantly, that women are absolutely hilarious. 

RIP Louise, you'll be missed by many generations of young women, but we'll be able to laugh through the tears by re-reading your wonderful books. 

Achieving a dream...

Last week I spent an evening at a book launch. For a book that I've been published in. And I was so incredibly excited that I was bouncing around for the whole day before it (A day which included a lecture about standards and policy documents - hard to concentrate, I can tell you!).

Backtracking a little bit, in case you've missed it. One of my short stories, Destiny, has been published in For Book's Sake's latest short story anthology, '(Re)Sisters: Stories of rebel girls, revolution, empowerment and escape'. I submitted the story last summer, wanting to push myself more with my writing. Working to a deadline really helps me to actually get stuff done, so I wrote the story, edited in a fury and submitted on the day of the deadline. Then I took a deep breath and tried to forget about it for a while.

Fast forward a few months to me sitting in a car with my mum driving through West Cork to visit friends when an email pops up. My instant thought was 'rejection', because...well because I wanted it not to be so badly.

It wasn't, obviously.

So there I was last week, surround by the Grrls from our wonderful women's writing group and my mum and partner, as well as lots of other awesome people and some of the other authors from the book. And I read from my story, enjoying every second of it. My new ambition, to read my work out loud more often is definitely cemented after last week.

I was high for days on the excitement and celebration of the night, achieving my dream of breaking my way into the world of published writers. It raised an important point for me, about what I can achieve, in fact, what anyone can achieve when they believe in what they're doing even a little bit; because that little bit can grow and expand. If I hadn't taken the chance, I wouldn't be feeling like this now. I wouldn't be writing more regularly and planning novels and short stories left right and centre.

I have discovered another part of my life that my anxiety cannot touch, that I am proud to speak about and not shy or retiring; I don't hedge my sentences with doubt when I speak about my writing, because unlike with so many other things in life, I know I can find solace in something that I love, that I can lose myself in and that I am completely proud to say I am good at.

Onwards and upwards from here: next, the novel!

Click the link to order your copy of (Re)Sisters from For Book's Sake. It's filled with incredible stories by incredible women from around the world, showing the variety and courage of rebel girls, empowering others to tell their stories. 

http://forbookssake.net/store/products/resisters-stories-of-rebel-girls-revolution-empowerment-and-escape/

28 years young

In just over 2 hours I will turn 28. I like to mark these dates by writing, I used to do it in paper journals, counting down the minutes until quarter past midnight, filling the pages with a stream of consciousness. This time I want to mark the changes that have happened since this time last year, the differences that have made the year what it is.

I was in Italy a year ago, working on a ballet show in a beautiful theatre with a star-scattered sky painted on its auditorium room. I ate ice cream in a warm seaside square and drank too much coffee waiting for italian theatre technicians to return from their lunch break. I searched for parmesan cheese in the rain and bought a copy of 'Northern Lights' in Italian with the intention of reading it in simultaneously with the English. I can see it now, sitting on the red shelves with its English counterpart, the bookmark still on the first page, its conjugations too hard for my medium skill.

This year I won't spend tomorrow working. Its reading week and I've given myself tomorrow off. A year later I'm a student studying to get out of my depression-inducing career, trying to kick start a new one. Maybe by next year I'll have started it.

The biggest change from last year is that there will be one card missing, one less greeting that has been a constant for every birthday of my life. In just over a month it will have been a year since my Grandma, Noddy, died, on Christmas Eve. Already the onslaught of Christmas adverts is becoming too much, I know it will only get harder as the month moves on, but now I want to remember the happy times. Last year she gave me a knitting kit: two balls of undyed cream wool, two needles and a pattern. It's beautiful. I haven't started it, not because I don't like it, but because when its finished she won't be here to see it. She taught me how to knit, I'm only starting to be able to fix the problems in my knitting myself, still expecting her to be there to pick up my dropped stitches. I will knit it at some point, but I can't bring myself to do it yet. Perhaps I'll start it on Christmas Eve, start a new tradition.

This past year has had its happiness as well. Its been the year I've finally kick-started my writing, taking two 6 week classes with some wonderful women who have become close friends and extremely supportive friends. At the time of writing, I'm 17,204 words into a novel that I started in earnest at the start of November for NaNoWriMo. I've been a writer (and not just sporadically on here) for as long as I have had a stationary fascination. As a notebook covered with the old body shop animals will attest, this too has been a long standing obsession too. I'll let you know how the novel turns out.

This year I've also made some amazing new friends, four of whom threw me an amazing birthday party at the weekend with delicious food and their wonderful company, and a personalised birthday cocktail named after my favourite musical, 'Into the Woods'. I can't adequately express how amazing it was to have people I've known for relatively little time so quickly become such close friends who mean the world to me.

Tomorrow, my mum and I are heading to see 'Suffragette' and have afternoon tea. Patch and I are going out to dinner at a diner and I'm going to make my favourite chocolate cake. Seems like a pretty good day to me. The last year has handed me some of the hardest times and some of the best, I take forward all I have learned into the next year, and sign off to go and dream of cake!

Yellowbluepink by Ann Veronica Janssens

One of the great luxuries of studying at UCL is its proximity to other wonderful institutions. The British Library, with its regular exhibitions and general book-based allure is just down the road; the British Museum is within walking distance; countless independent bookshops and cafes fill the roads of Bloomsbury, not to mention the museums and galleries which are part of the campus itself. Perhaps my favourite local institution, however, is the Wellcome Collection, where I have spent many  happy hours in exhibitions, and where I have just spent my lunch break enjoying the mesmerising work of Ann Veronica Janssens: Yellowbluepink.

It may seem a simple concept: a white room filled with a fine odourless mist lit by 3 different colours of overhead lights. The effect, however, is incredible. The work itself is exploring the topic of consciousness as part of the States of Mind season and does a brilliant job of focussing ones perception of ones surroundings and calling into question how our experience is understood by our minds. 

Allow me to walk you through it. 

You are given a lanyard and told to only open one door at a time to access the room. You assume this is to contain the haze within and happily comply. Stepping out of the vestibule (once the outer door is safely shut) you emerge into pink. Not a pink room, not a pink object, just pink. You become aware of a foggy sensation within the room which prevents you from seeing anything apart from your own feet, hands, arms...and the overhead lights which at this end are the room are pink. 

You make your way around the edges of the room, cautious at the moment not to bump into anyone and unsure if there are any objects at ground level. As you reach the centre of the wall, the colour around you changes to a yellowish green. You smile: the room is beautiful and is making you calm. You venture further along the wall, towards where you assume the corner of the room is. The colour changes again. You are unsure, until you look up to confirm, whether you are actually moving through space or whether the lights are changing above you. As you reach the corner you are enveloped in blue. 

You lean against the back wall to look back the way you have come. You can see the suggestion of other colours somewhere off in the distance but you are not worried about that. Other people are perceptible as shuffling footfalls and whispered exclamations 'this is so cool!'. They are only seen when they are very nearby and even then they appear ephemeral, so absorbed are you and they by your surroundings, or rather the blank canvas that you find yourself in. 

You go exploring. You discover windows on one side of the gallery, which at seven paces away are just noticeable through the mist, and at eight disappear completely. You go nearer, reach out, try to understand something as ordinary as a window within this new context of seeing.

You walk back towards the yellow. Your perception of the yellow has changed because of the comparison to the blue you have just left; you walk into an orange dawn, watching halos around your eyes shift as you comprehend the change. 

You want to stay for longer. You want to remain in this place that has calmed your brain from its worries and given you peace so close to so much busy-ness. You search for the door and resolve to return as soon as you can. 

The exhibition/experience is running until 3rd January 2016. The lighting design is by Jono Kenyon (Studio ZMA Ltd). Other examples of second person story-telling include the brilliant 'How to become a Writer' by Lorrie Moore (in case you were wondering what I was doing there...!). 

A new beginning...

As some of you will have seen from Facebook, I started a masters degree this week. I enrolled on UCL's MSc in Light and Lighting last Wednesday, lectures started this week and yesterday I picked up one of the course books from the campus branch of Waterstones; I think I can safely say, it's started!

I remember hearing about the course back during my undergraduate degree and thinking, since I was told it was incredibly hard to get into, that I wouldn't even try applying.

6 Years later, with a considerable amount of work experience under my belt and with much more of an idea about what I want to get out of my career, it's perhaps not a surprise that I found myself applying, still nervous about getting in but more confident in my abilities than I have been in a long time.

Some context, perhaps? Over the past year, I've found myself becoming increasingly disillusioned with the world of theatre, especially with regard to pay and opportunity for career advancement. And before you even start to think about saying 'You get out of it what you put in' or similar ludicrous aphorisms that are the mainstays of the most privileged in our industry, I have put 6 years of my life, plus the 3 I spent training, countless 12 hour days, evenings, weekends, spare moments, any time that was available to me, and anything I could think of, into advancing in my chosen field. And although I'm in a better position than I was a year ago, although I can gain recommendations from some very well regarded theatrical colleagues,  I still find it so hard to find work that it feels like a constant struggle rather than a career. Having a producer completely screw me over a month before I was supposed to start a 6 month tour was, frankly, the final straw. There have been a few articles recently about the detrimental effects working in theatre can have on one's mental health, and I am not afraid to tell you that my depression and anxiety hit their worst in 10 years at that time.

I have reached the conclusion that, although it was always my dream to work in theatre, it is not for me. This has been an incredibly hard thing to admit to myself but ever since I acknowledged it I have been happier and able to move forward with other ambitions.

I'm not so naive as to think that having a further degree will necessarily guarantee my future career, but the opportunities afforded by being a student at such a well regarded and supportive university, as well as studying further into the subject that really excites me - Light - can only help.

Every new thing I hear about what I'll be studying, every new person I meet, every opportunity I hear about, makes me certain I have made the right decision.

I will continue to work in Theatre for the time-being, enjoying it all the more because I am closer every day to moving on from a career that has caused my mental health to deteriorate, my faith in myself to dwindle daily and my sense of self-worth to plummet.

I want to mention here that I have met some amazing people and fantastic friends whilst working in theatre, and it is with no reflection on them that I make this decision. Indeed, I have had this conversation with several of them who have expressed the same frustrations with this isolating and all consuming industry. Unfortunately, no amount of wonderful people and laughing in the good times can stop the bad times from being crushing. As much as I have enjoyed parts of my work so far, and I honestly wouldn't trade some of the theatre making experiences I've had for anything, I cannot continue knowing that I'm doing so only so I can stubbornly say 'I didn't give up' when it is much better to say 'I gave it my best, now I'm going to try something else'.

I haven't taken the decision lightly but I know it is the right one for me.