A lot of people have arrived here this week, but I’m thinking this morning about the people who left and the consequences of being totally honest with complete strangers. Should I be sharing this amount of detail about my interests and affiliations? Does it really matter that people are aware of my political and ethical standpoints before they commit to this ‘experience’?
Once upon a time, I’d be told to keep my opinions to myself for no other reason than it was unseemly as a woman to have these things so publicly accessible. If I possessed Arts Council funding, for instance, I could potentially lose it for publicly professing support for particular causes. Some writers find it easier to never publicly commit themselves to any cause. Others become rabid extremists.
In the overlaps between these stances are where the real truths are revealed.
It is a source of continual amazement to me how certain people fail to register the significance of their own actions. Take the various Conservative MP’s this week (including an ex-Prime Minister) who were unable to vote in Local Elections due to them not having valid Photo ID at a polling station, a requirement they themselves voted into law. Did they assume these things would never happen to them? More likely, they were simply too stupid to think through the consequences.
I am painfully aware of how what is written and increasingly what is performed will become all that certain people will ever see as my opinion. I’ve already lived through that experience first as a blogger, and then as a games journalist: verbally abused, threatened and stalked as a result of comments that, at the time, were tame in comparison to what I’m now producing. People fixate on things you never really expect, and too often ignore what matters most to you.
In those spaces important signposts to future content can be located.
The absolute best way to give yourself a reality check as a poet is to go be with other poets you do not know. If you’re smart, you’ll take a notebook too, and come back with ideas that weren’t borrowed from those you saw and listened to. You’ll be making notes on how those moments made you feel, how fresh words and actions stirred within you. Performance is a vital mirror to our own shortcomings.
It is through the surmounting of fear that we alter and develop our output. That reticence to be in a new space, the uncertainty of performance when you cannot guarantee the outcome, plus the realisation that you will stand and fall by your own words is always a decent reality check. Your actions then hold significant consequence. However, they are only a part of a far larger whole.
It matters what you stand for, how you are perceived, and in turn how you react.
Reality is the most complex it has ever been for humanity right now: how you perceive your surroundings, how others shape (and increasingly manipulate) that view, what history has done (or not) to improve it and equalise it for everyone. Being able to state with utter confidence that your perception of it is correct and unblemished is not the win so many people try and make it out to be.
There are good reasons why other people require that level of certainty in their lives. We are watching what happens to everybody in different spaces, over differing time periods and those who can see above and ahead of that are aware of chaos long before anybody else. Knowing what will cause trouble allows you to plan for it. Being prepared grants greater flexibility and awareness.
In the overlap between chaos and order is where you learn most about yourself.
I am proud of who I am, for the first time in my life, and if that means people walk away when they become aware of the details, then so be it. It is important, in order to build an honest reproduction of yourself online, to show people exactly what it is you stand for. You can’t help it if people don’t read that stuff initially and then get upset or annoyed once they finally register the reality. That is on them alone.
This place will continue to be an eclectic mix of whatever happens to fall out of my brain at any given moment. What it will never be is bitterness, arrogance or extremism. There is never an ideal path towards inner peace and enlightenment, only a lifetime search for moments where everything briefly aligns. It is the foolish person who thinks they have all the answers. Life is never perfect all the time.
In the spaces between learning is where the real improvement happens.
"In the spaces between learning is where the real improvement happens." Just as the down time between workouts is where the muscles build back, stronger than they were. The parallels are palpable.