Category Archives: Being serious

Jan 18 2013

30 Before 30: #1 Register with the Anthony Nolan trust

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I thought I should give an update as to where I am with my 30 Before 30 list because I’ve actually ticked something off. And it’s an important one too. In fact, when I first wrote the list, I bumped this one up to the top and promised myself that whatever happened, I would complete this thing first.

For various reasons, I’ve been going to register with the Anthony Nolan trust for a long while. But it quickly became one of those things that I just never got around to doing. The Anthony Nolan trust is a charity supporting people with blood cancer who need stem cell or bone marrow transplants. Being on the register means that the folks at Anthony Nolan can match the donors on their register with people who need a transplant and y’know, save more lives. But they always need more people. More people, under the age of 30, to register as a donor.

There are lots of myths surrounding bone marrow transplant: that the process involves having a limb snapped off so that the bone marrow can be scooped out and it’s THE MOST PAINFUL THING EVER, and you might not ever recover from the procedure.

That might be a bit of an exaggeration – except for the “IT’S THE MOST PAINFUL THING EVER” bit on the end, because the second you mention bone marrow transplant, that’s usually the first thing people say after screwing their face up. Usually people who probably know nothing about it but heard somebody else say that once, and so they feel they should pass the information on.

If you’re a regular(ish) reader of this blog, or if you’re someone who knows me, you’ll be roughly aware that I’m not a very brave or confident person. Hearing that the charitable thing I wanted to do was possibly THE MOST PAINFUL THING EVER was, admittedly, a little off-putting.

Alongside my complete lack of confidence are feelings of guilt. So you can imagine how conflicted I was feeling having already half-decided that I was going to register and at the same time being terrified about it being the most painful thing ever. To illustrate my point, it all looks a little something like this:Inner Conflict

I went round and round in circles for a long while until eventually, I told myself to stop toying with the idea. I was either definitely going to register or I definitely wasn’t. So I went on to the Anthony Nolan site and did the research for myself (which included watching this little animation all about what’s involved in the donation process). After spending a good couple of hours clicking through the site, my mind was made up.

I realised I had to do it. And what’s more, I wanted to. Even though I don’t like hospitals, and I have a low pain threshold, and I don’t like blood or operations and I’m incredibly squeamish. I shrugged all that off and filled in the form, because the only thing worse than registering after everything I’d learned about the process would be to not register.

My stem cells could be used to help someone whose own immune system is failing. Those stem cells could potentially save someone’s life, and what I realised was that however painful or uncomfortable the donation process was – it could save the life of someone who had been through far, far worse.

So before Christmas, I registered. Last week I got my official donor card.

Huzzah!

If I only did one thing on my list before I turned 30, it would most definitely be this one.

Nov 27 2012

30 Things to do before I’m 30

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This blog post has been in the works for quite a while (about 4 months). I’ve come close to posting it so many times and at the last moment, talked myself out of it again. Last week some friends on Twitter were talking about the 101 in 1001 lists thingy and I decided that it was time to post this. It’s still taken me another week to overcome inertia, so I’m posting it now before I give myself the opportunity to back out again. Apologies for any typos, I’m just sick of reading this over and over and then deciding not to post it. This is a long one btw, so grab a cup of tea and pull up a chair… Jo.

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve been a little internet-absent recently. Normally when this happens I come back with some blog post or other plagued with apologies and excuses. This time it’s different (and no, it’s not because I had to go to rehab following my Snickers addiction).

A few months ago I realised that I am now, officially, in my late twenties. I am 28 and a half (ish) years old. That means that in a year and half (ish) I’m going to be 30. I know that’s not an overly distressing thing in itself, but it prompted me to think about my twenties and wonder what, if anything, I have been doing with my life so far.

I started to think about the things I have done, but mostly, I thought about all the things I haven’t and I wondered why that might be.

Let’s go back to when I was about 6 or 7 years old. At this point in my life all of my friends had birthday parties at a place called The Big Buddy Bear Club which was a massive play area (ball pools, slides, tunnels, rope ladders etc.). The Big Buddy Bear Club was the place to have birthday parties. It was excessively good fun, for most kids.

I’m sure that given the amount of times I actually went to The Big Buddy Bear Club I probably had fun at least once, but all I remember is that I once got stuck in a tunnel and I found it very scary and upsetting.

I was crawling through a tunnel which had a gap in it. To cross the gap, I had to crawl across a rope bridge. As I approached the rope bridge I stopped. I wasn’t keen on crossing the rope bridge – it just didn’t feel safe. My gut instinct told me to go back the way I came, but there were kids behind me and I was too shy/scared/socially awkward to ask if I could crawl past them so I closed my eyes and hurriedly crawled across the bridge before pulling into a side tunnel and bursting into tears.

Even though I didn’t fall, and the rope bridge didn’t disappear beneath me, and nothing bad happened at all, I couldn’t bring myself to continue further down the tunnel. And I couldn’t bring myself to go back across the rope bridge, either. Supposedly, facing your fears means you overcome them. For me, it merely confirmed that I definitely found crawling across a rope bridge incredibly scary and that I didn’t want to do it again.

And so I sat there in the tunnel and cried. I cried about being too scared to go forwards and too scared to go backwards. All because of a totally non-threatening rope bridge especially designed for children of my age, height and weight to crawl across.

As I sat there sobbing loads of other kids crawled by. Some would give me a quizzical look before going on their way, others didn’t notice me.  Once again, being incredibly shy, I was too scared to ask one of them to help me get out of the tunnel. So I just sat there and all I could think about was how everyone in The Big Buddy Bear Club was having masses of fun except me. And maybe some other kid who was throwing up in the ball pool or something.

Eventually, after I can’t even remember how long, some girl I didn’t know saw me crying and helped me back across the rope bridge and back to where lot’s of extremely bored-looking parents were sitting on a bench drinking coffee and waiting for the party to be over. I sat with the bored parents until the end of the party, watching all the other kids playing and having ridiculous amounts of fun. I wanted to go back, but I told myself not to. It just wasn’t worth it, what if I got stuck somewhere else? What if next time, no one found me and I’d just get left there?

This is pretty much the story of my life. I’m scared of everything. When I face something I find scary I don’t conquer my fear, I simply reinforce the fact that, yes, I really do find that thing scary.

This is, apparently, how I roll. I seem to fear things I’m perfectly capable of doing, just in case something terrible happens. And so I sit on the side, crying, too scared to go forwards and hoping that, eventually, someone much more confident than I am will find me and I can go home.

Whenever I have taken ‘risks’ (and I mean that in the broadest possible sense of the term) I feel like things work out badly, and I regret taking that risk… And then that puts me off ever taking any other sort of risk or impulsive action ever again… Ever.

So now I ring-fence myself into ‘playing it safe’ that is: avoiding all the things that scare me, not making any decisions, and hoping that maybe one day everything will just work out for the best and I’ll be happy. I stop myself from making any decisions just in case I make a bad one that might make me unhappy.

So here I am. Nearly 30 and well and truly fenced into my comfort zone. This doesn’t result in a particularly satisfying life.

When I started thinking about what I have done this past decade, I realised that I’ve moved house more times than I care to remember, eaten a lot of pizza and watched a lot of films. I also passed my driving test, but I’m too scared to actually drive a car. And I wrote a novel… with no story.

I’ve realised that a combination of life anxiety and an unrelenting fear of failure has left me in this situation. I can either shrug my shoulders to it all and say that this is just the way I am, or I could do something (even if it’s a fairly small thing) to change.

In the interests of turning 30 and knowing that I’m heading in the right direction (or at the very least, be safe in the knowledge that I did more than move house and eat pizza) I’ve decided to make a change.

I started making a list of things I wanted to do before I’m 30. It’s kind of like a bucket list – minus  the  swimming-with-dolphins cliché and having death as the deadline. There are only 30 things on my list, but some of them might take me a while to complete. Others are small things that I’ve wanted to do for while but never got around to doing them – or simply because it’s easier not to bother.

I’m sharing this with you, Internet, to force myself to actually do the things on this list instead of flaking out like I normally do.

And I figured that since I’m sharing my list with the internet, I may as well write about each of them here. I foresee most of these things going spectacularly wrong (all part of the fun/learning curve, right?), and I’m more than happy to share those experiences for your amusement (you’re welcome).

Still reading? Excellent. Without further ado, here’s the list:

30 before 30 – The List

1. Join the Anthony Nolan register.

2. Have something (anything) published and be paid for it.

3. Begin to pay off my student debt.

4. Do volunteer work.

5. Be a confident driver (i.e. not have a panic attack when facing the prospect of getting in the car).

6. Write a new novel and complete my MA.

7. Learn how to play chess.

8. Take a yoga or meditation class.

9. Eat lobster.

10. Go ice-skating/sledging.

11. Learn a bit of Spanish.

12. Host a dinner party.

13. Walk the Three Peaks.

14. Try out for a roller derby

15. Have a party with a bouncy castle.

16. Master using WordPress

17. Go to a music festival.

18. Watch the films I haven’t watched (list to follow).

19. Go out for brunch.

20. Go to a drive-in movie.

21. Visit Edinburgh.

22. Do all the touristy bits of London you’re supposed to do when you’re a tourist.

23. Do a pub crawl.

24. Knit a scarf.

25. Do all the things I was too scared to do as a child (list to follow).

26. Own a round wicker chair.

27. Be a vegetarian for a week (or maybe a month).

28. Go on a random trip without planning any of it.

29. Stay up for 24 hours.

30. Work in the field for which I received my degree.

There’s a reason for why each of these things went onto the list, but I’ll explain each when I blog about them (because otherwise, this is going to be the longest blog post ever).

Apr 23 2012

How Compliments Make Me Feel Awkward (and how I keep thinking my brain operates like Windows)…

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This isn’t a real post, it’s half a post. It’s another one I redrafted several times, but I kept lapsing into serious rants about self-image. In short, this is really just a follow-up to the previous post, about getting a compliment during a note passing incident with a strange man, and feeling very anxious about a post I had written (about me feeling anxious about writing).

Firstly, I can’t cope with compliments. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t really know how to react. My brain gets a Windows error. Then I freeze up. Then this happens:

It’s really hard being me. And having a brain that runs on Windows XP.

I also said, y’know, that no one had ever said… that  particular thing to me before. Which, wasn’t strictly true. My point was, it sounded completely alien. Seriously, like klingon or something. It’s not a word I would use to describe myself… I mean, not that many people would (except maybe narcissists. And Christina Aguilera), but in my case it really clashes with my haphazard personality. I spend my days sitting at my desk in joggers or lurking in coffee shops wearing ripped jeans and Chuck Taylors with gaping holes in them. This reality makes compliments like that hard to take. Also, I have an extensive catalogue of disparaging comments that stretches waaaaay back into those dark days of ‘high school’, which contribute to my general deflection of compliments.

I’m beginning to wonder if insults stock-pile in the psyche. Maybe they’re like a worm virus: one negative comment sinks in, replicates itself and then forwards itself to… everyone in your address book… (Okay, maybe I didn’t think this metaphor through properly). What I’m trying to say is, maybe the damage control of negative comments is difficult to manage – much like that of a worm virus. You think you’ve sorted the problem and then months later, it will reappear and wreak havoc all over again and you become super-infected by negativity. Unless, of course, your psyche runs on Mac OS X.

In which case, my psyche got infected during my teens. Puberty wasn’t kind to me. My nose went from being one of those cute-button-noses to looking like it was broken (but it wasn’t). In addition, I had goofy teeth and it was only when puberty hit that I got landed with the hellish years of orthodontic treatment. My skin mutated into hideousness and my eyebrows, for some reason, grew seriously out of control (they rivalled Madonna’s in the 80s). In a time before GHD straighteners, my hair transformed from long, blonde adorableness to a frizz-tastic, static nightmare, which seemed to take on a life of its own – reaching forth from my head and attaching itself to the polyester v-neck jumpers worn by everybody in the school. On top of this uncomfortable set of changes, I was at an age where suddenly fashion and style were important. And I didn’t have a clue about either (I still don’t).

Here’s a run-down of a few high school incidents that readily spring to mind:

  • One day, a popular girl marched up to me (popular entourage in tow) and asked me HOW ON EARTH I could wear blue socks with black shoes. I was stumped for a response, mainly because I hadn’t even realised the error of my ways. Looking down at my shoes,  I flushed with red trying to think of something to say. Eventually, I uttered: ‘It’s a free country…’ a popular response in the mid-nineties as it was applicable to almost anything. Sadly, its applicability did not stop it from being super-lame. The girl snarled and stomped away with a herd of her fashioncentric friends, as if my mismatching socks and shoes had somehow been a personal attack on her.

 

  • Once, during an English class, we had to play a description game, where someone had to guess which person in the class was being described to them. My classmates described me as: ‘She’s got blonde hair, and big teeth’. Bingo. The boy who was guessing (who I also happened to have a pretty big crush on, at the time) instantly pointed (that’s right pointed, without actually saying anything) at the girl in the back corner. Me. Blondie big teeth.

 

  • In a drama class, we had to improvise an argument with another person. My drama teacher reiterated (several times) that the argument was to be purely fictitious and we were not to make personal digs at each other. My partner shrugged at me and murmured: ‘You got a big nose’. AND THEN DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING ELSE.

 

  • A boy I was going out with, broke up with me because every time he saw me, it made him feel physically sick. (True story).

It’s a fact of life that high school is hell for the under-confident.  I think the fourteen-year-old me is the one who hears compliments, and they’re just so hard to believe in and amongst the hundreds of big nose/big hair/big teeth insults. I feel like I’m being lied to. This is partially due to my school days, but mainly down to watching way too many American high school movies in which the “unattractive” girl is dated by a cool jock in order to win a bet.

For the record, I still don’t understand fashion. And sometimes I still wear inappropriately coloured socks with black shoes. Sometimes I wear socks that don’t even match each other. With holes in them (take that, girl from high school!). Sometimes, I’ll get up and I won’t even change out of my pyjamas – which are fleecy and pink and covered in little cakes. Sure, you can call me beautiful but you haven’t seen me eat cold, leftover bolognaise direct from the fridge. At four in the afternoon. Wearing fleecy pink cake pyjamas. Using only my hands (take that, boy I used to go out with!).

This post doesn’t really have any sort of conclusion. Except that high school was hell, and compliments make me uncomfortable.  But I think I said that at the beginning.

So, moving on… Here’s a little follow up about my anxious feelings of writerliness (that’s totally a word). A few things have happened over this past week to settle the nerves. One of them was watching Elizabeth Gilbert talk about creativity, which I found kind of beautiful (take that, compliment guy with red biro!) and inspiring.

Anyway, next time, a proper post. Promise.

Feb 18 2012

Why my attempts at being confident make me feel like a knobhead

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I’ve become convinced that my crippling lack of confidence is becoming a bit of a hindrance.  You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve been told to be more confident (at least 9000 times a day). It’s something that has plagued me forever. Even as a kid, my school reports all said the same thing ‘needs more confidence’ as though they had been rubber stamped by every teacher, for every subject, for every year until I left. I’m now almost convinced that if I was more confident, I might kick-ass (but probably not).

Compared to how I used to be, I think I am pretty confident these days. At one point I was too scared to go out for a meal or drink in a bar, because the prospect of actually having to order food or drink from another person was completely terrifying. In the past few years there have been various little confidence hurdles I’ve (somehow) managed to get over, but others are a little trickier. What’s frustrating, is the way that people tell me to ‘just be more confident’ as if a) I’d never realised that before and b) there’s some kind of switch inside that just needs flicking on – releasing some kind of previously untapped super-confidence resource that’s just been lying dormant until now. I don’t think that switch exists, or if it does, it’s faulty and I keep flicking it on and off out of boredom. I don’t know how to be more confident and (hand on heart) I have tried.

The thing is, whenever I attempt to be more confident, I get stuck in an endless loop, because I hate cocky, over-confident knobheads. While I want to be confident, I don’t want to be a knobhead, and  it is a scientific fact that there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance:

super fine line

My problem (as with everything) is I try too hard. Whenever I attempt to be confident, I accidentally launch myself over that fine line, and end up talking like a cocky-know-it-all. Afterwards, I tend to despise myself for being a knobhead and thus, remind myself why it’s much better to just keep quiet and not speak at all. But then, not speaking at all reverts me back to my coy little ways, which in turn makes me feel like I’m missing out… It’s a vicious cycle. No. Really – here’s a diagram to prove the theory:

vicious cycle

A perfect example of a vicious cycle – it’s super vicious. You just have to imagine it having really sharp teeth.

So, anyway, vicious cycle, endless loop whatever you want to call it – I can’t escape it. I’m pretty sure most other people manage to go through their daily lives without lurching from crippling shyness to cocky-knobheadedness, and if you are one of those people, then I feel I desperately need to know your secret. My question is: how do you become confident without becoming a knobhead?

PS. I’m not sure how you spell knobhead. ‘Knobhead’ and ‘nobhead’ are apparently both acceptable. I think.

Jan 18 2012

Stop SOPA and PIPA

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I know, SOPA and PIPA sound like dog names – which is confusing because today, people all over the internet are yelling ‘STOP SOPA and PIPA!’ and it makes me think ‘Why, what did they do? Did dogs kill the internet or something?’

No. Dogs did not kill the internet. It’s something much, much worse (and dogs are pretty bad, right?)

Today, lots and lots of websites (including the massive Wikipedia) have closed their virtual doors in protest of proposed U.S legislation which threaten the internet as we know it today – SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA (Protect IP Act).

This affects user-generated content around the world, so please take a moment to read up on the subject. Those good folks over at WordPress.org  (who made the software I use to create this blog) have put together an informative video. Please go there now to find out more about how this legislation will affect the internet. Thanks.

UPDATE: Okay, so now the protests are over, WordPress has returned to normal and I can’t find their super-awesome explainy video anywhere. So instead, how about checking out The Oatmeal’s animated GIF to find out more about SOPA/PIPA… Clickity Click

Jul 14 2011

And then from nowhere, you feel like smashing things…

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This isn’t quite the sneaky hate spiral, the one which Allie Brosh describes so brilliantly on Hyperbole and a Half. This is something else. Entirely.

In recent years I’d say that I’ve managed to knock a lot of my self-loathy behaviour on the head. But every now and again, I wake up feeling like I am the worst person to ever have existed. I’m terrible and everyone knows it etc.

Sometimes I can even wake up feeling fine, happy almost, and then at some point in the day lurch frantically into this evil state of unadulterated rage.

What’s a classic trait of this state of mind is that I can’t say what it is that’s making me feel so terrible. I feel bad, and I have no explanation as to why that is. Which, in itself, makes me feel more upset.

Generally, I try to hide feelings crappiness, but even a minor set back (in any capacity) seems to open a floodgate of anger fuelled by a back-catalogue of negative thoughts from my life so far. It looks a little something like this:

Stage 1 – A Minor Setback:

wonderwhyspreadsheetwontprint
Stage 2 – Irrational Feelings of Anger and Rage:

why printers suck

 

who do printers think they are

 

printing capabilities

 

refuse spreadsheet

Stage 3 – Self-Loathing:

not printers fault

 

dont understand

 

lol

Stage 4 – Crying:

Er… No illustration needed.

 

When I’m not falling out with printers or other bits of technology, I’m punishing myself for other minor mishaps. The other night for example, I found a tasty looking recipe (complete with mouth-watering picture next to it) in a book and decided to give it a go. Despite my best efforts, however, the end result did not, by any means, mirror the appetising delights in the picture. Immediately after sitting down to consume it I found myself yelling "THIS FOOD IS DOGSHIT" because honestly, that’s what it looked like.

Worse still, whenever I’m in a total funk this way, people seem to collect around me, more so than usual. They’re everywhere – popping up left and right with their smiles and polite conversations and telephone calls. And I know it isn’t them, it’s me being angry. I know that they’re merely existing, and I’m merely existing and we’re all just existing together. But their existence somehow fuels my feelings of irritability. Therefore, anyone who even so much takes an inhalation of breath within a five mile radius of where I am, is subject to endless sighs, tuts and aggressive rolls of the eyes by yours truly.

Ironically, less than a week prior to my stonking rage festival, I had attended a training course on building confidence and learning the power of positive thinking. I really felt as though I was feeling the benefits too, until the end of the week rapidly transformed into the beginning of the week and for whatever reason, I woke up feeling like a failure and hated everything.

Sometimes, to clear up these weird feelings that seem to appear from nowhere, I just need a good cry, or a long sleep or a massive piece of cake. Eventually my brain shifts back into gear and all the hating flows back into whatever dark abyss it came out of in the first place.

Afterwards, when I’m wringing out my pillows, and wiping the smears of chocolate cake off my bed sheets, I feel a quite stupid about it all. I have this feeling of  ‘Seriously, what was I so upset about?’ and I still can’t really figure it out. And while I’m being honest, I also still feel a bit of resentment towards printers.

Jul 5 2011

How TV Ruined My Life…

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It’s coming up to three weeks since I last wrote a blog post, and I should warn you that by no means, will this post make up for it.

 

If you haven’t closed your web browser, or navigated yourself elsewhere and you’re still reading this, then you should probably reconsider. I’ll give you a moment (you’re welcome).

 

Still here? You crazy. Here’s today’s post:

 

Despite all my fantastically amazing intentions to write as much as possible, sometimes I quickly admit defeat and other life type stuff appears and completely destroys my writing schedule (suggesting I even have one). It isn’t long before it’s been a week since I last wrote, then two weeks and then three. Eventually, once things have simmered down, I know I’ll have to get back on the horse.  And getting back on the writing horse is always a bit of a pisser.

I know this. I know this fact so well I torture myself with it while I’m loafing on the sofa watching repeat episodes of Friends for the 8 millionth time. I am so overly aware of this fact, that I’ve already written a post about it. Twice.

But after a slog in the office or a weekend plagued with late nights and hangovers (that’s right, I get out), I’ll happily opt for slumming it on the sofa in my pants over writing a blog post about not writing because I’ve been at karaoke parties, torturing people I’ve never met before by shouting my way through Prince’s 1999 (seriously, no matter how much you think you know this song, you don’t. I learned the hard way).

Don’t get me wrong, it’s hard to justify that watching TV as a valid reason not to do any writing. It’s even harder to justify watching repeat episodes of Friends, which I’ve seen a buhzillion times, and have on DVD instead of writing, but I still do it. And just when I start to feel guilty about wasting my life away watching shows I practically know line for line, I start watching something else instead, something really crappy, like The Big Bang Theory, which I don’t even like. Eventually, guilt will set in and my psyche starts to use all this TV watching apathy as ammo against me and I’ll start asking myself why I’m  watching shows I’ve already seen/don’t even enjoy instead of writing.

To minimize the guilt, and justify TV watching further, I’ve been asking people to suggest other shows (ones I haven’t seen, and might enjoy more than The Big Bang Theory) that I can watch instead. Therefore, I can justify not writing, because I’m relaxing.

Seeing as words are failing me right now, here’s a diagram of what goes on in my head.

Writing not going to happen

When other life stuff starts happening all over the place, and you’re trying to juggle work and a suddenly very hectic social schedule (I know, I can’t believe it either) alongside all the usual crappy things (like laundry and ironing and visiting parents and going to the supermarket and crying at your bank balance), collapsing in front of the TV to watch, well, anything is more appealing than shifting your brain up a gear and getting creative and bashing out a blog post or another chapter in your sprawling novel that is taking forever to complete.

Underneath it all, I know this isn’t really a valid excuse. I know that really, I’ve given in to laziness. I know that even if I just did five minutes of writing a day, it would be better than not writing at all and merely spending hours snarling at how crap The Big Bang Theory is.

But I also know (or at least hope) that I’m not completely alone in this. So, when you’re other life stuff gets hectic, do you still make time to write? How do you discipline yourself, or do you also resign yourself to watching The Big Bang Theory even though it’s rubbish?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address.