I always Like to share complaint letters, so here’s one I’ve just written to Sky… Dear Stephen, Many thanks for your letter of 29th March 2010, regarding the cancellation of my skyhd TV subscription, account number as per the subject line. I was curious to read the sentence “if there’s anything we can do to [...]
When we’re young – I mean, younger – life can seem so complicated. Who are your friends? Who do you fancy? What should you do at the weekend? And the most scary of all, what the hell are you going to do with your life?
Many years later, life is still pretty complicated, but we establish our routines and develop our coping strategies. While it’s tempting to look back on teenage years as a simpler time, they were bloody difficult. As a young gay man coming to terms with that fact, life can be even more difficult. In a world where you’re bullied for wearing the wrong kind of shoes, differences are not embraced. I spent a great deal of time in my teens pretending, even to myself, that I was something I was not. I was scared beyond all reason that being gay would stand in the way of me having a ‘normal’ life.
I guess as you grow up you learn that there’s no such thing as ‘a normal life’.
I wish I could go back to my 16 year old self and say ‘worry less’, ‘be the person that you feel you are’ and that bullies are just small minded idiots, afraid of difference and stuck within their own pathetic boundaries. I have so much respect for young LGBT people who can stand up to that. It took me a few years, but I got there. And you know, my life is so much better for it. Yeah, I’m not married with 2 kids and a house in suburbia, but I’m good and successful, and I’ve made a person out of myself that the 16 year old me would never dreamed of.
You see, the choices we make in our youth will form us, and follow us for the rest of our lives. Its the most important time to be strong, but its the most difficult time to do it, sometimes with the least support. I have no hesitation in saying that there were times I wanted to give up. I never would, but that’s more about a lack of bravery than a lack of will. In truth, without realising it, I had an amazing support network – a great family and great friends. I wish everyone had the same.
For reasons of my generally pessimistic nature, and probably my fears of my own sexuality, I was always unable to consider my life beyond the age of 30. I found it really hard to contemplate the possibility of success, love and most of all acceptance.
I had a friend who was much the same. He often cruelly, and always inarticulately helped me to come to terms with myself. To my eternal regret, I was never able to help him come to terms with himself, and when my heart became too unsalvageably tangled in him, I had to walk away and stop trying. He was me. But he was the me that could never really accept what his brain was telling him.
In the lazy sunsets, and beer fuelled evenings we had many immature ponderings. Perhaps one I now remember most significantly was a talk about living fast and dying young. A vile cliché. Well I’ve never lived that fast to be honest, but I have almost made the magical 30. Sadly, he never will.
It’s really important to always remember – it gets better. Ask for help, because there’s always always someone to help. And perhaps above all, with everything in this world, be the person you are.
Don’t just dream it. Be it.
You may have heard of the “It gets better” project - In their words - it sets about to provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens by letting them know that “It Gets Better.” It’s well worth a visit to their site.
Dec 052011
Yesterday, in the space of a day, I managed to start and near enough finish my Christmas shopping. As I write this I sit in Starbucks, Westfield White City not finishing the rest of it.
Of course Christmas Shopping on a weekend in December is, ostensibly, an obstacle course. First, you must swerve passed the bearded socialists, profiting unmitigated doom. Next you must take the long route to avoid the embarrassed looking schoolchildren corralled by a prozac-uppered school teacher into singing “Santa Claus is coming to town”. Then, and I offer you this advice as a friend, if you reach the sports shop blasting from its doors a seemingly random collection of bass-y sounds loosely veiled as music, turn back at all costs. You won’t like what you see inside. You won’t like it at all.
Of course, to prevent your passage around the obstacle course you have the crowds. A meandering heard of apparently brainless slow-walkers, hindering direct passage to anywhere you might want to go. Where the hell do all these people come from? In my opinion, to mitigate the force of the crowds, Christmas shopping is best completed following an unhealthy quantity of mulled wine.
In the midst of the festive obstacle course there’s usually the gripping panic of the “What am I going to buy them” reflex. It’s the thought that counts, but it’s not really is it? What counts is the gifts appropriateness, size and relative sparkliness. And in the case of some of my close friends I don’t only mean sparkliness metaphorically.
And then, like a revelation the idea comes – you know the perfect gift. Relief, delight and joy. You don’t care how much it costs – it is what you must get. So you set about to purchase it.
Can you then find the damn thing? No. You battle the obstacle course, apparently always against the flow of people traffic, to go in every shop from one side of the city to the other. The simplest of items evades you. Panic renewed you resort to Amazon, not available, or must be shipped from a small island off the coast of Western Africa, arriving in the third week of February. I like to refer to this as “The simple present idea curse.” You just know that in January every single shop in the country will have the item in it’s window, reminding you of the 2 trains, 3 buses and a boat you had to get to buy the thing in December.
I’m not going to patronise you by saying Christmas is an over-commercialised waste of money (which it kind of is I guess, blah, blah, blah, Scrooge, Humbug etc.) I actually genuinely think it quite nice that once a year we show our appreciation to our friends and loved ones by buying them a (sparkly) token of your affection. I just don’t really enjoy the process of getting there, unless of course buffered by friends, festive food and fine booze. Mainly fine booze.
This year, I learnt a Christmas trick: no forward planning, a visit to John Lewis and TK Maxx (but don’t tell my friends the TK Maxx bit) and a congratulatory glass of Prosecco afterwards. You can probably see an alcohol-related theme emerging from my Christmas shopping. Finally I’m feeling slightly festive.
I wish you all the best with your Christmas shopping. Season’s Greetings, and please leave your excessively sparkly gifts for me under the tree.
Jul 222011
“Do you believe in fate?”
I mean what kind of question is that for a rainy Wednesday morning? I very much make it my aim to not get into a contentious subject before at least my third caffeinated beverage of the day.
“Not really.” I reluctantly retorted, hoping that my non-verbal signals, which are about as subtle as a neon elephant, were heeded. There was a long and most appealing pause. I sipped slowly on the brain awakening coffee as I flicked through messages on the blackberry, desperately avoiding question-welcoming eye-contact.
“So, no then?”
I sighed. I’ve never felt very comfortable with the concept of fate. To me, the belief that everything is mapped out for you makes life seem rather futile. In fact, it makes me want to go to bed and stay there indefinitely. Particularly half-way through coffee number one on a rainy Wednesday morning.
As a species, we do seem to have trouble accepting things we can’t explain. Fate and religion seem to be symptoms of this shared grievance. I’m not saying these things can’t or don’t exist of course (I always like to remain slightly non-committal on the higher concepts) – but it is rather neat to pin the unexplainable on some unseen force that can neither be proven nor
disproven.
The only higher concept we seem to allow ourselves to accept is love.
Love is a disastrously over-used term, totally unacceptable to describe an overpowering feeling for which there is no name. It once crushed me, and now it makes me rise again. I have never felt that I’m at my best without that perfect someone to share my life with, and I’m well aware that’s a deeply disturbing character fault in myself. But that is me.
The answer to the question I was asked is “No”.
There is no fate, just the fates we make for ourselves from the endless choices – and they are choices – that we make every day. To put everything down to some pre-planned path is lazy. We fall down, and we pick ourselves up, that’s just what life is.
I once flippantly described the PR profession as “champagne and misdirection” much to the disgust of my many PR related friends. When you think about it though, isn’t it also a pretty good metaphor for life?
In a long passed memory, for reasons which need no great explanation here, this weekend was to have been very different. That’s not a bad thing, or a good thing. It’s a fact. Things often don’t work out how we plan them to.
Sometimes, we forget who we are. In a haze of misdirection from our own experiences we get lost. The thing is though, it’s not wrong to get upset. It’s not wrong to think about the past, we all have one and it’s what makes us who we are – not fate. Sometimes though, if you’re lucky and make the right choices, against all the odds, an unexplainable combination of factors come together. Something amazing comes along you let down your defences and life and love can begin again.
Stop thinking. Start dreaming. Be who you want to be. And never stop drinking champagne.
May 092011
Every day, I put my office bin in the place where I want it and every morning the cleaner comes, empties it and puts it where she wants it. The silent war of the bin has carried on for many years with no hope of cease-fire until, unexpectedly, last week I did something uncharacteristically rational – I left the damn thing where it was. In a stroke, the war was over. I was defeated.
This act of outrageous defeatism on my part stems from my hard-learnt but simple realisation in recent times that there are some battles you just can’t win, and moreover, there are some battles that aren’t even worth fighting. For someone as obstinate and opinionated as me, that is quite a realisation. While that might seem simple, obvious even, I can’t help but think that if a few more people had that realisation a fair few wars might be spared. Should I write to someone and let them know?
It’s curious that a foolish thing such as the location of a bin can cause so much irritation, maybe that says more about me than anything else, but it didn’t half work me up when I walked into my office every morning. Now I have formally signed my instrument of surrender, I no longer walk in and get irritated. The bin can be wherever the hell she wants it to be. I am liberated.
Odd that – you can sometimes be happier with something you didn’t think you wanted than you can by fighting to get what you thought you did want.
It’s always good to reflect on a metaphorical thunder storm and know that we can learn more about ourselves, our friends and the world around us in one bad day than we can in a hundred good days. As Oscar Wilde, or someone similar, once said – it is from our mistakes, not our successes that we move forwards. In my opinion that is excellent news, as I have made a fair few. I must be moving at quite a pace.
The sad thing about life is that you have to go through a hundred battles to understand when the right time to walk away is. But then sometimes thats the easy bit, sometimes it’s even more difficult to have the wisdom to know when is the right time to stay and fight.
End of the line. All Change.Where did 2010 go? OK, that’s a bit of a cliché, but it really doesn’t seem like 12 months ago that I was lamenting the passing of 2009. It’s fair to say, and perhaps even an understatement, that I’m not ending 2010 in any way close to how I imagined that I would at the [...] |
 Thanksgiving, family and a broken umbrellaI’m not good at taking holidays. In fact I’m terrible. I’d like to say this was due to some mammoth commitment to work, which I guess (in at least as far as being a bit of a workaholic) it is, but more importantly I think the whole damn thing can be a bloody hassle. Nevertheless, [...] |
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 Don’t look too good, nor talk too wiseWhen someone is badly dressed, i mean really badly dressed, it can say an awful lot about them. I wonder if the same thing can be said of people who are well dressed, maybe, but I suspect not. But then there’s a difference between being well dressed and ‘too well dressed’. Fashion is a terrible [...] |
Ashes and DustSomebody suggested that I put some of my old, unused song lyrics on here, so here we go with a pretty old one… You can’t decide, I can’t let go, It’s all breaking down And we both know You’re pushing it on, I’m pushing it back We’re pushing into places we both know we can’t [...] |
 CrazyDepending on which statistics you look at, somewhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 6 people will suffer a serious mental health condition at some point in their lives. The effects of mental illness are common and widespread, and yet there is still so much stigma and misinformation attached to it. Why? Perhaps its [...] |
