Horrifying

When I was younger (particularly in my teens) I used to have trouble with what I think of as "waking nightmares". Just before I'd properly fall asleep, when your senses are getting all fuzzy and making nonsense, I'd get flashes of images that were the sort of thing you'd see in a horror film. They'd startle me awake, and give me the heebie jeebies, and I'd struggle to calm down enough to try going back to sleep.

As someone who has had trouble sleeping since forever, this didn't help.

They were often things I'd actually seen in an ad for a horror film or on the cover of a DVD case or book. Sometimes they were new and exciting combinations of these things. I think, for some reason, my brain just decided to process anxiety and/or depression by showing me things I found unsettling - things I hadn't wanted to see in the first place, and now wished I could unsee because I was getting to see them again and again - quite involuntarily.

You know how, when you have a cut somewhere on your ankle, you suddenly keep kicking that spot on your ankle whenever you walk even though you never do otherwise? It was a bit like that.

And I've always had this weird thing happen with my sight and hearing when I'm overtired (which is quite a lot of the time, really). I'll see movement in the far reaches of my peripheral vision that isn't there when I turn my head to look at it, and I often hear sounds I can't pinpoint. Add that to the fact that I grew up in a Christian denomination that believes in demons, and that demons try to manipulate you...

Well, let's just say I started being completely terrified by the threat of being terrified. I needed to sleep in a room that was controlled enough for me to keep tabs on everything, so I could tell myself what every shadow and sound was, and I'd still feel on edge. I still hate sleeping in a room where you can see your reflection in a mirror (that lovely half awake state you get into when you're just conscious enough to catch sight of something moving in the mirror, but not quite awake enough to realise it's *you*). I'm not fond of being in a dark room with a mirror in it, in general. Those things are just inherently disturbing.

And I guess, even though I'm now much better at shaking myself out of the "creeped out" zone that I used to get in back then, I'm still a little bit on edge about things like this. I still have ideas and images I didn't particularly want in my head in the first place come back and visit me when I'm trying to relax.

This is one of the reasons why I hate clicking on "hey, you should see this!" links that have no indication of what they are or what I'm going to see. Things that other people don't even notice (especially if they often watch the kind of things I avoid watching, like horror or violent films) can just leave me feeling creeped out or depressed for days.

I think people who know me well tend to share lighter, brighter things with me, because they know I don't like the dark stuff, but newer friends and acquaintances are always a bit of a minefield.

And I'm not sure it's necessarily "Horror" (as we think of it in terms of a genre) that does it for me so much as cruelty. I can read old-school ghost stories by the likes of Poe or James without drama. Zombies chasing people to eat their brains or vampires trying to seduce people before draining them dry? I can take it or leave it, depending on how it has been executed. But something where someone is being hurt or disfigured (by natural or supernatural beings)? Or forced by demonic powers to hurt or disfigure themselves? Nope. Nope nope nope.

And anything with really strong, visceral imagery is a big "no thank you!"

There's a theory (in a couple of schools of Buddhism, and probably some other faiths as well) that heaven and hell are where your head is at. When you are feeling swamped by negative and dark thoughts, then you start to spiral into a hellish state. I also think that what you put into your head through the media and images you consume contribute to this. How can you feel bright and happy when you are weighing yourself down with things dark and cruel? 

Or, as the old saying goes "garbage in, garbage out"... only the garbage tends to stick around for a while and mess up the place, in my experience. 

St Paul's advice to the Philippians - to find things that are lovely and admirable to dwell on - is sort of a basic survival tactic for me. I think lovely and admirable things come in all sorts of forms (often in genres that are looked down on as much as those that seem "nice" on the surface), but the one thing they have in common is they make you feel lighter after encountering them, not weighed down.

And certainly not horrified.

Sometimes, When You Wear the Scarf

 One of my favourite television shows when I was in university (for my first undergraduate degree) was a short-lived puppet-based show called Don’t Eat the Neighbours. 

I’ve gone through a number of periods in my life when I was able to watch children’s television during the day. There was my own childhood, of course, and then I watched TV with my younger cousins when I was a teenager, and saw the children’s television of their era. My first degree in the late 90s/early 2000s, and my library qualifications in the mid 2000s… All told I’ve got a good 20-30 years worth of children’s television under my belt. These days, thanks to catch-up TV, I’m starting to get another dose, as I watch new classics like Bluey when other people are watching crap like The Bachelor.

 

My first degree, though, was probably the biggest period of children’s television watching outside of my own childhood. My timetable was such that I really only had time to watch TV during the morning, when mothers plonk their kids in front of the set while they try to get the house wrangled into some sort of order. I became such a fan of the first series of Hi-5 that I bought one of their cassettes to play in my car. To this day I can still remember most of the lyrics to “Boom Boom Beat”. 

 

I guess I was old enough to have kids of my own (other girls my age started when they were 19), but I didn’t. I just refused to accept the idea that not being or having a child meant you couldn’t enjoy things that had been created “for children”. I also have a deep an unending love for picture books, which I often borrow from the library. I’m taking them home for myself to read, even though there are no children in my house, because I enjoy them.

 

Don’t Eat the Neighbours involved a family of Canadian wolves who moved to England and found themselves living next door to a family of Rabbits. Both families were headed by single parent fathers, which was interesting, and most plots involved the interaction between a predator and a prey animal in a situation where it was both expected that there would be an altercation, but also kind of rude and unnecessary. There was also a fox, voiced by Simon Callow, who was clearly both gay and highly interested in the father of the Wolf family. It was never quite clear if Wolf noticed, or just thought Fox was his new best friend. They both tried to catch Rabbit (and his best friend, Terrapin) whenever possible, and Rabbit and Terrapin spent their days out witting them.

 

The kids in the families got along well with each other, had no interest in their parents’ petty feuds, and would either thwart the adults’ plans or just do their own thing and ignore them.

 

At one point, the wolf kids were asking Fox a question, which lead to the following exchange:

FOX: Do I look like your mother?

WOLF CUB: Sometimes, when you wear the scarf.

 

This really stuck with me. It stuck with me so much that I used to say it all the time. Whenever my answer to a question was “sometimes”, it just seemed perfectly natural to follow it up with “when you wear the scarf”. It became one of several quotes from obscure children’s television shows that I used to say so often in my university days, that by the time I left uni I had several friends also quoting those shows regularly – even though they had never seen them.

 

Which is fun, I think. The fact that I was constantly quoting things that no one had seen became irrelevant after a while. They stopped caring about the fact that they didn’t share the TV shows with me, because after a while they simply shared the catch-phrases with me, even though they were divorced from their original settings.

 

That’s kind of how catch-phrases work, I guess. I, too, quote things I’ve never seen, because I’ve come across those quotes elsewhere and picked them up along the way. Sometimes, I picked them up after they shifted in meaning slightly from the original. Take “I say it’s spinach, and the hell with it.”

 

Ah, but perhaps that’s another pointless, rambling story.

Worth Your While

You’ll never fly as the crow flies
So get used to a country mile
When you’re learning to face
The path at your pace
Every choice is worth your while
- Indigo Girls, Watershed

 I was having a conversation with a friend the other night and it took an interesting turn. He’s a fairly new friend, so hasn’t been privy in the past to my endless rambling indecision about what I want to do for a PhD. As you may recall from either this blog or others, I have been thinking about doing a PhD for some time, but can’t settle on a subject or a discipline.

 

As often happens when I mention the degrees I’m interested in studying in the near future, the topic of “getting a career out of it” came up. To which I gave my customary answer, which always seems to throw people out slightly: “Oh, I’m not looking to change careers – I’m quite happy being a librarian. I just like learning things.” We’re so used to thinking of study as a stepping stone to the “next thing”, or even some sort of career advancement, that I think I thoroughly confuse people when I say I want to go through the pain and drama of a university degree just for the heck of it.

 

I mentioned that the thing about being a librarian is that everything you learn benefits your practice in some way, so you really can study whatever you like and it makes you better at your job without necessarily making you think about what it means for your “career” – at which point he said something interesting: that I was the only person he’s ever met who seems to have her life sorted out. I’m not sure I’d agree with that 100%. I go through stages where I wonder what I’m doing with my life. The job that I have at the moment isn’t exactly my “calling”, and I have been known to waste valuable sleeping hours in the past wondering if I’m wasting my time.

 

But a while ago I realised that your job isn’t there to fulfil you and make you happy. If you think it is, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment and dissatisfaction. No, what you should be aiming for in your work is a job that you don’t hate that allows you to do things you do enjoy, while giving you the opportunity to make a positive difference in someone’s day. I have that, and I’m very grateful for it. I hope you have a job like that, too. If so, just take a moment to appreciate it, and try not to feel hard done by if it isn’t anything more than that. If not, can I suggest that you look for something else – and that you stop looking for a job that makes you happy and just find a job that doesn’t suck and gives you time to do a hobby you actually enjoy? It may be a step backwards as far as the people around you are concerned, but you’ll have a better time of it.

 

The other thing my friend mentioned is that he’s currently feeling overwhelmed by fear of making the wrong decision, so he’s fallen in a bit of a paralysis regarding deciding what he should do about his own career. He realises that not making a decision to change is more or less the same as making a decision to stay, but he hasn’t quite landed comfortably in that decision either. I have been there, done that and bought the T-Shirt. I still sometimes find myself paralysed by the thought that I’m going to make the wrong choice for the wrong reason and stuff everything up.

 

But there is something that I have been sitting with lately, and it has given me a lot to think about. Most of my fear of making bad choices has stemmed from the fact that my previous choices haven’t panned out the way that I’d hoped, and I was taking the “failure” personally rather than chalking it up to experience. When past choices lead to past pain, you don’t want to make more choices that will lead to future pain. It all boils down to worrying about making the “wrong” decision. 

 

But (and this is what I’ve been sitting with): There’s no such thing as the right decision and the wrong decision. You can definitely make choices for the right reasons and the wrong reasons, but the choices that you make are simply the choices that have been made. Regardless of your reasons, the outcomes of your choices will unfold as they unfold, and you just have to see what happens and work with that. If you are making the best choice you can in the circumstances (i.e., the choice that is either for the most good or the least harm), there’s no guarantee that it will pan out at all the way you hope it will, but at least you’ve made a choice. And, as the Indigo Girls once sang (and probably still do at their concerts): “Every choice is worth your while.”

 

In the past, in my youth, the choices and decisions I made to follow my dreams ended up with my dreams being completely smashed to pieces. For years I thought that such misfortune was God or the universe putting me in my place and telling me I was wrong to have those dreams. Now I realise (although I do sometimes forget), that my “dreams” are more of a vague direction than a destination, and they just nudge me along until I find something comes up and I should change course. It’s one of the most counter-intuitive things, but the old Lojong slogan “Abandon any hope of fruition” is one of the most encouraging pieces of advice I’ve come across in the past few years.

 

Don’t worry about making the right decision or the wrong decision. Just make the decision that seems best given the circumstances and be prepared for everything to go in unexpected directions. And – and this is the hardest bit – remember that the outcome will only be undesirable if you decide you either don’t desire this outcome, or you get hung up on the fact that you desired something else. It is what it is.

 

And every choice you’ve made so far has lead you here, and made you the person that you are. Without being here, now, as you are, you wouldn’t be in position to launch out from this spot to take off in new and exciting directions. Or confidently hold the course and see what unfolds.

 

So, yeah. Every choice is worth your while.

 

Now, if only I could make up my mind about that darn PhD…