It's my party and I'll cry if I want to...

I didn't cry, but it was a close-run thing.

I should probably explain...

Much has changed over the last year. That's probably stating the obvious. With the decline of Steff's mental health, culminating in her hospitalisation, relations between me and her family reached an all-time low. This is, in hindsight, totally understandable. Indeed, I've since discussed this with Steff's key-worker who helped me to realise that I did something similar towards Esteem, the early intervention service who deal with her care.

Nancy and I never really got along. I had met her once before Steff and I got together. She wasn't impressed. Apparently, when Steff told her we were together, her first response was "Fuck!"

She thought Steff could do better, a view shared by some of her friends at the time as well. We're still together, and she's not friends with those people anymore...

But your mum is always your mum, so her opinion has always counted for much more. Over the next 4 1/2 years, Nancy barely concealed her contempt for me, while chipping away at Steff when I wasn't around. She should be with someone who can provide for her financially. She shouldn't hold out for someone she loves, because Nancy did that and it ended in tears. That sort of thing. She also took a dim view of my physical condition, stating on more than one occasion (to Steff, never to me) that there was nothing wrong with me.

Then, when Steff finally plucked up the courage to tell her mum she was in hospital (she didn't tell her mum the first time she was in hospital due to her poor reaction when she was told of Steff's previous and incorrect diagnosis of depression), things went from very bad to very, very bad.

She called me up, accusing me of bullying Steff to get money from her and mismanaging her finances for my own benefit. She told Esteem that I was the reason Steff was unwell, that returning to live with me in our home would only make her worse. She asked Esteem to look for assisted living accommodation for Steff and to inform the Department for Work and Pensions that our benefits claims should be separated as we were no longer partners.

On top of having the love of my life in a terrifying situation and being, despite the offers of help and support from friends and family, utterly alone, I had to deal with all this...

Then, around December, something just clicked.

The groundwork for this was laid by Esteem over the course of 6 weeks or so with their Family Work course, where Steff, Nancy and I would get together with Steff's key-worker and doctor for a 2 hour session to work on dealing with her illness as a team. Without that input, I'm not sure we could be in the situation we're in now. However, after a month or so of Steff's symptoms returning and causing her real distress, things were quite tense again. Then Nancy, completely contrary to everything that had gone before, asked me to come through to Motherwell to help me look after Steff. This, as far as I can remember, is the first time she admitted that she didn't know what to do for her daughter and that she needed help. That must have been an incredibly difficult thing for a mother to admit.

She sat down with me and spoke about what we could do together to help Steff. We agreed on a course of action involving Esteem. We were putting the skills we had learned at Family Work to proper use for the first time.

Since then, Nancy has tried her best to make me feel welcome in her home and part of her family. The three of us spent Christmas and New Year together. I lived in her home for weeks while Steff was recovering from her setback. I believe having both her mum and her partner there to look after her, and not have resenting each other, made a huge difference to her recovery. Since then, Steff has improved at a rapid rate. We are settling in to our new home with a dear friend. The start to this year, despite the backdrop of cuts and uncertainty for folk in our position, has been extremely positive. We're looking forward to the future with a sense of optimism that has been absent for far too long.

As anyone who is reading this is probably aware, it was my birthday on Wednesday. We had already made plans to go through to Motherwell before I realised that was the day of my birthday, and I didn't have anything planned for celebrations until the weekend, so we kept our plans and went through. Steff told me on Tuesday that we were going to her gran's for tea after dinner. I didn't realise that Nancy had arranged with her family to have a little tea party, complete with birthday cake and candles. I was incredibly touched. I don't know how long it's been since I celebrated my birthday like that. To go from contempt and suspicion to acceptance and belonging in such a short space of time... A few months ago I didn't know how things would ever be put right again. It was easier than I could have ever expected.

Been a long time comin'

I usually try to keep away from any communicative medium when I feel like this. It's just easier for everyone. I hate whining on the internet. (I mean I hate to whine on the internet, not that I hate everyone who does.) I know a fair few people who are worse off then myself, so I tend to think of it as pretty self-indulgent. And even then, most of them just get on with it for the vast majority of the time, so why can't I?

I know this is silly. Most of my tweets these days are about 4 of the 5 things I love most in the world. (Steff, my friends, football and music, if anyone's counting. I don't tend to tweet much about my family.) In general, at least in comparison to over summer, I reckon I'm mostly positive on Twitter, so I should really give myself leave every now and then to have a bit of a rant. I just can't be as expressive in that format as I'd like, though. Certainly not for anything personal. It's easy enough to get worked up about job cuts and Tories and Lib Dems and bankers (these are a few of my least-favourite things). I find myself using Facebook less and less (except for Scrabble, obviously), and anyway, I don't want my friends to feel like they have to leave comments out of obligation. I've gotten out of the habit of ordering my thoughts and feelings like this in a blog. Ever since I stopped regularly updated Livejournal, I've let my feelings of inadequacy get in the way. I've never been a great writer and never will be. All those wonderfully expressive blogs by my friends seemed to be mocking me. Why it felt like a competition, I'm not sure, but it did.

Anyway, it's almost certainly been to my detriment. I might not have ended up needing to see 2 different psychologists now if I'd just sat down and typed it all out. I might have been able to hold onto my job when Steff went into hospital. I might have dealt with the stress better if I had sat down and properly engaged with someone, actually using all the wonderful people who offered whatever help they could provide. I might have realised that what everyone from friends to Steff's doctors to my family were saying was true - it was affecting me too.


Talking about what Steff was going through felt like I was betraying her. Talking about what I was going through felt like I was belittling what she was going through. I tried not to think about myself. If I remained stoic, I could be there for her her. How could I help her if I was allowing myself to crumble? I now see I did more harm than good...
If I had done any of the above, I might not have had to deal with this tightness in and pressure on my chest, caused by the wonderfully-named Costochondritis, for months.

I hate feeling like this. It's exhausting. Simultaneously, someone sits on my chest while they reach inside and tie all my arteries in knots, giving my heart a good squeeze into the bargain. Any energy not wasted on, say, moving, or breathing, or snapping at Steff when she's trying her best to help, goes on convincing my brain I'm not having a heart attack. (I've had my heart checked and there's definitely nothing wrong with it, thankfully.)

I've come to realise that it's this symptom more than any other which makes me terrified of returning to work or study. It's recently come to my attention that I've dealt with anxiety for most of my life, but it's never taken up more  energy than it has over the last 18 months. I don't know how to make if go away. I'm hoping this is a start.

This isn't the entry I started to write...

I started this blog during one of my creative bursts. They don't happen often and they don't last long. When the storm subsides, I'm left with little or no energy to follow up on what I've started. So booked gigs go unpromoted, demoed songs go unrecorded... and my blog sits accusingly empty.

That's not to say my post today is a sign of another creative burst or surge in energy. Quite the opposite. I could barely move yesterday after overdoing it with packing for our impending move and today doesn't seem to have started much better. Steff has been encouraging me to write more and I can see how positive using her blog has been for her, so I'm just trying to get inspired.

Since my last post I've started a few entries, but just couldn't bring myself to write them. Between October and December I wasn't exactly short of material given our Dear Leaders' assault on people like me and the subsequent protests, but to be honest I couldn't bring myself to research just how bad things might get for me and Steff over the next few years. Thankfully, since then we've formulated something approaching a plan for the future, involving returning to studying. Hopefully this will get us both off demoralising benefits and lead to us both being able to work again somewhere down the line, without having to return to Call Centre Hell. It's certainly worth a shot.

Cuts might scupper those plans, too, though. I'd ideally like to end up teaching in adult education. I've heard over the last couple of days that Glasgow University is looking to significantly reduce it's adult education budget. Another option for me is teaching adults with learning disabilities. I find helping out at Enable's clubs hugely rewarding and think I have the patience to do this kind of teaching, but I doubt that Glasgow City Council will consider funding these courses a priority.

I've spent most of my life with no plan whatsoever. Now that I've finally formed one, I have no idea if, 5 or 6 years down the line, it will be remotely viable. Still, a flawed plan is probably better than none.

What a waste of time...

But all I have, these days, is time. And still I get to the end of the day and remember all the things I was supposed to do. Like call Citizens Advice, for example. Instead I watched the Minnesota Vikings lose to the New York Jets and Atlanta Braves get swept by San Francisco Giants, all the while muttering to myself about how cold my living room was, and how much pain I was in, and the relationship between the cold and my pain levels.

Right now I should be sleeping. I'm not, as you can see. Why am I not sleeping? The same reason I was up late on Friday. Why, football, of course. Football is the reason I didn't take my amitriptyline on time on Friday (I had folk over to watch the Scotland game and was distracted when my pill alarm went off) and football is the reason I still haven't taken my amitriptyline tonight ( I was in the Captain's Rest, watching the other Scotland game, when my pill alarm went off). I'm supposed to take my pills with me if I'm going to be out past 9pm (pill alarm time), but I rarely remember.

A proper routine and a regular sleep pattern goes a long way towards making living with FM manageable. Unfortunately, and fairly predictably,  forgetfulness is a big part of the problem. I think it's almost certainly impossible to have a chronic condition and not feel a bit sorry for yourself from time to time, but I have to admit, having a condition that lists "fibrofog" amongst it's symptoms partly makes up for it.

EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION...

The aforementioned Liz Ely (she of the eminent talent) posted on her blog a while ago about education as it pertains to class structure, titled "My Nu Labour Education is OVER - Post Uni ANGST...", which I just read properly today. Dyslexia, and my until-recent frowning-upon of making time to read blogs, makes me a skim reader, and I remember reading the start of this blog them wandering off to do something else. It really is a wonderful piece of writing and I'm glad I gave it the time it deserves, especially since this is a subject close to my heart and one which has shaped who I am today, for better or worse. Probably worse.

Coincidentally, I was talking about this with Jef on Monday. We were having one of those vast, sprawling conversations about Life, much of it focusing on our education (or lack of, in my case). She mentioned her secondary school conditioning to "reach for the stars, but don't forget you'll need to pass maths to go to uni", and the problems there-in. She talked about her guidance teacher (who was, funnily enough, a maths teacher) telling her she shouldn't even bother applying for RSAMD, even though, in retrospect, she would probably have been accepted, and how she's trying to teach her teenage sister to sift through the bullshit conditioning she'll no-doubt be being subjected to right now.

Anyway, I listened politely while she talked about all this, thinking "I can't relate to any of this". At first I commented on how this difference was probably based on her living and going to school in a pretty affluent area, while my parents fought pretty hard to get us into a school outwith our catchment area of rough-as-fuck Castlemilk. See, this was in the dark late 80s/early 90s when parents didn't have the right to choose schools. It was very much a fight, but once they got Andy, my elder brother by 3 years, accepted for King's Park, it was much easier to get the rest of us in.

As such, while we officially had access to the same opportunities as all other pupils, we were still treated differently from the other kids. I remember one occasion in particular. Probably the first time Andy was suspended (first of many, but I can't help but think his treatment was part of a wider reinforcement of the behaviour expected of him as a "troublemaking", poor working class kid), he had been caught doing something or other with his friend Mark. Now, Mark lived in King's Park (the nice area with the big houses, not the park itself). As such, when my parents were called in to discuss Andy's misdemeanor, he was identified as the ringleader  (if someone can be the ringleader of 2) because, and I'm obviously paraphrasing here as I wasn't in the room and was only about 9 years old at the time, Mark "came from a nice family". The implication was pretty obvious and has stayed with me since, along with my parents' fury.

During my standard grade years (3rd & 4th year) I remember vague discussions about university going on around me. My peers discussed courses and which were the best universities to go to, how if you wanted to apply for Oxbridge you needed to apply earlier. That sort of thing. I must have been sat down with a careers councillor, my guidance teacher or whoever has these conversations with pupils... I must have been. I cannot remember a single conversation about university in the context of me actually applying. I have never seen a UCAS form. I know they exist, and I know if you apply for one uni you may as well apply for 5 because the cost is the same, but it was never made part of my plan. I do remember someone pointing out that, in the section of the school library nominally used as the 5th year common room while the room above the assembly hall was being refitted sat a computer, and that computer contained a database, and typing a job or career into that database would bring up a career plan detailing the best course to apply for and entry requirements... I remember using it once. I wish I could remember what job or career i entered, but I can't. Maybe teacher. I remember I entertained that notion for a while.

Anyway, when Jef was talking about her experiences, I assumed that the reason university made up so much of her post-school conversation and I didn't have a post-school conversation was based on the class divide and the way I was viewed in school as being somehow less than,  nothing more. During the course of this conversation, however, I realised something else was much more of a factor.

Liz mentions in her post that she started school shortly after Labour took power. I started secondary school in August 1992 at the age of 10 years and 5 months. I left shorty after the start of my 6th year, in August 1997, at the age of 16 years and 6 months. I was lucky enough to have scraped 3 highers at "C" level, despite my undiagnosed dyslexia, and officially left to pursue further highers at Langside College. More realistically, I was looking forward to 2 years of not having to work particularly hard and spent most of those 2 years in bed (the first year my own, the second , somewhat surprisingly, someone else's).



On a side-note, I remember my first lesson of this new and exciting post-Tory world was Modern Studies. A quick check of the electronic calender informs me this would have been on the morning of Friday 02/05/97 and memory suggests it would have taken place between 9:25 and 10:15. My teacher (named, in one of life's little jokes, Ms Blair), who was a wonderful, passionate, patient teacher and probably the first one I had any real bond with, betrayed her neutrality with her unashamed delight and optimism. She had probably spent her entire career fighting against the current of a Tory government and was looking forward to a brighter future. She did, however, add an important caveat, one I've never forgotten. She said, and again I'm paraphrasing, "Watch out for this Peter Mandelson character. Never trust a Minister without Portfolio".

Brazil's grass-roots campaign for a women's right to choose...

No, not that right, but the right to make that issue, along with a raft of other issues close to Brazilian women's hearts part of the national discussion in an election year. This campaign is beautiful in it's simplicity - teach disenfrachised, mostly black, largely poor women how to make their voice heard through the medium of personalised postcards to political candidates. Have a read for yourself and let me know what you think.

An essay on the problem(s) with Feminism, in (just over) 1000 words.

I've been thinking a lot about Feminism* lately. I was thinking about it a lot before I attended an Anarcha-Feminist (I always thought that would be Anarcho-Feminist, but they seemed quite insistent) workshop featuring an excellent discussion of Adventures In Kate Bush & Theory (no, really) and some inspiring/inspired left-leaning stand up comedy by the eminently talented Liz Ely, but more so since.

Here's my main problem with Feminism. A good deal of Feminists don't think it means what I think it means.

–noun

1.

the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.

2.

( sometimes initial capital letter) an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women.

That seems pretty clear to me, and nowhere in that definition does it say you need to have ovaries to believe the attainment of the above should be sought. Many feminists, however (including, I'm lead to believe, the Glasgow Feminist Network ) believe that the possession of a penis and the possession of Feminist opinions and beliefs are mutually exclusive, and that a male Feminist is an oxymoron. I should point out at this opportunity that the organisers of the workshop mentioned, held at the Forest Cafe in Edinburgh, didn't have this problem and I was made to feel very welcome and that my opinion was as valid as anyone else's. I doubt I could articulate fully, however, how angry it makes me feel to be excluded from the conversation when that's not the case. All we're talking about is the pretty simple belief that woman are not inferior to men, and as such should have the same rights and opportunities as men. Why shouldn't I, as a man, be able to handle that? Why can they, as women, not?

The reason they can't is that they believe, not that women are equal to men, but that women are better than men. I have a problem with this. Not because I am a man and therefore viewed as inadequate. I'm pretty clear on my fellow man's faults, of which there are many. I'm no picture of perfection myself. I just can't see this as any less sexist than the belief that women are inferior to men.

I can get on board with the theory that our planet would be a far less scary place if women had more of a hand in running the place (although, sadly, our only female Prime Minister to date could be used an argument against that theory, dragging us, as she did, into just as unnecessary war as Blair), but not the conclusion that line of thought often leads to. Perhaps the reason that most, if not all, of the most dangerous and deadly weapons ever conceived were created and designed by men is that those same men were afforded the kind of education and development that women were barred from. I understand the powerful argument that men create these things because we are the destroyers as opposed to the creators of life. I know where that line of thought comes from, and it is compelling, but I don't think it's the only reason. Frustratingly, it's not even an argument that can be proved or disproved. Perhaps the most interesting ones can't be.

Anyway, that's not really what I want to discuss. One of the reasons I've been thinking about Feminism lately is that I find the term itself to be unhelpful. The professional footballer, Rohan Ricketts, recently tweeted something which I found very surprising. Something clearly had him upset, and he made a few comments you don't really expect to hear/read from footballers. Basically, he was making the point that not enough men show enough respect to women. He went on to qualify that statement by suggesting that some women don't have much respect for themselves, but that this is no excuse to take advantage of said women. (Sorry if I misrepresented your comments in any way, Rohan. If so, let me know so I can amend). Coming so soon after the comments Darren Purse, the Sheffield Wednesday captain, made on homophobia in football, hopefully many people will amend their opinions of footballers and their intellect. It's always encouraging to see evidence of thinking men within the game.

The question of respect to and for women is something which must be difficult for a young, intelligent and feminist footballer who isn't part of the pack. I imagine there must be a lot of peer pressure for this hypothetical young man who is suddenly earning vastly more money than his peers and finds women throwing themselves at him. It's a microcosm of our society in general, I think. I've been to some of the seedier clubs in this city, accompanying friends who fit the description above of women riddled with insecurities and completely lacking self-respect, trying to fend of the vultures only too happy to take advantage of them. Like I said, it must be hard for that young man to swim against the tide in this particular situation. (I should point out that I'm not saying young men shouldn't have sex with young women, or young men for that matter... just that it would be nice if it was for the right reasons.)

Part of the reason I'm talking about this is that I firmly believe that most men, most people, are feminists. Most people believe that there is nothing that makes men better than women, or women better than men. So why does our society make the distinction between a man sleeping with 20 women and a woman sleeping with 20 men? Why is this man viewed as a hero by his peers and the woman a whore by hers? One of the things that angers me most about this double standard is that many women seem happy and eager to enforce it. This isn't necessarily a double standard created and implemented by men. Why is that? I just can't understand it, and it's emblematic of the problem. Some see females as automatically more qualified as feminists purely because they are female. That is simply not the case. I and some of my male friends are more feminist in outlook than many women I know. I think a gender-neutral term is needed to refer to equality of the sexes. How many men out there hold feminist principles but wouldn't call themselves feminists because of some of the negative connotations attached to that term? I used to be one of them. Nowadays I wear the badge with pride, but it's not without it's faults. We, as feminists, are the majority. So why doesn't it feel like it?

*Please excuse the inconsistency of Feminism & feminism. I just couldn't be bothered capitalising every one.