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Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
How am I able to be so transparent on paper about rape, malpractice and poverty, yet still compartmentalize? It’s as though I were telling the truth while simultaneously running away from it.
“How long,” I begin to wonder, “has my habit been to recount horror with a smile, standing in the light recalling tales of darkness?” Long enough that being here, with this darkness, feels foreign.
We were told at school, if we wanted to pursue this, we should be “yes” people, and expect to be poor for the rest of our lives. “Climb because you want to tell stories.” I loved the concept! All of us united, climbing toward storytelling at the risk of poverty, screaming “Yes!”
I was aware, even then, that the proportion of Black people imprisoned in the UK was almost seven times our share of the population. Seven times.
Is it important that voices used to interruption get the experience of writing something without interference at least once?
Social media has done great things for us. It’s allowed some of us to feel more loved, encouraged, connected, to make and share work, but it’s also raised anxiety, paranoia and loneliness, in young people especially. Are we informing our young people of the possible negatives, or are we too busy capitalizing on it?
Calculating the hours easily, I saw I could reach my targets if I erased the concept of weekends, and saw sleeping as something you didn’t do deeply, or every night, just some nights, like anal.
As the producer said, she wasn’t racist. I knew that. I’ve never accused anyone at work of racism, but I’ve been urged to understand someone “isn’t racist” on every job I’ve acted in since, just by pointing out possible patterns, tendencies. When I agree they aren’t racist, but suggest they may be thoughtless on the matter, it doesn’t go down very well. But if you’re not racist, or thoughtless about race, what other thing can you be?
Could this have been managed better? Did it have to be on my birthday? I call that a catastrophic consequence. The producers saw shooting in “that place” as a low-cost haven. They didn’t consider the experiences of the Brown and Black cast to meet the morals of their diversity compass, because they didn’t think to see things from our point of view.
I wondered why, if 95 percent of us didn’t fit something, we would encourage each other to aspire to it, to emulate it?
As they enlighten you, with TV stories you can’t film or write without them, enlighten them; shine a torch on the figures and budgets they can’t see.
Some say our industry is a microcosm of the world. It’s a delicate dance, isn’t it; the world reflecting us, we, in turn, the world. We have to remember that there are people, outsiders to this industry, being raped by men and women who lack any celebrity status to snatch or public power to dissolve.
Why are we platforming misfits, heralding them as newly rich successes, while they balance on creaking ladders with little chance of social mobility? I can’t help usher them into this house if there are doors within it they can’t open. It feels complicit. What I can do is be transparent about my experiences, because transparency helps.
The misfit doesn’t climb in pursuit of safety, or profit; she climbs to tell stories. She gets off the ladder and onto the swings; swinging back and forth, sometimes aggressively, sometimes standing up on the swing, back and forth, in pursuit of only transparency, observing the changes, but wonders if these changes are taking place within a faulty system.
I think it’s important to make silence for yourself. Five minutes. To check if you’re okay. And interrogate your own morals and beliefs in relation to how you operate. Even if you do think about these things already, why not think a little more, a little deeper?
And in that small gap of silence, I realized that she was right, and rewrote the part; I changed the narrative. And on reflection, I wished I’d just listened. I wished I’d spent more time thinking before I’d acted.
He said: “There are as many perspectives as there are people.”
I’ve decided to embrace as many perspectives as I can, and be brave enough to update my beliefs, and discover I’m not always right. What a brilliant thing, to discover we’ve been wrong about some things, what a brilliant thing it is to grow. We’re all gonna die. Instead of standing here, wishing for the good ol’ glory days, about the way life used to be before Mark Zuckerberg graduated, I’m going to try to be my best; to be transparent; and to play whatever part I can to help fix this house. What part will you play?
The tales I told myself about the moth—my attempts to try and liken its journey to my own narrative as a human—led me to see the lecture itself, and my giving of it, as a symbol of death. Death to the habit of compartmentalizing pain and avoiding emotions, death to coping so successfully that I put my ability to process life and to grieve in jeopardy.
I learned that staying silent for fear of losing safety doesn’t compare to the feeling of safety I found within myself from choosing to be fearless in my curiosity to question the house, to question the very identity of the house, and from choosing to question myself.
And what can happen in your life when you comfort or embrace the things that repel you?
