Happiness isn’t talkative

happiness at last

 

Which is why I haven’t been writing much of late.

Apparently I like being busy because whilst I’ve been happy lately I’ve also been busy – maybe I need to be busy to be truly happy. Not too busy – I need time to soak in luxurious baths, to watch my  good share of pointless tv, to sit about day dreaming and to ring round friends and family. But enough to enable me to feel that I’ve purposes to my existence and that I’m pursuing aims and goals.

For example, I’ve determined upon creating an exhibition during the course of this year that will come to the public eye within the next couple of years, three at most. It will effectively be both a mid-way retrospective and a completely new work: that is – the works in the show will constitute one large work in itself.

The theme of the show is going to be ‘Self & Identity’ after the self and identity research project being spearheaded by Jerry Tew (from the University of Birmingham)  and Kris Benington (from MHRN). Amongst others of my acquaintance I have been on the steering group for this research and have recently been getting more involved in the realisation of its active parts.

The exhibition is going to involve the representation or expression of my perception of the ‘self’ and ‘identity’ as emerging from within shifting flows of connection and interconnection with overlapping contexts and individual others. I’m hoping to find some way of expressing this through the shape and organisation of the exhibition as a whole.

I’m quite excited about it as it is my most ambitious attempt to date to show these things, to relate the unique detail to the larger whole and the manner in which the two are absolutely interdependent, yet also absolutely unique with relative autonomy.

It is of course a remarkably serendipitous exhibition I have in my mind: somehow stuff has come together in my life through the years that lends itself to something of a majestic effect if I’m able to give it justice. We’ll have to see..

 

So much to do!

Look Up for Glory

That I’m getting very little time left over to reflect and to update this blog.

Recently there have been developments both in my professional life and in  my private life.

In my professional life I have been active via the University of Birmingham‘s IASS department in working to raise mental health awareness and mindfulness with both fellow service users and with training professionals.

In addition I have been developing the template for an ambitious art exhibition, whose name I’ve yet to determine. It is related to the ‘Self and Identity‘ research project I’m involved in at the university. It will provide an opportunity to showcase a range of outstanding artists who have kept their gifts unnoticed by the world at large, and it will provide anonymity for anyone who wants to keep it that way.

Meanwhile there has been a slight pause in the house clearing at home although I’m now ready to push on and am sitting here in hopes that I might hear from my friend who is helping me. We were both otherwise engaged in work on Monday and Tuesday and we’d pretty much given ourselves the weekend off before that, so – time is pressing on and I’m feeling eager to see the next phase of the space emergence project develop.

All of these involvements and activities are resonant of the recovery I am enjoying in my mental health. Four years ago, almost to the week, I announced that only three components were necessary for the enjoyment of a happy life: an adequate income, a circle of friends and a purpose for living.

It isn’t as simple as it sounds (nor is it my idea – I’ve stolen it from Epicurus from some couple of thousand years ago), but it is as attainable as it sounds.

Two years of ‘talking therapy’ with Nicola Bate rendered me still and clear within and two years of developing the group ‘MissionMiraculus’ provided me with an opportunity to develop and explore the concepts of friends and purpose with a grant from Open Up (part of the Time to Change group). Four years later my life has transformed from messy, reactive and pitted with relapses, to clearing up, proactive and apparently clear on the horizon.

It appears almost miraculous, though a closer look at the trajectory would reveal explicable cause-and-effect processes to have been the secret of success.

Either way – I’m more grateful than I can say and more hopeful than is wise about my future.

For anyone out there suffering from mental distress and all of its accompanying poverties – notice this story, for it’s a story from someone who had been ‘written off’ as irretrievably ill some years ago and who is now looking up and out at a vista of joy and achievement. When you reach the bottom of a hole, the only way out is …. UP!!

 

Notes from Heaven

Volcanic Brightening Burst

Yes, it’s been a while since I updated you, readers.

To begin with this was because my life had been thrown into unbearable disarray because my loft was insulated on 31 January and I had to have it emptied first, of course. I’d discovered that I had the house contents again in crap in the loft, but I needed to go through everything in case I threw something away I wanted to hold onto.

Initially I didn’t start clearing. I lived a life of doing very little. The amount of STUFF was so huge I felt overwhelmed by it. Only the bathroom was unaffected by it.

And as I sat in it I told myself that I would make the clearing a part of an art exhibition. I took a few photographs that didn’t save for some reason, to I’ll have to take photos of what’s left and make sure this time that I don’t lose them.

Meanwhile a few weeks later a friend, I’d not seen for some time, gravitated back into  my life and one evening he gravitated into my house. He sent me a text two days later saying that I should think about storage for my stuff. Then two days later he said he’d help me if I was willing to be ruthless and to do as he told me. I clutched at his terms with gratitude.

So over the last 10 days or more I’ve been very busy helping Mike to help me to sort my house – and maybe, consequently, my head – out.

It’s working a treat!!! I feel as if it’s a kind of game, so I focus on doing as I’m told, and since that means going through and chucking loads of books and paperwork and babies clothes it means that my surroundings are emerging to become tranquil and pleasant instead of busy and blocked!!!

So I’ve had the space internally to relax and day dream, and I now have an exhibition planned out more or less; a book in planning, a list of ‘to do’s’ in relation to them – and a kitchen and living room that are genuinely comfortable and preparing to become very attractive. I never realised that the outside of me was SO important!

I haven’t published my friend’s name because I haven’t asked his permission to do so yet.

Transforming the Old in Light of the New

Doh!!!

Mistakes Made During the Year (Photo credit: bentsai.com

This isn’t going to be a long entry; I simply want to correct something said in the Human Aesthetics piece.

Frankly I have to confess that on a reread of Goodman which arrived today (my earlier copy having been lent out ..permanently….) I can’t support yesterday’s confident assertion that my thoughts subtend from his theory.  The influence of Goodman and Kuhn are present in the background of most of my broader thinking but I think that is as far as it goes.

I shouldn’t really have shared my working so soon after producing it because in retrospect I’m having serious doubts. It lacks rigour, there’s little scope offered for the ‘fleshing out’ of it and all in all it’s really just a bit of meandering ‘thinking out loud’.

Well – you didn’t do it for me but I got there in the end: the writer becomes her own critic.

… Back to the drawing board apparently…

Introduction to the as yet unformed theory of Human Aesthetics

The following represents the formative ‘overview’ informing what I intend to become a more fleshed out theory, a less idealised and more concrete, theory of Human Aesthetics.

I will naturally be astonished as well as extremely pleased if anyone chooses to contribute to the architecture of this theory by commenting on these early cogitations.

The concept of ‘aesthetics’ from which I draw in forming the theory of Human Aesthetics is taken from Nelson Goodman’s ‘Languages of Art’ (first published in 1968).

Nelson Goodman’s discussion of ‘aesthetics’ is extremely instructive. He takes a view that is not necessarily normative in relation to the concept.  In his model of the term,  ‘aesthetic’ refers to that attention paid to the perception or the production of a thing in which absolutely every tiniest detail is attended to, and every detail is related to the larger whole.

It is a concept that fully meets with my approval and thus I am using it in relation to the idea of ‘Social/Human Aesthetics’ that I will be elaborating in this essay.

A few weeks ago I began to intervene in my working life by asserting the need for ‘femininity’ to enter the arena. Women, I’d noticed, had achieved the right to enter public spaces as nominally ‘equal’ to men.  The culture of femininity, however, I’d  noticed, in equal ration had been entirely ‘left out’ of the equation. Thus we women were entering public life as ‘damaged men’. We didn’t have penises, we didn’t have deep voices, we didn’t have paternalism, we didn’t have meetings organised around a hospitable culture for us. All in all we were simply pretending to be men and feeling pleased with ourselves the more accurately we managed to hide our true natures. Particularly since the more successful we were, the higher we climbed on men’s ladders.

[Although – I will say this – and it forms a part of my inability to work on this line – I have found that my inability and unwillingness to co-operate too much with this way of working has NOT harmed me in any way. I have noticed that, these days, the men I am around are endlessly accommodating, if at times a bit ruffled and other times amused, with my ‘eccentric’ approach to life. – It’s an eccentricity that loses such a noticeable quality the minute I find myself back in the kitchen with a couple of kids and a female friend round for a cup of tea or vice versa, so I definitely think that femininity is involved in it.]

This IS and remains, a pertinent issue.

However, my purpose was never to place men on the defensive or to add to the culture of guilt and shame which has often been the unintended, and sometimes intended, outcome of ‘feminist’ actions and movements.  Far from it.  I LOVE men.  Where would I be without men?  I have possessed so great a love for men that I have, over the last couple of years, recognised the absence of women friends in my life, and have been addressing that issue.  I need to love WOMEN more than I have done, and this is not only because only then can I truly love and accept and value myself, but also because, on  balance, – well, we won’t get true balance until we love both men AND women.

We aren’t loving women by asking of them that they learn the ways of men. We aren’t loving women by developing masculine subcultures of women behaving as men.

SO – the masculine/feminine culture debate is a rich minefield for exploration and elaboration and I’m likely to return to it again.

But I noticed that I was running near a danger zone by raising division in the work place. So I took a step back and meditated on what was in the hind of my thinking.

Human Aesthetics was the term I then selected to identify my zone of attention.

I am relating this term to the ‘Shared Humanness Model’ articulated by Tracey Holley in a Power Point Presentation three or four years ago.

The presentation was deceptively simple at first view.  When Tracey sent it to me I read it through and found myself entirely agreeing with everything she was saying – indeed, Tracey and I had ‘clicked’ on first meeting, at least, on my side that was the experience, I mustn’t speak for her.  Though she was quintessentially feminine and womanly with all the long, blonde, wavy hair and bodily curves that imply such identity, and the soft voice and soft manner that backed up such an appearance, whilst I was and am spikey, angled, sometimes fiery; a long way from my feminine ideal! Nevertheless, our essential natures were mirrored because of our shared value in empathy and ultimate gentleness.

I underestimated Tracey’s work initially. I thought ‘yes, absolutely,’ but I didn’t properly recognise the profoundly innovative potential in her thinking.  Her natural modesty somehow assisted me to under appreciate the significance of her work.

I found myself mentioning her ‘shared humanness model’ often when I was giving presentations, until this year, during my Collaborative Learning Initiative work at the University of Birmingham, I found myself insisting on a projection of Tracey’s first slide to provide the backdrop for my entire contribution, a background which I brought to foreground in my talking.

In fact, of course, I had become Tracey’s marketer. Not by request – I’m still waiting for a skype call to talk with her about this. But by passion. The thinking, in my view, evident in this presentation, is but the tip of the iceberg in relation to the thinking that may collaboratively emerge out of it between us.  Because, of course, I’m thinking of this ‘Theory of Human Aesthetics’ as a pillar of support and elaboration –expansion – within/of it.

So – what is ‘human aesthetics’?

I am using this term to draw attention to and to emphasise the micro, as well as macro, behaviours and settings in which human beings interact with one another.

I am also using this term to draw some confusion away from the ‘art world’.

I am going to attempt to design a model for clarifying the proper concerns of ‘Fine Art’ and for upgrading the activities of every day human existence. I am going to try to ensure that in so doing I gain sufficient agreement and support from sufficient a number of people that the theory starts to lean rather destructively on ‘inhumane’ models of production – not because they fail to be ‘efficient’, ‘powerful’ or ‘rapid’,  but because they fail to be ‘enjoyable’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘nutritious’.

Yes – to accommodate this theory of human aesthetics we shall need to revise our normative daily values.

We may prefer to slow down. We may prefer to scale down. We may prefer to spend some time decorating ourselves and our lives in ways that bend toward the pleasure principle. We may prefer to move toward honesty instead of hypocrisy, not because it is morally ‘better’ but because it makes us happier.  We may prefer to revise our Hobbes and Locke and discover that their convictions were borne of their circumstances, not of their unalterable genius in divining the core of human nature as infinitely avaricious and competitive.

We can be and will be these things for as long as we believe it is our nature.

As soon, though, as we believe that we are ‘naturally’ co-operative and supportive, and that we are ‘in-born artists, every one’ – then that is exactly what we shall be and become. And obviously we will see rapid alterations in the balance of life in consequence of such an alteration of conviction.

Don’t  be deceived. Hegel got it right – it is through the evolution of ideas and beliefs that our lives are altered.  Action follows belief.  Belief does follow action, of course, reactively – but on the whole, it is by far better to form an action plan upon belief and value than to act impulsively or ie in knee jerk manner to actions already taken by others – or even by oneself.

Funnily enough, this is a theory that could well assist an outcome not unlike that foreseen by Marx in his early idealistic phase, by the romantics in the 19^th Century, typified by William Morris and so forth – it isn’t a revolution of blood and guns but an evolution enabled by the wondrous technologies made available to us by the humanly tragic phase of the industrial and post industrial revolution. Raymond Williams, was thinking along these lines in his ‘Long Revolution’ (1961) – it was a piece of work which attracted plenty of criticism at the time on the grounds of its ‘wishy washy socialism’ – but I think if we took another look now we might find that it was ahead of its time. I haven’t been back to it since I first read it in my late teens, and I think I might just check back now.

It’s true that some ‘levelling down’ will need to occur and that there will be those who resist the alterations for this reason.  But the levelling up of quality of life will be so enormous for such a large proportion of our world’s population that it is simply a matter of persuasion required to delimit any enthusiasm by the army to kill its own families, effectively to enable economic transformation to take place.

Passing Strangers

Mr Fox

Started this entry and lost three paragraphs immediately. How infuriating is that!!

Well, as I was starting – I met with Nicola Bate today for the last time.

As the woman who has worked with me for two years to adjust my identity toward self acceptance, embrace of my womanhood, ego-stabilisation and recognition that ‘no man is an island – nor is any woman’ and, even, that this was a lesson I needed to learn: it was not an occasion I necessarily looked forward to. She has become my ‘internalised mother figure’ and it’s always nice if you have an external figure to attach to your internal registers.

Still, I have memorised her image quite well, I doubt I’ll ever forget her face or her gait, indeed, I’ll never forget anything much about her. To her I owe my entirely novel state of wellbeing.

It is an achievement that would not have been possible, however, without an entire network of friends and associates in my life echoing her acceptance and positive regard.

Is this the point at which I list all of the people I regard as contributing to my recovery, indeed, not mere recovery but progress toward what Mike Smith and Marion Aslan define as ‘Thriving’?

Is it too soon to make such an announcement? After all, I’m sitting in a kitchen that defies description in any civilised terminology – my entire home is reminiscent of anyone’s concept of ‘hell on earth’ – boxes, bin bags full of books and clothes, portfolios, canvases, ‘people’ every inch of the place – it’s barely safe to walk to the front door, so likely is it that I’ll fall over something leaning in my way. Loft insulation wonderful, preparation for it – nightmare!

But also – preparation for it: miraculous: down fell so much art work I thought I’d binned many years ago.. Of course the larger part was binned and this is merely the smaller stuff the ephemeral stuff that was easy to chuck above myself out of sight. Still, it’s been a treasure of wonder to me that I can only feel deeply grateful for. How to proceed from here, though, is another question. My father’s will to furnish me with sufficient fund’s to see me out of financial distress after his death was an unexpected privilege I still haven’t got over, any more than I will ever get over, past, or want to move from his words and look on the last day I spent with him, five days before his death. The cash is not in sight as yet, however, and won’t be for some time. The house needs to be cleared, cleaned and repaired before that can occur.

I’m still accepting incapacity benefit/esa and ‘therapeutic earnings”supervised’ by a woman who seldom offers any supervision, and I remain in the dark regarding how or when a more dignified alternative to this plight will arise as an unmissable opportunity.

Yet, such an opportunity is what I have some sense is absolutely predictable for me within the year.

So, again – is now the time to announce my transition to health or is now the time to remain a little wary of such open optimism?

On balance I’ll stick with just a little wariness. Whilst also thinking it’s high time I thanked endless characters from the University of Birmingham – Jerry, Maureen, Kris, Ann & Alex, Dee, and from MHRN, Sonia, and Paul McDonald, for a culture of acceptance and tolerance in relation to me that has made a big difference to my life in recent years. To Paul Roberts and Gordon Parsons, Becky and Bella I owe my sense of security in possessing a local friendship circle and to Glenn Miranda I am ever grateful for his unswervable faith in MissionMiraculus. He, I and Gordon alone, I suspect, remain enthusiastic adherents to the mission and values informing that eccentric little group. It’s never been smaller or less active, officially than it is today – other than that ’til 2009 it had remained effectively a concept in my head and a few bits of paper since 2000 – so it’s made progress since then.

It surfaced in my mind today after seeing Nicola and having my eyebrows threaded (not simultaneously). I sauntered into Cafe Nero, my favourite Redditch coffee bar (there’s a really cute little girl who works there, same age as my own daughters, and I tend to buy her a chocolate each time I go there, though today, after the expense of the threading, she had to go without). I sat down and within minutes the owner of the cola on the table I was at appeared and sat beside me. His name was Mr Fox and he was 26 years old and he suffered from the kind of restless, nervous leg movements that aren’t unusual amongst young men. It transpired that he has suffered from mental health distress and that he attended Kings Norton Boys School. I add in these details because, if anyone recognises this description I’d like you to urge him to come along to Suresearch and find some peer support in Birmingham. In the absence of any organised peer support in Redditch it seems the best thing to do.

Suresearch has a website and the address and directions to arrive at the right destination will be on the site. I go to these meetings so he won’t arrive and find himself isolated in any way.

It made me think. Maybe I need to localise some of my energies and organise some kind of peer support group in Redditch that isn’t paternalistic and boring as hell but appeals to young people being casually written off by a cynical social infrastructure.

That’s it for now.

I need to brush my hair and dash along to Birmingham to get another hepatitis jab for my honorary research contract.

Toodle Pip,

Janie

Manna from Heaven

Hiding from the Wreck

Or, rather, from my loft (same difference?)..

I very sensibly arranged to have my loft insulated lately and today is the day that the event will take place. Indeed, I am writing this just 40 minutes prior to men entering my home to find that preparation for their work has turned my home, which had lately begun to look quite civilised, into wreck of the hesperus – not that I’ve ever read that poem, but it’s entered daily parlance so I’m assuming that the overwhelming chaos in which I daily find myself is a fitting tribute to that concept.

Not that I had or have ever wished to make such tribute. It seems that my life has been predisposed to the matter. No sooner do I exert myself to the huge effort and commitment of a mega clear up than something comes along in my life that undoes all my good intentions and returns me to this whirling disorder.

I’m not, at the best of times, the most domesticated animal ever born, so maintaining simple dignity is a challenge even then, but when my life is turned upside down like this, it’s like beginning to drown in life’s drivel..

I maintain my sanity by ignoring it and sitting down to write. It hardly answers to the demands of the occasion but it answers to my need to hide from ugliness by living inside my mind.

It is, perhaps, one of my more crazy habits.

Still, in recent years my crazy habits have been very kindly tolerated and accommodated by an ever growing circle of true friends who seem to acknowledge, accommodate and forgive them all by focussing on what virtues I possess. If it weren’t for these dear friends I dare say I would still be living half my life in the loony bin, drugged up to my eyes on anti psychotics and hardly able to walk in a straight line, so deleterious are such drugs upon one’s co-ordination, hope factor and social opportunities.

I was reading a very interesting account by Jan Wallcraft in her recently initiated blog – I can’t recall it’s name now, which is infuriating – I’ll get back to you about that.. She was writing about ‘recovery’ and her attention was focussed on the use of that concept, and the bending of it, by psychiatry. Psychiatry has taken the concept of ‘recovery’ on board by emptying it of any meaningful content. They have to because, as dealers for pharmaceutical companies they must, perforce, continue to peddle the crappy idea that people who have intense life crises that see them ending up in front of a psychiatrist will probably need to be held down with drug addictions for the rest of their lives.

Jan has a very good point. The concept of ‘recovery’ has been utterly corrupted by these idiots. And around the country, certainly in Worcestershire, the regional mental health trusts are ‘leading by example’ of identical idiocy. Pernicious idiocy is what we’re talking about of course.

Still – there’s a case for re-claiming the proper meaning of the word. In the last couple of years I have been ‘reclaiming’ – and ‘recovering’ the identity of ‘Janie Greville’ as it had been ‘identified’ prior to `1997 when I fell foul of my ex husband’s good will and thus the mental health services.

Little by little I have noticed that I am addressed as an intelligent, creative, productive and affectionate if impulsive human being. This would fit nicely with the ‘Janie’ I was prior to meeting my ex-husband. I managed to sustain something of that identity even during much of my relationship with him. When it became impossible to ‘be myself’ with him I ended the marriage.. And apparently my entire edifice of being. His temporary blind rage ignited the mental health services in 1997 to an energy of purging. The intent, it would appear, was to purge me of my identity, my personality, my character, my aspirations, my earning power and my reputation. It all fitted in well with how my enraged ex-husband would like to see me punished for the crime of ending the marriage. It barely fitted in very well with my purpose of improving my – and my children’s – lives, however.

So I kept rebelling. Each time I rebelled I found myself back in hospital drugged to a state of bare consciousness. A steady stream of psychiatrists and cpn’s and one very silly social worker, ‘maintained’ this despicable culture. May I name a few people? I’d better not, I’m not wanting to excite trouble I can avoid.

I’ll name those who stand innocent of this fiasco, though. Verity and Fez, social worker and cpn respectively, who have intervened in my life in only beneficial ways.

There is a Dr Dhaya in the background, also, who doesn’t appear to have input much harm into the situation. He has stayed in the background, exactly where he belongs. To that extent he must be praised. It’s just a possibility that he is notably less dogmatic and arrogant than so many of his colleagues.

There is also a man called Dr King, now largely if not entirely retired now, I think, who ‘saw me’ in ways that were not merely hopeful but positively flattering. I like being flattered, don’t we all? Most of all, though, I like it when I am treated as a person I can recognise as me. He had that capacity. He occasionally addressed the part of me who saw me in my potential even hypothetical best possibilities. That tended to make me feel a bit nervous – I always fear disappointing others and prefer to underplay my abilities rather than the reverse, though at times I too see the possibilities, fear of failure has held me back.

But I support the attempt to paint my picture in as optimistic a light as possible – after all, it’s encouraging and hopeful. And a huge contrast to the kinds of portraits offered to me by his predecessor. I feel I owe him a tribute for this; partly because it held me for a few years in a state of survival instead of probable death; partly because he may in fact be somewhat a designing architect of the identity I now approach.

After all – we, none of us, are ‘islands’. This cliche needs to step out of its space as simple cliche. We are in fact less islands, or lands, than junctions into which and from which energies move and flow, or become stuck. Everything that encourages flow enhances the self, everything that inhibits flow or excites explosion, is to be condemned as destructive of the self. Every successful achievement is the achievement of a community of goodwill and support and input – even those achievements that appear to be the production of a single person are in fact the achievement of a community of this kind.

It is true, likewise for destructive as well as noble actions. None of us act alone however lonely we may feel at times. This knowledge tends to support the idea that we should choose our friends carefully for undoubtedly we shall in time become the measure of the friends we spend most time with and the values we nurture most in our minds.

Well! What a splendid way to avoid the clearing I need to do to turn my wreck back into a home, and the loft insulators are still not here, they were due 15 minutes ago – gosh I hope they haven’t forgotten!!!

By Janie Greville 2013.