Further adventures in possibility

I spent this morning working through a few new potential activities for the podcast. Our central library runs weekly meetings, readings and groups and is hosting readings from a national fantasy and sci-fi magazine, so I’ve approached them and asked if it would be possible for us to go and interview them. I’ve never done anything quite like this – although I suppose it’s not far from touring the literary festivals a couple of years ago.

It’s amazing how you meet people doing something like this. At the beginning of the week, I went to Sangha night at the Manchester Buddhist Centre. I haven’t been back there since finishing my course in November ‘07, and wanted to see what the Sangha was like. While I was there I found myself talking to a guy who’s obviously living a life I’ve never imagined possible. I’d always been raised to think the only way to get money was to do some standard job and work for somebody else. It’s a very limited view, but it’s one that’s very established amongst most people I’ve ever known. You go to interview after interview desperately hoping people will employ you, and you probably learned how to do what you were told at school. If you can’t get a job, you have to go to the government who channel you into whatever happens to be available. There’s a distinct lack of imagination when it comes to that: we don’t ever teach children really about money, how it works in the world or the very basics of making your new ideas get anywhere.

After reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I realised how limited my perspective was: I’d assumed I had to have a “real career” and that if I was truly blessed by the gods of publishing, maybe in a million years I’d get offered a tiny deal and nothing would happen. Careers support in school is so limited, and doesn’t seem to be geared towards people’s real abilities at all but what certain people imagine might be useful in the market. This was really what lay behind the idea of the Gadasim in Amnar, since both my brother and I were raised with talents which everybody told us were basically useless. My brother’s a musician, and a brilliant one, but because he has dyslexia he really struggles with the basics of our standard learning system. Nobody ever really suggested that he really could make something of himself with music – it’s always assumed that it’s too difficult, it’ll never happen, you can’t do it, and that kind of thing.

Anyway, Monday night I encountered somebody who from the start has had to think differently to make his life work, and I felt quite inspired by his understanding of himself, that he couldn’t fit into the “conventional” mentality and had so far been incredibly successful developing new ideas, especially start-up businesses. It’s almost like talking to somebody from another planet, having the courage to go out and do things differently. It’s encouraging, too, when people like that look at what I’m doing and are impressed and encouraging. Who knows where this will go but it’s nice to have somebody else as a soundboard (if he doesn’t mind!), especially as we share a lot of ideas about the world.

Anyway, it was the experience of being told the one thing I was really great at, the one passion I had in life was pretty much a dead-end, that I think subconsciously made me bring out the Gadasim in Amnar. All children in Amnar have a Gadasim who is responsible for finding whatever gift they have so they can be the most use they can in wider society. So unlike our society, where we have very restricted ideas about what’s useful and what makes money, and trying to fit people into what those things might be whether they like it or not, Amnar is based on people contributing what they’re best at. Since everybody has different talents and abilities, pretty much everything is taken care of in this set up.

A wise friend of mine has suggested that we have something like a donation drive or support box. Since what we do with the podcasts, as well as the writing itself, takes time and effort, we might be asking if people would help us keep them going with a donation. I know some bloggers who do that, although I’ve never really explored it myself. We’ll see how that works in the future. What I’d really like to do is get enough money together to commission an artist (probably somebody on DeviantArt) to produce some really hot Amnar art, because I’m not good enough to do it myself, and then incorporate that into the website and our promotional material. We’ll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, it’s a beautiful Friday afternoon here and the sun is shining brightly. I’ve just started reading the Daniel Tammet book and the descriptions of him seeing letters and words in colours that I don’t is still causing me some mental strain. At least judging by what he says, he has the same problem. I’ll do a review when I’ve finished reading, and know a bit more about it all. Next podcast is due out tomorrow morning, early.

Finding a path

I get a lot of people check out my about page and I’ve never been able to write anything decent that really tells you who I am because I’m not sure how you go about compressing a person into a brief set of phrases, a CV for the world to look at when they come hunting for Isabel Joely Black. I used to be a bit of an approval junkie and when you write things like that you’re always thinking to yourself “Oh, people will hate me for saying I have a PhD” or “They’ll judge me for having anorexia.” When you put yourself out there like this, and especially if in your work you have to say “Here, check out my blog/website” then you’re basically allowing people to see whatever you write, and you can’t stop them reading the bits of your writing that maybe you’d rather they didn’t see yet. You can’t hide, and you don’t get to keep many secrets.

It’s funny, actually, because there’ve been a couple of big anniversaries in my life the last few weeks. Nine years ago, in January 1999, I was admitted to hospital suffering the effects of a very serious medication error. It took days for me to come back to consciousness (I was given barbiturates and benzodiazepines in combination, which isn’t fun, let me tell you), and when I did I’d lost my short term memory. I was 20, and as an adult, in the middle of my second year of my degree, and although I could remember who I was and my basic history, I couldn’t remember one minute to the next yet still had to fight to stay at university by myself. Everything flashed by me in a series of freeze-frames. I have my diary from that time, when my handwriting changed dramatically every single day, and I first began coalescing a childhood and adolescence spent playing in this imaginary world. I changed its name to Amnar.

Five years ago this week I walked into a doctor’s surgery and told my GP that the medication I was supposed to be unable to cope without I was no longer going to take. Hang it, I said, I’m going to do this by myself. Fifteen years of starving myself ended with a decision that I would eat – a conscious decision – that I could get over this by myself, by choice. I’ve read a lot of autobiographies and accounts of former anorexics lives and most of them tell the same story. No miracle cure is found by a therapist, although we may lean on one to help us along the way, no drug will cancel out your furious determination to starve. Eating, like living, is a choice.

That doesn’t negate the seriousness of anorexia or any other eating disorder. I don’t really buy these studies saying it’s a brain disorder, or the minority claiming you could develop anorexia from missing a couple of meals. It’s a serious business, a full-time occupation to fight that instinct to eat. Consciously, or unconsciously, I’d made a choice that starvation would be my way of dealing with The Stuff In My Head, and then I made the choice that I wouldn’t starve anymore. So I ate, I got better, and I’ve been off medication for five years this week. I survived, nine years ago, with bits of paper to remind me where I was and what I was doing. I started writing the first draft of Amnar that year too.

All of that pales into insignificance compared to this. The thing is, however huge things get, however bad or threatening or worrying, I realised that you just carry on living. You’re not going to suddenly and dramatically drop dead. Life won’t pause, and you certainly don’t get to rewind or press “Undo Action” until you reach a point where you feel you might make a different choice. Life doesn’t stop because you got upset or you were down or the bills weren’t paid or you lost your job. Your heart will go on beating and somehow you’ll have to find a way through. That’s scary in a way but liberating in another. I was always scared of life and found it fundamentally threatening, until a few weeks ago, when it reached the most terrifying it’s ever been, and I’ve never been happier. Not because I was scared, but because I just felt this sense of being in the right place, doing what I was supposed to be doing, and no longer trying desperately to be somebody else, to fit somebody else’s idea of who or what I should be being or doing.

I’m excited and terrified. I own the choices I’ve made though, and the reasons behind them. They might not be your choices, and you might well be sitting there feeling quite annoyed that I don’t allow comments so you aren’t easily able to tell me exactly how bad you think my choices are. It’s taken me a long time that I can’t really live up to anybody else’s expectations, or please anybody else because everybody wants something else, and everybody, especially on the internet, believes they are Right and have some grasp on The Truth. For some reason this week I decided to up and share my particular version of that truth, and it may not be yours. Hell, it may offend you. The first thing you learn when you realise you’re a synaesthete is that nobody sees, hears, feels, tastes, touches or generally experiences the world in the same way. Firstly, you see the world as your brain and your senses are set up to see it. Then you see what your beliefs tell you is or isn’t there. We all live our own way, and I chose this path.

It still feels a bit odd talking like this in such a public way on a blog anybody can see and read. You’ll notice over the coming weeks, those who read me and follow the podcasts, that I’m going to be talking more personally about the process we’re going through at the moment, with varying levels of detail depending on what’s actually going on (or not, as the case may be). Regardless, I don’t think, in all my life, I’ve ever felt this open about life, this excited and hopeful about life, as I do now.