Strong

On March 24^th I will be attempting to run just over 13 miles on forest trails for no reason other than bloody mindedness; I didn’t think I could do it so now I have to prove myself wrong.  Twisted, I know.  The upshot of such recklessness is that I have been training pretty hard in an attempt not to embarrass myself on the day.

In the last few days, several people have assumed that I am exercising regularly because I want to lose weight.  I comfortably fit into size 12 clothes – below the national average size of 14/16 – and am a healthy weight for my height, with a BMI in the normal range; why would I want to lose weight?  I am strong and supple with a wonderful wardrobe that I’d hate (and can’t afford) to shrink out of.  Sure, I wobble, and there are bits of me that aren’t as perky as they used to be, but that would still be the case if I were smaller, I’d just be colder and less well dressed.

If intelligent grown-ups are still buying in to the idea that women should be trying to be thinner then what hope is there for young girls?  How can we show them that healthy and strong is what matters?  The Olympics helped but there’s more to be done.  The average person in this country is overweight so I suppose it’s reasonable to assume that most people should be trying to lose some poundage, but when skinniness alone is the goal, it is often achieved (or not) at the expense of health.

One of the things that I love about roller derby is that there is a place on the team for anyone who is fit enough and dedicated enough to earn it.  The teeny blocks of solid muscle who don’t present a spare inch to hit; the long, lithe girls who pass you with one slippery step; the powerhouses of unshiftable mass who are speedy and nimble enough to always be in the way – a group of roller girls is like a campaign poster for all the different ways that strong and healthy can manifest itself. 

I’ve been fat and unhealthy.  I’ve been slim and unhealthy.  Being strong brings confidence and happiness.  Busting out a hand clap push up makes me ridiculously proud, as does knowing that I am in control of my body, it isn’t in control of me.  Come the 24^th March I will run that half marathon with my super fit friend and I will not let her or myself down.  She’ll beat me, but that’s fine; my competition is with myself.  Physical strength and mental strength feed off each other and this spiral can serve to strengthen or weaken – take control of the direction yours is going in.  Be strong.

Overthinker

“You think too much.”

I’ve been on the receiving end of this observation since I was about 13 years old.

Back then, I didn’t understand why people were saying this to me with varying degrees of pity, confusion and exasperation; surely thinking a lot was a good thing?  My diaries from the time are a never ending saga of introspection and dwelling, with occasional bouts of self-loathing thrown in just to break the monotony.  I second guessed my friends and enemies, analysing every tortured twist and traumatic turn in our dysfunctional circle until I drove myself insane.  I assumed that everyone did the same.

A particularly prolonged period of inner wrestling almost saw me drop out of university.  I simply couldn’t see what the point was in writing essays about what other people had already written.  Discovering that my romanticised ideal of three years of stimulating and earnest academic discussion where fresh insights on old issues elicited approving and admiring nods from bearded professors before we merry students retired to the bar to get drunk and have experimental and fabulous sex was but a pipe dream, I became slightly disillusioned.  The reality of mostly dull lectures delivered by academics who neither knew nor cared what I thought and judged my understanding based on a 2000 word essay summarising what everyone before me thought, followed by retiring to the bar to get drunk and have disappointing and vanilla fumbles was unfulfilling to say the least.   While my peers just got on with enjoying themselves, I was unable to stop questioning everything about the process.

Profundity is often sought but rarely achieved by those seeking to dish it out, but Professor Brooke was (probably still is) one of those people who never wasted a word.  In 1998 he said something to me which has since often provided a key with which I can unlock myself from destructive cycles of overthinking.  “Sometimes, Karen,” he said, “You just have to play the game.”

This new way of looking at the world was a revelation!  It gave me permission to occasionally stop trying to ‘understand’ everything and everyone and to just go along with the world around me as it appeared on the surface.  Clearly I was not cured of my excessively analytical nature but I felt like I’d been given something to control the condition.

Fast forward to today and six months of immersion in the world of dating has led to a massive relapse.  ‘Playing the game’ doesn’t work when you’re trying to work out why he hasn’t texted or what the exact significance is of how many times he’s written ‘x’ at the end of a message or what it is about you that’s putting everyone off.  What even is ‘the game’ when it comes to dating more than one person or deciding when it’s time to put a label on the situation and if so, which one?  I never appreciated how far a stable relationship had pushed this side of my personality into dormancy or how all-consuming the analysis monster would be when she grew full size.

My old ‘play the game’ medicine doesn’t work on this new strain of overthinking; I suspect because the condition has changed and is now augmented by a deficiency in self-worth and a lack of understanding of the new symptoms.  The only solution is to try new cures.  Distraction works but is tiring; the same goes for getting in shape.  Surrounding oneself with friends is always a winner, but after a while a resistance builds up as they, understandably, become fed up with such constant navel-gazing.  Wine absolutely has its place, but it is contraindicated with the aforementioned treatments, rendering it best reserved for serious attacks.

Ultimately, acceptance is the only way forward.  Acceptance of oneself, the situation and the ever-changing nature of the world.  Acceptance that nothing stays the same, good or bad, and that there really is some truth in the idea that what doesn’t destroy us makes us stronger.  Acceptance that whilst being overly analytical and pondering can lead to dark and twisted places, it can also lead to self-understanding and wisdom and that, either way, if that is who you are, then that is who you are.  Someone will love it.

Fantasy Headteacher

Since New Year’s Resolutions are doomed to failure, I’ve decided instead to consider what I might do if I were someone else.  School starts again next week and I find myself thinking what I might do if I were a secondary school headteacher. 

1.    Before making any decision, ask myself ‘will this help the students to learn?’

Too much of what happens in school is done to please OFSTED and parents.  Almost all of my other resolutions are the immediate result of instead focussing my attentions on helping students to learn. 

I understand that it is necessary to judge schools and hold them accountable, but the current system necessarily focuses on what is easily measurable as opposed to what actually matters.  I wish I could offer a solution, but I can’t – my only suggestion is that all headteachers refuse to play this stupid game and instead focus on doing what they know is right.  (I realise this is never going to happen, sadly.)  If every school did this, OFSTED would be forced to develop an inspection regime that did schools justice and the tail could stop wagging the dog.

2.    Remove the focus from exams

Much more easily said than done, this one.  However there are ways to accomplish it and good reasons for striving to do so.  Resits would be allowed in my school but parents would be billed for both the exam entry fee and any extra after school support provided.  We wouldn’t even discuss target or predicted grade in the first year of any course of two years or longer.  Meaningful courses with no resulting formal qualifications would be provided and professionally taught.

I’m not suggesting that passing exams is unimportant, just that we seem to have lost sight of learning for learning’s sake.

3.    Ban homework

Homework is set because parents expect it and because it is easy to monitor.  It is often educationally pointless or worse, counter-productive.  I would remove any notion of a ‘homework timetable’ and allow teachers to decide whether it is relevant or necessary to set homework at a given time.  Poor quality homework tasks encourage a negative attitude from students and arguments at home.  We perpetuate the unhealthy notion that the working day does not stop upon leaving the workplace and unfairly disadvantage students from less academic households.

This is not to say that I would be encouraging students not to seek learning opportunities outside school.  A bank of inspirational, optional projects, combined with support for parents in how to develop a love of learning at home would complement the ethos of my school regarding learning being about more than just passing exams.

4.    Allow failure

Life includes failures.  Learning to handle these and move on from them is a life skill.  When we allow a student to hand in vital work after the deadline, or clutch at straws to find something, anything, good to say about a shoddy and lazy piece of work, or enter them for their third resit without demanding some change in effort or attitude we are doing them no long term favours.  When we correct their work for them, rather than insisting they work out where they went wrong, when we give them rewards for simply doing what is expected, when we lie on their university references we are just passing on problems to the next teacher, professor or employer who has to work with them.  Allow failure, catch them, support them in their quest to avoid it again.

These ideas are all impractical, for one reason or another, which is one of many reasons I shall never seek to be a real headteacher.  In reality, headteachers have a ridiculous variety of conflicting stakeholders to try to satisfy.  Most of them entered the profession to teach in the classroom, not to sit in an office balancing multi-million pound budgets whilst being pulled in a dozen different directions by department heads, governors, parents, pupils, the Council, the Government and the local community.  They do a mostly thankless job, mostly very well – it’s too easy to forget this and we shouldn’t.  Here’s to the headteachers.

Reviewing

In January, I shared my New Year’s Resolutions.  As 2012 draws to a close, I feel it only fair to honestly review them.

1.    Relearn to focus.

Getting there.  I still watch television with the laptop and/or ‘phone close by but I have become much better at not turning the television on at all and with the odd show I really like the computer gets a definite back seat.  As I become a student again in February I really need to continue working on this.

5/10

2.    Be a better friend.

A horrific failure on this one.  When I wrote these resolutions, I hoped my marriage was reparable.  It turned out that it wasn’t.  The echoes of this have spread through every facet of my life and reverberate into the most obscure corner. 

In a (largely unsuccessful) attempt not to bore everyone to death with how miserable this year’s been I have kept a lot of the darkness inside.  One of the results of this is that there’s not a lot of room left for other people and their lives.  This has led to me being a lousy friend, though also an incredibly grateful one.

-2/10

3.    Be able to turn stop in both directions.

I have practised and practised and practised and all I can do is resolve to practise more in 2013.  I WILL nail this. 

0/10

4.    Explore different ways of making a living.

Started this.  Didn’t get anywhere.  Anyone want to pay me for being me? 

1/10

5.    Stop being the drunkest person in the room.

Achieved this on a technicality by hanging around with a lot of very drunk people, rather than by drinking less myself.  Result. 

10/10

6.    Get happy.

Definite progress here – I’m certainly much happier than I was at this time last year.  I have a wonderful bunch of friends, for whom I’m very grateful, an amazingly generous and thoughtful family, a great job, a lovely house, my health and (almost) my freedom.  Short of a lottery win or Johnny Depp realising he’s completely in love with me, I’m not sure how things could get much better. 

9/10

According to a survey, 92% of New Year’s resolutions are not kept, so I’d say that my score of 23/60 is not bad at all.  How did you do?

Lonely This Christmas?

2012 was the year my marriage became irretrievable.  I found myself single for the first time in nearly 14 years and it was tremendous.  The freedom to be entirely self-centred in my own way in my own space was joyous.  I revelled in the silence of my own home and the cocooning effect of being surrounded entirely by my own stuff.

After a while, however, I began to miss the intimacy and affection that comes with having a boyfriend, as well as just having someone to hang out with, so I started to dip my toe into the treacherous waters of dating as an adult.  It has not been a success.

First there was The Colleague.  A school trip to Spain working with a guy I had always shared a mutual attraction with, fuelled by sun, sand and senselessness, led to a romance of sorts.  On our return, failure to communicate properly meant that weeks of flirting was only made flesh a couple of times before he suddenly and inexplicably went mute (a male habit I was to experience several more times this year) over the summer holidays.

Unbowed there was then The Barman’s Friend.  It was with this guy that I experienced for the first time the strange phenomenon of ‘phantom dating’.  This is when a date is arranged, only to be cancelled at the last minute; in hindsight it is clear that the male in question never actually intended this date to happen.  Why organise it?  We’d only been out once before - really, he wouldn’t have broken my heart if he’d just said that actually, he didn’t think I was his cup of tea.  He even led on the arrangement of another phantom date, only to cancel once again a few hours before kick off.  A layer of sudden, inexplicable muteness on top of the two phantom dates and another one bit the dust.

Bank Holiday weekend brought The Hippy into my life.  Beautiful, sweet and interesting, this one goes straight to the top of the ‘I would let my friend date them’ pile for being not only beautiful but the only one to actually have the cojones to tell me that he didn’t think it was going anywhere and therefore we shouldn’t waste our time.  I completely agreed with him (though I would have wasted a bit more time – did I mention he was beautiful?) so we parted happily.

The Colleague decided this would be a good time to start pursuing me again.  Two phantom dates and a sudden, inexplicable muteness later and he’s back with his ex.  They’re welcome to each other.

Next came Twinners.  Instant mutual attraction, physical and mental, led to weeks of flirting before a proper meet up.  One lovely day followed by complete rejection and sudden, inexplicable muteness.  See the pattern yet?

With my self-esteem in tatters, I finally met someone who I could reject before they rejected me!  What a hideous world where this seems like a good thing.  Red was a good-looking, nice guy, but his grammar was terrible and he had annoying eyebrows.  Game over, I’m afraid.

Dating disasters of 2012 finished with Beardy.  A breakfast date that lasted all day with texts that evening and a second date planned for the next day all combined to make it appear that the tides were turning in my favour.  But no.  Stood up.  Merry bloody Christmas.

Logically, I should now be swearing off dating for good.  The evidence suggests there’s something fundamentally undateable about me, but I say screw the evidence!  I love that feeling of flirting with someone new, of getting excited when the ‘phone makes its text message sound, of going over and over every word they’ve said in your head.  If boys knew the extent to which I dwell on every possible version of our future together, having only known them five minutes, they’d be terrified, but it comes from a place of hope and indefatigable romanticism, not psychosis.  Not all women want to stop you seeing your friends and control your life.  Some women want to be with you in order that both your lives can be enriched and enhanced.  Some women really do want a partner, not a browbeaten shelf-fixer.

James Dyson said of his vacuum cleaner, “I made 5,127 prototypes of my vaccum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure.”  I’m not quite at 5,126 failed dates yet, but I have learned to move on from the sudden, inexplicable muteness much more quickly rather than clinging on to some hope that it will pass.  I have learned that after one phantom date, he’d better do some serious ass-kissing to get a second.  I have learned that very few men are brave enough to actually say what they feel; I don’t know whether this is arrogance that they think I’ll be devastated or cowardice that they think I’ll be horrible to them, in reality neither of these things will probably happen, I’ll just be grateful not to have any more of my time wasted and move on.  Most of all, I have learned that when you have the right person, you should hold on to them with all your might.  James Dyson may have moved on from failure 5,126 times but he was also smart enough to stop at 5,127 and not tinker with what worked.