Other lives

People watching

One of the things that has always intrigued me is how my life is so important to me, but to anyone else is almost meaningless. Aside from a fairly limited group of friends, the vast majority of people I see every day wouldn't even class as acquaintances. To those people, rushing past in the busy city centre, I am nothing. And to me, that random couple across the street are just scenery.

When I think about the number of people who have glanced at me without caring, or pushed past me, or stepped to one side to let me past, I realise how unthinkably large the number of people I've been in contact with is. So I decided to start taking note.

Instead of ignoring the people I don't know, I watch for a little bit (not in a creepy way) and try to work out what's going on in their lives. For example, that man holding two cups of coffee, who's the other one for? A friend? A partner? Is he just so tired he needs an extra cup? Or that woman adjusting their suit, why are they so worried? Maybe they have an interview? Or a date? Or they just want to look smart? I don't know but it's fun to come up with ideas.

So many things that I see have such stories behind them. An idea I've entertained for a while is writing a story where random people in the street take over the narration and become the main character. Unfortunately I don't have the free time or the patience to work out such a complex story - but maybe one day I'll give it a go.

Funny looks

If you've ever gone out somewhere dressed in an extravagant or unusual way, you may well have experienced this for yourself. I'm talking about the times everyone seems to glance at you as you walk towards them. There is definitely a 'weirdness threshold' (as I will call it) beyond which you will find yourself the subject of a large amount of attention. Through extensive research* I have identified a number of criteria for reaching this threshold.

*Extensive research may or may not be extensive and may or may not be research.

Disclaimer: If you use my techniques I take no responsibility for any funny looks, confusion or laughter caused

1) Outward vs. inward

To seem weird enough to be noticed, the weird aspect of you must be something visible. For instance, wishing you were a purple jelly bean, though sufficiently weird, will not gain the focus of anyone around unless you actually paint yourself purple or wear a jelly bean costume. The most obvious things to the average passer-by are clothing, anything on your face and how you are moving. Wearing strange clothes, heavy/vibrant makeup or large piercings are good ways to reach the threshold. Walking with a limp or skipping will often be just as effective.

2) Range of notice

To reach the great heights of the weirdness threshold it is important that your weird aspect must be visible from far enough away for people to notice as they hurry past with their busy lives. Writing "Hello, I'm Bob" on your forehead can potentially draw attention, but not if you write it too small. 

3) Extent of weirdness

At some levels of weirdness, people will not take notice. It is possible to be fairly weird without getting more than one or two looks. Take leaning on something for instance:

As you can see, the first posture wouldn't draw attention, the second might a little bit, but the third has passed the threshold and would be noticeable to anyone nearby.

Fear

Sometimes I get scared of being around lots of people. I know that I'm different to a lot of people - there aren't many who seem to be a completely different gender at the weekends - so I'm often worried people will look at me and think: "freak". Of course, most people don't look hard enough to notice anything odd, so my fears are often misplaced. But sometimes even being in a crowd puts me on edge.

The urgency of everyone rushing past, as if anything in their way would be pushed aside or trampled over without thought. It sets my heart beating faster than my panicking footsteps, one step the wrong way and I'm suddenly in the wrong place at the wrong time. I try to keep my head down and my path straight. But it's not just crowds that scare me...

I find it hard to do many things in public. I'm not sure if that's because I'm British or because I have some kind of social anxiety. One of the things that makes me stressed is paying for things, not because I don't like spending money, but because I take so long to get my money out and put the change in my wallet. I can feel the person behind me get more and more irritated the longer it takes.

I try to avoid at all costs the complication of pubic bathrooms - whichever I use I risk being kicked out. If I'm presenting as fully female, it makes sense to go to the women's but, if someone realised I am not biologically female I could be in a lot of trouble. If I go into the men's it is likely that people will think I'm a girl and therefore I shouldn't be there. So I avoid it as much as I can.

I suppose one day I will become more confident in these situations (and many others) but for now it makes going anywhere pretty stressful.

Our world is full of expectations and eyes, social constructs that tell us how to act, interact and feel. Sometimes I wish I could ignore them more easily.

Creativity

Self-criticism

It's often easy to be self-critical, particularly if your interests are creative. There's no way to definitively measure success when it comes to the arts, which means writers, artists and musicians tend to spend a lot of their time convincing themselves that they'll never make it. I consider myself very lucky in that I have both academic skill and creative skill, but it is far easier to know how well you're doing at say, physics or maths, simply because you are either right or wrong. Meanwhile, though I can measure how many songs I've played or how many poems I've written, I still have no real grasp of where I stand in the grand scheme of things.

I have found myself on many a night staring at my as yet unpublished poem of the day thinking: "Well this is terrible." But by that time it's too late to start again, so I click 'publish' anyway and punish myself internally for inflicting such words on the public. Of course, I am always assured that said poem is better than I think, but the more I read it the more I see problems with it.

It's the same with drawing, I've finished sketches fairly happy with the result, but the more I look, the worse it gets. In the end I try and fix the mistakes and more often than not find myself longing for a real life undo button. And of course, no composition is ever perfect, it never quite sounds how it does in my head.

Now, obviously it is important as any form of artist to know when something is too far gone to be worth pursuing, but we all, collectively, find it very difficult to believe that our work is worth it. The sad thing is, ideas that could become masterpieces can be thrown away in a moment of self-doubt.

Selective hearing

The easiest way to find out if what you're doing is any good is to ask someone. Getting a new perspective is always useful, whether they like what you're doing or not. Now, the problem (certainly for me at least) is that we're naturally very good at hearing criticism and a little deaf in the praise department.

A hundred positive comments don't have nearly the same impact as one or two negative comments. Thankfully, most of the time, the comments I get are either positive or constructive rather than "this video make me sick" or "wow this poem sux" etc. But when someone tells you that your work needs improving, it can stick in your mind for a lot longer than someone saying it’s great. Perhaps it is modesty, or a fear of seeming too full of yourself, but receiving feedback always seems to turn into another chance to beat yourself up.

Of course, we should listen to feedback, but we shouldn’t let it take over what we’ve done – and sometimes, we need the confidence to say that actually it’s better like this. You are the one in control.

Education

Over the past years, particularly in the UK where I live, there has been a certain reluctance to acknowledge the arts as ‘real subjects’. Students are often encouraged to take sciences or maths (and yes, maths has an ‘s’ at the end) simply because they are the ‘core’ of learning. I’ll try not to get too side-tracked with a rant about education (I’m sure it will be covered in many, many future blogs) but the fact is, the system in this country works perfectly for people with a certain kind of mind, but horribly for people with a different kind. What I mean by that is, if you can memorise facts, use maths with ease and visualise scientific concepts, you will breeze through school with flying colours. If you can’t, you’re pretty much screwed. It’s not fair, because there are whole generations of people who have amazing talents who believe they are failures.

When I came to choose my A-levels I had a lot of pressure from all sides to take a lot of subjects. I’m not saying this to boast, basically I have the ‘right’ kind of mind for school. I knew I was going to take Physics and Maths already – I had very little choice and no real objections to that – but my other two subjects came down to my decision. Now, anyone who knows me will know I am absolutely shocking at making decisions. I’m the kind of person who can spend a good twenty minutes deciding which sandwich to get for lunch (egg & cress has its merits, but is it really as filling as chicken? I don’t know! Maybe I should just get both – but then that’s too much! What do I do?!). So choosing between all my options was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. The day before I made my decision I was convinced I was going to do French and Chemistry as my other two subjects – after all, two sciences, a language and maths would look great on a university application – but on the last day, I happened to notice the Creative Writing course. I looked into it and I was sold – this was perfect for me! Then I spoke to my music teachers and I realised that I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. So I surprised everyone by being one of the only straight A* students to choose two art subjects. Best decision of my life.

For the sake of my sanity, my workload and my development into “maturity” (I use the term loosely) I could not have chosen better. I have come on tremendously as a writer and music has been a sanctuary that I could not have managed without. What I'm trying to say in a kind of weird and tangent-filled way is this:

The art subjects may not look as good on a UCAS form, but they are incredibly valuable and we cannot allow creativity to die. Most importantly, taking an art subject doesn’t make you lazy or stupid – it makes you different in a way that really should be celebrated.

So what's my point?

Whatever it is you're pursuing, creative or not, it has to start with the confidence in yourself to be able to make it. I’m not saying just write a novel without changing a word, but sometimes we need to take a step back from all the negativity and just look at what we’ve made. Allow ourselves that moment to appreciate what we’ve managed to do, without worrying about that word which doesn’t quite flow in chapter 6 or that line that’s a little wonky next to that tree. Creating art is not about perfection, if it was artists would have been replaced with photographers long ago, it’s about doing something no one’s ever done before.

And that is something to be proud of.

Words

Personal meanings

At the time or writing I have just got back from a party that reminded me how much I love my friends. We're all way off what anyone could consider normal and really there's no explanation as to how we all fit together, but we do. As a general rule our conversations start with a kind of awkward phase of people trying to work out what everyone wants to talk about, before descending into an indescribable phase of rambling, tangents and word creation.

Now this got me thinking, after today inventing the word 'puddleskip' I wondered how much of what we say to one another means absolutely nothing to anyone else. Our in-jokes have become so extensive that they now make up the majority of our conversation. For example, a conversation could run like this:

Me: What are you doing?

Laurie*: Feeding Seb's friends

Seb*: But I wanted that

Me: None for you

Seb: All for me

Ozzy*: But did you have exact change?

Seb: Exact change

Laurie: Everyday

Me: Fuduckulous

*All names have been changed to characters from my books

Which of course makes absolute sense to all of us and sounds like the the gibbering of the mentally deranged to anyone passing by (which is quite probably a more accurate description). The simplest moments have become so engrained in our conversation that we will never forget them. I'm sure this is not unique to my friendship group, but it does seem to be a great way to remind each other of the good times.

I suppose the question is: Will I still remember these words in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?
Perhaps not, but I like to think that one day I'll look back - maybe even at this blog post - and I'll see one of these meaningless words and I'll be reminded of these days. Will I even be in contact with anyone else who understands them? I like to think so, but if I'm not, maybe I'll call them up.

One word

As a poet I know that just one word can have the power of a thousand others, that's why I spend so long deciding if I've got the right one. What I have come to realise is that actually, the words which mean most to me usually mean the least to others. Some people's eyes are drawn to different letters or different shapes to mine, which makes my job quite difficult - trying to create something that other people can appreciate, not just me.

You may have seen one of those word-searches on Facebook (or your social media platform of choice) which says something like "Comment the first word you see". While being fairly pointless it can be interesting to see how differently people look at the same jumble of letters, often people comment with words you may not have noticed at all. How accurate as a psychoanalysis test this is remains to be seen, but I know there are certain themes I am drawn to quicker than others. (Rather worryingly a lot of those themes include death and blood...)

Another interesting one is word association, which has been used as a real test of mental state. I know that if someone says to me "shimmer" an image of water is instantly brought to my mind, whereas if someone said "glint" I'd think of something metallic - a car perhaps? Subtle differences between words make a big difference to how people think about what you're saying.

Oh, on a side note, whoever said "a picture is worth a thousand words" clearly didn't realise the wonders you can do with the English language.

Memory

I remember things in images, I remember words by how they look on a page and music by what my hands looked like when I was playing. This means that most of the things I remember, I remember very vividly.

This has its upsides and its downsides.

It's great for remembering diagrams and formulae in school, it's fantastic for recalling details about somewhere I've been and it's perfect for when I've lost something - I just get a clear picture in my head of what I'm looking for and look back at when I last saw it.

Unfortunately, I also have crystal clear memories of my darkest days and nights. I can see the look someone gave me when they told me they hate me, I can visualise every millisecond of my first breakup and don't even get me started on horror films. 

Also, I don't remember spoken instructions anywhere near as well as I remember written instructions (not helpful when, for example, asking for directions). 

I find memory a curious thing, sometimes I try and to explain to myself how it is I am 'seeing' both in my head and in real life at the same time but in the end I give up and just carry on my day. Being so perfectly in two moments at once is rather confusing when you start actually thinking about it. As I type this, I'm hearing me saying the words in my head as they appear on the screen and I have an image of myself walking home back when I had the idea for this blog. How do I do that? I haven't a clue! It really starts to mess with you after a while.

Hive mind

Writing, in a way, is the collective memory of humanity. Everything we put down on paper or into a computer is a unique collection of words that can allow someone else to think what you were thinking when you wrote it. It is what separates us from so many species - we have a (fairly) permanent record of the past that we can build on without having to start all over again.

I like to think that the things I write now will one day help someone understand what life was like for me, or delve deeper into the ideas I rambled on about. In a funny way, a writer never dies, their voice can still be heard hundreds of years later, still passionate or fearful or full of wonder. I suppose that's what keeps me going sometimes - the knowledge that what I care about will be remembered because I wrote it down.

This is why the words "I can't write" bother me so much. Everyone can write! Everyone should write! If for no other reason than to be remembered, write.

I'll leave you with a quote that has filled me with optimism and self-belief every time I see it:

"If you want to write, you can.

Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent.

Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me?

You are a human being with a unique story to tell.

You have every right." - Richard Rhodes

Now...to my dreams.

- Parsavagely Hayashi

Hello!

This is me

Well, here we are, my first blog post! I hope this will be the first of many and I will do my best to keep to my self-made schedule of (at least) one post a week.

I decided that the best way to start this blog would be to tell you a few things about myself. If you're here from Movellas or from my YouTube channel you probably know some of these already but I'll try to include some more obscure facts.

My name is...

So we'll start with my name, which is actually a little more complicated than you'd think. You see, I am transgender, which means that my body doesn't match my gender. For this reason I use two names: Stephen (my birth name) and May. The name May was suggested by a close friend, but what neither of us knew was that, had I been born a girl, my middle name would have been May.

What do I do?

Well, currently, I am studying Physics, Further Maths, Creative Writing and Music at college. I sing and play piano, trumpet and guitar. What I spend most of my life doing, however, is writing poetry. I write a poem every day, to varying degrees of success, and I intend to keep doing so for as long as I can. I have written and self-published a book, but this isn't the place for self-promotion.

I'm also very passionate about equality - particularly for the LGBT community - so I try to do what I can to raise awareness of these issues. 

My dreams?

If I could, I would love to make a difference to the world. Of course that's a crazy and rather predictable dream, but I'd love to help make the world a better place somehow. Perhaps one day I might write a story or poem that speaks to enough people to change attitudes, or maybe I could invent something. I don't know, but I know I want to make an impact. Maybe one day I will.

And a few random facts

- I'm 6 foot tall

- I have grade 6 in singing and am working on my grade 8 at the moment.

- I was obsessed with lettuce as a kid (which has now been replaced with an obsession with parsley),
- I was born two minutes after my sister.

- I have played a candlestick, a frog, a liquorice allsort, a hippie priest, a thug and Beadle Bamford on stage

So! That's a bit about me, future posts won't be like this, but I hope this has been interesting enough to keep you interested in my life.

Now...to my dreams.

- Parsavagely Hayashi

Poem of the day: http://hellopoetry.com/poem/1531645/distraction/