Tag: Change

Changing Direction

Changing Direction

by alexforshaw ♥ 7 Comments

It’s been a long time since I sat down and wrote something. So long that I wondered whether I still possessed the ability.

My life has changed a lot over the last couple of years. I got out of an abusive relationship, found a place to live. Started to live in a very real sense. After years of being who others wanted me to be I began to discover who I was.

I discovered–perhaps that should be re-discovered–a love of art and made the time to explore and indulge this growing passion. Regular visits to galleries and exhibitions punctuated my own creative exercises, drawing and painting, as I quickly realised that my desire was to build up my own visual arts practice.

That continues to develop, and I’m certainly blessed with the most wonderful collection of friends who offer support and advice. As this interest has risen I’ve found that one casualty–the other end of the seesaw–was my long-established interest in programming.

I’m not sure if that reached its natural conclusion and faded after more than thirty years, or if it was affected by the severe mental health problems I’ve endured since leaving the toxic situation I had been in. It doesn’t actually matter.

My life has reached a point where I feel pulled towards a new destination. The road I’m on branches here, and the path I expected to take no longer calls to me. I’m not sure where my steps will take me from now on, but alongside trepidation at the prospect of upheaval I am feeling excited and eager to explore new lands.

Being both impulsive and risk-averse, I feel conflicting urges to simply jump in feet first while also planning every step in careful detail. Because I have commitments I’m taking the careful option and researching my choices. I’m working on keeping my existing career going while I first explore and then build an alternative, and then I plan to transition from one to the other.

It might not all work out, but I’m taking the advice of Neil Gaiman in his book Art Matters. To “make good art” for sure, but also to imagine my goal as a distant mountain and whenever I’m not sure which way to go, to make sure I’m heading towards that mountain.

In the last year I have sold an artwork, and I’ve had work exhibited. I’ve been lucky, but then to some extent we make our own luck. I’d love to exhibit and sell more work, but more than that I want to make more art. There’s joy in seeing my work appreciated, but the most joy comes from the act of creation itself.

Reaching this turning point has been difficult, tumultuous. I’ve struggled to rekindle a sense of purpose, but there’s direction in my life once again and it’s not one I would ever have imagined even just a few years ago. I’ve changed and that change has unlocked the door to a different world, one in which I feel I belong. All that remains is to build a home there for myself.

Going With the Flow

Going With the Flow

by alexforshaw ♥ 1 Comment

Day 9 of 30 Days of Poetry

Waves crash into a solid rock, spraying high
The timeless rock stands guard
Against the passing years,
A friend we always see
Unchanged through ageing eyes.

My parents knew this rock
Forebears of theirs did too,
But I will break that chain.

I vow no child of mine
Will moor their life and ride
At anchor till their end.

My child will know the sea
And learn to float and swim:
Let the tidal current flow
And take them where it will.
That Was The Year That Was

That Was The Year That Was

by alexforshaw ♥ 17 Comments

portrait_watercolor
Beardy Thinky Man

I started 2013 as Ben, the man in black: long-haired, bearded with black jeans and a black leather biker jacket. I was often feeling uncomfortable when out socially, my relationship with my wife was rocky, and I was getting drunk regularly.

On the bright side work was going well: I continued to be happy in my job as a software developer. I was organizing darts competitions in my local pub.

But on a personal level the cracks were showing. By the middle of the year tensions at home were very evident and I had been contemplating separation. My wife told me several times that I wasn’t the person she had married: I had changed.

I guess I was aware of this subconsciously as a kind of dissatisfaction with my life, a feeling that things used to be better. If I could only go back to those happier, more innocent days… I was spending more and more time in introspection, analyzing myself, trying to figure out what was out of balance in the machinery of my mind.

I finally took steps to seek help with one of my problems: anxiety. I underwent a course of CBT to help me handle some of the situations where my anxiety was seriously affecting my ability to function. It helped with one small area of my life but I recognized that I had other problems and was suffering deeper and more frequent bouts of depression.

I started writing about more emotionally difficult subjects, trying to exorcise the demons of my past. Maybe some of this acted as a trigger, maybe it was just the build-up of stress, but I began to break down. I was feeling scared, sad, lonely, tired and trapped. My marriage appeared to be beyond salvation and my wife and I were at each others’ throats.

I ran away for a few days, staying with friends. I took time off work. I wrote a post that was as close to an admission of my true feelings as I had been able to come so far in my life. I saw my doctor and started treatment for depression. And finally I revealed to my wife a secret that I had held for about thirty years.

And over a few weeks, through a combination of my new-found openness — no more secrecy, no more pretending to be somebody I am not — and medication, I started to feel better. My relationship with my wife not only improved but became stronger than ever.

As this year draws to a close I am, at last, happy and optimistic about the future. It has been an exhausting journey and there is still a long way to go in terms of changing my body to match my gender identity. But I have had such support from my friends and especially from my wife that I truly feel accepted and loved.

So I’m finishing the year as Alexandra and I feel a long way removed from the person I was twelve months ago. After so many years — decades — I can be myself openly.

portrait2_watercolor
Look, no makeup 😉

 

Breakdown Timebomb

Breakdown Timebomb

by bjforshaw ♥ 2 Comments

Handling strong emotions is extraordinarily difficult. Trying to keep them under control – rein them in – is like trying to close a suitcase packed with so many clothes that they threaten to burst out from every side.

I am caught in the currents of my feelings, one minute floating calmly and the next being pulled under by the rip tide or whirled around in a maelstrom of despair before sinking down in darkness. The illusion of control lies shattered around me as I huddle fetus-like in the middle of an barren landscape, no feature to break the monotonous emptiness fading to the horizon in every direction. Out here there is only loneliness. No sound. No breeze. Nothing moves, not even me. Yet within my mind nothing is still: huge, demanding thoughts and emotions slug it out in a battle for my attention while I struggle to avoid being overwhelmed.

And then, as softly sudden as the bursting of a soap bubble, the turmoil subsides and I experience a period of relative calm.

I feel the need to escape – a basic animal instinct to flee from threat. But there is no path to the place that draws me because it exists only in my memories, in the past. An illusory golden history, a carefree time of happiness. An amalgam of times and places synthesized into idyllic fantasy. Such a temptation!… to slip away into this perfect dream world.

A number of factors have likely contributed to my current state of mind but they all boil down to one thing: change. Too much has changed and is changing in too short a space of time and it all pushes me out of my comfortable routine existence into an unstable, unpredictable, disorientating state of uncertainty and confusion. I’ve not been sleeping well as a result, compounding the problem with tiredness – I feel tattered, ragged, frayed, worn out.

Please, somebody stop the world. I want to get off – I’ve had enough of this ride.

A Change of Plans Causes Issues

A Change of Plans Causes Issues

by bjforshaw ♥ 6 Comments

I don’t know about anybody else but I have a big problem when events fail to turn out the way I expect. It’s one reason I try not to plan what I’m going to do in advance. Take what happened yesterday for example – I knew there was mince in the fridge that needed using along with tomatoes, mushrooms, onions and carrots. So I thought, “Pasta sauce!”

And then I got home and my wife had somehow managed to cook me a chilli despite her feeling so ill. Did I react with gratitude? I’m sorry to say I didn’t. I was knocked off-balance because some of the ingredients I had been going to use for my pasta sauce had been used instead to make this chilli. I managed not to get angry or melt down – took some self-control – but I did complain. I knew my reaction was upsetting my wife but I couldn’t stop myself. I tried to explain that it was the fact that my plan had been scuppered that had stressed me but the damage had been done.

I must say that I ate the chilli and enjoyed it very much. But. It. Wasn’t. Pasta. Sauce! How do you explain this kind of feeling to somebody who can handle change? That despite appreciating the effort she had gone to, I was unable to get past this clash – this discrepancy with my mental image of myself cooking a different dish. It’s my normal reaction to change – I try not to respond in this way because it hurts or offends people I care about but it causes me stress and I find it very difficult to hide. That would be the same as lying which I also find very difficult, even to save people’s feelings.

In this case I got over the worst of the feeling quite quickly and apologised – this kind of thing has happened numerous times before so my long-suffering wife is sadly used to it by now – but I’ve still got a little lingering disquiet that things didn’t happen as I expected. And I feel bad about not showing my gratitude from the outset. I know it’s a shabby way to treat somebody who’s made an effort to do something for me but I really don’t know how to get past the intense disappointment and stress I feel in these situations – the feeling is so intense that it swamps any other, more rational, thoughts I may have.