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itskatepaddington · 11 months

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Analogue

I wrote a short film about this, which the world hasn’t seen as of 2023. But there’s only so much you can say in 10 minutes, so here I am, explaining myself again.

My godfather gifted me a point-and-shoot Kodak camera when I was a baby, or so I am told. It was with our family ever since. Developing film today is expensive; it would be cheaper back then, and yet it was pricey for someone on a lower income, with different financial priorities. And so taking these snaps limited us to only the events of importance.

When the roll reached 36 exposures, and they were passed onto the photo shop to be developed, you anticipated them nervously. Then, all of them were locked away behind the pages of the huge volume with a thick, red cover. I don’t think we’ve filled it all, to this very day.

If you flip a couple of pages through the album, you will quickly understand the meaning of what “an event of importance” was. It means weddings, christenings, big birthdays, Christmas sometimes, the end of the school year when yours truly got to show off her excellent grades (I won’t stop mentioning this, my Reader, for I have peaked at school), or the first communion for my sister and I, as we were both raised Catholic. We never went on holidays, but what I count as holiday snaps are the summer pictures: playing with our cats and dogs, burnt by the sunshine, with strands of hair highlighted by the summer rays, in clothes dirtied by mud and grass, hugging dolls or playing sports with our cousins or neighbours.

We turned the camera to these slivers of lives. Only the events of grander importance were captured, and I developed muscle memory - it’s that important event that I personally turn the camera to. While maintaining that rule helped us to remember those special occasions, a lot of everyday moments that burned into my memory would remain somehow unacknowledged, lacking any proof that they ever existed. I remembered them, and so did those that were there - even if they may have remembered them differently - but no physical evidence remained.

When my sister suggested we look through the album, I knew I would’ve remembered some of those photos. When I got my first PC, I was reading a lot of computer magazines (interested in a lot of things! Don’t ask!) One of them would give me the idea of digitising the old pictures. I scanned them all, or at least quite a few of them, so I remembered a lot of those. My sister and I laughed, we asked Mum to sit with us, and we reminisced. But there were a couple of them I haven’t seen before.

I really wanted to look for photos of Dad. He didn’t like being in the photos, but he complied when we asked, and I was still hoping I could possibly find some pictures he was in. There were going to be some from what I remembered, but when you lose someone, none of this is ever enough, and you're always hoping for a surprise. And even if you do remember some of the preserved moments, like these family Christmas snaps, you start to wonder how much of their feelings you truly understood at such a young age.

Eventually, we found some pictures, the stories of which I would never know. One of these was a black and white photo with people I assumed were Dad’s coworkers from his railway days. These were the times that I didn’t remember, but he would tell us about them, as opposed to that photo in which he was going through his bag, near a pond. A long-haired, young man, in his railway uniform, different from how I remembered him. I would never know the context of that photo.

In a moment like that, you realise how unknowable to one another you really were. There was a whole chunk of life your parent had before you came around. Now, it was on a page in front of you, a split second frozen in time, a memory that is not yours, for which you have absolutely zero context.

So many of the moments which shaped them were probably never captured. You know you would never see them. Some of them were; you may even have some context for those. I even jotted down some of his memories that he told me about since I was a graphomaniac for as long I could remember, and this time around it came in handy. They’re in a file on my hard drive, written quickly from memory, in a pained attempt not to lose those memories forever. My dad’s first car, for example, which he had when he was young and was very proud of, or what I remembered him saying about it. Or his shenanigans from the times he worked as a railway electrician.

Many of these captured moments will remain there for you without any explanation. Or you may try to find one. There’s the Internet, after all, with all the knowledge available to humanity - but then what if your parent never used it? You quickly counter that fact in your head. Others might have. They might have posted, and you can figure out the context, you think. You type a name into a search engine anyway. But you’re met only with some noise, followed by digital silence. No relevant search results, it says. Do you want to try something else?

You end up thinking that you took the ability to capture every day for granted. You take photos, and so many of them - then you post them online for the world to see. You share them with friends, you make it a brand or a meme, you name it. You wish you did that more often before.

I didn’t have a good digital camera before I left home. I had some snaps from rather bad phone cameras, but nothing much beyond that. Anyway, you end up wishing you had used the bad camera you owned.

But this learned habit stretches further, into the times when the technology was already at my fingertips. But the routine was an excuse. Even during the lockdowns of the curséd year of 2020, I discovered how much I appreciated returning to the moments I had previously kept for myself. But I did notice one thing: I still tend to turn the camera to the event of importance, whatever it may be. Yet, these pics of my family and friends around me let me escape out of the temporary confinement and into the life I used to live, brought to a halt by an unprecedented historical event. I promised myself to capture more of these moments back then.

Now that the world is open and I can do just that, I do take photos in multiples, yet many of them never see the light of day. I go crazy with the number of snaps I take, too. It’s so common that it probably lost some of its charm if not its value. This was when I first started considering that maybe I would like to have them in a physical form, too. And maybe I would want to think before I make the shutter click.

An article containing a lot of fascinating statistics about photos we take was recently making rounds on my timeline. An average citizen of the US takes 20 photos a day, it said. Even if professional photos represent a small percentage of those - what we take pictures of can be anything, from local posters and info we want to keep, to food to selfies and snaps at parties - and only about seven per cent of photos are taken with cameras, this is an incredibly big number when you think that a smaller film roll, commonly used about two or three decades ago, has the capacity for just 24 or 36 photos. More photos are taken every day than in the nineteenth century when the cameras were first invented, and we’ve surpassed the number of photos that were taken in the twentieth century already. It’s estimated that by 2030, 2.3 trillion photos will be taken every year.

It’s hard not to think about the environmental impact of something that we use so freely. A lot of these photos are stored in the cloud, and at some point, that will be a challenge. Every photo that we take is eventually turned into a little signature of the times that once were; a little acknowledgement that we existed. If climate change starts impacting technology in the end, what will happen? Will my family, in some distant future, know about any of these moments that I so painstakingly capture?

I have just received an email that one of my old service providers will remove the accounts that were inactive for more than two years - to save resources and all that. Maybe the huge chunk of it will be wiped out anyway, and unless I become Someone Important For History, someone will search for my name and find absolutely nothing one day. Maybe. Or maybe my brain is writing science fiction again.

My sister kept the habit of printing photos out, regardless of the digital copies she keeps. She selects some of the photos we take digitally and takes them to a print shop - as my kindest superfan, she even saved some of mine and put them in her album - but I store them all on hard drives only. And in the meantime, having taken up photography, I’ve developed a habit of taking multiple photos at a time.

There are obvious benefits to this. A lot of what I do now is in a professional capacity. When I do edit them, I have all the coverage I may potentially need. But it’s also chaotic. I end up with a lot of outtakes - some gems, some won’t see the light of day. And they take up a lot of storage. This is when I first started toying with the idea of returning to shooting film. I saw people taking film photographs, I thought it was cool for a while. I could potentially come back to it, too. And of course, there were film directors I loved, obsessing over the colour and the grain in a different context. The usual camera for everyday photos, special treatment - wouldn’t that be nice? I asked my sister to ship the Kodak camera to London, but she’s a busy gal, so it didn’t quite make it to me, yet.

Months later, I ran into a neighbour while taking photos at a local park. He saw my camera, asked about its make, and that’s how we started talking. We spoke about the photography business his son owns, his Sony camera, and the old film cameras he used to have back in Turkey when he was young.

“You kids, you’ve got it easy,” he said. “You take as many pictures as you want now, but back in the day, you needed to know your camera inside out to take good photos,” he said.

As we spoke about it more, his words started to make more sense. Getting a film camera could possibly get me into the habit of practising more thoughtful composition. Slowing down and giving it more thought could make my photography better, too. And both negatives and printed photos are tangible, and if kept well, boast rather good longevity - and that was just what I wanted.

So I went home, looked at some classic cameras, and found a physical vintage shop, but my expedition into the rabbit holes of internet reviews extended well into the night and it was unlikely a shop would be open at 2am. When I woke up the next morning, there were more pressing matters to attend to, but the whole film camera business came through my head and went a few times more.

A few months after, I ventured into the French sunshine for my first experience of a film festival abroad. Packing films into my schedule, I saw Aftersun. I will do the film a disservice if I try to summarise it; to start with, it’s a film about a depressed father and his daughter, now several years older, desperately searching for the meaning of his behaviour during a memorable holiday.

The protagonist was a child - she wouldn’t have understood everything back then - but she picked up on some of his behaviour, and now, an adult herself, she’s grasping for something that would help her understand his pain and dissatisfaction with life from the perspective of all that time. The final scene of it all leaves it open to discussion - was that her last holiday with her dad? Did he pass away? It’s all open to interpretation, and you can essentially project any story about nostalgia and memories onto the canvas of this confidently defined story that regardless leaves a lot of space for us all to empathise. It’s a phenomenal film - not just this slice of life story, but also the warmly coloured visuals of it all. They feel analogue.

As soon as I watched it, I walked into the Mediterranean breeze with tears in my eyes, a need to call my mum as soon as possible, and a want to get a camera that produces tangible memories. But that wouldn’t happen for a little longer.

When I did decide to pick up my first camera, it was totally an impulse purchase. I was heading for a Circa Waves gig at the Roundhouse, and I have just left work. The weekend has just started, and I had plenty of time until the support was on stage, so I went into the Camden Market. I passed by that camera shop with my friends once before, and I almost bought the camera then. I had talked myself out of it commiserating the state of my finances, but this time around, I was two beers in and about to have a good time… so of course I walked in again, asking the shop assistant about my different options.

The kind gentleman showed me a couple of cameras, explaining that point-and-shoot cameras are what most people go for, whereas the more expensive cameras are better for those who understand basic photography concepts.

I mentioned that I didn’t want to spend too much just yet - after all, my sister did have a camera waiting for me - so I picked a really old Halina camera from the 1950s. I eagerly jumped right into taking photos as soon as I walked into the Camden sunshine of the early summer.

A selection of photos I took with it was a light-leak-embroiled disaster, but it was fun. I found myself thinking more, and deciding to hold my horses and not press that button a lot of the time. After all, there were just 36 exposures on that film roll. Even if it was a test, you kind of want that test to go well. Shortly after, my second film camera from an online friend found its way to me, too, allowing me to take some more excellent photos.

Trying to get film for my new camera brought me to a realisation that film was becoming a huge trend - particularly amongst young people. Obviously, I saw some of my friends and plenty of strangers with film cameras. But I hadn’t realised how much of a demand there was until I found myself struggling to get a roll of Kodak Gold. I liked the warmth of it, so I was desperate to replicate it. I walked around the city pleading, I traversed the depths of Online, but both physical and online stores mentioned supply and demand issues, with others racking up the price by half.

And that’s definitely not the first time. Back in 2017, Kodak brought back their Ektachrome roll, which they phased out due to low demand just a few years before, and the company had to rapidly hire to keep up with the surprising growing demand. So much for that Kodak company that failed to keep up with innovation, eh? Take that, business people. There’s a market for everything, some say, and as the great ad man of scripted TV once said about a Kodak product, it’s all about nostalgia: “a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.”

Many have picked a camera as a hobby during the pandemic. Undoubtedly, with the aesthetic of the nineties and noughties returning with full force, many young people also did it for the nostalgic value. Like the annoying hipster I am, I’m a sucker for vinyl, too, and it’s hard not to see the similarity here. After all, at some point a few years ago, the demand was so big that more records were sold than CDs, and the demand for Adele’s latest album in that form actually caused a shortage at the presses for other artists releasing music around the same time. As much as we value our instant gratification, a huge part of us is yearning for an escape from it all. And we’re finding it in returning to familiarity with something that isn’t digital at all.

When the information that surrounds us daily is so unstructured, chaotic, tailored to us, and often agreeing with our bullshit, you can keep up without being tired or switching off your attention for only so long. Something that you can’t skip through, curated by a human, or simply bringing an experience that lets you breathe can release the tension your body and mind are unknowingly under all the time. It’s a bit therapeutic. It’s fun to do it blindly - you never really know how it’s going to turn out. It’s just a wonderful test of expanding your patience, likely severely impacted by the way we’re all filtering information now.

These negatives are something so tangible, along with the pictures you choose to keep for yourself. Taking these photos is a signature of our existence. We snap, we keep the moment, and we hope to preserve it with the evidence that can be held in our hands and hung up on the walls. You don’t have to filter multiple lines of bullshit at a time, you don’t have to switch off your attention to cope with the flood of irrelevant information. You focus and you stay in the moment for a little longer - you do it just before you decide to press the button. You hear the shutter click.

That signature of your existence will now remain with you for that much longer, signalling that once upon a time, you and perhaps people you cared about shared this moment, no matter how they want to remember it.

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itskatepaddington · 11 months

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Wavelength

Dad knew that I was going to be awake. He wasn’t going to sleep: for several years, he had worked as a security guard, picking up plenty of twenty-four-hour-long shifts that stretched from busy days into the silent nights around the office complex he was at.

Back then, I was already shaping up to be a career insomniac I am today. Without fail, I exhibited the first signs of being nocturnal - enjoying the peace that arrived as soon as the sun dropped behind the horizon being one of them, and my tired body working in separation from my active brain being another.

I inevitably had the radio on. Even though it was reasonably easier at night, preparing for a test the next day wasn’t exactly a walk in the park when you still tried to hustle like you had to know it all. And besides coffee and energy drinks, you needed something to keep you awake. Having music on usually helped.

Dad also had the radio on, although the station he would’ve picked was different. Dad loved music. He was once an amateur musician who played the accordion and harmonica when he was younger but had to give it up eventually. That meant, however, that there was a lot of appreciation for music, even if what we had access to was limited. The radio soundtracked a lot of my childhood, too. Before the Internet took over my life - way before YouTube became a phenomenon and we all got our first MP3 players - I used the radio to discover new music.

Whether at a local radio station that my parents would listen to, a trendy Capital FM equivalent, or while listening to the show that my cousin with a taste for rock music would recommend, it was how music would find me.

When I was a child, I would wait by the radio, anticipating the songs I loved to tape them. I would even design my own inserts for those. Painstakingly imitating the covers I would see on CDs that my friends used to buy, collaging or drawing on a piece of paper, I would bring my own artwork to life. A bit of childlike ingenuity, and I would have those mixtapes to keep; sometimes recorded over an old Duran Duran tape that I found at my grandparents’ place, to my grandma’s dismay.

That was the time when my phone wasn’t on silent all the time, and when having a snippet of a song as a ringtone wasn’t entirely passé, or useless. I heard the Beatles track cutting into the melodic rock of late night on the radio, alerting me to the fact someone wanted to talk. I knew who it would be.

We’ve had this agreement that I could call if I needed company but didn’t want to wake up Mum or my sister. I would use it occasionally when I felt I was fading out but had work to do. But today, it was Dad who called. If he did, it would usually be to ask me what time I was going to be at the train station so that he can give me some pocket money for lunch, or to ask if we wanted him to bring us some of these fancy teas from the office to try.

I picked up.

This time, he was calling to ask me about the song he’s heard on the radio. He’s heard it for the first time and liked it a lot, and he wanted us to make it his ringtone. The song was in English, which he didn’t speak, so using the lyrics would be absolutely impossible. If he did try, he would give me a laughing fit, which in turn would make him a bit embarrassed. I spoke a decent bit of the language at the time, enough to start picking out smaller bits of song lyrics yet still having to google the majority of them. He wouldn’t know the lyrics, he said, but he wanted to hum it for me, to see if I recognised it.

He tried and tried again, but the melody he attempted to reproduce didn’t resemble anything I could think of. I was distracted, I said, maybe I was focusing on this history book for too long, so could he please try again? He did, and then something clicked. It was Lana del Rey’s Summertime Sadness that he really liked. I promised that we were going to make it his ringtone when he comes home the next day.

When Dad passed away, I found myself drawn to so many things that deep down, symbolised the easier times I had left behind. Nostalgia was at the heart of it. I knew it, and I idealised the times of simple joys that looked so uncomplicated from a long distance. I tried to remember only the good times and I couldn’t help myself coming back to them. I would dig into the musical guilty pleasures of my childhood, no matter how embarrassing they were. And I found myself thinking about this moment of bonding over the phone quite often, eventually deciding I needed to listen to some radio.

Personally, I don’t need art to imitate my exact experience. If it does, great, but I strive to empathise and connect to emotions in any work of art regardless. If I did have this requirement, I would end up surrounding myself with exact copies of my experiences in slightly varied shapes, stuck in a little echo chamber. But what I do recognise is that it’s often the human connection, the shared moments, that make art important to us. In cinema, we often talk about the importance of communal experience, and this could be applied to live music or theatre, too. And in the digital era where everything is personalised and responds directly to our personal tastes, we are in danger of getting stuck in the ever-growing rabbit hole of endless repetitions that the algorithm has learned about us. And as humans, we aren’t meant to be standing this still. We’re ever-changing.

This is why I found returning to the radio so soothing. I would be parodying metaphors I dislike if I said it was a mindfulness exercise - I am restless so anything that forces me to take a breath feels like one, and these days feels like every self-help strategy looking for sales carries that label. But in a way, it feels less immediate.

One of the streaming services has recently added an automated DJ to its functionality, which speaks to you in an attempt to make it more humane. Yet, that attempt at imitation still feels incomplete. The real radio feels soft and reassuring. It is emotional. It is intense. It is relaxing and it is funny. It’s pop and rock and hip-hop. It is human. Someone on the other side selected these songs in an order presented to you. You can’t skip them. You can’t swap them for a track you like better. You will be exposed to major bangers you like from the first chord, and to songs you are lukewarm about that will grow on you. And when you are throwing yourself into work while grieving in some early morning hours and you pause to think, knowing that there is someone on the other side at this exact time, selecting these tunes for a small group of people who are still awake for different reasons, it makes you feel that little bit warmer. It’s the perceptions of others listening to the same sounds that weren’t tailored just for you, and the vibe changes that radiate that humanity.

On a similar note, I had a laugh with my online friends about the randomly named playlists generated by one of the streaming services. I went down the rabbit hole discovering the bizarre playlists allegedly made “just for me”, with names like Chicken Scratch, Angry Tuna or Power Murder Ballad, which are supposed to cater to anything I may possibly search, tailored for the most niche of situations. If I made someone look the playlists up, they would inevitably be tailored to their taste (Florence and the Machine on your angry playlist and Rammstein in your happy collection, anyone?)

But just as with every single machine learning algorithm at this point, they pored over datasets, tags, connections between artists and music profiles of other users to collate this for you - and they don’t make unexpected choices. They are making selections from a restricted pool of carbon copies linked by tags and probabilities. And they try to absolve you of the effort of trying to expand your horizon so you inevitably end up being stuck in the cycle of pressing play on music that sounds like everything else you’ve listened to. They exclude the possibility of opening your taste up to new, fresh works. What is missing is the fact that it’s specific and that it’s curated and guided by someone else’s choices rather than an “if this, then that” instruction. The unexpected choices that end up fitting the bigger picture make it special.

Ultimately, we tune into the same wavelength in an attempt to find a link between one another. With these mixtapes and playlists we make for others, or films we recommend, we strive to connect over art we like or offer up the details that make us in hopes of finding similarities. And that makes certain works of art that bit more special, along with the form of collating them. A machine learning about you will never quite replicate that, submerging you in a deluge of That Specific Genre or Artist You Love playlists or automated DJs that will pick up the same old good stuff for you - and nothing else.

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itskatepaddington · 1 year

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On the art of doing things alone

Doing things alone doesn’t come naturally to everyone.

Some people are content with their own company, and some people have it a bit harder when it comes to chilling with themselves. Some are incapable of doing anything alone, ever, and I can’t really blame them. After all, time spent on your own allows your thoughts to run crazy - as a highly anxious person who mostly likes her own company, I struggle with that, too. It’s not fun when you get stuck in your head, especially when it starts to have a heavy impact on you. And being independent is a blessing and a curse, really, but that’s a topic for a whole new piece of writing. But a lot of our attitudes around doing things without others have to do with what we see other people doing and how we've learned to live by gleaning at others. What if other people think I’m a loser? Will it actually be fun if I do it alone?

A thing that my anxious brain learned when it comes to my leisure time and has a long way to go to learn everywhere else: no one cares as much as you think, and it’s for the best.

As an avid cinemagoer with several cinema memberships, I tend to watch a lot of films. Very often that means I want to watch things that others aren’t that keen on. I know my friends' tastes: I will ask if they want to come along if there is something that I feel they would like, or that they told me they wanted to see. But a lot of the time, I’m not shy to make five cinema trips on my own if there are some weirder or smaller films that others aren’t really into that I want to see, or to stack a day full of films on my own. Or to take a whole holiday to go to a film festival to seek out the films I maybe wouldn’t have a chance to see otherwise, which I have been known to do.

Cinema is probably the least social of activities in the traditional meaning of the word. It is communal; you’re in a pitch-black room with many other people to appreciate a film. But it never struck me as something particularly social. Your attention is going to the work of art on the big screen anyway, you can’t (and really shouldn’t, cause if you do, you’re annoying) talk to others. And it’s lovely to have an informed conversation about a film afterwards if you enjoyed it. But is it really social in the same way that other group activities are, so it was rather shocking for me to find out that a lot of people wouldn’t go to the cinema if they had nobody to go with.

How did I come to this conclusion? It all starts in the dark. I worked in the cinema when I was at the university, and the abundance of films I could see for free proved to bring me so much solace. As a girl without any support network at the time, I often went to the cinema to fill up my time, and I fell in love with it so deeply that I can’t imagine not paying back the debt to what it brought into my life for as long as I get to be on this planet. It picked me up so many times. It saved me.

That was when I discovered that a solo cinema trip is best for those days when you want to be among people, but you also feel like your soul could spill over and create a mess to clean up - an uncomfortable mess, sometimes. You buy a ticket, you sink into the seat, the lights go down and you’re ready for an episode of escapism served just for you - alongside everyone else who chose to be here and will likely laugh and cry at the same moments. At the cinema, it’s really easy to push that thought about everyone judging you out of your head.

What about things that are more overtly social activities? You can do them alone, too, but if you’re an overthinker, it may initially be a bit harder. Then again, you never know how much fun you’re gonna have until you go. And I have made the choice not to go before - and every time I regretted it royally.

There is a band called Wolf Alice, who I wanted to see in concert several times. I’d really liked their music for a long time: I even had tickets to their shows, twice. So why haven’t I seen them yet? The first time, I had a row about going to the show with my boyfriend at the time, who couldn’t care less about going and decided to stay home instead of going on my own. The second time, I was set on going alone, but another guy that I was then seeing wanted to do something else. What could I do? I ditched my own plans in favour of what he wanted to do. Girls, listen up: boys are temporary, but gig memories are eternal. Go to that concert. I will certainly do that next time Wolf Alice tour. And let me tell you about one of the first times I did just that.

It was early 2014, and Reading and Leeds festival was putting on the lineup of the century - or so my 19-year-old-self was convinced. Arctic Monkeys have just released AM, The 1975 made a lot of noise with their self-titled debut. Paramore was going to play a set, and so would Vampire Weekend, Imagine Dragons, The Hives and blink-182 as well as Queens of the Stone Age. CHVRCHES. Bombay Bicycle Club. The Courteeners and Metronomy and Temples and Peace and Hozier and Circa Waves and so many other acts I was listening to and super excited about were making an appearance. It was my music taste for years to come condensed into three days; I was desperate to go, but it was my first year in a new country, and finding friends who were into the same things proved a bit challenging. I was insecure about my English since someone made fun of my thick accent, and that stuck with me. That was why I rarely spoke unless spoken to or comfortable around someone, too. I constantly felt stupid when what I wanted to say got dislodged between what I had in my head and what came out of my mouth in my attempt to express it. My self-esteem was at an all-time low. It wasn’t happening just yet.

The money was tight, too - I was a student begging for extra shifts at my part-time job to pay the rent and sleeping on a bunk bed in shared accommodation - but I just got a tax refund. I made a quick budget in my head: I figured that if I got cheap train tickets, ate one huge portion of chips a day and smuggled vodka in somehow, I could probably go to the fest and survive, and perhaps even thrive. But I was worried about going on my own. Music festivals are social events as well as places to appreciate music; and while cinema is easier to go into and lose that self-awareness, it’s technically way harder to do that when you are in a crowd of people divided into groups. I was a girl on my own, was that really safe? How would I entertain myself while waiting for the bands to come on if I had no one to talk to? Would I look like a massive loser? With generalised anxiety disorder in particular, these are real questions that you come up with on a regular basis that cloud your judgement and make you feel really horrible.

I bought the ticket. I packed. I went. I saw most of the bands that haven’t clashed with others. Nothing horrible happened - I was sensible (mostly) and took good care of myself. I still ended up eating that one portion of chips a day, though, cause I spent all my money on getting there. Even if anyone thought I was a weirdo for going to a festival alone, nobody turned around and told me that straight to my face. Who would even pay this much attention to a stranger when blink-182 was putting on the biggest bloody show of all time?! Going to that festival is one of my cherished memories, and I think I would have regretted it if I hadn’t gone. I was going to gigs plenty of times on my own since and enjoyed them as much as those I attended with my friends.

Two years later, the year was nearing its end. At that point in time, I haven’t travelled much. The first flight I ever got onto was to move to the UK to study. The focus for my life this far was on surviving and going places was never in the budget - we’re not even talking long-haul or exotic. But my circumstances have changed a little; I graduated and got a job. For as long as I remembered, I wanted to go to Paris, too. I signed up for alerts on some last-minute travel websites and looked at those religiously. One evening when I opened my alert, I saw an opportunity.

Click. Click. Done. No way back now.

I was going to Paris the following weekend, then. And it was incredibly short notice; my boyfriend at the time couldn’t ditch the shift, so I was going to do it alone.

It felt freeing to be in a completely different city on your own, seeing all these things that you’ve once learned about in French classes at school. For someone with so little life experience, it felt like one of the most precious things that happened to me this far.

I rarely got on public transport - I walked around the city, taking in everything I always wanted to see. I went to Montmartre and paid respects to Jim Morrison and Chopin at Pere-Lachaise. I took a stroll down les Champs-Elysees to see if there actually was everything I needed there. I sat down drinking wine at some smokey bar. I attempted to exercise my rusty high-school French and ordered milk instead of coffee by accident. I took a selfie with the Eiffel Tower and spent several good hours at the Louvre looking for Mona Lisa (really small, and always surrounded by people it appears!). I ate the most banging crepes of my life.

And if I hadn’t gone, the New Year promise I made to myself a few months later probably wouldn’t have happened.

I went to Amsterdam with friends later that year, and that only fed my hunger to see a little more of the world. I was back to working part-time again, so I figured I could potentially travel within my budget. The problem was, my boyfriend at the time would have trouble getting hours at his job if he was to be too picky, and he tended to get quite annoyed with the short notice nature of finding a good travel deal. He couldn’t possibly join me on all of these trips, but he was fine with me going on my own if I wanted to.

Having discussed that, I figured out that European city breaks were within my reach. So as the year was about to start, I made a promise to myself: I want to visit a different country a month over the year. And frankly, I surprised myself with how quickly I managed to get really organised to make that happen. I’d booked cheap flights, hostels and coaches, and managed to do it with little money. I decided I would make a trip a month, the destination relying on cheap flights and accommodation I could get. And out of the twelve trips that I made that year, eleven were made all on my own.

It can appear scary to travel on your own, especially if organised travel and package holidays aren’t your thing. But being on your own gives you so much freedom to choose what you really want to do. When you plan any activity with other people, you need to reach a compromise regarding what you want to do, or what pace is best for everyone to be moving at. To do anything different is dictatorial and selfish. And don’t get me wrong, it’s fun to travel with others, too; it’s a different kind of experience that is just as enjoyable. But on your own, you can make choices on the spot according to how you’re feeling, or plan it out to cater to yourself if you want to. You can spend three hours relaxing in one place, breeze through it in ten minutes, or not even go in at all. And if you spend at least some time thinking about what you’d like to do and throwing together a schedule that you’re not obliged to follow by all means, you don’t get lonely - there’ll be people around you.

So, want to go paragliding with the people from that booth that you’ve just spotted? Hell yeah, go paragliding. Feel like booking a cheap hostel on a boat instead of something regular and possibly more expensive? Do that. Hungry and craving something specific? No problem. Feeling like a gig? Of course, who’s playing and where? And boy, did I perfect my airport security and packing light routine that year!

So this is a note to my anxious brain, really. Life is too short and we’re all mortal. And after all, you just don’t know. Plus no one pays as much attention as you think they do. Anything telling you otherwise is your anxiety. You will never regret doing a thing on your own, but you may come to regret anything you haven’t done because you were that little bit too scared. You will learn, and maybe eventually it will become so natural that you won’t have a problem doing it at all.

#doing things #being alone

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itskatepaddington · 1 year

Text

The New Black

Trigger warning: death, grief

Dad, I promise you I’m not wallowing in it anymore. Or at least I’m trying not to. And it’s almost my birthday, and I’m headed for Paris for a few days, and it is a nice experience after all, so I’ll call mum and M (she wants to go and I’ll take her there one day, cause that’s what older sisters do) when I get there. I promise I’ll enjoy it in a very wobbly way x

If this helps anyone at any point, that probably answers the question of why I wrote it.

I’m lying, somewhat. It is for me, too, after all.

I didn’t really have to wear mourning. First of all, I was abroad. Besides your friends, seldom does anyone really give a damn in a big city. I don’t think anyone asked me why my wardrobe rarely seemed to have any colours beyond black and muted colours later. In the Western world, where it used to be a ritual, the symbolism of it has been lost: beyond just a stylish colour, it means little. Even the mention of wearing mourning would probably make people a little bit confused. Announcing that choice would be an instant comparison to something a Victorian widow would do.

But in the small town I come from, many people still look to their neighbours and still follow the old customs that spring from Christianity. I was raised Catholic, but I consider myself an atheist now. And to be clear: I don’t miss organised religion. Ever since I was a teenager growing up in a small Polish town, I questioned the part it played: for me as a woman and someone who wanted to get an education that involved science, and in public life. And this is where I landed. I understood what it meant to people historically - especially as a Pole - and I respected other people’s beliefs. Its continued dominance in Polish culture and politics is a complex and thorny topic, well worth another essay by someone better versed in history and sociology than I am. It can feel hard to explain your stance to people who haven’t seen or understood it sometimes, but that’s some context for you.

That aside, it wouldn’t be too scandalous not to wear mourning. The habit started disappearing with the older generation. But as I hurried through the high street to buy dark clothes for the funeral and my visit, I asked my mum about the ritual.

“Six months of mourning,” she said, “and then another six of half-mourning.”

That meant wearing all-black for half a year, then introducing different muted colours half a year later. One last mark of respect. A way to keep that memory alive.

“I don’t think he would want you to wear mourning, though,” she said immediately.

“I know,” I said, and I wore black throughout my stay. It was a way to pay my respects; it was something everyone recognised at this time, in this place where everyone had known me since I was a baby.

But my yearning to keep that ritual didn’t hit until a little later. With my mum and sister, I decided that returning to work as soon as possible would be best. You get restless easily, my sister argued. Better to keep yourself busy, my mum said. I kind of wanted to start doing things, and a lot of them, again. I didn’t want to think too much. But when I returned home, I was in my own space with my very own thoughts once again. Not ideal for someone whose anxiety can send them beyond the edge.

Funerals are for the living, not for the dead, and in 2020, hundreds of people were deprived of that. If we got to say goodbye, it probably was under severe restrictions. That meant fewer stories from the community and with them, opportunities to commemorate the person and to share the heavy load of grief. In many cases, we were all grieving some losses. The world we knew spun out of control, we were stripped of certainty, and rules seemed to have changed on a whim according to what the economy dictated.

At the time, it was still rather hard to see other people. I abode. It was important, and I for one knew what it was like to have an immunocompromised family member. And truth be told, I developed a bit of anxiety around getting sick. For most of that time, I had a bubble with my friends who lived nearby - it was a thing that often saved me from going completely insane. I worked remotely and saw my other friends over Zoom, in parks, or in restaurants with outdoor seating. But none of my friends here had ever met dad. They’ve heard stories. They knew he played a huge part in who I became. They understood he was a complex but wonderful person. And this is why I am so grateful for having them in my life, especially at that period of time. I thank them for trying to make me feel less shit or just listening. But I had things I had to work through alone.

As a stereotypical older kid who’d always received a fair share of responsibility, I’m of the people who dislike being a burden and will run from that feeling, even if that assumption may be entirely imaginary. And that’s why I was so desperate to find a way to soothe the pain on my own. Blunting it in usual ways worked for a time, but a deep cut straight through the heart refused to heal cleanly. It did its own thing. It broke through the stitches to dry up on its own to do it all over again. And I failed to understand the process.

We don’t externalise our grief as much anymore. The disappearance of certain rituals may be a sign of it, and mourning is a perfect example of that. When I was looking for my own answers, I discovered that this entire set of rules was slowly dropped in the UK after the first world war - because in the face of suffering on such an unprecedented scale, working through that many losses proved difficult. You’d want to package it up and hope it doesn’t spill through the cracks, after all. I totally believe that statement. After all, I’m of the generation that didn’t get time to process much of what keeps on constantly going on, too.

We get a short window to deal with grief in a simple, externalised, shared way. Much of it is a haze filled with paperwork and simply facing the realisation that the person you loved will never walk through the door or pick up the phone again. As a society, we talk about it quickly and quietly: in condolences, then in confusion when the person seems a little overwhelmed for longer than we expected them to.

The grieving want it to be over, but also feel the need to keep and cherish the presence they miss. And the people around them often don’t know what to say. Those who understand that nothing will make it worse and come to you with open arms even if they may not completely get it, those who bring you parcels of food, those who keep trying and call you to do your walk up the hill and talk about nothing in particular - they’ll help. You may end up being hurt and disappointed by people who failed to say anything at all, maybe because of that lack of words that everyone kept mentioning just around the funeral time. But several months in, silence is heavy, rings in your ears, and becomes an ultimate disappointment. You feel like you’re being mentally flogged during holidays and anniversaries. Father’s Day is a mess, with the innocuous adverts in shop windows becoming torture by a thousand cuts. Even happy events like birthdays have a staggeringly blue undertone to them.

And then, fewer people remember. You need rituals, even if they’re devoid of meaning for others.

But where to find them? Coming up with those while bandaging up my heart to keep it from bursting at the stitches clearly wasn’t working. So I scoured the internet articles to find answers. I picked up that grief book by Sheryl Sandberg. Reddit, of course, cause that’s where we all go for bullshit lived experiences. But a lot of what I discovered seemed to rationalise this unreasonable, shape-shifting, ever-encompassing and overwhelming weight that just wouldn’t budge and move into the neat frames I prepared, understood and was ready to put it into.

Even some ways of dealing with pain involve measuring it using arbitrary scales or timelines. Doesn’t everyone know about the stages of grief? I know them by heart now: denial; anger; bargaining; depression; acceptance. It’s one of these concepts from pop psychology familiar to many people. I was aware of them before I was thrown into the abyss of my thoughts.

But no one told me that grief was like a vortex with the power to suck out all the energy you throw at it. The more you feed it, the stronger it becomes. If you get lost in the peaceful waters of feeling nothing at all and swim a little bit too far into it to cool down, it shows you an undercurrent so strong that it could drown you if you let it. Or, as many have described it, maybe it feels more like a tidal wave that comes and goes, not a diagram of stages that is clean-cut and separated from the last neatly parcelled bundle of emotion you experienced.

All the notion of stages had ever accomplished for me was leading me to constantly compare myself to where I was on the scale. Was I just a dysfunctional exception from everyone else’s pristine grieving processes? Why don’t I have my shit together?

When was I going to be productive and fully functional again? Why do I feel depressed? What are the chances these are my hormones - it felt like the denial stage last night? Why did I want to punch everyone in the throat for a week? Wasn’t I meant to be in the bargaining stage already? Why did I find some bullshit excuse to berate someone who didn’t deserve it? Why was I feeling suspiciously good and distracted at this music festival my friends took me to? That feels wrong.

And when will it stop hurting when I least expect it?

I’m trying to keep a volcano from erupting, and I don’t know how long I can deal with that force. Will it go to sleep quietly, or tear through whatever I’ve got going on at the minute?

Cue the rituals. When everything is uncertain, not even your behaviour when you try to keep it under control, or even your beliefs moulded and challenged in fits of rage, you so desperately yearn for some kind of a constant. Something you can return to that is stable while everything else seems to be like a mess. This is how I made the decision to, or rather gradually slipped into the idea to wear mourning. It just made perfect sense.

I stuck to black clothes most of the time, to begin with. Even if we’re thankfully far from the eighteenth century and no one would see any deeper reasons for me dressing in one colour, it was meaningful for me. It honestly didn’t matter if no one else saw the point in it; it was that one thing that I was in control of, and it seemed like a relatively healthy way to express what I was feeling amongst constantly coming up with a sleeve of ideas that kept me far out of dealing with my emotions healthily. It kept that memory with me a little longer. And at the back of my head there was this assurance I could quietly withdraw it when I felt ready. My emotional crutches were propping me up in an uneasy mess that I was still trying to make sense of - especially since melancholia and anger still happened just as often.

And so I was performing my open secret for myself in plain sight, externalising my pain to the entire world without a single person being actively aware of it. I was wearing my heart on my sleeve, silent, unnoticed.

It continued for a while. With time, I started giving myself exceptions - on days I felt better, for example. And I started welcoming that change, too. When I returned to my wardrobe after a while, I felt I found joy in getting dressed up once again. It used to bring me a lot of joy pre-2020, and maybe I can find my way back there.

Mortality is inevitable, unquestionable and final; yet the pain doesn’t get any smaller if you’re aware of it and comes back in waves months after, with more warm tinges than these blue ones as time passes by . Faced with grief we always sought solace in rituals and stories to give ourselves hope. And even if we’re disconnecting it from any philosophical framework, having this ritual helped me. Because in the end, I'm only human who looks for constants and answers.

#cw grief #grieving #griefjourney

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