#thoughts about stuff

[not-poignant]

I've been catching up on writing Underline the Gold (Anton / Flitmouse), which is featuring pretty hardcore eating disorder recovery, and it's been pretty confrontational.

But it's also good to be writing Flitmouse again, not least because he's such an angry omega, and he's so cynical and jaded with everything, and also he's in this picturesque location and he hates the beach so much. Just...so much.

[alleesaur]

doodling a bunny vs doodling a hare

[yeepof]

I understand that tall men are our POV characters, but surely being like a foot taller than everyone around them would have some occasional consequences

[tonispencerart]

This will probably end up being a really long post, mostly because a lot has happened that I don’t feel comfortable leaving out, if only to offer a clearer picture. If you make it to the end, you’ve definitely earned a cup of tea and and least three biscuits.

Anyone who has actually spent some amount of time with me over the past five or so years will probably have noticed a difference in me. What marked a massive change was actually during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Scotland. I’ve always struggled with some things throughout my entire life, but I had mostly learned my way around being a human, or at the very least, making it look like it. It would become very obvious (to me) that most of that learning was observational and then practised unconsciously for almost 40 years. And then lockdown happened, and all that learning, and all of the coping strategies I had in place went straight out of the window! I could barely function within just a few weeks. At one point, I was so frustrated and incapable of being that functioning human, I ended up on the phone to a GP begging for help. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was, although I had my suspicions. The GP agreed to initially assess me for ADHD, and by the end of that 20-minute call, she had also agreed to refer me for an actual assessment for diagnosis. That whole process was long and highly stressful. It took around 18 months, not counting the 30-odd years of me asking questions about it and being brushed off as Depression and Anxiety.

Anyway, I did get an assessment with the ADHD team, and I was subsequently diagnosed with ADHD and started taking medication (which was an absolute godsend!). I had been painting again for about two or three years by this point after taking a very long and unexpected break. Ironically, it was those lockdowns which saw me reach for the paint again… Around this point in the story (roughly 2022-23, but I don’t remember exactly when), I was studying art again at a local college, and for one of the ‘blocks’ in the course, I decided to base my studies around Burlesque.

I’ve pretty much always been interested in burlesque, mostly for the outfits and the glamour, really - at least to begin with. My project at the time was exploring expressions of gender and sexuality ,so it was a good fit for what I was working with at the time. About 10 years previous to this, a friend from High School had been talking about doing some burlesque in her local area and how much she enjoyed it. This sparked an even bigger interest on my part, but I had no way of exploring that then. I didn’t know anyone - except for my friend who lived over 150 miles away - so I didn’t think too hard about it, though I did make a note about learning more if the opportunity ever came up.

Fast forward to Spring 2023. I was having another tattoo by the absolutely gorgeous and super talented, and skilled Debay Miles, and we got chatting. I have a tendency to zone out a bit while being tattooed, but I also like a good natter with someone else who just ‘gets’ me. Seriously, Debay and I have had some of the weirdest conversations while she draws on me! Anyway, we were talking about performing. Debay (as well as being a smashing tattoo artist) is also a burlesque performer… I have been involved in theatre and music on and off for almost 40 years (which is terrifying if I think about it too hard! I’m still 17 in my head!), and, prior to the lockdowns, I was part of a small theatre company based in Paisley. Lockdown ended that pretty quickly, and I hadn’t found anything else at the time.

I had mentioned that I hadn’t been acting or doing anything like that for a few years and that I actually really missed performing. “Maybe you’ll find something else,” she said. “Yeah,,, Maybe…” I replied, not feeling very confident about it, but at least I was open to the idea. Maybe something would come up at some point. And then something actually did come up!

A couple of days or so after Debay and I had talked about it, she’d posted on her Instagram account about a Burlesque course her friend was running in Glasgow. I thought about it, and for a brief second or two, thought it may not actually be for me. I have a disability that impacts my mobility and balance. I’d had a small stroke when I was born, which has basically meant I’ve been a bit… wonky… for my entire life. Thanks to surgery and years and years of physio and occupational therapy (the latter, I hated with everything in me), I can do most things, and unless you were paying very close attention, you’d probably never notice anything. But it does limit me from time to time, especially with anything physical.

But then I thought, “Why not? It’s worth a try, even just once,” and emailed the class teacher. And she was lovely! I was a bit apprehensive during that first class. And uncomfortable! It was freezing in the venue! I thought I’d be OK once I’d moved around a bit and ‘warmed up’, but no. It was so cold it was painful. But I enjoyed it, so I went back the next week, and the next, and the next… It was fun. Challenging and frustrating, but fun. And I took every short course after that until the Summer Show when I’d finally built up enough confidence and spite to do my first solo performance. It actually took me three rounds of classes to get to that point. I was still studying at the point, and I just didn’t have the headspace for anything else, but I still went along and did what I could. And made friends with some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met in my life. More on them later…

I did my first solo in August of that year. And another for the Hallowe’en show. I was taking medication for my ADHD, and it was actually helping me loads. We did an impromptu Christmas Show that year (as in the class teacher said, “If I booked the venue, shall we just put on a show anyway?”), and I was excited to get started again in 2024. And then disaster struck.

The ADHD medication shortage, which I’d known about for several months but hadn’t had it myself, finally got to me. My meds were nowhere. No pharmacy had the dose I was taking, and what was available couldn’t be made up to the dose I was on - the dose that was working really well for me. And I went from 50mg to 0mg in a day. It was awful. I went from a mostly functioning human to someone who couldn’t even remember to eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus on anything for more than 90 seconds (I’m not even exaggerating. I wish I was.) And there was no alternative available to me, either. I just had to get through as best as I could (which wasn’t very good at all to begin with), and I was terrified.

Prior to starting ADHD medication, I had hit absolute rock bottom mentally and emotionally. I was drinking heavily, and it got so bad that New Year’s Day (2023), when I woke up in a friend’s house, alone, hundreds of miles away from home, hungover, and hurting. I’d hit my rock bottom hard. Alcohol had been my crutch for too many years, and it all hit me at once. It was what I turned to - at first - just to slow down my brain enough to rest at night. Just a couple of glasses a night. Enough to sleep. And then, slowly, it was what I did when I was stressed, scared, bored, nervous… I drank half a bottle of gin the day I got my rejection notice for the Glasgow School of Art. The chance of getting accepted was slim to none to begin with, but I still hoped anyway. I drank most of a bottle of gin the day I accidentally smashed over £200 worth of art supplies on the floor of a bus on my way home. At my friend’s wedding on New Year's Eve, the groom said, “We bought all this wine. It needs to be drunk!” - and I took that as some kind of personal challenge and made a serious dent in the leftover bottles of wine. It probably didn’t help matters that the only people I really knew at the wedding were my friend and her immediate family, so I was also drinking away the nerves and anxiety of being in a massive room with a lot of people I didn’t know. And waking up in the newly married couple’s house, alone, and hungover to Hell was my wake-up call to sort myself out. I couldn’t keep doing this to myself; otherwise, I would spiral out of control, and I’d never get out of it. So, when I got back to Glasgow a few days later, I made the decision to stop drinking. I had to anyway, I reasoned, because I’d be starting new medication soon, which would mean it wouldn’t be wise to drink alcohol. And I haven’t had a drink since 5th January 2023. It sucked that first yeat, but the second was much easier. I’m now a little over four months into Year Three. There are still times I think about having a drink, wanting a drink, feeling like I need a drink, but I haven’t. I am proud of that. I really am. But I think it’ll always be something in the back of my mind that I won’t ever completely shake off.

So, when January 2024 came around, my medication suddenly stopped, and every class for burlesque ended in a meltdown. I ended up taking a break from January 2024 until the summer of that year when I finally felt a bit stronger (even without medication at the time) and basically decided “Fuck it. I enjoy it, go back!” and I did the Burlesque Showcase that September. It was hard, and there were still times when I thought that maybe I had come back too soon, but I did it, and I was once again really proud of myself for pushing myself enough to do it - even if it was mostly out of spite (to myself) that got me through it!

But something still felt “off”. I wasn’t really feeling like myself. I was struggling creatively, too. Painting became something that felt a bit like a chore, even though on the other hand, it was something I couldn’t not do. I really had missed performing and that little buzz I felt right after the show was good and I liked it enough to keep coming back, creative hiccup be damned!

And then came the Hallowe’en show. The rehearsals were hard. I felt betrayed by my own body. Why wouldn’t it do what I wanted it to do? Because I am a disabled person, there will always be something I cannot do as well as I’d like, or at all. My body just cannot do it. I have to be OK with being limited. And I am, most of the time. It’s just a fact of my life. There are things I cannot make my body do, no matter how much I want it.

My concept and act for the Hallowe’en show was a challenge and really different performance-wise, even for me. Once I had my song choice down (and really, the song found me. It just gave me enough of an idea to run with and work on). I had quite a specific vision for my act. I knew what I wanted to do, what story I wanted to tell, and how I wanted to tell it very early on. And it all worked perfectly in my head. I just couldn’t get it out physically, or visually - something that was tangible and something an audience would understand. It was so frustrating - having an image in my mind and not being able to make it a reality.

My song choice? BloodMagic - ‘Death / Rebirth’. And I’m not joking when I say that the song found me. I have had a playlist on Spotify since the early days of my burlesque journey - for inspiration, to play around with, improvising, etc. I don’t know if anyone else does this, but for me, having the same songs in a playlist on a loop after a while it starts to sound very ‘samey’ and isn’t working anymore. No new ideas come up. That’s when I shake things up by removing a bunch of songs and adding songs in at random. The idea is that if it doesn’t work, you can just take it back out again. Nothing’s lost. And one day, towards the last few weeks or so before the September show, I’d done just that - removed songs, and added some back in without even looking at what they were. And then I forgot about it until the following week when I was walking to rehearsal and a song started playing - a song I didn’t recognise. I listened harder, trying to place it before realising it must be one of the newer songs. So I listened even harder. And barely a minute in, I stopped in my tracks, in the middle of crossing a road… and narrowly avoided being run over by a car! In my defence, if I have one, hardly any cars actually come around that corner on a regular basis (and I did check before crossing, I promise!) and I didn’t exactly plan on being so stunned I couldn’t walk! But it worked. Suddenly, my brain was absolutely buzzing with ideas for ‘something’. And it kept coming. This does happen sometimes, but it’s not a very frequent thing for me, not like this. And it can happen anywhere, but typically for me this comes from music, literature, and spending entire days in an art gallery. But it’s still quite rare for something to move me the way this has.

I made it to the venue in one piece (finally!), went straight onto the internet to find out more about the song that almost saw me squished by a car. I made some scribbles in a sketchbook (that I almost always take everywhere with me, just in case), and got into rehearsals for the show. I could think about the Halloween show another day!

And because those initial ideas were so strong for me, and the vision I had was so exact, I tried to choreograph my act so tightly to try and get it how I envisioned it. And it just wasn’t working. It worked in my head, but for some reason, trying to translate that into a movement, a gesture, etc., just wasn’t happening the way I pictured it. And it drove me nuts! I knew what I wanted, so why couldn’t I just make it happen? I had multiple meltdowns, I pulled every damn muscle bashing things out during rehearsals, and I cried for weeks. I even considered not doing the show - I had nothing to show anyway. But that was swiftly rejected. Since I made my debut, the only reason I have for pulling out of a performance is if I’m too ill to do it. And I wasn’t ill, just stuck. I had to push through it and figure it out. With about two weeks to go, I finally said “Fuck it!” and simply immersed myself in the music as much as possble. I even fell asleep with it on a loop! I had to know everything about it inside out until it became something intuitive and instinctive. And that was the point when it all started coming together.

But it broke me, over and over! I think it had to, really, as difficult as it was. I really learned a lot about myself as an artist and as a performer. I’ve learned that, as an artist, I really have to live in it, immerse myself in it, until it becomes part of me. I learned a lot about my practices and my processes as an artist and performer. But I had to be broken first. It was tough, and there were definitely times when I was tempted to quit, and a lot of those early weeks were horrible. I am, however, grateful for it - and like I said, I learned a Hell of a lot in doing it. The night before any show will always have me questioning my sanity and why the Hell I get myself into these things, and why the fuck does nobody stop me?! But those times are necessary, too! I mean, you do have to be a bit mad to be an artist, right?!

For a while now, I haven’t felt very much like myself. But by learning and continuing to learn and perform burlesque, I think I’m finally starting to find more of me, about who I am as a human, as an artist, and as a performer. I still have some way to go but it’s a great start!

At this point, I want to say thank you to some people.

Firstly to Miss Behave (Dani) for accepting me with an open heart pushing me to just try, for the encouragement, for the mantra “Fuck it!” when things get tough, and for the love you show every single one of your students. I miss you very much.

Secondly, to my burlesque babes that I’ve met along the way. I love all of you so much, and I’m so glad I met you. You teach me something just by being there every week in rehearsals. I love performing with all of you! Let’s do it again, yeah?!

To Debay, for drawing on me, for the weird and rambling conversations, and for basically introducing me to burlesque and to everyone else on this long but wonderful journey. I just love you and you are a beautiful and wonderful person.

To Tootsie - I have learned so much from you, too, even in such a short space of time; thank you for pushing me even further, for the creative freedom to try out whatever weird idea pops into my head! I love learning from you! You are one of the best humans to ever exist, and I am so grateful for the patience you have shown me - even when I stop rehearsal asking “What the heck am I supposed to be doing with my leg?! I don’t get it!”

To Jamie Bower. I suppose I should thank you for breaking me…! But also thanks for the inspiration. That act was the hardest, most challenging one I’ve ever done, and probably the most rewarding to perform. Thank you also for the hard lessons and for pushing my creative boundaries. I needed them, I just didn’t realise how much. And I learned so much about myself - as a person, as an artist, a storyteller, and as a performer.

To Edinburgh. Specifically, to the wonderful art galleries in Edinburgh. Whenever I feel creatively empty or simply just to refresh my brain, I like to take myself off to Edinburgh for the day, just to wander around a gallery until they kick everyone out! And to my crow friends in the gardens beside the National Gallery in Edinburgh, where I share my lunch with them - I like to think they remember the lady with the sandwiches and scrambled eggs!

If you actually did make it through all of that, go have that cup of tea and some biscuits. You’re probably hungry by now anyway.

[littlemut]

[goldensunset]

did you know? if you do your laundry you can get your clothes back

[nothingbizzare]

You have a good heart

[inkskinned]

i hate to say it because i'm neurodivergent and a chronic-pain-haver but like... sometimes stuff is going to be hard and that's okay.

it's okay if you don't understand something the first few times it's explained to you. it's okay if you have to google every word in a sentence. it's okay if you need to spend a few hours learning the context behind a complicated situation. it's okay if you need to read something, think about it, and then come back to re-read it.

i get it. giving up is easier, and we are all broken down and also broke as hell. nobody has the time, nobody has the fucking energy. that is how they win, though. that is why you feel this way. it is so much easier, and that is why you must resist the impetus to shut down. fight through the desire you've been taught to "tl;dr".

embrace when a book is confusing for you. accept not all media will be transparent and glittery and in the genre you love. question why you need everything to be lily-white and soft. i get it. i also sometimes choose the escapism, the fantasy-romance. there's no shame in that. but every day i still try to make myself think about something, to actually process and challenge myself. it is hard, often, because of my neurodivergence. but i fight that urge, because i think it's fucking important.

especially right now. the more they convince you not to think, the easier it will be to feed you misinformation. the more we accept a message without criticism, the more power they will have over that message. the more you choose convenience, the more they will make propaganda convenient to you.

[heavymetallluver]

[chloesimaginationthings]

William Afton winning that “idgaf” award in FNAF

[umblrspectrum]

3 years of this godforsaken show

[hmura-hmara]

Something about Luke being the spitting image of his father

[tonispencerart]

So... A lot has happened!

I'm not even joking, And a lot of it has happened in a really short space of time. Sometimes this is a good thing. At the moment, though, I'm just tired. This week week I started my community art classes. To be honest, I feel like l might have made a mistake with the timing; it's the Easter holidays and lots of people tend to go away for the holidays. It was quiet (due to the aforementioned holidays) and I expected that, but it was a nice chill kind of evening for the first one. Two people turned up but we all had fun playing with ink and drawing with materials you wouldn't normally draw with. It was a little messy but nothing too crazy - which was nice because clean-up was chaotic! I have ADHD (I've mentioned that before. ;) ) so I didn't have much of a strategy when it came to tidying, cleaning, and packing things away. I tried to do multiple things at once... and there were a few moments when I found myself standing in the middle of the room with a random object in my hands and no clue what to do next! This week I have plans to play music during the class and have folk listen and interpret the music with shape and colour... after a spot of colour theory, that is! I'm also hoping a few more people turn up, too. I still expect it to be a little quiet - because it's still the Easter holidays - so I'm keeping everything crossed that things pick up soon. And then on Thursday I performed at the Burlesque student showcase. The theme for this one was called Decades of Decadence - a quick snapshot, if you will, of the history of Burlesque through the decades. My act was based on the 1980s - purely for the music. I chose Kate Bush - 'Babooshka' for my song, and I tied it to the story of Die Fledermaus (The Flitter-mouse, or The Bat) - an operetta by Johann Straus II. The narrative of both Babooshka and Die Fledermaus are quite similar, really. It was an idea I had for last Halloween's show, but at the time I thought it was too niche for my audience. My dance teacher - and my fellow burlesque babes - convinced me to have more conviction and belief in my ideas so I went for it. And it was the best decision ever because this is my new favourite act, and I hope to be bringing it back soon... More on that another time when I have more info, etc. I decided to stay in the city at a nearby hotel for the night. Because I don't live in the city centre (or anywhere that close to it), I've previously left shows carrying a whole heap of stuff, racing it to the train station to try and catch the last train 'home' (and it doesn't even stop at my local station). To get out of the station there's a load of steps off the platform and then a load of steps down to the street... It's usually way past midnight, in the dark (and often cold/wet), and I'm further away from my house. I basically decided I've done that enough times already and it sucks, not to mention I've almost tumbled down those steps too many times for my liking, so I booked a room in a hotel. It turned out to be the best decision because it's a) easier, and b) the bed was huge and very cosy... Until I was rudely awoken at around 4AM with horrible cramps in my legs. That'll teach me to stretch properly after a performance! And I had a most delicious breakfast! I'm definitely doing that again! It's also kind of nice to make a proper 'thing' out of a performance/show day. Makes it extra special, you know? Today, I am 'noodling' in my sketchbooks and planning for the class on Wednesday. I've had two naps today - unplanned, but I obviously needed to sleep a bit more. I'm hoping to be back to my normal self tomorrow. It's been a busy week - but the good kind of busy. I'm sure once things settle and become more of a routine, it'll be less tiring. Here are some photos of some of the wonderful art that was made during the first class.

[lopsaii]

Ongoing stepladder debate

[hinamie]

i'm exactly as normal about him as I thought I'd be

[ciderjacks]

dad issues

+

(I think they were all fundamentally affected by what they saw and just collectively decided not to share the upsetting details)