Jane Wharam on......

Going Back To My Roots

  Last night I went to a College reunion, the first one in thirty years, and met people I haven’t clapped eyes on since 1979 and renewed acquaintanceships with friends I’ve lost touch with over the years.  The thing which most surprised me most though was that I didn’t just see a sad bunch of 50 somethings prancing around to ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’; instead, I saw a bunch of people having fun, who reminded me of when I was 18, several of whom still touched my heart.

So what is it about people from our formative years, which still has the power to move us?  I’d like to think that it’s about the essence of a person, which hopefully doesn’t change with the passage of time.  OK, our bodies start to give up – at one point we were playing the ‘guess the number of hip replacements in the room’ game! – but our souls are immutable and embody our core traits – kindness, generosity, curiosity, intelligence, humour or loyalty.  These traits make up the facets of our personality, which we have from birth, and they are then polished and honed over the years or buried and forgotten.  But they never go away.  In some people they are buried so successfully that newer acquaintances don’t even know they exist and in others, traits which aren’t very developed in youth start to shine as they get older.

 Funnily enough, I had been going to blog under this very title earlier in the week, but that was going to be all about going back to my academic roots.  I now find myself working very much as I did as an undergraduate; I research and write all day and quite often party at night (second adolescence, obviously!).  I was going to say that I’m reverting to my original hopes and dreams from my teenage years as I approach my Autumn.  But, of course, it’s so much more than that. 

 Where I went wrong all those years ago, if ‘wrong’ is the right word, and I’m not sure that it is, is that, having achieved my first goal of going to university – at a time when only 2% of the population did -  I started to lack balance and, more importantly, I started to lose my inner purpose and concentrated too hard on what felt right at the time – or, more accurately, what I wanted at the time, even if I knew that what I wanted wasn’t what I should have.  I certainly started to lose my self-discipline and that has taken over twenty years to get back.  Without going into detail, I made several bad choices back then, based on the gratification of the moment, and started to lose my way and my self.

 However, those traits never disappear and, having spent the last several years scraping the layers off, I now feel as though some of the better facets of my personality are starting to appear and develop again.  The organisers of the reunion  (who did a fantastic job, by the way) had made up badges for the attendees, which we wore around our necks like labels.  The badge consists of a picture of the person from their College years, their name at the time and what they studied.  I now have mine hanging next to my desk and the next time I feel unsure about which direction to take, I’m going to look at that girl and remember what she would do instinctively and weigh that up with the experience the woman I am now has acquired.  I’m going to go back to my roots.

Please Sign This Petition

I have a few horses of the hobby variety, such as treating people with respect, smiling whenever possible and, of course,  Rainbow Trust Children's Charity but sometimes I meet people with such belief in what they are doing that it makes my efforts look like whims. And one such person is journalist and campaigner Rosa Monckton, whom I met recently at a fundraising dinner in aid of the Westminster Society for people with learning disabilities.

I'd already heard about Rosa's e-petition to ring fence money for people with learning disabilities and to review how it is spent and am a passionate believer in what she is doing. However, meeting her 'in the flesh' and feeling the force of her distress at what will happen to the thousands of young people with various forms of learning disability when their parents die, made me want to do something to help. So this is my contribution to the cause.

Rosa needs 100,000 signatures on the petition to trigger a debate in Parliament on this important subject. In her own words, she has "received over 1,300 e-mails from worried familes and many from elderly parents, who are confronting their own mortality, and are desperately concerned about the welfare of their children after they have died.Intentional residential communities across the country are being closed, and places that have been home to people for many years are being shut down. People with no mental capacity are being assumed to have made decisions that they are incapable of making."

I have a number of friends who are in such a position and it breaks my heart that they have this worry to carry day in, day out, so I urge you to sign the petition and send the link to your own networks. At the moment, Rosa has 11,890 signatures and only has until March 20 next year to reach her target, so there is still a long way to go.

Another great site to visit for further information is the Down's Syndrome Association 

However you get to it, please sign it and/or pass it on to your frends. Here's the link again: Petition

Please Sign This Petition

Earlier in the week I was at a fundraising dinner in aid of the Westminster Society for people with learning disabilities, where I met journalist and campaigner Rosa Monckton.  I'd already heard about her e-petition to ring fence money for people with learning disabilities and to review how it is spent and am a passionate believer in what she is doing.  However, meeting her 'in the flesh' and feeling the force of her distress at what will happen to the thousands of young people with various forms of learning disability when their parents die, made me want to do something to help. So this is my contribution to the cause.

Rosa needs 100,000 signatures on the petition to trigger a debate in Parliament on this important subject.  In her own words, she has "received over 1,300 e-mails from worried familes and many from elderly parents, who are confronting their own mortality, and are desperately concerned about the welfare of their children after they have died.

Intentional residential communities across the country are being closed, and places that have been home to people for many years are being shut down.  People with no mental capacity are being assumed to have made decisions that they are incapable of making."

I have a number of friends who are in such a position and it breaks my heart that they have this worry to carry day in, day out so I urge you to sign the petition and send the link to your own networks.  At the moment, Rosa has 11,497 signatures and only has until March 20 next year to reach her target, so there is still a long way to go.

Here's the link again: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/31475  

And thanks for reading this.  If you would prefer not to receive information from me or my other website, Yardstick Writing, just mail me on jane@janewharam.com and I'll unsubscribe you.  I'll miss you though!

Boosting Your Self-Esteem

Talking to a friend last night made me realise how lucky I was to have parents who helped me to believe I could achieve anything I wanted in  life.  There have been dark times when I have forgotten that it's true but on the whole, I do remember it and don't let setbacks bring me down.

My friend, however, isn't so fortunate and constantly belittles herself and her achievements, which is sad. So I thought I would remind myself and anyone who wants to read this, how I tackle the subject in my book, Emotional Intelligence: Journey to the Centre of Your Self (O Books)  http://tinyurl.com/79facbc

'Most people’s feelings and thoughts about themselves fluctuate somewhat based on their daily experiences. The mark you get in an exam, how your friends treat you, the ups and downs in a romantic relationship can all have a temporary impact on your wellbeing.Your self-esteem, however, is something more fundamental than the normal ups and downs associated with situational changes. For people with good basic self-esteem, normal ups and downs may lead to temporary fluctuations in how they feel about themselves, but only to a limited extent and they can generally take whatever curved balls life throw at them. In contrast, for people with poor basic self-esteem, these ups and downs may make all the difference in the world and can even be the trigger that sends a person over the edge.

Our self-esteem develops and evolves throughout our lives, as we build an image of ourselves through our experiences with different people and activities. Experiences during our childhood play a particularly large role in the shaping of our basic self-esteem.  When we were growing up, our successes (and failures) and how the members of our immediate family or teachers and peers treated us, all contributed to the creation of our basic self-esteem.

Our past experiences, even the things we don ‘t usually think about, are all alive and active in our daily life in the form of a Critical Voice, which we spoke about earlier. Although most people do not hear this voice in the same way they would a spoken one, in many ways it acts in a similar way, constantly repeating those original messages to us.

For people with healthy self-esteem the messages of the critical voice are generally positive and reassuring. For people with low self-esteem, the critical voice becomes a harsh inner critic, constantly criticising, punishing, and belittling their accomplishments. Very often, the phrases used can be traced back to a specific person or people –  ‘you’ll never amount to anything’ from a parent or teacher, for example.

One of the aims of the book is to help you boost your self-esteem but, if you are like most people, the chances are you have some issues with your own confidence in yourself. Low self-esteem can have devastating consequences.

• It can create anxiety, stress, loneliness and increased likelihood for depression.
• It can cause problems with friendships and relationships.
• It can seriously impair academic and job performance.
• It can lead to underachievement and increased vulnerability to drug and alcohol abuse.

Worst of all, these negative consequences themselves reinforce the negative self-image and can take a person into a downward spiral of lower and lower self-esteem and increasingly non-productive or even actively self-destructive behaviour.

So, how do we boost our self-esteem? The easiest way is to challenge the Critical Voice.  Let’s say that you’re in a situation with someone and you think:

“He looks angry. He hasn’t said anything, but I know it means he doesn’t like me!”

Think about this thought and then pretend you have a friend with you, who could maybe offer this suggestion: “OK, he looks angry, but you don’t know why. It could have nothing to do with you. Maybe you should ask him.”

Another way to boost your self-esteem is to look after yourself – as L’Oréal says, ‘because you’re worth it!’ – and do some things that make you feel good and don’t hurt yourself or anyone else. Maybe go for a walk, sit and look at the sunset, watch a favourite film, have a nap or pick on something good about yourself – your good manners, hair, teeth, eyes, and really praise yourself for that one aspect. Even if you don’t believe you’re worth the praise, it will become natural to you in time – remember the 21 repeats to form a habit. Write down the good things about yourself in your EI journal at least once a week. As you re-read, you will be amazed at how much longer the list gets as time goes on. 

Quick exercise – Good Things You Have Done

Get your Emotional Journal out (just a blank notebook in which you jot down how you feel or things you'd like to say to people but feel you can't) and make a list of what you ‘ve accomplished recently. This could be today, in the last week, month or even few months. If you ‘ve had an on-going hard time, it can be very easy to lose sight of your achievements. They may have been tiny, but remember the baby steps. To have achieved anything when beset with problems is remarkable. Maybe all you did today was put on your make-up or said  'No'. Great. It’s a step forward. Praise yourself for what you ‘ve achieved, out loud if practical. And/or send a close friend an email saying how proud you are of yourself and invite them to reciprocate. We’re all too often reticent about ‘blowing our own trumpet’ but it can do us the world of good to remind ourselves of how far we ‘ve come and what we’ve achieved.

Getting help from others is often the most important step a person can take to improve his or her self-esteem, but it can also be the most difficult. As we ‘ve just said, people with low self-esteem often don’t ask for help because they feel they don ‘t deserve it. But since low self-esteem is often caused by how other people treated you in the past, you may need the help of other people in the present to challenge the critical messages that come from negative past experiences. Here are some ways to get help from others:

• Ask friends to tell you what they like about you or think you do well.
• Ask someone who cares about you to just listen to you rant for a little while without interrupting, even with positive messages. Get it off your chest!
• Ask for a hug.
• Ask someone who loves you in any way to remind you that they do and why.

Sometimes low self-esteem can feel so painful or difficult to overcome that professional help is needed. Go to a recommended therapist or, if money is an issue, borrow some self-help books from the library and you’ll quickly realise that you are not on your own.'

 

The Final Taboo

Driving past a cemetary over Easter I saw a youngish man - maybe late thirtes - accompanied by two lttle boys, tending to a grave.  It was such a stark image that it played on my mind all the way home. My initial instinct was that they were at the grave of the boys' mother, but then I hoped that they were paying their respects to one of their paternal grandparents.  Of course, losing a parent at any age is sad, but to a child, the death of a parent must be incredibly difficult.

I have several friends in their fifties and sixties with aged parents and one who has just lost both of them.  The recently bereaved one now feels orphaned, despite being well into middle age herself. Another finds his parents' independence in the face of increasing frailty - which he sees as obduracy - very frustrating and can never relax, always fearing the call that prefaces an accident or worse.  Others had a fractured relationship with one or both parents, leading to feelings of guilt after their death over unresolved issues with them, such as anger or resentment.

But as adults, we are better equipped to cope with our parents' deaths - or are we?  When do we stop being children?  Is it when we have children of our own?  And what if we don't have any?  Can any relationship take the place of the one we have with our mother or father? Having had a difficult relationship with my mother and being one myself, the older I get, the more I appreciate  how difficult life must have been for her and I wish I had been able to see her more clearly while she was alive.  I don't have the sort of memories of her I hope my son will have of me but I now realise how much I learned from her. Maybe it took her death to show me that.

And the problem is that people still don't want to talk about death, seeing it as the final taboo, and yet it is something that must happen to us all and we will all probably experience the death of someone we're close to in our lifetime. Perhaps the best preparation we can make for a good death is to live well, and hopefully long, and, above all, communicate with those we love, before it hapens to us or those close to us.

 

 

Not All Hearts And Flowers

 The thing with children is they don’t come with a health warning.  However they are conceived, whether planned, as an afterthought or as a complete shock, they change your life – and not always for the better.

 You may think that a strange thing to say, today of all days, here in the UK, as it’s Mothering Sunday but what I mean is that there are many children who arrive merely as the by-product of sexual activity and are not wanted.  Those who stay with their birth mother can become loved, if they’re lucky, but others will always be a reminder of a mistake, a miserable experience or, worse, be ignored.  These are the forgotten children who never experience love, affection or security.

 To those of us who wanted and love our children unconditionally, this is incomprehensible.  “How can those parents be so cruel?” we think. “How can a mother think more of her own needs than her child’s and introduce a potentially dangerous partner into the home?  How can a mother herself do harm to her child?"

 The sad fact is that not every woman is maternal and some, who never received nurturing themselves, have no idea how to nurture a child, even if they wanted to.  And I’m not just talking about young women in shaky relationships.  Some women who are part of what looks like a stable couple or in marriages need so much looking after themselves that they just don’t have the mental room for a child, or may have a partner who can’t cope with the competition.

 The bottom line with having children is that the love has to be unconditional and the child has to come first.  And that’s a huge shock to the system.  And the guilt, if a woman doesn’t feel that way, is huge.  But, like the chemistry between two adults, it’s either there or it isn’t and if it isn’t, it can’t be manufactured. 

 And spare a thought for those women who really don’t want children and have to endure the silent or sometimes vociferous condemnation by those who believe that ‘real women’ want to procreate and that there’s ‘something the matter’ with a woman who prefers to remain childless.

 Then there’s the aching gap for those women who really want a child but, for various reasons, can’t have one.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just swap everyone around, so that those who could give a child a wonderful home could take over the care of those who will never be loved by their birth parents?  And let us also think of the mothers and fathers who experience the unthinkable – the death of a child, surely the worst pain in the world.

 So, today let’s try and include everyone in the relationship with a child, not just us mums; the grandparents, other family, godparents, close friends and foster and adoptive parents should all be remembered and lauded.  If you have been instrumental in helping a child’s development with a wonderful memory, a helping hand or a warm embrace, you deserve recognition.  And if you don’t get it, keep doing what you’re doing; no-one’s in this for the praise.

 

Leon and Louise

Sometimes a book just makes me forget everything but the characters in it, to the extent that I feel their pain, laugh with them and want them to be real so much it hurts; in fact, they're sometimes so perfectly drawn that I can believe that they did or do exist.  So it was with Leon and Louise by Alex Capus.

Essentially a love story, the book also describes the horror of war, both WWI and WWII, and how famlies are kept together - and torn apart. Leon and Louise are soul mates whose love survives war, separation and other lovers; separated after their first passionate encounter, they find each other again only to be kept apart, but in body only, as their spirits are forever intertwined.

This is essential reading for anyone who believes in the eternal nature of love, the power of endurance of the human spirit and who enjoys losing themselves in a beautifully-written book.

To find out more, visit: http://www.hauspublishing.com/product/384

Vive La France!

Watching the BAFTAs last night and seeing how The Artist deservedly scooped so many awards made me wonder how the film will fare at the Oscars at the end of the month in the very different environment outside Europe.

Director Michel Hazanavicius and lead actor Jean Dujardin accepted their awards in beautiful, if delightfully-accented English and even threw in some jokes.

In America, being able to speak French (even badly) appears to be something of a drawback, if Mitt Romney is to be believed. It will be interesting to see how the voting in the States differs from the voting here.

My money is on awards for The Descendants, Moneyball and maybe even The Iron Lady, rather than on a black and white, silent movie made by a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys!

Let's hope I'm proved wrong!

Waxing Lyrical

I don't often do this - wax lyrical about a play or book that is.  Or at least not in my blog, as I tend to confine that to musings on my own internal landscape.  However, I will make the exception for the one-woman show I went to see last night called Waxing Lyrical.

Waxing Lyrical is written by and starring Judith Paris, an accomplished stage, TV and film actress and writer, and is the story of Mme Tussaud, arguably the first, modern female entrepreneur.  Judith takes us through Marie's life from helping 'uncle Philippe' in his famous wax-modelling studio as a young girl, through marriage, births, deaths and showmanship to her famous exhibition in London, now known globally as Madame Tussaud's.

The woman really was an inspiration, living through revolution, heartbreak, deception and treachery but all the while focussed on her ambition, talent and family. Judith brings her to life brilliantly and I have to confess that I even cried at one point, being so caught up n the performance.

Sadly, I don't have the time or words to do this fine performance justice here.  Just go and see it and judge for yourselves.  It is on at the New Diorama theatre, 15-16 Triton Street, Regents Place, London NW1 3BF.  But hurry, as it finishes on December 10th.

http://www.chifest.org.uk/pdf/WAXING-LYRICAL-STATEMENT.pdf

Maybe It's Just In My Head

You know when you get a feeling that's so strong, you almost feel as if something has actually happened?  Well, I have one of those at the moment; the problem is that I'm not sure what the feeling is about... It's as though there's something going in in the ether, something which affects me, but I can't put my finger on it.  I can't even work out whether it's good or bad!

I'm not going down with a cold, as I'm just getting over one, nor have I got anything looming, like bills, meetings or decisions, so I'm stumped.  All I know is that, just outside my field of vision, there's something waiting to manifest itself, which is unsettling. I sometimes think I think too much and don't feel enough.  And maybe that's the problem; I've been so used to analysing everything lately that I've lost the capacity to just let emotions flow through and around me.  It might just be the novelty of a feeling trying to muscle in that is causing the unrest. In fact, 'it' might be my subconscious's way of reminding me to balance thinking and feeling again.  I may have been living too much in my head of late.

So, until I know what it is, I'm going to take my own advice and think of something else - that and maybe immerse myself in a film or a book which captivates my attention and allows my emotions to work themselves out.  One of the lessons I've learned is not to allow myself to be frustrated by things I can't change.

And if it's just in my head, it will be gone tomorrow; if it's in my heart, I have the emotional capacity to deal with it, whatever it is.  And if it is anything momentous, I'll let you know!

 

 

An Exercise In Creativity

The writing group I belong to sets itself homework every month (we're nothing if not committed!) and last month's was 'show not tell'.  We had to write a passage of around 300 words showing that someone had lost something without telling the reader what that thing was and ideally also indicate a time of year, era and general background story.  It was much harder to do than I thought it would be but I eventually came up with the following piece.

I'd be fascinated to know what you think the back story is.  Wonderful thing, imagination...

'She suddenly remembered being made to read Proust, when she had longed to be outside watching the young men, all long hair and velvet loons, parading around the campus like peacocks.

 Finally she understood what he had meant in his description of remembering things passed.  As Jeremy left the room, all that was left of him was the smell and her memories.

 She had bought that leather jacket for him during the holiday in Milan, had loved the look of the tanned material against the white of his tee shirt and had just watched him in the days that followed; Jeremy on their balcony, silhouetted against the deep blue of the sky; Jeremy threading his way through the market, tall and blond against the shorter locals with their dark, lustrous locks.

 But now, mixed with the earthy, rich scent of the faded leather were the clean, spicy notes of the cologne he had taken to wearing.  He had just bent down to kiss her cheek, enveloping her in memories of Italian nights, lemons in clean, fresh air and his own, more subtle scent – that unique smell, which she could pick out in a room full of men.

 She had caught his arm, her hand registering the warmth of the leather, fingers feeling every small crack and flaw before sliding down to his hand, strangely cold and almost clammy in the heat of the room.

 The room was always kept warm for her and she hated it; hated the feel of the rug across her knees, cashmere, of course, the money had paid for that. At times, she would throw it off, like a child impatient with a toy, hoping that Jeremy would come in and hold her hand and reassure her, as he used to do, bringing their past with him.'