Monday 31 July 2017

There comes a day.

Yes of course there comes a day when you physically loath yourself. You wake up one day and racing through your mind is everything bad, everything stupid, everything unloveable that you have ever done. You can't decide which is worse: the person inside, or the body enclosing it. How hideous you are. You want to shrink and shrink and shrink until there is nothing left of you but dust. There is not necessarily the ideation of suicide, something is tying you to the surface of the earth still, but there is the desire to not exist. You wake up and here you are; awful, ridden with mistakes, hurting and alone.

Except you don't just wake up on this day and feel like this: you build it up. You spend days before noticing little bits that you don't like about yourself. You indulge in unhappy moments, not because you enjoy them but somehow you think that maybe you deserve it. You keep thinking thoughts that are just a little bit painful. Blows to the chest. You remember being heartbroken, you remember not finding love, you begin to be unsure of yourself.

Some days, thank God, you forget the way you feel. You keep yourself busy, working hard, distracting yourself. Although, despite doing the things you know that really you should love, it all feels a little bit different. Everything feels a little bit sad. You're not doing it the best you can. You're not really joining in with conversation. You have to leave the room to call your mum in tears.

And this is when you wake up on that one day and you hate yourself. It's a horrible, sharp pain and it comes from being heartbroken and feeling empty and eventually it just turns in, clinching your heart.

I'm not going to write any more about it because the memory of that pain is bad enough. But that's the thing, it's turning into a memory. I am recalling the feeling. I'm bored of doing that now. I'm enjoying the feeling of liking myself much more, you see. I'm working on that instead.

There comes a day when you physically loath yourself. There comes several days, over years, over months, after decades of being okay. And then it goes again. You try really hard, because really the whole time you've loved yourself enough to work at it. And then it goes, and you can breathe, and you feel okay. I'm working on that bit, I think I'm nearly there.

Monday 24 July 2017

Dunkirk: afterthoughts.

I watched Dunkirk last night. My dad walked out half way through because the direction of the film upset him, he found it was overtly stylised for a serious and real topic. I almost walked out towards the end because it was too much. Obviously the film was going to be bleak. Obviously there were going to be lots of deaths and tragedies that actually happened. It's just that, having seen it, did I really need to go to understand the hideous things that humans do to each other?

Okay so the film was powerful. The sound was done so brilliantly that, not having ever felt a bomb go off, I could imagine the extreme terror that noise brings about. I could imagine the utter hopelessness of standing on a beach open as a target to Nazi aircraft. I could see the desperation. I could picture my male friends in the same position. Boys my age just wanting to survive, just wanting to go home, just not wanting to die.

But would I have known and understood all of this without seeing the film? Was it necessary to put myself through 2 hours of crying and stress in order to feel closer to the men who lived through?

Film is a medium that is like no other. You cannot feel the sound, or hear the cries, or see the bleakness of it all from reading a book, unfortunately. A history book could give me the death toll, could describe the conditions. A work of fiction could potentially describe the terror, the bitterness, the humanity. But I'm not sure either of those things could fully immerse me in something which feels a fraction of what it was actually like.

And so perhaps feeling like that, crying for actors on a screen representing real men, is a simple reminder. A reminder of history, of our awful, tragic history. Of what can happen to humans, of what we can do to ourselves.

I'm not really going to comment on the style of the film, the quality of it because obviously it did its job. It made me feel. There were faults and choices made that I don't agree with. But if I'm being honest I think that had I not seen the film, or any film like it, I wouldn't really understand just a little bit of the horror of war. The horror of wars that have happened, and wars that are yet to come (because, sadly, history can and will repeat itself). I think there is a job for films like Dunkirk to do, and I think it's an important job. Just make sure that you're ready for how the film is going to make you feel.