Flying On Clipped Wings

Here's some things I've learned during that period of frantic panic and caffeine consumption known as exam season, having gone through three bouts of it with my next period of it coming up in May. These aren't anything to do with my course material, rather they are little life lessons from the various things that I've experienced during them. 1: Listicles get clicks. This isn’t even me trying to be all meta with this article, I’ve clicked onto so many things which have turned out to be unfulfilling, watched so many end of year review list videos on YouTube, all due to this desire to just not have to engage with the foreboding behemoth comprised of powerpoints and pdf files staring me in the face. 2: Caffeine has a dark side to it. All those coffees, those cans of edge, those cans of red bull should you have the money to afford it, they may well keep you awake, but there is a crash and it will come. It may come midway through typing where you feel a wave of tiredn...

This article has a rather stark title compared to my other ones, no sly little joke or further expansion on the specific nature of my discussion. There’s nothing really humorous I can put there to alleviate just how fucking heavy a read this is gonna be, and there’s no short little summation of this article. It’s not just my experiences with suicide, it’s about how we handle the topic of suicide, how we might have put our feet on the moon, but when it comes to matters of the mind we’re still grasping at straws a lot of the time. There’s no hashtag, or foundation behind this to continue some sort of advocacy, I’m just a voice on the internet, opening up about something seriously traumatic that happened to me, in hopes it can open the conversation, in the hope that I’ll somehow come to terms with it, even a little bit. April 1st, 2015, a date that’s not gonna leave my mind any time soon. The explanation of the context that helped contribute to my attempt would take up almost another art...

For someone who’s obviously open about many things, due to the content you can view on this blog, I’ve never been good at accepting help or letting people in. Perhaps I saw it as further admittance of weakness and wanted to save what little face I had left. Perhaps I didn’t think I was deserving of help. Perhaps I was sceptical of what help could be offered and didn’t want to end up going back to square one with memories of better times burning a hole in my stomach. Perhaps I just didn’t know how to react, having gone through life relying on myself, dragging myself through whatever mess I ended up involved in. Whatever the reasons, that reluctance is something that’s held me back, something that has held many people back from getting help, making bad situations that bit more unmanageable. I dragged myself through a lot of shit, on my own, and while I’m still here I wonder if things would have gotten better a while ago if I hadn’t kept things secret from my mam, if I’d listened to m...

Sharebait. It’s a term anyone who’s spent an extended time on social media, particularly Facebook will be familiar with, generally referring to the likes of Buzzfeed articles, posts with purposely inflammatory titles and statuses packed with emojis urging you to copy and paste. While they may clog up newsfeeds, most dismiss them as being harmless if irritating pieces of code. However there’s a darker, nastier side to this, found both in the cult of the passive-aggressive not-quite memetic images and that of the faux-deep, faux-inspirational images. They’re intrinsic parts of a negative culture, which does no favours to your mental health or relations with others. It’s an unnamed phenomenon, while there’s a slew of articles that deal with passive aggression on social media and this excellent Vice article that covers some of what I’m talking about somewhat better than I can, it still is an ongoing thing, a loop of the banal we’re trapped in.   I’m not quite sure when the passiv...

While MRAs will frequently cry out “wut about the menz” whenever feminists dare to do something as simple as post a relatable meme for the purpose of likefarming, what many of them fail to realise is that it’s men that fuck each other over. The constant arms race to be “the bigger man” be it through whatever traditional image is in vogue or within a subculture, is a very damaging thing, for everyone. Herein are the chronicles of my experiences with toxic masculinity, my own personal struggles with trying to get out of it, a tale of much unnecessary bullshit. I’ll be focussing on interactions with people, because if I was to untangle the problematic messages in every piece of media I’ve experienced, I’d probably be at dissertation length. My introduction to toxic masculinity was at home. Despite seeing himself as a woke and unproblematic individual, my dad would still take part in those annoying tests of manliness. In front of relatives he would try and perform subtle put downs, knowin...

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that a band or singer or teen idol saved your life. It’s hyperbole, often a sympathy call online or a means of validating your fandom when validation isn’t really needed. Having said that though, music does have a certain power. It can pick your mood up by letting you switch off and just enjoy the vibe. It can help push out the negativity building up in your gut, suffocating negativity, by forcing the tears out. It’s never gonna be too busy, you don’t need to lie to it, it’s just always there. Listening to music will get you through quite a bit. While not a solution, compared to a number of other coping techniques like smoking, drinking and self-harm, it’s a safe way of taking the edge off the shit parts of life.   To keep the top paragraph from looking more like an empty platitude written by a blithering idiot who sat in on one psychology lecture over orientation week and thinks they understand people, I should give some context. Mental illness ...