#OpenMinday – Sport, commentary and banter @BarnayRonay @EvaWiseman @martinkelner

What is Open Minday?

The oily slipperiness of banterese makes attempting to pin down why it’s become the touchstone of maleness (or, at least, self-proclaimed ‘ladness’) a Sisyphean task. The banterers aren’t listening.

Anyway, @BarnayRonay has already expertly speared the way banter has weedled its way into mainstream sport (or football, as it’s known outside of the tabloid back pages) all  shit-eating grin and shrugged shoulders, hands raised in defence, “It’s only bants!”

And @EvaWiseman took a scalpel to the seams holding together the “Just bants, gramps!” excuses, in the awkward silence as UniLad shuffled its feet and squeaked out an apology for celebrating the low convinction rate of rapists.

Banter is now, essentially, an excuse to be inexcusable. It’s driven by fear – of silence, of being outflanked, of failing to be the dog that’s doing the eating. It’s tribal, it’s aggressive. It’s not sparring with words, it’s half-formed nonthoughts scrapping like boys in a playground, all headlocks and hamfisted thumps.

The “it’s just a joke!” defence means one thing – “I didn’t mean it!”. Banter is a loud and unpleasant fart, semi-self aware, guiltily enjoyed for the effect it has on bystanders but ultimately and unavoidably a waste product that could have been avoided. Or at the very least genuinely apologised for.

In 2012 banter isn’t Oscar Wilde or even Newman and Baddiel. Like Barnay Ronay says, banter is “anti-chemistry”. It’s shutting other people down, drowning other voices out, filling the verbal space with guff spuffed directly from the sludge of the unconscious, the hindbrain, bypassing thought.

I stopped watching football after binging on the World Cup in 2010. I’ve since lost all interest in the sport. One summer of listening to men paid to share their knowledge and experience of the game blurt out inane, uninformed lazy commentary was enough to kill football for me forever. My own knees, meanwhile, were enough to stop me playing.

“This player has the ball, oh and now that player has the ball, he’s taken the ball past another player and hit the ball with his foot and, oh, the striker nearly put the ball into the net to score a goal which as we all know would have made the game a different game to the game which we are watching now which is actually still the same game because what I said could have happened didn’t.”

I’ve thrown myself into cricket instead, a sport that can still boast a full-voiced beer-fuelled population while managing to talk about itself without smirking, joking, winking or nudging. Cricket commentary in every form covers the game, the tactics, life and everything inbetween. Football commentary seems trapped in inane nothingness. In banter.

Almost a year ago @MartinKelner wrote a fantastic article comparing the sparse, sure-footed commentary of Brian Moore in the 1981 FA Cup Final with the nonstop nothing-speak of latter-day TV sofa-saints like Clive Tyldesley: “It is almost like a form of Tourette’s”. Or banter.

There are some great analysts in football – I loved Gordon Strachan’s short stint on Match of the Day, and occasionally one of the old cloggers will shed light on an aspect of the game usually given nothing even approaching lipservice by the Andy Grays and Richard Keys of the world. But you simply can’t fill every second of a match with considered thought.

But banter can fill a thousand stadia, a hundred thousand silences. So commentators banter with each other, cast judgement on a player’s off-field life or make idiot abstract observations. And the language of football, the teased statistics, gives these babblers all the mouth-amunition they need to fill every second of a match with unconsidered nonthought.

In Saturday night pubs automaton voices parrot the same witless verbage, proving their commitment to the sport through their dedication to memorising the accepted phraseology. And on the Sunday morning sports fields the adult voices bellow remembered lines of commentary at confused kids attempting to learn an incredibly technical game. Attempting toenjoy learning an intricate and hugely tactical game.

What other sport promotes the voice of the fat-ankled radio presenter, the bellowing fan, to such a towering level they can spit out judgements of a player’s commitment or effort while picking donut out of their teeth? How can you take seriously a sport which insists on elevatating the recognisable voices, the cloned outrages, the echoed opinions?

The phone-ins complain about the skills of English players, players who have only ever been told to hoof it out of danger into the channels or the mixer, who never heard an extended and exploded discussion of the thought behind the action during their grassroots years, who grew up listening to commentators filling dead air with dead thoughts.

I honestly believe that commentary is a huge and compelling factor behind the English football team’s inability to win a major tournament. It’s a cycle of non-ambition that begins with watching the game on TV, through to the yelling of fans in the stalls, and the limp questioning of TV interviewers in post-match broadcasts.

And it’s this need to banter, to talk, to spout noise endlessly at all levels of a game that has the same base strength as cricket or rugby (another sport that manages to retain thought without being sapped of excitement) that makes football the obvious contender for mainstream tribalism, easy access sports tourism.

It’s precisely because of this ubiquitousness of football that the massive influence of TV and radio mouthpieces spouting sport talk about anything but sport can’t be underestimated. Football can’t go anywhere but down if it continues to elect its champions from the ranks of the banterers, the unreconstructed lads, the echo chambers in human form.

xc

Some of my brightest memories are from the acting I’ve done, at school, at university. It all felt so natural – I never had stage fright, the lines always came, my confidence on stage always several levels of tonnage higher than in my normal life.

But though I was good I would have faced a struggle if I wanted to be great, to be a professional. Because every character I played was me. My approach was simply to soak up the character and imagine what sort of me their situation, their backstory, would have created. I reacted, I spoke, I moved as a slightly different sort of me.

In acting it’s not such a problem, unless you want to really become a true actor – someone who doesn’t just put on different clothes, but different people. In writing, though, my impulse to put myself before everything else has strangled me, and continues to do so.

I wouldn’t want to escape my natural talent for taking things I experience, moments I live and relive, and being able to turn these out on the page. But now deep into my first real writing project my weakness in character, in understanding other people, comes out.

There’s parts of me, or potential parts of me, in my characters. But there must be more than that, unless I want a book staffed by facsimilies. Without differences there’s no tension, there’s no direction.

The other night I sat down with a new book my wife has bought me, a text book basically, and gave an exercise a go which asked you to examine your philosophy of life. Use a few lines of dialogue, it suggested, use images.

I’ve written about using books like this before in my journal – this whole exercise is from the first book she bought me. I always feel a bit dirtied, almost, by using something so workmanlike (in my perception) in the pursuit of connecting with my passion.

Sometimes I think it’s because sections are so obvious, or Fisher Price level to me that I question why I’m even reading the book – I know all this stuff, don’t I? It feels like a dumbing down of me, of the process of writing. It takes the magic away, and makes it all into something that anyone could do. It devalues my image of writing.

But only because I see what I want to see, or see what I don’t want to see. When I’d finished the exercise what I had to share with my wife wasn’t anything to do with my life’s philosophy – it was a sugar-shell bit of fun with words and images. It was easy.

I didn’t engage with the point of the exercise, I just saw in it what I could do without thinking about it too much and fired something out. My technique is practiced, I’ve had years and years of writing to hone the ability to develop something surface-level in a matter of moments. Well done me. But one tap and it all shatters into worthless pieces.

The fact my wife wouldn’t allow me to get away with what she called a missed opportunity really cut me. I wanted reaffirmation that my cleverness with words, my unformed quick-and-easy natural idea was something to be proud of, to celebrate.

I always react badly to these books, and it was clear from our conversation that it’s because I want to be able to do what comes naturally, easily, and get somewhere without having to do anything more. Which isn’t possible. I can be good, if I like. But wouldn’t I want to be really great?

So the challenge suggested by all these books is that I’m not working hard enough, that I’m lazily drifting through something I want to succeed at, and succeed in big, big terms. But if I’m serious about getting better, I’ve got to do more than just do what I’m good at.

The evenings are getting lighter and I’m getting increasingly excited about this year’s cricket season with my village club. Any suitable moment I have between now and April’s first match I’ll be practicing, pushing myself, working on ironing out the flaws in my bowling and getting consistent. Consistency is my only ambition. It’s doable.

Why I can’t look past my natural writing talents and start cracking on with practicing and improving my natural writing weaknesses is beyond me. Well, it’s not beyond me. It’s down to me. It’s up to me. It’s my fault I didn’t push myself in the exercise, and I deserve all the stick I get, much as I’ll deserve any praise if I target my weaknesses.

But I’ve not been writing this for a long time. I’ve been reaching for journalism on a low level, personal questions. I’ve been expressing a lot, my writing’s been about taking action or actively expressing something that I’d arrived at or come up against. But I haven’t been journaling, I haven’t been questioning, I haven’t been getting myself out of the way.

I’m sure my wife, reading this, will see that I’m casting about wildly for a direction, and that probably I’ve arrived at the direction right now, and will be frustrated that I’m about to stop writing just as I arrive at the direction. I feel blind, I feel lost. I feel like I’m blathering on about old, old stuff. Tired stuff.

I need to be asking myself new questions, not repeating old journal entries in different ways. One of the greatest things about our relationship is that we talk openly and intricately about everything. I’m a natural confesser, I can’t move through something unless I express it, and I don’t want to express something without expressing it to her first.

That’s why I’ve talked with my wife about visiting a strip club. About looking at other women, girls. About my feelings of uselessness, or my fears of getting things wrong, my emotional weariness. My sense of how pathetic all this sounds.

I drag these feelings I have around and around trying to make sense of them. I question myself, and if I don’t reveal these questions to my wife – the one person with whom I share my entire life – then I can’t fully answer them, and I wouldn’t be able to express or discover the answers with her if I didn’t reveal the questions to her.

At the same time I don’t want to be a stuck record, always having the same tensions, the same questions, the same confusions, and so often I’ll just brush away recurring conflicts in an attempt to save her from the same conversations. Like an idiot. Because largely the conflicts only recur because I don’t share them with her.

There’s no direction here, only a need to write something honest and open and exploring at work, because I’m getting sucked under the tide of my job, and my job is not who I am. I want to give it what I can, but it can’t have the whole of me. And yet, I have to stay whole somehow, I have to prevent myself splintering into work-me and real-me.

I’ve been running a weekly blog thing called Open Minday, writing some theory blogs, some economic thoughtblogs, basically just examining and exploring my feelings about topics and issues. But I think I need to put those away for now. I need to concentrate on the book, on myself, on character and other people, other humans.

I need to get back into journaling, digging around in my head, giving the papers of my mind a shuffle, file away bits and pieces, take out things and consider them. I need to get back into journaling so I can get back into writing, and back into the book. That’s what’s really important. That’s the writing that really matters.

I’m white, middle-class, male and live in the west. I know what it’s like to be a woman #OpenMinday

What is #OpenMinday?

There is no opposite to racism or sexism. When I see a woman I don’t see a sexless thing. I see a person who is female, a person who is not my sex, a person who is fundamentally different to me on an obvious level. But this doesn’t make me sexist.

Walking last week I passed between two very tall black students stood chatting calmly on the path ahead of me. The gap between them was more than big enough for me to walk through. They didn’t look at me. But I didn’t see colourless ‘persons’, I saw two people who were black. This doesn’t make me racist.

A person who is black is black. A person who is white is white. A person who is tall is tall. To be someone who resists, who rejects and who stands against racism or sexism or any prejudice isn’t to be someone who doesn’t see these truths. It’s to be someone who sees that all of these people are people first.

One of the things that struck me while my wife and I visited a naturist resort last year was how naturists are just people. Being a naturist doesn’t mean they have this view or that view. Being a naturist is an expression of the views that they have as a person.

But on that visit I couldn’t shake the pre-conceived idea I’d had of naturists. I viewed the whole visit with a cynical eye, looking for the dark cracks in the ordinary surface. Looking at something I didn’t understand and expecting the worst.

Honestly, when I approached these two black men I became self-consciously non-racist, like an idiot. I went over every thought I usually have in this situation: Is it racist to look? Is it racist not to look? Is it racist to walk slower or faster? Is it racist to smile or not to smile? And how do I make peace with the fact that I feel intimidated? Is that racist?

Put me in a dark night at 3am after all the pubs have kicked out and see me walking towards two young tall men of any description who are taking up my path onwards, forcing me to pass between them, and I would feel at least this same discomfort.

I don’t know who they are, I can’t judge their temperament and I feel vulnerable because to go on I have to submit to being surrounded. But this is in the depths of night. Why do I feel this way in the middle of the day? The only answer can be because they are black.

It hurts me that I feel indimidated by black men, because I loathe the swallowed-racism I’ve somehow internalised without evidence. But my bewilderment at these feelings surely can’t begin to match the confusion and frustration that would be felt by the two students if I told them how I felt. And why shouldn’t they be confused? Offended, even.

When the morons who created UniLad’s ‘banter’-inspired content found themselves hauled up as an example of how men normalise rape it struck me that even in the places that men are attempting to talk about how men normalise rape, there’s still a fervent defensive streak fuelled by men failing to understand that they know what it’s like to be a woman.

The majority of men who would even have such a conversation would be white, western and middle-class (to be judgemental, but see GoodMenProject for examples of this neverending circular discussion). And I believe that a good deal of them would have experienced what I’ve experienced, and would feel exactly the same self-conflict.

The fact is that this discomfort, this self-conflict and self-conscious attempt to be both invisible and visibly not making yourself invisible, is experienced by women all the time whether they’re walking alone or not. Men intimidate women. The attempt to justify the normalisation of rape as ‘banter’ or a joke does nothing to solve this.

Plenty of men I have read online are aghast, offended, upset or even furious that a woman would class them as a potential rapist. I’ve been among this number. Because it feels idiotic, doesn’t it? It feels unjust. Exactly how those two tall black students would have felt if they’d known what I was thinking. Probably, they did know what I was thinking.

White, western, middle-class men have a lot of priviledges, but being able to have our cake and eat it is one that in the modern world has to mark us out as all sorts of -ists. Racists, sexists… they all have two things in common. They’re people who see the detail before the person and who will defend their right to do so.

I know what it feels like to be uncomfortable, to hate myself for prejudging someone, but to also know that I’m doing so because I want to protect myself and avoid finding myself in a situation I’m not prepared for. Is that wrong? Only if I ignore everything else but the detail, only if I don’t see the person first.

I don’t think it’s right for women to see every man as a potential rapist, but then I don’t think it’s right for any man to be a rapist and there’s plenty of debate about that too. Rape is bad. Women want to protect themselves, rightly, from it happening to them. Who am I to blame them if their methods make me sad?

It’s men who believe that their rights are under attack who we should be arguing with, not the women who just want to avoid being brutalised. Because we all know what it feels like to be vulnerable, to be uncomfortable. Would you appreciate being made to feel guilty for feeling that way, too?

On Tuition Fee Mistakes and #OpenBook, @mariellaf1, @BBCRadio4 @MartinSLewis #OpenMindaySpecial

A message I wanted to submit to Radio 4′s Open Book programme but was unable to do so due to the limits of the contact form.

Dear Mariella and Open Book,

I admire you very much and enjoy your podcast immensely. But I nearly chewed through my steering wheel this morning in frustration as Ben Masters and Prof John Bowen aired  ridiculously uninformed comments on the impact of tuition fees on modern students.

To suggest a sort of Brideshead reimagined, where a “two-tier” system exists not only between the privileged ‘finishing-school’ students of monied families and earnestly grateful young people from underprivileged households, but also between universities themselves (without clarifying what exactly this might implicate or mean) points to a void of understanding of the lives of students today and the HE system itself. This is a surprise to hear from two writers with such a strong connection to student life.

But to allow the misjudged, if popular, assertion that tuition fees means fewer students from low-income families will be able to finance their studies to stand unchallenged by the facts is irresponsible. Mariella, I would have anticipated you at least to question this unformed, knee-jerk opinion with your trademark spearing intellect.

In actual fact, by comparison to my own entry into HE, it is now far more immediately affordable for anyone to go to University than it was a decade ago when £3,000 worth of fees was payable up front.

And as the tireless Martin Lewis will explain to you, in careful and slow detail if required, even a drop to fees of £6k would benefit only those who leave uni into a job with a starting salary of £30k+. I can tell you categorically that this is hardly a broad swathe of graduates.

The moral panic that has gripped discussions about tuition fees wilfully ignores the reality: At a salary of £21k a graduate pays back less a month than an iPhone contract; Mortgage brokers and credit agencies have stated that student ‘debt’ will not affect calculations; The entire debt will be written off completely after 30 years regardless of payments.

I only wish I had gone to university 10 years later and ‘suffered’ the new fees. I entered in 2000. At the moment I pay back over £120 a month to my student loan. I began paying it back when I earned over £15k a year. This was more than two years after I had graduated (having been a journalist) which meant that I am only now, after working full-time for 8 years, beginning to see the total drop noticeably beyond the £9k I left with in 2003. And this does not even touch the £3k a year in fees which was paid by my parents.

Under the new system I’d pay £80 a month (£40 can be very useful). This would see the interest drive the total higher and higher but at this point in my career I would be just as close (if not closer) to being free of the debt as 2012 loans will be written off 30 years after graduation whereas my actual loan will exist until I every penny is paid. Or I die.

I would go so far as to suggest that in the last 10 years, perhaps almost 15 years, there has been no better time for a student of the arts or humanities to go to university. Careers in the arts and humanities traditionally not only start below 21k but often will rarely step significantly over this line, making the lifetime repayment a fair fee for a higher education.

I am fortunate in earning far more than I ever dreamed was possible, given my English degree and my distaste for management or upper office roles, but my ambitions to become a full-time writer do not combine as well with the 2000 fees as they would do with the 2012 fee. I have to face the fact that I may never pay off my debt.

The obfuscation around this issue makes me furious. Especially so when a highly respected and intellectual arts and humanities service such as Open Book gives credence to such idiotic, ill-considered conclusions that do nothing but pile higher the blind fear and confusion which feeds newspapers and commenters with low ambitions.

The question of whether increased fees would impact on campus novels was cack-handled in similar fashion by the two guests. The lives and loves of a generation of students who might carry alarming and undeniable debt but who are also empowered by the ownership of their education (not gifted it as I was by my parents) and the prospect of the future emotional and financial payback of making good on both that ownership and the debt owed, promise truly gripping and moving pieces of work.

Work that a 2015 graduate, with no repayments to make until they had reached 21k (a mark of fair success and comfort by any measure) and who had paid less upfront than myself to enter university, would be perfectly well positioned to create.

If I weren’t already deep in another project I would write it myself. Perhaps, in a few years, I will. At which point I look forward to the privilege of being invited to talk with you on Open Book, Mariella, about how the unreconstructed opinions of two men inspired me to write this message and begin the entire process.

Thank you for your time,

Ben Catley-Richardson

lxxxix

I’ve hung on to a lot of loss. Some moments in particular are still so clear that I can, for instance, summon up the image of my favourite toy as a toddler going down the plughole after a bath and see the exact hue of sea green bath and cheese yellow spaceman.

One of the losses I mourn the most for the fact of what I lost, not the consequences of the loss, was the contents of the plastic cardboard-backed art folder that I put down in the canteen of my upper secondary school and never remembered to pick up.

I have always wanted to draw, always. I instinctively reach for images anyway, my ideas are often defined by a single or series of snapshots. It has pained me for years and years that I couldn’t translate these vivid images into drawings that did them justice.

Unlike music and playing the guitar, drawing feels like something I should be able to do but can’t because my biomechanics won’t cooperate. I don’t feel or think in music, which is something I just know you need in order to play the way I want to, from my bones. But I feel and think in images, I play with ideas visually. Why can’t I draw them properly?

In my GCSE art class we had what I think must have been a TEFL or training teacher for a month or two, and after days watching me do nothing in the class he speared me with the question, “Why don’t you try?”. I could tell that he was asking because my self-defeating fecklessness was actually upsetting him.

Goaded or inspired by his challenge, I did try. I drew two pictures, the only complete drawings I have ever been proud of. One was an earnest attempt at surrealism that really did replicate what was in my head, what I wanted to see on the page. The other was a clean, sharp still-life that I had great fun embellishing.

Of course both were possible because I concentrated on them, I tried very hard to achieve something – instead of launching into something half-hoping that it would just work out without me knowing much about it, half-waiting for it all to be shit. Just like always.

These pictures made me so happy that I carried them around in the folder everywhere. And, of course, they were in the folder when I left it behind. When I lost it. I never saw them again. But shamefully I never tried again.

What was the point? I had lost the only proof of my effort, and I’d never remember what I was able to do, once, how I was able to surprise myself. With my best work lost I simply gave up. In my GCSE exam, my half-hearted attempt just wasn’t good enough and I threw it away, instead handing in a piece of paper covered in scribble with ‘Scribble’ written on it.

The pain of losing something I had really tried hard to achieve was far too much for me to bear, and any chance of me giving it another go, of me trying just as hard or harder again, was completely out of the question. Looking back now, I am astonished at my weakness.

Nowadays even though I carry notebooks everywhere I know that, as Steinbeck said, nothing good gets away. Some of my best ideas have sat within/outside of reach for years before I’ve got a hold of them. I don’t worry about forgetting great ideas anymore because the best ones never get away.

But back then I had no hope. I think I had looked to this man (though he might only have been 20 or so) who challenged me and felt that it was his challenge, his insistence that I try, that had made it possible for me to put such effort and achieve such results.

Part of coming to terms with being a writer, or to be more honest part of coming to terms with continuing to be a writer, has been to accept that everything that burns powerfully in my head can be expressed with the same power on the page, by me. I just have to try.

Why did I hang on to that loss? I used the sheer scale of the pain I felt in losing something I loved, something I had created, to convince myself that in creating it I had removed something from myself that could not be replaced. By losing it, I had lost a part of myself.

And the pain of losing was easier, irrationally, to cope with than the perceived pain of renewed effort. Last week I lost a very powerful blog post that I had taken a long time to work through and was heartened to feel a sense that it didn’t matter – the fact that I had written it once was proof that I could write it again. And, perhaps, better.

Last but not least it was an opportunity for guilt. If I had loved those pictures so much, how could I have possibly been so careless as to lose the folder I carried them in? I beat myself with this so much that hearing it from someone else was excruciating.

This though is finally the real reason that the memory still hangs around. As much as I hated myself, was furious with myself, for losing the folder – and as much as I seethed and recoiled when anyone else piled on the same judgement – by clinging to the guilt of my actions I was succeeding in avoiding the responsibility.

Not only did I lose something through my own carelessness, but then I gave up and failed to find it again. I may have talked to everyone I could in order to find the folder, to track it down, but I never once did the human thing and turned to myself. I looked for an external force to take away from me the responsibility to replace what I had lost.

Had I done so, had I expended the effort to replace the pictures that I had stupidly left behind in a moment of dumbness, I would have truly understood the cost of my loss. I would have also learned a hugely positive thing about myself – I could do it again.

lxxxviii

In my first year at secondary school (I was about 15) I sat in the canteen and tried to convince my friends of the fantastic benefits that being a-sexual would bring. I had a whole concept, a fantastical made up planet populated by repeating families of clones.

It would be easy – two clones would touch and choose to create a third, child clone. It was secure – there would never be an accidental clone. It would be a relief – there’d be no need for sex. It would be freedom – there’d be no need for girls.

My entire life has been coloured by my problem with girls. Women are a different matter. But my fear of girls, my longing, my need, my understanding (or misunderstanding), my distrust/mistrust, my disconnection, plagued me from childhood to adulthood.

A depressing amount of time during the three years following that bizarre conversation (throughout which, of course, my friends treated me like a crazy person) was influenced by the sort of iconic, can’t-eat-can’t-sleep schoolboy crush that sells unambitious teen novels.

The actual breath in my lungs was often owned and controlled by the modest, unthreatening young girl who was in my form class. There are memories of my inability to connect with her that sting even now, and which shaped the rest of my life.

I endlessly examined and re-examined the question she asked me at the end of one class, clawing for some truth, some hint, that I had missed or failed to interpret at the time. “Do you think it’s funny that M said he could see Uranus?”, K asked me, quietly. My flustered reply, “No…” didn’t result in anything but her returning to her desk. What did it mean?!

It’s embarrassing but undeniable that I tried to draw her once, while gazing over in her direction, but stopped because I felt that to create anything that wasn’t perfect and beautiful – like she was – would be an insult, would destroy my vision of her.

Looking back now, I can be pretty sure I know what this meant.

In a heartbeat I can relive with clarity one morning in our form room. I had missed assembly and went to wait for my class, where I found K had done the same. Silent, I sat at my desk. I think my desk was some distance behind hers. I kept my head down, every minute of silence a suffocation, a choking. I was terrified of her.

I was terrified of her. Because I knew that I was small, ugly, worthless in comparison to the boys who were her friends, and I knew that this meant that I did not exist in her world, that when I left the room I would be impossible to recall. That she did not think ever of me.

I was terrified of her because she had everything of mine. I was powerless. And she knew it, she must see it, she must know exactly the way I feel and it must disgust her, trouble her, upset her that someone like her could attract someone like me. Someone awful.

But I was terrified that she was also testing me, sending out codes about the way that she felt about me and I did not have the capacity to see them, let alone untangle them and even if I did understand them I would never, ever, believe that they were true.

After three years, K and I ended up in fewer classes together and though I always knew when she was in the same room as me, my breath (at least) was now my own. Until the next wrenching crush, and the next, and the next.

Throughout all of the terrible longing-distances I put myself through, it was my unsolvable self-doubt that swung me from a passionate and romantic hope that something was happening to the pain and despair of being so terribly wrong.

Not that I told any of my crushes about the depths or the realities of my feelings. I played the same game I felt I was suffering in reverse, attempting to send out codified hints and learn how to say everything without ever really saying anything, how to prevent making myself vulnerable to rejection while yearning for the relief of honest expression of feelings.

I feel a prize idiot now, writing this, knowing that I managed to convince myself that a) I had to play this game because everyone else was playing it, and b) That I was the only, the only, person who played the game in order to protect myself from rejection.

What a fucking idiot! What was I thinking? But I didn’t think, I didn’t see beyond everyone else’s cool, calm faces. I saw only the beauty and the sexuality that I yearned for and the calculating and confident eyes that saw straight through me, that skewered me.

I gave away all of my power without once ever realising that everyone else around me was doing the same thing. Except that because I’d solidified this idea that I was totally unlike anyone else, I maintained this voluntary evacuation of power while so many others learned how to protect themselves better, build themselves a way to take their power back.

To my great and undiminished shame, I hit rock bottom at the age of 23 in the queue for a bus outside of the University of Bath after a night out with friends. I hated women. They had everything. They used the power their beauty gave them to crush me, to hurt me.

I hated women. I really said that. In a ludicrous, pantomime muttering splurge I expressed all of the poison I was drowning in, all of the hideous suspicions and pathetic accusations I had surrounded myself with, strangled myself with, disempowered myself with.

Because only I had given all of my power away. It was mine to possess but I had thrown it out as soon as it had entered me, thrown it in the direction of a pretty girl who really didn’t want it, and who rejected it, and who I then hated for rejecting me.

The friend of a friend who invited us all to the night out never spoke to me again. I’m glad, because he was right not to. If it would have been psychically possible I would have never spoken to myself again either. I was a disgrace. I was a mess.

It’s been many years and much, much, much talking since then but there is still a hoary dinosaur lurking deep inside me that fears pretty, lithe, outwardly-confident girls (girls, remember, women are something else) because I can feel its feeble urge to dissolve the control I have won over my own power and give it away.

But every day I have the love and support of my wife. Every day I feel the wholeness and peace that our marriage formed in me after decades of staggering through a stunted emotional wasteland. Every day I aspire to live honestly and with the understanding that a man is responsible for everything he does.

#OpenMinday – A mature individualism @diane1859 @shepleygreen

What is Open Minday?

“To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people.”
Promo for The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis

Even if this belief is challenged by Curtis’ documentary, which illustrates how Freudian psychology has been employed by business and politics to control the masses through the illusion of individual power, the power of the individual is still formidable.

In the West we live in a culture which cultivates and rewards individualism. Though only a specific kind – survivalists are a joke and people outside of conventional society are suspicious, but we all act as consumers in order to get through the day.

That’s not to say we are all driven by consumerism, but if we want to eat, sleep under a roof, create something or enjoy something we have to accept our role as consumers or seek out an alternative – confining us to the crowd outside of conventional acceptance.

A great many people are very good at making our individualist society pay for them, but this is more a testament to the ingenuity of human beings than proof that individualism is a natural human instinct. The rage expressed against the 1% who are particularly good at manipulating the system only highlights how non-human individualism actually is.

Individualism, especially consumerism, is focused on ‘want’ and not gratitude or the urge to contribute towards something external, something ‘not you’. It’s a one-way path, where the world passes into the individual and remains there. Individualism hoards energy.

But for me this is only the first stage of a cycle, the childhood of individualism. The possibility of a return path from individual to the world is occasionally hinted at – those people whose ‘want’ actually drives them to positively contribute, even if they remain essentially selfish regardless of achievement.

If the first stage focuses on the things which travel along that path – the gain which being an individual brings – then the second stage begins when the end point of the path, your own self, finally becomes the focus. In this adolescence of individualism, the questions “Who am I?”, “Why do I want these things?” or “What do I really want?” are unavoidable.

They are huge and alarming questions. I have never felt that anyone taught me to answer them, and my developing self-awareness was so hamstrung by guilt and shame that I was trapped in this stage for almost my entire conscious life. Until I at last discovered that I’d had the capacity to provide the answers myself all along.

By accepting my self I could begin completing the cycle and discover how to return the energy which passed from the world into me back out into the world, and in a way I feel contributes something – the maturity of individualism. My method is this blog, my future writing career. My method is in my contributing to discussion, ideas, thought.

But I’m only a writer, that’s only my method. What’s your method of returning to the world? Look around you and you’ll see a hundred other people, each with their own innate method. But how many of us have discovered what that is?

At a weekend away last year I met a group of people I’ve become hugely interested in, particularly one guy who told me about his business in making furniture and how he was building his own house with his girlfriend, at the same time as a full-time tutor post.

He got up early to use his workshop, taught a full day, then returned home after working into the evening. The more we talked the more obvious it was that he had passed all the way along the cycle far earlier than I had. He had found his method.

Neither of us are exactly changing the world but we are both contributing to it. And, although both of our aims would be to make enough of a living out of our methods that we didn’t have to do anything else, there’s a difference between us and business.

Principally it’s in that simple word, ‘enough’. Consumerism, that one-way strain of individualism, has no understanding or place for the word enough because it suggests that there could possibly be an end to ‘want’, which is only possible if consumerism ends.

As I drew out the other week, the modern structure of business is also unfamiliar with the word enough. The desire to make a living out of your individual method only breaks the flow back into the world if you allow it to forget about ‘enough’ and focus on ‘more’.

I see a future where a vast gulf opens up – between child-like or adolescent individualists (businesses) driving for ‘more’ and mature individualists driven by getting ‘enough’. The businesses will only ever get bigger, because mid-size or smaller companies will be either consumed by corporations or will fail to support the drive for ‘more’, and die away.

The further the corporations get from individuals, the more the mature individualist  groups will be free to express their methods and strive for quality that businesses focused only on wanting more are unable to match. And yet this new mature, mirror-like individualism will still be contributing to the world through the pursuit of individual goals.

If your method creates a product – writing, building, crafting – then it can be easy. But where I see the need for Government is in enabling a change to the shape of our culture so that individuals whose method isn’t so straightforward a match to retail-style society (ie, caring, teaching, healing) can fulfil their individual goals of having ‘enough’ too.

But my point right now is a request for everybody to ask what method exists within themselves, to strive for a mature individualism where that method is expressed in return for ‘enough’. Finding my method taught me that ‘enough’ is less than I thought I needed.

I’ve tried to open your mind this Open Minday, but if you’re interested in expanding your thoughts about society, economy or capitalism then @diane1859 @shepleygreen are the perfect place to start.