Many are stronger

I'm reading 'The Happy Depressive' by Alastair Campbell on my Kindle at the moment (I'd started reading 'A Tale of Two Cities' but gave up). I have to say, that although Mr Campbell and I aren't exactly on the same page politically, something that I know will cut him to the core, I am really enjoying the book. 

I am finding it enlightening to read someone who works (or worked) in such a high pressured, high paced environment talk openly about his depression, and how he has learned to deal with it.

I had a similar reaction to a TV program that the wonderful Stephen Fry did a few years ago,  'The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive'.

I don't know that I would be quick to use the labelling, of depressive. (Sounds rather, er.. depressing doesn't it ?), but I have certainly been through a rather stressful time from the last month of 2011 onwards. I am much better now, there are some things that are no longer hanging over me. I had a very terrible time of it around Christmas and New Year, and things came to a head toward the middle of February.

I've felt that the big 'start of a new year' thing that I was so looking forward to, thinking that 2011 had been pretty much of a crap year, never really happened for me. From feeling that my life was on hold, and my future utterly in the hands of others, I am now left feeling directionless and uninspired in relation to my professional future.

What I've been through has really made me take stock, again, about what sort of person I am, and what sort of things I am cut out to do or be. There is no point trying to fit a square peg into a round hole now is there ?

As my feelings and understanding of myself and the environment around me evolves, things may change, but right now, I feeling rather let down by those that make a virtue of telling me that they have my best interests at heart, and that they are looking after me. They're not. They haven't, and they continue to provide fresh reasons to distrust them.

Like everything, any relationship has its time. It starts, it blossoms, and it grows, and in time, it fades away and withers. There's no point trying to get a dead plant to grow, no amount of watering and soft talking is going to produce green shoots.

People are funny things aren't they?  I only meant to write a line or two, while I waited for another video to upload. Instead I've managed to poor out a page of heartfelt (although rather vague), comma and parentheses  laden text. Semicolon close bracket.

Here comes the sun...

I write this, sitting outside (on my camping chair) basking in the gorgeous sunshine we are inexplicably blessed with. These things seem all the more special when you consider that it's October 1st today. Yes that's right kids, October 1st. Bloody hell, after all this furore about global warming, and how bad for us it is (going to be), no one stopped to tell us that it might mean I can write outside on a sunny day, in my shorts, IN OCTOBER. OCTOBER !

Did I mention it was October ?

I've gotten up reasonably early today (well, a shave before 9am) grabbed a coffee, after feeding the cats, and taken netbook with me to sit outside and enjoy the sunshine whilst catching up on some script editing and some reviewing for Beacon.

I even decided to risk letting the cats outside. It's so quiet, and there's probably no better time to let them have a sniff around than today.

Too often I lazily trap myself in my flat, in front of the television, or more often, in front of my Mac. Living on my own (sorry Midnight & Twilight, you don't count as people) that leads to a rather insular existence. Lots of moping and self reflection may be good for you, or at least required if you're a teenager, but at my age it's just a bit on the sad side. I don't feel a burning need to be with other people because I can't manage or survive on my own. But I do recognise that I learn the most from other people (usually all the ones I disagree with) and do enjoy the company of others, as long as they are the right people.

The group I work with (my team) at work the 'right kind of people'. Which I don't think is something that neither I or they would have said six months ago. It's been quite the roller coaster this year. I do feel good about the difficult times I've been through, because we (as a team) have all come through them together and that gives us a better understanding of one-another. I'm a great believer in whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. It's as true for immunity to virus and germs as it is to resilience to emotional distress and conflict. Having said that, there is still work to be done. There is more for me to learn (from them) and about how to get along with people better, and achieve more.

Times gone by I think I have been so eager to get a result that I've knocked everyone and everything out of my way in my determination to get there. Unfortunately this always involved knocking over the very people I needed to help me get there.

By far the greatest pride I feel about this year is that one person in my team managed to be successful in getting a job in another area of the business they were really interested in, when they've been overlooked a lot before, two others have been headhunted by other managers to stand in as their deputies, and another has shined so well that I'm convinced pretty soon the same will happen to her.

I'm sure that if you asked any of these four people, six months ago, that they thought they would be in that situation, and how well we'd be getting along, they would have all told you it was impossible and not to be so fucking funny or stupid.

I would have probably said pretty much the same. I've changed, they've changed. We've all grown. I'm sorry this all probably sounds rather mush and twee or terrible Americanised corporate bollocks. But it's true.

Someone who my relationship with has moved in the opposite direction is my friend of nearly 20 years. The person that I've written 4 plays with, countless sketches and created improvised videos for the world to enjoy (or avoid). We've always had diametrically opposing political views, and it's been something we have always been able to work with, ignore and manage. It's actually contributed to some of the balance in our writing. Now we can't seem to see eye to eye on anything. I don't think it's down to the politics. I think it's much more deeply routed than that.

You may recall that we fell out during the production of the last show. It really does seem to have been the death of our friendship. How she was feeling and reacting at the time was due I guess to the severe strain that she was feeling at home. She's had domestic issues for quite some time, in that one of her sons has unfortunately been caught up in the drugs world, and this has also made worse (or been made worse by) his problems interacting with people. He is afflicted sadlywith not being where you would expect a man of his age to be, in terms of social mental development. I am sure there's a medical or psychological name for such a condition, but I'm sorry, it escapes me. She also has, from time to time, problems where her other son gets involved in what could possibly be discribed as the darker element of society, or seems to want to declare war on the drug dealers as a whole for what he perceives as their decision to ruin his brother's life.

All of these pressures take a place in amongst all the others of money and time that an awful lot of people feel at the moment. She also has to deal with suffering from a debilitating condition herself called fibromyalgia. She works from home, as is sadly no longer well for long enough to be in the mainstream workplace. (this wasn't always the case).

We fell out because we disagreed about how to organise some things, or how to make things work within the show. Increasingly her ability to invest productive time and energy to the show became an issue. She became steadily frustrated that I (as she saw it) had taken over and was running things less as a partnership and more as a one man show, with an assistant director / producer. This situation was not due to a lack of effort on her part, merely that she couldn't seem to focus on the things that needed doing.

I steadily began to recognise the symptoms of stress in her, and what certainly looked like her heading toward a breakdown. I could see this, because I have been in that situation before myself, and have been able to move on with my own mental well being (if you like) because I can recognise these traits and take action to deal with things before they get worse. Unfortunately, she wasn't able or willing to agree that this was what was happening, and pretty much saw that I was being mean spirited and making her feel worse.

In the end, I had to manage to juggle not only my day job, and my own outside work pressures (they were nowhere near the sort of thing she was going through of course),  protect her from the harsher elements of what I had been told or observed from members of the cast, and the some of the workload AND protect the show from the more destructive behaviors she was exhibiting. I do think I did a good job of this under the circumstances, because we managed to get to the end of the production with a show that was watchable, and enjoyable (although it could have been 1000 times better had we planned and organised better) and without our friendship exploding right infront of everyone involved.

I don't feel good about having to make decisions to do things without telling or asking her. I didn't like it, but didn't see an alternative at the time that didn't pose a greater threat to the show.

Somewhere along the line we have stopped communicating by telephone. I think this may be attributed to me getting cross with her after repeatedly being unhappy that she'd be on the phone to me for hours on end, when I've just come in from work and hadn't even had a chance to eat and was due back into work in 8 hours. These conversations would always be bad ones, that would make me feel shit, and would ruin my evening, or they would be ones that didn't actually achieve anything other than to moan about how much work there was to do, and how little time we had to do it. My observation at the time that we could achieve more by doing things than by sitting on the phone talking about them seemed to fall on deaf ears.

The paralysis of negativity is something I can see in people that are depressed, and also understand is hard to see past. I also know that the only way to feel good about achieving things is to get them done. You won't get the reward from finishing something if you never even start it.

She has now sent me several either lengthy (2000 word plus) emails or similarly long facebook messages, including one which she sent out to her nearest and dearest friends to 'brief' them on what's been happening in her life. In addition to this, she has now mentioned twice in different messages that she was offended because I haven't commented on her status at all. That I had 'hidden' her.

What's the netiquette about how often you should comment on your friends' status updates ? What if you don't want to, or feel the need to comment ? What if you don't because you're pretty much certain that what you say is going to start an argument ? Her updates are normally very political in nature, and mixed with rather lame personal attacks against those in power, that are usually all in capital letters. She also has the unfortunate habit of copy and pasting just about every pointless internet hoax or chain message that's doing the rounds.

I don't comment, because I think such things are either just rude or stupid, and say lots of things about how gullible and crazy the person repeating them is.

One of her longer messages that was sent out to a 'select' bulk of about 20 friends listed all the things that's been happening to her lately. Truly horrible things. Lots of our mutual friends made impassioned comments in reply to it. Was I wrong not to comment ?

I'm now left with the troubling problem of what to do. I'm not happy to be painted as the villain, but I'm also not happy to be expected to say things that someone likes just because they want to hear it, even if saying it will mean me lying, or being false.

To Vlog, or not, to Vlog. That is the question.

I've been playing around today with the camera and Final Cut Express to see how easy it would be to put the same person in one scene three times. It turns out that it's actually very easy, when you've spent half the day figuring out how the hell to do it.

After messing about with the technology vs my lack of skill and finally getting to a workable solution. Which I have uploaded onto the M27's facebook page for all the world to see.

I've also decided to have a little play with some of the footage that I've taken on my Blackberry of the cats, and edited that quickly in iMovie. Example of this  :-

Flip camcorder

I have been a little inspired lately by the vlogging style of Nerdzrl who seems to pretty much just take her  flip camcorder with her wherever she goes, and record her conversation to camera, and with real people too. I don't know if the good folks of Cosham would react in the passive way that the public in Canada seem to be happy with being filmed, which is funny really given our propensity to shove a CCTV camera in every conceivable location. (by conceivable location, I don't actually mean the ones people conceive in, although you never know....).

When I was a teenager, like most teenagers, I was pretty convinced that I had a unique and special way of looking at the world, and no one else really understood. It wasn't just me they didn't get, THEY also didn't understand how the world REALLY was. THEY just couldn't see it.

Well now that I am (ahem) older. My opinion is pretty much the same. Except maybe just a little (a little I said) arrogant. I do think I look at the world in a slightly different way to most other people. Does that make me some sort of undiscovered genius ? Hell no. It probably means that I am more socially backward than normal people and have far too much thinking time on my hands.

Anyway, I have digressed. When I was a teenager, I kept a diary. That's not that uncommon. A lot of teenagers do. Inspired as I was by 'The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole' (By Sue Townsend) in all it's generations, I picked up whatever writing implement was to hand at the time and committed to paper the workings of my demented, self absorbed teenage mind. There are volumes of my diary, pages upon pages of it. I told my impressionable, naive, and intellectually reckless young self that 'one day you can publish this, and it will be of comfort to anyone that reads it... ' not so sure about that one now or that 'your children can read it when they are teenagers and will be happy to know that the sort of things they are going through are the same things that their dear old dad was going through when he was their age'. hmmm. If there is one thing that is certain in the universe it is that teenagers most definitely do NOT want to be reminded of any similarities with their parents. As my daughter rapidly approaches her teenage years, one thing comes to mind. There's no way she would ever be interested in reading it.

For one thing, it's pages and pages of self opinionated drivel (see nothing changes). Deluded is the word that comes to mind.

So in the face of my daughter reading my diary, and suddenly having a tearful revelation that I too, suffered as I was a teenager, that I too did awkward uncool things. (still am doing - how's the hat going ?) That I too was a jumbling mess around the opposite sex. A mess around the same sex for that matter.

My point, my point ? Oh yes, there WAS a point. Is the written word more suited to this kind of outpouring or is the video blog (vlog) better ?