Tag: conversation

What do you mean you can’t feel it?

What do you mean you can’t feel it?

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 1 Comment

When we think about physical disability, a lot of the time many of us conjure the mental image of a severely physically disabled person who’s permanently confined to a wheelchair, miserable, and in serious need of society’s help. And if you’ve read enough of my blogs, then hopefully you’ll understand why this way of thinking is immensely damaging to literally everyone – regardless of whether you’re disabled or not. But today, the assumption about disability that I want to focus on is the one we make about the relationship between physical disability and pain.

A lot of the time, whether we’re watching an episode of DIY SOS, or Children in Need, or Me Before You, many of us assume that if a person has mild to severe physical ailments, then they’re probably in a lot of pain because of it. You hear that I’ve got Spina Bifida, you see me walking down the street wearing callipers, or getting out of a car after putting a disabled badge on display, and you figure that I probably have to take medication and I experience pain in my feet. (Obviously, you might not think about it at all, but if you are thinking about it, then this is often where the brain goes). It’s not an unfair assumption, and I’m not offended whenever people ask me whether I’m in pain, but it always makes for a fun back-and-forth when I then say that actually, one of the reasons why I develop problems is because I don’t experience any pain in my feet.

This is normally how it goes:

*at some point in the conversation the fact that I’m disabled has cropped up*

Them: So is it really painful?

Me: No, I actually don’t have much sensation below the knee on either leg. I can feel the inside, but not the outside. And I can’t move any of my toes – except my big toes, but even then, not really.

Them: Woah, that must be weird. Nice that you can’t feel if you’ve stood on something, though.

Me: Umm…hahahha…not really…If I stand on something, then I’m not gunna feel it, so I’m just gunna keep walking on it until it gets wedged further into my foot. My shoe could be filling up with blood and I’m not gunna know until I take it off. Then I’ve also got really bad circulation, so that’s going to take ages to heal. So it’d be kind of helpful for me to be able to feel it because then I’d know to not walk. But I get what you mean hahaha, it does mean I can kind of ignore it if I have a problem.

*and, scene.*

Basically, my relationship with pain in my legs is love-hate. If I had pain, then we probably could’ve avoided most of my foot problems – let alone the COUNTLESS internal monologues of stress, trying to guess whether something’s kicking off in my shoe – but obviously, I also don’t hate that someone can stand on my foot and it’s all good. Plus, it does make for hilarious stories, like how one time a guy told me he’d been playing footsie with me under the table for a literal hour and I’d had absolutely no clue…Or how every time somebody apologies profusely for standing on me, or accidentally kicking my foot, I tell them they can do it again if they want; it doesn’t bother me. Or that time that I didn’t know my friend’s house had underfloor heating until I fell over.

If there’s one thing that I’m trying to do on these online pages when I talk about disability, it’s to show you that that word is used to describe an infinite amount of variations of the human body. We use it when we deem something to have ‘gone wrong’, and in viewing it negatively, we always assume the worst. And I’m not saying that disability doesn’t come with problems – of course it does. There are disabled people who experience huge amounts of physical pain, who have to take loads of medication, or who are reliant on someone else to help them complete the most basic of tasks, but that isn’t all their lives are, nor is every assumption of what a disability is relevant to every disabled person.

But I’m not bringing this up to incite the ‘omg I hate people, why is everyone so closed-minded with their understanding of disability?’ response. Honestly, as you can see in the generalised example I gave before, I have a laugh with pretty much every person who asks me about how much pain I experience.

The fact is, society has a super problematic understanding of, and approach toward disability, but to sort that out, we’ve got to have conversations where it’s comfortable enough for somebody to get it wrong, then learn why without being humiliated or villainised for not knowing something that they have no direct experience of. As the person who’s being stereotyped, and treated a certain way because of lame assumptions, that can be difficult sometimes – understatement of the year. But you’d hope that by staying patient, and explaining it this time, the next time that that person comes across somebody with a disability, they’ll be better equipped to ask questions rather than make assumptions.

You’d hope.

I ran away to the Ukrainian mountains

I ran away to the Ukrainian mountains

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

As many of you have seen on social media, I went back to Ukraine this summer to work as a summer camp counsellor for a month, and if any of you are prOper big-time stalkers (*cough* I mean, ‘followers’…) of my work, then you’ll know that this wasn’t my first rodeo: I did the same job at the end of my year abroad two years ago. And what’s funny about coming back from doing anything for an extended period, is that people ask you how it was: some ask you out of politeness when they’re not really that interested, and others ask you because they truly want to know. But then when it comes to it, there’s no way you can effectively concentrate a month’s worth of experiences into one conversation, so you’re left with the ‘oh yeah, it was really fun thanks’.

I wanted to go back to Ukraine for two main reasons. The first was that I wanted to go to a different country because I like seeing other places, and because this year pretty much everyone on the planet has had the urge to leave their home country ever since being literally confined to it by law. The second reason related to the first, but was distinct in that I wanted to go somewhere else because for so long I felt stuck. I’d thoroughly enjoyed my second year at university but a pandemic, online learning, and the basic fact that I don’t really enjoy my degree made it so that I had this feeling that I was waiting around for something to happen only I had no idea what that something was. So I guess if we want to psychoanalyse it, I was eager to go back to do something I’d done during my year abroad since that was the time that I’d felt the surest of who I was and what I was doing.

The pandemic threw everyone for a loop, we know this, but my feeling lost and directionless at times can’t be wholly attributed to Ms Rona: it must also be a side-effect of our school systems telling us all the way through our adolescence that we need to know every step of our lives at least five years in advance. If you don’t plan, and if you don’t know, then you’ve done something wrong, you’re failing at adulting.

For the longest time, I knew I wanted to go to university and study Japanese Studies. So, then when I got there and realised that not only did I not enjoy it, but that the teaching had beaten my confidence down so much that I started to genuinely believe that I’m a bit stupid, it came as I nasty shock. And though I’d never really thought about it before, I now acknowledge that when situations or people stress me out, make me feel embarrassed or upset, I prefer to just run away and hide so I have time to make sense of it in my head. Hence the trip to the Carpathian mountains to fuck about doing dance routines and eating grechka with some kids for a month. Grechka, by the way, is this buckwheat thing and whilst I love some Ukrainian foods, grechka isn’t for me…it’s just that consistency in between needing to chew it and not needing to chew it…kinda gross. But anyway, back to the analysis of emotions.

I’m not about to criticise the part of my personality that likes to hide sometimes, because I don’t see why we need to change every little inconvenient part of ourselves, but I will say that I need to be less hard on myself right now. Yes, once you leave school and move out, you become an adult and there are lots of responsibilities associated with that, however, that process doesn’t automatically come with knowing exactly what you’re going to be doing at every stage of your life. Therefore, we should start cutting ourselves some slack for feeling a little lost sometimes. Especially considering we just lived/are living through an iNtErNAtiONal pANdeMIC.

On that note, coming back from Ukraine to see people no longer afraid of standing near strangers, of hugging, of going to a festival, of dancing in a bar, has really helped with dampening all those intense anxieties building up in me for the past 18 months. Let’s not be silly and assume that the stresses have completely gone – I’m still a languages student with no real semblance of a year abroad – bUT (!) as everything relaxes, and musicians release new music, life feels like it’s moving again. And thank fuck for that.

Age is just a number

Age is just a number

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 1 Comment

In the months before I started my second year at Durham University, I decided that I wanted to know more about the place where I was living and studying. Already, I’d spent the best part of a year as a Durham City resident and even though I was born here, I hadn’t really explored the town at all – at least not sober or in daylight teehee.

However, I didn’t just want to go on more drives or go into town more often – although I have done both of those things – I wanted to meet more of the people, and feel like a proper part of the community. Plus, I’m acutely aware of the fact that I attend a very rich university with lots of very privileged students – some are even part of that 1% we hear about so much. But that institutional and familial wealth isn’t reflective of the North-East; like a lot of the north of England, County Durham is no stranger to poverty. So, for all of these reasons, in October I started to volunteer at a foodbank every Friday morning in Chester le Street.

But there’s this really funny thing about volunteer work: publicly announcing that you do it, can make you seem like a self-righteous tosser. And I didn’t really fancy having that description in my bio, so I haven’t really been telling people about this part of my weekly routine. Even though it has made me look forward to Friday morning every week.

At the foodbank, I volunteer with three other people; two older gentlemen, and one older woman. We wait for people to walk in, ask them if they have a food voucher, pack food parcels to last them three to four days, give them the parcels, and then we sit down to wait for the next ‘customer’ – I always found this a strange turn of phrase for the context of a foodbank, but we won’t analyse vocabulary just now…

Obviously, handing these food parcels out is very rewarding, but I’d have to say that it’s been the moments when the other volunteers and I have just been sitting and chatting that have been the most interesting for me so far.

I was always raised to give older people the same respect that I wanted to receive. I was encouraged to treat everyone – no matter their age – like a person, and to try to refrain from assuming an individual’s personality just because they look or sound a certain way. But no matter how much this was drilled into me as I grew up, I was influenced by the media and politics, and became very aware of the fact that in this country, people from different generations are encouraged to alienate themselves from one another and sometimes, to hate each other.

So it’s no surprise that the second I walked through the door and the other volunteers saw my age, that they assumed I was just another student looking to have something righteous to add to their CV. I was going to come for a couple of weeks, stand about on my phone, not contributing, and then eventually I’d just stop coming. Not only did I see these assumptions on my colleagues’ faces, last week they literally told me that that’s what they had thought. Thankfully, I’ve proven to them that not all students are lazy or entitled. Although, they do take the mick out of me for coming in hungover, so I don’t think I’ve broken the ‘students drink too much and too often’ stereotype. But hey, I still show up every Friday at 10:30am and get involved.

Then on my part, it’s become so much clearer to me that British society completely writes off older people. After people get to a certain age, we deem them irrelevant and stuck in their own ways: they’re almost dead, so why should they be listened to? But this is such a damaging narrative and it’s only helping to alienate people from each other more. Yes, the older generation grew up in a different time, and there are so many ways our society has progressed positively which may be against what the baby boomers have always known. However, just because we assume this, doesn’t mean that we should assume we already know what every person in this generation thinks.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken to the other volunteers about a whole host of subjects. We’ve discussed ageism, sexism, homophobia, racism, classism, ableism, politics, the coronavirus – to name only a few. And in many ways, we’ve been able to have these conversations with total honesty because we’re not related, so there’s absolutely no pressure for us to agree on everything just to ‘keep the peace’. There were disagreements at times, but more than anything, hearing the perspective of someone at the opposite end of their life has been really beneficial for us all to be able to understand each other more. Youth has always been the time when people seek and fight for change, and when they criticise the shortcomings of everything that has happened before them, but people age, and life is complicated, and it’s important to understand and listen to every perspective – not just that of your peers.

Volunteering at this foodbank is one of the best decisions I’ve made at university so far, and it’s made me realise that we really need to stop hating everyone before we take the time to get to know each other. Old people aren’t just interesting because they’re old, they’re interesting because they’re people with thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Obviously they deserve respect, but once again that’s not because of age, it’s because it’d be nicer for everyone if we just started relationships with respect for each other.

Age is just a number, after all.

Get woke

Get woke

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The last 8 months have drastically altered the way the world works. By being forced to stay indoors for weeks – in some countries, months – on end, we’ve been thrust into personal isolation in a way we’ve never experienced. In the future, some will probably only talk about how they were really bored, unable to go on holiday, or gained an unhealthy obsession with TikTok during this time (guilty…). Whilst others will have worse tales to tell.

Overall however, there seems to have been an increase in how much the general public pay attention to the news. It’s an unsurprising change, given we had very little else to do…but even though people started watching the news more, it seems we still struggle to fully engage with what we’re hearing.

When we go through school, there are often moments in our classrooms when we’re encouraged to discuss the politics relating to whatever we’re studying: whether that’s how the social climate of 1920’s America influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or whether it’s answering the million-dollar question: why did Henry VIII have so many wives? However, a lot of the time our curriculum doesn’t actually encourage us to really think about the topics, and then relate what we learn to our society today. We learn phrases we know ‘the examiner wants to hear’, but we’re 15, so why would we need to care about these things outside of the classroom?

But then we come into the world and we’re completely unprepared to understand everything that’s going on. Only we’re not completely unprepared: it’s just that we’re rarely taught how to recognise that what we learnt about the Tudors, the Bolsheviks, or the Ancient Romans is relevant to us now. Furthermore, people think they don’t have access to politics because they don’t know the lingo. But politicians complicate things on purpose; they’re trying to make you think that you don’t get it because then you’ll leave them to it.

Plus as humans, we separate ourselves from our history and assume that because we weren’t there, we don’t need to give it that much attention. And our learning at school is for exams, it’s rarely for the sake of knowing. But trust me, you’d probably recognise a lot of the ideas and political tactics kicking about now, from your history lessons if you took a second to think about it. After all, humans can be amazingly innovative but we also have a habit of ignoring our past, then repeating it because we’ve ‘forgotten’ about it.

So I couldn’t care less about how many news articles you share on your social media: it’s your profile, do what you want. What I do care about though, is people asking questions and actively learning about the world they live in. We’re the next cohort of citizens and we’re inheriting a big, phat, stinking mess. I mean, the planet is literally dying…

You learnt so much about how the world works today from school and everything you’ve ever read. It’s not irrelevant and it’s not always ‘boring/depressing’: educate yourself about the positive/exciting parts of world history too. But there’s so much to be said for paying serious attention to humanity’s past mistakes, learning from them, and finally doing something else.

I listened to a podcast the other day that said around 22% of American millennials don’t even KNOW what the Holocaust was. And that’s terrifying. So please please please exit Instagram/Facebook/Twitter/TikTok for a couple of hours today and read a book, watch a documentary, listen to a podcast, read an article – I don’t care, just learn something new.

The girls’ bathroom

The girls’ bathroom

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

When speaking to boys, sometimes there comes a point in the conversation when they ask me why the bloody hell girls go to the toilet together. And, once we’re in there, why’ve we got to take so long?

The most obvious answer is that we get to have a chat – and it’s quicker to cram loads of you in there, so you can go straight after each other whilst chatting… So yes, often we chat about stupid things, like how we’ve spotted a really fit boy and need to give each other a pep-talk before someone tries it on with him when we leave the bathroom. But then sometimes the conversations can take a whole other direction.

I’ve been in bathrooms and spoken with girls where they’ve confided in me about some really dark stuff. I’ve had separate girls tell me that they have an eating disorder they’ve never told anyone about, that they’re struggling with their mental health, and one even told me that she was in an abusive relationship. It’s in the safety and privacy of the girls’ toilets, that we get to be completely honest with each other and confess things that we may have been scared to tell anyone in any other environment.

Even though there will inevitably be someone shouting and banging on the cubicle door for those inside to ‘hurry up, I NEED A WEE’ in the background, we pass toilet roll over or under the cubicle dividers, try to speed up, and give that emotionally vulnerable female the attention she needs. And doing that is so important.

The ways in which women and girls regularly share their feelings with each other, has been subject to a lot of mockery throughout time. But whilst some of the conversations might be cringey, convoluted, drunken ‘I love yous’ and ‘you’re the best friend ever’, even those silly moments help set up a space of mutual love and trust. Yes, women can back-stab and b**** about each other, but there’s also this indescribably close bond that builds between a group of girls – and it’s conversations like those we have in the bathroom which help contribute to that.

I’m not saying that we exclusively cry and have ‘deep’ conversations when we go to the toilet, because sometimes we do the opposite. Sometimes we cram a group of us into one cubicle, only for someone to do some impressive and moderately dangerous acrobatics on the toilet seat to make everyone else laugh. Other times, we just go to de-sweat from dancing.

But then on the most serious end of the scale, the girls’ bathroom can act as a sanctuary or panic room for some girls.

There have been times in my life where I’ve gone on nights out and I’ve had groups of boys try to cut me off from the rest of my group. I’ve had friends who’ve had their drinks spiked. I, and many of my friends, have had physical contact we didn’t ask for or want. One time I was actually hit on my bum – right on the spot where all of the nerves which would allow me to have feeling in my feet are in a knot. So that slap caused me to not only feel violated and publicly humiliated, but it put me into excruciating pain for a few minutes – imagine someone dropping 2 weights on both of your feet at the same time. That’s what it feels like when the lump on my back is hit.

So in those times, girls know that they can go to the girls’ bathroom and that they’re less likely to be followed or trapped. There’ll be a huge group of more females there able to help or protect them. They can call someone from their phone to come help, or they can even call the police.

I adore men. I have so many men in my life who are some of the most amazing, caring and sensitive people on the planet. I know that when they hear of mine and my female friends’ experiences like this, they’re appalled and in disbelief because they would never do anything like that. But unfortunately, these things still happen, and they happen all the time. Often men just don’t notice when it does because they’ve never really had to worry whether they’ll be on the receiving end of it, so their radar for it is simply not on the same frequency.

That girls’ bathroom is so much more to women and girls than a place to cry about someone not texting us back. We need and cherish that space for our physical and emotional well-being.

Even if only for someone to dry your tears, tell you you look hot and to get back out there.

Third-wheeling

Third-wheeling

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 1 Comment

I never really wrote a diary when I was younger: I’d just write entries sporadically- and when I say sporadically, I’m talking a couple a year. Sometimes they’d be about pointless fall-outs with my friends, but more often than not the content would discuss what you’d expect a teenage girl to write about: boys. Girls lOve to talk about boys, and as pathetic as I might feel to voice my feelings on this subject, I’d be lying if this weren’t something that plays on my mind – and has done since puberty. So in an effort to continue to be uncomfortably honest in my writing, off we go.

Love and relationships are so weird to me. Society completely obsesses over them, making single people feel like they should stop being single at the first opportunity. There’s also this weird culture in my generation where people are always searching for the best: they could be talking to someone they really really like, but they can’t possibly commit to a relationship label because what if they meet someone better? But then you can’t end it completely because you haven’t found anyone better yet, so let’s just not have a label: I’ll tell you I love you but get with other people – sound good?

No. That literally just sounds stupid. Lol.

Then there’s the people who stay with someone they’re not really vibing anymore because they’re scared to try something new. This scenario also doesn’t make sense to me…but then I’ve never had a boyfriend, so how would I know?

I’ve gotten really good at living vicariously through others’ relationships. Honestly, at this point I think I could probably put ‘professional third-wheel’ on my CV – contact me for enquiries and bookings, I can be available any day of the week. But as much as I love third-wheeling, always doing it is getting a bit boring now.

With the boys I’ve ‘dated’ (not sure my experiences really qualify for that title but anyway) I’ve never felt the strong feelings music, literature and film tell me I should feel, so it’s clearly not been right. It’s common knowledge that humans learn by example, and the most influential romantic relationship I’ve observed has been my parents: they’re perfect for each other. Not only are they madly in love, but they’re also each other’s best friend and connect on every level. It’s an utterly beautiful thing to see when growing up and it’s meant that I’ve never (really) wasted my time with toxic or superficial relationships. However, the flip-side is that now my expectations are stupidly high. I don’t regret not having a boyfriend during school because I now know exactly what type of person I am/want to be – a luxury many girls my age don’t have. But I do also kind of feel like I’ve missed out on something, being 20 and having never properly dated anyone.

To be fair though, I think this feeling was exacerbated by my first term at University. I thought I’d meet new people and the trend I’ve experienced with boys so far would end, but I’ve just been confronted by the same old bull****. Since the age of about 15, I’ve consistently been told by boys that I’m intimidating, I’m ‘too much’ (a direct quotation) or that I’m amazing but they’d never go there. All of these comments were either offensive or just didn’t make much sense to me. But the killer of the recurring themes has been that boys already with girlfriends think I’m great. Can’t really do anything in that situation can I?

Thankfully, I’ve always refused to settle or to change myself according to what a boy said he wanted – although I did briefly try one time when I was younger. Bad idea. The fact is that if someone compliments you profusely but then follows that up with not wanting to get to know you or spend time with you, then they’re just not that into you (or worth your time). Annoying when that’s all that ever seems to happen though innit.

I know, I know, I know, I’m young, I’ve got plenty of time.

These reassurances are true, but people of all ages still get bored and annoyed by stuff like this all the time. Relationships are shoved in our faces so many times a day that of course when you can’t relate, you’re going to get jealous and impatient. Not wanting to be single can be the most depressing and tedious part of your day, but the important thing to do is to stick to your guns and not compromise for someone. Truth be told, eventually you (and I) will find someone: we’ll be the ones telling others to chill out about wanting a relationship, trying very hard to hide our smugness at already being in one. So keep ploughing on, and remind yourself that whoever you end up calling your boyfriend/girlfriend will have been worth the wait.

I mean, my lad will have enough balls to like the things about me that everyone else called ‘intimidating’ or ‘too much’- and that level of confidence sounds pretty hot to me.

Raising a disabled child 101

Raising a disabled child 101

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 1 Comment

As a young girl, I was incredibly confident, outspoken, enthusiastic, and so fortunate that my parents never allowed my disability to suffocate that. My childhood had a fair few tumultuous years: I had operations, infections, insufficient footwear causing more infections, new parts of my condition popping up as I grew and so many other problems I can’t even remember. All of this was then exacerbated by my free-spirited attitude leading me to accidentally injure myself and then not understand why I couldn’t walk like the other kids, obviously ending in huge upset.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to imagine how completely I could’ve been crushed by my Spina Bifida. There are children out there who are unable to live away from it, and in all honesty, for a time I was one of those kids. Aged around 7, I spent the best part of 18 months in and out of hospital and in a wheelchair and yet, my family managed to make me feel just like any other kid. They worked tirelessly to protect my personality from my disability: a feat I will probably never be able to repay them for.

It’s well-known that parents need to be supportive when their children are struggling in order for that child to feel safe, loved and happy. But having a child with a disability that you know nothing about requires a whole other level of support. To make life all the more challenging, my eldest brother has Marfan Syndrome and has his fair share of medical problems. So not only were my parents navigating raising 4 children whilst working full-time as English Literature teachers, they were working out how the hell to cater to 2 separate disabilities, whilst ALSO encouraging those children to feel equal to their non-disabled siblings and the rest of the world.

They managed it though.

I spoke a lot in my last entry about how complicated it is to live with a disability, but an important aspect of my experience is that I spent the first years of my life living as disabled with my family. I was so overwhelmingly supported that there was never any aspect of it where I was alone.

When I describe my childhood and adolescence as perfect, that isn’t to say that there weren’t points where I really struggled. For instance, I was in a wheelchair at 3 separate points in Secondary School – prime time for teenage insecurity and social paranoia. What made my early years perfect though, was the fact that everyone around me constantly made me feel normal. In the moments when I was physically or emotionally isolated from my peers at school, my parents and brothers kept me laughing and focused on a positive outlook on life.

This did then mean that at the beginning of this year, before my travels and before moving to University, I was confronted by the loneliness of moving out. I knew that I’d make friends at University, or wherever it was I went, but I now knew that my support system was about to be miles away. My family and friends who all knew my condition as well as a non-disabled person can, weren’t going to be 2 seconds away. This would mean that I would have to re-explain myself to people, bringing attention to my limitations in a way I’d never done on my own before. There would be no-one who knew me: I had this moment of realisation on the floor of my room, crying to my Dad, with an infected foot, weeks before my plane to Nepal.

It was only when I started to travel that I realised that I can do this on my own – even though it’s definitely not been easy so far. And it’s only thanks to the immense amount of love and support I had whilst living at home that I now (sort of) know how to. Thanks to my family, I’m confident in social situations and don’t shrink into myself when my disability is mentioned. Owing to my parents’ strength, I’ve learnt how to get respectfully passive aggressive with institutions or individuals when they seek to deprive me of things I need, because to some I don’t appear ‘disabled enough’ (side-note: what does that even mean?..). But most importantly, it’s thanks to all of my family’s unwavering support that I know that as lonely as disability can be, there will never ever ever be a time when I’m alone – no matter where we all are in the world.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you should raise a disabled child.

In my feels at Ukrainian Summer Camp

In my feels at Ukrainian Summer Camp

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 1 Comment

One thing I’m very proud of is the fact that I’m a West Yorkshire girl. We may have cold, rainy weather, and it might be constantly assumed that we drink tea or have some sort of superior authority when it comes to judging a Yorkshire pudding (tho the latter’s true tbf), and it might well be accurate that we struggle to spend money on anything. BUT, it’s because of these facts and many others that I love where I’m from. However, aside from that cheeky bit of patriotism, there are plenty of things about the Northern English psyche that I don’t love all that much.

The main one that was appropriate when it came to my time in Ukraine was our tendency to be emotionally guarded. I grew up in a family where sarcasm is encouraged, and through making digs (lovingly) at each other my siblings and I gained a thicker skin in preparation for the wider world. One consequence of this was that I, like many other Britons, have a tendency to take the mick out of anything that shows excessive enthusiasm or ‘deep’ emotions. By ‘deep’ I mean when you’re sitting with your group of friends and someone brings up the meaning of life, and because you’re English one of you responds with ‘that’s deep’ and you all laugh it off, then change the topic to something ‘lighter’.

A natural avoidance of topics requiring more emotional vulnerability such as this made life in a Ukrainian Summer Camp all the more alien to me. Our first week in the Carpathian mountains was a training week, where counsellors and English teachers got to know one another without any children running around. We played games every day, and brainstormed activities we could do with the kids, but then on an evening we’d sit and have conversations where everyone seemed to willingly bare their souls to strangers. Now I was struggling to get used to the fact that we actually had to learn dance routines for the kids to mimic for 15 minutes before EVERY meal, let alone that everyone would then have heavily emotional chats with each other before bed time…

The Yorkshire lass in me wanted to laugh and take the mick at so many points, but it became clearer that I was the minority in the room when it came to not wanting to publicly emote. It’s apparent in Europe, and from what I’ve seen the rest of the world, that those ‘deep’ conversations the English only seem to have when drunk or in therapy are standard dinner time chit-chat. It’s in this way, amongst others, that we play to our stereotype of being uptight and emotionally closed-off.

To be honest, I do like this characteristic of our culture to an extent. In my eyes, we privilege monumental emotions over minor ones. By this I mean that we don’t emote constantly, but (for want of a better phrase) save it for a big occasion. In this way, we don’t force our emotions onto people excessively, for fear of being branded a ‘downer’ or, in Yorkshire terminology, ‘a whinge’. That being said, this is definitely a toxic trait when it comes to mental health: the English have a real problem with internalising emotions and therefore allowing those feelings to overwhelm and isolate the individual. Through living in Ukraine surrounded by people of all nationalities (not exclusively European), and being in a hyper-emotional environment, I was encouraged to be a lot more vocal and in-tune with my own feelings. Life in a summer camp is effectively a hot box where everything you feel is heightened due to extreme levels of stress, responsibility and a whoooole lot of laughter.

In this week’s concluding paragraph – seen as I just can’t seem to get that A Level English Lit essay structure out of my bones- I basically just want to say that the English need to have some more ‘deep’ conversations. As a community, we need to make it clearer to each other that emotions aren’t scary or unusual. I’m not suggesting that everyone sits and has a cry with each other regularly, although an occasional cry is good for you. But some of the most valuable parts of summer camp for me, and others, was everyone leaving little notes for each other just to say thank you for leaving the art room tidy, or helping with an evening activity, or just to say I think you’re amazing and this is why. Ukraine showed me that when a group of people are almost completely emotionally vulnerable with one another, life is easier. We wound each other up and occasionally we argued, but overall I formed some of the closest friendships I’ve ever had in 2 months flat and laughed until I cried multiple times every day.

So next time someone wants to talk about something ‘deep’, humour it and get involved for a bit. It might be interesting and afterwards you’ll feel good. Plus, then when you want to lighten the mood and have a laugh with each other your relationship is going to be stronger, more genuine and so much more fun.

GAP YAH

GAP YAH

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello! My name is Elizabeth and I’ve spent part of the past year travelling the world. But due to my physical disability, I’ve had to be slightly more creative in how and where I chose to spend my time overseas. So whilst I may not have hiked up the Himalayas, I did sit and paraglide over them- but I’ll come to tell the details of the cool stuff I did this year in future posts. Since this is just an introduction, I couldn’t possibly give too much away so soon…


A main theme of this year has been talking. I LOVE talking. I love to talk about absolutely anything with anyone who wants to talk to me. As far as I’m concerned, conversation is a completely underrated medium of expression. Simply by talking to new people this year I’ve learnt an indescribable amount: about people on a personal level; people in the context of their culture and language; then how all of these elements to someone’s life can affect how they think and communicate. One huge conversation of this year has been answering the question posed to me by my friends: did you find yourself? And I did. Ever so slightly. (And I puked a little just typing that…)


Whilst the phrase ‘to find oneself’ may or may not mean a lot to you, personally, I’m a product of my Northern English working/middle class upbringing so it just makes me cringe. Regardless of this, the past 12 months have taught me that the phrase is relevant to my life. But what does it even mean?


Nerdy moment and big words to follow…


Well the pretentious connotations surrounding the words have largely been created as a result of rich upper class kids exploring the third world, as a kind of penance to pay society back for their inherited wealth (and because they can). This causes those less financially fortunate to feel resentment- both actively and passively- towards that class of people, sometimes leading them to take the mick. This psyche unsurprisingly distracts from the actual meaning of the words themselves. So whilst my observation may seem blunt, it’s been the way of the world for centuries that those with less money than others generally become jealous very quickly. In this country our societal jealousy often manifests itself in humour and mockery. Good old Brits with their sarcasm. But most of the time it’s not even the wealth itself that sparks the jealousy, it’s the opportunities that money provides for people.

In a culture where reality is so easily tainted by apps such as Instagram, it’s no surprise that this pattern continues and has arguably intensified in recent years. At this point it’s important to say that I’m in no way attempting to devalue those with money giving back to the world and travelling, but it’s also difficult for those who’d love to do the same but can’t afford it, to see. Thus the phrase and act of ‘finding oneself’ is mocked alongside the term ‘gap year’ – which is often said in an exaggeratedly ‘posh’ London accent i.e. ‘gap yah’. I’m even guilty of saying it like this and I have harem pants and bead bracelets just like my fellow gap yah-ers. Call me a hypocrite.


Though I don’t believe that you can go and sit in the jungle for a few weeks and ‘find yourself’ definitively by any means, I will argue that completely separating myself from the familiar has given me a new perspective on the world and my place in it. The state of society at the minute is such that we’re provided with lots of opinions as statements, and oftentimes there’s little discussion about what’s said.


SO, I guess I’m going to use this platform to talk about some stuff and I hope that you take enjoyment out of reading it. But if you don’t, then you read to here so I still win.
🙂