Tag: learning

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.

I want to go for a walk

I want to go for a walk

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 2 Comments

For me, disability causes a constant conflict between personality and body. Ever since I was small I’ve struggled to mesh the two together because I’ve never wanted to accept that there are things that I’ll never be able to do. From the age of about 8 until 14 I was awful for it: I’d just do everything that my friends were doing because I wanted to, and I’d rarely give a second thought to my feet. But then I’d end up with infections, and in a wheelchair. So living that way didn’t get me very far.

After about the age of 16 I’d managed to (sort of) make my peace with it. I accepted that I couldn’t ever live my life the way most people could, and I mourned it, but ultimately I realised that those are just the cards I’ve been dealt. I mean, my disability could be so much worse, and what do I gain from fighting it?

Then I was 19 and I had my gap year. I proved to myself that I could travel the world on my own: I went to seriously remote places, away from medical institutions, and showed myself that doing what I want to do doesn’t always have to end in infection and debilitation. It might sound trivial to you, but it was breaking news to me, my family and my doctors.

This year, quarantine happened and after a while the government started allowing people out for walks and exercise. This change to the lockdown brought so much relief to most people, but not to me because I can’t just go out for a run. I can’t just walk down loads of steps to the beach and then back up them, because if I do, I have to accept that I might injure myself. I might put myself in a wheelchair.

This is where we get back to how complicated disability is, because many of my readers have seen me in person and have seen me walk plenty of times. I can walk short distances, and I’ve been known to dance for hours on a night out, but sometimes it’s just luck that I don’t end up with a blister after doing these things. I’m a seasoned professional when it comes to internalising my worries and pushing my disability as far as it can go. I’m stubborn and I’m young, and I don’t see why all my friends can but I can’t. Like I said, it’s a constant conflict.

But I don’t write these blogs to be all ‘woe is me’. Loads of people have it so much worse than I do, and everyone does the best with what they’ve got. It’s just that if I’m going to write blogs about when I feel empowered by being a young disabled woman, then I have to show you the side of my condition which gives me no joy whatsoever.

Some days I just don’t want to be this disabled person. It makes me feel weak and suffocated. I don’t want to have to think about whether I can go somewhere, I want to be able to just go. Sometimes I look at my feet and wonder how it’s fair that I have to be the only person I know who can’t just wear normal shoes and have normal legs. I wonder how it’s fair that I’ll have this for the rest of my life, and how I’m supposed to get over it when there’s nothing I, or anyone else can do to ever improve it.

There are no solutions to these problems. Life doesn’t work in ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ – especially when I don’t believe in any type of God. As far as I can see, random people get random sacks of sh** to deal with, and we move. I have a really good time even with the headache of my Spina Bifida, and it’s shaped me in so many positive ways. To be honest, if someone told me that I could flick a switch to get rid of it I’m not even sure that I would. Disability can enrich a person’s perspective on the world and life in many ways, but I’d never, ever, wish it on anyone.

Say what you mean, mean what you say

Say what you mean, mean what you say

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Everyone knows that when you start new friendships at University, one of the most interesting parts of getting to know everyone is seeing how they operate when they’re on the pull. Or at least, I’ve always found it pretty fascinating…

By second term my friends and I were fully getting to grips with this part of each other’s personalities (and LOVING it). We’d all started to notice who had terrible taste in boys/girls, who attracts a certain type of person, who’s picky, who’s not that bothered, who’s shy about it, who’s really not, and so on.

But one mealtime when my female friend and I were talking to a couple of our boys about this, the discussion got pretty spicy.

Basically, the boys said that they find confident girls really attractive, and that they’d love it if a girl was just straight-up with them about what she wanted. They also said that they think that that’s a pretty universal opinion for boys our age. At which point my female friend and I, both very confident and honest with our feelings, told them that boys our age say that but they don’t actually mean it.

Now we live in a pretty PC world, where some people probably read what I just said and thought it outrageous that we tried to dictate an opinion to those boys. 😮 !!! However, what’s important to consider is why we said what we said. And, before someone gets all keyboard-warrior on me, please remember that things like this are always about personal experience.

Most people my age have no notion of who they are at this point in time: a totally normal and healthy position to be in. So when an individual is confronted with someone who appears to be really confident in themselves, incredibly self-sufficient, and very forthcoming with what they want from a romantic partner, that’s not always going to be super attractive. Sometimes it’s the opposite: it’s kind of intimidating, and makes some people feel a lot of pressure to match the other person’s level of self-awareness.

At this point the boys were seeing what we meant, but weren’t quite with us. So we went on to use some anecdotes for context because everybody lOves an aNeCdOte.

My friend explained how she’s very confident in her sexuality, and isn’t afraid to tell her romantic partners what she wants: exactly what many boys have described as vEry attractive. But in her life this confidence has often been misconstrued by boys as her being ‘too keen’, or ‘down for anything’ and ultimately, a bit of a slut.

And in my own case, I said how I’m really not afraid to be myself even in the early days of getting to know a boy – and I’m not afraid of giving a boy a compliment. However, in the times when I’ve offered to do something for someone I kind of like, or said that they look good, or have replied pretty promptly because I can’t be bothered to play the how-long-do-I-wait-until-I-reply game, I’ve also been seen as ‘too keen’ or ‘too much’ and ultimately, a bit too easy (the PC term for slut).

Our boys were totally with us now.

It also started to become a little clearer why some young women prefer slighter, or quite significantly, older men. Our explanation being that when we’ve spoken to men even just a couple years older than us, we’ve both felt a lot less judgement.

We’re all aware that men are more freely allowed to show their confidence: in fact, there’s intense societal pressure encouraging them to do so. It’s also well known that confident women are not as widely celebrated as confident men. Instead, they’re often feared and belittled. It’s just easier and more acceptable to be perceived as sexy if you’re male and confident.

So yes, my friends may well have meant it when they said that they like a confident girl. As your’s also might. But all my female friend and I were trying to say, is that we wish boys were more honest in saying what they like. If you don’t fancy us, then we’ll survive, people have preferences after all. Just don’t mislead us into thinking you’re attracted to our personalities, and then think us slutty when we stay true to them.

No matter any of our opinions and preferences it’s always better to be honest with people, and to show some R.E.S.P.E.C.T! Whether you fancy the person or not.

2019

2019

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

2019 has been the most influential year of my life, and it’s one that I’ll remember until I’m an old disabled lady, sitting in a comfy bed, complaining about the state of young people and their antics. Though, I kind of hope that I won’t do that last bit…unless it’s ironically…

Nepal was my first insight into what absolute bliss feels like. My favourite memory (of many) is sitting in a small pagoda in front of the monastery, on the side of a mountain, hidden by the jungle, as the sun was setting. I remember stroking the puppy sitting on my knee, 4 other dogs at my feet, and listening to the children singing their prayer in the temple to the background noise of all the other wildlife. I’m not religious at all, and I’m not really a spiritual person, but in that moment I completely understood why those monks chose to spend their lives in spaces such as that, away from the noise of the modern world. And no, I didn’t record it, since no recording on any device would’ve been able to capture it- but it’s always going to be in my head.

South Korea re-ignited my love for the Far East, and showed me that I can manage my disability on that side of the planet after all. The biggest indicator of this being the fact that I successfully spoke (broken) Korean in A&E of a hospital in Seoul, got myself some antibiotics, and didn’t have to fly home immediately. Oh, and I went on a date with a Korean policeman. Good times.

Fiji was the hardest of my trips. I had some points of bliss like Nepal – the most notable being singing to myself on a private island whilst washing dishes in the pacific ocean. It might not sound as sublime as how I described the scene in Nepal, but I liked the simplicity of it and I love the ocean, so it was perfect to me. But, I didn’t like all of my experiences in Fiji so I learnt how important, and possible, it is to make the best out of a disappointing situation.

Ukraine worked me harder than any of my travels, and it was some of the most fun I had this year. I have so many memories from those 2 months that it’d be too hard to pick a favourite. What that time taught me more than anything, was that I lOve people, and that I need to keep making friends from all over the world. As one of my wonderful American pals put it when we realised that we didn’t know when or if we’d have the chance to see each other again, I love knowing that you all exist somewhere in the world. I hope that you keep making people smile as much as you made me smile for those 2 months in the middle of the Carpathian Mountains.

This year I realised so much about myself and others whilst being in different countries, that when I came back I was able to appreciate everything in my native country so much more. To me, the Yorkshire hills are as beautiful as the Nepali mountains and the safety of being with people I’ve known forever, is just what I needed after all that newness. (That is a word btw, google it).

But overall, 2019 has taught me just how much I want to know about the world and everything in it. So I hope that the next 12 months bring me as many adventures as the last, and that next year’s post has as many happy memories in it as this one.

Life in the Nepali jungle

Life in the Nepali jungle

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

To be honest, the first thing I want to say about Nepal is that it’s just a ridiculously beautiful country that everyone should visit. So that’s the core of this blog established. But hey, whilst we’re here we may as well elaborate. ONWARDS.

Nepal is super famous for it’s mountains, the Himalayas, and all the amazing hiking routes they offer. Saying that, my experience was spent living and volunteering in the heart of the Chitwan jungle. Needless to say, the scenery was some of the most stunning I will EVER see. I could go all English Lit student and spend paragraphs describing it but even then I could never ever do it justice with words. So, to be brief: we woke up to the sound of monkeys and showered surrounded by geckos. Enough said.

3 weeks in this country introduced me to so many breathtaking things: one of the first to strike me, was the overwhelming poverty of the people. You hear so much about third world countries in the news, and see adverts on TV showing images of starving children so often that somehow the tragedies become trivialised. When physically seeing the way some people live every day in a glorified hut in the middle of nowhere however, you’re forced to understand the reality of true poverty. And it’s astonishing.

Actually, the first scene I saw when driving from Kathmandu airport was a naked child relieving himself on what can only be described as a mound of rubbish by the side of a dusty road. But poverty in Nepal manifested itself in so many more ways than just stark images such as that.

I worked as a children’s English teacher with 2 other English girls, and 1 Montenegrin girl in a Buddhist monastery for most of the 3 weeks: the children’s ages ranged from 6 to 18 and there were around 100 of them, some orphans and some not. The Nepali government’s textbooks we used to teach were riddled with grammatical errors and nonsensical sentences. We would correct these mistakes in front of the classes as we read the children the same thing they’d been reading for months, only now we told them what they thought they’d already learnt, was wrong. We constantly fought against confusing them in order to teach them correct English. The kids themselves were an absolute joy to teach: they tried so hard to follow everything we were saying as they scrawled notes in their beloved (dilapidated) exercise books.

The poverty they experience is all-encompassing. As mentioned, their school equipment is basic to say the least. They eat the same thing every day so their level of sufficient nutrition is non-existent. They rinse their plates under a tap and eat with their hands. They wear the same school uniforms every day and the clothes they have for leisure are clearly second-hand, since they’re covered in holes and stains. They live in the most basic housing and their bathrooms are definitely not sanitary judging from the smell. They shower and clean their clothes in the same area outside with minimal soap. Many of their little bald heads show the marks of ringworm.

These children deserve so much more than the amazing staff of the monastery could ever give them. The nuns and teachers devote most of their lives to the kids and the amount they care is tangible, but there is seriously only so much that they can do with what they have. It became painfully obvious to my 3 new friends and I that everyone there couldn’t even fathom our European lives, nor would we ever really be able to explain it to them.

It’s obviously heart-breaking that people live in situations such as this, without the basic resources the West don’t even pay much attention to. That being said, we, the ‘privileged’, can learn so much from people such as those I met in Nepal. The children and staff in the monastery might have lacked so much when it came to physical things but their love for life and each other shone a different light on my world.

I spent every day in that monastery in total bliss: listening to them sing in the temple at dawn, mealtimes and dusk; lying on the roof with my friends watching my first ever shooting star inside a sea of others; laughing with children and adults who tried so hard to, but could barely understand much of what I said, and most of all, just not even slightly caring about material things. My parents never encouraged me to care much about objects, but the reality is that our society conditions us to rely on them no matter how hard we try.

Obviously we could and should supply these people with more money and resources. Everyone already knows that. On a human level though, I think that every financially comfortable individual should be physically exposed to true poverty. Then assess their own privilege, hold back their pity, and celebrate how humans always find a way to survive, and how they smile whilst they’re at it. Those kids in that jungle are financially poor but I know so many people in the West who are a whole lot poorer than they are when it comes to an appreciation of being alive.

So all in all, Nepal taught me to just take a second. And enjoy.

One for my girls

One for my girls

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

It was my privilege to work as a Teaching Assistant in a local Secondary School as my main job of 3 in the first half of my gap year. The students I worked with were mostly those with learning and behavioural difficulties: some with diagnosed disabilities and some without. What grouped all of them together though was that they had exactly the same teenage struggles as each other, and every other teenager in the world. That being said, this school was totally different from the one I’d just left as a student. It was an all girls’ school for a start and I can safely say that the single gender had a profound effect on the vibe of the school- more so than I’d first expected. It became clear that in this environment the tendency of teenage girls to gossip and marginalise others was amplified. But so was their kindness and infinite loyalty to each other. To add to that, the girls were mostly from first, second and third generation immigrant households. Generally speaking the students themselves shared cultures and religion, it was only the staff and the part of England in which they found themselves that were different.

These girls were some of the most generous and loving people I’ll ever have the pleasure to meet, and I write this with the utmost respect and affection for them. I’d like to be clear in that what I write is with them in mind, not as part of a patronising privileged white girl social study. We came from completely opposite walks of life, yet our similarity in age allowed for me to be gifted a very honest insight into their lives and minds. They did still call me ‘Miss’ though lol.

But in order to paint a picture of the specific obstacles in their way, I’ll have to set the scene more plainly.

It’s a fact that most of the girls at this school had never been on a bus or a train on their own before. It’s a fact that many believed they’d be attacked if they did. It’s a fact that most of the girls had never been to the next nearest city before. It’s a fact that many of the girls spoke English as their second language, even though they were born here. It’s a fact that very few of these girls had friends outside of their race, culture and religion, let alone socialised with them. It’s also a fact that these girls were as, if not more, curious about life and everything that comes with it as their white middle class peers attending schools 5 minutes down the road. But it’s a fact that satisfying their curiosity was not as easy for them to do as for their peers.

In my capacity as a young, white, female TA I appeared to these girls as an outsider when it came to culture, race and religion. That being said, I was lucky enough to make some of them feel like they could confide in me and ask questions that they simply couldn’t comfortably ask anyone else in their lives. Now I’d just like to mention that I worked mainly in the Science department and that the majority of these queries came from the worst-behaved students in the entire building: my delightful 15-16 year olds. That should explain how these questions came up in lessons. Sex Education happens in Science for example. Yeah, now you’re with me. 🙂

A few questions that come to mind now are: ‘Miss, what is contraception?’, ‘Miss can girls enjoy sex too?’, ‘Miss, it’s legal for an 18 year old to have sex with a 15 year old right?’, and ‘Miss Douglas, is it wrong to be gay?’. The last one especially affected me. It’s 2019. A 15 year old girl living in the North of England shouldn’t feel required to ask that anymore.

Academically, these 15-16 year old girls often fell short of the government’s target system because they saw little reward in studying. What they felt success in was that they could make each other laugh. Oh and they sure made me laugh. These girls were so funny.

As a consequence of not being in the top set however, they’d often call themselves stupid. But truthfully, being able to read what will make an entire room laugh time and again is also something that requires real intelligence. For a few of them, school was an escape from some really dark things going on at home. They cared little about their education because they didn’t see how it’d help with their own troubles. Fortunately though, the friendships they all forged with one another and the laughter they constantly experienced together made for a welcome relief. And I had the honour to regularly laugh until I cried right along with them.

Working with these girls and being able to infer the struggles they were having from the questions they asked me, showed me just how much of a privileged white girl I truly am. My experience of school was easy for the most part: I had a good home life, good grades, good friends, amazing support for every aspect of my disability and whilst I’ve never been rich, I’ve never known what poverty feels like. Like many teenagers in every school, some of these girls had it a lot rougher.

But would I ever dream of patronising them? Absolutely not! They’d have my life! And I respect them far too much for that. My girls are strong young women. It’s true that some of them might never be able to wear the clothes they really want to, or love who they want, or go where they want, or try to find a job they fully enjoy. But I sincerely hope that they’ll keep the kindness, generosity and fiery sense of humour that I got the pleasure to observe for 6 months.