Just write a paragraph.

"Just write a paragraph" I've said to myself about 20 times today and yesterday. It seems my head is in its repetitive mode where interesting things are said once and then latched onto and dismantled into something boring and overdone. A thought or feeling is so strong for me that over weeks I find myself sitting down to write and wanting to say the same things. Writing is the greatest form of my emotional expression, and describing how I feel is often my way out, but I write for an audience here and I have a diary to write more explicitly and less eloquently how pain or happiness or stress pervades my day.

I do write for an audience here and I think that's where I get stuck sometimes. I write for an audience that I know, mostly. I sit down at my laptop, or sometimes on my phone, and I wonder what people, people I've befriended on Facebook, would mind reading about. It is no bad thing to write for an audience. It sharpens the way that you write, that's one reason why I do it. But sometimes it can stifle me when I get scared. I'm not scared of anyone I know, I could tell anyone anything... I'm a big sharer. It's just that knowing that people will read what I like and they will decide whether they do or don't like it, whether they do or don't agree, makes me falter sometimes, hesitate over the 'publish' button, re-write the first sentence over and over again before I find something to go with. It makes me procrastinate for days on end.

And now I've written something. More than a paragraph. A few short ones instead. And the funny thing is I don't mind what people think, as long as someone enjoyed the words that I wrote on this stuffy April evening. That's all that matters, isn't it?

Possible if the sun is shining.

There is something about the sun shining that makes everything seem good again. Or, at least, possible. A few days a go I wrote this, intending for it to be shared:

So you've found yourself here again. Sitting in the car by yourself wondering why your chest feels like its caving in and you can't stop crying. The world feels like it might come to an end but yesterday you sat drinking with friends thinking what a wonderful thing it was to be alive. You were so filled with love and laughter. Why are you here again?

You keep worrying - don't you - that this is going to repeat itself forever. That this earth-shattering emotional pain, that this deep-seated sadness is going to go round and round. That you'll have to swim through these periods like swimming through thick tar missing bits of your life you fear will be tainted. 

You know that's not the case. You know that sadness in memories fades, that the happiness that was there all along fills it in. Pictures that were painful to look at now bring joy. Not all of them, but only because some things still hurt. 

What are you going to do then? You know this can't keep on. You know that it doesn't. You know that you pull yourself back up. But what are you going to do? 

You are surprised that you're here again. You thought you were going up, but no one goes up forever. Life is up, life is going up, but you are sometimes watching from the bottom. You are moving with life, but you are not feeling with it. Not all the time. Not right now. So what are you going to do? 

-

Life is so unpatterned, so random that knowing what will happen next, how you will feel from day to day is impossible. I have no external reason in my life right now to feel the "deep-seated sadness" that I sometimes do, but I do. Perhaps there are biological reasons, perhaps its in my nature. But the repetitiveness of 'bad' feelings is not good enough for me. I do not have the time to fixate on thoughts that bring me emotional pain. Today the sun is shining and I feel calm. Later I will see friends, I will read, I will go to work. I will feel happy. I know I will. I will also dip down - perhaps today, maybe tomorrow. But it must be my conscious effort to forgive myself and get back up again.

I asked myself "so what are you going to do?" and now I know: forgive yourself, take care of yourself, love yourself and get back up. That is not always easy, but it is almost always possible. Even if the sun isn't shining. 

No more Manic Pixie Dream Girls.

I am bored of second rate female characters in films. I am bored of being highly critical of how a film portrays women, or people of colour. 

The other day I saw 'Isle of Dogs' at the cinema and it was great. But at the end of the film I was left feeling annoyed. How come Wes Anderson's female characters can only exist as romantic interests? I went back through them all in my head as the credits rolled, he may be the king of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The women are interesting, sure, but they only serve as quirky love interests of the much more developed, central male characters. 

This isn't to say that I don't enjoy the films where every character except for the white male is mis/under-represented. I'd be hard pushed to find films where that didn't happen. Even in films that I love, films that might have interesting women fall short elsewhere. "Oh the black actor is the main part's funny sidekick again? With minimal characterisation? That's new." 

If I'm going to be "fair" to the sexist way women are presented in (mostly) Hollywood movies then obviously I have to consider the social climates/times they were made in. Blah blah blah. The newer the film the less time I have for its lazy underdevelopment of non-white male characters. Or its lazy casting. Or its outdated, antifeminist sexualisation and exploitation of women's bodies (I just watched Blade Runner 2049). 

I know that social movements go slow. I know that the Weinstein exposure only just happened meaning, up until the end of 2017, women were quietly being bullied, manipulated and sexually abused. Women are still being bullied, manipulated and sexually abused just, hopefully, less quietly and less effectively. If Salma Hayek's story is anything to go by then the constant misrepresentation of women in film and the constant over-sexualisation of them is hugely unsurprising. 

But I'm still bored of it. Female characters are not hard to write, a black actor is capable of playing the lead role, white men are quite clearly not the only interesting, complex, beautiful human beings we can portray in film. There is so much more we could be exploring, so much more most people want to explore. I am so bored of pretending otherwise.