I remember recently telling a friend of mine who had asked how my job searching was going that I’ll happily work my fingers to the bone if it means I never have to write another essay again. Every now and again I am prone to exaggeration, and making the odd mountain out of a molehill, but on that occasion every word was the truth. For myself, and many others, essays were an ever-present school struggle that ultimately helped to tarnish my positivity towards studying. Once you’d completed the draft, which was usually 2,000 words or more in length, seemingly endless revisions would lie ahead, and as I got further into sixth form these would usually involve scouring the web for incredibly tedious “critical material” in the desperate hope of fulfilling the marking criteria. I think I’ve made my disapproval clear enough already!

Indeed, life is that little bit more rosy now that the pressures associated with demands like those are no longer present. I’m very thankful for this and any apprehension that follows is microscopic compared to it. Therefore, my upcoming work experience placement at the local job centre – starting on Tuesday – is something I am looking to seize fully by the horns. The tasks waiting for me look to be perfectly suited to my skill set, heightening my optimism towards a challenge I know I can accept with confidence. That’s certainly an effect that writing essays never had on me. Everything about my position will be practical for me, from the desks I work at to the toilet I do my business in. Having been to the job centre yesterday in order to sort out all of the formalities, I now feel totally familiar to use the resources that are to hand in the best way possible during at least the next four weeks. Virtually nothing is daunting me about this – not even the return to an early start. Essays could be intimidating no matter when you started them!

With this mindset, I’m feeling very positive about life in general, and I at least partially have a distinct lack of essays to thank for that. I’ll go in to start on Tuesday with my head held high, being very grateful that I’ve finally found the work I’ve spent so long looking for since October – and in the very place that’s been helping me do that. What’s more remarkable is that the whole opportunity only came by chance. Had I left the job centre dejectedly after that Employment Event, at which I had not been able to make any other breakthrough, I might never have found myself at this point – one that will hopefully help me gain the experience that so many employers look for when recruiting. And there won’t be a single essay in sight…

Mason

 

Lost among the barren wasteland of the Internet is my first online project, which can be found at http://www.thejuniorscriptwriterscommunity.wikia.com. When it was founded on a spare summer’s afternoon in 2011, my slightly too optimistic 13 year-old self believed that it would immediately follow in the wake of the other communities I’d been inspired by and become a runaway success. Unfortunately, I obviously did not take into account the considerable development needed to make the website an appealing product for budding writers like myself, and therefore – as we approach the site’s fifth birthday – no more than four people, including myself, have ever contributed to it.

Nowadays, it’s like a ghost town – completely deserted. I went back to it the other day and realised just how big my delusions of grandeur had been. No more work has been done there, but my desire to create something that others can regularly enjoy alongside myself remains. It’s perhaps logical, therefore, to think about how I can expand this blog, in terms of what it has to offer and how it looks. Whenever it loads up, what do you see? Not just my writing, but also a substantial amount of blue, as things stand – and most people will agree that that won’t do me any favours where catching the eyes of the online public is concerned.

My main priority, of course, is the continued publication of decent content, be it text or anything else. With each new blog post, I’ve had to spend longer and longer on writing the material so that I can ensure it is as fresh as possible. This mindset even to the titles – the name of the aforementioned first website, as you can probably see, is far too long, so when it came to creating this blog I decided that they should be mostly concise. When this isn’t the case, however, they should aim to be sincere or – hopefully – amusing. Personally, I’d say they’ve only been longer when nothing else seemed to fit.

I’ve now come to another apparently natural progression for this blog. The appeal to others might increase if I invited other viewpoints, be they serious or surreal. So that’s just what I’ve done. In the near future, you can expect contributions from Will and Grace (not the sitcom characters). It’s just an experiment at this early stage, but I know that a careful and considered approach could gradually help me achieve the free-for-all community I’ve always wanted.

Mason

Within that same Drama group responsible for Crumbs In The Butter, there emerged another devised piece that required me to delve even further into my personal thoughts and experiences, possibly more so than ever before. At the beginning of the project, we were all tasked with describing some particularly unpleasant nightmares for potential use as stimuli. For the others, said nightmares were what you’d expect as far as I can recall – tales of darkness and claustrophobia. Unfortunately, I was unable to match those, for what I put forth could almost be laughable were it not totally true and, to my much younger self, totally terrifying.

I’m told that when I was a toddler, an estate agent whose exact name I can’t remember went bust, and that when this appeared in the news Mum and Dad jokingly taunted me by saying they could save him from total financial ruin by selling me to him. They saw it as nothing more than a joke, but little did they know that it seemed like a very real prospect to my tiny self, and as a result endless nightmares featuring an estate agent hell-bent on sealing my doom (with ET as an accomplice) would plague me for many years afterwards. I’d say that they only stopped when I was almost ten. Not only did I find it incredibly silly that I was having genuinely scary visions of an estate agent in the first place, but I was also a little bit miffed that they were only just going away by the start of middle school.

Eight years on from then, however, my experiences of fear in a suit and tie would be coming back to life – this time on the smooth floor of the Drama Studio. What we came up with revolved around the estate agent carrying out a tour of a house for sale to a potential and ultimately ill-fated owner. As the two main characters visited each room there would be an apparently inanimate object watching them from afar, and this gradually lead to a conclusion where the estate agent revealed that there would be no escape from the house as the objects towered over the victim – thereby sealing their doom too. My description probably makes it sound simpler than it actually was, but you can probably blame that on my failure to take down all the notes we were supposed to in lessons! Nevertheless, at the time it proved itself to be another piece of work within that group to be proud of, as well as one that once again proved what a joy it was to be part of that class. As a child the mere mention of an estate agent, or even of the word “bust”, was capable of sending a shiver down my spine. By the age of 17, though, it had become an artistic muse, and a pretty good one at that. I’m still yet to write any kind of horror story with ET in a starring role though!

This week, the estate agent made a second comeback – in my head, just where he always used to be. It’s not in a scaremongering capacity, because he’s doing his best to help clear my scriptwriter’s block (like writer’s block, just more scripty). When I put him up against all the other ideas I’ve had in the past – and don’t worry, he’ll be a fictionalised estate agent as opposed to the real one – he’s rare in that I have more confidence in him in my head than I might do when he’s down on paper. He was a part of my life for a very long time, so when it came to using him as the basis for an idea he was almost fully formed. For that reason, I’m going to bide my time with him. After all, depending on how much longer I’m jobless for, I could need another worthwhile project to occupy myself with.

Mason

With my disability comes a feeling of apprehension towards quite a few social situations. It all centres around the idea that I, in my immensely cumbersome chair, will immediately upset the balance of any tranquil environment – even if I’m literally doing nothing at all. This morning I had only one task that required me to venture outside, this being that I had to buy some first class stamps. Nine times out of ten this is a perfectly innocent engagement that is all done and dusted in the blink of an eye. Bear in mind that all I had to do was glide into the shop, ask for the stamps, pay for them and glide out again. Easy peasy.

I had never had any reason to buy my own stamps before, however, and although I’d discussed exactly what I needed with Mum earlier on I was still stupid enough to expect an imminent catastrophe. Of course, such a thing did not unfold, but reassurance that I could buy stamps in Superdrug at all only came when I saw a sticker on the till proclaiming rather conclusively that I could “buy first and second class stamps here”. Mere minutes later I was away, carrying my purchase and the ear to ear beams of the cashier with me. Thinking back over this and other situations has led me, within the last hour, to the simple fact that I am a massive wimp.

Everybody has at least a mild wimp somewhere inside them, as these are what lead us to fear such things as spiders and the dark. For me, however, it has been stronger on occasion. During the later stages of sixth form I’d get myself worked up through a worrying lack of logical thinking, as one of my English teachers once pointed out. It’d be clear that a situation posed absolutely no risk to me, and yet I could still be easily driven into a blind panic. This all developed from the fact that I wasn’t always very good at asking for help or advice where my work was concerned. If I didn’t have my planner to hand so that I could record whatever homework we’d been set, I’d just pray that my brain retained the instructions by itself. Time and time again, of course, it would fail me, meaning that my more reliable classmates were often badgered for the full details. Eventually, in English and Media, the aforementioned teacher had to write my homework for one half term down on paper so that I couldn’t pester her again either. All of this could have been easily prevented had I simply opened my trap and asked for what I needed to know.

I think of this now that I’ve left education, and especially when I’m sending emails to potential employers. To click the “send” button is to make a miniature breakthrough. I’ve made an enquiry and when the reply comes, my mind is instantly put totally at ease. I know that only good can come from being proactive, even if it is only a small step I’m taking, and with each one – or so I hope – I’m getting just a little bit closer to being a little bit less wimpy, indoors as well as outdoors. Don’t confuse that with being outspoken, though – I still like to take my time before making bigger decisions…

Mason

I’ve always considered my music taste relatively eclectic, and this is something of which I’m quite proud, because snobbery in music really gets on my nerves. We’re all guilty of it at some time or another, but most of us grow out of it before long. On my iPod there’s everything from Motorhead to Michael Buble, but some particular genres can mean much more to certain listeners. Today I was reminded of mine, and its rather unusual significance in my life.

In the car, on the way back from a day out with the family, “No Good (Start the Dance)” by The Prodigy was playing on the radio. Mum, Dad and Louis were all completely unfazed by this pounding track, but had they not been there I’d most definitely have been moving around like a maniac. Until recently, dance music was a guilty pleasure, but lately I’ve been more open about my love for it. It’s gradually occupying more and more of the aforementioned iPod, and I’ve also added The Prodigy’s latest album The Day Is My Enemy to my growing vinyl collection, taking no notice of those who believe it’s nothing more than a racket. Like anyone else who revels in the beats, the adrenaline courses through my body and I am lifted to an almost euphoric state, but this can be down to more than the music – as another important element is my “flapping”. This is something with links to my cerebral palsy. Sudden electrical charges in my brain cause bodily spasms, namely ones that cause my arms to flap wildly. It often happens when I’m happy or incredibly excited, therefore explaining its connection to the anthemic and uplifting nature of dance music.

I used to flap occasionally at school, where not everyone understood exactly why I did it. I wouldn’t say anyone mocked me for it, but appropriately enough I was asked by some people in middle school to “do the dance”. Just as they didn’t realise it was actually an effect of my disability, they were also unaware of the music that made it happen at home! Today it is a source of some amusement within my family, as well as some frustration (only because they believe I should be doing it far less often at 18), but to me it does have sentimental value. No matter when or where it happens, there can only ever be a happy thought accompanying it – be it of said music or any other big interest, such as Formula One. 18 or not, that’s one of those things that money simply cannot buy, and if nothing else it gives me yet another reason to love my passions.

Mason

 

As I write this, nearly everything in my room has been packed into boxes as Dad prepares to redecorate it. The colour charts have been fully browsed and any noise made echoes with the lack of anything to absorb the sound. The room is barren, but for a good reason, because within weeks it will have attained an entirely new personality and perhaps a new charm as well. Nails will hold together new shelves, and some new bedside drawers will bear the weight of a new lamp and clock radio. It’s important that any bedroom is a safe haven for any occupant, and therefore it must be tailored to match as many personal tastes as possible. I intend to supervise the entire process as best I can, but I still wonder if it’ll still leave a little to be desired for one reason in particular.

I remember hearing recently that one of Louis’ friends has described our house as “the cream house”, cream being the colour of virtually all of our walls. To be honest, I’m so used to it that I’d stopped noticing the pattern myself, and I didn’t realise that it was noticeable among other people either. That’s what inspired the title of this blog post – it’s almost like the creamy blandness of our interior designs will one day become legendary if enough people recognise it. Whilst it may unmistakably seem like I completely disapprove of the colour scheme because of its lack of personality, it would be unfair not to point out its benefits according to Dad. He says that a bright colour, be it cream or the orange of Louis’ feature wall, lifts the light in any room, and in my case he insisted that it will help me when I want to read. He does have a perfectly valid point, even if I do still struggle to believe that a slightly darker colour will totally plunge me into darkness. Happily, I know that no matter what is done to my bedroom there will be one crucial thing that will remain unchanged.

My bed slots snugly into the far-left corner. It exemplifies what I love best about my room, because that corner is a microcosm. A hideaway within a hideaway. As a disabled person who perhaps doesn’t venture outside as much as he would like because he always wonders what to do there, my room carries double the importance. My keyboard is there, along with my books, notebooks, magazines and record player – so therefore it is a large source of stimulation whenever I don’t feel that the great outdoors can offer me anything. In the aforementioned corner there is more than just a space to lay my head. There’s a space to mull things over, and not just in the traditional lying-awake-at-night-worrying-about-things sense. Some of the ideas I’m most pleased with have come from there in the dead of night. We can feel snug in any bed, but mine is in a bubble where creativity and surrealism roam free, where I really feel like I’m taking time out away from everyone else – even if they’re in the room with me. That’s why, regardless of what happens to the room, the bed is staying put, away from the cream washout!

Mason

Collecting vinyl has given me a brilliant new hobby that fills me with childlike wonder. On Saturday I was mesmerised once again by the sheer variety of records (all of which I wanted) in the shop, all staring me in the face and jostling desperately for a place in my growing collection. After some deliberation, and having flicked frantically through what was on offer, I eventually chose Blur’s Parklife to take home. As I took it down the street with me I felt lifted, as though a record had the power to instantly improve an entire day. When you eventually approach the turntable with it, it’s one of the most tactile things of all – you can peel the cellophane along and away from the smooth surface, and once the disc itself is out it gleams and shines in the light, just waiting for you to connect with the music it’s about to unleash.

That’s one of the great things about music, or any other artistic pursuit. It allows you to make that link, either with the people who share your passion or with whatever work you may be doing. The ideas and opinions we have when on these journeys are like tradable commodities, and they can help us to while away countless happy hours. When my cousin Matthew dropped off a new LP just last night – The Smiths’ Hatful of Hollow – as a late Christmas present, it felt almost like he was passing something along to me. We share the same enthusiasm for the same band, and it’s only going to be strengthened now that I have that album. In all of my life, however, the best experience I had of a multitude of ideas bouncing around in one space came during Years 12 and 13, in my A Level Drama class.

In the latter year we were tasked with devising our own 20-minute drama piece for our final exam. This eventually took the title it shares with this post, Crumbs In The Butter, and it was something I was personally very proud of. Over many weeks my group – Deanna, Alice, Olivia, Flo and myself – collaborated to bring our ideas, many of which came from a large sheet of paper scribbled on with red pens, to life. Along the way there were disagreements, as there will be in any group at some stage, and being in a difficult place at the time I probably didn’t help by abruptly leaving the classroom for fresh air in the middle of some lessons. Thankfully, however, the group and Mrs Westwood, our teacher, were very patient and we duly knuckled down to create our performance. Countless ideas were scrapped almost as quickly as they were floated, and all of what made it into the finished product only served to give each of us equal prominence. In that class there was always lots of room for compromise, which I felt was very encouraging, and as individuals we were all instrumental in developing our own characters. Seeing as any impact my movement would have on the performance was going to be minimal thanks to my wheelchair, I made sure I projected with my voice as much as possible. I guessed it would help if some of my dialogue was also memorable, so in one scene, for which we borrowed the “never have I ever” game to use in our dialogue, I decided to do a spot of improvisation, firstly as a joke – but it ended up sticking. Our characters, all of whom were keeping secrets from the past, had to follow the words “never have I ever” with whatever that secret was.

I, however, decided it might be to good effect to put a break into the seriousness of the scene. With that in mind, when it was my turn to say the line, I uttered, “never have I ever walked”. As I said, I didn’t expect it to be taken seriously, but the rest of the group was so welcoming and considerate that it was kept in as my line. Throughout the whole process, everyone was asked for their opinions and ideas, allowing the creative juices to flow in and through us all. Admittedly, my confidence wasn’t always that high at times, but I felt that despite the differences we occasionally had, we were like a family and we could help each other out when it was necessary. This meant that when the big night finally came, we all stormed it, cementing the fact that it was a pleasure to be involved with – even if we did have to write an evaluation afterwards! You can now see why sharing, discussing and even floating ideas is so special to me, because they really can stay as awesome and long-lasting memories (and my longest blog post so far). In fact, I reckon the natural next step is a reunion performance!

Mason

Ever since starting school, I have always had a deeply troubled relationship with Maths. I believe that the root of the problem lies somewhere within my cerebral palsy, and how it may affect my brain. I’m no doctor, of course, but I’ve always suspected that while the English side is highly proficient, the Maths side is and has always been paying a sorry price. The issue was prominent throughout my school years – in first school, I would spend significant chunks of lessons agonising over a relatively simple question, and in middle school it got to the stage where, in Year 6, I’d escape to the toilet after the introduction to the lesson so as to avoid any actual work. Eventually the teacher and my helpers saw through this, and my actions earned me a reprimand from the Learning Support staff, by which time my grades in Maths had started slipping.

You might think that this would have caused me to buck up my ideas, but unfortunately I wasn’t about to get any more enthusiastic about this most dreaded of subjects. Various booster and springboard classes were of little help, and the problem escalated to the point where I refused to retake my GCSE Maths paper (having already failed it twice), simply because I had had enough. Maths and myself were clearly totally incompatible, so why should I waste time on it when it made so much more sense that my true capabilities really lay elsewhere? Nobody can succeed at something they are not designed to do, so with that in mind I left education with only an E grade for my Maths GCSE. Now that I am out, however, and now that I have more time to pursue the things I love, numbers are helping me. I’m setting targets that in turn help me strive to be even more creative and ambitious than before.

Just the other day, and completely on a whim, I began re-learning French, wanting to know if I really could remember as much as I thought from Year 9 (my teacher was a little annoyed when I decided to drop it for GCSE). I’ve been doing 5 minutes of practice for the last few days, and according to the app I’m currently 8% fluent. That’s the first magic number! I’ll be very surprised if I can become even remotely conversant, but it’s something to at least try to work towards, and it’ll keep me stimulated and alert. In addition to that, yesterday I had the idea of one day publishing a collection of these posts in book form, so that I can say I am actually a published author! At the moment, between 20 and 25 posts have been written on this site. I believe that once I have closer to 50, I might have enough material to fill said book. That total is some way off, but with the right incentive you can accomplish anything. In fact, I can probably count reaching it as a New Year’s resolution I might stick to after all!

Mason

Happy New Year! I must admit that I always view the crossover between one year and the next with some reluctance because we’re encouraged to celebrate it, and – not being the biggest fan of January – I tend to wonder what there is to celebrate. We all feel the post-Christmas blues, right? There’s so much to lift us in December that when we get to January, regardless of whether or not we have the opportunity for a fresh start, the realities of everyday life reappear and we inevitably feel the comedown. Call me negative and a pessimist if you like, but fear not, because after midnight had struck and the champagne had been downed, I made a sudden but encouraging realisation.

People say that “life is what you make it”, but that does of course depend on your individual situation and what you have at your disposal. I was thinking about that expression last night, at which point I remembered that 2016, for me, would be an almost completely blank canvas on which to “make” my life. As things stand, the job I was due to start in just a few days’ time hangs in the balance. Circumstances beyond my control mean I could be starting later than I expected, and depending on when that is I may have to move on and find something else. It’d be a shame to have to abandon such a great job, but if it should come to that it’s important that I stay positive about the future – and that’s where the canvas analogy comes in useful.

Don’t be fooled into thinking I haven’t considered the difficulties associated with getting a job, especially for a disabled person like me who has to find something he can do in the first place before negotiating every other hurdle. I have visited many job websites time after time, always refreshing the page for updates, only to find things I’m too underqualified and experienced for. Distance is an issue, too. I need to focus on how I’m to resolve all of them, of course – but my mentality is important, too. I’m thinking of my predicament as something that is giving me complete control over how I fill the coming year. Until now, school and College occupied a great deal of it, but now that is gone and I am flying solo. If I am productive and successful, I will be satisfied, and if not I will only drag myself down and be held accountable by others. I need to make sure I tackle this challenge head-on and be happy, hardworking, creative, enthusiastic and social (where the opportunities arise). These aren’t New Year’s Resolutions – breaking them would be a tremendous risk. They simply need to happen and if I consider them in this way, the pressure will be off because they will just be part of normal life – therefore, I can go into 2016 with a smile on my face!

Mason

I once read that anyone wanting to be a proper writer must learn to take criticism, and that if you don’t do this you might as well keep it a hobby. Since then, I’ve made sure that everything I’ve seriously written and wanted to send somewhere has been analysed – and either approved or rubbished. Until recently, I believed that I’d been doing this long enough to easily withstand and learn from any negative feedback. Indeed, that was the case right up until I had to remind a friend of mine that I had a blog.

They might have read some of it to begin with, but they’d forgotten about it since then. When I prompted them with a link to the latest post, I waited somewhat anxiously for their verdict, because I believe that every opinion you can get is important. Mere minutes had passed before they’d read it – so few, in fact, that I wondered if it had been scanned rather than read properly. I can’t remember a lot of their feedback without looking (and I don’t know whether that’s by choice or not) but one part I do remember is that at which they said I’d lost my touch, partly because I “didn’t make it feel like the reader was there too”. I could have been offended by this, and for a couple of weeks my creative juices were knocked – hence the lack of activity on here until now – but at the time I just decided to do my best to turn this negative into a positive.

First of all, I pointed out that the more recent posts might have been different because they were more personal and had more relevance to my life than anyone else’s, and secondly I just told myself there wasn’t that much else wrong with what I’d written. There were no spelling mistakes or grammatical errors (to my knowledge), and even if I didn’t have a big message to spread or point to make, I was doing my best just to raise a smile. There were perhaps different intentions behind it, and therefore a slightly different style – nothing wrong with that! I should add that I’m not angry at my friend for their opinion, and I treat it as constructive criticism because it taught me something about writing. It’s OK to be fluid and to deviate from time to time, because it just develops you more as an individual writer, and if you have serious ambitions like I do it can help you to stand out from the crowd. Actually, this comes at a pretty good time for me. I’ve devised and developed a radio idea I’m very proud of, one that came together fully in a matter of days. A couple of weeks ago I sent it to a production company, having done what I could to ensure it will make the best possible impression there. I’m still waiting for news and I hope it will be good, but I know that even if it turns out not to be what I hope for, I will take some kind of lesson from it.

Mason