I flunked English (and art) and dropped out of school. But I’ve since found reading, writing and drawing provides an essential power source. So even if you struggle with reading, writing, spelling, or your writing’s messy, you can’t draw – keep your mind open to these mediums. And wouldn’t we all have a stronger sense of identity and place if they made studying your ‘Self’ as important a topic as English and Maths at school? And music, art, poetry and film were on the book-list for this subject. But it’s never too late to make your ‘self’ a topic to study – to seek a greater knowledge and understanding of who we are and explore the possibilities of who we can become. And if through this more people felt more comfortable and at peace with themselves (and difference), and more solid in their sense of place in the world – wouldn’t society (the world) stand to gain from this collective of more educated and contented selves?
“Virginia was a sane woman who had an illness. She was often a patient, but she was not a victim. She was not weak, or hysterical, or self-deluding, or guilty, or oppressed. On the contrary, she was a person of exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism, who made the best use she could, and came to the deepest understanding possible to her, of her own condition. She endured, periodically, great agony of mind and severe physical pain, with remarkably little self-pity.
She frequently uses the word ‘apprehensive’ to describe her states of mind. The word is a crucial one: the awful fear which accompanied her breakdowns and the possibility of their recurrence can never be underestimated.
What is certain is her closeness, all her life, to a terrifying edge, and her creation of a language which faces it and makes something of it. This is a life of heroism, not of oppression, a life of writing wrestled from illness, fear and pain.”
Excerpt from biography ‘Virginia Woolf’ by Hermione Lee.
Rose never feared a broken heart – she’d set herself up nicely in the mending business.
Rose lives a relatively trouble free life due to her ability to make sound decisions about relationships and all matters of the emotional kind. Rose appears unphased by the outcome of hurt because she is well practiced in the task of pain management. She takes firm and full responsibility for herself, leaving the actions and reactions of others where they rightly belong – along with their wrongs.
Her handiness in the mending department ensures she is always fully engrossed in lap and mind, far beyond all sense of conventional time – and the complication of others. Long Live Rose.
(Reposted from 2019. Find Rose in her own pocket book and in Clunk & Jam book 2019.)
This condition of mind. It comes. And it goes. And it comes back again. So if I have nothing right now. What do I have? The knowledge that it comes. And it goes. And it comes back again ….
Footnote: There’s something deeply consoling about the notion of endlessness. It’s the opposite of being STUCK. And the understanding that things come and go. And if you replace the ‘condition of mind’ with … good and bad times; anxiety and fear; happiness; sadness, grief, despair; relationships; worries and so on – it is the transient (cyclic) nature of things that provides reassurance for getting through – coming out the other side.
