Self esteem – Stefanie Moore

Tell me if THIS is weird

Do you have images from films or books that stick in your head? For years afterwards? I don’t mean the collective, iconic ‘you’ll find me on the back wall of a Planet Hollywood restaurant’ kind of image – but the weird little private ones, that maybe only you will remember. One image that I always have lodged in a mind-crevice is that of Danni Minogue tossing a salad from a Smash Hits annual, circa 1992 (this must have been a receptive time for me – I also recall Annie Lennox’s advice to always wear rubber gloves when doing housework from the same edition). Going back further, I retain ‘up there’ *gestures at brain* a cartoon from a pictorial version of Robin Hood, of a squirrel, dressed in Lincoln Green, holding a log aloft like a muscle man. I think I was in love with this squirrel (call me if you’re reading this, k?) Anyone else do this?

Just me, then.

A less idiosyncratic moment that I come back to again and again is a scene in Network by Sidney Lumet. Which, if you haven’t seen, you should. In fact, stop reading this and do it now. It’s on Netflix. I’ll wait.

Good.

So now you know that it’s about an embattled news anchor who loses his shit. you probably also know the moment that lodges in my head (thought maybe not, if you were looking for squirrels with logs) which is when Peter Finch as Howard Beale the news anchor yells ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!’

I feel this moment so hard. Especially today. For I too am mad as hell and not going to take it anymore and I have demonstrated this in the strongest of ways.

Firstly, I whispered ‘Dickhead’ at a car that nearly ran me over. Secondly, I enquired in a very nice text (which ended with a ‘x’) as to why I hadn’t been paid for some work that I’d done.

And these milky reasons make me want to do an even bigger Peter Finch as Howard Beale the new anchor out of the window. Because I’m mad as hell at myself.

I know – I’m laidback, but I’m laidback for the wrong reasons – not because I’m easygoing – but because I will literally punch myself in the head before I confront a situation with deeds or words. As a freelancer, I know I need to rep myself much much better than this – but I have, for years, erred on the side of self deprecation. I do not take myself seriously. May I add that in the second case, where I’m waiting for payment, that I have had my hours cut without consultation? So I have gone from earning peanuts to earning the bits of peanuts that fall off in the bottom of the bag – and not even that, if the current situation persists.

I need another image to put in my head, one that sticks. I’ve tried Ripley (too tall), Michael Douglas in Falling Down (too aggro), Furiousa from Mad Max (too much and I’m a terrible driver). I don’t want to be Howard Beale yelling at the world. I need a better fit and I’m open to suggestions.

Of broad oaks and little leaves

I know I’m not alone.

Last night, at approximately 6.37, it kicked in: the gut wrenching pangs of realising that the sweet taste of freedom has almost completely slid down the gullet towards the sour stomach pit of realisation.

I had work tomorrow. I had to get up. I had to interact with adults and children on a neverending pedastal of stress, each step made up of deadlines and demands. And emails, emails, emails. Like I said, I know I’m not alone in this feeling! But in the spirit of things, I decided to replace my otherwise Beckettian monologue of repeating ‘Do I have to go in tomorrow?’, and do some research on the dreaded sunday feeling, and how to resolve it.

Not for me the first few sites that I tuned into, who seemed to accept that work was something to be managed like a taciturn orca. I didn’t want to read about ‘Time management’ and Éffective strategies’. I wanted to be inspired. And somewhere, lodged on page three of my google endeavours, I came across some quotations from a man called Khalil Gibran, who wrote a book called The Prophet.

Granted, I haven’t read the book and I will misquote him, but the gist of his writing shed a new light on the Sunday feeling. He believes that work is essential and a joyful act at that. This is what he writes (with my commentary in italics):

Älways you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune (true that!). But I say to you that when you work you fulfil earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born (huh?). And in keeping yourself with labour, you are in truth loving life. And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret (hmmm….okay…..).”

Granted, I don’t know what life’s inmost secret is – hands up if you do, because I want a detailed powerpoint presentation on what that is. And I’m also not sure on how to achieve this state of bliss while trying to drill the three sentence types into my year 9’s heads on a wet and dreary afternoon, but it was a helpful perspective today. Instead of finding ways of managing work, to strap it down and hold it in place and hate the whole darn thing, to actually take a moment to appreciate the act of work, of all the myriad decisions that we make while working, of the processes that we adapt to and in so doing show an understanding of life. It made a difference today: I actually enjoyed a discussion with students about two poems that we were studying, rather than marshalling them towards the right answer. Instead of despising my commute, I enjoyed the chance to be still and see a new world emerging from the darkness. I felt prepared and ready.

The other point that he made resonated, and that was regarding work envy. At school, I didn’t really care what I wanted to be, I just wanted to be renowned for it. Since leaving school I’ve tried my hand at a variety of jobs, but they’ve always had the potential for fame nd glamour: I was an actor and then I worked in television and all the time I was focussed on how to become known in these circles. Looking back, I realise that my focus was wrong and maybe I should have enjoyed the work more rather than looking to be the next thing. (Or maybe stopped and realised how little I was enjoying my work and rung a few changes…). And now I’m a teacher and I sometimes think of the phrase ‘Those who can, do, those who can’t teach’. For a long time it has seemed like a failing in me, that I’ve ended up as a teacher, unlikely most days to even get a thank you from my students. This feels particularly galling when I turn on my television set and see any of my peers acting their little socks off in a primetime dramas, maybe even making a move on Hollywood, the big time. Would you like some salt with your wound, Madame?

What Khalil Gibran advises us to stay away from thinking about is of the status of particular jobs in relation to each other, but not to denounce them. When I see a compadre doing well in their chosen field, I should stop musing bitterly on their shelf life and how it will all end badly for them as a way of gaining temporary and illusory satisfaction, I should think on the joy inherent in my own work. The quote that I have been musing on today was something like this:

“Both the broad oak and the blade of grass feel the same sunshine’. This is not to suggest that my job as a teacher is any less signficant than being an actor (some would argue the opposite in fact), but that relative values don’t matter. If you are gaining joy and satisfaction from your job, it is the same feeling regardless of external recognition.

Unless your occupation is a serial killer. Or you are Rupert Murdoch.

I’m not normally one for spirtuality, but this struck me as sound advice, certainly more practical than other guides with their talk of ‘maximising business opportunities’ and ‘learning to succeed’. It’s certainly something that I will hold in my head until I finally learn to feel 100% grateful for what I have.

Writer’s bitch

It’s devillishly personal and impossible to explain to anyone else. This is because I have writer’s block which is a) devillishly personal and b) writer’s block which means that I can’t express it or indeed anything very well (witness this sentence).

My writer’s block is accompanied by a grave case of self doubt. The bitchface inner critic is perched on her bony arse in my left ear, waiting to pick up on any phrase I spin forth and critique it in her bland, repetitive, empty way. She seizes up on the irrelevant and builds them into something significant. As I typed ‘like’, I accidentally punched in “liek”. Bitchface was straight on it, taking it as a sign of my blanket failings as a writer. Bitchface is about 12 years old and a total asshole.

I wouldn’t mind if she were witty, but she isn’t. She is purely there to destroy any shreds of hope I have in my writing at the moment. Very often she will simply repeat a phrase in a whiny voice and add nothing to it. And by Jiminy is she powerful; she has even now wrapped her vines around my tentative google searches for inspiration in the guise of writing competitions or forums. Her ‘what’s the point’ mantra’ is winning hands down at the moment.

I’m beginning to think that she has something going on with Writer’s block because they’re always together. I don’t trust them. If so, bitchface definitely wears the pants in their relationship; if it were just Writer’s Block on his own, big solid stump of blank that he is, I think I could win him round. But she always shows up and sticks the boot in. Writer’s Block might even be quite helpful if he were on his own and I could just …contemplate him for a while. But it’s never just him. They’re a couple, I’m sure.

I hate Bitchface. She spoils everything and I’m not even kidding. She is making my life hell at the moment. According to her I am terrible at everything I try and deserve to fail. I’m a rotten teacher, with no social life (deservedly) and no chance of being happy and creative and successful. Ever. In stronger moments I’ve tried exorcising her, but it never works.

Bitchface has read all of this and you would think that she would be happy with this paean to her ways. But she isn’t. She has complained about my lack of adjectives and lack of stylisticpunch. For this is how she rolls.

Bitchface 1 Nefny 0