Pea Arts About

This week, I completed my eighth and final session of online Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. My teen years spent chatting inanely to friends on MSN instant messenger trained me well for this strange but hugely positive eventuality. Given the lengthy waiting lists - 13 months, I was told in September - for talking therapies, I was offered live messenger sessions that are more experimental and have a short waiting list. I was tentative because the idea of typing everything out was daunting. But I considered it realistically. Since having a prolonged breakdown four years ago from stress caused by workplace bullying, I have struggled with speaking. If you're aware of my podcast , you might think this strange, but I'm a damn good editor. I salvage decent slivers and piece them into something coherent. In a way, that's what I've always done as a child and now as an adult maker of things and stuff. Maybe I'm in the process of becoming the Hollis Frampton or Chris Marker of ...

Having earlier this year received counselling for mental health issues, I found the many topics raised in A Monster Calls deeply affecting and cathartic. Like Conor O’Malley (Lewis MacDougall), I was a child who lost a parent to illness and at around the same time experienced extremes of either being bullied or being ignored at school. The other kids either didn’t know how to treat me, or thought I was an easy target. I was placid, and big for my age. Aligning this with hardwired gender constructs, they decided I was ‘manly’, stoic and strong, never once considering that I was breaking inside and needed my pain to be treated as normal. It was easier to shut me down and confuse me about my gender identity than to dare disrupt their safe assumptions that parents lived to old age. At 32 years old, I was still getting bullied, this time in a bigger playground by people who could exert even more power over me. Like my childhood experience, when I defied their expectations and stoo...