Wow, daytime and I’m writing. I should be working, actually. I’ve read ‘Growth Monitoring’ in Health For All Children, unfortunately I’ve actually read the second, not the third edition; mostly because I got 3/4 of the way through photocopying it before I realised that I had the wrong edition in my hand (it looked like the newer one!) and didn’t have the money to copy the newer one…
Anyway, I’m just having a bit of a break before I start writing the stuff up; answering the questions. I’m so tired though. I have no idea why. I think that spending ages looking at old photos last night took it out of me.
What I do find slightly freaky about my old photo albums is there’s plenty of photos of places I went (landscapes, or shots of bits of tree, or even a crazy golf course from when I was little); there’s shots of old cars (disturbingly there’s two shots of the inside of a Morris Minor’s engine bay (UUU 203, incidentally) – from when I was at most 7 years old. I was a freaky little girl). Plenty of stuff like that. Some, but not a wildly huge number, of my friend Brian, and his brother.
And probably about 20 photos of my parents, in total, in 4 albums. I really want to sort through the albums and remove some pictures…. some of them though are nice. At least there are some. I know there’s also Cine film of my parents; from when we went to the Lakedistrict, just after I got my sound camera (hah, like there’s any sound recorded! I don’t think that the sound bit of it worked terribly well)….
At any rate, I looked through the photos, it was funny, seeing the people that I knew at school; the me that existed back then; the person I was. I look so thin, scarily thin, and I had huge glasses. Insanely big. Probably they look bigger because of how thin and frail I look. I do wish I’d stayed thin though. Not that thin; because it’s actually disturbing, when you look at me next to the other kids (in the very few photos; particularly the “you look like an anime character” photo (it’s my big hair that does it)). It’s quite scary. I don’t remember being like that. I barely remember that person. That… demi-person; that half-life I lived.
I wish I could go back and change things. But I think coming out, at school, in the early 90’s; I think that would have been a bad thing. But then as I’ve said elsewhere I got bullied and no-one spoke to me most of the time; so it’d’ve made no difference really except to me. Why? Because it’d mean I would maybe have some connection to the life I used to have; rather than the feeling of having severed it at 20 years of age. The first 20 years, more than 2/3rds of my life so far feels like it was lived by someone else.
Not that my sieve like memory helps. I look at photos, and they stir something in my soup like brain, but a lot of them mean very little to me. I can’t distinguish individual holidays; maybe because we went to the same/similar places very often. Freakily I can’t really remember my sister being on holiday with us; despite the fact I know it happened. There’s an entire holiday in France, with pictures I’m aware that I took; and yet can’t remember. I can remember something about a barrier that kept going up and down of it’s own accord by a French Chateau that I’ve got a photo of. That’s about it.
It’s all one big blurry mess in my head. All stuff that happened when I was trying to be someone for everyone else. Now I’m being me; and people actually seem to like me for who I am, and that’s fantastic, but it makes it hard to relate to the things I did before. Because I wouldn’t do those things. I wouldn’t stand for the things I did, I wouldn’t be treated the way I was, and I wouldn’t respond the way I did. I know it’s all part of growing up, but for me, coming out and the changes that accompanied it in my life were so huge; it’s completely disconnected me from the past. Even the images in my head; my memories are tweaked to fit in with me now! Isn’t that scary? I have edited my own brain to correct the images. The dialogue, the actions, the everything is the same, except the way I look in my memories. Freaky.
Anyway, I should get back to work. At least the heating’s working again; it’d stopped and it was getting bloody cold in here. Incidentally, I recommend the Zutons album. Kate’s music pick of the day. That and Gwen Stefani (actually I’ve not got that yet, but the bits I’ve heard sound cool).
