First Writing Job Post-Uni - PANIC.

When I was a child I yearned to be an actress; stage, screen – you name it. And after much performance training and long ballet classes, as well as GCSE’s and a BTEC in Performing Arts I decided I wasn’t as competitive as the profession needed me to be (however, I do still belt out the Musical Theatre classics in the shower).  Acting and musicals were my childhood; my grandma and I used to spend Saturdays (and her pension) visiting West End Musicals and I still have a giant box of programs collected over the years. My adolescence was spent performing in college shows and enjoying Amateur Dramatics with Second To None Theatre Company, based in Kent, but when I came to University that all changed.

At Winchester University, I never took a dance class, I never joined the Performing Arts society – I started writing, editing and writing and editing, and writing and editing. It’s only now that I’ve realised, post-degree, that the writing-world is very similar to that of the acting/performance world. Everyone thinks they can do it, very few can. I am still yet to know if I can do the writing thing. However, I did take on my first freelance job last week. Not something I’d planned to do, but enjoyable and beneficial nonetheless.

A friend, Simon, runs a Television Studio company and he’s putting on an event in Boston this September. His PA is currently on holiday, and his ‘people’ surprised him by asking for their Health & Safety document, complete with schedule and risk assessment, three weeks too early. This is where I came in, Simon is a friend of a friend, and our mutual friend Cassi suggested me to help him out.

With no previous Health & Safety knowledge, I was incredibly dubious and nervous to even agree to help – I just didn’t want to let either Cassi or Simon down. However, I turned up eager and ready to work. A semi-stressful day and a half later and the work was finished and I was really happy with the work I’d put into the document.

Even though Health & Safety isn’t something that I want to do, and it’s not as ‘creative’ as I’d like to be writing, I am eternally grateful for the experience (and the pay, believe me!).  I am also so glad that there were people around who thought that I could do it, even when I thought I couldn’t.  Who am I to be writing about Health & Safety? I am perpetually smashing things and I’m always peppered by black and blue bruises. A bull in a china shop comes to mind, actually. A bull in a china shop, whilst copywriting. 

So, although it’s not my writing-world ‘big-break’ it’s certainly a step in the right direction. It’s inspired me to get on with my own stuff; to blog more regularly, to read more, to learn more – all so I have more to offer, more knowledge, more opinions and more practise under my belt. If something is true of both acting and writing worlds it’s that if you have a spare moment; practise. Practise doesn’t always make perfect, but it makes better than the time before. That’s pretty much all I can offer at this stage in the game, that I am better at life than I was yesterday, and here’s hoping that that’s good enough.

I’ve copied in some useful websites and things that keep me inspired and interested just because I know how shit it is to be ‘stuck’.

Ideas Tap is a completely free website that lists job opportunities, information and inspirational videos and articles to keep things fresh in your mind.

You The Designer is an awesome, slightly more visual, creative inspiration space that provides ideas on typography, graphic design as well as downloadable freebies.

And last, for today, Pinterest. Be it with interior design, quotes, fashion or recipes this website is awash with bright ideas and creative inspirations that keep me awake for hours when I really should be sleeping.

Lust for Learning.

Learning should never stop. I believe that with my whole heart. Just because you’re done with school (be it college, or a degree, or an MA or whatever...) I don’t think you should stop learning. I don’t think you should WANT to stop learning. If there comes a day where you don’t want to learn anymore – there’s a problem. I hope there isn’t a day that I don’t want to learn anything else, because that might mean that I think I know everything or that I know enough – I will never know enough.

Anyone who doesn’t understand, I sort of feel sorry for. Not in a mean way, I just think it might be quiet lonely to never want to know anything else about anything. I like that I get hungry to learn things; it’s a good thing. I’m sure there are people out there in the world, or even the near vicinity, who think that I’m a swot, or a bit nerdy, or just all-around lame but I honestly don’t care. Because one day, I will be able to hold my own in most conversations and feel confident about what I have learned and the opinions that I have formed from my own research and learning.

Recently, I have read two books that have taught me so much about areas that I could never have studied in a dedicated institution (school, college, university) because they aren’t part of the faculty that I put myself into by choosing to study what I did at University. I am so grateful for the fact that I find these books engaging and useful because, on a rather cliché note, I will be a better/more rounded person for reading them and exploring many other subjects that I haven’t studied.

THE SKELETON CUPBOARD: The Making of a Clinical Psychologist . (Prof. Tanya Byron)

“The Skeleton Cupboard is Professor Tanya Byron's account of her years of training as a clinical psychologist, when trainees find themselves in the toughest placements of their careers. Through the eyes of her naive and inexperienced younger self, Tanya shares remarkable stories inspired by the people she had the privilege to treat. Gripping, poignant and full of daring black humour, this book reveals the frightening and challenging induction faced by all mental health staff and highlights their incredible commitment to their patients.”

Featuring emotionally harrowing passages on child abuse, dealings with a physically abusive and psychotic patient, treating an older German-Jewish patient (who survived Auschwitz) now suffering from dementia who believes that in every shower she takes she is being exterminated. As well as exploring the lives of drug dependant patients, the fluctuations of T-Cells of HIV positive patients, and lastly a stand-out section on a young girl suffering from a malicious eating disorder.

Whilst all the above combined doesn’t sound like such a cheery book to read, it’s worth it. There are light moments; happiness within families brought closer together, congratulations on various remissions from disease and what seems to be an everlasting stream of hope for a better future running throughout.

Because Professor Tanya Byron is so academically decorated it makes reading the book very easy and enjoyable; believable, real and emotive. Whilst giving details of treatment procedures, the book also provides insight into the lives of various medical professionals that we as outsiders couldn’t ever fathom.

For someone who already had interest in the psychological world, I would majorly recommend this book. For someone who has no interest in the psychological world, I would recommend the book purely to learn about the human race and their feats.

DO NO HARM: Stories of life, death and brain surgery. (Dr. Henry Marsh, CBE and FRCS.)

I’m only a third or so through this book, but I’m already hooked. The chapters are split into medical diagnoses for example; Pineocytoma, Aneurysm, Haemangioblastoma etc and reading through the Aneurysm passage – I genuinely believe I could clip an Aneurysm if needed. Obviously, literally, I couldn’t but in theory I could.

"What is it like to be a brain surgeon?

How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands, to cut into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason?

How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially life-saving operation when it all goes wrong?

In neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor's oath to 'do no harm' holds a bitter irony. Operations on the brain carry grave risks. Every day, Henry Marsh must make agonising decisions, often in the face of great urgency and uncertainty.

If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practised by calm and detached surgeons, this gripping, brutally honest account will make you think again. With astonishing compassion and candour, one of the country's leading neurosurgeons reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets and the moments of black humour that characterise a brain surgeon's life.

DO NO HARM is an unforgettable insight into the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern hospital. Above all, it is a lesson in the need for hope when faced with life's most difficult decisions."

The book illustrates the neuroses that brain surgeons themselves go through – the tension and pressure of holding a scalpel to the section of the brain that controls motor function; you could rid someone of their basic motor skills. Holding a scalpel to the temporal or frontal lobes? You rid someone of everything that makes them who they are and wipe away their memories as quick as condensation on your bathroom mirror.

 I don’t know if I could cope under the pressure of holding peoples’ lives in my hands – or worse than that, if you don’t actually end up killing someone, you could just remove their ability to move or talk or see or hear and surely that’s a fate worse than death – being an alive being trapped in a coffin of a lifeless body; unable to interact with the people you love.

Because I’m not quite finished with this book yet I can’t give it a definitive review but I get the feeling I will enjoy it and benefit from it as much as I did from Tanya Byron’s book. Henry Marsh became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984, which is home in London and plays host to the fabulous Huntarian Museum which I visited with my boyfriend earlier on this year.  The museum holds a vast collection of weird and wonderful things and if you too have an obsession with the morbid and medical, I would absolutely recommend taking a trip when you’re next in London.

Overall, these are just two examples of books I have read this year that I have learned amazing things from. Of course I could just read all of the information online, but when people like Tanya Byron and Henry Marsh bother to make the information readily accessible and enjoyable – why not take advantage?

I will always yearn for more knowledge and to learn about things and I think you should too. Learn Russian. Learn the phonetic alphabet. Something. Anything. J