Ambition

I struggle with the term "ambition". I'm wary of job advertisements which seek "ambitious" applicants, and uncomfortable with what this term tends to mean to wider society. It's a dissatisfaction with what you've already got, and a strive for more; more money, more materialism, more for yourself. It's apparently a positive quality in a person. It's what we should all be, and it qualifies our worth to the rest of society, all the while disempowering those who lack it.

"Ambition" is not available to all. It's not a personality trait you're born with; it's genetically inherited in the same way that wealth is, and becomes persistently more obvious the older you get. It's drummed into you, or drummed out of you, as you develop. When you're a child, they ask you what you want to be when you grow up. If children were handed out application forms, some forms would have a list of 500 careers available to choose from; other forms would have a list of 10. Tick the appropriate box.

Those fortunate enough to have "ambition" bestowed upon them at birth are told the age-old lie that you can do anything if you set your mind to it. Some people can. Some people can dig and climb their way out of the deepest slums and become Sir Alan Sugar, and we are told that "If I can do it, why can't you?" - but not everyone can win the lottery. If we were all astronauts, popstars, actors, scientists and laywers, who would sweep the streets? Who would collect your rubbish? Who would unblock your toilet? Who would stack the shelves of your local supermarket? Who would teach your children, and look after you when you're too sick or too old to do it yourself?

"Ambition" is a lie. "Privilege" is the truth.

If you have the privilege to touch whichever dream your mind dares conjure up, be bold enough to look upon those who don't with the same respect given to you, the same respect you feel you have "earned". Do not blame, disempower, chastise or divide those you consider beneath you. Look upon ambition as a strive not for money, materialism or personal gain, but as a strive for happiness - however that might be gained.

And once you do, maybe then we can all have ambition.

Keep It Going

The Earth is finely tuned.

Temperature.

The air's composition.

Diet.

Lifespan.

Love.

Everything is put on Earth for precisely one reason: to keep it going. Keep it ticking. Preserve what we have, nourish life and watch it blossom.

You are here for that very reason.

Keep it going.

Keep it ticking.

Preserve what we have, nourish life and watch it blossom.

I'm not talking about your own life; I'm talking about the life of the world.

Hiatus?

I think. A lot. The term "overthink" is often bandied about where I'm concerned, and while this can often be a negative thing (in fact, it usually is a negative thing; my thoughts tend not to be: "The world is good. I can smell flowers. Life is beautiful. I want to go and run naked and free in a meadow."), it is also the thing that keeps me moving. It's the thing that leaves me unsatisfied and wanting more of a good thing, less of a bad thing or something different entirely. It is the thing that makes me understand people, helps me see the other side of the story (and the other side, and the other side, and the other side). It's the thing that frees me to write. Thoughts come to me in a jumble of words which don't necessarily form a coherent sentence, but form a coherent expression (as evidenced by this, probably).

My problem at the moment is that I have too many thoughts, and I don't know where to put them all. I don't have one batch of jumbled words; I have about 50.

But I'm working on it, so please excuse my absence from the blog lately...

"Guys, it's my body."

For the last year, I have been writing a play about a young woman’s decision either to keep or abort a pregnancy. About a month ago, I wrote my final scene, pulled everything together, stayed up till the early hours of the morning and read through it, from start to end.

When I reached the end, I realised that I was far from finished.

The thing I had overlooked all year long when I had been writing the play was the very message I wanted to put across at the start. I had spent so long deliberating whether the character should or shouldn’t terminate this unplanned pregnancy that it began to feel like it was me, and not Gemma (my main protagonist), making the decision. Kind of ironic given my standpoint on this issue.

I have never been pregnant, let alone experienced an unplanned pregnancy. You get some pro-lifers who concede that “Yeah, I guess if she’s raped then that’s different, maybe abortion is okay then”, but I consider that argument irrelevant. There are near-infinite reasons why a woman might want to terminate a pregnancy: it was conceived through rape; she can’t afford it; she considers herself too young or too old; she doesn’t think she’s ready; she’s afraid for hers or the baby’s physical or mental wellbeing; she does not want children... The reasoning does not alter the effect. If a woman does not want to donate her body to another being for nine months (and then some; the effects of pregnancy don’t cease entirely after birth), is that not all there is to it?

Very often in life, you try to see things from another’s point of view by saying to yourself, “What would I do if I was in that situation?” I am sure there are plenty of women who would or who have continued with a pregnancy which was conceived through rape, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with those who choose to do that. That is their choice. I have known women who have fallen pregnant accidentally and gone on to have a baby, and there is nothing wrong with that choice. But what is right for those women might not necessarily be right for every other woman on the face of the earth. Do I know what I would do if I fell pregnant tomorrow? I know what I might do, but how do you ever truly know what you would do until you are in that situation? You only have to look at history and at places where abortion is illegal to see the damaging effects this has on women’s health; spend any length of time on the web and you will find countless personal stories of women who have suffered or even died as the result of the unavailability of abortion clinics. In fact, I’ll start you off with this one.

I don’t agree that men shouldn’t have opinions on abortion – after all, I have opinions on all kinds of stuff that don’t directly affect me – but there’s a difference between opinion and dictating. I might think that my friend painting her bathroom pea green is a poor choice, but I’m not going to march into her home with a pot of paint and a roller and paint over it blue. (Weird analogy, but you get my point.) Ultimately, abortion is an issue that will never directly affect men. Men do not have wombs, nor vaginas, nor breasts (well, not the kind that lactate, anyway), and yet more than three-quarters of MPs are male. These are currently the people making decisions about women’s reproductive rights, and that, if anything, is wrong.

A Poem

A Poem

A poem is the rainbow you see within greyscale,
The beat in every silence.
It reaches into a realm unrealised and
Chokes it to the surface.
It cries in the desert,
And smiles when you’ve forgotten how;
It pains where there are no nerves.
It knows no nerves.

It runs when you can’t go on,
And swims with a hole in the sail,
Binding you with me
And me with him
And him with her
And her with you,
Joining us together like a constellation in vast darkness.
It hears the tears dissolving into your pillow
And sees the beams that prop up your smile;
It evaporates your tears, holds them in a cloud over your head
And pronounces your pain to the world.

It dreams in consciousness and unconsciously dreams,
Inhabiting your inhibitions until it bursts through the roof,
Smashes all the windows and falls through the floor,
Leaving you to climb out from the rubble,
Shake the dust from your hair and
Wait for the wounds to heal.
It exposes you:
Fraudster,
Liar,
Cheat,
Coward.

It wraps itself around you, strong arms raising the hairs on your neck.
It tells you, “Me too”
And you entrust yourself to it,
Fingers licking at the pages,
Hungry for more of
This bittersweet truth.

By Martha Everitt
October 2012

Surplus To Requirements

No one is superior nor inferior.

We are equally different, good at some things and bad at others.

We all came into the world with the same proporties of promise, but our behaviour and the choices we make from thereon separate us.

Do not disregard this. Do not see yourself as more or less, better or worse. Do not consider others disposable unless you consider yourself on par.

Your leading lady represents women; represent them well.

Been super busy these last few weeks. I'm delirious with busyness, hence my careless and dorky use of the word "super". Yesterday morning, I actually had to give myself a pep talk before I could get up. My alarm went off at 7am, and these were my first thoughts: "What in Santa's name is that noise? Aliens? What are they doing here? ...Oh wait. Alarm. Oh dear. OK, come on, girl. You can do it. You are strong. You are a strong woman. You can do this, YEAH!!!!!"

And then the little bitch inside me reached out, hit snooze, rolled over and went back to sleep.

That's just the way it's been lately.

But I've discovered a lot, writing-wise, lately. I've learned to be disciplined, for one. I actually have a timetable now, would you believe. When you work full-time and still want to pursue other stuff and have a social life, sometimes you just have to walk the dorky green mile and set yourself limits. Monday to Friday 9-5 is when I make money; Saturdays, Friday evenings and one other weekday evening is mine to go out, chill out or slob out, and all the other weekday evenings and Sunday are writing time. So far, it's working. I "finished" my play, then read it back, gave an inward sigh, proclaimed "No" and decided to rewrite half of the thing entirely. Perhaps that sounds like the only direction I'm headed in is backwards, but I prefer to look at this thing as glass half-full. This play is going to be epic. I spent lunchtime today writing a monologue for "Adam", an underachieving 37-year-old single father to one 17-year-old superbrain girl. I used to think that it was crazy - me, a 23-year-old, well-educated woman, trying to put myself into the mindset of someone my polar opposite - but it's not, really. We're all people. We all feel stuff, we all get happy and sad and angry and insecure. We all fart, we all shit - to put it pleasantly.

One thing that has become evident is that my writing is always going to slant towards bigging up women. I am never going to write something exclusively sympathetic to men. There are enough men in positions of authority and enough women still being regarded for solely their sexuality, that I think it's important that those who can should do their bit to change that. And as well as working on my own play, I've also been dabbling about on my brother's upcoming feature film, Goodnight Gloria, and acted as a bit of a "scriptwriter consultant" on occasion. Here's a film with a leading female character with so much potential to make a statement on behalf of women: we make stuff happen; we make our own happiness.

And so, I have formed my writer's motto: "Your leading lady represents women; represent them well."

And on that note, I went to the pub yesterday evening, which means that Thursday evening belongs to the notebook and biro.