Building a Mind

Today I am suffering day number two of a god-awful hangover, and in between sips of orange juice and slices of pizza I have wondered what happened to the pledge I made to myself two blog posts ago to seriously cut down my alcohol intake. I don’t drink often, but as is typical of the British I have a tendency to drink to excess whenever I do do it. Not experiencing this dryness of the mouth and aching of the head is the reason I wanted to stop drinking in the first place, but it’s all gone a bit wrong. This has gone a bit wrong too, I think. My writing on this blog. What it is is that I feel as though I’ve begun to preach. I didn’t start posting these thoughts with the intention of shoving my views down people’s throats, but I believe I have started to do just that. I feel anger and discomfort in my own writing, and I don’t like it.

My ‘views’. I don’t feel comfortable with that term in itself. ‘View’ implies ‘opinion’ and I find the concept of opinions difficult to come to terms with. What is an opinion but a learned connection between an action or a certain belief system or a piece of music and the idea that it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’?  Opinions are really just associations our brains make between a thing and a feeling. As I understand it, (and please, anyone who knows better, do correct me if I’m wrong) our brains are not like pools of water within which the ability to think is fluid and capable of taking any course we feel like. An individual thought – an idea connecting two other separate ideas – takes a strict course. It is the interaction between those two separate ideas already existing in the brain via the synapses that, I believe, are created each time we think a new thought. So it isn’t random or fluid, and it’s sort of stuck. Opinions, it seems to me, once set must be added to in order to expand one’s knowledge, or understanding, or to develop one’s empathy. So is it possible to ever truly change an opinion if that original thought – the bridging of one idea to another via a physical structure in the brain – always exists at the root of the issue? It’s like building a Lego house around a broken Lego brick which won’t come unstuck from the big green base. I don’t know. I am not remotely scientific. I have never studied the brain beyond the basics of GCSE biology.  All I can say is that I am interested in people’s opinions because they can be so solid, yet somebody else’s opinion on the same subject can be completely opposite to it. This suggests to me there is little fluidity in the creation of opinions. We set ideas in minds like we show people where to drive their cars by laying roads. Point A leads to Point B, from which the road leads directly to Point C. What a child learns, therefore, will be the basis for whatever information it collects from then on.

I have mentioned before my young siblings’ strong opinions on certain issues of particular interest to me, and how they worry me. Recently I have been worrying less about the fact that they have them, and more about the fact that they have been put there by somebody, or something. Something has taken a young head and structured it in such a way as dictates that its owner is made to believe that X is bad and Y is good, and without fluidity of thought there is no way of getting rid of that association. The car must follow the road. I can try to build upon this broken brick in such a way as reduces the influence of that small initial thought by drowning it out with ideas which contradict it, but it will always be there. It is a seed planted deep in the soil of the most fertile mind.

Each of us is a product of our influences, be they natural or nurtured, and it terrifies me that we have this capability to influence. We are all of us – no matter how much we try to fight it and to think for ourselves – we are all given a road to travel by those we are made to or choose to spend time with, or by what we read, or are made to read, or see, or are made to see. None of us is free. We are all wired like robots to behave in certain ways, filled with combinations of ones and zeros and corresponding actions and beliefs. So, I have been wondering, why do we not feel a greater duty of care over young minds? I am not a parent, although one day I hope to be, so perhaps I am completely unqualified to comment. Perhaps it is just too hard to manipulate a child’s mind in only the best ways possible. But is there no way of setting the best foundations for the construction of a mind? Surely that is our greatest responsibility in the advancement of the human race. But who am I to decide what the best way is? By my own admission I cannot think any more fluidly than the rest of humanity, so how can I ever be sure that the ideas I intend to plant in my children’s minds are not the poisonous foundations of hatred, apathy, and selfishness?

What I can do is to focus on the building blocks I choose to add to the structure that is my own mind. What foundations are laid will be in my head for the rest of my life, until perhaps my mind begins to dismantle itself, and even now I will continue to be laid roads for by outside influences which I do not choose, but cannot help, to acknowledge. I have been steadily teaching myself mostly over the last three or four years simply to question. If there is anything which can help us build positively it is questioning. Once the idea of questioning everything is established – once that seed is sown –  the ability to reassess and to stop and wonder becomes not only an ability but a compulsion. Since making the conscious effort a few years ago not to take things at face value, and to properly determine the worth, the validity, and the goodness of things on their own merits, I have enjoyed riding with the changes I can feel in my own head. There is nothing more satisfying, and nothing more important for us as human beings than influencing a mind, even if to begin with that mind is only your own.

On becoming and being a Longhair

The Longhairs might sound like a clan of medieval Scandinavians, but aren’t. A Longhair is neither a species of monkey nor a type of carpet, as far as I’m aware. A Longhair is a man (sometimes a woman, too [see UrbanDictionary]) who (pay attention here, because this is pretty complex) has long hair. Longer hair, anyway, than most men, who subscribe so strictly to a shorn scalp. I came across the term on-line a few months ago when I was trying to find out what – if any – effect having hair longer than the average male’s would have upon my life. I was researching this, because now that I have long hair at last, I am pretty reluctant to let it go. At this point, I would honestly rather feel happy in myself and be looked at askance for it than to chop off my hair and blend in – outwardly, at least – with the crowd. People might (and do) see me and dismiss my ‘look’ as an immature rebellion against some indefinable authority, but I don’t see having my hair long as me making a statement. It’s just me enjoying existing in my most comfortable, natural state.

I clearly remember sitting in my classroom aged ten or eleven and wishing more than anything that I had hair that flopped down over my face at the front and tickled my neck at the back. I remember pulling at my fringe, which didn’t reach my eyebrows, and despairing over how long it would take to grow. Worse than the time it would take to grow was knowing that before long Mum would have me back in that bloody chair and Sue-the-hairdresser would be buzzing around my head with the electric clippers, that favourite line of Mum’s ‘when you’re older, and you’re paying, you can have it as you want it’ ringing in my exposed ears. It was so unfair! My sister was three years younger than I was and she got to have exactly what she wanted. I had to walk around looking like a boring boy – like a boy who played football and was friends with other boys. ‘This isn’t me!’ I was silently crying from beneath my high, straight, carpet-like fringe. When I watched the Disney films I lusted over the smooth wave of the men’s hair as they swung themselves about after the women. Tarzan was really fucking cool. Kind of attractive too, in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on just yet.

By the time power over my own appearance was finally granted me in my early teens, I had been struck by that fear of ‘being different’ that I’m sure plagues each of us who within him-or-her-self feels not quite the same as everyone else. I habitually shaved and sculpted my locks into the towering, gleaming sculpture of wax and fringe that was so popular amongst my male peers. I regret to admit that, furthering my appeal for normalcy, I played a (slightly pathetic) part in the ‘wars’ between ‘townies’ and ‘goths’ that broke out in the playing fields of my secondary school on a regular basis: I on the side of the gold-chained, wet-look, trackie-wearers, lobbing bottles, sticks, and stones at the  long-haired ‘weirdos’ in the corner. For this, I apologise. In my defence, I can only plead duress: that of peer pressure, made only more difficult to avoid by my own particularly crippling fear of exposure as not truly feeling I was one of the crowd.

I think I was fifteen when I finally decided to let my locks grow. My girlfriend (yes, really) of the time was disgusted by the idea. Long hair was for girls, and short hair for boys. She is now a fierce homophobe, or so I’ve heard. For the first time I made a conscious decision to do something I wanted to do even if it did set me apart from the majority. My hair grew, and I loved my floppy mop, swinging in my eyes and hanging over my school shirt collar way beyond the bristles of the other boys’ ‘dos. I would have liked to grow it out longer, but that still seemed like ‘goth’ territory, and not somewhere I wanted to venture unless I fancied a bottle across my own head, courtesy of my ex-war-mates.

I kept my hair relatively long, hanging somewhere between eye and upper lip level, following me through my ’emo’ experimentation, and my brief baggy-clothed ‘hippy’ identification, until I reached seventeen. At this point I followed that long-fringe, short-around-the-edges trend that was popping up in the fashion magazines and on all the trendy ‘indie’ boys of the time, but still enjoyed a good lip-level swish of fringe across my face. By the time I reached university in 2009, something had happened. In fact, something awful had happened, and it was not to end until the early months of 2011. Leaving school, I felt I had to somehow ‘change’ as my life did. I felt I should grow up, and I decided that meant adjusting my image to better suit others’ expectations of how a young gay man in 2009 should look. I began to wear make-up. I bought clothes in sizes I might now dress my big toe with. I once shaved my chest, and felt a bit sick. Worst of all, I cut my hair. I cut it to the scalp, leaving just a minimal flap of fringe, and I had the lot of it dyed a horrifying raven black. (When I was alerted to the colour’s contrast with my pasty face in mid-2010 I began staining my skin orange to counteract my ghostly glow.) Looking back at that time now, I can see what an idiot I was being, but at the same time I still understand how I was feeling. I was growing slightly more comfortable with myself inside than I ever had been in my teens, but how best to match that inner adjustment to my outward appearance remained a mystery. The basic thought process, I believe, went something along the lines of ‘well, I’m gay, so I’ll look gay’. Thus ensued a year and a half of a very strange period of my life. People I met at the time now tell me they thought it was odd even then, and that my personality and my garish appearance clashed more obviously than the raven hair and Caspar face had before the ‘tan’ had taken care of it.

It wasn’t until 2011 that I actually looked at myself in the mirror, probably whilst cooking my fringe with the straighteners, and thought ‘what the fuck is that?’ This, I believe, ended up sparking in me a shift that has transcended many more layers of myself beyond my skin. Over the last almost-two years I believe I have changed more than I ever have before. But that will be for another time. For now, we’re sticking faithfully to hair.

Growth: On June 30th 2011 (I remember the date because on that same day I bought a new railcard at Swansea train station, which I have kept as a memento), I got my last haircut. So, since then, it has uninterruptedly grown. ‘You should trim the ends, you know. It’ll grow faster.’ Bullshit. It’s grown perfectly, and I’ve not a split end in sight. Having abstained from blow-drying, straightening, and dying for this entire time, everything is just fine as it is, thank you. And as it has grown I have felt cosier, happier, and more relaxed in myself with every day passed. I am at peace with my outward self (my nose still isn’t straight, and I would like whiter teeth, and bigger arms, but time, lasers, and continued exercise will rectify these issues), and it is blissful.

The problems I face now are not my own, but those of the people around me. I am told I should cut my hair by various people, and for various reasons. Yesterday I was yelled and sworn at by a group of shaven-headed youths speeding by in a very small car, something about cutting my hair because of something to do with ‘look[ing] like a fucking girl’. I can ignore these Neanderthals easily enough, having grown used to their ignorant type in the town I’ve grown up in. Closer to home, however, the strong suggestions of a trip to the barber’s are not so easily pushed aside. My father tells me I should cut my hair for the good of my career, which I accept as fair advice. I know very well that discrimination over skin-deep elements occurs. But I don’t want to spend my time here pretending to be something other than that which I feel I am. So I feel as if I should say sod it to being employed by anyone who wants me to be their version of me. I want to be my me in all ways and in all the parts of my life until the day that it comes to its end. My sister tells me I should cut it, just because. Her friends, I hear, think I’m ‘not hot anymore’. How tragic. I’ve been told by another I should cut it because I need to ‘grow up’. If cutting my hair off truly constitutes ‘growing up’, then, please, call me Peter and let me be. If being a grown-up means allowing myself to be moulded by the crowd to the extent that I can’t even control what my hair looks like lest it should offend anyone by its differentness, then I’m quite happy playing in the trees and dreaming my days away with my curls around my ankles. Surely the greatest ability of the mature human mind is that which allows it to open itself up to all of those varieties of appearance, thought, and behaviour; to accept that differentness is not inherently bad, or in need of rectification; to do battle with the prejudices indoctrinated in the minds of children and which remain largely taken as gospel, and carried to the grave unquestioned. I don’t want to live my life in battle for assimilation. I am no longer the thirteen-year-old boy who consciously tailored his mannerisms to replicate those of the other boys around him so that they would stop calling him ‘girly’ and ‘gay’ (which I then considered an insult – I was a child homophobe). If the length of the filamentous biomaterial (cheers, Wikipedia) growing from my scalp offends you, then I suggest it is in fact you who has the issue in need of resolving. I won’t be getting a haircut, but please feel free to indulge in a little self-enlightenment. You really should.

You might say that I’m setting myself up for a struggle I needn’t undertake. You might say I should grow up and wholeheartedly conform. Watch The X Factor and stop thinking. Have a Big Mac and shut up. Cruise towards the end with a close-cropped cranium. Well, thanks for the advice, but no thanks. At almost eighteen months and counting, I consider myself Longhair and proud, and as long as my thinking remains much the same on this topic, only baldness might stop me now.

P.S. Mum says my hair is lovely, so there.

The onset of odious opinions.

Aside: I’ve been putting off posting anything. The last entry I made to this blog got a few really nice reviews from a few people whose opinions really matter to me and although I felt encouraged to begin with, I have inevitably ended up in battle with that great nemesis, Self-Doubt. I have told myself that what I wrote must have been a one-off. I must have fluked it. To begin with I thought ‘fuck, yes, Ben – you are good‘ and I had to hold myself back from quickly bashing out another entry to add to that which had received so much praise. Although I’m glad that I didn’t do that, I have now reached a point at which I feel I have to post something because if I don’t then I’ll lose my way and stop posting altogether, and people will stop paying attention. (Didn’t I, in my first or second post, declare that I was writing this mainly, if not solely, for myself? I am a liar. Who writes anything with the intention of nobody ever reading it? If someone writes a journal [which I have tried and failed at a couple of times] that they claim to wish nobody else to read, then I am almost certain that they are lying too, and at the very least dream of its posthumous reading by some unknown stranger of the future who will find it beneath the loose floorboard it was left beneath.) 

What I really wanted to write about leads on almost perfectly from what I wrote about in my last post. Worried about the possibly illiberal opinions my brother might develop in the next few years as he enters that minefield that is The Teens, I didn’t consciously suspect my eight-year-old sister of being the one more likely to take the path towards black-and-white conservatism. The girl is only eight years old. I can’t hold her responsible for everything that comes out of her mouth. She is regurgitating constantly. Half of the things she and her peers talk about they most probably don’t understand. But, sitting with her and my mother, I browsing Twitter, with Come Dine With Me on in the background last night, I heard her say “he’s gay – that’s disgusting”.  For a moment I almost let myself allow the moment to pass with nothing more than my own raised eyebrows and a moment’s eye-contact with my mother to mark it, but, realising that I was calmly controlling a deep stirring of anger inside myself, I felt obliged to say something.

Me: ‘Why is that disgusting?’

Her: ‘He’s gay. He kissed that man.’

Me: ‘Why do say think that’s disgusting?’

Her: ‘Because they’re gay.’

It went something like that. Not much was said, and my mum left the room on a household errand. Abbie remained and thought no more of my chirping up at her comment, and continued to play at whatever game she was creating for herself on the footstool. Again, although I told myself to breathe and let the matter lie, I felt I had to speak up. I asked her again why she had said what she’d said and she told me that being gay ‘isn’t normal’. I told her that’s fine, but that to be ‘not normal’ isn’t bad; that to be different from most other people doesn’t necessarily make someone a bad person. There is a great difference between ‘different’ and ‘bad’. I asked her where she had got this idea that for someone to be gay is inherently bad, and she named her peers at school. I asked her what she would think if someone she knows turned out to be gay, and she told me that had she known this person was gay from the outset then she would not have become friends with them at all. My brother entered the room and joined the conversation midway through, and offered the opinion that ‘gay people are just the same as everyone else: they just love different people’. I was relieved, and delighted, (see my last post – you’ll understand) because even if this is a regurgitated opinion too, then at least the opinions he has been fed are those which I believe should be offered to all children in this day and age. Where my sister and her friends have heard what they have heard I am at a loss to imagine. What parent, teacher, or any other adult exposes a child to as strong and damaging an opinion as that?

This is where my issue lies. The children are unaccountable, and will lap up whatever it is that they are handed. At some point they might rebel against those beliefs, but I believe that usually a child will follow its childhood influencers’ values to a fair degree. So what are these siblings of mine hearing that allows them – causes them – to think this way? Perhaps it is partly what they are not hearing. The film Weekend by Andrew Haigh includes a speech by Chris New as the character Glen, outlining his ideas about the overpoweringly dominant and exclusive nature of heterosexuality in popular culture and the complete lack of any gay role models in everyday life. On adverts, in books, films, TV, stories, songs, sport, and everything in-between, we see straight people. Homosexuals are today slowly being let out of the gloom into the light of the mainstream, but are still a long way from shedding the shackles of their social subdivision. It is still considered newsworthy for a gay couple to feature on a television advert. What impact does this have on my siblings? The idea that the gays must not be spoken of is blindingly obviously insidious. Like the devil, children learn that what is not to be spoken of is bad, and not to be trusted. Don’t let children know about drugs, because they’re bad. Don’t let children hear about the rape stories on the news, because they’re bad. Don’t let children watch horror films because they’re bad. Don’t let children develop awareness of homosexuality, because it’s bad.

Is this a valid argument? I believe so. I believe that if my siblings had grown up understanding that their big brother likes other men (they are yet to find out) the way that Daddy likes women and Mummy likes men, then there would be no question in their minds that there is nothing wrong – nothing even to comment upon – about homosexuality – that homosexuality just is. I believe that the sooner we bring up our children to think this way about homosexuality amongst the various other divergences from the norms of human nature that have for so long been lauded as the good against the otherwise bad, the better for our own social development. I won’t be letting the subject lie, and I have hope for my siblings yet.

The next step? The big reveal.

Brother

My brother will turn ten years old in less than a fortnight, just under a week after my own birthday. He, one of our two sisters, and I are in the house alone. Our sister was sleeping already. I sat with my brother on his bed and we both read separately. He often asks me, when I’m around, to sit there with him at bedtime.  I read Nausea; he, something about animals to begin with, before moving on to Read Me and Laugh. From the first book he read out facts about ants. The Fire Ant, I think, can kill a man in twenty minutes. He looked up my birthday in his next book, written as a diary, and showed me the poem on the page. It was about the carrying of the simple pleasures of childhood into later life: I can’t remember any of them now because I’m tired. I need to get to bed. One verse was about ice cream. Maybe the poem isn’t even about what I thought it was, but as I read it I realised he was experiencing one of the pleasures I remember from childhood: sitting late at night with somebody older, leaning on their big shoulder, moving up and down as they breathe; feeling so safe because there’s someone so much bigger by your side, and they’re on your side, and there’s nothing that could hurt you because they’re there.

My brother misbehaves. He shouts and screams and we don’t know why. He does this almost daily. But he is equally sweet, and helpful, and generous, and affectionate, and funny.

We both read for a while. He tired quicker, lay his book aside, and linked his arm through mine. Head on my shoulder, his breathing deepened and he dozed. I continued to read, and at the same time I felt an intense love for my brother. I don’t mention it as if I’ve not felt it before. I often do feel this way for the people I care about. But the peacefulness of the moment and the gentle breathing of my sleeping companion felt somehow poignant in its finiteness. He isn’t going to be this little boy for much longer, and I believe that when this boy is gone I will miss who he is at this moment. He won’t ask me to sit with him on his bed when he’s fourteen, and it wouldn’t feel the same to do that either. He won’t want to tell me how long it takes an ant to kill a man, or to show me what my birthday poem is. Sitting with him, letting my book fall back as I began to drift off too, I felt that feeling of love that makes me want to curl up so tightly that my face is tucked right into my heart and my knees are touching my head and I’m smiling like The Cheshire Cat.

I’m frightened of him growing up, of his teenage opinions of me and how I am, and how I am not what he is. He is as boyish as a boy can be. As much as he turns his nose up now, he will like girls. He doesn’t know that I don’t. I think he should have been brought up fully aware of that fact, but that is for another entry. Maybe that won’t ever be an issue. Maybe I’m underestimating my sibling’s liberalism. Still, as he grows older, the differences between us, I fear, are going to widen, and I’m going to miss moments like that moment when he fell asleep on my shoulder tonight, when I was just Ben, his big brother.

I woke up, and I tucked him into bed, treasuring the act.