Weaving and layering
Growing up I was obsessed with art and writing. I’d stay up late poking my eye out with scissors trying to sew in the dark (sorry mum). I won an award for writing ‘the missing chapter of Alice In Wonderland’ at school (peaked too soon). I was always imagining and making and crafting and thinking.
After A-Levels I couldn’t for the life of me decide what I wanted to do next, so went for Social Anthropology which seemed to work in themes rather than a stream. I also decided to study languages, and decided on Arabic because fuck me if life isn’t hard enough already, right? I spent a year in Palestine and another few months in Lebanon.
But after uni I faltered. Untended trauma reared its head, and I sank into it. I took the first job that came along, then the next. Then finally, in 2018 I started to emerge from a long period of deep disassociation and found myself in a career in online learning. I’d apparently worked hard to get there, but it was very disconnected work and I felt disjointed, not where I had imagined I’d be. I couldn’t do the work I was hired to do.
The faint scent of freedom and clarity in the air prompted me on a quest to pick up living where I’d left off. I pottered off on a journey of process and discovery that has had many winding paths and revelations.
Last year I was left with the question ‘How might I weave the threads of myself to move forward?’ I felt much better in myself but the themes of who I was felt too far apart to make sense of.
Wrestling with that question took a long time. As part of answering it, I started looking at the educational system in the UK. I researched everything from OFSTED reports to curricula, from teacher training to career guidance and realised that I was struggling with this question because of the system - not because there is anything wrong with me.
The great narrowing
The educational and career system in the UK works to narrow us down. We’re pushed to go into certain streams at a young age - humanities, arts or maths and science. The urge is to specialise, to pinpoint, to declutter. There’s no real room for a polymath in this version of the world, or for the interdisciplinary creatives we so badly need for true systems change. The great narrowing works to reduce things to black and white, to endlessly try and simplify the complex systems in which we live, love and work.
Once I realised this, I began to wonder if the answer would be to resist the urge to clarify. When it comes to building a new starting point for my life’s work, I have been trying very hard to hold myself open to the complexity of what is needed. I decided to work in themes rather than streams, and there are several…
anthropology
language
painting
learning facilitation
trauma recovery
coaching
poetry
Change is the umbrella I use for these themes because everything changes. There’s space for curiosity and enquiry. I like to use guiding questions for enquiry rather than resolutions and goals. I value openness and I’m letting go of the idea of ever finishing anything. With each new course, learning, book or training I attend, there’s a sense of layering and weaving knowledge that can mulch and emerge into the next project I take on.
I’ve been lucky enough with clients so far that they are happy to be co-creators of playful enquiry into complexity, and long may that continue.