Utter creative limitlessness!

Uni is all encompassing, taking over not only actual time but also my mind as thoughts and ideas dash around and I begin to either build upon, store or dismiss them as appropriate.

This never ending process is exhilarating most of the time as it confirms life in its splendor and is only contained by conscious choice or the lack of ability to think further, harder, differently, effectively, or just more.

So tonight I still have two assignments waiting to be written. I am working on them. I have been working hard on them (in between writing poetry which for some damn reason won't take a low profile at the back of my mind for a couple of weeks...it keeps seeping out!) but then after a few hours I realise my thoughts have turned creative again!

So I start thinking film topic. Next semester I have to make a short film (again) but from what I understand this time kind of marrying two, or perhaps more, forms of creative media or art.

So I'm messing about thinking about this idea. It needs to be simple yet thorough. Challenging with levels of 'moving on' comfort zones. Abstract but not offending the viewers integrity... and so it goes on.

As I began mulling over these thoughts a little more I realised my ideas needed to be something that was a journey for me too. Maybe a theme or issue that I would begin to understand differently, and/or maybe even develop more and grow as a person too. If I wasn't part of the journey how could it hold worth or be real? Sounds big headed I know! Yet I felt to solely observe others and give commentary as some kind of voyeur seemed to suggest that I was somehow different, better, or superior. If I've learnt one thing from winning the Adult Learners' Award it's that I'm part of 'us' which is really cool and I want to work 'with' other 'us' people (in this case other disabled people), in order to learn and share because this society is generally an unfair place where we have to fight our invisibility repeatedly.

While all this was going on I'm messing about with the web cam, playing with the controls for effects and I start taking pictures:



and I was stunned! Here I am a severely disabled, morbidly obese, ugly and hindered woman, yet this picture of me, even though I say it myself, made me look completely different to that, in fact I looked pretty good! And then I did another:



and although different to the other, I liked this one too.

So my thoughts turned to the idea of how I see myself, which moved on to how other disabled people see themselves.... and maybe how the 'them' that stereotype us see us too.

But more importantly how we feel about our bodies and what they can or can't do, or might want to do, whether they be deformed, unable to be used, scarred, painful, frightened, restricted...... whatever it may be.

So maybe poetry, photography, art, prose, in their utter limitlessness, can become expressions of the journey that tell the stories - not the theory - of complete and whole 'us' people. We don't have to actually become complete or whole, we already are, but I know that I, probably like hundreds and hundreds of other disabled people, have soaked in a lifetimes negativity about myself, from the medical institutions where 'we' fail to be healed, to the education institutions where many of us were segregated or underfunded in mainstream - so 'we' fail to become educated... and ultimately 'we' fail to live with absolute equality, in communities where other people believe and perpetuate the lies and deceit we may have learnt to be truth.

Much more thinking is needed - hopefully after the assignments are finished and not necessarily at 3.43am!!!