What happened to a world full of correspondence of letter, a world full of individualisation of your handwriting and the magazine drawings of the acceptably unachievable perfect woman?
We seem to live in a world now where technology has taken over us. I look around me and I'm surrounded, just like many of us could agree. An instant buzz of the mobile and the ding of an email, the too familiar black and white text and those in speech bubbles, recreating a real life conversation. We have become so virtual. Yes, the basics have become useful, but not an unhealthy dependency we have all be guilty to admit too.
Children, touching iPads and iPhones, putting together virtual puzzles and forgetting the tangibility of those misshaped cardboard pieces. I realise now that this is what my photography lectures have been talking about with their film cameras and how we have changed that dramatically, shooting acceptably good quality on our phones. I hadn't seen it that way, but there is always two sides to every argument.
Sometimes when you walk away from technology, you really experience a pure version of yourself. I never gaze hour after hour on Facebook at the other girls deeming themselves hot, in competition with their female friends and surrounding males. I don't stare at online magazine sites trying to keep in touch with the fashion of 'right now'. All this and what makes the world perfect, to say the least in a girls eye, is forever changing, the whole world is forever changing. We need to find ourselves and respect ourselves. This is what has gone wrong and we don't seem to know our place in this world. Our politeness and respect as flopped. All this crime, drug usage and lusty sex is a distraction, a quick route to get us to our happy place, but does it really? Of course not. We want so much more than that. We want love and we want respect and how are we supposed to get it? Not by those ways. By respecting and loving yourself. If you can't love yourself first, then you will find it harder to love others around you. Everyone is deserving of someone.
We have become so troubled as world, so confused and full of angst and misunderstanding. But what we need to understand is that we are all in this together. We all started off with a fresh innocent face, crying for air on our day of birth. The world was at our oyster and no means superficial in our eyes. We had no idea what insecurity meant, just that we knew that pain could make us cry.
We get lost, we all lose our confidence somehow along the path of life. It's our job to react to it in the right way and gather it all up. We have to look within ourselves and find peace. Find calm, a natural euphoria that we can escape to drug and alcohol free. It's possible and it takes practice.
Just sit. Remove yourself from that buzz of technology. Feel the guilt but do it anyway. You deserve time for yourself. You deserve to heal and each day brings a new opportunity for that.
Smile. Smile to yourself in the mirror, feel the overwhelming embarrassment, stare into those eyes and soften that gaze. Hold your head up high, take in your flaws and smother them with acceptance, wear them with pride.
We should pass others, no matter who they are, with a knowledge that they hold pride within themselves. A knowledge that they may have problems too and realise that things in your life may not be as bad as it seems, even if may feel like it now.
We need to be open to change. Pride ourselves, the country we belong to and the world we share and live in.
The world shouldn't seem such a scary place. The only thing we need to change, is ourselves.
Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedom. Show all posts
Wednesday, 10 April 2013
Sunday, 3 March 2013
Freeing yourself from education's mould...
I remember when choosing your GCSE's was one of the hardest choices you had to make back when you were fourteen/fifteen. It was the start of deciding who you wanted to be. Someone had got this stick out and started poking you with it, pushing you to choose this subject or that subject and you just didn't know.
The decision wasn't too hard for me, I suppose. I love Art so that was definitely a 'Yes'. I also picked Geography and French. It was important to for me to have a language in there as we had been told that would look good on our CV's (Resumes).
However it is Art as an academic subject that I want to talk about.
If you are an Art lover, you probably spent many hours after school or on sunny and rainy days just drawing away. You invented imaginary people, gave me them a name, age and place of birth and signed your work with your full name and how old you were at that exact time, even that 7 and 3/4's business. Well I certainly did. Art is supposed to be limitless in how one expresses themselves and it's not just about drawings, it can be singing, photography or any creative subject. You will know that you're that kind of person and what you enjoy.
Up to GSCE level of Art, I had expressed myself so freely and reached a stage of, say drawing people that ended up in a kind of cartoon-like form throwing out any sense of proportion and shadows and shading. You could say I still wanted to belong in that cartoon world and I took Art in a fun way rather than serious. So drawing people wasn't for me but that's ok. It was when I got to choosing my topic for my Art exam. The duration was ten hours and we had to create a sketchbook and plan out beforehand. The topic was I, Me, Mine. You could say that the most limitless topic was right ahead and I got to thinking straight away. I had been working my way up the GSCE Art ladder with B's and due to get my first A. I was so sure and so confident about this.
As a nostalgic person, blossoming a new passion for photography, I created a pin board, a real tangable one that I was firstly going to paint on canvas but wanted the texture and photographs painted by hand. I hadn't painted enough, which was my outcome, leaving me with a C. It was Art, I was proud of it and it didn't meet the criteria.
The mould had begun.
My further education at college was quite limitless and experimental, particularly my Independent Project taking a photographic form on Teenage Stereotypes and the fact that barriers are often too high.
I moved closer to the photography dream and now in my second year of university, that mould of getting us to be a certain kind of photographer and use certain tools with certain expectations has been, well thrown upon us. I'm liking the fact of using old cameras, the real kind that people used when photography began, but growing up in a digital age, it's hard for me to flip back.
I'm not naturally technical, I'm shy on first meeting and here are teachers saying to the class of many others like me that "Being a photographer you have to be a people person." forcing it upon us like we didn't know or that wasn't us, that and crushing our dreams. Many of us are good with people, we don't have to be gregarious. But that's the mould they want us in, as if we couldn't be successful any other way.
I may be struggling with the pace of this river, but I work slowly to achieve the best results and to really learn and my communication is gentle and directive. But just because us 'quiet lot' with softer voices doesn't necessarily mean that is us inside. I know for a fact that isn't who I would describe myself. With building confidence slowly, that "people person" is going to come out of all of us, because it's there. We fell in love with Photography and Art for the expression and wanting to make something beautiful out of some instant. We probably didn't consider that we should have all these millions of business skills. Some may do, but there work could be lacking in what is Art. We're not all perfect.
What happened to Art being limitless, the world being limitless? Or was that part of life that defined us as children and now we have to face the professional world seeking success in a grey suit, striving for a Face that isn't really us?
When choosing your career? Make it natural, make yourself natural with the natural confidence and aura that just makes your clients/colleagues know that you are genuine in what you want to achieve. You might actually stand out that way.
It's ok to be that boulder in the stream. It's ok to stand still for a moment, resist the stereotype needs and do whatever you want to do and express that you want to express. Once that education is out the way, those gates can be opened if you let them.
Be limitless. Be You. Be Free.
The decision wasn't too hard for me, I suppose. I love Art so that was definitely a 'Yes'. I also picked Geography and French. It was important to for me to have a language in there as we had been told that would look good on our CV's (Resumes).
However it is Art as an academic subject that I want to talk about.
If you are an Art lover, you probably spent many hours after school or on sunny and rainy days just drawing away. You invented imaginary people, gave me them a name, age and place of birth and signed your work with your full name and how old you were at that exact time, even that 7 and 3/4's business. Well I certainly did. Art is supposed to be limitless in how one expresses themselves and it's not just about drawings, it can be singing, photography or any creative subject. You will know that you're that kind of person and what you enjoy.
Up to GSCE level of Art, I had expressed myself so freely and reached a stage of, say drawing people that ended up in a kind of cartoon-like form throwing out any sense of proportion and shadows and shading. You could say I still wanted to belong in that cartoon world and I took Art in a fun way rather than serious. So drawing people wasn't for me but that's ok. It was when I got to choosing my topic for my Art exam. The duration was ten hours and we had to create a sketchbook and plan out beforehand. The topic was I, Me, Mine. You could say that the most limitless topic was right ahead and I got to thinking straight away. I had been working my way up the GSCE Art ladder with B's and due to get my first A. I was so sure and so confident about this.
As a nostalgic person, blossoming a new passion for photography, I created a pin board, a real tangable one that I was firstly going to paint on canvas but wanted the texture and photographs painted by hand. I hadn't painted enough, which was my outcome, leaving me with a C. It was Art, I was proud of it and it didn't meet the criteria.
The mould had begun.
My further education at college was quite limitless and experimental, particularly my Independent Project taking a photographic form on Teenage Stereotypes and the fact that barriers are often too high.
I moved closer to the photography dream and now in my second year of university, that mould of getting us to be a certain kind of photographer and use certain tools with certain expectations has been, well thrown upon us. I'm liking the fact of using old cameras, the real kind that people used when photography began, but growing up in a digital age, it's hard for me to flip back.
I'm not naturally technical, I'm shy on first meeting and here are teachers saying to the class of many others like me that "Being a photographer you have to be a people person." forcing it upon us like we didn't know or that wasn't us, that and crushing our dreams. Many of us are good with people, we don't have to be gregarious. But that's the mould they want us in, as if we couldn't be successful any other way.
I may be struggling with the pace of this river, but I work slowly to achieve the best results and to really learn and my communication is gentle and directive. But just because us 'quiet lot' with softer voices doesn't necessarily mean that is us inside. I know for a fact that isn't who I would describe myself. With building confidence slowly, that "people person" is going to come out of all of us, because it's there. We fell in love with Photography and Art for the expression and wanting to make something beautiful out of some instant. We probably didn't consider that we should have all these millions of business skills. Some may do, but there work could be lacking in what is Art. We're not all perfect.
What happened to Art being limitless, the world being limitless? Or was that part of life that defined us as children and now we have to face the professional world seeking success in a grey suit, striving for a Face that isn't really us?
When choosing your career? Make it natural, make yourself natural with the natural confidence and aura that just makes your clients/colleagues know that you are genuine in what you want to achieve. You might actually stand out that way.
It's ok to be that boulder in the stream. It's ok to stand still for a moment, resist the stereotype needs and do whatever you want to do and express that you want to express. Once that education is out the way, those gates can be opened if you let them.
Be limitless. Be You. Be Free.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)