Strength Through Time.

Having just finished watching 'I Am The Elephant Man' on Channel 4 I can't help but take away with me a collective medley of emotions of sadness and hope. 

After the guy had undergone an operation to remove the tumours on the right-side of his face, his mother and brother entered his room and his mother was calling his name repeatedly. And it was so heart-aching to see her motherly calls go unheeded as her son laid still on the  hospital bed in agony and the blood seeping through the thick white bandages. Yet he managed to raise his hand, as if to be reaching for the person who brought him into this world whilst seemingly passing through another. Even after the operation and back at his small village, all he hoped for in having a 'normal' life was to be able to fulfill his duty as a son and look after his parents in old age...and this hope is what gave him the strength to live.

This human fragility is something that is particularly able to generate feelings of compassion in myself and more so poignant as I'm often dubbed as a rather cold person. Also, this helplessness seems to stoke an inner sense of responsibility to help and care for those who are less able to provide for themselves. If anything, responsibilities now have fallen to the societal steamroller that is hedonism and a rights-based culture.

But most fundamentally, I can't help but think, is this powerful resolve of the Chinese Elephant Man innate to all or is it self-learned through pain and denial of good things?

Return Of the Queen

Oh how my heart is filled with complete and utter glee at the moment. I'm still on a high after Meagan called me earlier on yesterday afternoon to tell me she'd got the job with CC in Canary Wharf. I'm so happy to have her back in London and revel in the moments we've shared since she came during first-term SOAS.

Her coming in June couldn't be more perfect. Me and Freddie will hopefully (if we manage to get our acts together) be coming back on the same flight and I'll be starting my job in the City mid-June onwards. It's fairly exciting. I know for a fact I won't be as non-chalant with work this year compared to last year's dread tax office experience buttressed with the medical typist position. 

Oh how i remember last summer as the hardest time I'd ever been in for quite sometime; having quickly exited an intense, 'long-term' relationship where I was left with anything but a fair and sincere explanation which had completely shattered my self-esteem. I remember for a time last July, I sat with an empty notebook in Starbucks and spent 3 hours trying to write down how i felt. I went home the same evening with 'broken' scribbled in fine blue ink on the first underlined page. 

I'm certainly on higher emotional planes right now but all the thoughts and feelings I'd managed to push out with the passage of time did rush through me again; that sudden heartbeat that reminds you of the suffocating situation where one can do nothing but accept a stalemate and move on. 

But I feel like the luckiest guy alive right now. Meagan's coming back is effectively going to be a partial reunion for the original group at SOAS. I wish Steph would come home and complete us!!!!

SQUEEEEE.