Mentality Matters

Class and identity are often things you don't have to consider until you are removed from your normal, comfortable circumstances and forced to consider them.

How can you know that you're an outsider until you're placed on the outside looking in?

How can you understand that your outlook, your mentality, your voice, your personality, your sense of being makes you different? 

Rooted in our core like stubborn weeds are the phrases spoken to us, as well as the phrases spoken by us, that reinforce our sense of “other”. 

And if we finally begin to uproot ourselves, we find a terrifying lack of safety net to catch us if we fall. 

There’s no family to bail us out. 

“It's pointless, only the best of the best will ever make it, try something else.”

No financial security to pursue the arts. 

“Don’t bother with film, you’ll never get a job.”

We are constantly swimming against a changing tide whilst looking for the shoreline - and when we finally see it, we glimpse: our friends, peers, colleagues, strangers, watching on, smiling and thinking that we’re such a strong swimmer! 

Look at us go! 

But actually we’re exhausted, and barely staying afloat. While they’re comfortably lounging on a lido funded by a relative's helping hand, or the self-proclaimed belief that they will be successful because those seeds were planted in them from a young age. 

We feel the tightening grip of those roots.

Trying to pull us down under the waves…

So find a bloody good weed killer.

And get to work. 

Because we have a lot of people to prove wrong, and I know you're stubborn enough to do it.

#workingclass #creatives #writing #expressing