Last week we headed to Belfast to a live podcast. I listen to the Blindboy podcast weekly and for Christmas my partner got us tickets to see him live. Again, like my trip to Co. Offaly the other week, I didn’t bother with the google maps. I know how to get to Belfast, but I don’t know the city very well. Sure if we’re stuck we’ll stick on google maps. Turned out her phone network didn’t operate data in Northern Ireland and I was after getting a new phone and I didn’t know that you had to turn on the data roaming settings thingy, so we ended up just having to wing it. I pulled up at a parking spot along a Belfast street so we could get out and ask someone where the Waterfront Hall was, but before we could ask anyone I realised it was right there in front of us, how easy was that?
Blindboys guest tonight was Daisy Fancourt, a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London. Daisy was the lead researcher of the UK’s largest study about the psychological and social impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. She also directed an international network of hundreds of longitudinal studies exploring the global mental health impact of the pandemic. However, her main interests were in art and how the arts can be used as a cure, not just for society as a whole but also for our own individual suffering. She recently wrote a book about it called Art Cure.
On her website she states that Art Cure examines the role of the arts in healthcare, demonstrating how artistic engagement can support both mental and physical health outcomes across a range of clinical conditions. It highlights the impact of the arts across the life course, from the role of music in shaping children’s brain development to the ways in which creative hobbies help maintain cognitive resilience and reduce dementia risk in later life. The book also outlines how participation in cultural activities, such as attending concerts, museums, and theatre, can lower the likelihood of future loneliness and physical frailty.
Daisy’s hope is that one day engaging in art for health benefits will become the norm for everyone, and not just thought of as a bit airy fairy. She went on to highlight that engagement in exercise for health benefits back in the 1970’s and 80’s was once laughed at. Whereas now, the majority of people know and except how important exercise is. Even a half hour walk a few times a week is enough. Daisy hopes the same will happen for art.
Blindboy himself went on to talk about how art wasn’t taken seriously at school when he was young. As he put it, you were either good or bad at crayons. If you were bad at crayons you weren’t encouraged to continue with art. That wasn’t a good thing as art is a great way of expressing ourselves and some of the best art comes from repeated failure. By encouraging people to engage in art whether they are good or bad, teaches resilience by being ok with failure in the process of creating art.
This made me think back to my own days in school through the 1980’s and 90’s. Ireland was going through a transformation as we were embracing being part of Europe. Ireland now had money and we were building a new economy based on technology. It was bred into us at school that there was going to be great opportunities for us all, and if we worked hard and got into a good university we could take up those opportunities.
I had a slight problem at school, I had a stutter. Well I still do, but it was more of a problem when I was a kid. Now as an adult it’s only a minor thing that pops up unexpectedly from time to time, and some people wouldn’t even know I had a stutter. A stutter is a speech block officially known as ‘Childhood Onset Disfluency Disorder’ a disorder very closely related to PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder). In very rare cases stuttering is caused by brain damage from stroke or other physical head trauma, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Stuttering, or stammering is a psychosomatic symptom, it’s a misfiring of the bodies nervous system in response to our perception of our external environment. Psychosomatic symptoms is the nervous systems way of bypassing rational thought in order to keep us safe even if the threat is not real. I’m not going to go into more detail about the specific causes of a stutter, it’s very complex. Using the biopsychosocial model, there is biological, psychological, and social factors to stuttering and it deserves more time and space to try and explain it. But in short it’s not the actual physical stuttering or blocking of words that’s the problem, everyone does that from time to time, but rather it’s the fear of the social reaction to it, it’s the fear of social rejection for expressing oneself. No one event, person, or thing was to blame for my stutter, it was a combination of a lot of different things. Nowadays, must of us have heard of the fight, flight, freeze or fawn response to danger, or the least the first two, fight or flight, well speech blocks are a part of the freeze response.
Anyway, at primary school I got the usual teasing from the other kids but actual intentional bullying only really came from a very small group of kids in my school. Funny enough some of the other kids that sometimes laughed or teased me actually had my back when I really needed it. I also had my small group of close friends. Art was how I coped with having a stutter, that’s where my focus was taken away from my speech and towards drawing and music. It was here that I could find my flow and often when I had to speak while engaging with art I spoke with no stutter at all, it was freeing for me. It was my way of expressing myself without fear. That’s why traditional speech therapy alone is a waste of time for treating a stutter as there is nothing actually wrong with the child’s speech. I would argue that the best treatment would be a combination of both speech therapy and psychotherapy. Unfortunately, that would be out of reach for a lot of families these days. If I had to choose one form of therapy, I’d choose the psychotherapy.
Over time my drawing transformed into comic book characters in which I’d make up all sorts of different scenarios that they would get themselves into. I dreamed of becoming an animator for a gaming software company, and interestingly at 10 years old I taught myself how to code computers from magazines and could create simply little video games. Musically, I played the tin whistle, piano, and the trumpet. I was best at the piano, I didn’t really like the tin whistle and I was just ok with the trumpet. I didn’t sing much. I didn’t really like it, I just done what I had to do to pass my yearly music exams. But most importantly, I never remember having problems with my speech while engaging with all this, and if I did I wasn’t self-conscious about it.
In secondary school, gaining a place in university became number one priority. In the first year I was able to take all the subjects to sample what I liked including art. There was no music in this school. But after the first year I had to choose subjects to do state exams in. I done what was expected of me and I dropped art in favour of studying a language to help secure a university place, French in this case. I clearly remember my art teacher being genuinely shocked and she begged me to speak to my parents and reconsider. I didn’t, and I continued with the ‘grand plan’, whatever that was. Apart from my art teacher, nobody was telling me that studying art at university was a serious thing.
Over the next two years I could still cope with school as I still had my music after school, two evenings per week at piano and two evenings per week playing trumpet with the local concert band. I never really studied at school. I just done the bare minimum, but was still getting decent grades, although apparently not decent enough for university. So music was dropped so I could focus on my studies. However, I now had zero artistic expression, my emotions had nowhere to go. I shut down. I had no way of expressing myself.
The only other thing that interested me at school was computers. The class was about basic coding, but the teacher was new to the job, very young and inexperienced. She couldn’t control the class and the other students walked all over her, it was just a class full of noise. There’s one thing I never did at school and that was disrespect a teacher. I quietly called her over, I showed her the coding that I self-taught myself as a kid and asked her straight out ‘am I going to learn anything more than that here, and if not may I please leave to do something else’. She said she was sorry she couldn’t teach me anymore than what I already knew and if I wanted to find a quite spot somewhere else I could do other work. I did find a quite spot, it just happened to be outside where I could smoke cigarettes.
I became hyper focused on my speech which became a massive problem for me. I remember my French teacher asking me to read something out, I just sat there in silence. The teacher thought I didn’t know the words, but I did, I just couldn’t get the words out. I got violently slapped across the head for that, not once, not twice, but three times. So now I learned that that having a stutter was such a bad thing that I got physically attacked for it by an adult.
I shut down that much that during a business studies class when the teacher realised I had fallen so far behind, she pulled me aside and started shouting at me that I was a waste of space and that I’ll end up being a nobody. I just stood there taking it, saying nothing, trying not to burst out crying. You tell a 16 year old those things, they’ll believe it. She ordered a suspension from school and sent me to the principal’s office to start the process.
As I entered his office and I couldn’t hold it back anymore and broke down in tears. He had his eye on me for a while, he noticed a change in me. When I calmed down he informed me that he didn’t think school was the best place for me, and that I was 16 years of age and therefore legally I was free to leave. He knew I was from a farming background and was good with my hands so I’d have no problem finding work. He rang my parents to explain everything, and that was that. It was still 1990’s Ireland, so let’s ignore the fact that this young 16 year old was more than likely suffering depression, but we don’t talk about that, lets deal with anger and other difficult emotions in other unhealthy ways shall we. Just smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol , and keep busy like a normal person and if things get too much, sure you can always project those emotions onto someone else.
In later life I did get the chance to deal with all that emotion I went through, and I’m so grateful for that. But you can see how art had such a positive impact on my life, and the negative affect it had when I no longer engaged with it. As an adult now I can look back with a different perspective. Yes, I had every right to be angry at those teachers that wronged me, but I can understand that that French teacher was off an older generation. I’m not sure about the laws in the 1990’s but I’m fairly sure it was illegal for an adult to hit a child, but when he was at school it was perfectly legal to physically abuse a child. He was probably battered black and blue by the Christian brothers. He may of carried that trauma with him, repressing it as best he could, and in the heat of the moment project that anger onto another child, in this case me. I can understood that.
My business study teacher was of a younger generation. She was probably at school just before Ireland started to build the new economy and good jobs were probably a little harder to find. Her parents probably told her to study teaching so she could find a good safe civil servant job with a pension. Nothing wrong with being a teacher, we badly need them, just do it because you actually want to. The art was probably bet out of her too. She probably seen the deadness behind my eyes which unconsciously remained her of herself and then projected her own frustration onto me. I can understand that too.
The principle was more than likely coming from a place of empathy, but he was wrong. School was the right place for me, it was just the wrong school. Most of the teachers were ok and there guidance was coming form a good enough place. My art teacher was the only one there that could see my potential, but she was cheering from a very small corner. The noise of ‘what you should be rather than what you are good at’ was far louder.
As for the very small group of bullies in primary school, I don’t know much about what happened them in the years after school. However, I did learn that one of them committed suicide a few years ago. It doesn’t excuse the way he treated myself and others, but he must have been experiencing tremendous suffering and the only way he could relieve it was to try and project his suffering onto others, and I can understand that too. Where I just needed art that other little child needed a lot more help and support.
The above is just a snap shot of my experiences as a child without risking oversharing. I’m not alone in these experiences and a lot of children go through these struggles, especially during that difficult period of transition between being a teenager and young adulthood. My struggles just happened to revolve around my speech. Art was so important for my well-being, but I also had another ally and that was nature. Nature was another safe place for me to express myself and was where I spent the remainder of my spare time as a child, playing and learning about nature either on the farm or in my granny’s back garden.
I never really integrated art life back into my life in the same way as I did as a child. As an child, art was my safe place to express myself but now as an adult nature is my safe place to check in on my mental health and help process emotions. It’s a place where I can reassure my nervous system that the world where I live is generally a safe place, and even if I experience social rejection, it cannot kill me, I’ll be just fine. Interestingly, the more I engage in this process in nature the more creative ideas seem to emerge within me.
Much like Daisy hopes that engagement with art for health benefits will become the norm in the very near future, I would add to that and hope that engaging with nature will also become the norm. Ecopsychology research has shown us that humans are genetically programmed to feel at home in nature which makes nature a source of comfort and gives us a sense of belonging. This calms our nervous system, reducing blood pressure and reducing the stress hormone cortisol, which in turn will reduce anxiety, depression, and rumination while enhancing mood and cognitive function.
So that’s what I thought about while at the Blindboy live podcast which is in itself is an act of engaging with art. We started making our way home after the show, again without google maps, how hard could it be. Sure there’s the sign for the M1 motorway, follow that. I soon remembered that the M1 in Northern Ireland is not the same road as the M1 in the South, we were heading west instead of south. Ah for f#!k sake, smartphones are handy now and again, aren’t they!
Ultan
No AI used in the above post and the image used is my own doodle
