Hello my lovelies!
After a month of waiting for Call Us Angels to be marked for my London's Theatre MA at Roehampton University, I'm back and raring to go!
In this short and sweet blog, I'm going to reflect on my break and share some ideas for the future of the project.
If this sounds like it'll be your cup of tea, read on my loves and let me know if you have any ideas for the future of the project in the comments. I always love to hear from you all.
Hope you enjoy x
I'm sitting here on my incredibly uncomfortable IKEA white office chair that has so many tea stains on it that it has turned more of a spotty brown colour - remnants of the year gone by where it felt like a hot cuppa was the only thing that kept Call Us Angels going. I'm listening to some old school Mariah Carey (Always be my baby, if you really wanted to know), trying to distract myself from the anxiety I feel as a result of trying to write my first Call Us Angels blog since September.
For me, writing is like pulling out one of my teeth using the old door and string technique, except the string keeps on breaking instead of successfully pulling the tooth out. Writing hurts. Really hurts. It's hard, and always fills me with dread and anxiety. As soon as I feel like I'm getting somewhere, and that I might be able to pull the tooth out, the string snaps. I lose my train of thought and forget what I was trying to write in the first place. Apparently it's a dyslexic thing. But for so long, I just thought it was a 'Charlotte' thing.
Photo credit: shutterstock.
During my month long break from Call Us Angels, I have been thinking a lot about how hard it is for me to write. I've also been thinking about the struggles I have with reading too. Sentences often intertwine with each other, cutting each other off in a dance to try and grab my attention. It's a long and arduous process, made all the more difficult when reading academic texts from academic minds who assume that those reading have the vocabulary of an academic genius.
This needs to change.
So how does this relate to Call Us Angels? Have I just been selfishly waffling on about my struggles to write and read during my MA? Perhaps. But I think there's more to it than that...
During Call Us Angels, I started to realise that a lot of the texts I was accessing to do with gender and the ecological crisis were only available to me because: 1. I was part of an academic institution and could therefore afford higher education + 2. despite my struggles, I was able to have the time to work through the complicated + scientific languages used within these texts. The more of these texts I shared on the Call Us Angels' Instagram, the more fellow angels wanted to know. Except many didn't want to read the actual text... they wanted to know what was in them, asking me to write short paragraphs about what the text said. They didn't have the time to sit down and read, and many didn't feel confident delving into scientific papers that use overly complicated language and scientific jargon.
I also realised that there is so much I still don't know about climate change, the ecological crisis and gender, despite the fact that I have spent the last year researching these issues in depth. It isn't just me who doesn't know, it's a nationwide issue. Newspapers only share a fraction of the impact climate change and the ecological crisis is already having on our world.
This is unacceptable and needs to change too.
Misinformation is prevalent. We talk about climate change and the ecological crisis being solvable through lifestyle changes. Admittedly lifestyle changes may help, but the crisis is bigger than that and is dangerously close to becoming irreversible.
Cooperate companies greenwash, telling us that they are changing their ways to become more eco-friendly, more sustainable, as long as we continue to buy their products.
This greenwashing is permeating its way into our conversations, into the language we use to share knowledge and talk about climate change and the ecological crisis. Only certain voices and solutions are heard.
We are lying to ourselves and this needs to change too.
All of these realisations have stayed with me, and have pushed me to do more research and more thinking. They have also made me consider the changes Call Us Angels needs to undertake in order to continue to share and receive knowledge about climate change and the ecological crisis from many different voices.
As a result, some things are going to be different going forward:
I've realised that posting every day of stories is exhausting, and that actually I love posting on my feed. Going forward, I still will be posting on stories but there won't be that demand for daily posting. Furthermore, there will be more posts on my feed in order to get information out into the world in short chunks. On Monday I will post a reading list for the week. On Thursday there will be a sneaky preview post to Friday's video. On Friday there will still be a video reflecting on the week, but this will be posted later on in the day to fit around my other commitments.
I'm going to be doing a PhD looking at how an ecological framework could be used to share knowledge about climate change and the ecological crisis. I don't know how this will connect in to Call Us Angels yet, but it is something that I will be sharing on the platform as I continue to explore the issues I've highlighted above. If you want to find out more about the research I have been conducting around these issues, let me know and I'll write a blog with references.
There will be more workshops in 2021! My aim for Call Us Angels was to enable other women to explore the relationship between gender and the ecological crisis by making their own trash wings. Although this is not how my MA turned out, it is something that I hope to work on in the future. So prepare yourselves for live wing making sessions on Instagram! I also realise that me pumping out information into the social media sphere is not helpful and that Call Us Angels needs to be an interactive conversation where knowledge is past back and forth between us. I hope to make this site and the Instagram more interactive to reflect this.
I promised myself that this would be a short and sweet blog, but I feel like its become more than that. Perhaps this is a realisation to myself that changes need to take place and that these changes are necessary and positive.
Thank you all so much for coming on this journey with me. I value your presence and your thoughts on Call Us Angels. I missed you all a lot during my break and hope that the next year will bring this community of angels closer through knowledge sharing, laughter and comfort.
Bring it on!