Posts by Adele:
A Meeting of Me
I’m three months shy of my 30th.
Whatever anyone (generally those already through the gates) says, it is a landmark. It looms. It is a reminder of dreams, goals and promises made by Younger You.
I don’t know about you, but I have a conflicted relationship with the Younger Adeles. I’m trying to explain to a couple of them where I am now, and by and large, they’re looking at me like I haven’t just made a wrong turn, I’ve lost the map, if not the entire plot. They are shaking various ‘before I’m 30′ checklists at me, woefully unchecked.
So if I’m honest, this Meeting if Mes isn’t going brilliantly.
They don’t care that I’m as single as they were; they never have. They do, however, want to know what happened to my equestrian career; a couple of them are not hugely impressed at the financial situation (although others are not the least surprised); and don’t even get them started on the question of That Book That’s Supposed To Be Finished, Remember?
I understand their confusion. Adele of a year ago, for instance, considered the group exercise studio to be the actual and only point of a gym. The gym floor was a foreign country, a place where people inflicted complicated looking machinery on their bodies, grunted and generally displayed a range of expressions amongst which enjoyment was suspiciously absent.
Adele of five years ago had never even stepped inside a gym.
So I’m telling her I’m a Personal Trainer now, and she’s employing a three-word phrase that starts with ‘what the’ and ends with a rude word plus optional question mark.
I show her my first poster.
Despite herself, she is mildly mollified by the evidence of this transformation from her ungainly, uncoordinated and famously unfashionable self into someone who can stand on her head – although she doesn’t entirely see the point.
I tell her that I’m teaching in a three hour Body Combat marathon tomorrow; she agrees that’s pretty awesome.
I tell her I have an existing job where I can legitimately pretend to be Buffy, and a hobby where I can dress up and pretend to be Wonder Woman, Elektra, River Tam, Korra and generally an adult female of elegance and style; at this, she’s deeply surprised.
She goes to put the familiar prefix of ‘I can’t…’ ahead of all those things, all those pictures, and I gently correct her with the new reality of ‘I can.’ I tell her that as a PT, I have a job where I help people take their weaknesses, doubts and fears and turn them into strength; and I reckon she’s almost impressed.
Damn her stubbornness though, she still wants to know where the book is. Where the TV series is. Where the writing career is. Where the horse is.
I find myself starting to answer with ‘I can’t…’
…and she calls me a bloody idiot and points at the PT poster. Asks me how it is I’ve transformed her many uses of ‘I can’t’ into ‘I can’, but taken her most sincere ‘I can… (have a writing career by 30)’ and turned it into a goddamn can’t.
At first, I cannot answer her.
And then I realise that I avoid the Younger Adeles through shame. I ask them, collectively, not to be disappointed in me. They confer, and agree that as none of them can find our ass with an atlas, I had little chance of sticking to the map in the first place, and at least I now have a better ass to be found.
They bullishly gather, my many Mes, and remind me of their youthful dreams.
They suggest that I stop wasting energy avoiding them, and redirect it towards Future Adeles. Given the trajectory of life to date, I cannot project where they will be, or what they will be doing. I fully suspect to be surprised.
But I can make a commitment to them now: to root out the crippling examples of ‘I can’t’ and turn them into ‘I can’. This process, it starts in the gym with acts as simple as the pull-up and ends with The Book That Will Be Finished. And whatever I learn, as a Personal Trainer I will pay these lessons forward.
For the next Meeting of Me, I have a dream, one I refuse to allow to become a regret: a dream in which all parties present are proud.
Taking the 48Hr Challenge
>> post originally written for and posted on Chris Jones’ blog I’ve been going to the SF London Film Fest a few years now, and annually considered the people who undertook the 48Hr Film Challenge to be a pack of loons. Having now completed it, I can safely confirm this as truth. I’m a novice [...]
Life’s too short not to be Leia: SFX Weekender 3
If the geeks do inherit the earth, rejoice my friends, because they know how to throw a damn good party. Now since arriving on the fair shores of Albion I’ve been no stranger to the writing, film, TV and comics fan scene, and there is photographic evidence of me prancing around in a wannabe Xena/Angua [...]
Love Fail: Fantasy v Reality
In which I fall in love with a jacket, or possibly a man, and then certainly a fantasy of the man, which despite his being a pretty decent prospect, usurps any possible reality. In short, why I am fast approaching my 10 year anniversary of undisturbed spinsterhood. I’m in the tube station leaving Oxford Circus [...]
Notes to self for LSF
So it’s here, the London Screenwriters Festival has arrived and let’s be fair, based on the experiences of the pre-pitching day, there are a few things that I need to remember: 1. leave the cloppy heels at home if I’m going to continue to be unable to sit for more than 40 mins at a [...]
Business Card Aaaargh
The London Screenwriters Festival is almost upon us, which is an occasion on which forcing your business card upon people politely offering your business card to every moving body is deemed socially acceptable, if not mandatory. Packs of writers will rally one another to bouts networking courage through little competitions, like who can give out [...]
Exercise for Writers – part 2
Writer? Finding it hard to exercise? Check out Part 1 of Exercise for Writers, and then do continue… Number 3 Appreciating exercise as a way of exercising the imagination. So with No1 and 2, you’re multi-tasking to maximise efficiency of a passive exercise (watching/listening) with an active exercise. But there’s definitely a split in concentration [...]
The ‘E’ word (for writers) – part 1
Oh yes, today’s subject is… exercise. Yes, for writers. Though I’m a fitness professional, I hardly ever talk about the E word by choice – mostly because people seem to want to talk to me about it all the time, generally hoping for magic fixes. Go away, there are none. Unless you’re Steve Rogers. But [...]
Say Yes
So last Monday, I go to Starbucks to write as usual before work. The usual folk don’t bat an eyelid, but irregular early morning coffee folk keep kind of skirting around me. Later, whizzing past cars stopped at a red outside Notting Hill Police Station, I was blinded up a huge pollen-laden blast on wind [...]
Schedule of Awesome (and the C word)
Let’s be honest about this: I am hardly the most qualified person to manage my own life. I’m overly curious, endlessly interested, easily excitable, more easily distractible. Is ‘distractible’ a word? ‘Distractable?’ Whatever. You know what I mean. Attention span of a – - where was I? Oh, life management. Fortunately, while we may not [...]