The International Writers Magazine: Rebel at your peril

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Blame Yourself • Michelle Cochrane From day to day our perspective on whom we admire changes. Just the other week, I was worshipping the terrible tune of Buffalo Stance by Nina Cherry. As I bounced around my room, the cries of ‘Please switch that off’ and ‘Shut the hell up’ came from my housemates. Little did I care, it was all about me and I was going to dance to it god damn it. As we grow up though, our perspective begins to change. From the first time that you see your father drunk and realise that he is just human after all… to the day that you piss you mother off so much that she bursts into tears and actually tells you that she is sorry, we learn something new and exciting.

That’s why I get so annoyed when I hear the familiar moan of…’I have nothing to do’…or ‘I’m bored’. You just have to look at the news to really see what boredom is. To see that there are thousands of people in serious trouble, yet we can turn around and so flippantly say those words while our X-boxes or satellite television lie in front of us. How dare we! But we do dare, and the reason? Because we are who we are and we were brought up as we were.

My father used to make me and my sister sit down and watch the ten o’clock news every night and of course I always questioned why. Now at least I know. He’s a well off man, yet we never saw a penny of it, always taught to work for our own money and to get along by ourselves, in a land of opportunities, where let's face it, we get the long straw.

So I did, I went through life, rebelling at every opportunity and finding myself unhappily working at a bank, always knowing that I wanted to go to university but just refusing to do so, as I wanted to make my own choices and not have them made for me. The stupid thing about this, is even though I thought that I had the upper hand, I never did. My Dad knew that one day, I would turn around and say that I wanted to go to university. He knew that I had a longing for knowledge and unless that was fulfilled, then I would never be happy. I would in fact be bored with the hand that not life, but I had dealt for myself.

So now I find myself here, struggling through a course that I assumed would be easy for me. How little did I actually know. But I really do enjoy the struggle. Sometimes I fail and sometimes I succeed. More the former than the latter but that makes the success somehow more sweet. I know that in a couple of years from now, I will look back and want to thank the people that got me here because even though I am the one who has chosen this path, I would never have gotten through the mud without them. I am also never going to blame boredom on anyone else again!

© Michelle Cochrane Feb 2nd 2005 - 2nd Year Creative Arts student at Portsmouth University

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