Marsden is Here

Several months ago this thread on Unpaid Emotional Labour came to my attention via Facebook. It is a very long and emotionally fraught conversation in which many people shared their own personal stories and which at that time took me about 5 hours to work my way through, before I left it open in a permatab to re-read and post about at a later date.

If 5 hours sounds a bit much, just recently a condensed version (pdf)

This thread was especially useful to me in adding language and concepts around emotional labour to my toolkit, and shining a light on
- how much of it I actually do in my life and whewre; which is sadly apparently more than is generally expected of men in our society and yet still much less than is expected of women.
- how ways in which I have gone looking for support in the past may have amounted to causing unwanted emotional labour for my friends, for which I am sorry.

A lot of the stories/bits of quotes resonated in other ways too, and my intention in saving the thread for later is still to go through and pull some of those quotes fully out of that context and into mine, to unravel some of those emotional chords. That is however not this post.

Learning another language is something which I've occasionally thought I should do, but never gotten around to. I seriously looked at taking Russian when I started University, but there was just no way a language paper fitted into my science-and-maths loaded timetable.

Now opportunity, finances and motivation have all aligned. However said motivations are rather more complex than just revisiting an old desire.

- there are parts of my brain that have lain neglected for to long, probably since I stopped having or finding the time to read for pleasure on a regular basis. Learning a human language will provide stimulation and exercise to those.

- I suffer from a common flaw of the bright child - I never learned to study, and that has come back to bite me repeatedly. As a result many things get put in the too-hard basket; I often do not deal well with being asked to do something where I will need to knuckle down and learn something I am not interested in / quickly proficient at. I know I will not succeed in learning a language without also developing some of those skills. (Better late than ever ;) )

The first lesson was yesterday, a class of five (including myself) mostly consisting of friends I have known for years and who all put their hands up when I asked who else might be interested. I was a little surprised by the amount of interest actually, I had expected maybe one or two people from my wider circle. The calibre of the company makes me far more optimistic about the likelihood of long-term success.

It was never in question that learning a new language was going to be challenging. Only halfway through the lesson my brain started going "nope" and refusing to process any input it didn't recognise - a characteristic I'm well familiar with and exactly one of the things I hope to improve on. To be fair to my brain I wasn't at my sharpest to start with after a long several days and a night of little sleep.

More positively it was only shortly after the lesson that turning over and examining the bits I had retained started. Revision will hopefully catch the rest -I have just completed my first pass and already some more things seem to be clicking.