As I sit here in my cupboard room listening to the dulcet tones of Mayhem's 'De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas' I am reminded of the day when I first arrived to the campus. At that time I was living in halls, had only visited the college once for my interview in August and really did not know what I was going in to. To be totally honest I didn't particularly know what the course I would be studying involved and wasn't nearly 100% on why I was there.
I remember walking through the corridors with my meagre belongings thinking to myself, 'I'm really not going to find anyone here who likes metal, comic books and the bass am I. This is going to be a lonely three years...'. It turns out I found someone who liked one of the three, a couple of people are/were kind of into bass (maybe not as obsessively as I can be but you have to take what you can get in these situations) and semi-found someone who was into metal of some form.
To be honest though, there is little that can knock your confidence in who you are more than being in a place where the individual aspect of your personality can't really thrive. Now don't get me wrong, that isn't to say that people don't want to let it thrive, just that when people are simply unable to passively (or, dare I say it, actively!) nurture a part of someone's identity the rest of the psyche can begin to question its validity. Curiously, it seems that the most important part of my identity, that which is rooted in Jesus Christ, is the one which should be thriving the most in this environment. It is, however, a constant struggle to feed that into the dying parts of who I am because the feeding line is a complex one. When something is so deeply rooted (metal for example) and it is unable to be nurtured effectively within the context of the deeper core (Christ) everything begins to suffer.
We are a relational people, this is not a post encouraging people to attempt the nurture of personalities which they cannot effectively relate to but rather to suggest a new approach.
When you recognise something within a person which you perhaps perceive as lonely, rather than either ignoring it or *shock horror* mocking it in a jovial manner think about the impact your words or lack thereof are having on that person. If you feel able, maybe ask them something about it, appear interested in something that they are rarely able to talk about or that you know they might be desperately wanting to talk to someone about (be it a gig, a new computer game, a new album, book, date, whatever). You don't need to be over-sensitive, most people can take a jibe or a stereotype, but don't let it overstay it's welcome. There is always a line to these things.
On the note of nurturing, metal and being relational there is always a chance that someone is going to show up in the new intake of first years who I can invite round to listen to metal with me. It's unlikely but you never know! It's going to be interesting next week, I think I'll post tomorrow discussing 'Moorlands Orientation Week Protocol' which could prove controversial!
For now I leave you with love,
The Rambler
Follow @BenMartinBass
(Obscura - The Anticosmic Overload)
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