Being Honest - Boys & Girls Can Be Friends.

In this installment on WhatLexySaid, I’ll be taking the age-old and long-pondered question of whether the lads and the ladies can be, oh-so-simply, just friends.

Before I elaborate entirely, I should give a small disclaimer that yes, I do believe we can all be friends without wanting to jump each other’s bones. If you disagree, this is your stop on the train of this discussion. Time to hop off; you’re the reason that eleven year olds don’t think they can be friends with the girls in their class because of the ridicule and teasing that their mere friendship can bring.

Anyway, now that we’re left with all the open-minded folk, let’s get down to it. 

Since I started secondary school, earlier than that... since primary school, I’ve had a predominance of male friends. I remember far more of the boys names from primary school than I do the girls. Does that make seven year old me a little sauce-pot? No, it doesn’t. 

Obviously, in Secondary School there came a time when I realised maybe I wanted to spend a little more time with certain guys, but that didn’t mean that I had to feel like that about all of my male friends. I understood that, it’s the people who don’t who seem to be the problem.

My first year at University, I ended up living with a boy as well as four girls. Nothing romantic has ever happened between us, and we’re still good friends to this day. Gasp-shock-horror? What? How is that even possible? This is just the way it is.  As with most of my male friends, we never made the conscious decision to inform the other person that we weren’t attracted to each other, it was unspoken yet known. For the predominance of my third year at University, there were usually more men in my house than there were ladies and my one female housemate and I would often find ourselves coughing and spluttering in a cloud of testosterone and Lynx Africa, among other things.
We weren’t attracted to them and they weren’t either. It was that easy.

My friend Grace reminds me however “if there is a hint of something more on the table it can get messy...” and of course, in true Gracie-fashion, she’s right. But that’s okay too. As long as you’re honest with each other, there doesn’t have to be any drama. As soon as you bring sex and all those feelings into the equation, a million more questions pop up and sometimes, like Rachel says - it’s never off the table but it’s always best to keep communication lines open and talk about it.

Once I’ve been with someone romantically, can we go back to being purely-platonic friends again?
I’m going to go with yes, on this one. Yes you can go back to being friends. Whether you’ve moved on to dating someone new or not, if you want that other person in your life but not in a romantic sense then tell them. Make it happen as best you can, but don’t push it.
Obviously, I understand that if you’re coming out of serious relationship, flipping back into being good friends may be difficult; no one is saying you have to be friends immediately, if at all. Sometimes it’s too hard to get over that person and what they mean/meant to you.

What if I want something more/less than he/she does?
Respect is of utmost importance – to quote another song, you can’t make someone love you if they don’t. But you also can’t make someone not love you. Be respectful of the other person’s feelings if they differ from your own; you might be ready to be friends again, but they might need more time.
Or, if you’ve never been together romantically and one person wants to progress into that and the other doesn’t, then just be honest. Let them hide away for a week and lick their wounds, if that’s what they need, but remind them at the end of the day you’re still friends.

Does being jealous of my friend spending time with their other half mean that I’m attracted to them?
Not at all. You can miss someone’s company and their attention and not be attracted to them. If you used to get Pizza every two-for-Tuesday night, and now Tuesday night has been reallocated to their other half as date night, you’re allowed to miss that time together.

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With 2015 just around the corner and hurtling towards us like a freight train, I encourage more people to take on the honesty philosophy...

If you want to see someone, tell them.
If you like someone, tell them.
What’s the worst that could happen?
 They don’t feel that way? At least you know.
If you miss someone, tell them.
If you want to call, call.
If you want to chat, then chat.
In the same sense...
If you don’t want to see someone, tell them.
If you don’t miss someone, don’t say it.

If I’ve learned anything recently, it’s to not say something if you don’t mean it.
Don’t say things for the sake of it, people will only get hurt and read into things that don’t mean what they want them to.

After graduating in October, it’s been hard enough entering the big bad world without picking and choosing who you’re going to be friends with based on their sex/sexual preferences. My friends all went back to their parent’s towns after University, I stayed in Winchester, so when it comes to new friends I’ve taken what I can and I’m ever-grateful for them all. I wouldn’t be without them.

Maybe I’m not the best person to be giving out relationship advice, but there’s so much chatter about how there is absolutely no possible way that people of the opposite sex could every be purely friends and it bugs me.

Rant over J the floor is now open to discussion...

Lust for Learning.

Learning should never stop. I believe that with my whole heart. Just because you’re done with school (be it college, or a degree, or an MA or whatever...) I don’t think you should stop learning. I don’t think you should WANT to stop learning. If there comes a day where you don’t want to learn anymore – there’s a problem. I hope there isn’t a day that I don’t want to learn anything else, because that might mean that I think I know everything or that I know enough – I will never know enough.

Anyone who doesn’t understand, I sort of feel sorry for. Not in a mean way, I just think it might be quiet lonely to never want to know anything else about anything. I like that I get hungry to learn things; it’s a good thing. I’m sure there are people out there in the world, or even the near vicinity, who think that I’m a swot, or a bit nerdy, or just all-around lame but I honestly don’t care. Because one day, I will be able to hold my own in most conversations and feel confident about what I have learned and the opinions that I have formed from my own research and learning.

Recently, I have read two books that have taught me so much about areas that I could never have studied in a dedicated institution (school, college, university) because they aren’t part of the faculty that I put myself into by choosing to study what I did at University. I am so grateful for the fact that I find these books engaging and useful because, on a rather cliché note, I will be a better/more rounded person for reading them and exploring many other subjects that I haven’t studied.

THE SKELETON CUPBOARD: The Making of a Clinical Psychologist . (Prof. Tanya Byron)

“The Skeleton Cupboard is Professor Tanya Byron's account of her years of training as a clinical psychologist, when trainees find themselves in the toughest placements of their careers. Through the eyes of her naive and inexperienced younger self, Tanya shares remarkable stories inspired by the people she had the privilege to treat. Gripping, poignant and full of daring black humour, this book reveals the frightening and challenging induction faced by all mental health staff and highlights their incredible commitment to their patients.”

Featuring emotionally harrowing passages on child abuse, dealings with a physically abusive and psychotic patient, treating an older German-Jewish patient (who survived Auschwitz) now suffering from dementia who believes that in every shower she takes she is being exterminated. As well as exploring the lives of drug dependant patients, the fluctuations of T-Cells of HIV positive patients, and lastly a stand-out section on a young girl suffering from a malicious eating disorder.

Whilst all the above combined doesn’t sound like such a cheery book to read, it’s worth it. There are light moments; happiness within families brought closer together, congratulations on various remissions from disease and what seems to be an everlasting stream of hope for a better future running throughout.

Because Professor Tanya Byron is so academically decorated it makes reading the book very easy and enjoyable; believable, real and emotive. Whilst giving details of treatment procedures, the book also provides insight into the lives of various medical professionals that we as outsiders couldn’t ever fathom.

For someone who already had interest in the psychological world, I would majorly recommend this book. For someone who has no interest in the psychological world, I would recommend the book purely to learn about the human race and their feats.

DO NO HARM: Stories of life, death and brain surgery. (Dr. Henry Marsh, CBE and FRCS.)

I’m only a third or so through this book, but I’m already hooked. The chapters are split into medical diagnoses for example; Pineocytoma, Aneurysm, Haemangioblastoma etc and reading through the Aneurysm passage – I genuinely believe I could clip an Aneurysm if needed. Obviously, literally, I couldn’t but in theory I could.

"What is it like to be a brain surgeon?

How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands, to cut into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason?

How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially life-saving operation when it all goes wrong?

In neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor's oath to 'do no harm' holds a bitter irony. Operations on the brain carry grave risks. Every day, Henry Marsh must make agonising decisions, often in the face of great urgency and uncertainty.

If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practised by calm and detached surgeons, this gripping, brutally honest account will make you think again. With astonishing compassion and candour, one of the country's leading neurosurgeons reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets and the moments of black humour that characterise a brain surgeon's life.

DO NO HARM is an unforgettable insight into the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern hospital. Above all, it is a lesson in the need for hope when faced with life's most difficult decisions."

The book illustrates the neuroses that brain surgeons themselves go through – the tension and pressure of holding a scalpel to the section of the brain that controls motor function; you could rid someone of their basic motor skills. Holding a scalpel to the temporal or frontal lobes? You rid someone of everything that makes them who they are and wipe away their memories as quick as condensation on your bathroom mirror.

 I don’t know if I could cope under the pressure of holding peoples’ lives in my hands – or worse than that, if you don’t actually end up killing someone, you could just remove their ability to move or talk or see or hear and surely that’s a fate worse than death – being an alive being trapped in a coffin of a lifeless body; unable to interact with the people you love.

Because I’m not quite finished with this book yet I can’t give it a definitive review but I get the feeling I will enjoy it and benefit from it as much as I did from Tanya Byron’s book. Henry Marsh became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984, which is home in London and plays host to the fabulous Huntarian Museum which I visited with my boyfriend earlier on this year.  The museum holds a vast collection of weird and wonderful things and if you too have an obsession with the morbid and medical, I would absolutely recommend taking a trip when you’re next in London.

Overall, these are just two examples of books I have read this year that I have learned amazing things from. Of course I could just read all of the information online, but when people like Tanya Byron and Henry Marsh bother to make the information readily accessible and enjoyable – why not take advantage?

I will always yearn for more knowledge and to learn about things and I think you should too. Learn Russian. Learn the phonetic alphabet. Something. Anything. J