Try as I might, I simply can't forget. Annoyingly.
This is gonna be a fairly diva/drama queen/self depricating/etc post, so if you're not in the mood to read such right at the moment, you might wanna skip over it.
Certain songs has personal resonances for me, they do for everyone. For a few songs, some of those for a long time were literal, rather than metaphorical. 2 such songs were 'You belong to me' and 'Fly me to the moon', for the same fairly obvious reasons. I mention these things in this blog, as it concerns a lie I tell to practically everyone, everyday.
I can do a supreme job of disguising my feelings if I want, usually not right when they happen to me, but a week later you'll think I'm perfectly okay again. It's partly my own way of coping, in doing this, I convince myself a lot of the time that the problems aren't there, yes its ostritch like, but it works, until it all flares up again.
I do a dammed good job of fooling everyone that the failed piloting thing, whilst occasionally a bother, is largely something i've come to terms with. It's not. Yes it's eight months down the line, and it might appear as petulant and immature to not have accepted it, and to still be railing against the universe, but I am. It doesn't exactly help that at least once every single week I have to explain to someone why I did a classics degree for the last 3 years.
It's like an extended breakup, it falls in the realm of things you'd rather not think about, because when you do, it hurts. Like hell. For the two months after I failed my medical, I cried most times I thought about it, which was most nights when my mind automatically had nothing else to turn to. 8 months later, thinking about it for any extended period of time still brings me close to doing so, which is saying something, considering the events which have caused me to cry since I was 16 can probably be counted on the fingers of 1, at most 2, hands. Or the toes of 1 or 2 feet, if you prefer. I'm afraid I'm forced to discriminate against quadraplegics, as I don't really have any comparable body part for them.
It always felt like a bit of a bitchslap by the universe when I failed. I had a childhood plagued by health problems, which prevented me from taking part in a lot of activities I otherwise would have done, and got me sent to the psychologists a fair few times, never a good idea, as I have issues with psychologists, I'll discuss this some other time if it comes up. I got through the chronic asthma, which allowed me the ability to go out a reasonable amount without too many issues, though the history of it still kept me out of the RAF. I made the hayfever workable, and found if I didn't spend my summers in the UK, all was fine. And by the time I was 17, various other issues had also gone. Whilst I was by no means an athletic god, I could at least do most things that might take my fancy now, even if I had to train myself up to the demands of it first. I worked hard, earnt money, passed my flight exams, and got my PPL, and spent 4 amazing summers in San Diego.
And then I went to my JAA Class 1, and on the first test, fell one grade short of the boundary line, on something that would never have been picked up before, and there is no known way to fix. Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I even held it together enough to get through the rest of the tests, and I passed every single one of them with flying colours. It wasn't until I was on the train home that I finally lost the superhuman amount of self control I was managing overmyself, and was forced to let go.
And to cap this all off of course, I can still actually fly planes. I can still hold my PPL; I can learn to fly multi engine planes; I can learn to fly at night, in rain, in cloud; I can fly the plane by myself, with no one else around, and telling no one else where I'm going first; I can fly over the ocean; I can even take friends up with me in the plane. I'm just not allowed to get paid for it, and I'm not allowed to fly jet engines. Hell, I'm not even allowed to teach other people how to fly the little planes, I can just fly myself around in them and think about how I wanted to do more.
And the problem that I have, is only present in one eye, and compensated for by the other, so when I use both my eyes, as I tend to most of my everyday, and even abnormal-day life, it's not an issue. But your eyes have to pass individually and together, and I can't do that on my right eye. The fact that this would only ever be a problem if the copilot was incapacitaed, and I had a large piece of metal sticking out of my left eye, at which point I think being one grade below the required standard on my right eye is the least of the plane's problems, is neither here nor there apparently.
To be clear, I don't blame the CAA or anything like that, as a (private) pilot, I more than accept they have to draw the line somewhere, and know and understand the very good reasons there are for drawing the lines where they do. No my acrid hatred of myself and raging anger extends far further than them: to life, the universe, and everything.
And so now I'm stuck wondering what to do with myself for the first time ever in my life, pretty much all other life goals have either been achieved (come out, get bf, etc.), are in the works (i.e. engagement), or are no longer possible (see above). I know a lot of people have this problem, and not to lay on the sob story, but many people haven't fought as hard as I have to find they cant achieve theirs. And I also find myself doing a degree I'm not 100% sure I want to be doing, because I'm not entirely sure I do want to work with planes anymore. Don't get me wrong, I love them, but if working with them will invoke these feelings everyday, I'd rather pick the soul destroying office job, that occurs relatively painlessly, rather than this. Equally, I'm not sure if I'll ever keep up the pilot's license. California, San Diego, and Gillespie, are like my second home. And I really missed not being there this year. But flying little planes for my own enjoyment and an exorborant cost and knowing that's all I'll ever do might not be something I want to confront face to face for a good long while. A little known fact, or in fact not known at all as I never told anyone, is that I almost ended up crying the first time I got on a plane after I failed my medical. Driving past the perimiter fence of heathrow/gatwick/stansted still makes me crash severely for hours afterwards. And seeing a jet go past my bedroom window every 2 minutes all day hardly expedites matters.
Some people ask me why I didn't take the class 1 earlier, so I would have known before I acquired all this useless knowledge (which is a lot, and reminds me of the bitterness in tiny ways every day, i'm my own weather forecaster for instance, i can name all the different types of clouds, and i understand the effects of pressure, altitude and temperature on aeroplane systems far better than most others on my course). My answer to them is firstly, I had no reason to suspect I was ever going to fail it, in fact I went for a regular eyetest back in March, but this isn't something it picks up. And secondly, a JAA initial class one costs £400 - £500, which is a lot of money to find and spend, 3 or 4 months spending allowance in fact, and when you can do the PPL on the medical that costs, why would I have paid for the class 1 sooner than I needed it, when I thought it wouldn't be an issue. And now I can't even fly for fucking ryanair.
If I was taller I'd seriously consider working cabin crew. Less glamorous (and well paid) than a pilot to be sure, but a damn sight closer than working in an engineering design office.
So yes, it hurts. It bothers me. When I should probably just get over myself, and it. But I don't forsee that happening for a long time. But as I said at the start, this is a lie I tell everyone everday, and so when you talk to me tomorrow, I'll probably seem perfectly well adjusted, and in a few weeks, once this post goes past the first page of the blog, it'll go completely out of your head that this is something that bothers me this much. But that's life, as they say.
Mood: Does it really need spelling out? Okay, let's go with, despondant.
Music: http://open.spotify.com/user/jorgamond/playlist/2siPfBQr5Bh1iyEBmhKnx6
N.B. The above cover the fangtasia post as well, I just decided to do them as two separate items due to the different tone and nature of the,
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