It was a nice sunny evening at the train station in Wakefield; the kind of romantic spring light that gives every place the elegance it deserves.

But just as I began to feel a mental ease from knowing that my day had gone well, it was interrupted by an angry-sounding commotion in the station’s somewhat notorious underpass.

It sounded like there was a perpetual threat of imminent violence. Knowing I had to use this underpass to get to my train, I waited until another person took this route, so I wasn’t by myself.

As we passed the group making the noise, neither of us experienced any hostility. The 3 blokes, smelling of booze and weed, were simply wrapped in their own friendship drama, and the aggression was seemingly as much a tool to access their emotions as a prelude to violence. But still, it was the kind of racket that unsettles you.

From the vantage of the other platform, I saw another group of middled aged men and women, with a mildly more affluent appearance to the previous, arrive on the platform. All of sudden one of the men of this group decided to take it upon himself to stop the ‘rabble’ going off, and as he approached them in anger, and walked down and out of sight, all hell appeared to break loose, with glass smashing, swearing, with no idea how this would end.

After being dragged away by friends who ran to the rescue, this burly man, well dressed, in typical going out gear middle aged blokes wear, was screaming at the other blokes that he was ‘gonna fucking kill them’, and worse.

I don’t say this with judgement. I often have self-destructive fantasies about being able to let out my anger at somebody else, over any minor injury inflicted on my ego.

Hope against an undercurrent of rage.

What I’m writing was initially meant to be for an Instagram story; I felt spooked and wanted the reassurance from other people knowing this.

But as I wrote I began noticing heavy breathing, informed by oldish memories of conflicting engagements over social media, when talking about things that can’t instantly be framed in a positive light.

I use social media as a tool to share my political opinions and social observations far less than I used to. It has reached a point where I have, to all intents and purposes, depoliticised myself. This, in turn means I have also de-spirited myself. This is because most of what we do now is mediated through social media, making what we see and do on it the mainstay of our daily realities.

I feel less able to speak my truth, largely because as a people-pleaser, I have development an overpowering fear of getting on the wrong side of people. I have obsessive inner-criticism going off that often chooses to take the side of those I disagree with, especially when arguments, as they so often do, turn personal.

Yet, despite how omnipotent it is, I am hard pushed to see evidence that social media has developed space for constructive, welcoming debates, that bring more than us into the room. All it seems to do is thrust all content we create into a one dimensional sphere based on competition, giving even our most earnest pleas and howls the appearance of being mere ‘virtue signals’.

The question of how to work around this is harder to answer. But what is becoming increasingly obvious to me is that there is an undercurrent of rage, that is caused by an even more pervasive lack of hope. And personally speaking, this is something I need to work on, and intend to do so.

For the past 2 years I have been working on a project called ‘Straight A’s, which is far more about my own personal journey, and ultimately positioned as a milestone towards living better. But it has become increasingly clear to me that this isn’t possible without hope and horizons that extend beyond my own life. 

In older years, in times less troubling that the present, I personally harassed myself with socio-political catastrophising, that helped create a deeply treasured body of artwork, and spawned an ability to observe processes bubbling up in culture.

The drawing I have used for this piece is an untitled work from 2009 that I recently rediscovered. It was about directions, looking at the past, as we are frequently at the moment, as we make comparisons with 1930s, and taking that path all the same. But now as I look at it, I realise there are far more forms of direction we can take, that may initially appear invisible.

This exhibition was concieved as a marker point to recognise all the hard work I’ve put into this artistic ‘journey’ over the last 20 years. But now I realise it’s always about taking a new direction. This direction must have different tenets at its core, perhaps even a new faith, of sorts.

I have learned the long and hard way that combative forms of argument do not suit me, and yes I know the line about when things get so extreme you have to become combative, but equally I will never settle for black and whites – the way of seeing, and feeling, that social media has compressed so much of our lives into.