John in his own inimitable style bid adieu to YTYT

This time around, the honour falls to me to write my farewell blog to Yew Tree, and likewise does the question of how best to encapsulate my time here. I fear, however, that most approaches have been or will be done in a better fashion than I can muster. I don’t trade so easily in sentimentality, nor do I feel I can share any anecdotes without concluding with the dreaded ‘you had to be there’, and so what else remains but my tried-and-trusted approach of an overly-philosophical essay on the nature of what Yew Tree does best: creating. In October I leave for university to study chemistry, a subject I enjoy because of its real world applications. When we understand the nature of matter and the way it changes, we are empowered to manipulate the world around us. We create new molecules, new elements, new structures and we use them to enhance the life we lead, and I have always found this to be an alluringly human, arrogant aspiration. This same understanding can also be used, rather disconcertingly, to handwave away swathes of the human experience. Our thoughts and feelings can be drily understood to simply be fluctuations in chemical concentrations in our brains, and to some this constitutes an entirely nihilistic take on what it means to be alive. If we are merely the product of chemicals mired in organs, then what are we? I do feel, however, that this misses the point. There is no theory to explain why we can think and feel and perceive as we do. There is a chasmic gap in understanding between the disciplines of neurology and psychology, and this gap contains the entirety of our thoughts, feelings, and consciences. We can never understand it, if our brains were simple enough to understand we would be too simple to understand it, and it is easy to think that this precludes us from being able to manipulate ourselves as we can manipulate the world around us, but on the contrary – it’s what we’re built to do. Before being co-opted by certain hilarious corners of the internet, the idea of a meme, a cultural equivalent to a gene was devised by Richard Dawkins. We take ideas and spread them person to person using our faculties of communication, and eventually develop a shared culture. Art isn’t purely a pleasurable endeavour, it is a series of new lenses through which we experience life, and it is thoroughly memetic in nature. When we create, we take our feelings and thoughts and parcel them up in a way that those who experience our art will have them replicated in their brain. This opens up new avenues through which we rationalise and express our emotions, adds a new depth to our understanding of life, grounds us firmly in the quasi-spiritual reality that however opaque the reason for our being is, we are still here. The things we create persist intangibly and spread memetically, and broaden the unifying human spirit that resides in us all. This boils down to a simple truth: humans without the tendency to create would be emotional Neanderthals. Without the tools to communicate, to rationalise the things we feel and share them with others, we would hardly be able to function at all – the slightest inconveniences would plunge us into blubbering tantrums, the slightest joys would leave us boiling over ready to explode. The creative spirit empowers us to delight and take part in the human experience, and to shape our emotional landscapes in much the same way as science has enabled us to shape the physical world. I choose to share this now, because I wanted to communicate the immense value this creative spirit has to me, personally. Were it not for the ability to express myself, however naïve and imprecise that ability may be, I cannot honestly say where I would be, or whether I would be recognisably the same person. I have been propelled through some of the stickier periods in my life by this intrinsically human tendency. I honestly believe we all have, in some way. I would of course be remiss to end this parting message without a note of thanks. In truth, this is why I chose to write about the importance of the creative spirit, rather than about my personal experience at Yew Tree. This seems to be one of precious few occasions in which a Yorkshire lad may find himself where ‘cheers’ doesn’t suffice as an expression of thanks, and in an effort to communicate my appreciation more thoroughly, I thought it right to impart the impact these last two years have had on me, such that I could in turn impart the weight of my thankfulness. The most enduring writ of gratitude I feel able to express is simply thus: wherever I shall walk the boards of a stage, or an open mic at a pub, or feel something deeply and express it, rather than bottle it up, wherever I shall exercise my sense of empathy so strengthened by my time here, or cope more ably with failure, and continue to move forward unburdened, wherever I shall write, act, sing, or exercise my newfound creative voice and in future sharpen it, some component of that moment will be owed to Yew Tree Youth Theatre. To those I’ve had the pleasure to know both on and off the stage, thank you for the company and the fond memories. To Sarah, thank you for your patience, your willingness to indulge my quirks, for the ever-present offer of help wherever required, and for furnishing me with opportunities to create and express myself wherever they could be found. Au revoir, YTYT, it’s been a blast.

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