about my mother

I haven’t posted for the past few days, mostly because I spent nine hours traipsing around London in the heat on Saturday and haven’t fully recovered. I’ve written half an essay on something, but it needs a lot more work before it’s shareable.

Looking to be inspired, I found a writer’s block prompt generator.

It asked me, “What do you like best about your mother?”

It’s a tough question. I like a lot of things about my mother. I like that she knows when to offer advice, when to listen and make non-committal noises, and when to unleash a stream of creative invective at whoever it is that’s upset me. I like that she’s proud of anything I accomplish, however inconsequential it might be. She’s proud of me when I get a new job, she’s proud of me when I perform, she’s proud of me when I get myself out of difficult situations. She’s also proud of my ability to write joke advice leaflets and open bottles of prosecco.

My mother makes me laugh. My mother has a strength I’m in awe of. My mother is wise. My mother skives off important things she’s meant to being doing and spends the time lying around triumphantly. My mother does a note-perfect impression of Janet Street-Porter. My mother is empathetic and compassionate to the last. I fail to see how anyone could manage to not like her.

The thing that I’m most grateful to my mother for is that she makes no assumptions about me. She doesn’t compare me to society’s model of successful and happy, or to any ideas she may or may not have had before I was born about what I ought to be like or the direction my life ought to take. She’s never seen me as a reflection on her, a vessel for her hopes and dreams, an extension of or an accessory to her life. I’ve never felt like I was competing with some abstract idea of a daughter; my mother has always treated me like a person. She’s taught me and cared for me and got me out of any number of scrapes, but at the same time she’s excited to learn from me and comfortable asking for my help. She treats me like an equal.

The best gift my parents have given me (besides question everything question everything QUESTION ALL THE THINGS) is that not only have I never doubted their love for me, I’ve always been completely secure in the knowledge that they like and respect me. I’ve never wondered if I’m a disappointment to them, or if they were expecting something better out of parenthood.

If I had to give one single answer, the thing I like most about my mother is that she’s also my friend, and it’s a friendship I’ve never questioned.

focus

For the last couple of days I've really been having to force myself to write here. Partly because life has decided to throw a lot of things at me, and partly because I've been writing a lot to myself, or to one specific person or another. My energies are not focused here.

But I won't stop, because I promised, dammit.

I am going dancing tonight. I hope I get to dance to this:

OK

What I would really like right now is for somebody to tell me that's OK not to know, it's OK to be unsure, it's OK not to be OK with things the way they are right now, and for that somebody to sound like they actually meant it.

filler

Once again, it's too hot to think. Here are some things:

London is big and getting across it takes ages.
I have two weeks left in this house and no idea where I'm going to go next.
The Commonwealth Games opening ceremony was WEIRD.
Tomorrow I will have the very great personal challenge of leaving the pub before the last train goes.
Sleep should have a higher priority than the one I've been giving it.
For the last three days, I have had a variety of Chas and Dave songs stuck in my head.
Given the heat, the concentration of penguins in my life currently is much higher than it should reasonably be.

a stupid thing to say

"Do you remember we were going to run away together? Find some distant bit of countryside somewhere in Europe where nobody would ever think to look for us, get some animals, plant some fruit trees. We'd go and see our nearest neighbours, two miles away, and swap milk for wine, beef for chicken, apples for peaches. Our phones would stop working and eventually, everyone would forget we'd ever existed at all."
"It never would have worked. We like civilisation too much."
"I know. We'd have fought all the time. But I think I might have preferred fighting with you in the middle of nowhere to being happy here."
"That's a really stupid thing to say."
"I know that."
"...I would still go, you know. If you wanted to."

teen goth

I had a teen Goth phase. Given that I’m 29 years old and engaged in confessional blogging, you could probably have guessed that I had a teen Goth phase. It lasted about four years, during which I was depressed and angsty, slightly unpleasant to strangers and authority figures, and constantly plugged into terrible music that I pretended to like more than I did.

I was an unpolished Goth. I was fat. I was sullen rather than sultry. I didn’t have the steady hands to apply eyeliner, so I just smeared it along my lower waterline and nowhere else. I also had some singularly unattractive purple lipstick that I wasn’t very good at applying either. I had fingers full of cheap rings, arms full of cheap bracelets, and a wardrobe full of clothes that didn’t go together. I was naturally the colour of milk that had seen a ghost (a ghost that had seen some milk? I don’t know) and I hid from the sun like it was out to get me personally.

At this point, I haven’t been a Goth for well over ten years. But for some reason, the voice of my teenage Goth self has always refused to go away entirely. If I want to get in touch with her, all I need to do is go into a shop and try on a dress that’s white, or pastel, or ruffly, or covered in bows. As soon as I look in the mirror my fifteen-year-old self is looking back at me.

"You have got to be kidding."
"It’s not that bad."
"You have GOT to be kidding. What even is this thing? Take it off now."
"But I need - "
"OFF. NOW."

And she stays until I take it off. If I try to buy it anyway, she emerges every time I put it on. If I wear excessively pretty or girly clothes, I look like an angry child forced into something her grandmother will find acceptable for a family outing. I’ve long since given up even trying these clothes on, unless I’m trying to demonstrate conclusively to someone why I don’t wear those things.

Teen Goth Jen has made a lot of allowances for the adult body she finds herself in. I can wear bright pink, or orange, or lime green. I can wear flowers in my hair. The other week she even let me buy a jumpsuit. Teen Goth Jen is actually rather pleased about what she’s grown into, and she wants to keep me sweet so that she can use me for wish fulfilment.

A couple of months ago, I went to Camden Market to get the final bits of a fancy dress costume. Teen Goth Jen was thrilled.

"Oh my God, look at that! Look! Can we get those boots?"
"No, we can’t. They’re £300."
"Aww. Oh look, piercings! Can we get a piercing?"
"We don’t want a piercing."
"Well, then, can we get that giant floppy purple hat?"
"No."
"Awww."
[walk along for five minutes] "So can we try that dress on? We don’t have to buy it, I just want to look."
"…fine."

And then we try it on and Teen Goth Jen gets all excited and sometimes she’s excited enough that I buy it anyway, despite having absolutely no occasion to wear it.

The Teen Goth Jen that now lives in my head isn’t very much like my actual fifteen-year-old self. My actual fifteen-year-old self was thoroughly miserable, terrified of everything, and having to deal with things that fifteen-year-olds really shouldn’t have to deal with. Carrying her around with me everywhere would have been well beyond the limits of my strength. Teen Goth Jen, as I know her these days, is very firmly committed to the same aesthetic as my teenage self, but has none of the insecurities or fears I had because that was half a lifetime ago and she can see that none of the things she was worried about actually happened, or that they did happen and we handled them pretty well, all things considered. Instead she celebrates my every success with immature enthusiasm, especially the superficial, petty things that my adult self is embarrassed to take pleasure in. She boosts me, not because she’s trying to help, but because she’s genuinely thrilled that this is the way life turned out. It helps, especially when things get overwhelming. If I have to give up white dresses and ruffles in exchange, I think I'm OK with that.

heat

This weekend has been the most uncomfortable one I can remember for some time. Still, sticky heat surrounded by thunderstorms, where you can't go out because it might rain (and rain hard) at any moment, and also the heat isn't summer sunshine, it's aggressive. Stand out in it and you feel like it's hurting you, like it's ripping at your skin. I've stayed inside, by my little electric fan, sweating into my bedsheets and feeling like the fluid is being slowly wrung out of my brain.

So I haven't had much inspiration to write. I cannot get into a place where I can sit down and work. Circumstance distracts me and there's no way to concentrate on anything but sweat and dehydration.

But I got to a new place in my photography project. I haven't written anything of substance this weekend, but this picture makes me feel like things haven't been a total loss, creatively speaking.

skipping

So I missed a day.

I did actually write yesterday. I wrote quite a lot. But out of all that, there were maybe two sentences at most I could post publicly without triggering an "overshare overshare holy SHIT overshare back away from the blog now" in the readers I know I now have since I posted a link on my Facebook the other day (and people actually read it. They told me so. Some of them read literally all of it. I genuinely didn't know this was a thing other people did). I often worry that the things I post are too personal. That was definitely too personal. It was almost too personal to write, never mind show to people who don't live in my head.

However, I needed to do it. Those words needed to come out and I needed to look at them. Having done that, things make a little more sense to me now.

(Yes, today's post is just an excuse for not writing yesterday's post. Won't happen again, honest.)

dealbreakers

[note: all of these are actual things I've seen in the last year]

OK, so you're conducting viewings and you decided to show this room with the bed upended against the wall, wood shavings everywhere and a six inch-high pile of cigarette butts in the middle of the floor. "Oh, no, don't worry, there's no smoking in here."

This is a very nice two bedroom flat. Thing is, there are three of us. Oh, that thing the size of a toilet cubicle with no bed in it is a single bedroom? Maybe if our flatmate was a Jack Russell, sure.

What exactly is this growing on the wall? Oh, I'm glad to hear it's not deadly, very reassuring.

One-bedroom flat with a converted living room. Total number of flatmates: five.

Total number of people physically able to fit in the kitchen at once: one. At a push.

Things the flat does not have: a working sink.
Things the flat does not have: windows that open.
Things the flat does not have: a lift. Place the flat is located: 23rd floor.

Place the flat is located: half an hour further away from the tube than the ad said.
Place the flat is located: at the end of an enclosed alleyway with no lighting whatsoever.
Place the flat is located: along a road full of people offering a wide selection of drugs. At 2pm on a Wednesday.

Landlord status: pushy and frightening.
Landlord status: obsessively rambling about all the terrible tenants he's had.
Landlord status: obnoxious posh boy who has nothing but contempt for everyone living on his property.

"Is this place safe?"
"Oh, sure, there's a security camera right by the door."
"Is that necessary?"
"Oh, no, not really. We're on the top floor and the furthest away from the lift, so anyone looking to cause trouble would probably go to one of the other flats first."

progress

This post takes me over the halfway point of my self-imposed challenge. I've managed to write and post something every day for sixteen days so far, even when I've been crazy busy or sick or apathetic. Even if it's just a couple of lines, something's gone up.

I think... I think... it's working.

I started doing this because inspiration has been so fleeting and elusive lately. I've just found myself staring at empty pages or half-formed sentences or bare ghosts of an idea going, "No. Everything in my head is bad right now. I'm just going to put this away and come back to it." And then I come back to it and it looks even worse and I give up on the idea altogether.

Last week, keeping this going was really, really tough. Most days I just posted a few placeholder sentences to stop the project dying. Sometimes that was because I was ridiculously busy and didn't have time to write anything longer or more in-depth, but mostly the placeholder posts followed hours of trying to come up with something interesting, writing and deleting the same sentence half a dozen times, having ideas and rejecting them, looking around my room or my office or my memories for anything that I might be able to wrap up in a nice little word package and drop into Blogger.

Suddenly I had no stories. Everything was too dull, or too personal, or couldn't stand on its own without fourteen pages of back history. I had one thought that I couldn't expand, or hundreds of thoughts that I couldn't cut down. The blank page and I were stuck in psychological warfare. I would try to trick it by writing three different posts at once, and it would mock me every time I pressed the backspace key and then give me a migraine.

Something changed at the weekend. I have no great revelations to share, no moment where I understood what the problem was, and I'm certainly not claiming the quality is any better. But for some reason, it got easier to think in stories. I didn't have to stare at the blank page because I already knew what I was planning to write before I got to it.

It's more than that, though. I've remembered what it feels like to want to write. For some time now "wanting to write" has meant "I wish I could remember how the fuck I used to do this" rather than having a story to tell or anything specific to say, but for the last few days I've been actually excited about it. I sit in front of a computer and instead of listlessly clicking through page after page of time-consuming nothing online, I think, "Hey, I could write!" And then I do, and it's easy, and I like it. I've stopped pre-judging my ideas based on how other people might react to the subject matter; people will either like the thoughts in my head or they won't, and I think I'm just about comfortable with that again. I'm just writing because that's what I do, because that's who I am and how I work and when I can't do it I just don't feel right.

I'm not quite there yet. I know that if I stopped doing the challenge it would still be really hard to motivate myself, and for that reason I might carry this thing on past July. I have a lot of work to do before I really feel comfortable communicating with a lot of people publicly, or before I'm able to write fiction again. That's OK. Right now I'm just struck by how amazingly fucking good it feels to see myself writing and think, Hey, I remember you.

mouse

We have a mouse living in our walls.

We don't quite know what to do about it. We heard it scuffling around between the bedrooms at 4am, but we don't know how or where it got in. We don't know where we would put a trap, or who would deal with a trap full of dead mouse. Between us we have most things covered - we can get rid of spiders and slugs, do most bits of incidental DIY, and deal with any potentially awkward legal issues that might come up, but present us with a dead rodent and we really are a house full of girls.

"Why don't you just get one of those traps you can throw out?"
"Why did you think we were going to manhandle a dead mouse just because we'd caught it in a reusable trap?"
"Does anyone know any men?"
"Nope, none of us know any men. Not a one."
"I know a man, but he's in Canada."

In the meantime, the mouse is in the walls. And once, possibly in my bedroom. There was squeaking and scurrying and things rolling out from under my bed one night last week, and now I'm sleeping with the light on until I can work out how it got in and find a way to make it stop doing that.

My brain, being the jerk it occasionally is, has observed that a) there is most definitely a mouse and b) the mouse has been able to get into my room, and twisted this until EVERY SINGLE SOUND made when I'm trying to go to sleep is somehow mouse-related. I heard a noise. There was definitely a noise. OK, now there's no noise. No noise no noise no noise OH GOD A NOISE I heard it again there's definitely a mouse in here and then I have to remind myself that mice don't actually work that way, Jen. The mouse isn't trying to sneak its way into the room, playing The Pink Panther in its head, standing on its tiptoes and pressing its back up against the wall. If it was in here, it would be running around and squeaking and disturbing everything, like that time when there actually was a mouse. And then it's hard to sleep because I'm preoccupied with feeling like a dumbass.

It feels like the kind of thing that shouldn't bother me. In most ways I'm a semi-competent adult these days. I can cook, I can clean a toilet, I can fix minor problems with my laptop, I can handle even the most stone mental of landlords. I'm not lacking in life skills. A small pest should not be a problem, and it usually isn't. But when it is, I turn into an avoidant child. A few years ago my friend and I went to Mexico and found the most enormous cockroach in our hotel bathroom. Rather than get rid of it, we just named it Bob and spent the next week taking very nervous showers and ordering it to stay away (until one night I woke up to find it had got out of the bathroom and was crawling over my duvet, at which point I scooped it up on a book and flung it out through the patio doors. Too far, Bob. Too far).

Part of me feels like I should declare war on the mouse, get over my own silliness and get rid of it. But it's entirely possible that, since we're about to move out, the mouse will get rid of us rather than the other way round. Maybe I should name it.

Scenes from the middle class

[There has been a years-long running joke between me and my brother which takes the form of:]

Him: So I bought a selection of jams.
Me: You are so middle-class.

[and]

Him: I brought the Sunday Times, Private Eye, and a spare pair of socks.
Me: You are so middle-class.

[and]

Him: I wanted to make crème brulee for after the poker game, but it’s really hard to do without a crème brulee torch.
Me: Oh my God, you are SO middle-class!

[Some years after this starts, I bring my brother to a lindy hop event at which I am performing]

Him: You don’t get to call me middle-class anymore. This is the most middle-class thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
Me: Yeah, I know.

[a few months later]

Me: So, how was your skiing holiday?
Him: It was excellent. I was with a really good group of mates…

[there is a half-proud, half-ashamed pause]

…I nicknamed us ‘The Piste-y Boys’.
Me: OK, now you’re just a toff.
Him: Yeah, I know.

goals

I used to have what most people would refer to as a bucket list. I didn't call it that, just in case the continued reminder of my own mortality rendered me incapable of actually accomplishing anything (I understand and accept that this is probably not normal). I called it “Things To Do” and it was a strange mish-mash of lofty goals, places I wanted to see, vague self-improvement koans, a hundred things starting with the word “learn” and twice as many stupid little nothings that would make no discernible difference to my life but I thought might be funny.

3. Become fluent in another language.

53. Go to Machu Picchu.

84. Learn to dance.

134. Be in a really shit low-budget musical.

151. Relax.

190. Go to an outdoor fair, eat too much candy floss, and win some kind of plastic duck or something.

I started the list when I was depressed and looking to not be depressed anymore. I couldn't think of any goals I had or anything I wanted to do, so I started reading other people's lists and stealing things I liked the sound of. Mostly what other people wanted to do was: visit a lot of different countries; have some kind of family; meet various famous people; do very mundane things “in the rain” or “under the stars” (this last one is my fault for trying to find inspiration on LiveJournal). When I'd got enough of a spark back to start thinking of things on my own, I decided I wanted this list to be as specific to me as possible and not just a stream of things that sounded nice.

24. Meet a really crap celebrity, like Neil Buchanan or one of the original Gladiators.

32. Meet someone hugely famous and legendary and be less impressed by them than I was by Neil Buchanan/Gladiator.

(I did meet Neil Buchanan. He was playing in a heavy metal band. I was very excited about it.)

My list didn't include a lot of the more popular goals I'd seen.

Save a life

Get married

“Save a life” is a horrible goal. “Become a doctor” or “become an aid worker”, sure. But generically wishing someone into mortal danger just so you can feel you're a big hero type seems a little gross to me. And “get married” isn't the goal, not really. The goal is “find someone I want to get married to”, and that's not really within my control. I didn't want to put it on a list and then sit around hopelessly watching it not happen.

(I often think that maybe I won't find someone I really want to marry. The thought occasionally makes me a little sad, but fundamentally I'm OK with true love being a thing that doesn't happen, if that's the way things happen to play out. I am happy and busy and not prepared to clear any space to accommodate mediocrity.)

I used my list as an active motivation tool for years. I set myself a goal to cross off an average of one per month. It didn't matter if the goals I accomplished were serious or stupid, just as long as I was identifying things I wanted to do and making them happen.

64. See Skunk Anansie live.

101. Take a trip on a gondola in Venice.

129. Learn a selection of classical arias.

141. [from my call centre days] Get a lyric from “Once More, With Feeling” into one of my calls.

171. Go back to college and get another qualification.

Over the last year or so, my list has fallen into disuse. I haven't crossed anything off and I haven't really accomplished any of my old goals without realising it, either. This isn't to say I'm doing less; quite the opposite. My life just isn't set up to work this way anymore. What happens now is more along the lines of:

[thing comes up in passing]

Me: We should do that.

Whichever of my ridiculous friends I happen to be speaking to: OMG YES.

And then we go to Italy or dance in the street or go and see Frozen in full costume or drink gin and tonic out of a freezer bag with a pink grapefruit goldfish in it or bring cheese to the pub or enter competitions or spend the entire night in the cinema or force people to have house parties or drink far too much wine three nights on the trot or play dance bingo or just laugh hysterically and collapse in a big pile on the sofa or the floor or wherever can accommodate us.

I still want to do some of things on my old list. I still want to finish the novel and live abroad for a while and buy a cinema and go to Mardi Gras and be in that really shit musical. I just don't have time to aim for them, because so many other things are happening right now and I don't want to miss a single one of them.

an exception

It wasn't a crush. I just took an interest in him.

It couldn't have been a crush, because we could never have been a couple. He was a dead end. He was immature, possibly a misogynist, almost certainly an idiot. He didn't understand most of the things I said to him. He was pretty, but prettiness alone couldn't have made him that interesting to me.

He took an interest in me. He found me enthralling, baffling. He thought he knew what women were; an ugly, simplistic perception of a mysterious monolith out to get him for no other reason than undirected spite. What made me stand out to him I never quite understood, but from the first time we met he told me I was different, not like the others. He would follow me around, asking me questions about my life and not understanding any of the answers. He would stare at me in wonder when I rejected any of his certainties about women, the backstabbing bitches who hate all their friends. You're amazing, I've never met anyone like you.

It was probably this, rather than anything about him, that made my interest so enduring. I couldn't work out why this guy, this pretty woman-hating dropout with no real interest in the world, would be so fascinated by an overweight feminist dork who read books on her lunch break. When he sat next to me and asked, So what do you look for in a guy? Do you like guys with tattoos? What about tattoos like mine? I would answer the questions as calmly as possible while my brain screamed Why do you even care? behind my eyes.

I didn't fit into the world as he'd constructed it. Talking to me was like reading a book; he'd drift into a place of let's say I was going out with you for a while, then our shifts would end and he'd close up the fantasy and go back to the real world, the way things actually were. You can't live in a book.

He had obligations, ones he didn't tell me about and ones which made his escapist questions and hypotheticals much more damaging in retrospect. But it made sense. He had a real life that he didn't much like, and now he could come into work and pretend it wasn't happening.

I don't know how long the interest lasted for him. For me, it lasted much longer than it should have, long after we stopped working together, long after I stopped seeing him with any regularity. It lasted through an entire other relationship I had. My then-boyfriend saw him more often than I did and would sometimes say things like he asks about you before he even says hello, but I don't think he thought anything of it. After all, there was no chance of anything happening there.

I saw him after my break-up, after his divorce, several years after we first met, and we swapped numbers. My mother suggested that maybe I could make something happen. And maybe I considered it, for a moment.

I would have disappointed him. I would have cried, and said mean things sometimes, and done some things that Women do. He wasn't interested in me because he thought I was any kind of real person, and I didn't take an interest in him because I wanted to be any kind of real person. I didn't like his framing of me as the saving grace of my gender, but having spent years feeling absolutely ordinary and unremarkable, the way he reacted to me was revelatory. I was unfathomable to him, I was nothing he'd ever imagined existed, I put his whole view of the world on shaky ground. It was unhealthy, unquestionably, for both of us, and maybe we would both have been better off not knowing each other, not having this strange, awkward interest that spanned years for no real reason making other relationships more difficult for us. Maybe I shouldn't remember it with any kind of fondness.

Maybe.

on sharing

I haven't shared anything I've written for a very long time.

 I used to be prolific. I had a box full of handwritten books that people could delve into. I would write stories during class and hand them out to people in the corridors afterwards. I had multiple serialisations of dramatic teen fluff on the go on my fiction sharing site. People would say nice things and I would be pleased, but never surprised. Of course they liked it. The one thing I never doubted was that I could write.

Over the past ten years, it's usually been the case that the person I was closest to, the person who loved and valued me more than anything else in the world, was also resolutely uninterested in the fact that I wrote. One of them was also a writer and we decided to write a book together. We wrote alternating chapters and we spent hours at a time discussing the plotlines of his chapters, the motivations of the characters and their back stories, the themes he was trying to present. We got it almost finished, and he never read a word I wrote for it. One of them nagged me for months to let him read something I'd written, and once I'd handed it over didn't glance at it for the best part of a year. When I finally got him to read it, he told me he wasn't quite sure which country it was set in and refused to discuss it any further.

I've written a lot since then, and I've shared none of it. Most of it is bad. I'm quite comfortable with my bad writing, where my characters are undefined and my plot is like wandering around the supermarket with no list, or even the vaguest idea why you might have gone in there. I understand it. I understand why it's wrong, I understand where the fixes would need to be made. My bad writing has never made me doubt my ability.

The thought of sharing my good writing is petrifying. The idea of presenting someone with words I'm genuinely proud of - which is rare - and having them go ignored or uncared for frightens me more than I can say. I genuinely worry that after so much disinterest, my urge to write simply wouldn't survive any more of it. So I hide it, refuse to show my work to people, and keep my belief in myself as a Person Who Can Write.

I'm doing this project in large part to try and get over that. Maybe if I get used to sharing something - anything - again, get to the point where I expect my words to be read, I can start sharing the good stuff. Maybe once I'm sharing again, I won't be too frightened to finish my good stories because I'm terrified of ruining them. Maybe if I can stop seeing the potential reader of my writing as one single, bored audience member, it'll be easier to access that place of honesty where all of my good words came from.

It'll take a while. But I have hope.

strike

Today I was on strike. I intended to use the time to put my life in order. Instead I ate chocolate and watched shitty internet videos. I am quite comfortable with my life choices, and also living in filth.

stuck

I had a lot of plans for what I was going to write today. I started three or four posts. But then I got stuck, and now what I want more than anything is to be outside, in the air, and to not look at a computer again until it's not today anymore. I have serious thoughts, and maybe even insights, but this is clearly not the time.

(Also I told her YOU CAN'T EVICT US WE QUIT, except in language so horribly nice that the sarcasm was almost obvious, and I'm a little too sunk in nerves to be able to write coherently.)

I will go to the park. And have pudding. Perhaps not at the same time.

power cut blues

Tonight we were dancing, and the music stopped and the lights went out.

We carried on dancing to piano and harmonica by candlelight (and iPhone light, because what year is this).

I love the things that happen to me.

lost

In 2008, this song was mine.

It wasn't new to me. I'd run out to buy the album on the day of its release, an eager little Skunk Anansie obsessive who would take what she could get in what she assumed to be their permanent absence (I spent so long wishing that they'd come back, writing about it and complaining to virtual strangers about it and what will it take, guys, seriously, that I now feel I've made some strange pact with the universe to buy everything they ever record for the rest of time regardless of how good or bad it is, and I'm beginning to feel like they know that). I got it home, listened to it, thought, "Her voice is still one of the most awesome things nature has ever created, but this is clearly not Skunk Anansie" and didn't pay it much more attention. A few of the songs found their way into my writing playlist, but they weren't special. Her voice was special, but the songs weren't anything much.

This song didn't become mine until several years later. When this song became mine, I was spending days at a time in bed, sleeping through the afternoons, leaving the house as sporadically as I could possibly manage. I wasn't interested in life, and though I didn't ever consider doing anything about it, I often wondered why it wouldn't just stop.

He would call me every day. He would bring me food. Sometimes he would yell at me for living in bed, if he wanted something to yell at me for, but mostly he liked that I wasn't going out, that nobody else could see me. It made life a lot more difficult, but it eased his mind. I wasn't going anywhere.

Part of him had always been convinced that I was going to leave, or rather, that somebody was going to take me from him. I knew that wasn't going to happen, because who'd want to take me?

This song became mine as I started to understand exactly what he was doing to me. This song became mine as he told me, repeatedly, that I had absolutely no skills for the real world and would never be able to survive in it. This song became mine as he listed all the things he was doing for me, as though they were favours rather than hindrances and manipulations.

What was I waiting for? Waiting for the bubble to burst?

The song remained mine as I started to get myself together, as I rediscovered hobbies and mornings and the ability to shower. The song remained mine as I went for walks and took photos and called my friends.

Now I'm up and running...

The song was mine after I made that final call to him. The song was mine as I ignored his messages and his turning up at my house and his promises to change, and it was mine as I spent the next several months trying to get my head around what had been happening for the past five years.

Strong enough to walk away... and leave you alone.

The song isn't so much mine anymore. I used to feel weirdly possessive over it, wanting to believe that nobody else had ever heard of it. The idea of other people listening to it made me feel uncomfortable, as though they were listening to the quietest and most hidden parts of my mind. Even if the people in question had no idea that this song meant anything to me, it still felt like they were too close to my vulnerabilities.

Luckily I didn't come across these people very often, because who cared about this song? Lead singer of some defunct indie rock band released an album? So what? I've played it four or five times while writing this post, and it is not an exceptional song. It's not bad, but it's not Secretly. There's no real reason to care about this song.

And yet it still gets me. I don't feel ownership of it anymore, but it still gets me, even on the fifth playback in a row. I hear it and I can remember, viscerally, everything I felt back then. I hear it and it's like looking back over my shoulder and seeing just how fucking far I walked away. If I'm feeling confused or overwhelmed or useless and I hear this song, the feelings stop, or at least fade. I'm not lost. Quite the opposite.

filler

This is when the daily thing gets tough. Two hours left in the day and I find myself staring a blank update page going ...dunno. I could write about... what's in my direct line of vision? A pile of clothes, half a Chocolate Orange, and a stuffed Loch Ness Monster with a derp face. None of that works.

OK, so what did I do today? I drank more milk than most people get through in two weeks. This is also not a good subject for a post.

Tomorrow? Work. Also discussing with my housemates what to do about our terrible landlord. I could write about that, but the rage is too strong and also she might somehow be reading this GO AWAY AN this is not for you the rights to my blog were not included in the contract with all the other shit you got and I didn't really mean you were terrible and YOU CAN'T EVICT ME I QUIT oh god now I don't have a house anymore and I should not write about this because it will break my mind.

Maybe I should look at my actual diary to see what's been on my mind. ...hah. No, the world does not need to know any of this. Sometimes the sixteen-year-old Goth with the long variety of stupid flowery OpenDiary handles takes over my fingers and makes me write some fascinatingly terrible melodramatic shit. Back in your box, Goth Jen. You can come out again next time there's a trip to Camden Market on the cards.

Other people on the internet are... taking photos of their children and watching Wimbledon. Nope.

Out on the street there are kids fighting, drug dealers sitting on front steps, and a local butcher who moves meat around by holding it directly in front of his face. I can't make a post out of that. Well, not right now. In the right frame of mind I could probably get a few hundred words out of almost being hit in the head with half a cow.

So maybe I have nothing to say. But I promised I'd say it anyway.

Tomorrow will be better than this. Promise.

sleepless

I have had five hours' sleep since Wednesday, and I'm about to go out to a party.

I don't have the talent for falling asleep that some people have. I don't sleep on public transport, or in waiting rooms, and I don't take naps in the middle of the day. I've spent a lot of nights lying awake alternately trying to will myself out of consciousness and trying to distract myself from my attempts so that sleep might be able to catch me out in a sneak attack. I'm rarely tired enough to sleep anywhere except in my bed, and when it does happen it unnerves me.

Time skips five minutes, ten minutes, thirty seconds, an hour, and it all feels the same. Every time I open my eyes I see something unfamiliar and I panic, briefly, trying to remember where I am and what I'm doing there, assuring myself that I'm done now, no more sleep required, I can stay awake in this place. And then I forget it instantly because things make more sense with my eyes closed.

blank

I have no thoughts in my head today. There's been nothing I've wanted to share.

I spent my lunchtime sitting under a tree in the park, not thinking.

I sat in the office all day, not thinking. No work to do, and if there was I managed to ignore it.

Things happened to other people today. The internet told me so.

 He's bought a house. I'm glad he's happy now. That was a rough couple of years.

I'm sorry, you named your child what now? 

That's an amazing photo. I wonder how they got up there?

Oh, she's gone back to her maiden name. They were only married three years. I'd like to ask what happened, but we're not really friends, no matter what social media says.

I still miss you. It's not fixable, but I miss you nonetheless.

on a dating site

Somebody asked me what I was looking for in a relationship.

I told him I wanted someone I could learn from, someone who wanted to learn from me. I told him I wanted us to be able to discover new things together, meet new people together, look at things in a new way together. I told him I was looking for rapport, for someone who appreciated and shared my brand of silliness. I said I wanted a relationship to make my world bigger and more interesting, rather than shrinking down to a tiny life with just the two of us in it.

He said, “That’s a first.”

Is it really? That’s a little depressing.

He said, “Women usually say they’re looking for someone they can talk to who makes them laugh.”

That’s a very nice sentiment, I said, but almost everyone wants that. I could give you that answer and you’d have no more useful information about whether we’d be compatible than you did before. I’m not trying to keep my options as wide open as possible; I don’t have a burning desire to get myself coupled up at any cost. If I do decide to start a relationship then I need to know that it’s going to make me happy, and I’m not going to get that kind of certainty from platitudes.

He said, “Yeah. Well, I want all those things you just said too.”

I stopped responding.

on fear

When I was five or six, my school started weekly screenings of a serialised educational programme that was meant to teach language skills through the medium of Exciting Adventure Saga. It’s a well-remembered Exciting Adventure Saga amongst my age group, and the consensus seems to be that it did its job well. It had an epic quest to save a magical land, with a dragon and a massive talking mouse and a singing swamp and a green man and an orange man and a purple woman and a big intimidating villain and lots of fun with letters and words.

It scared the everloving shit out of me.

Not in the sense that it made me jump, or gave me a couple of nightmares. It wasn’t just that I covered my eyes when the baddie came on screen. I didn’t sleep properly for years. It was the first thing that jumped into my mind when it was dark, or quiet, or when I was alone. I used to squish myself into the tiniest little space on my bed and barricade myself in with whatever happened to be in my room – teddies, magazines, empty boxes, inconveniently pointy plastic toys. (Having written that, I realise I’m still not quite over this nesting-in-everything habit. Hmmm.)

In defence of baby Jen, the villain of this particular show was an eight foot tall bird-skeleton thing who could melt people by touching them. I still think that’s a legitimately horrible thing. Admittedly, baby Jen was also scared of pastel hippos and being stared at by a live tomato with no face (my father accidentally traumatised me with sarcasm), but that passed much more quickly than the fear of melty skeleton man.

My parents had me removed from TV time when they realised that it was causing me some fairly serious problems, and I spent the rest of the series sitting in the library (or what passed for such in my fairly rough local primary school) with the kids from the friendly neighbourhood cult who weren’t allowed TV. This was rather less helpful than you might think. That terrifying bird thing was burned into my brain, and it followed me everywhere for the next three or four years. Being hauled back into the TV room for the final episode, where nothing happened to the bird thing at all until the closing credits, when it DISAPPEARED as it was walking RIGHT AT ME was also somewhat less reassuring than my teachers anticipated. Damn you, show. Damn you.

As an adult, my memory, imagination and sense of empathy have kept me from watching or reading or listening to any number of things. Horror is out. Gore is out (“oh, it’s not that gory,” people say reassuringly when trying to persuade me to watch something. But there is some gore? “Yes, but it’s really not - ” Thank you very much, I have noted your recommendation and will be over here assiduously NOT WATCHING IT). I point-blank refused to read one of the books on my university syllabus on the basis that it was fucking gross. The three-line synopsis given to me by one of my classmates was more than enough. But mostly, my fears of bird-skeleton things and coal-eating dragons and green trolls lurking under bridges followed the more common path and developed into mundane fears of what-if and other people’s reactions to things I did, or said, or was. Those mundane fears kept me static and terrified for an uncomfortably long time, and there is pretty much nothing to say about that period of my life, because nothing happened. I understood boredom. It was comfortable.

My fear of the unknown is now all but gone. I think everything is an EXCELLENT idea, especially if I’m in the company of people who can also be persuaded to think that everything is an EXCELLENT idea.

Actual email conversation between my mother and me last year:

Mum: Just back from visiting Pat and Paul! Are you in for a phone call tonight?

Me: I’m actually in Italy with an Australian I met on Tuesday. I can call you on Sunday evening.

I’m still a fraidy-cat at my core. I can find really interesting ways to be scared of something. But the voice telling me to be scared is much smaller these days. It has to compete with impulsiveness and curiosity. It has to compete with the rational voice explaining why the thing is not a scary thing at all, and also with “do it do it DO IT it’ll be funny”. The comfort I used to find in monotony is pale and disinteresting in comparison to the comfort I now find in my equally silly friends who clearly aren’t scared of the thing at all.

Sometimes the fraidy-cat still wins, and that’s OK. Some things will pass me by. But I am busy and happy, and I don’t have holes in my life that I need to fill with regret. We’re good, my fears and I, and these days they shut up when they’re told to.

on writing

“Write something every day. Even if it's shit. Even if the subject is vacuous. Even if it's a transcript of that email conversation about the sarcastic blue gremlin in the call centre. Even if you know it'll look like a waste of words tomorrow, write something today. It doesn't matter what the words you choose to write say about you. Bad writing gets you closer to being a writer than no writing at all.”

 Alright, July. Let's do this.