stuff

I'm about to move house. This will be my fifth move since last year, not including the two months I spent couch-surfing (another nine places). I've become notorious for it. People are either sick of hearing it or want to make jokes about how I must be cursed, which was funny until about two moves ago, when I started to wonder if it might actually be true. We agreed this new tenancy with three days to go on the current place, which hasn't helped my mental state or my writer's block in the slightest.

Back in the autumn I lived out of a suitcase for two months. I sent most of my possessions back to my parents and learned to live more minimally than I thought possible. I'm in no hurry to do that again, but looking around my room eight months later and seeing the amount of packing I'm going to have to do is a little intimidating. I moved into my last place with the suitcase and moved out having acquired bedding, sundries like cushions and mirrors that our landlord didn't want, and a sackful of clothes from my former housemate's periodic clearouts. In the six months I've lived here, I've accumulated a bewildering amount of stuff. I'm not even sure what most of it is, but I can see that it fills the room. And I have the big room.

Some stuff is understandable. A second set of bedding, extra towels. I bought a sleeping bag to go away with. A laundry bin and a desktop fan. None of this explains why my cupboards and drawers are full to bursting and the floor is covered in god knows what. There's no space under my bed. What is it? It can't all be clothes. I didn't think I even had that many clothes. Ripped tights and worn-through shoes, dancer casualties, that I haven't got round to throwing away? That's part of it, but how much space do tights take up? Hair paraphernalia, beauty products? I have a lot of that, but not a room's worth.

Most of it will probably turn out to be uncategorisable. Paperwork that seemed too important to throw out but not important enough to file away. Empty bottles that I thought were pretty. The tub of mini chocolate pumpkins that I've been carting about with me for ages. Things I acquired while drunk that I have no earthly use for but make me smile when I look at them. Small unidentified pieces of rubber or metal that look like they were part of something once, daring me to throw them out before I work out where they came from.

It's easy to build up this kind of collection when it sits quietly in your bedroom, not obviously worthless enough to spur on a decision to throw it away. It's one thing just to leave it where it lies, but it's quite another to pack it all up and lug it over to the other side of London, and I'm determined not to do that. I don't want to move into a new home and have it feel like a mess from the off, because on the basis of past experience I will look around, go, "Hey look, mess!" and proceed to throw junk food wrappers on the floor and sleep on a pile of clothes. I want to be able to make it look and feel like my space, and while I suppose cramming every surface with crap and leaving piles of clothes everywhere is a reasonably accurate representation of me, I'd like to have the option to do something else this time.

So my challenge is to throw things out. Not send it to be stored in someone else's house, actually get rid of it.

I know I have clothes I don't wear. Books I'll never read again. Mostly empty bottles. Shoes that hurt my feet. Information leaflets from old dance festivals that I have electronic copies of anyway. Boxes of Celebrations with just the Bounty bars left. Broken hair grips. Cables for products I don't even own anymore. I know I have things I don't even know I have. There are so many things in this room that I wouldn't miss if they vanished. I probably wouldn't even notice. But actively throwing it out feels different, like I'm callously rejecting that potential future situation when I will be in desperate need of a pair of awkwardly low-riding jeans with diamante on the back pockets (why on earth do I have these? Good grief). It's a block I'm going to have to get over, because this stuff really can't come with me.

This'll be interesting.

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.