#57 Plan_C - Chasing Status
In this newsletter I wonder if I can correct the past through clothing. Which is mad.
I was standing in Victoria Park with a finger hovering over the bid button on Ebay to sniper purchase a dress that was so of-the-moment in 2008. I caught myself thinking, What am I doing? Why do I have a feverish, urgent need for this?
The deepest part of my brain answered me, I am trying to reach through time and put myself right from here, when I have the dress I couldn’t have when I was 22-years-old all will be right in the world, ok. Ok.
The dress from the past is now in the post on the way to me. Why do I think a dress is going to be the answer to anything?
As with everything, this all came to be from beliefs that go back to something put in my head before I was sensible. Partially this stems from money being tight as a kid, partially because I have an addiction to clothes that borders on the pathological and partially it is all to persuade people that I am cool enough to invite to the party via impressive cardigans and to all prove that I am good enough now.
I had a past love where the residing feeling that coloured my everyday was that I wasn’t enough, I was always lacking in some way and failing to measure up to the person he wished I was.
My crimes were petty; I cared too much about frivolous things, I wasted time on uninteresting art, my emotions were outsize and disproportionate.
I did what any person with a poor sense of self would do, I would play-up to anything that I thought would please him, I would feel triumphant if I made him laugh or he liked my clothes or found my taste in films up-to-scratch. I chased his approval. In every way he just seemed better than me, wiser with money, never over-the-top in his reactions, always content with the situation and no evidence of the painful motivation of chasing something that seemed to rule me.
A tiny thread inside me snapped and started a slow unravelling one August. I was musing some doubts about a friend buying a house with her boyfriend, I was worried she was entering a situation where she would lose out. My boyfriend replied, that it was no different for me, should we end, I had no stake in our home. I felt like I had been drenched in cold water. The casualness of the information, the startling nothingness in the tone, the realisation that I was a total fool, it left me reeling. I had a lot of pride in the way I had sought out things to make a beautiful home - vintage chairs, carefully placed art, wasting hours scouring the internet for a 1950s sideboard for my records. Losing it was painful, it wasn’t just a place for things and hopes but it was my best expression of how together I was. I couldn’t really be an unloveable fuck-up if I owned vintage glass salt and pepper shakers and Phillipe Starck chairs now could I?
Fast forward to another boy, another living room, another set of inadequacies to feel unworthy about. He had parents with a Porsche in the garage, champagne ignored in the wine rack and the casualness of not obsessively caring about any of it.
It was all a lifetime away from my upbringing and how anything of monetary value has to be kept ‘for special’ and maybe even keeping the plastic on for minimum enjoyment. His easiness around money threw-up another sense of woefulness. I remember buying M&S flowers and cakes to try and make-up for my perceived awfulness and then being too embarrassed to hand them over. I remember wearing new black jeans and shrugging on a blazer, feeling dizzy and holding on the kitchen worktop behind my back to stop feeling like I was going to tip over and trying to look better, seem better than I felt to these people. I was just so exhausted all of the time.
In this configuration, all of the things that I had learned to be seemingly a good girlfriend didn’t apply anymore. Quietness was not rewarded, keeping inconvenient feelings to myself came across as suspicious, remaining independent was not viewed as competent and cool but fierce and cold. Every day was like learning a painful lesson of just how wrong you can be while following every rule you have been given. I would sob while driving, at my own complete inadequacy to be a proper person that everyone else just seemed to know how to be and ashamed that I just couldn’t be right. I was utterly devastated when my attempts were met with tiresome other kinds of upset I had unlocked by not measuring up.
At that time, I looked the worst I had ever looked, I didn’t believe in buying myself good things then. I felt like I didn’t deserve good things. Things came to an end and I had nowhere to go. The cruel sound of the door closing - click, locked behind me - started a different kind of inadequacy.
I have had it levelled at over time that I am a dark horse or that I keep my cards close to my chest, fair I suppose. However, a lifetime has taught me that my untidy feelings are a burden. My messy family, the griminess of situations that it is hard to make sense of and by sharing these stories you force people to have an inconvenient reaction, so the kinder thing to do is to keep that to yourself. So, mostly I do, there is salt in my sugar but the overall taste is still sweet.
The past few years have seen me buy homes, cars, furniture, art, cardigan after cardigan - move cities, move jobs, move metaphorical mountains to chase away the feeling of never being enough and somehow being too much all at the same time. The numbing and narcotising behaviour of trying to be another person, with different hair, a different postcode and a different even better coat.
There is an unrelenting itch that things aren’t panning out the way they should and there is a sense that everybody seems to feel a way that eludes me. Other people seem to play their hands with confidence, strategy and gracious pragmatism and I play chaotically and emotionally with a bluff that never comes across well and upping the ante wildly out of sync with the game, somehow having chips but only through a scrappy win.
I am sitting here knee-deep in stuff, in my Levi jeans, Ganni t-shirt, a cashmere cardigan with an embroidered rose on the lapel, Chanel perfume and a new Barbour coat that has just arrived in an open box at my feet - covered in plasters from walking too far in my Grenson boots. An embarrassment of riches as approved by Refinery 29.
It is a trivial pursuit that feels especially hollow, especially now. Nobody can see me and nobody cares and yet here I am still chasing, chasing, chasing someone to tell me that I am ok now, I am enough. I need to remember that feeling will not be remedied by a parcel abandoned behind the wheelie bin, from Hermes. Besides, the world needs the cardboard these days.
Here is an interesting story about the impact of being struck by lightning - now we can now see Mars in real time (exciting!) but also have no real idea about lots of things that we view as mundane(ish) - article here.
Read the words of Cazzie David on black eyeliner here and know that I agree with every one of them.
“Can’t Even looks like it might be some navel-gazing pop-psych title about the millennial experience. Actually, it’s as much about 20th-century economics, and serves as a necessary reminder that we subscribe to an inhumane form of capitalism that prioritises profit over wellbeing.” Read here.
Beautiful comic and poet Tim Key here talking about his new book “He Used Thought As A Wife” and an excellent poem of his about romance…
Romance
Two lovers, exiled from one another.
They started doing the same things at all
times.
He would post her a bagel for breakfast
and they would eat “together”.
For lunch they would cook linguine,
slinging it into the pan at twelve forty-five on
the dot.
They’d run at five and stop in front of
their respective oak trees, and in the evening
they’d start their movie at the exact same time
and watch it with the same red wine in
matching glasses, and it was beautiful.
At night they screwed their respective
flatmates, and all four had a WhatsApp group
and it was an absolute disgrace.
Here is my version of Jerry Springer’s Final Thoughts
I think about giving this newsletter up after every edition goes out. I think, that will be the last one! everytime. I am an idiot and why am I even doing this? Then something pulls me back, someone subscribes, and I feel my fingers tappity-tap on the keyboard with words pouring out in documents all over. So, another one comes out and again – this one will be the last, go away and live a quiet and minimal life of dignity you boring fool! I think. I have come to believe this is just going to be part of my process, my lovely tortuous self-loathing process. My typos and grammar are shameful. I know. I am sorry.
So thank you, sincerely, for reading and subscribing it means a lot and I am very thankful.