On Mess

I have been on hiatus, feeling my feelings, and now I am back.

I have been messaging a friend, of course, about the Lindy West thing. Of course I have! I am on deadline, so I will spend a whole afternoon going through a long read and talking about it, of course I will. And one of the things that occurred to me, is how difficult it must be, to live your life like that - processing whatever’s happened to you in real time, turning it into a blog post, a poem, a one woman show, almost before it has finished happening. How was she meant to think about her relationship with any degree of clarity when she was writing about it? How’s she meant to find that kind of peace now, with me chattering about it?

I used to live like this, in a minor way. I used to blog, and write performance poetry, all about myself, exactly as it happened. As if my life would go off, like old milk, if I didn’t. And at first, it was kind of great. Everyone always knew what was going on with me. Total strangers would take my side in any minor grievances I had over my ex, over my boss, over my ex boss. And it was comforting and also fun! Fun in the way that screeching your secrets over a second bottle of rose in the pub is fun, in the way that making a bitchy joke about a mutual friend and, after a horrible split second, everyone laughs, is fun. I abstain from this kind of fun, mostly, now that I am a grown up and a mother and like to think of myself as too sensible and kind for this kind of thing, but am I really? I do miss it.

But I stopped. There were a couple of times that I felt that what I was doing was… emotionally dangerous. When I was 28 I went to Edinburgh and I did a one woman show about how scared I was of pregnancy, about how afraid I was that it would literally tear me apart, every day for a month. Every day, no matter what I was feeling. And I knew it made me tired, and I knew it made me feel bruised, and mad, but what didn’t occur to me at the time was - I could have been pregnant, that summer. It would have been an accident, but it wasn’t impossible, and if it had happened I’d have kept it. And I’d still have had to get up there, every single day, and tear myself apart.

Two years later, I did another show, this time about disasters. I did a poem about the worst thing that ever happened to me - at that time, the death of my cat. And the last time I performed that show, my dad was in hospital, following a heart attack. STUPID little girl. I choked the show out anyway and I never ever went back to performing on that level, because - what the fuck. I was done with feeling my feelings as a commodity. I wanted a personal life back.

If my 20’s were the era of TELL EVERYONE EVERYTHING, my 30’s were the era of DEFEND YOURSELF. BECOME WHO YOU WANT TO BE, WITH NO ONE WATCHING. And then, like a lot of people in my 30’s, I fucked up this plan by having a child, which - surprise - left me feeling like suddenly a completely different person, and also one who wasn’t wearing any skin. Everything HURT and I felt thing so DEEPLY in the baby and toddler years. That leakiness of the early days - when everything is blood or milk or tears - felt like it lasted until my kid was nearly 4. And through all of this I was freelancing, and unmoored - two days a week as a stay at home mum, a day tutoring A level students, a couple of days as a university lecturer - a kaleidoscope of different versions of myself, different people’s eyes looking at me in a different way, and I didn’t feel like any of them really. I felt most at peace when I was walking the baby around in the pram, or offering her a toy. It’s weird how much you pick up about motherhood by playing with dolls. You really do spend a lot of time rocking and shushing them, walking them around. If it wasn’t for the crushing responsibility of keeping a tiny life alive, my kid, now five, could pretty much do it already. People were always watching me, it felt like, at the baby groups and through their zoom screens, and becoming who I wanted to be felt further away than ever.

And now I am 40 and last week I quit therapy and I think that something has happened which is that, in the best possible way, I have… given up. I don’t have to spend a lot of time BECOMING, maybe. Maybe I just AM? Maybe that is unavoidable, and always has been. Somehow I feel more comfortable, now, in my skin. I can make jokes and ask questions at work and not worry about people thinking I’m stupid, and if someone criticises my parenting I can quietly roll my eyes and walk away.

For my next novel, I am considering doing a messy, messy thing, which is to include an anti-acknowledgement. Of course, I would not name them, but the book lies so firmly in the shadow of someone I used to know that it would feel weird not to shout them out, and also it would be wrong to thank them. I don’t want to say thank you! I want to say fuck you! Fuck you so much I wrote a book about you. I don’t know if I will. But isn’t it interesting that the idea won’t leave me alone? Such a bad idea. So much MESS.

So anyway I think I’m going to start writing personal essays again and I think I’m going to try and work out 5 minutes and start doing a bit of stand up.

Because the thing is… I’m a human and I think it’s kind of worth it? I think it’s worth the MESS. I think the mess might be the point. When Lily Allen dropped that album just before the Stranger Things press tour (SO MESSY) I was absolutely cheering her on. And will that album come back and bite her in the arse, in ten years, in twenty? I dunno. I hope not. I hope that she’ll get to a better place and look back at her younger self with affection. I think I can. I can look back at me aged 28, writing an hour long show about how having a baby would tear me apart and I can think - oh, love. Yes. It did. And it was worth it.

Being human is worth it?

AI could never.

More soon.

L xx