i am very serious about my pants.

Tags

feminism, insecurity, opinion, pants, serious things, underwear

I try not to talk too much about Serious Things on the internet. I pretend that it’s because the world is full of enough people shouting their opinions, and really, nobody needs to hear what I think about Terribly Important Stuff.

Really, it’s because a lot of the time I’m not sure I trust my own opinions on things, and I’m pretty sure that if I try and write some kind of intelligent and incisive takedown of the latest government policy or sexist twitter storm or idiotic statement, then I’ll just expose myself as a rampaging moron who is nowhere near as clever as she thinks she is.

And so, I just don’t talk all that much about Serious Things. I have the odd debate with my Farthing Wood Friend (who recently revealed himself to be a massive stinking Tory, much to my horror, but really we’re a bit far into things now for me to run screaming into the night because he has no political soul). I get a bit indignant about the Daily Mail whilst still obsessively reading its website, like everyone else who has ever been on the internet. I work myself into some kind of election frenzy everytime there’s a vote anywhere. But I don’t really talk about this stuff on the internet, because I just don’t really want to look stupid.

But if there’s one thing in my life that I’ve decided I need to abandon, it’s my fear of looking stupid. If only because I spent a large part of my early 20s in a bit of a drunken haze, and undoubtedly did many, many things then which will have made me look about as stupid as it’s possible for a person to look. And so maybe, sometimes, I might a little bit try talking about Serious Things.

Although the Serious Thing that’s got me started isn’t actually that obviously serious. Because it’s pants. Literally. Women’s pants.

As part of my quest to replace every item of clothing I own, you see, I have had to replace pretty much all of my underwear. I’ve not bought a new bra in years, and my pants mostly have holes in the them, and I don’t own a single pair of entirely ladder-free tights (I would say I feel sorry for my Farthing Wood Friend, but since Tories don’t have sympathy for anyone, I refuse to have any sympathy for him). So I’ve been in a lot of underwear departments. And one thing has appeared over the past few years that was not really there as much before; shapewear.

At first, I saw it and I thought it was BRILLIANT. I could avoid all the effort of exercising and eating healthily and just put on this incredibly uncomfortable and deeply unattractive flesh-coloured lycra monstrosity and have the Body of Dreams? AMAZING. But then I thought about it a bit more, and realised it wasn’t just the squishing of my internal organs that was making me uncomfortable. It was the whole idea of it.

Yes, I know that the media seems to think that Mad Men has brought back the hourglass figure, and as someone whose basic shape is closer to hourglass than waif, I know I should probably be grateful for this. And yes, I know that people like Gok Wan try and pretend that these giant Bridget Jones pants are somehow empowering, but I’m reading stuff about “new-style girdles” and “modern corsets”.

This does not sound empowering to me. It actually just sounds like yet another thing to be self-conscious and insecure about. On top of having a second-rate body, I now apparently have second-rate pants that do a second-rate job of helping me achieve yet another “perfect body”, which anyone with any sense knows does not actually exists. The whole thing’s bloody exhausting.

So after originally buying a pair of the Magic Pants in the hope they would make me feel less dreadful about my body, and then discovering they actually just made me feel worse, I’ve decided that I am not going for any of this Shapewear shit. I am going to carry on with my plan to eat normal food and do normal exercise and wear normal pants, and everything else can just bugger off. Especially the “modern corset”.

video blogging part two: judgemental sixteen year olds

Tags

adulthood, nostalgia, video blog

a few weeks ago i took part in Billygean’s blogging experiment, in which i rambled on slightly insanely about Will Young. this time, it was my go to pose the question which was “what would your sixteen year old self think of you?”

my twitter

Valerie’s blog and twitter

Kate’s twitter

Billygean’s blog and twitter

Nathan’s blog, twitter and website

i need to channel my inner Barlow

Tags

anger, gary barlow, irrational, patience, property, take that

I am not a particularly patient person. I never have been, and I have always known this and been OK with it. Yes, patience is a virtue, and yes, maybe I might not get myself into quite so many stupid situations if I didn’t insist on crashing through life without any real forethought, but I don’t care. Being patient is BORING. Really, really, joy-crushingly boring.

It’s one of many reasons why I’d be a rubbish doctor; I could never get my head around “wait and see”.  I’d just stomp right in and throw drugs and steroids and surgery at absolutely everything, because I could not be arsed to wait for it to resolve on its own. And yeah, maybe my approach would be good with stuff like massive cancer, but not so much with a bit of a cold (in this scenario we are, of course, ignoring the fact that I am rubbish at science and would never even make it to med school in the first place. Let’s blame the patience).

And I know that Gary Barlow loves to tell people to have a little patience, and yeah, Gary Barlow is usually right about things. But in this case, I decided long ago not to listen to him. Because he is GARY FUCKING BARLOW. I actually can’t think of anything better than being Gary Barlow, with the success and the beard and lovely family and adoration and the years in the musical wilderness to put everything in perspective. If I were Gary Barlow, I’d sit around all day every day patiently waiting for everything to carry on being just a brilliant as it already is.

But I am not Gary Barlow. Or any other member of Take That, for that matter. I’m just a girl who does not like having to wait for things.

Which is why buying a house is proving to be the greatest test of all time. I knew it was going to take forever; I have seen other people buy houses. I have sat in the pub whilst they tell me about all the endless delays that have happened. I have heard about surveys doing funny things, and about solicitors losing key papers, and about chains and gazumping and badness.

I was kind of expecting that it would take forever. I had been preparing myself for it to take forever. I was trying to listen to Mr Barlow, and my Farthing Wood Friend, and my mother, and everyone else in the world who has ever told me to Have A Little Patience. And I’d been doing quite well.

But not today.

Today, you see, I am a great big mess of MAD IMPATIENCE. It’s been started by the survey; the lack of documentation on everything that might possibly be wrong with the house was what I had decided was holding the sale up. But now we have the survey back. And it’s told us everything that might be wrong. And I am irrationally, intensely angry with it.

STUPID SURVEY. How dare it tell me to get other people to look at things? How dare it cause more delays? Does it not know that I WANT MY HOUSE AND I WANT IT NOW? DOES IT NOT CARE AT ALL? Were it not for the fact that it’s a piece of paper and therefore does not have a face I would definitely punch it in the face. I’m actually a little tempted to draw a face on it just so I can punch that.

But I won’t. I’ll try and pay attention to Mr Barlow. I really, really need to pay attention to Mr Barlow.

i am not a nomad.

Tags

adulthood, houses, plans, relationships, travel, work

When I was younger, I always thought that at some point I’d bugger off and live overseas.

And when I say younger, I don’t mean “when I was about 11”. When I was 11, I actually was living overseas, so the thought didn’t really occur to me. It was more the chunk of my life from 18-23, where I just assumed that at some point in my mid-to-late 20s I’d get a bit bored of London and decide that actually, I quite fancied going somewhere else for a bit.

I didn’t give that much thought to where; I just figured I’d probably either go back to Australia, or actually make use of my so-far-entirely-pointless US passport and go live in New York for a bit.

And that was the plan; graduate, do a bit of work, get some stuff on the CV, go a-wandering. It wasn’t a particularly well-considered plan, more just the result of an assumption that going overseas for a bit is what you do. Because it’s what we did when I was a kid; after a few false-starts of maybe going to live in Canada or in Africa, and that whole being born in Houston thing, we buggered off to Melbourne for a few years. Moving about is the norm when you’re spawn of oil company employee. Staying in one place had never really occurred to me.

Then I started going out with my Farthing Wood Friend, a man who is so keen on the concept of “home” that it’s sometimes a bit of a struggle to get him to leave the house, let alone the country. So I waited for the wanderlust to hit, and I said to people that I might try and drag him overseas for a few years before we “settled down”.

And then I entirely forgot about the whole thing, and started obsessively rightmoving instead.

In the past few months, the plan has come sneaking back into my brain a bit. I should’ve expected it, really, what with the whole “I’m approaching 27, which is the age at which I always said I’d go overseas” thing. But I’m not going overseas. I’m buying a house 20 minutes from my hometown instead, even though if you’d asked me when I lived there I would’ve tried to tell you that I didn’t really have a hometown and was a bit of a nomad instead. Which I’m not; one stint living in a different country doesn’t make you a nomad. Bruce Parry wouldn’t come visit the home counties to stay with your really rather stationary tribe.

Yet some of my friends are doing the overseas thing. Quite a few of my friends, actually. And whilst I expected that I’d have a giant pang of jealousy, and sit there looking at the list of fixtures and fittings my solicitor has sent me and seething about the fact that I’ve ended up exactly where I never thought I’d be, I haven’t had any of that at all.

I think it’s great that people are Going Places and Doing Things, but I’m also really glad that I’m not one of those people. Because actually, I just want to sit on a sofa with a cat and watch a whole load of Yes Minister. And then visit the people who’ve gone off on adventure and started a new life. And then go home again.

quarter life crisis – a crazy exciting video experiment

Tags

quarter life crisis, relationships, video, will young, work

at work i spend all my life talking about collaboration, and engagement, and podcasts being an excellent format for really connecting with your people. and i believe it, because i’m one of those weird people who actually loves their job. but, as i’m sure you’ve noticed, i do not really do the podcast-ing, video-ing thing myself.

billygean decided to change all that; she created a video blogging project in which a few of us People From the Internet had to answer the question did you have a quarter life crisis, and are you over it yet?

and here are the results. apologies for being a bit strange and ranting on about will young.

Valerie’s twitter and blog.

My twitter.

Billygean’s twitter and blog.

Kate’s twitter.

Nathan’s twitter and website and blog.

depression awareness week

Tags

depression awareness week, mental health, stigma, talking

Apparently, this week is Depression Awareness Week. I think it’s safe to say that I’m pretty bloody aware of depression. I’m also pretty open about it; I figure the best way to get rid of any shame or stigma or badness or judgement is to act like I have absolutely nothing to be ashamed about.

Yeah, I have depression. I also have entirely rectangular feet, and ginger hair, and a tendency to talk way too fast, and I fall over absolutely constantly. I’m no more ashamed about depression than I am about any of those things.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve not had some interesting chats in the year and a half since I was diagnosed.

And that year and a half is actually a relatively short time in the tale of me vs my own brain; the endless amounts of therapy have revealed that it’s something that’s actually being going on since I was about 20, and which started rumbling even before that. I was just too busy trying to ignore it and stomp on with life – or to just completely self-destruct – to actually deal with it. This used to be a regret of mine. Now I’ve decided that it’s stupid to regret things.

Still, once I finally did decide to get some help, things didn’t get any easier. It took a long time for me to stop thinking of myself as “broken”, and to stop being angry, and to stop trying to get back to some mythical land before depression where I’d been happy all of the time (and which I know now doesn’t exist). I needed a hell of a lot of help and support. And some people were fantastic. Others were not so.

It’s not that people were actively out to say stupid things, or to upset me, or to just act like dicks (although at the time, some of the wonderful Depression Paranoia made it feel that way). I thought that being open was the best way to deal with things, but at times that didn’t help. I was asked if I was “defining myself” by my depression. I was asked if I actually wanted to get better. I had conversations where people were hinting that maybe I found something romantic in being depressed, that it was some kind of Tortured Artist act.

These were the conversations after which I’d find myself sat on the kitchen floor, staring at the spin cycle of the washing machine, and wondering how I’d ever find the energy to get up again.

But I kept going, and I kept plodding, and I kept talking. And now I think I’ve reached a point where I know how to manage both the miseries, and talking about it. I don’t shy away from telling people, but now that I’m well, I don’t go out of my way to mention it either. Sometimes it comes up in conversation, sometimes it doesn’t. Kind of like my stupid rectangular feet, and the tendency to fall over.

the great big list of places to go

Tags

adulthood, holidays, lists, plans, travel

When I was about 19, I started work on my “Great Big List of Places to Go”. I was sat in my bedroom at uni, talking to my housemate, desperately trying to avoid reading Gawain and the Green Knight, and it seemed a pretty good list to make at the time. And I convinced myself that gradually, I would be able to make my way down the list and visit all the places I wanted to see, and eventually I’d be the most brilliantly-travelled person in the world.

I am beginning to realise that this is not going to be the case.

There are two problems with my original plan; the list itself, and stupid reality. Because when I was sat in my slightly damp and utterly filthy bedroom in Birmingham in 2004 talking about how I really wanted to go to China because I was “fascinated by the history and culture” and other such knobbish things, I was not even a little bit aware of what life’s like after uni.  When you have jobs. And bills. And rent, or maybe a mortgage. And you get one paycheque every month, and 27.5 days of annual leave every year.

And yes, you can fit some pretty good trips in around this – I’ve done safari in South Africa, and I’ve done dragging my boyfriend around Holocaust museums and memorials, and I’ve done romantic trip to Venice and I’m shortly going to do a Leonard Cohen gig in Finland – but still, chances for escape are pretty limited, and the funds with which to do the escaping aren’t really any more forthcoming.

And yet, that’s not really the problem. It is, as I started saying before I distracted myself, the list itself. Because the bloody thing just keeps growing in a way that is not at all proportionate to the number of places I visit. It’d be fine if I could operate a one-in-one-out system on it, because then I’d at least be able to trick myself into thinking that maybe one day I could get to the end of it. But that’s not how it works; I go one place, and it ends up inspiring about three more potential destinations. And I keep hearing from friends who have just been Very Exciting Places, and they end up going on my list as well.

At this rate I’m going to need to win six different lotteries and then take 15 years off work if I’m going to make it to even half the places I want to go.

So I think I’m going to need to introduce some really good List Administration if I’m not going to spend the rest of my life looking at the British Airways website and sobbing. I think the time has come for me to introduce The Numbers of Desire – or, if you want to be boring about it, to just actually prioritise where I want to go.

So Russia’s staying near the top, because I’m a disgusting history geek and my Farthing Wood Friend has a Russian A-Level and can hopefully at least read some of the signs. Paris is sticking about because it’s near and can be done in a weekend and I haven’t been since I was 8. Japan, because it’s Japan. Vietnam because everyone keeps telling me I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO GO THERE and I think I agree. And China, because at heart I’m still as pretentious as I was when I did my history A Level and decided I absolutely had to go and see the place where all this stuff happened.

So I’ve got the top five. For now. It’ll probably change tomorrow, or after lunch, or the next time someone mentions somewhere different to me. But for now, I’m just going to focus on the five, and ignore the rest of the list. Because otherwise, I might just cry.

katniss everdeen is my saviour

Tags

books, depression, hunger games, reading, recovery

Back in the Dark Times of last year, I lost the ability to read. I blogged about it at the time, but I wasn’t particularly coherent, and never quite explained what happened. Which was really quite simple; I would sit down and try and read something, but I couldn’t make the words on the page come into focus. And if I could do that, I couldn’t get to the end of a sentence and still be able to remember the beginning of it. I stood pretty much no chance of making it to the end of a paragraph without being utterly confused. My brain was just refusing to cooperate, and it didn’t care if I was trying to read a novel, or a form, or an email. It just wasn’t having any of it.

At the time I coped with it by trying to point my brain at history books, mostly because it didn’t really matter if I missed huge chunks of the book out and failed to digest entire chapters; I already knew what happened to Henry VIII’s wives. I would get to the end of 400-page books with no more knowledge about whatever their subject was than I’d had when I started. But that was OK. Just the simple act of having made my eyes follow some words was enough for me.

And then I got a little bit better, and got frustrated at my inability to follow things, and gave up reading pretty much altogether.

Which is how it’s been for the past six months or so; I don’t read books anymore. I read magazines in the bath, and I read the odd newspaper story, but my kindle battery has been dead for months, and my bookshelves have been undisturbed. I keep thinking I should give reading another try, but I can’t bring myself to. It was the very first thing I ever loved – alongside Jason Donovan and Superted – and it was just too piss-annoying and upsetting to not really be able to do it anymore.

But over the past few days, I’ve discovered my reading saviour. And it an entirely unexpected one.

It’s the Hunger Games.

Traditionally, I am not the type to read things like the Hunger Games. I spent years refusing to read all Harry Potters. I have never even opened a Twilight. I haven’t even read a single Philip Pullman. I’d like to pretend I’ve got some proper, well-thought-out reason for this. But I don’t. Really, it’s just because I’m a whacking great snob.

Still, I went to see the Hunger Games film on the weekend, and I enjoyed it. And then the friend I saw it with told me how the book was quite good, and quite an easy read, and I just thought I might as well just stop being a knob and give it a try, because maybe what I needed was something easy to remind me how reading works. So I bought the first book on my kindle, because I’m just too much of a self-conscious pretentious dick to actually stand on the train with a book at aimed at teenagers pointing out at everyone.

And less than three days later, I’m 86% of the way through. I haven’t made it past 9% on any book since last summer. I seem to be fixed.

So now I love the Hunger Games more than it’s reasonable to love any book. Not because I think it’s that great, although I am enjoying it, and I am pretty rubbish at putting it down. I love it because it’s given me the ability to read back. And for that I will be eternally grateful.

i’m in the middle of the clothing apocalypse

Tags

clothes, fashion, money, sewing

A few weeks ago a strange thing happened. I was stood in front of my wardrobe, trying to work out what the hell I wanted to put on my body that day, when I suddenly realised that all of my clothes are really old. Really, really old.

Admittedly, some of them are old on purpose; the vintage ballgowns I bought off eBay, and the stuff I inherited/stole from my mother. But a lot of the rest of it is just…old. Not in an exciting, vintage-y way, just in a faded, slightly bobbly, seam falling down-y kind of way. And I have never realised it before.

I used to buy a lot of clothes, you see. I started at the University of Birmingham the very week the bullring opened, and so almost inevitably, 50% of my student loan went in Topshop (the other 50% went in the Bristol Pear). And I’ve been living off those clothes for years. I thought this was fine.

Then I remembered about the passing of time, and how much it likes to mess with my brain.

Because, much as I hate to admit it, my university days aren’t all that recent anymore. I graduated almost six years ago, so clothes I bought in my first year are the best part of a decade old.  AN ACTUAL DECADE. Which maybe explains why they’re so tatty now.

Sure, I’ve picked up a few things since uni; mostly jeans, and some plain t-shirts, and a few asos dresses. But over the past two or three years, I’ve stopped doing even that, because I went a bit mad, forgot how to eat normally, and decided I hated shopping.

I hated having to guess at what size I was, and whether I was fatter or thinner than last time I shopped. I hated seeing myself in dressing room mirrors. I hated the complete uncertainty on whether or not an item of clothing would fit. And I always tried to convince myself that it wasn’t worth me really buying anything, because I was going to lose a load of weight soon.

But of late, I’ve been putting in a buttload of effort to be less mad about food. And I’ve got myself into an exercise regime. And I think my weight is kind of close to stabilizing, and my uni-bought clothes are definitely close to falling apart, and my sewing skills are improving. So, I’ve decided, it’s new clothes time.

Unfortunately, stupid self-control voice means that I have to be “sensible” about this wardrobe overhaul, and can’t just buy everything all at once. But what I can do it buy one item of clothing a month, and make another.

So this month has been my beloved GREEN JEANS, which I found in mid-March but wouldn’t allow myself to buy until April payday, and my Bastardly Complex Teadress, which tested my new-found sewing skills. And next month will be NEON BLUE JEANS, and Bastardly Complex Teadress The Next Generation. Or perhaps Flouncy Skirt the First. I’ll decide nearer the time.

And in my brain, this is the best plan since Operation Quit the Booze. Because not only do I get nice things each month, I can also hopefully avoid the clothing apocalypse I’ve found myself in.

Because nobody ever wants a clothing apocalypse.

self-control voice is a whiny bitch.

Tags

adulthood, anxiety, bad idea, depression, drinking, ridiculous, self-control, smoking, wonky logic

A while back, I decided that my long-held belief that I had bugger-all willpower was utter bollocks. It was a reasonable decision to make; I’ve given up smoking, and drinking, and clawed my way back from a complete mental breakdown, and all of those take a hell of a lot of willpower.

And I thought this meant that by definition, I had a lot more self-control than previously believed, even though people sometimes love to tell me that I’m impulsive and a bit ridiculous. This is largely true, but I’ve got to a place now where I come up with ridiculous ideas, get incredibly close to doing them, and then the self-control kicks in and I stop and go “oof, that was close. Good thing I listened to self-control voice, there”.

But there’s just one problem with this. Self-control voice is BORING and ANNOYING and a WHINY WHINY BITCH.

Yes, sure, she sometimes has a point. Were it not for self-control voice I would’ve applied for at least 17 different MAs by now, without giving all that much thought to how I would go about funding them (I think I was expecting self-control voice to come up with a plan for that as well). And I probably would’ve signed up for German lessons. And bought quite a lot of shoes. And I might’ve painted my living room blue, even though it’s not actually my living room and my landlord would probably have had something to say about it.

I see how none of these things were particularly brilliant plans – or at least, not brilliant plans at the precise moment I came up with them. But still, I hate self-control voice for stopping me from doing them, and for ruining all my fun.

And yes, I know that self-control is part of being an adult, and that eventually you have to stop being the kid that goes to the party and eats until they are quite literally sick. And if you’re going to do proper, sensible things like hold down a job, and pay your rent, and get approved for a mortgage, and not drive your other half to kill you because you just WILL NOT DO ANYTHING SENSIBLE, then you need to listen to inner reason sometimes.

It’s just that these days, sometimes seems to be translating to “quite a lot of the time”, and that’s just a bit shit. And not all that brilliant for the anxiety. Because apparently, if you spend your entire life sitting there thinking of reasons why you shouldn’t do things, then you start to see the negative consequences of every little thing. And whilst I can cope with being a bit dull and a bit sensible, I don’t think I can cope with being one of those people who won’t ever take any kind of risk.

So it’s all decided. I’m going to refuse to employ any more self-control than I currently do, before I become the least interesting person on earth.