Or, how I walked away from a perfectly good life path in search of something "more" and OH CRAP what have I done. If you're looking for real advice, you won't find it here. You may find something relatable though. WIP (me, as well as the blog)
What wicked world is this,Â
where girls are taught to practice silence
taught look for love in violence
and that itâs their job to defend
themselves, to shape their lives
in ways that prevent men
from seeing them
as things that can be touched and taken,
claimed,
because a short skirt is an invite
and a glass of wineâs a pass,
and if youâre grabbed you should have
better hidden that âsweet assâ,
or looked away,Â
or just walked past,
however loud the shout or lewd the name,
your girlhoodâs a defensive game,
innocence shed to cautionâs gain,
it happens time and time again,
we grow tough skins and swallow blame,
for boys are boys who become men,
and irresistible to them are girls who havenât learned
that girls cannot just be girls,Â
but must deflect and hide,
deny and bend,
and learn to laugh at fear
or else meet violent ends.
How To: Get blood off a bathroom wall (or, things nobody ever told me about my period)
Iâm still not sure how exactly it happened. One moment Iâm efficiently dealing with a tampon, fifteen years of practice reliably informing me that I have time to manage this between delivering an order and taking the next plate out. And the the next moment? Carnage.
I dive forward for an escaping toilet roll, pants at ankles, my quarry a wodge of paper and my weapon a used Tampax Super Plus, ready for disposal. It swings on its string with my movement and suddenly, it looks like my uterus is auditioning for the title role in Carrie. It looks like someone added red to the mass produced monochrome bathroom art. It looks like a scene from Dexter. It looks like my table might be waiting for their lunch.
In the panic that ensues, the loo roll unravelling faster than my belief that a simple wipe will fix everything, I scan desperately through the pretty pastel âstarting your periodâ book that I was handed aged 11. I remember the part about tampons vs. pads. I remember the cutesy diagram showing the generalised angle of the median vagina. I remember when it told me that I might feel âa bit emotionalâ, but nowhere do I remember a section on what to do when your period becomes a crime scene.
Itâs at this point that I tap a desperate plea into a whatsapp group I have with a bunch of female friends.Â
âGuys. Period just went nuclear in the lunch rush. How do I get blood off the wall in less than a second using only the contents of my handbag??â And bless them they came through. It turns out the answer (for me) was hand sanitiser and a wetwipe, both things I have in my period prepared handbag. âAlcohol for lift and wetwipe for glideâ says Blood Sister #4, and Iâm back in the kitchen much sooner than I though I would be. But not soon enough to have avoided notice.
The chef, (male, mostly liberal) shoves my plates at me and tells me to save taking a shit until after lunch next time, and normalcy is restored. Except it isnât, because I spend the next ten minutes wondering if my customers noticed how long I disappeared into the ladies for, whether theyâre secretly disgusted by me, whether the tiny dark fleck on my fingernail is cracked black pepper or a spot of blood Iâve somehow missed in my frantic hand washing. Itâs pepper, and eventually I calm down, but not before I realise that my tampon debacle means I have failed as a woman to do what societyâs comfort level and numerous adverts tell me I should be able to do and make my period invisible.
Iâve been menstruating now for a decade and a half, and since those first couple of anxiety inducing years where I fumbled applicators, stuck pads to my pubes and mistimed my due date, Iâve pretty much had it down. Month round, there are tampons in my bag, because four weeks is the idea but hormones are vindictive. As soon as I feel the gasous nausea which signals my imminent period, I add spare underwear and various other feminine hygiene products, so that I can feel fresh and clean, regardless of the outcome, and know that even though I feel bloated and disgusting, the only outward sign that Iâm passing an ovum is the monthly outbreak of zits. I take my bag to the bathroom month round, just so that itâs not obvious when Iâm on. I work hard to make sure my PMS stays between me, my friends and my cat.
And to what end?
Who benefits from the invisibility of my period? Who benefits from the lack of general conversation about a symptom which takes out most women, every month, for a third of their lives?Â
Because itâs certainly not me, trying to hide cramping and nausea in meetings and interviews, trying to hold a smile and a tray when Iâm pretty sure the world is falling out of my bottom.Â
Itâs not other women like me, struggling to deal with their period disasters in isolation. My overshare in my group chat led to multiple anecdotes of washing hotel sheets after overnight leaks, giving presentations while convinced blood was trickling down a leg under a pencil skirt, poorly timed crying jags and ruined dates and underwear.
And itâs definitely not young women trying to educate themselves about the changes their bodies are undergoing, or going to undergo. Nowhere in my guidebook to womanhood did it tell me that no matter how prepared I was, ultimately my uterus was going to regularly screw me. Nowhere in my chats with my mum did she tell me about the vindictiveness of hormones and nowhere in my awkward teenage chats with my friends did we discuss all the ways in which our period experiences were abnormal.
And thatâs a problem. We have prettily packaged products, we have a system of coping that works most of the time, and if weâre lucky, we have friends we can talk with openly about the beautifully gory mess that is the female reproductive system, but we donât have a society where itâs normal to tell your boss the truth about your prolonged toilet break. We have scientists concluding that period pains can be as severe as a mild heart attack, and yet neither I, or any of the girls in my chat group, felt confident giving it as a reason to call in sick to work. Sometimes, surviving a particularly gruesome period feels like a badge of honour, an achievement beyond the average expectation of just coping with your monthly stint as a human blood bag. And that needs to change.Â
Activism is out there, and I need to start to educate myself better, freebleeding might not be for me but Iâm ready to do something, starting with just talking about it.
From now onward Iâm going to try not to evade. If someone tells me I look pale, Iâll tell them about my monthly anaemia instead of brushing it off. If sort-of-friends comment that Iâm going to the bathroom a lot at an event, then who am I to shield them from the truth that my bowels like to get in on the purging action each month and that festival bathrooms might be gross but theyâre not as gross as shitting your pants. If the chef at works doesnât like my rest break duration, then he should know why it was necessary, and, if I ever write a book about periods for young girls, I wont gloss over the facts that no matter how prepared or experienced a period have-er you are, you can still get caught out.
When Convenience becomes Compliance - Uberâs London Ban
As a millennial, (she says, shuddering at the implications), I have grown up riding the wave of tech innovation. My first classroom had a big, boxy computer in it. My maths classes were punctuated by sessions in the âIT Labâ, where I learned how to make Powerpoint text appear letter by letter on a background so psychedelic it probably should have come with an epilepsy warning. My first mobile phone was only the size of a small brick and now, in 2017, much of my life is logged on the 3x5 inches of microchip and glass a network loan me for two years at a go, at a price that very briefly seems reasonable.
Which is all a long way of saying that I have used Uber. This is the story of why I kept using it, even after I suspected they were operating unethically, why I eventually stopped and why I hope the London Ban forces many others, like me, to acknowledge that their cheap rides maybe subsidising rape culture and unethical working conditions.
During my five year stint in publishing there were periods of time where my monthly post-expense budget was in the tens of pounds. This, as you may imagine, was limiting, especially in an industry where progression involved a fair few evenings spent networking at launches etc. This meant drinking warm wine and eating crisps in pubs, libraries and quirky ânoveltyâ venues all over London. While the wine was free (yay!), the ride home was not, and with Black Cabs out of the question, Uber promised a heated, safe delivery from the back streets of Brixton. I loved it, nursed my rating like the first born I will never have, called friendships into question over unpaid split fares and rowdy backseat behaviour.
Uber quickly became part of my landscape. And I never questioned it, because in my experience, once tech grabs hold like that, itâs here to stay. I never questioned it, because it lived quietly on my phone until I needed it, and damn was it convenient.
And then, in the post 2016 Presidential Election landslide of horror I read an aside that mentioned Uberâs C.E.O. was joining the Trump cabinet. And that made a tiny warning light in my head light up. I wish I could say I dug in then, but I didnât. Life got busy and I got more Ubers and there were bigger crises to deal with. But with that light on, I started to catch sight of Uber in places that I didnât expect to see it. In February, I didnât read Susan Fowlerâs post about endemic sexism at Uber, because I wasnât âsureâ it was unbiased. I ignored this article from May about how sexual assaults in Ubers accounted for 1/5 of the total assaults reported in cabs and car hires. I ignored that one because Uberâs statement seemed reasonable. Then in June I ignored a NYT article about the toxic environment and a string of sexual harassment firings at the companyâs California HQ, because that was a whole ocean away.
What I didnât ignore was the second lawsuit brought against Uber by a New Delhi rape victim, the same rape that led to Uber being suspended in the city. Having won her initial case, it was discovered that executives at Uber had illegally obtained and shared the victimâs medical file within the company during the course of her first case. Publicly, they played ball, and behind the scenes they invaded her privacy, broke the law and made her a victim in their crime, as well as her rapistâs.
This line in particular stuck with me and caused me to stop using Uber.
âRape denial is just another form of the toxic gender discrimination that is endemic at Uber and ingrained in its culture. Hopefully, this lawsuit coupled with the changes recommended by the independent counsel will create real change and reform.â
Except it didnât.
September 2017 and TFL revoke Uberâs license to operate in London citing a âlack of corporate responsibilityâ, both towards the reporting of sexual assaults and in treatment and protection of itâs drivers. This isnât just TFL being petty, this is a a shot across the bows which demands the company update its lousy business practice in order to continue to operate. And what is Uberâs response?Compliance?
No.Â
Instead, it asks its users, me included, to sign a petition, protesting the removal of their convenient service.
And hereâs the rub.
Unsurprisingly, they donât give you all the facts in that email. They use their access to your details, which TFL does not have, to contact you directly and make a case for how they are being unfairly stigmatised, based on⌠well nothing. They take advantage of their access, your clicktivism and your prior experience of them as a convenient and useful company to get around the nitty gritty of what theyâre being asked to do. They appropriate our right to petition and try and turn it into a get out of jail free card for their corporate screw up.By asking for an impulse response, they appeal to our desire for convenience, âquick sign this and keep your easy fixâ, inflame outrage at the loss of what many of us have come to see as a form of transport we have a right to and bury the facts in a flurry of confusion. And that is SO problematic.
Because if you go along with it, youâre transitioning from accessing a convenient consumer service, to complying with an unethical company in their attempt to subvert a governing body. Your cheap ride is subsidising Uberâs culture of misuse, low employee standards sexual harassment, and to an extent, rape. And itâs not under the surface any more. The truth is out there, if you take half a second to look, and so far 500k people have signed a petition to deny it.
The sad thing is that the same technology that brought an Uber to your door is capable of giving you all the information as to why the move by TFL is the right one. Enabling Uber in itâs flouting of the standards of not just good business practice but common decency sets a dangerous standard, for apps, our transit services and beyond. It implies that where tech moves faster than law and legislature, we should allow the popularity of the innovation to dictate whether or not we hold it to the same standards we do pre-existing businesses. And thatâs just not workable. Innovation shouldnât be a get out of jail free card for unethical start ups; just because something is new doesnât mean it can break the rules, and just because something is convenient doesnât mean it is right.
And thatâs what this really comes down to.
Instead of spending time posting to social media about how long you have to wait for a cab or how unfair it is that you have to walk to a bus stop, use that time to research why TFL is doing what it is, start with this article and dig as deep as you can stomach.
Then look up alternate modes of transit, because trust me they exist, and until Uber can pull its socks up and bring a better deal to the table (and I have no doubt it is capable, if not willing), travel elsewhere.
Your refusal to buy into Uberâs remorseless irresponsibility is worth much more than a few cheap rides.Â
Rocking a bikini with zero shits given about my body for the first time in a long time. Iâm feeling healthier than I have in a while in body and thatâs translated into a better state of mind⌠I see myself instead of rolls and chubby bits and it makes enjoying the beach so much easier.
Iâm no model but Iâm happy and thatâs so much more than Iâve been in a while
Escape Day 1 - In which I learn that Hollywood Boulevard is kinda gross, the Hollywood sign is hard to get in a selfie, that the Observatory is the balls, smog is not just for London and that when youâve been awake for 24 hours, tonally pleasing fast food aesthetics are very soothing.
It is a truth universally acknowledged by the unemployed that people exclaiming, "Oh! You should come and work with/for me!!" almost never actually mean it/have an opening.
Enthusiasm is nice, but it doesn't pay the bills, and false hope is still crushable.
A guide to abandoning the well tended path youâve been working on for years and running, screaming and naked, into the wilderness of life.
Live the life you were raised to. Be employed. Pay taxes. Save money. Think about mortgages, pensions and progression. Stave off existential crisis.
Give in and stop thinking about that stuff. Quit job. Tell everyone who asks what youâre doing next âI donât knowâ and grin while saying it so they donât know youâre petrified.Â
 See what happens nextâŚ
Earlier this year, on a Thursday afternoon, I found myself driving round the M25, in torrential rain, in floods of tears, sobbing down the phone to my boss. At the time I justified this as PMS + traffic stress + a bad day, but the truth was that it wasnât the first midweek meltdown. It wasnât even the first time Iâd sobbed at my boss.
It was, however, the first time I lost control to such a degree that I had to pull off the road to avoid the increasingly inevitable fact that hysterical crying, spray and driving 10% over the speed limit was probably going to end up in an accident.
In the days that followed I realised how much those circumstances were representative of my life in the wider sense. I was rushing at a breakneck speed through my days, terrified of being late or missing something, with crappy visibility and no idea where I was headed or why I was going there. Much like the M25, I was going nowhere fast.
Itâs only exaggerating slightly to say that the choice made to sit a test when I was 10 was, in many ways, responsible for that fact. Deemed a âbright childâ I was encouraged to take the 11+ test and as a result ended up at a selective grammar for my secondary schooling. There, I was taught to be ambitious, what I was good at, and how I should use these two things together to go far. In time this landed me at a respected University doing an English degree, my work there earned me several internships in publishing, then a job offer, then two promotions and eventually, a mental breakdown.
Which is how I ended up here.
At no point during this fifteen years of ambition and âsuccessâ did anyone stop me and say, âHey! Just because youâre good at this doesnât mean you have to do it. Why not try this?â and I was too busy trying to be a success to board that train of thought on my own. I'm not trying to say that it should be someone else's job to guide me, merely that I was the product of an environment where forward momentum was all that counted, and if you were doing well, passing exams and headed somewhere, you weren't a cause for concern and would be pushed to just keep going, versus exploring your options. Pushing for bigger things was all I knew.
I had always been taught that this was the stuff that mattered. I was supposed to find my niche and plug away at it until I was in charge, contribute to the population, retire to the countryside and donate money back to my school and University to help those behind me do the same. I didnât need to blaze a trail, my purpose was to wear in the path, achieve the top spot, take a bow and pat myself on the back for doing enough  That was my place in the system, my purpose, and, if weâre being brutally honest, my privilege. Because donât get me wrong, in terms of cookie-cutter life plans I got lucky and there are many things worse than being a midweight arts professional, grinding towards being the big fish in her small pond and dreaming of more while having enough.Â
I knew I was lucky. I knew I was doing well, but that didnât make any difference to the fact I was miserable. If anything my gratitude added a weight of guilty responsibility to my unhappiness. Why couldnât this perfectly nice life be enough for me? I felt ungrateful as well as unhappy.
Which brings me back to the M25.Â
When I eventually got off the road from hell, and the rain cleared, I found myself driving past a pub where the regulars had poured out to the pavement, eager to enjoy a passing sunburst. They had pints and friends and smiles. I had cold coffee and two hours of admin to do that evening and a headache. There was a help wanted sign. And I thought, âI would rather work there than be here, in this car, ever again.â And I started listing all the things that I would rather do than stay in the car and chase that next promotion. All the jobs I had never considered, all the paths my school pretended werenât options, things that began at 9 and ended at 5 and wouldnât get you in a boardroom but would pay the bills better than any entry level âaspirationalâ career ever could. It turns out pretty much everything was on that list. In that moment I honestly would rather have hung off the back of a bin lorry than opened my email.
So I quit.Â
Just like that.Â
Fifteen years of training, graft and progression towards what I believed to be success were wiped from the board by the realisation that I would rather do anything else. So thatâs what Iâm doing. Anything else.
Iâd like to say that after this decision came a great clarity, a dream job offer and that my skin cleared and I now do yoga and run five miles a day, but the reality is rather more mundane. Iâm now officially unemployed, I have a freak out every third day that Iâve made a horrible mistake and that I wonât be able to pay my bills in a couple of months, my skin is still at the mercy of hormones and I do a sit up when I remember (which is not often). But Iâm still happy I did it.Â
In a world that promotes perpetual motion as the fastrack to fulfilment, I stopped. I parted ways with what I thought I was supposed to do, with a view to taking the time to find out what I want to do, and thatâs exciting. Terrifying, fiscally problematic, hard to explain to other people and occasionally frustrating, but exciting. And I canât remember the last time I felt excited about my life as a whole, rather than just satisfied with occasional highlights for holidays and events. Iâm still unhappy in many ways, but I no longer feel hopeless and thatâs a step in the right direction. Â Â
Iâm taking some time to be irresponsible to my upbringing and responsible to myself, my potential and most importantly my mental health, and thatâs what this blog is going to be about. At least I think it is.Â
