As a UK citizen with family in the city of Manchester, Monday night’s events were shocking and too close to comfort One more in a series of events that serves to remind me how tenuous the “safety” I have the privilege to enjoy really is. My younger sister was supposed to be at that concert. I’m lucky. She wasn’t. Many others were and their loved ones are facing a much harsher reality than the “what if” tremor that ran through my life, and I feel incredibly selfish in both my second hand worry and my relief.
But it’s brought something home. Something that has been hanging over me and I’ve avoided acknowledging. The shoe has finally dropped.
I’m living in fear. Not of terrorism. Not of death, But of somehow making a wrong choice and ruining my own life. I’m scared to live. And so I’ve chosen safety. I’ve chosen to hide in my privilege, to live small and safe and it’s not working.
I am incredibly lucky to live in a country where I do not have to fear for my life, where the system protects me from the appalling violence and danger that too many witness much too young. And instead of using that privilege to propel me, I have let it paralyse me. When facing choices my concept of “the worst happening” involves being short on rent and having to ask for help. Not death. Not the deaths of my loved ones based on location, or misfortune or religion or sexuality. Just the injury to my pride and the relative luxury in which I live.
And I have to stop.
Events like the Manchester attack prove that no matter how innocently or cautiously you live, no matter how safe you feel, there is no such thing as true safety. I can’t sit around and wait for life to hand me a get out of jail free card. I have the key to my own escape and I have to have the balls to use it.
And I’m terrified.
But I’m done pretending that anything besides my own fear is holding me back. It’s time to step out, to try and turn my privilege into a starting point, to try and help others instead of just talking about it, to try and find myself instead of just thinking about it. I can’t stop being scared but I can stop letting it control me.
Tomorrow I will hand in my notice. I will make a change.
Tomorrow I will be brave.
Even if I’m still afraid, I refuse to be terrified out of living my life.
Yesterday Mod Liz posted her video about why honesty is so important to starting this process… even when it’s uncomfortable. And Mod Rose’s attempt to do the same got really uncomfortable really fast.
As we gear up to start the process, the idea is to get really honest about what we hope to achieve, what habits we want to break, what hurts we want to heal and what we want to find in ourselves. That’s not all going to be pretty, and some of it may involve really snotty crying.
When I hit record I had no intention of getting weepy. I just planned to read my affirmation and give a little context but something about this week, where my emotions have been close to the surface, just caught up with me. What I’m looking for is a version of myself I lost five years ago, and though this may be the least flattering video of me in existence, I’m sharing it to tell you that no matter what hurt you carry, no matter how big or small it may seem relative to the rest of the world, it is valid. You are allowed to feel it and you deserve to heal. -Rx
Wherever you are in the world, however old you are, whatever religion, ethnicity, sexuality or gender identity you are, we are here for you. Our mods are in their 20s, 30s and 40s respectively and will all be bringing their different experiences to the table… but it will be so much more rewarding with you there too. We are stronger together. We are in this together.
Tag your preparation story/video/picture with #WeWomenBookclub, message us, anon us, email us [email protected]. We’re here and we’re listening.
I just logged into my facebook to check a message, only to be confronted with a news story informing me that one of my childhood friends/classroom competitors has been killed in a boat accident.
In print, the tragedy is clear.
She was single parent to a seven year old daughter. She was only 27. She was supposed to do and be so much more than dead.
I’m crying for that. For her family. For her kind, concerned mother who helped us practice for talent shows and drove us back from swimming galas. For her brothers and father, who I never really knew, but must now bury their loved one too soon, and for her daughter, who will never get to know the woman she was as an adult.
But I’m also crying for the stupidity of what drove us apart. For the reason I won’t be at her funeral when we had so much in common and so much we could have shared.
An old teacher of ours once joked that one of us would end up ruling the world and the other would probably go mad from jealousy. Because that was who we were. The “bright kids”, the ones who were going to make it. We were encouraged to compete and to one-up and to measure ourselves against one another. I remember feeling like a winner when I outscored her in a test. I remember feeling small when she got picked first every time for anything vaguely athletic. And kiss chase. I remember feeling powerful when at 16 she arrived at my dancing class, knowing nobody, and looked to me to help her navigate. I felt the balance shift. I’m sure she did too.
And then life moved on. I went to uni and started a career and found other competitors, other measures, and I assumed she had done the same. We were facebook friends and that was it. I was surprised when she had a child but also, in some twisted and perverse way, used that as a factor to measure our relative successful. I envied her relationship and her motherhood, because as our twenties wore on I began to suspect I was not well equipped to do those things, but I also marked myself up on career success because I was doing the corporate ladder thing and she was not.
On the fucked up scale of how I had been taught to view her, we were about even.
Except now I’m unemployed and she’s dead.
All those years off petty scoring and veiled judgement and social media snobbery and where did it land us? Nowhere. And that makes me so sad.
A world where little girls are taught to compete over collaborating is not a world I want to participate in any more. We spent so long trying to live up to the standards set for us when we were 5 and fighting over the advanced maths quiz cards that when at 25 we met on a train, we interacted not as old friends but as women with something to prove. And I don’t want her daughter, my sisters, all the other little girls starting out right now to experience the same messed up beginning.
Life is so short and so fragile, and it is too easy to build ourselves up on the misfortunes and failures of others to live up to the “standard” we are taught to expect. We have to stop. We have to try to embrace our “rivals” and look for the good in them as a way to connect instead of the bad in order to distance. We need to feel free to duck up and fall down without becoming less in the eyes of our peers. We need to teach younger woman that we want them to succeed because of who they are and not because of who is around them. We need to celebrate the success of all women around us, even those we feel threatened by, because life.is.so.damn.short
And all it takes is a moment for everything we did and didn’t achieve to be in the past tense. There’s no success in outliving your classmate. No victory in winning over someone who didn’t make it to the finish line through no fault of her own.
Live your life for yourself. Do the stupid stuff. Take the chance and don’t look over your shoulder for a reaction. Shout about other women’s success. Be kind. Give praise. Console failure. Live. Love. and then do it all over again until it feels right/
Because I swear to you, from now on I’m doing my best to be cheering you on, no matter how terribly my own life might be going.
I want you to succeed. I want you to win. I want you to live.
As a relatively new fan to the show, I’ve sometimes struggled to understand the level of vitriol the fandom harbours towards the show’s creator, Chris Carter, but 12 hours from the premiere of S11, I think I’m finally starting to get it. It’s not about any one episode, or a character arc that is less successful than the show at its best. It’s not about the anticlimax of years of rose-tinted revival.
It’s about disrespect and misogyny masquerading as creativity.
It’s about a man who has created a project and with it a person, offering it to us as one thing - a journey for truth starring a woman of integrity and worth, uncowed by impossible odds and stalwart in a world determined to misunderstand and belittle her. But this is not actually what he is offering. Having convinced us that he values and believes in this character, that we should too, he begins, under the guise of “character development”, her total destruction; the molestation of all she holds dear, and through this act and a hundred other micro-messages reinforcing the same thing, the rape of not just one character but in essence everything the show has purported to be.
To its fans and many of the creative forces involved, writers, directors and cast, The X-Files is a show about love and hope and possibility. It is a tale of strength and loyalty and humans. It is a show I have come to love, a show that brings us all together here, which is what makes its creator so increasingly problematic.
Good Acceptance vs Bad Acceptance, and the Courage to act on both.
As I begin to move though a new stage of my life, with WE still knocking about the back of my mind, unfinished but present, I have begun to see patterns that I didn’t before. I see myself harbouring synthetic pain to use as fuel for vendettas I don’t need, I see the difference on days I allow myself space to process and be versus days where I don’t, and I see a world of women, who are just crying our for sisterhood.
I struggle with the acceptance jar. I struggle with the object and the idea, because, like Madeleine in Big Little Lies, my grudges sometimes feel like my pets. I tend to them carefully, keeping track of wrongs done to me for a rainy day where I will somehow even out the score. Except I don’t. I just hold on to them until they weigh me down and I’m too tired to keep them any more. These are things that I need to accept. This would be good acceptance.
While part of me is scared that without my righteous, self-stoking anger, people will walk all over me and that I wont be standing up for myself, I know deep down that I am more than my unhappiness. Every time I have been brave enough to forgive I have felt better for it and I know that I need to draw down my courage and push myself to do it over and again. I know that the evidence will build until forgiveness becomes the norm and acceptance becomes a natural part of what I do and who I am.
So I’m working on that. And while I do I’m also trying to refocus that anger, to modify my behaviour to tackle bad acceptance.
Yesterday, on the International Day of the Girl, I went around my workplace, which is woman dominated on every level, and asked if I could take pictures of our women at work. The response was staggering.
Every single woman I asked, shuddered. Every one said that they hated having their picture taken/weren’t photogenic/looked terrible. When faced with a camera, these effective and amazing female managers lost all confidence, retreated to a place of self questioning where they didn’t feel capable or beautiful.
Sometimes it’s easier to stay broken than be brave
Today I went to the doctor and I told her that I needed help.
Well that was the plan anyway. As the months wear on in my post-career quitting, supposed self examination, Rose The Reboot phase, my hope that changing my employment situation would fix me has worn a little thin. I am glad I no longer have the suffocating spectre of my workday hanging over me, and some things have gotten better but the truth is I’m not better. Oddly enough fixing one problem didn’t magically make me happy, and after months of blaming vitamin d deficiency and low iron and daylight and diet… I was going to walk into the doctors and ask for help.
Except I choked. She asked what I wanted and I told her I was tired. I told her about my sleepwalking. About my job. About my lightheadedness. But I didn’t know, when it came to it, how to tell her that sometimes a song on the radio can paralyze me with sadness, or that my sabattical has robbed me of motivation and inspiration. I didn’t want to use the m words or the d word or anything that might suggest maybe my mind was working against my wellbeing.
I choked up when she suggested I talk to someone, when she wrote out the number I should call, when she said depression so I didn’t have to. I was so relieved when she didn’t let me explain it away, when she told me that though I was spinning it to a positive, it would still be an idea to talk it out. That it was okay if I wasn’t okay.
Thank God for her training. Thank fuck that she could diagnose my avoidance, if not the underlying cause, because I have been trained to be brave, not to be broken, and if I’d walked out of that surgery without a referral I don’t know how long it would have taken me to reopen the issue. I don’t know how long I would have beaten myself up for going 80% of the way and bottling it. For failing again.
Today I’m grateful that my doctor had more courage than I did, enough to stop my flow of normalisation and point at the problem. Tomorrow it’s my turn again. I have a call to make, and I hope I will find the courage to make it and the bravery to be honest about what that might mean.
How To: Get blood off a bathroom wall (or, things nobody ever told me about my period)
I’m still not sure how exactly it happened. One moment I’m 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 “starting your period” 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 “a bit emotional”, but nowhere do I remember a section on what to do when your period becomes a crime scene.
It’s at this point that I tap a desperate plea into a whatsapp group I have with a bunch of female friends.
“Guys. 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??” 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. “Alcohol for lift and wetwipe for glide” says Blood Sister #4, and I’m 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 isn’t, because I spend the next ten minutes wondering if my customers noticed how long I disappeared into the ladies for, whether they’re secretly disgusted by me, whether the tiny dark fleck on my fingernail is cracked black pepper or a spot of blood I’ve somehow missed in my frantic hand washing. It’s 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 society’s comfort level and numerous adverts tell me I should be able to do and make my period invisible.
I’ve 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, I’ve 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 I’m passing an ovum is the monthly outbreak of zits. I take my bag to the bathroom month round, just so that it’s not obvious when I’m 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?
Because it’s certainly not me, trying to hide cramping and nausea in meetings and interviews, trying to hold a smile and a tray when I’m pretty sure the world is falling out of my bottom.
It’s 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 it’s 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 that’s a problem. We have prettily packaged products, we have a system of coping that works most of the time, and if we’re lucky, we have friends we can talk with openly about the beautifully gory mess that is the female reproductive system, but we don’t have a society where it’s 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.
Activism is out there, and I need to start to educate myself better, freebleeding might not be for me but I’m ready to do something, starting with just talking about it.
From now onward I’m going to try not to evade. If someone tells me I look pale, I’ll tell them about my monthly anaemia instead of brushing it off. If sort-of-friends comment that I’m 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 they’re not as gross as shitting your pants. If the chef at works doesn’t 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.
A guide to abandoning the well tended path you’ve 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 you’re doing next ‘I don’t know’ and grin while saying it so they don’t know you’re petrified.
See what happens next…
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 wasn’t the first midweek meltdown. It wasn’t even the first time I’d 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.
It’s 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 ‘bright child’ 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 “success” did anyone stop me and say, ‘Hey! Just because you’re good at this doesn’t mean you have to do it. Why not try this?’ 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 didn’t 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 we’re being brutally honest, my privilege. Because don’t 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.
I knew I was lucky. I knew I was doing well, but that didn’t make any difference to the fact I was miserable. If anything my gratitude added a weight of guilty responsibility to my unhappiness. Why couldn’t this perfectly nice life be enough for me? I felt ungrateful as well as unhappy.
Which brings me back to the M25.
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, ‘I would rather work there than be here, in this car, ever again.’ 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 weren’t options, things that began at 9 and ended at 5 and wouldn’t get you in a boardroom but would pay the bills better than any entry level “aspirational” 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.
Just like that.
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 that’s what I’m doing. Anything else.
I’d 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. I’m now officially unemployed, I have a freak out every third day that I’ve made a horrible mistake and that I won’t 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 I’m still happy I did it.
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 that’s exciting. Terrifying, fiscally problematic, hard to explain to other people and occasionally frustrating, but exciting. And I can’t remember the last time I felt excited about my life as a whole, rather than just satisfied with occasional highlights for holidays and events. I’m still unhappy in many ways, but I no longer feel hopeless and that’s a step in the right direction.
I’m taking some time to be irresponsible to my upbringing and responsible to myself, my potential and most importantly my mental health, and that’s what this blog is going to be about. At least I think it is.
It’s time
he says
to go and check on death,
to mark out our remembrance
in empty glasses
blame filled glances.
this was not her life
but we insist on laying tables
in her name
celebrating birthdays that are not,
there’s ashes for confetti
memories that keep on warping
further from the truth
so there is proof
that we remember
and I think -
if this is memory
she’d want us to forget
oh my heart is heavy
and the road seems very long
and the rain is cold and steady
as I wear doggedly on.
I’m decaying like the season
and I’ve half forgotten spring
won’t somebody bring me sunshine,
or a smile
or anything.
What wicked world is this,
where girls are taught to practice silence
taught look for love in violence
and that it’s 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 wine’s a pass,
and if you’re grabbed you should have
better hidden that “sweet ass”,
or looked away,
or just walked past,
however loud the shout or lewd the name,
your girlhood’s a defensive game,
innocence shed to caution’s 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 haven’t learned
that girls cannot just be girls,
but must deflect and hide,
deny and bend,
and learn to laugh at fear
or else meet violent ends.
