write me well

Tag: life

  • The Apocalyptic Thing About Change

    It’s been a good eight months since I last camped out at Foyles. Considering this was an almost weekly haunt of mine before the world imploded back in March, it’d be surreal sitting back down here even if it wasn’t in a room where everyone is distanced in their support bubbles, masked and sanitized and hopefully not infected. Needless to say, the then-and-now difference is hardly just linear.

    How different is my life since I last sat here? Very, but again, not just because of COVID. On a personal level, so much has changed in those eight months. I started a new job, my first outside of true retail (the word retail still hovers, linking me to the past decade of my work, but there are other words in my job title that will hopefully lead to the next decade). Not only that, but I’m a month into a part time masters’ course at Queen Mary University, something that still feels a little wild to me, if I’m honest. Less so now than it did in my second lecture at the end of September, when one really-not-that-silly question suddenly made me feel so deeply out of my depth that I spent the next seventy-two hours scrambling for an eject button. But still wild.

    I like to blame my whimsical Piscean flighty-ness when it comes to my love of the eject button (nothing says commitment issues like an inability to go on a second date nearly seven years after I left my last relationship), but the truth is I think it’s a pretty natural reaction. As much as you think it’s going to be a comfort to discover the thing you want to do with the rest of your life, it’s actually fucking terrifying. My genuine love of castles and Empress Matilda and medieval anything sustained me through the application process, the visions of my rural English future in the heritage industry suddenly validated when I was accepted into QMU’s Heritage Management program in July. But the reality of taking steps down a new professional path shook me more than I was prepared for, and I’ve had to do a fair amount of talking myself down (read: panic texting) since logging into that first virtual seminar.

    On an emotional level, the last eight months saw the last two-thirds of being in therapy. I had two major blows that kicked off that particular journey: first, the sudden death of my dad last July, and second, being forced to step down from my job at Regent Street. The death of a parent is traumatic by nature, and I wrote an essay about why my personal experience of it was such. But in a different way, my demotion shook me even further. For someone whose only adult concept of commitment was to work, suddenly being told you’re not nearly good enough at your job (whether true or not) makes you doubt what you’ve been doing with yourself for the last ten years. So the two experiences, which happened within two months of each other and were equally blindsiding, kind of, y’know, crushed me.

    Being a natural optimist, almost incapable of seeing “cons” and described on more than one occasion as sunshine personified (a favorite compliment I will remember until I shed my mortal coil), I did not handle being crushed particularly well. When my best friend suggested I look into therapy, I listened. Therapy looks different for everyone, and I worked through a goodly amount of my struggles from January to July of this year. I think more than anything the lasting benefits of knowing what it’s like to be heard and give yourself space make therapy for any amount of time worth pursuing.

    So, again still ignoring COVID, we have a career change, the discovery of a new life passion, a return to academia, and the finishing (a loose term) of therapy.

    Mixed in with the life-altering nature of the pandemic, there’s the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, and the personal stock-taking of privilege, being party to, and engaging and benefiting from systems of oppression and learning how to become an ally. Of expanding my awareness beyond the borders of these personal things that have happened to me in the past eight months and processing the experiences of others.

    I remember posting about Ahmaud Arbery back in March, making my first calls to a DA office to leave a voicemail, and being terrified of doing it “wrong”, and almost letting that fear stop me from talking about it. Fast forward to Breonna Taylor. To George Floyd. To it becoming belatedly apparent that staying silent in the past was to be complicit, that to be “apolitical” is (and always has been) synonymous with “my life isn’t effected enough to care, and I don’t care that yours is”. What kinds of changes has this wrought in my life? Adding antiracist reading to my regular book stack. Educating myself on systemic racism, and diversifying my feed, my shopping, and my cultural consumption. Learning that you never stop learning, and that it is a privilege that my education in this subject is academic and not physical.

    And then, we have COVID.

    When I finally got the call that my Italian citizenship had gone through back in 2014, I spent the next few years hemming and hawing about actually making the move back to England. Those were the days before Brexit seemed remotely possible, so instead of being plagued by potential red tape, the primary case I made for staying in the states could be narrowed down to one thing and one thing only: the movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

    Really? you ask, understandably judgemental of the fact that a plot that involved Keira Knightley and Steve Carell as a plausible romantic couple could make me feel anything other than bafflement. Yes, really. For those unfamiliar, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a black comedy that chronicles the last days of earth, after a final attempt to stop a meteor flying towards our home planet fails (…emphasis on the black in black comedy). Keira Knightley and Steve Carell live in the same apartment building, but they don’t meet until he happens upon her, crying on the fire escape, because she has just found out she missed her last chance to fly back to the UK to see her family before the world ends.

    Call me crazy, but that movie and that circumstance really fucked me up. I empathized with Keira Knightley’s character, because choosing to live across an ocean from most of the people you love does relinquish a certain degree of control you have over your life. Sure, it’s unlikely that if I lived in Philadelphia and needed to get home to my family under emergency circumstances, that I’d be able to do so on foot. But if it came down to it, physics wouldn’t stop me. You don’t need a plane (or a pilot, for that matter) to make that journey. If I moved to England, though? That was no longer true, and, ridiculous or no, that fact kept me stateside for years.

    Obviously, my feelings eventually changed. Not my feelings towards that fear – it’s still deeply rooted within me. But my practical side caught up with me, and egged on by the nagging dissatisfaction I had with my life back in California, I made the move to the UK in 2018. I figured the chances of an apocalypse that would somehow stop me from visiting home and seeing my family was too absurdly unlikely to sacrifice my dream.

    Writing this in October of 2020, I think I owe my past self an apology. COVID may not be the apocalypse, but as impossible as the possibility seemed then, we do now live in a world where any minute my ability to go home can suddenly be, well, disabled. More likely than not, it’d only be a temporary problem, but still. Talk about things you never saw coming. (Or did. But wrote off because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.)

    So, now, not ignoring COVID, it’s been a long eight months. A whole lot has happened and I am grateful that if nothing else, Foyles is still standing, and I’ve been able to return after all this time, in this unfamiliar world, to something familiar.

    Change has many guises and I don’t know that I have anything more philosophical to contribute to the discourse than that. But it would be remiss of me to sit in this café and not share the experience so as to commune even the slightest bit with that old life of mine. I’m pretty busy these days, whether with work or study or just existing, but I’m going to do my damnedest to try and be here a little more. Despite everything that has happened and continues to happen, writing brings me joy, and we can all use a little more joy, right?

    And while all that means in the context of this blog is that I’ll post a little more, I’m not sorry. As Carl would say, I will not apologize for art.

  • Lot 432

    I don’t really believe all things happen for a reason (I do). But when seemingly unrelated events/moments/ideas coincide, I’ll pick up that old tried-and-vaguely-true mantra and preach to anyone within ten feet of me that fate is a thing that really pulls life together (and apart). Like, for instance, when the two ideas I’ve been toying with writing about pair up neatly and I get the opportunity to knock them both out in one go. Such is my luck today, sitting down in front of the enormous clock in Waterloo Station, realizing my unintentional theme is time.

    We use time to boundary everything. It’s usually the first reason we can or can’t do something, tied with or just ahead of money. At work, it is without a doubt my most familiar adversary, and if not having enough time was a Buy Five, Get the Sixth Free punch card situation, I wouldn’t get through a week without a freebie (or five). When someone or something gets a sense of entitlement about just how high they should rank on your priority list, there’s that embodiment-of-an-eye-roll argument that we simply MAKE time. Like we’re wizards that are one agenda notebook or scheduling app away from adding three more hours to the day.

    Worse – and maybe I’m alone here – time seems to have two distinct versions. There’s how it feels on a day off, and there’s how it feels on a day on. One second you’ve got a handle on how to manage your time, but then you turn around and your Saturday has gone by in an impossible flash, and NOTHING has gotten done. Unless watching a season of Sons of Anarchy for the billionth time qualifies.

    So how do you pick? How do you know what matters and what doesn’t? When you eventually find a way to magic in a few minutes here and there, how do you know what to do with it?

    There’s no single answer, but I’m going to try and help anyway.

    I Knew Him, Horatio!

    Two weeks ago I was in the office at my store, having the wily kind of Tuesday where in the middle of editing Excel spreadsheet formulas you decide that despite your borderline illiteracy in the subject of Shakespeare, it’s time to get a tattoo of that one line from Hamlet that you quote all the time.

    I have this thing about famed literature, where it doesn’t stick with me in a big way, but I retain bizarre but specific details that then carve out a spot in my heart for said literature regardless. These details and the resultent pseudo-obsession have no respect for the fact that this will almost definitely manifest in me embarassing myself when I try and talk about books I haven’t touched in ten years, a la Bridget Jones and Chechnya. A prime example of this – the obsessive specificity, if not the Bridget Jones part – is that I couldn’t write you three sentences on what happens in Catcher in the Rye, but until I die I will be able to recite the completely under-valued line “LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM MY VICELIKE GRIP”, spoken by Holden Caulfield when, with the senseless surety unique to late-teenaged boys, he executes the decision to put his friend in a headlock while he’s trying to get ready for a date. Give me a few years and I’m sure I’ll find a reason to get that tattooed too.

    Where Shakespeare is concerned, you’ve got the course I took during my English Lit degree, where I relied entirely on my friend (and Drama major) Suzy to get me through, and then you have my more prominent memories of the abridged collection of Shakespeare plays my aunt bought me in seventh grade. Hamlet was the first play I read, and I don’t know why, but the only thing that really stuck in my bones was that line: “Alas, poor Yorick!” (Well, that, and the image of Ophelia’s dad hiding behind some curtains, which my twelve-year-old-self thought showed some pretty weak hide-and-seek game). Real talk, though? I didn’t ever bother to look up what the hell Hamlet is even talking about when he says the line until that two-weeks-ago moment in the office.

    But then I did, and I decided that in fact, the skull of the court jester from Hamlet’s youth WAS something that should definitely live on my arm forever. Because when Hamlet says “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio”, he’s not just musing at a skull, as you do. It’s a bit of an “Oh shit, I knew the person behind this skull, he was pretty funny, and here he is, dead. Wow, life’s short,” moment. Life IS short, Hamlet. So thanks, Will Shakespeare, for your keen wordsmithing, and for giving me essentially a hip and highfalutin version of my own YOLO tattoo. It’s no punch card, and Yorick hardly actively gets involved in helping me prioritize my life and manage my time better. There’s a large case to be made, though, for having a bit of a black comedy reminder that even should you make the WORST decision when prioritising your time, we’re all Yorick in the end.

    #empressmatilda Gets Involved

    Two nights ago, Yorick fresh on my wrist, I was participating in the universal tradition of needlessly scrolling through my newsfeed one last time before going to bed. I was on an old post of mine (#narcissist) and accidentally tapped on one of the tags I’d used – unsurprisingly, given the post’s content, the Empress Matilda hashtag. And while generally speaking there’s not much happening in that tag, on this particular evening, there was a post from Dix Noonan Webb, an auction house in Mayfair, advertising several lots of coins going up for auction.

    Two lots included coins minted in the name of Matilda during the Anarchy. (Brief history for those new here: Matilda never officially reigned as England’s queen, but she got pretty damn close, and controlled most of the West Country during the nearly twenty-year period of time known as the Anarchy in the 12th century. More importantly, I’m highkey obsessed with her). The day and time of the auction? THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, A TEN MINUTE WALK FROM MY WORK.

    The first coin was valued between £700- £900, which was quite obviously outside of my price range. The second was a mere £200-£300, so still out of my league, but I went to the auction in hopes that nobody would bid for it (the history world isn’t quite as obsessed with Norman Feminist Icons as me….YET) and that they’d kick it down to £100 or so. With my hopes thus raised, I took the train in for the twelve o’clock start time, signed up for a bidding paddle, and made my way to the Wellington Room of Dix Noonan Webb, 16 Bolton Street, ready to get my auction on.

    Upon entering I helped lower the mean age of the room by about thirty years, and I immediately grabbed a seat in the back row, a few chairs over from the only other woman present. She was around my age, maybe a little older, but was seated with such chilled composure that I was absolutely certain this was not her first Late-Anglo-Saxon through Plantagenet Coin rodeo. She became one of my favorite humans when she leaned over and said, “All the women in the back then, eh?” I liked her even more when later in the afternoon I heard her chatting with another bidder and she genuinely uttered the sentence “Oh, I haven’t seen Dennis in yonks!”

    The auction started with Lot 299. I was interested in Lot 432. So I observed a fair amount of bidding while waiting out my Matilda coins, watching a few valued from £200- £300 go for closer to £1,000, while others – namely the most expensive coin of the day, one from 975 – went for a cool £8,000. (Who are these people and how do I become them). A handful of technical difficulties later, we made it through to the Norman coins, and finally, at 1:20pm, my time came. The Matilda coins went up, and I didn’t even get a chance to raise my paddle, because those motherfuckers went FOR £1,200 AND £4,300. I watched it happen, grinning like an idiot from my seat in the back row, because even though I clearly wasn’t going home with those coins, Matilda’s popularity, long-overdue, was clearly on the rise.

    Yorick was very fresh when I attended this auction, still encased in Dermalize and looking rather worse for the wear as the ink and plasma gooped a bit beneath the bandage (you’re welcome for that visual). He sat with me, not judging the fact that I didn’t have that kind of money to drop on medieval coinage, but more importantly, justifying my decision to sit in the Wellington Room in the first place. Because as much as I’ve just spent a lot of your time trying to convince you that we all die in the end, so do what you want with your time, sitting in that auction room gave me an amazing flip side. That this collection of coins – gathered by countless people with page-long provenances, if anyone had kept a record of their entire existence – showed that even if after we’re all dead and buried, humans are such that even a smashed up penny from the pocket of a noble in 1139 has value, almost a thousand years after its owner was dead an buried. After the monarch printed on it, who actually never even reigned but fought like hell for the right to, was forgotten by most of the world.

    & Waterloo Station

    When I saw down to write today, I picked a new writing spot. I was sneaking in a writing session before a closing shift, something I don’t do often because my writing sessions are almost exclusively the territory of days off. The past 48 hours had me filled with words, though, so I plonked down at a coffee shop at Waterloo Station, surrounded by hundreds of summery Londoners, and stared at the giant clock suspended from the ceiling.

    It doesn’t matter what you do with your time, but in the best possible way. All of that pressure that you feel is absolutely temporary. You can look at it from the perspective of YOLO Yorick, or of some nine-hundred year old coins. Yorick, the jester, being dead, when once he was funny and jovial and very much alive. Those coins, with Matilda’s seal stamped into them, surviving hundreds of years, into a world Matilda herself could not have imagined, being in a small auction room in Mayfair, where some mysterious bidder dropped over four grand on them.

    Time is ceaseless. It’s there whether you do the thing or you don’t. Whether your priorities are always the same or change every day. Whether it’s 2019 or 1139. Whether you’re cracking jokes or impossibly sad. It just keeps going on. It’s a little terrifying, but at the same time, strangely comforting. There’s not a lot in life you can bet on never changing, but the passage of time is one of them. And like Achilles says in the 2005 cinematic masterpiece, Troy, “Take it, IT’S YOURS!”

    Sure, he’s actually talking about immortality, but his aggressive demand is one I’d encourage everyone to echo. Your time IS yours, and you should spend it how you want.

    And if you’re waiting for the right moment for some change, think of Yorick. This might just be it.

  • Emotional Listerine

    Last night, one single Watermelon Margarita and Pornstar Martini in, a friend and I decided that when it comes to relationships, the term “palette cleanser” doesn’t come close to the level of reset needed come the end of a truly bad partnership. Two months, two years – when you’ve been dealing with someone for whom it turns out the word shitstain is a nicety, you need something a little more intense than a fruit tray and a sprig of mint to get you to the next round. And a cleanse isn’t gonna do it either.

    Fuck that lemon juice and cayenne pepper – what you you really need, we decided, is emotional Listerine. And because the idea of leaving the emotional recovery process to a rebound is somewhere precariously close to high-risk and deeply nauseating, I’ve been thinking about what perfect combination of controllables would constitute the best emotional Listerine.

    Here are my findings:

    One: A Word Document / Notebook

    This is for the whinging. The rage you’d generally spew at your best friends, the cry-happy moments that come back to you and haunt you and make you wax lyrical when poetry has never been and will never be your strong suit.

    It’s just for you. Nobody ever needs to see this guy. You may write in it and never read it again, you might reread it start to finish every time you go to add ten new lines (it me). But I’m a firm believer that the process of mentally getting someone out of your system can manifest in a real, physical way. Pen to paper – fingers to keys – get on it. We can’t all be Stevie Nicks and get a Silver Springs out of our breakups, but a .doc file full of emotional nonsense? That dream we can achieve.

    Two: A Real Good Walk

    This might take you a while, because not everyone has the best walks at their disposal, and sometimes leaving the room feels impossible two (or ten) days into this process. But my god, THE THINGS A WALK CAN DO FOR YOU. Through your neighborhood, through the neighborhood six blocks over, through a park, through the fucking mall. I’m serious. Get your body moving. Remind your body of the little miracles it – and YOU – are capable of. This will go absolute miles in getting you to the next brain-phase. Walks take you places, man.

    You can use the Real Good Walk to call your friends, call your mom, and talk through how you’re managing. Everybody walks their own way. But since you’re reading my advice list, I’m going to go ahead and recommend you leave yourself alone with your thoughts. See what’s around you. And if you must needs have something to occupy your ears and mind, bring along Number Three.

    Three: THAT Playlist

    Oh, you know the playlist I’m talking about. Or maybe you don’t, in which case, let me educate you.

    This is not the playlist that’s going to make you cry. This is the one that’s going to make you run the FULL EMOTIONAL SPECTRUM. Do yourself (and me) a favor and put some really silly shit on this playlist. Put some really happy, ridiculous, you-MUST-tap-your-toes songs. The tunes that when you close your eyes transport you to that summer you spent on the lake or laying out in the grass in your best friend’s backyard. Then put some sad shit on this playlist. The crescendos that make your spine tingle. The lyrics that pull your heart strings like hot rubber bands stretching from deep deep love to full-moon-I-kind-of-want-to-cry-myself-to-sleep.

    This playlist will do for your soul what that walk you just went on did for your body. Because when you feel absolutely exhausted by what life (and specific humans) have put you through emotionally, music reminds you of exactly what extreme and beautiful notes you’re capable of feeling, and that however intense those low notes are, in the end they are as ephemeral as a two-minute, forty-six second Top 40 Pop Song. You listen to THAT playlist long enough, pretty soon you’ll be perfectly poised for Number Four.

    Four: THE Project

    The first thing to accept about the Project is that you might NEVER start, do, or finish it. The aim of The Project isn’t to actually to do any of the things. It’s to remind you of the good, old, pure fact, that if you wanted to, though, YOU COULD.

    My mental picture of The Project will forever be Gwyneth Paltrow starting her own boutique PR firm in Sliding Doors after she breaks up with her Fuckface Boyfriend Jerry, so I always associate it with painting big, blank white walls Tiffany blue and buying a new personal planner. And really, that’s the perfect mental image, because it comes with a very visceral metaphor (you PAINT THOSE WALLS with a fresh coat of emotional paint) and new stationery. That’s how the best projects always start, right?

    The Project doesn’t have to be as major or physical as starting your own PR firm. What’s most important to remember when picking and planning it, is for it to be yours. Do not let a single person in your life – not even your absolute best friend gives you advice on EVERYTHING friend – tell you what this project should be. It is 100% just for you and your emotinal well-being. The project should be the answer to the question “What would I do if nothing else claimed my attention? My time? My energy? My money?” It could be as simple as working out (SIMPLE, she says, not remembering the last time she worked out), reading a book a month, or planning that twenty-country trip you’ve wanted to go on since the first time you saw a globe.

    Don’t limit yourself. You might find that you’re capabe of more than you ever even realized.

    …

    And that’s it, guys. I reduced all of my findings to those four things, and I stand behind it. The good news is that it will burn a helluva lot less than actual Listerine, and the better news is that nobody’s here to judge your results like some #beforeandafter hashtag. It’s just you, and I am a VERY firm believer in YOU.

  • The Bucket Theory

    I’m a chronic mom-caller. Like, I may live over three thousand miles away from my mother, and I may be a grown-ass thirty-year-old woman, but if I go more than 2-3 days without speaking to my mom, it’s weird. I used to call her on my way home from work, and now that I have my own place, I call her as soon as I’m home, eating my pre-made dinner on the couch while I tell her about my day and listen in turn about hers. I’ll call her on my days off when I have literally nothing new to tell her. I’ll call her when I discover pre-filled strawberry jam and cream scones for sale at Tesco. Chron-ic.

    Whether it’s because I do such a faultless job of this on a regular basis, or because my mom has a tendency to feel like she’s a ‘bother’ if she’s the one that calls me (“I never know what you’re doing! You’re so busy. You could be at work.” “Mom, I keep telling you. If you call me and I’m busy, I just won’t pick up the phone.” I digress.) – my mom hardly ever calls me. But this afternoon I was off work, sitting at a coffee shop, when my phone rang and it was my mom. Calling me!

    We talked about a lot of things, as we always do. Work stress, life stress, good things, challenging things. And at one point, somewhere between good things and challenging things, I mentioned my Bucket Theory. I feel like I tell everyone and their mother about my Bucket Theory, so I was 110% sure I’d already not only mentioned it to my own, but explained it in depth. But it turns out I hadn’t, and because I will never not enjoy the sound of my own voice – especially when expounding my own life views – when she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard about your Bucket Theory” – I LEPT at the opportunity. And as a result, the topic is fresh on my mind, and I figured no time like the present to infect the internet with it.

    So here, un-asked for, is my Bucket Theory.

    We spend an inordinately large amount of time while we’re growing up and getting older being told exactly What Will Make Us Happy. People, society, strangers, LIFE. They all act like there’s a one-size-fits-all formula for how to make a life for yourself that genuinely brings you joy.

    What I spent my twenties doing was unlearning all of that.

    Attaining happiness is only universal in that it can always be broken down into buckets. One bucket, six buckets, twenty buckets, every person is different. The buckets come in all different sizes. Maybe yours are all tiny and easily filled; maybe some are bigger, and need a regularly scheduled top up. But the constant between everyone’s buckets is this: the sum of their parts is a Satisfying, Happy Life. (Accidentally just typed Lie, and I’m gonna go ahead and ignore what that typo is trying to tell me.) The only way your buckets can be Wrong is if they hurt people in the process of being filled. As long as you have peaceful, kind buckets, I truly think your only priority in life should be to define them and fill them however you see fit.

    I believe I’ve gotten to the place I am in life because I figured out what my buckets are and made a big deal out of prioritizing filling them the fuck up. Having my family in my life is a big bucket – but for me, geographic closeness isn’t a requirement of keeping that full. I rely heavily and happily on technology to do so. Having a job that’s satisfying, but also allows me creative freedom in my style and on my days off, is another big old bucket. It needs a regular top up in that I always want to feel driven and like I’m developing the people around me, but I’m quite certain my career bucket will never get any bigger. It will always play second fiddle (second…bucket?) to others.

    And then there are the surprise buckets – Being Near Medieval English Things turned out to be a pretty major one. Nobody told me when I was thirteen that where I live would bring me more happiness than my college degree itself. Tattoos. Financial Independence. Writing – well, no surprise there. Seven year old Kathy could have accurately drawn the size of that bucket right after she wrote her first short story about a girl sneaking off from a family picnic to find a dragon in a hillside cave. It will probably always be my biggest bucket.

    But if your career bucket is your biggest, wahey to you! You will find no judgement here. The same if being physically close to those you love is a big bucket. I get that too. Making a family. Having a dog. Achieving fame. Immersing yourself in other cultures. Helping the environment. Listening to great music. Chocolate chip cookies. They are your buckets. It is your life. Too many people get down on themselves because their buckets are different or strange or maybe even because they’re not different enough. I assure you, it doesn’t matter. Nobody has to deal with whether or not something brings you happiness and fulfillment except You.

    So if you’re looking for an extra bit of happy in your life, take a look at your buckets. And once you figure them out, there are only two things you need to do: chase their fulfillment like nobody’s business, and never apologize for it.

  • Buzzcuts, Crusades, & Not Needing No Man

    It’s a rainy June afternoon in London, which is exactly the sort of thing everyone spent all of last summer warning me about. And yeah, it’d be a little bit more beautiful if there was blue sky on my day off instead of clouds and a more-than-light drizzle, but the atmosphere of a summer rainstorm has its own sort of magic. It’s warm, and damp, and grey, and green, and saturated. If you’ve got the option to spend that kind of afternoon inside with a view, there are worse June days to be had.

    I have done a markedly poor job of adventuring this spring/summer, and I’m determined to fix this. I may not have any current plans regarding how to do so, but I mean, this time last month I hadn’t even booked the last-minute trip to Malta that I went on two weeks ago. I doubt I’m going to jet off anywhere in the next two weeks, but for now the fact that I COULD is satiating enough. Besides, Malta was glorious, four days of lying in eighty-degree sunshine listening to Lizzo and re-applying sunscreen every hour on the hour and one day of solo-touring Valetta as I sweat my bodyweight trekking from Instagram post to Instagram post. The thrill of it will carry me through several rainy afternoons to come.

    I will also make do with the residual historical passion left from plowing through two Crusader-era novels about Richard I during said holiday, and a renewed focus on creating and committing to a social calendar. Last night was a bizarrely solid step forward in both regards, spent catching up with someone from my UEA days at an art showing at circa 1720 The Jerusalem Tavern. It was an excellent night of discussing cathedral pilgrimages, a shared love of old buildings, and the magical aura of places like Winchester and York.

    Yesterday marked the expiration of the last drop of patience I had in the growing-out-my-hair process. That sort of patience is always in short supply in my life, because once you have buzzed your hair, anything longer is considered high maintenance. I was having a moment, though, the record-setting kind where for almost a whole WEEK I thought I might have the strength of spirit to have a slightly long, curly-haired pixie cut. To give up my preferred silvery buzzed cousin of a pixie in favor of something a little more approachable, more akin to cute than “don’t fuck with me”. But yet again, it was not to be. I walked by a barber shop on my way to kill an hour before meeting up with said friend and walked out with significantly less hair. And let me tell you, that cycle is some well-known, battle-scarred territory for me.

    My close friends know that I struggle a lot with the concept of looking feminine. I don’t mind not looking feminine, and in fact actively revel in wearing my hair in a way that most people would call striking and/or androgynous. But when you’ve hit age thirty and five years of being single, even the most confident woman has a moment of self-reflection that involves examining how she looks and acts, wondering if that one thing is the reason a partner has eluded her all these years. And as a woman that wears her hair shorter than almost all others, my hair cut is an easy target whenever my self-criticism rears its rude head.

    The genuine truth is that 99% of the time, I love how I look and I don’t give a shit if it’s not appealing to men. My style is one of my favorite things about me and I absolutely would not change a thing about it just to attract a guy. But it is also genuinely true that that 1% moment, the one where I suffer crippling self-doubt and feel like I’ll always be alone, is a real fucking doozy. I miss having a partner. It doesn’t matter how much I love myself; it’s really hard to admit that I’ve just gotta wait around for a guy that’s not put off or intimidated by or unattracted to a girl that chooses to look like me.

    What gets me through those 1% moments is realizing that I’m not waiting: I’m just otherwise occupied. I have the luxury of other things to focus on and pursue and get excited about on my own. While it’s a little frustrating that my hair regrowth rate seems to line up perfectly with the creep-in rate of my self-doubt, I’ve learned to live with it (and my hair). Men might not be a fan on the whole, but just today I caught eyes with a lovely woman in her forties shopping with her friend. They stopped me and told me they’d been watching me since I came into the store because my hair was so amazing, and the friend pulled out her phone to show me the short hairstyles she’d just been looking up because I’d inspired her so much.

    Having said all of that, you could argue that I’m leaning real hard into my haircut as being single-handedly responsible for my singledom. Which is entirely possible too.

    Except you’re wrong, because what’s NOT to love about a loud, charming 12th century English history nerd covered in tattoos that can dad-joke with the best of them? I am flawless and so is my haircut.