In my feelings
But are they the wrong ones?
You may have noticed (or indeed, you may not have noticed) that the publishing of this newsletter has been reeeeeally erratic of late. I could make the excuse that I’ve been really busy (which I have), but that’s not the actual reason. I’ve just increasingly felt like I don’t have anything to say. I’ve been toying with the idea of stopping it altogether, but that proclamation has been met with cries of ‘NOOOOOO’ from the people I said it to, because obviously I only said it to people who would react like that, because ego. At the beginning there was definitely something to be said for forcing myself to write when I didn’t want to and being pleasantly surprised by the results, but long-term, I think forcing myself to write when I don’t have anything to write about is just going to result in me producing a load of work that I’m not happy with, which, in turn, will not make me want to write more. So I think I’m just going to send this out when I feel like it, or when I think I have a hot take on something that you absolutely HAVE to read. That way it’ll be a pleasant surprise for you. Or you will have forgotten about its existence altogether, in which case it doesn’t matter either way. Win-win.
The reason I didn’t write last week was, ironically, because something happened that made me think immediately (or after I had stopped crying, at least): ‘I’m going to write about that this week’. But after a few days of ruminating on it, I realised I didn’t actually have that much to say about it. I felt like I wasn’t actually feeling the things I was going to write, and that felt really dishonest. So I didn’t write it at all. Instead, I’m going to write about feeling the wrong things.
The gamut of feeling the wrong things is enormous, and it encompasses both big things and small things. On a smaller scale, for example: as a cynical, life-hardened person who does not want to be an actor or a yoga teacher, I feel as though I’m not supposed to like Los Angeles. Liking Los Angeles, to me, seems like something only starry-eyed idiots do; people who have never been there, or people who are terrible. But I fucking love Los Angeles. It’s beautiful. The weather is constantly amazing. The food is out of this world good. It has that purple-sky-Lana-del-Rey-languorous-depression vibe. People like me aren’t supposed to like L.A., but sometimes, we do.
Moving towards the middle of the scale, there’s the fact that I shouldn’t feel so bitter about being single. People who feel bitter about being single are people who aren’t happy with their lives, who need another person to complete them, right? Women who get angry when they see couples walking down the street hand-in-hand are pathetic, right? I never thought I would be one of those people who feel so unfairly maligned by the universe, so left-out of this human experience that seems to come so easily to so many people, one of the parts of being alive that you truly and honestly have no control over, and yet which some people seem to think is a human right. It bugs me so much when I say to someone ‘I think maybe it’s just not going to happen for me’. They think I’m being dramatic, perhaps, or that it’ll just take time. But they only feel like that because they’re in love, and usually have been for a long time. No-one who has been single for as long as I have would have any trouble empathizing with this feeling. The people who think that meeting someone is a kind of God-given right are the people who have already met someone. People who haven’t know that it is complete dumb luck whether you end up alone or not. But I’m not supposed to feel like this. I’m supposed to find my own life fulfilling enough. It’s not a trope that’s often discussed. You either have sobbing desperate women clinging on to the crumbs of affection from some pile-of-garbage-man because they’re terrified to be alone, or you have high-powered CEO women who have two bedroom apartments overlooking Central Park of which they are the sole occupant, who go on challenging holidays where they learn new skills and bring home indigenous ceramics. The woman who is happy with her life but also wouldn’t mind a partner with whom they could occasionally go on weekend breaks is not something that’s particularly represented.
And at the top end of the scale: the thing that happened last week that kicked this all off was that my divorce became final. After I’d finished blasting Adele and smoking a pack of cigarettes, I thought: I have so many feelings about this. But the next morning, when I essentially got out of bed and went about my day as if nothing had happened, I started to think that these feelings I was supposedly having were actually just observations – ways I thought I should feel after such an event. I thought I should be devastated. I thought I should feel as though the last line between him and I had been cut, I thought I should feel like all my progress had been re-set and that I would re-live all the pain and shattered dreams and ruined memories of our relationship. But that’s not what actually happened. I was experiencing it from the outside, thinking of things I would say to a friend if it had happened to them. Inside, I kind of felt fine. Or rather, since I’m not over our relationship anyway, this didn’t really make any difference. I just kept on feeling a bit sad while knowing it was still the right decision. The divorce didn’t change anything. I’d already been through all that when we broke up nine months ago. But it also didn’t feel like a huge weight had been lifted, like I could finally get on with my life. It felt like a piece of paper had been signed by a judge in an office in Brooklyn. Which is effectively all it was.
I think there can be a real tendency to go with the social narrative of how we’re meant to feel in certain situations – grief being an example that immediately springs to mind. But if we’re just play-acting these feelings, everything becomes performative. There’s no one way to experience anything, and sometimes it’s fine if you just feel okay about an occurrence that would devastate someone else, or if you feel floored by a comment that would roll right off someone else’s back. Be in your feelings, as Drake would say, but take a second to check that it’s actually your feelings that you’re feeling. You know?
One good thing:
There is a pub at the end of my road where an extremely hot guy works, and I drag my housemates there at least once a week so I can stare at him. We’ve had an ongoing debate for weeks about how old he is, because he’s one of those people who could be 25 or 35, and if he’s 25 then I was going to stop wasting my time. I mean, weekswe have been discussing this for. And then on Friday I went in again and he wasn’t there so I collared one of the female bartenders and asked her. She went away and came back five minutes later with his name, age, where he lived, how he got to work, and how he spent his free time. I fucking love women so much. We really go to bat for each other. Men could never.
One bad thing:
I made a catastrophic error in judgement regarding whether or not I needed to wash my hair one day this week and spent all day looking like something that gets washed up on a beach. When does existing as a human get easier? Is thirty years on this earth not long enough to know how often you’re supposed to wash your hair?
No con-texts:
Some theories about (cis hetero) men, some bitter single texts, and one text that is truly cursed:
