I am sat at the computer in my bathrobe, having just come out of the shower in preparation for going out tonight. J has just called up the stairs from the kitchen, “Five minutes, Luce.” (Yes, ‘Luce’. *cringes*). We are alone in the house.
I’m not sure whether I should laugh with the easy sweet familiarity of it all, or run, run for the hills screaming in terror that this is what, like, proper couples do! It’s fine. It’s lovely. It’s working :-)
How do you define yourself? I define myself as many things – a student, a Brummie (perhaps of the less stereotypical variety), a mathematician, a geek, a sewist, a Quaker, and so on and so forth. Essentially, though, I define me as me.
I was having this conversation with some friends the other day on the way back from a picnic. One of them has just got together with a new guy, and it’s looking serious already. We were talking about their future, in a loose hypothetical way, when something really struck me. H was talking about her career, her wants, and her life in general purely in terms of his. That’s all good, I suppose, from the point of view that by marrying someone you are tying your life into theirs and that somewhere along the way that is bound to involve a certain amount of compromise. But her aims in life seemed to revolve purely around her prospective husband’s – to quote, she would rather be the wife of a successful businessman than a successful businesswoman herself.
I’m sure that a lot of this stems from H’s rather traditional upbringing (; her mother will ‘allow’ her to leave home only in order to marry someone deemed suitable), and if that is what will make her happy then I wish her all the best. But at the same time, she is a highly intelligent postgrad, with strong views and ideals of her own, and is a lovely person to boot – and instinctively I don’t like the idea of H being transformed into ‘the wife of whoever’.
And for all I can see only too easily how it happens, I despair in the same way at those mothers (and yes, sorry guys, it does tend to be mothers) who find their personalities and lives absorbed into that of their children’s. Whenever I come into contact with women pushing a pram or pushchair, I make a real effort to engage with them, to meet their eyes without simply going gooey over their children, however cute the children may be. There are many things that I dread about potential motherhood and that’s a whole long story for counsellors to get their teeth into, but one of those is losing my identity to my children. I find myself feeling guilty sometimes for that childhood perspective of my own mother – she was my Mum, not C, not a primary-school teacher or an English/European Thought graduate or a keen walker. I guess that’s one of the things that I’m consciously trying to make up as I’ve grown older.
I’m quite pleased, for that reason, that J’s friends seem to know me as ‘Lucy’, not ‘J’s girlfriend’. I like having my own identity. It’s something I plan to hang on to.
I am so completely dippy at the moment it’s not true. Tonight was the Choral Soc Exec handover meal. I only realised when I saw some photos of the said meal being put on Facebook just now and I suddenly thought, “Shit, I was meant to be at that!”. Normally I’d've remembered in time to throw a nicer top on before heading out or at least half way through the night, even if it hadn’t featured in the evening’s immediate plan.
Then again, I probably still wouldn’t have gone even had I realised sooner, given the circumstances (although with texted apologies, admittedly). Sometimes people are just more important.
Oops…
Possibly the least inviting prospect imaginable, especially when you’re depressed, mildly ill, and have come out of a week at university that would send anyone’s self-belief plummeting to the floor.
But it went OK :-)
I went to a mixed school. I am at university with a lot of hardline Christians. I am twenty-one, which is not an unreasonable age for this sort of thing, and hell, I’d've been past my sell-by-date years ago in some parts of the world.
So I can cope with people getting engaged, even though it scares the hell out of me that people of my age are getting ready to spend the rest of their lives together. I can cope with the fact that a friend of my age has a two year-old (just about). I can even cope with friends a year older than myself getting married because, y’know, they’re big and old and into the scary real world. What I am finding difficult to cope with is today’s discovery that one of my Facebook friends from the year below me at school, has got married and is now about seven months pregnant, while in what I think might still be her first year of university.
It’s not that I disapprove particularly. It’s just, like, big. And scary. And I’m not that old and I’m not that responsible and I want my Mummy, not to be someone else’s Mummy! Not that I’m going to be for the immediate future, but y’know… When people put ‘Married’ on their Facebook relationship status, they don’t actually mean it, right?
“_____ _____ got married on Friday. No, really.” :-S!
“I can’t deal with taking responsibility for other people any more, which makes me colder, harsher, but also more honest.”
My response to this line was “More honest? Hell yes.”
And to a large extent I am – both more honest with people about me and more honest with myself. At the age of twenty, nearly twenty-one, the depression has finally got bad enough to ask for help, but that’s not to say that it’s anything new. I was seventeen when I finally was honest enough to admit to myself that there was a problem, although at the same time I resented and pushed away my parents’ implicit (albeit identical) diagnosis. The head-mess, the ‘lows’, the ‘down periods’ go back at least as far as thirteen.
It’s not even to say that I have been in a bad patch for all of that time, or that everything about me is as a result of being depressed. But that’s a long time for it to take a hold in ways that even I am still being surprised by. This particular train of thought should probably stop here; I stand by my recent assertion (elsewhere) that self-analysis is BAD.
A large part of the problem is that I’ve lived with this for so long without putting a name to it that I find myself getting angry and resentful. At myself for not saying or acknowledging anything sooner. At friends I’ve had for a long time for not knowing, even though I suppose that I’m the one who shut them out. That’s part of depression, and you often don’t pick up on the signs unless you’ve had direct personal experience (; here I would like to take the opportunity to point out that clinical depression is not necessarily about wearing black eyeliner and cutting your wrists). At the sheer scale of misinterpretation that I know has gone on, even though I know why that misinterpretation happened and in some cases that I actively willed it to happen. I even find myself slightly saddened by the normality with which I have related to my siblings since coming home this holiday, because it probably means that it has formed a much bigger part of my inter-personal relationships than I thought.
Every cloud has a silver lining, however, and mine is that this is a chance to start again. To look people in the eye and tell them, “Actually, this is who I am”. To discover which of my friends really know me (and understand that there may be this extra side to me but it doesn’t invalidate what’s gone before), and sad to say, which of my friends are running away. To run out of mental energy for social etiquette and game playing and indeed ‘the rules’, and to concentrate on who I am. Saying what I think isn’t always to other people’s tastes, but I’m finding myself having to do it in order to get through this.
It’s bloody scary, but even in the midst of a really bad day like today, I still know and take comfort from the fact that this was always going to happen and that it always had to happen. After all, once you’ve hit rock bottom then there’s only way to go, isn’t there?
There are twenty people in my Galois Theory lectures at the minute*, four of whom (including myself) are female.
That isn’t too bad as gender ratios go. Slightly unbalanced even for the Maths Department, but I’ve experienced much worse elsewhere. I don’t dislike having male company – if anything I find guys easier to interact with than other girls, at least in the short term – and let’s be honest, it doesn’t matter hugely one way or another. But there was still that moment, just before the start of the first lecture and before the other three girls walked in when I suddenly became conscious of being the odd one out.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Guys and girls may have physical and neurological differences. Guys and girls may have different social and cultural expectations placed upon them. The lecturing staff may be 90% male, stereotypes may be bandied about in jest, and the girls’ Chemistry Department toilets may be absolutely disgusting but that’s no hindrance, essentially, to being a girl learning Maths. In the eyes of officialdom, I am a student defined by a nine digit number alone, and in the eyes of everything that feminists have rightly stood for and fought for, that is how it should be – I would resent being picked out for being female on that basis alone.
And yet, I find that when the only girl in a group of guys, my subconscious instinct is to assert my femininity. Brush my hair, wear skirts and make-up, become generally ’softer’ in my attitude. I’m sure that a psychologist would have a field day analysing the associated sexual instincts, need for a USP, the degree of consciousness of such behaviour, and on ad infinitum… but as a self-declared assertive woman (who still agrees with Jenny here**), I just find the whole thing pretty damn scary. Is it just me?
x
*Tiny group! Not, though, as tiny as the group for ‘Approximation Theory and ODEs’ who allegedly have fifteen, indecisive ‘tourists’ inclusive. Given that that particular module description effectively read, “Numerical Analysis! Only more, and harder!”, I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised.
**This is NOT intended to be a strict continuation of the same discussion. If you want to argue about that one again, then do so on Jenny’s post, please – I’m sure she won’t mind!
How well do you communicate?
I’ve been considering this quite a bit in the past couple of weeks or so. I’ve never been a great verbal communicator. I’m better in slightly more formal contexts or when talking to people older than myself, but put me in a stressful social situation and I have a tendency to lose my grasp on the English language altogether, flailing around for words and meaning, desperately hoping that somebody will bail me out before I make too much of an idiot of myself. Phone calls can be similarly awkward, although it does depend who I’m talking to. I know this, it’s the way it is, I can deal with it. I’m a mathematician and therefore entitled to suck at words (- and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it!)
When it comes to body language, however, I’ve always thought of myself as someone who wore their heart on their sleeve – even if I’m not saying something, I’ve always been pretty sure that people can tell what’s going on, simply because I’m just not that good at acting otherwise. And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned of late it’s that this clearly isn’t the case.
The realisation started to come a few weeks into first term last autumn when one of my housemates asked me to make a ’status board’ for my door because when I came in and went up to my room, just to dump my bag or whatever, they simply couldn’t gauge my mood. My body language was clearly not sufficient to distinguish between ‘thinking hard about something problematic’ and ‘tired but contented’. ‘I’m in a foul mood’ would have been marginally easier, I’d imagine, but perhaps not as clear as I thought since I found that stating the fact calmly but explicitly got the message across much faster (and with better results all round). It’s not even to do with the length of time that I have known people – a close, long-standing home friend recently told me that she can only tell when I’m annoyed because she knows what’s likely to annoy me. Even my family have varying degrees of reaction time (- it’s my Dad, I think, who tunes in the fastest, probably because we’re quite similar).
Maybe this apparent lack of open communication would explain my interesting time with relationships over the years. What’s chicken and what’s egg?
I think it’s probably in writing that I consistently succeed best when it comes to communicating. Edited, thought-out, structured writing. Is that a true representation of the thought process that goes on behind the letter or the email or the blog? The irony is that no-one can do the controlled experiment and ever be able to tell!
It’s frustrating. It really is.
Perfection.
It’s about every apple been green, shiny, and bruise-free.
It’s about every voice being recorded in every studio with just the right conditions and enhanced with just the right technology so that it sounds clear, full, and natural, balancing out its accompanying instruments to create the optimum album – every time.
It’s about the ball dropping into the pocket with geometric precision.
It’s about not settling for ‘good enough’ in a relationship, because the dream guy is just around the corner.
It’s about every leading film actress being tall, thin, beautiful, glossy, attractive.
It’s about the email being sent now, the paper being crisp white.
It’s about achieving the average, the norm, the expected, the unattainable to all but the few.
It’s about discarding the blemished apples, the thin voices and the old microphone. It’s about the failure of the ball that was one degree too wide, the dissolving of the relationship because he didn’t hold the door that one time or sounded a bit distracted on the phone. It’s about the actress with the long nose and ageing skin being derided as ugly and unsuitable for the role. It’s about the job being lost because the email was sent a minute late due to a nose bleed, the application being rejected because the photocopier had only been supplied with yellow paper that day.
We have grown so used to the idea of perfection. If we work hard enough, if we invest the money, if we refuse to let anything get in our way then we can achieve anything! The world is ours to conquer! So long as we aren’t the ones composting the bad apples, that is.
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