There is something as unstable as water in me, and when things get tough I go away. I haven’t got what the English call ‘guts’. – Jean Rhys {x}I know what she means, Jean Rhys. There was a strangeness to her life: she had a rare ability to survive wherever she was planted, but little ability to do much more than that. She would find herself in the cross-hairs and take herself to Paris or find some money from some man or walk into someplace and find herself a job. But then she would quit and leave and give up, and she spent most of her time living on the narrowest of margins, in a bedsit with a bottle of gin, writing dark things. A sad, bitter survival – but one which was surprisingly strong, surprisingly unwilling to die. She lived to 88.
I have that same thing. I have been very good at achieving things, but all of it is done with single-minded necessity. There's nothing else to be done, so you must do it – not because you want to move across the country or go to this university or get this therapy, but because that's just what comes next. After that, something loosens: I stop being able to manage my own life. This is the way it has run for years, bewildering stops and starts, deadlines just met and then months spent in dark rooms with the curtains closed and bills late. Like Jean, I've always trusted that money would appear from somewhere, and generally it has, but I have no idea how to go about getting it (I'm talking scholarships, grants, benefits & donation websites, here, not rich parents). One day I'll decide that it's time to pull myself together, and I will do what has to be done, and once it's done I'll float apart again – I get back into uni only to leave again; I move into a house only to lose all ability to care for myself and all understanding of money. I don't have guts, either, or much sense or fitness for the world. But I survive.
I was reading an interview the other day with the real Christiane F, where she says, "This isn't what I'd recommend: this isn't the best life to live, but it's my life." It's a thought that echoes a Cat Marnell line that comes into my head a lot: "It was and is OK: it's just a different life. It's just different." It's where my thoughts go every time I tell someone a story and they respond with pity or sadness. My life isn't sad, though I spend a lot of it being sad. It's just my life. It's fine.
I don't like the feeling when I think that people are worried about me. [...] I wanted to write a song to tell all of my friends and family to shut up [laughs]. 'Cause I'm always ok. – Fiona Apple {x}
Anyway, this is really just a love letter to all the strange girls who don't get it, who might never hold down a long-term job or collect all those markers of success, but who are always fighting tooth and nail to keep living and might keep fevered notebooks in a suitcase for years to later open them up and find the seeds of a book or a collection of poems or an album. Big, well-formed ideas pulled from the sludge of a badly-lived life. I love you. May you never find yourself in jail for failing to pay your council tax bills (or, like Jean Rhys, for stabbing your neighbour with a scissors because she thought you were a witch).
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