Life is going really well for me at the moment. My hair looks great since I dyed it a more understated honey blonde and got extensions to hide the patches where it snapped off from over-bleaching. My bookshelves are crammed with books people with taste say you should read, like Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, and yesterday I got rid of all the page-turner novels that I read on holiday. I have one of those neat pastel pink diaries you get targeted ads for on Instagram and its pages are filled with things that make me feel important. Dinner at Moro with Ruchira. Zoom call with my agent. I have a book coming out and the people with proof copies love it. My best friend sent me a picture of her reading it behind her work computer because she couldn’t put it down. I nearly have two of those lines going down either side of my stomach from going to the gym all the time. I make a great carbonara. I go to cool parties where there are DJ decks and disco balls and I know loads of the people in the room. I’m nearing the bottom of my sickeningly long to-do list with just a few cupboards left to clear out and only one more thing to bug my landlord about.
So yes, life is going well, but it’s also been making me feel agitated, because I can’t escape this feeling that I’m waiting for something to happen in response to it.
I wasn’t sure what that was until I was in Leeds recently, in a bar my best friend Vicky likes because it plays rock music and that I hate for precisely the same reason. A guy I like who I used to work with came over to our table and asked me, “Now then, what you doing back here?” There was no space, so I pulled him down on my knee and felt calmer, as if I were dozing under a weighted blanket. I knew he was recently single because I’d seen him delete all the pictures of his now ex-girlfriend from his Instagram. We spoke about the book and he asked for a copy, “seeing as I’m in it so much.” I told him my Monstera is dying and he said just because he’s now a tree surgeon doesn’t mean he knows about plants. We laughed, his hand grazed my bare knee, but then more of his friends arrived, and rather than pulling them over to the table he stood up and followed them on to the next place.
I used to think that all I needed to do to be lovable was to become better. I told myself once I sort out my hair it will be different, once that article goes up on the internet, once I buy that corset. But I’ve done all of those things and people still look at me and walk away. It makes me feel like giving up, because what’s the point in being better if no one notices it? I didn’t take my make-up off when I got back home, didn’t go to the gym for a while, didn’t read anything; just watched my favorite vloggers buying furniture for their new house. Most nights I fell asleep at 2 a.m.
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