hey i am trying to be

I wonder how many single women in London are ovulating right now. I wonder how many have turned to their best friend tonight and said: I feel dangerous - and then walked to bed, put on pyjamas and done everything in their power to leave their phones alone. I’m just thinking about the online course I signed up to to try to create healthy relational patterns and I’m thinking about the way I also want to cause chaos for a bit longer. Anyway, maybe that’s normal if your boyfriend at 21 was talking about buying houses and the one after that just moved you into his. Maybe you get to nearly 30 surrounded by grown-ups feeling like that day after school when you covered your face in make-up and sat around a table looking like a clown.

Mum said on the phone that I must have come to her for a reason. Mum said it is hard to see pictures of me online with no clothes on, looking at the camera like that. Mum said that is hard for mums. But she said, I just need to say sometimes Annie, I just need to talk to you about it. And you came for a reason to challenge me like this. But it is hard to think about my daughter as a sexual woman. I know mum. I know I found another way to kick up the sand - but aren’t we all having a glorious time figuring it out. And I say, mum, you know this is just the way I am learning. I’ve been so good for so long, I wore all the dresses he bought me. I took off my make-up that day and I didn’t put it back on for six years - more or less. He said one time, you look better without a ring on every finger, less is more, so I took them off, one by one, till there was only one left. He got it for me from COS. Of course COS, the shop that makes clothes that don’t suit me. Anyway, I wore it on my wedding finger for a while, at least I did that.

It’s not his fault, it’s just a lifetime of oppression. Don’t worry, he was oppressed too. Learning what turns him on and what turns him off. No hair there please. And I’m a feminist, but no hair there darling, that won’t work when our sex life is dwindling. You’ll find a way to make me happy and you’ll find a way to swallow another pill that you absolutely didn’t sign up for. But you are beautiful. And you are beautiful when you wear A-line dresses that don’t show how perfect your waist is. And when you blow dry your hair until all the curls have been transformed into something shiny, that’s when you will be rewarded with golden eggs of love. That’s when.

Anyway, it’s not like I’m the first woman in the world who found her sexual power and then lost it in the next breath and spent the next 20 years trying to be both. Darling I’ll seduce you in the red dress and then burn it and only wear white, is that what you want? I’m not the first woman in the world who was told at 11 by Craig Mason in Maths that my tits were great, but it was a shame about my face. Anyway, my tits stayed small and my face is amazing so there. I’m not the first girl who was touched too soon and told she was too hairy and carried that round like the heaviest weight in the world for the rest of time. I am not the first. So yeah, now ingrown hairs come to the inside of my thighs and I cut them out till I’m bleeding and wish I never ever got a wax.

But I did it for love.

Cindy has taken all these pictures of me. Covered in my body, covered in my skin. And I love them and I want you to see them and I’m ashamed of it all. Because I learnt that the best way to be beautiful was to be naturally beautiful and hold it so humbly that anyone who looks at you is entitled to take whatever bits they please. I learnt how to stay small for years and only acknowledge my physical attractiveness with a reasonable handful of self deprecation. I learnt what we all learnt. You can be beautiful but only this way is safe. And as soon as you start to suggest that you might know it, you are on a different list, and you are untouchable by men and women alike. So hold that carefully, darling. Make jokes. Keep making jokes.

I watch it now when I walked around Hackney with Romy. Don’t worry, she’s my niece, I want to say on the back of my T-shirt. I’M ACTUALLY STILL AVAILABLE. But look at how the hot Dad who ignores me when I run on Tuesdays can hold my eye now. Smile safely. Because I’m a mum today and I don’t look at him like I might burn down his life, if he let me. Look at me now. Don’t worry, I’m safe on Mondays. Darling, don’t worry. I’m always safe, it’s you who got scared when I asked you directly. I knew all along.

I am just interested today because my therapist is helping to pull me along but she says, you’re close Annie, but you’re not quite ready for it all. And then I sit down on the floor and I think, yeah, I’m not quite ready to stop trying things out am I. And I thought it was a rush because I didn’t have that baby and I’m sad! But Bridget said; it isn’t a rush. There’s time, there’s time to pull myself back from the lives I am left behind in. There’s time and I don’t need to know the colour of the paint on my wall yet. I don’t need to care yet. And I said to Cindy, shall we make some more mistakes? Do we need to? I don’t know but I know I want to secretly take my phone to the bathroom and send the message I shouldn’t. But I don’t. I’m just saying. I spent a whole lifetime being who I was meant to be.

It’s just a shame no one tells you that you will have this strange power that is so fragile, it will have dissolved by the morning. No one really tells you how valuable you are until the chase is over. No one really tells you what it might feel like when they don’t love you in the morning. No one really tells you how good it will feel for a whole afternoon that he looked at you like that. No one really tells you how it’ll be when you find exactly what you really want and then don’t get it. Again. No one will tell you how to recover yourself from the ruins of not being chosen. No one will tell you until it’s too late that you were meant to choose yourself all along. Even though when you were 13 you began to learn how to please a man. Anyway, I didn’t need to be told, because won’t we only listen when we bump our head on the same corner once again. And anyway, wouldn’t we still have had every single one of those moments. Wasn’t it everything.