Split ends

I’ve been thinking about endings again.

I had three goals this year – get first-class honours, top my class, and get a scholarship for post-grad study. I juggled moving out and relationships and my own scattered brain, I felt like I spent the entire year fumbling around and half-finishing things, and out of all this mess a thesis was produced. It’s now sitting in my bookshelf bound and gagged, and god help me, I still want to go back and edit it.

I think I have spent the last two months getting over the last four or five years of my life, and now I am finally in a place where I can control most of the important things. I am single, living by myself, I have a well-paying job that I enjoy, and I am finally getting paid to write fiction. Not only that, I am getting paid to write fiction that I want to write. I don’t care that it’s a university paying me and not a publishing company – yet, hoho – I am getting money to spend the majority of my week with my pen to paper, and that’s fucking cool.

I went to a party a couple of weeks ago hosted by a guy I’ve known for years. I had never really got to know his mates – we were the kind of friends that were thrown together from opposite sides of the social fence, really – so this party was always going to be a little different from what I was used to. I expected a lot of pop music, girls in heels and highlighted hair, a few extra-sleazy boys and probably some familiar faces from back in primary school.

I remember sitting in a bedroom checking the messages on my phone, listening to one 24-year-old blonde talking about how she was doing pole-dancing classes instead of aerobics, and her friends all nodded in understanding and expressed a desire to do the same. What I wanted to say was, “Why the fuck would you even consider something like that?” but all I managed to muster was, “Doesn’t it make you feel a little… strange?”

The girl gave me a puzzled look and said, “No, why should it?”

Instead of going on to discuss the nuances of sexual exhibitionism for the sake of men, feminism, self esteem and all the underlying issues I could find (a lot) with pole-dancing classes being considered a preferable substitute to alternative exercise, I just shrugged and said lamely, “It would make me feel weird.”

The group then proceeded to lament about how they were “over” house parties and how they felt “so old now, there are so many 20-year-olds here!” When I told them my age (23) it somehow only served to reinforce this. Not sure how. To their credit, many of them were very nice – I made a couple of friends (mostly boys, though) at least for the duration of the evening – but all that night and all the next day there was this niggling feeling in my belly, like something had been incredibly wrong and if only I could latch on to the problem then I could get rid of it.

As I walked the 2.5km home from the train station after work the following day, I figured it out. I had major ugly duckling syndrome. I have never met so many long-legged, fine-featured, perfectly proportioned women in my life. And I had absolutely nothing in common with them – I didn’t look like them, I didn’t think like them, I felt so mentally and physically estranged that I was thinking in terms of “me” and “them” for most of the night.

For some reason at this party I felt like I’d compromised myself. It was bigger than just trying to ‘fit in’ – I felt like I’d muffled everything that defined me as me, the things I cared about, the opinions that I’d usually feel so compelled to voice – I was ashamed of them. I remember standing in the kitchen thinking, I am probably 3352 times smarter than every one of these women, I am probably making more money than half of them and I’m not even working full time, everything I planned to do this year I accomplished, so why the hell do I feel so shit about myself?

And at some point on my walk home, kicking up dust listening to Trent Reznor screaming (Oh, aren’t I tough, eyeroll, sigh) I decided: I am not going to do that again. I am not going back to feeling like I am not measuring up to “their” standards, I am not going to try to look like them, or speak like them, or think like them. I am not going to pretend that I do, or want to. I am not going to compromise my sense of self or self worth for anybody ever again. And I refuse to “feel old” until I’m 80. So last Saturday, after Elle had shaved Cass and Fiona’s heads, I asked her to take the clippers to mine too.

You can see my natural hair colour now. Boys look at me differently. Different boys actually look at me. I’m not sure what the girls do, but I do know that I walk prouder now, and with a lighter step.

I guess my resolutions are buried in there somewhere.