Category: Personal

(The title of this piece is a line taken from a letter by Claire Schwartz that was published in the Paris Review’s column: Poetry Rx).

Nobody ever warns you about how intense the break-up of a long-term friendship is, how that pain never really goes away – it just settles and comes back to visit you just as everything else in your life finally starts to feel alright.

I fell out with my best friend of almost fifteen years around this time last year, we had moved to the same university in Manchester and had (by complete coincidence) ended up living in different blocks of the same halls of residence. So much of those first few weeks were spent traipsing between flats, eating huge bowls of pesto pasta and being badly behaved in various clubs, it almost felt like we’d never left home.

I’m not going to pretend our falling out isn’t my fault, I enabled something to happen that never should have and I will spend the rest of my life kicking myself for it (note to self: do not ever give someone the passwords to your phone or social media no matter how much you think you might love them). I spend so much time wondering what life would be like now if I’d realised how wrong it was that my partner (at the time) was so jealous of the friendship I had with this person that she asked me to cut them off and when I refused to do it, she took matters into her own hands and did it herself from my social media. I’ll never forget those messages or the way my stomach dropped once I realised what had happened was real and not some totally horrid dream.

I’ve talked before about how the grief I feel is comparable to that feeling when you go swimming in the sea and the current is so strong that the gross, salty water starts to fill your mouth and lungs until it burns your insides and you spend what feels like forever struggling to get your breath back so many times before. I don’t feel it all the time, it’s at its worst when something happens to me and I reach for my phone to tell her about it (because she was always the first to know everything) and then I remember her number isn’t in my contacts anymore and I haven’t even seen her since the night we went to my favourite bar in Manchester and spent £17 on two double gin and lemonades because neither of us could stomach tonic. It makes my stomach lurch and suddenly, everything comes flooding back and I will spend the next few days almost entirely consumed by guilt. It’s a miserable cycle I’m scared I’ll never be able to break free of.

There’s so much I want her to know, I imagine the way she’d laugh whilst I recounted stories of failed Hinge dates over pints or how she’d squirm in horror once she learnt about the time I almost died in Newcastle. I want to tell her that I am so much happier now than I was in the last 12 months of our friendship, how I don’t let people walk all over me anymore and I finally learnt what it means to be happy without relying on other people all the time. I’d like to think she’d be proud of me if she knew that I finally got my work published properly too. It’s quite funny really because her mum sometimes comments on things I write when I share them on Facebook and it always makes me think about when we were kids talking about what our lives would be like as adults, conjuring up all these huge dreams in which the other always featured somewhere: huge houses in faraway places, stupidly unrealistic jobs – you name it, we’d probably made it up.

I don’t think the love I have for her will ever go away, it’ll just continue changing shape and I’ll push bits of it into the rest of my life and the friendships I have now. It’s there when I answer the phone in the middle of the night to give the worst advice possible because I’ve had two bottles of wine but I know my friend is hurting so I have to be there for him, it’s there when I decide to stay out clubbing into the small hours even though I hate those small sweaty rooms, it’s there when I listen to David Bowie as I paint black lines over my eyelids and it’s there swelling in my chest when I wake up next to the same boy in my bed every week because I know all she wanted was for me to be happy and I am (finally).

The first time I watched Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), I was fourteen and thought I was the coolest person alive because I wore fishnet tights and went to gigs without my dad trailing along behind me. A coming-of-age film about the complexities of growing up and moving on whilst juggling everything being a teenager throws at you (love, relationships, big life decisions), on first watch I can’t say I related to any aspect of the film because my experiences of the world were incredibly limited due to my age. However, as I’ve grown older and in turn collected experiences in the same way people might collect coins or stamps, there are a few themes that have started to become more relatable for me personally. Most notably Lady Bird’s (played by Saoirse Ronan) relationship with the place she’s from, her inability to like a nice person (although I’m better at that now than I was at 15) and in some ways, her relationship with her parents really stick out.

I grew up in a relatively small town (the population is just less than 20,000 people) on the outskirts of Leeds. It’s one of those places where everyone knows everyone, as in so small that you will almost definitely bump into old teachers and people you’ve not seen in donkeys in the local supermarket.  I’m grateful to have grown up in what is considered a (more than) nice area but I’m a firm believer in the idea that people grow out of places because I certainly did (or so I thought). I love where I’m from, the fact my accent has remained incredibly strong despite years of being surrounded by others from elsewhere but I’ve exhausted everything it has to offer; the old men’s pub that everyone from school frequents when they come back from uni, the park with the curry house in the centre of it and the same conversations with the same people I’ve known for 15 years – of course I’ll keep coming back to it, I just needed to get away from the sameness of it all,  much like Lady Bird does in the movie.

When it came to picking universities I might want to go to back at the start of 2021, my decisions were nowhere near as big or as rash as the ones Lady Bird makes. I knew I wanted to be close to home but not so close that it felt as though I had no independence, I had talked for years about moving to Manchester. I loved the busyness of it, its fit to bursting live music scene, the coolness of the Northern Quarter etc etc. It had all of these things that home didn’t and most of all, it meant a fresh start somewhere no one knew me. I had ultimately ended up living here by total accident having been rejected from Sheffield University on A-Level results day and at first, I despised it. I spent my first three months miserable and wanting to go home all of the time; I hated the hugeness of the city even though this was something I craved before I moved, I couldn’t understand why barely anyone I met sounded like me even though we were in one of the biggest cities in the north – everyone was southern and much posher than me, all I wished for was the comfort of home. It was during this time that I must’ve watched Lady Bird a further 5 or 6 times and it was then I finally felt connected to the titular character; I saw myself in the scenes where she leaves for uni knowing her mother’s attitude towards this move to the other side of the country and it made my chest burn.

A central theme to the film is Lady Bird’s relationship with her parents. I’ve always had an incredibly close relationship with both of mine except for a period when I was 17 and in a relationship that admittedly, turned me into a selfish, spoilt brat. Outside of pandemic restrictions, I’d spend every second I possibly could away in Sheffield visiting my girlfriend at the time. Christmas break 2020 was the worst of it because I didn’t come home for three weeks and missed Christmas Day with my family to be with hers. I’ll never forget the conversation I had with my dad that echoed the same one Lady Bird has with her mum, he told me that he’ll always love me but in that moment, he didn’t like me. I was so gobsmacked that I couldn’t grasp that I was the one being awful, I just thought that this reaction was my dad being mean and trying to prevent me from being ‘happy’. I look back on that discussion and am so grateful for it because even though it took me another year to get out of that relationship, I know he was just trying to protect me by getting me to think about the damage I was doing to not only myself but everyone around me. I thought about that period of time a lot when I moved to university, how my parents must feel without me in the house and it made me incredibly sad – I regretted all those months of bitterness and childish behaviour, all the times I told my mum I hated her and the fact I let this person that was supposed to be my partner fill my head with so much poison that it warped the view I had of my own family. It’s something that still crosses my mind from time to time but things are a billion times better now, I call them at least twice a week and go home to be taken care of as often as money and time will allow. I know that they’re proud of me for moving away but I can’t help but feel that sometimes they wish that I stayed to make up for all the time we lost over the span of that two-year relationship.

I’ve always been notoriously bad at finding the right people to like too; it’s only in the last couple of months I’ve become somewhat more aware of when someone is a dick before it’s too late. I’ve spent much of my teenage years fixating over brunette men in bands and boys that only kept me around to give them an ego boost when theirs was low, the women haven’t been much better either. It’s partly why I’ve almost always found extreme comfort in the character of Lady Bird because she too fixates on the wrong sort of person. There’s Danny who she becomes more of a friend to as he struggles to accept his identity as a gay man and then there’s Kyle: every woman’s worst nightmare because he’ll butter you up until he gets bored and fucks you off eventually (I’ve been Lady Bird in that situation and it SUCKS!).

She doesn’t mend her heartbreak in the way you’d perhaps expect, there’s no having sex with friends of friends or boat loads of time wasted crying over it; instead she paints over the space in which she wrote both their names on her wall and uses female companionship to get by because she learns (just like I did) that no love will ever be greater than that shown to you by friends. They’re the ones that pick up all the pieces when your life goes to shit, in my experience they’re always there to go for a drink or sit and listen for hours whilst you moan about how you pulled the short straw again, they’ll lend you clothes and come and buy condoms when you’re too embarrassed to go alone. I never realised just how much friends do for you up until my most recent re-watch of Lady Bird and the scene after she experiences her first break-up in which she and her best friend Julie sit in the car crying to ‘Crash Into Me’ by The Dave Matthews Band really hit close to my heart. I would be absolutely nothing without the shower of love I’ve received from my friends and to have a film written almost entirely as a love letter to female friendship is so special.  

Lady Bird has taught me so much about learning to love the place that you’re from, treating it with care as after all, wherever you grow up shapes a huge part of your identity as an adult no matter how much you may think it’s the worst place in the world. It’s also taught me the important lesson of taking better care of my friends and nurturing every friendship I have because I realise I’ve been pretty crap at that in the past. Who knew that a 90-minute film set 6,000 miles away from home could have such an impact on the way a person chooses to live their life even five years after its initial release?

I was born at 29 weeks and three days gestation, a June baby instead of the September baby I was supposed to be. Not expected to live past that first day on Earth, my parents were told that if I did, I would never walk or talk. Such an early entrance into the world meant that after birth, I had a brain haemorrhage that would leave me with the mildest form of hemiplegic cerebral palsy on my left side and near total deafness on my right-hand side among a whole list of other things that I wouldn’t be diagnosed with until well into my teenage years. All things considered, I actually got off pretty lightly if you think about it.

Growing up, my parents would always make sure that I got the same opportunities as everybody else in my life: they put me in drama lessons and sent me to various Girlguiding groups, I did bronze Duke of Edinburgh and went on every school trip that was offered to me. The only thing separating me from every other person my age was the odd hospital appointment.

Dating as a person with a disability or illness of any kind is excruciating because you know that as much as you may wish to hide these things from potential partners, there will come a time where you do have to sit down and have ‘the conversation’ and there’s always SO many questions that follow which are fine but there’s a constant feeling of dread that lingers in the pit of my stomach because sex almost always makes up a good 70% of this discussion. My answer always remains the same: yes I can and yes I have with both men and women. Whether or not I can be intimate with another person is not the issue but rather the idea that most nondisabled people have that disabled people should either a) not be having sex or b) we can’t have sex is the real problem here. Having this conversation feels a bit like a test of other people’s maturity at times too because either they’re grown up enough to stick around and realise that none of what is ‘wrong’ with me is as bad as it first seems, or they run away at the first sign that something is ‘off’. It really isn’t hard to be adult about something even when you don’t understand it.

I can deal with numerous questions and people not being able to cope, I get it and over the years I’ve learnt there’s no point in wasting time trying to make people understand because at the end of the day it’s a reflection on the type of person they are more than anything else. It’s the almost inevitable infantilisation and the patronising tone of voice that a small fraction of people adopt to address me because apparently having a mild physical disability means that I can’t have basic, adult conversation that I can’t cope with. It ignites an anger in me like nothing else because like I will keep on reiterating, nothing about me is all that different from the average person other than the fact I’m a bit deaf and a bit slow. I have ten GCSE’s, three A-Levels, am a third of the way through a Journalism degree, I live independently and am also a published writer. In fact, I think it’s quite possible that I’ve done more than most people ever will and it’s something that I’m incredibly proud of on the inside – I just wish I wasn’t so embarrassed to be more vocal about it publicly.

If I could change my life so that I didn’t have to go for yearly check-ups or sit embarrassed in doctors’ offices, I would but I know no different and I never will. I want other people to get used to the fact that people like me exist and we are NOT burdens. Even know sometimes it’s incredibly hard to believe, I know that I am more than capable of being loved – I just need to stop looking for love in all the wrong places and putting my faith in people that will never see me the way I would like them to.

I’ve been on dating apps since the middle of January, I only downloaded them as a way of figuring out where my head was at in terms of who I’m attracted to after never really being 100% sure – I’d been in a long-term relationship with a woman and had fancied men before but spent a long time drifting between labels because I couldn’t seem to find a place where I fitted comfortably. I didn’t really anticipate to still be endlessly scrolling on them seven months later because another man I’d spent a month speaking to started to lessen his replies to me until he became nothing but another viewer of my Instagram story.

I try not to be hurt by it because I know that this is just what happens: you start messaging backwards and forwards, you might even promise to meet up – or if you don’t then you just continue messaging until one of you gets bored and it fizzles out because you lose interest in finding out anything else other than how their day was by way of a message sent at 11pm on a Wednesday evening. Despite knowing that this is exactly how the vicious cycle of using dating apps works, it’s hard to not feel the tiniest bit deflated when you do eventually get ghosted because you made the stupid assumption that this time it might be different.

It feels slightly hypocritical to be writing about how much I hate modern dating culture and the fact ghosting is a thing when I myself am guilty of it too but let’s be real, who isn’t? I think we’ve all been in a position where someone just doesn’t do it for you anymore or they’ve made you uncomfortable with unwanted sexual advances after what was at first, a seemingly normal conversation. Sometimes, as human beings I don’t think we’re left with much choice but to just disappear – that doesn’t excuse the fact ghosting is still an incredibly shitty thing to do though. I don’t really understand what happened to just being honest with people when you can’t be bothered anymore, nor do I understand the people that think ghosting helps protect the feelings of the other person when normally it just makes you feel worse than if someone were to straight up say that they didn’t want to keep it up with you.

I seem to always go for the same sort of man every time I end up in one of these weird talking stages: brunettes that look like they could be a member of experimental rock group Black Country, New Road or like they’ve stepped directly out of a Sally Rooney novel. They’ve nearly always done a creative degree or made working in a high street retail chain seem like the most attractive thing in the world. There was a boy who spent ages telling me about all his favourite films and another that showed me poetry he’d written – they both seemed sweet until the inevitable happened and once again I found myself listening to Julia Jacklin’s 2019 album Crushing and wondering where I’d gone wrong this time.

I don’t like modern dating culture or this idea that there’ll always be somebody there to one up you. I wish it was easier than constantly being made to feel like that one toy you would get for Christmas as a kid just to play with it for a few days only to then forget about its existence once you grew bored of it. It’s for sure a first world problem and I know full well I don’t need to be romantically involved with somebody to be happy because there’s more to life than that but sometimes it would just be nice to have someone stick around for longer than a month at a time.