game face

some of the newslaters of the last couple of months (sorry not sorry)

May 26th. It’s Sunday, 6am. I’m walking down an alleyway connecting two big roads, deserted at this time. I’m already starting to shiver under a cold drizzle. The day before was warm and sunny, but of course, today… Well, today’s a new day.

This is what you get, I tell myself. This is what you get for living life on Why Nots and What Ifs. I make a mental note to reexamine my approach. Maybe asking yourself Why not? and waiting exactly ten seconds before deciding that if there was a good reason not to it would be immediately obvious is not such a foolproof decision making mechanism after all.

But I’m here now so I have to see it through. I keep walking.

Edinburgh is a dark brown, severe looking place. It’s breathtakingly beautiful. Weathered, but retaining its artistic integrity. It was willed into existence by the stubbornness of man, carved into unyielding stone. Us humans, we’re not like stone at all. We have neither the time nor the strength, but we have the will, agency, and desire.

Time and strength crumble into pieces under the weight of desire.

The narrow streets make everything look taller, but whether it’s imposing or cozy depends on your state of mind, probably.

My state of mind this morning is something else. I feel acutely that I am alone, and how confusingly beautiful that seems in that particular moment.

I have weathered myself preparing for what I need to do without any help; still my extravert character retains its structural integrity (read: I wouldn’t mind a friend around.)

🥐

Last week Jules and I were walking through our shopping mall when I grabbed him and dragged him to the Cinnabon stall. You have to see this, I said. You HAVE to see this.

“What the hell? Just tell me, why do we have to walk all the way there, you can just tell me, it’s not like we’re going to buy one, let’s just keep going.”

No, I said, you don’t understand. “This is culturally significant, you have to see this.”

And there it was, navy on white: Cinnabon® Classic Roll, 885 Kcal.

The densest material on earth, a classic Cinnabon® roll. And, I’m sorry, I understand sometimes it’s necessary, but consuming one is almost just as dense. I try to imagine the state of mind in which I’d have to be to allow myself such frivolity.

What’s the cultural significance of the calorie count of a classic Cinnabon® roll, you ask? I don’t know, but it’s there, and it’s important. I just know it is. It’s a menu, but it’s also postmodern art. It’s making me feel things, and although most of those things are various shades of rage, I’d say it fucking qualifies. Class it under black humour, social commentary.

Despite the absurdity of this the stall always, always has a long queue. Otherwise I’d probably be eating one right now.

🥐

I turned 31 on June the fourth, an event that went largely unnoticed by my conscious mind, said mind still being in May (2007) at the time. I was 14 the day I turned 31, and it enjoyed a family trip to the zoo with my fiancé and children, unencumbered by thoughts about passage of time. About the fact that despite making little progress to realise myself in any tangible way I still somehow managed to age anyway, which is just ugh, so unfair.

That’s all I have to say about that, really. I don’t much worry about birthdays. I do like gifts though, so, you know, feel free.

My age, with everything else going on, seems to have so little significance. Maybe it’s just my wishful thinking. I’m already aging out of my hobbies: how long before it becomes embarrassing to play video games this much? Don’t answer that.

🥐

When I was 14, balloon skirts were all the rage. I wanted one so badly, but none seemed to suit me, those that did were too expensive, or didn’t go with anything else I owned. And who was I kidding, wearing a skirt? I’d just be laughed at, no doubt. And my body shape was all wrong, and my butt was too big and anyway, forget the whole thing, I’ll never be skinny enough, never mind. To this day, I’ve never owned one.

On the day of the Cinnabon® incident I stood there staring at a mannequin wearing a balloon skirt realised that they were back.

As a grown human woman with unfulfilled dreams I feel compelled to live out my teenage fantasies of being a balloon skirt girl. But also, as duality of womanhood would have it, I unfortunately think they’re lame now. What to do, what to do?

But here’s the thing, can I really ignore an event as PERSONALLY culturally significant as balloon skirts coming back? Find out next time.

🥐

When I started training, that first run I did, I remember it.

It felt like a first clumsy and exhausting step in claiming back my body. I remember running, and thinking: this is mine. It’s not doing so well right now, but it doesn’t belong to anyone else any more, it’s mine now. One day it will suffer the last stage of separation from my toddler. Another day a little or maybe a lot later I will find myself climbed and pinched and pulled and poked less by tireless little hands.

But before that happens I’m allowed now to take myself for a run, how simple.

I’m only a little embarrassed to tell you I felt emotional to near tears every time I ran those first couple of weeks. Any mother of multiple small children that spent 4 years straight breastfeeding will tell you that this is a completely natural reaction to feeling in charge of your physical self again.

And I did claim it back. Whipped this ass right back into shape. Ran the half marathon. In a dress in the pouring rain, no less.

The Instagram algorithm decided it would be super funny to show me a bunch of jokes about how millennials try to squeeze in a race before turning 30, or that the day we turn 30 we start running half marathons, or something. Though I ran mine a few days before turning 31, I felt so called out that it made me angry.

“I’m not like this! I’m not like all the OTHER millennials! That’s not… nuh-uh, it’s not what you think!” I shook the phone, realising I’m shouting out loud. I didn’t care.

It wasn’t fair.

I already ran a half marathon before, in 2016. There’s registered evidence of previous engagement, from my early twenties. This gives me license to run a half marathon now without being accused of having a mid-life crisis rehearsal dinner or something. There’s the photos and everything.

I pull up the aforementioned evidence. There I am, holding up a medal, showing it to Aaron who ran a full marathon that same day. I love this picture.

Aargh, who am I kidding. I’m exactly like the other millennials.

🥐

A few weeks into my training I stopped feeling tearful about being back at a stage of my life where I have to regularly exercise, and started accepting the fact that I might actually end up doing this thing I am training five days a week for.

I know it might seem contradictory to a normal mind that while very actively training for a half marathon I still lacked a simple basic belief that I will even end up doing it, but you’re not me, lucky you. My mind hasn’t been in the same place as my body for a while.

But my body kept doing it.

One of the guided runs I did with the Nike Run Club app stuck with me.

“Who are you running with?”, the coach asked. “Who are your teammates that will lift you up if you fall?”

I was alone, so I imagined my younger self, training for the same race almost eight years ago. I’ll run with myself, I thought. The version of myself that already was determined enough to do it.

“You promised you wouldn’t be doing this shit again! That you wouldn’t even run for the bus, you promised me!” my younger self said, disappointed and hurt. This made me smile.

You’ll understand when you’re older, I thought at her. It’s okay to find things out as you go. She was wrong about running, but pretty cool in many other ways.

🥐

In terms of comings and goings, and general levels of business, I’ve had a Cinnabon® roll of a month. My mind and body have been themselves thrown about, rarely in the same direction. I found myself today witnessing a rare phenomenon of them converging in the same place and time, so I decided to document this solar eclipse level event by coming to you with a

Hello, I’ve missed you so.

You might not believe it, but I think about you all the time. I know say it every time, and every time I mean it.

Many things happened, and I want to talk to you about them all, but can only really cover a couple at a time. Besides the birthday and the race my phone got stolen, and I went to Germany for a wedding, and my sister came to visit. This is all significant, too.

🥐

I am sorry, friend, for my fractured way of telling simple stories. I don’t know how else to communicate this lack of a linear internal monologue.

People online seem to think that we’re the stupid ones, the ones without a voice in our heads. They’re confused by it. I don’t have a voice. There isn’t any one language narrating my existence. Sometimes I spell things out for myself on purpose, but the rest of the time it all happens all at once. Shapeless.

Have you noticed how the length of a dream has little correlation to the time you spent asleep?

In a dream we’re able to live a whole lifetime in two minutes, so in wakefulness, too, I live below the voice.

I put my head into this here moment fully, and all the other moments past and potential, never thinking about one single thing at a time. I think about how I should be running right now, instead of writing this here post. But every word brings my mind so much comfort, and I feel my body connecting with my head again, so I keep going.

I feel at the same time the gentle heat of the sun on my neck through the large cafe window, and the bitter aftertaste of my coffee, long finished. My eyes never fully let go of the orange cup that’s standing to the side, the teaspoon making a gentle jingling sound every time I shift my weight, its peace disturbed by the movement of the uneven table legs.

I think about you maybe reading this later and thinking I’m so cringy, or that I shouldn’t be thinking about calories so much. Or that running a half marathon isn’t all that impressive (or is!), and you’d rather be reading about Germany again. Balloon skirts are in there somewhere too, swirling around with images of my teenage self in the mirror disappointed at how awkward I look.

And with every shard of consciousness I buy into life.

I’ve been away and anxious, fatigued, feeling once again like the worst of my category. But I still buy into life, and let myself see small things as significant. And maybe that’s lame or whatever, but I will keep doing it anyway.

I buy into the social niceties of holding open doors, into sometimes eating awful things against my better judgement and letting myself feel ways about it, the manic need to run races we all seem to fall into at the first signs of ageing.

I buy into writing this thing of no apparent value, and count on you to buy into life enough to read it for no apparent reason.

Thank you for being here, again. For now, I think, enough.

More newslaters to come even laterer! <3

P.S. There’s a video that kept me going through training, giving me the motivation. My mom was carrying my things back before the half marathon in 2016. She was waiting for me with Jules and Aaron while I ran my race. They were talking about me, and she secretly recorded it because she’s cute like that.

“I was surprised,” Aaron said. “I couldn’t believe that she was doing what she was doing. She had a really full-on schedule without doing that. She must have been knackered, all the time. Cause every week, I got her to run more and more. You’re not supposed to increase your mileage by more than 10% and she did like, 50% the first couple of weeks, and then just kept on, and it was at least, 20% week on week.”

“Right, she didn’t need to do it,” Jules, now. “She could have dropped it. She could have done it. She could have said, no, I have too many things going on. Had every excuse to do it…—- you’re recording this aren’t you?” My mom’s been made then.

I listened to this a few months ago and felt tearful. Am I still this person?

Turns out, I’m exactly who I always was. What a comfort.

Here’s your cultural significance and the impact you can have on someone else: tell people how you feel, record it, put it in writing, something. (Or count on their mother to covertly record it.)