wild-eyed and unpredictable as a blunt-nosed foal.
sorry i haven't done anything particularly exciting recently (that's definitely a lie, i have, but it's mostly been getting day drunk in museums; getting night drunk at parties with my glam squad; catsitting; breaking my retainer and dropping $$ to fix it. luv 2 be young and in the prime of life, etc)
i also went to newcastle and back to london within 24 hours to see the previews of ask me anything, the new show from the paper birds (a cool devised theatre company, check them out). i wrote about the rehearsals for ask me anything in may, and i wrote about the preview this week.
when i was in bristol, i also went to see eighth grade, an excellent film, and i was talking to my secondary school best friend a lot because she was going through a breakup, and i spent a lot of time that week thinking about adolescence and growing up and blah blah. and when i went to newcastle last week, i hung out and stayed with my ex-boyfriend (2011-2017), which was nice but obviously weird, and i thought even more about the same things. so here are some of the thoughts i've been wrestling with for the last few months.
originally i was gonna write a review of eighth grade but i put it off for ages and went back to the notes and there's like 7 lines of useless scribbles (things like "silence!" "BODIES" great thanks past nicky). and there's not a lot of coherency to these thoughts, they're just tangentially related, so what follows is pretty much just extended scribbling But Digital.
We had some work experience kids (teenagers) in at work a few weeks ago and I was reminded just how lawless and untamed teenagers, teenage girls especially, can be. I always think of my teenage self as quiet and anxious, and that is true, but she was also often loud and incredibly, fantastically, weird, at least until that was beaten out of her by the blunt instruments of shame and mockery.
aforementioned secondary school bestie is visiting me atm and she said, apropos of nothing in particular, how strange it is to remember being a teenager when you felt free and just like, righteous about everything. i felt like i had a right to all my big emotions, like i had a right to be in the world; feelings that i now second guess or pre-empt or shut down for fear of being told off. lots of adolescence was properly awful, of course, and i'm not going to argue that it wasn't – but it was an awfulness that i could really feel, you know? everything was glamour and trauma and melodrama. i felt self-conscious a lot but i still felt, like, alive and like an actual person who existed, i had a level of confidence or self-possession or something, i did actually just do things without constant existential spiralling and i had these really visceral awful emotions – and it feels like when i went to uni i really lost touch with that core part of myself, i didn't really feel anything, i shrank, i drifted. and i'm still trying to work out how to rebuild the bridge over that gap.
i loved eighth grade in part because i Felt That, everything that kayla did i either have done or wanted to do or understood fully why she was doing it; it captures the odd balance between crippling anxiety and complete self-belief that was my adolescence really well. (i really liked booksmart too but those girls are wayyyy too self-actualised, they made me feel actively inadequate in comparison and they're supposed to be like 18 and i'm turning 25 this month. give me characters who are messy and incomplete, who aren't fully ~fleshed out because people aren't fully fleshed out consistent characters!! more kaylas 2k19.) i just really like it when we see characters who are still putting themselves together, who aren't fully realised (especially when teenagers but honestly at any point; anyone who claims to have a complete sense of self is either lying or an alien, in my opinion).
“The film’s about growing up. The many stages of coming of age. We spend all our lives in high school trying to find an identity, and then the next 10 years living it, and then after that, you’re 30, and you’re like, ‘Wait, I don’t relate to any of this s**t anymore.’
i really like this, from an interview with alia shawkat that came out yesterday; one of my friends always used to say, when i was going thru an existential crisis (so, constantly), that identity is a project of becoming rather than being; we're always working towards and never quite arriving, but we shouldn't expect to arrive. feeling like you don't have an identity but should is much more distressing and crisis-inducing than feeling like you don't have an identity but have enough bits that you can scrape together when you need to present a personality: three character traits stacked on top of each other in a trench coat, type thing. being told to be yourself all the time will sooner or later precipitate a but what even is my SELF crisis and friends, that's not fun! i really liked that at the end of eighth grade kayla can think about the future in terms of possibility rather than failure: in a message to her 17-year-old self, she says, You probably look a lot different than me, which is cool, but also if you still sort of look like this that’s cool too. Do you have a boyfriend? If you don’t that’s fine! I remember reading so many books as a teenage girl, about teenage girls, that started with new year's resolutions (i blame bridget jones): this year i will get a boyfriend, this year i will wear make-up every day, this year i will learn to curl my hair, etc. and i made all these resolutions, too, because i was desperately trying to figure out who i was supposed to be, so i could then work out how to be that person, and it's just exhausting. the way kayla comes to accept that failure in one thing doesn't have to mean total failure forever, it just means you failed at that one thing, this time – i loved that.
ask me anything, the show i was in bristol to watch being put together, is also about failure; the show itself is a kind of failure. [read my review for an explanation!] i really like art which fails, which celebrates failure, or at least accepts it as a fact of life and tries to work with it. that's what i loved about, for example, the last jedi: the way that luke's failures, as much as his successes, are a part of his narrative; that he has to keep trying to become himself; being luke skywalker™ is not a static but a dynamic thing. [more here; i will apologise for the plugs but i will not stop]
the thing is, though, that failure is not always simple to accept, is not always something we can be graceful about, is not always easy to swallow. sometimes failure burns bright in your gut for a long, long time. i think this is especially true of teenage failures; the first time you really really did something wrong, or weren't good enough, or missed out. those really hurt. this, on the song "the best ever death metal band out of denton" by the mountain goats, is a piece of writing i come back to quite a lot:
Remember being fifteen; remember feeling immortal. Remember feeling like you could do anything you wanted, that all of your ideas were good ideas, like you could achieve the things you wanted to. Stage lights and lear jets and fortune and fame. The first time you get your heart broken by the world – the first time you really get told no, in a way that is real and meaningful – the first time you get your heart broken by the world is the last time you really truly have a sense of pure hope. The first time you work and work and work and then you get told that your work doesn’t matter, that no one feels the way about it that you feel, that you want them to feel, is the death of a kind of innocence. You learn that some things never work out, not because you don’t want them hard enough, but because the world won’t let them. This was how Cyrus got sent to the school where they told him he’d never be famous. This moment happens in all of our lives, and the aftershocks of this one betrayal are still vibrating through our souls. Every disappointment that comes after this first one hurts but it hurts because it’s an echo of once
when you were foolish enough to believe in yourself.
[you should read this and you should listen to this song https://oneweekoneband.tumblr.com/post/124614168489/the-best-ever-death-metal-band-in-denton-the]
there are many things that i feel like i might never get over; things that i've done, that other people have done. i've developed many a plan to get even. it's really difficult to admit to your failures, dust yourself off, move on; to try again, and risk failing again. i feel like i come back to failure a lot – failure of language, failure of form, the failure to hold things which cannot be held. whether academically or just in life, it's the stories about failure that always catch my attention. i really loved ask me anything because the creators were so open about their failures: what had been missed in the planning stages, what they were having to do differently, where they had failed as teenagers and young adults and mothers and everywhere in between.
mid-way through my trip to bristol, my accommodation fell through and i was worried i would have to go back to london, admit defeat, fail. i felt like not having a place to stay was a reflection of my own failure – to do what, i don't know, but that i had failed to Do Things Right and that i deserved to be sent home, like a naughty child on a school trip. but then i got over myself and reached out to everyone i knew, throwing myself on the mercy of friends, then acquaintances, then friends-of-friends, relatives-of-friends, even the ex-boss of one of my friends. and i did find a place to stay – in bath, a place i'd never been before, which has a whole host of associations for me; it is in many ways a reminder of failures. but i was taken in and given shelter and pizza to eat and pride and prejudice (2005) to watch, and i got to finish the week of rehearsals and enjoy that space of creative failure that the paper birds opened up for me.
i'm still trying to figure out whether it's possible to get back to the adolescent view of the world – the sense of wonder, of infinite possibility, of things too big or complex or slippery to grasp. i feel like sometimes i'm almost there. i feel like sometimes i'm a million years old. sometimes i feel like i don't even recognise my teen self; other times, i feel like she's still right here and the last decade is just a veneer which you could scrape off to reveal the raw, wild girl underneath. looking back is weird because it's frustrating, you're angry at your younger self, you want to protect yourself from hurt and you want to let yourself feel things. wish you could tell yourself what you know now.
in eighth grade, kayla speaks forward in time, to her future self. in ali smith's short story "writ", the speaker strikes up a dialogue across the years; she comes face to face with her fourteen-year-old self. the story is full of tension; all the things she can't say to herself, the secrets the future holds that she can't spill ahead of time. as much as i want to reconnect with my teen self, with my teenage way of being in the world, it's probably for the best that we can't talk to ourselves, give advice, interfere (besides, i know fourteen-year-old nicky wouldn't listen). i would like to sit with her, and hear her talk, though. i think she would have some important things to say to me.