Once, sat in my Mum’s living room, I told her that I felt different to the other Mum’s at the school gate. That they seemed to be managing in a way I was not. That not one of them had surely ever found the headmistress on their doorstep because they had forgotten to send a form into school, and had to explain why they were were a) hopeless b) still in a nightie at two in the afternoon, to a shrew of a tiny lady who could wither you dead in the flash of her disappointed eyes. She often withered me dead that woman. I have in fact been withered dead more times than I care to count.
My Mum listened and laughed and said Oh love, all those women with their immaculate lives? They are swans gracefully perusing the lake with their legs going like the clappers under the surface. You, she said, just never quite learned to pretend that life is perfect in order to keep up with the Jones’s. And I believed her and decided that this must be the issue: perhaps I had simply missed a couple of months at woman school? Presumably during the year they taught muddled little girls how to be all grown-up swans. So I got to thinking I could take a course. Study the very women who mystified me or even persuade one of them to teach me all I needed to know. I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that I could learn what other women knew instinctively by taking a headlong deep-dive into womanhood, so that somewhere along the way as I excavated my very soul and poked around other ladies heads, I might, just might, find the key to normality.
But of course I was doomed. The very concept of normality is in itself something of a slippery customer, and I was really not ripe for learning that which it took all my energy to understand, let alone maintain. But I was nothing if not determined to fit in. To behave like the women I so admired. To exhaust my self trying, because I didn’t know there was another way. And I really didn’t know that no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t be like them regardless. That women like me, those who know nothing beyond what it is to live out loud, cannot be like them, because we tell on ourselves by failing always to understand the unwritten rules. Laughing too much. Saying too much. Existing in a perpetual muddle there is seemingly no escape from and bringing up children similarly equipped to go their own way and reap the consequences because we have taught them by osmosis, that to try to live any other way is futile and ultimately unsatisfying.
But still I laboured under the illusion that all around me there were women with prefect lives. Until one day a woman I knew told me something so shocking, and so unacceptable about her seemingly perfect life that my eyes nearly fell out of my head in shock. And one by one the stories kept coming. A woman who couldn’t stop eating behind closed doors. Another regularly assaulted by her high-flying husband. A third who tolerated never being allowed her own space, constantly haunted by a man who would not leave her side. Another whose life tumbled into an alcoholic abyss. And one beautiful woman whose partner dressed her head to foot and withheld money so she could never make her own decisions.
And I came to understand that I wasn’t like them for good reason. That life was a constant whirlwind, not just because the neurodivergence I as yet, had no label for, made life seem more challenging, but also because I refused to tolerate that which it seemed so many others simply covered up. That while I may have been wearing a mask, they had veiled entire relationships, whole houses, entire lives in destructive secrecy and were more keen to keep the status quo than they seemed to be willing to rail against inequity, addiction or abuse. And oh how my heart broke for them. And I would listen and say no, noooooooo, NO. You cannot live like this. And they would say what choice have I got? And that more than anything else bewildered me.
Because there is ALWAYS choice. Sometime choice looks like having the screaming abdabs instead of shoving your pain down into your stomach. Walking out of a room in which you are not being respected. Refusing to engage with those who want to engage only on their own terms. Giving up material things for peace of mind. Refusing to be scared of embracing the highs and lows that come with turning your back on the unacceptable and insisting that there has to be more (because there is, there really, really is). Sometime choice say no, no you will not speak to me like that, no I don’t want another glass of wine, no I am no longer willing to accept the way you treat me.
(Make a noise! Kick up a fuss! Stand up for YOU!)
Sometimes choice says, you will feel better if you don’t eat/say/do that. If you stop pretending you want to. Stop pretending you like it when it is ripping the very stomach out of you. That you will feel so much better if you give up trying to please every mother and her dog, and instead stand still long enough to work out what YOU need. Sometimes choice says fireworks and concerts and supermarkets make you cry: so create a life that doesn’t hurt. And sometimes choice says, don’t make excuses, simply explain and stand firm in that explanation because there is absolutely nothing quite as liberating as the truth.
If you CAN’T do it. Don’t.
If you don’t WANT to do it. Don’t.
And if it hurts: STOP.
Just stop. Decide you don’t have to be a swan.
Decide it is more than fine to create a life with clearly defined boundaries. Boundaries you need and want because within them there is absolute freedom to be your whole self without compromising for other people, wearing a mask that is slowly suffocating you, or staging an entire life for the masses that you aren’t to any degree living behind close doors.
Stop pretending and risk it all. You don’t need the big house, the job that is killing you, the empty holidays or the big car. Because what you REALLY don’t need is the kind of compromises you have to make in order to maintain it all when what you actually need is peace of mind. The kind of love that costs nothing in terms of self-esteem, emotional distress, ennui or the stifling of desire. The freedom to be your whole self and nothing but your whole self, warts and all. To be seen and to be loved.
Yes, it will be messy and scary and overwhelming, but it will also feel like a true renaissance. More than lip fillers and weight loss, more than a kitchen overhaul, or even a sex-life temporarily re-invigorated, could ever be. More too, than a puppy acquired to stitch a marriage back together, or a course on this, that or the mindful other. More than all of it, because true renaissance only starts when we take the mask off, stop pretending and allow the veil to fall oh so gracefully from our shoulders.
I have never been a swan. But I desperately wanted to be one, and I was trying really, really hard to convince the world that a swan is exactly what I was. And it was exhausting. And worse than that, it cheated me out of a life I could have truly embraced. My instinct to rail against what diluted the essence of me always standing between the life I had and the swandom I felt I should aspire to. Because none of us are “normal” and the pursuit of normality is exactly what robs us of our most authentic selves. The messy, beautiful lives we deserve. The lives not even the meanest of little shrews could wither us dead for because they are truer than true and there is just no arguing with that.
A messy, beautiful life I am claiming for myself now. A messy beautiful life I am no longer willing to apologise for.
Messy, beautiful me. Messy, beautiful you.