ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN AT ANY TIME

All you do when you criticise yourself is miss opportunities. I’m not talking about reflection – reflect away, examine the situation, but always have your own back. And fuck off anyone who exasperates your self-criticism. They are feeding off your energy. They are quite literally sucking the life out of you.

I know it’s more complicated than that. What if that person is your mum, or your best friend? I don’t know. Tell them to stop. You must stick up for yourself; have your own back. You definitely can’t believe their shit.

I was a beacon for self-haters in my 20s. People who were disappointed in themselves, or who thought they were somehow less than others. I tried to level with them, to stuff myself within the same confines they were oppressed by. I put so much energy into strapping myself in and pushing myself down. And yet I didn’t know any of this. At the time life felt like phantasy, like a dream. And it was.

For every five days spent in painful restriction, half heartedly wearing an imitation of conservative commitment to labour, spectacularly failing to meet their expectations of robotic compliance, there were 55 hours of pure splendid freedom, of shimmery theatrics, of being, feeling, seeing everything.

And it felt so real. It was life. It was the only reason to live.

Those 55 weekly hours were covered in sparkles, dusted with so much glitter, absolutely fucking doused in it so it would cut right through to your core and saturate your organs and flow through your veins. We had stars spilling out of our eyes, sicking up disco balls, shiting miracles. It was EVERYTHING. WE WERE EVERYTHING.

We held each others’ hands through the struggle of faking a mediocre weekend spent pottering and going to the gym. As if any of us would stoop so low. We were IT. We were SHINING. The necessity of maintaining a cover for the world of magic we had discovered, the fairytale portal we could conjure up was a fucking inconvenience, but it had to be done, so we did. We suffered through. We did whatever we had to to propel the wheel through the days and towards the next 55 hours of heaven.

And yet, all of this was infected by misguided parental interference of managing young expectations.