Tuesday 31 May 2016

BE YOU


When I told you guys I did a lot of thinking in Cyprus I wasn't kidding. I did a pretty fair amount of drinking as well. Which may or may not have been a good thing. Was it the wise Ernest Hemingway who told us to always 'write drunk, edit sober'? It is for this very reason that no blog post of mine ever gets published while I am intoxicated. And it never will. But that didn't stop me from sitting on my Cyprus balcony very late into the night, sipping wine, listening to undiscovered music & jotting screeds and screeds of jumbled up thoughts onto sheets of Ava's drawing paper. 

At the risk of sounding like a tosser, I did a lot of thinking about who I was. I often worry that I spend too much of my time putting on an act. Pretending to be someone I'm not. I feel a constant need to make sure I come across as ticking all the boxes. Not because I am trying to impress anyone in particular. But because it's important to me to show that in what I believe can still predominantly be a man's world, that women can be funny as well as attractive. That they can be clever as well as funny. Hell, they can even be clever, pretty and funny if they want to be. I'm not professing to be each, one or all of these things. I'm purely wondering how much of my time I spend simply trying to pretend I am.

The conclusion? I don't have the time, energy or emotional investment to pretend to be someone else. I might put up a pretty picture, crack a witty one liner on Twitter or write another long-winded blog post about the power of positive thinking, but everything is me. 100% unadulterated me. Even if I wanted to pretend to be someone else I couldn't. I couldn't keep it up. Everyone who knows me, loves me and cares about me knows exactly who I am because I am unequivocally honest about who that is. I make mistakes & I fall down, just like any other human being. But I'm no pretender. I'm me.

I worry that I feel things too much. Think about things too much & analyse too much. But then I think back to times where my behaviour might have come across as mean, possibly even cold-hearted and I realise that anyone can be anything dependent on the situation at the time. I'm over-emotional, probably cry too much and sometimes I feel everything so very deeply you'd think I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. But here's what I worked out during that amazing two week break of ours.

I don't care. 

It's better to feel everything, even if you lose your balance for a little while when doing so. Maybe if I wasn't so emotional I wouldn't love to write. I've followed my heart throughout my entire life and it has got me into some shitty situations. But I don't regret a second of it. I would rather feel torturous emotional pain, sinful envy or unreasonable anger than nothing at all. Even if it does get me into trouble sometimes. 

So to every girl who has felt like her heart was breaking and wasted far longer then they should have done wondering what he was doing. To every girl with a dream that she secretly worries is stupid yet yearns for more every time one of her counterparts lands that magazine column or exciting book deal. To every girl who compares her thighs to those of skinny, lithe models on Instagram and to every mama who worries that compared to everyone else, they're doing it wrong. I have a secret for you.

It doesn't matter what anyone else is doing. 
It only matters what you're doing. 
And you're doing great.

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