Cultural Cuckoo

Yesterday I received a message from my lovely friend and social media coordinator at the British Guild of Beer Writers asking me to make a short video about my hopes and ambitions for 2025. Usually I would be first past the post to help her with anything, and as the 2024 Michael Jackson Beer Writer of the Year I felt an obligation to support the Guild. However, when I started to think about it, it was more than my innate horror of videos of myself that was preventing me from complying.

My goal and ambition for 2025, aside from there not being a civil war which feels like a pretty important hope at the moment, is very simply to make more friends. I find myself regularly wondering if there is something actively wrong with me that I’m unable to perceive or understand, or if I’m caught in an unfortunate cultural curve that has segued people like me out into the region of easily dismissible. Neither is a particularly attractive idea.

It’s very easy to blame myself. I am exacting and particular. I don’t suffer fools and I have high expectations when it comes to loyalty. This is why, perhaps, I can be inclined to keep people at a distance until they have proved themselves trustworthy. At my age, I have been burned enough times to be wary. But this doesn’t explain the simple lack of people in my demographic who are willing to socialize – who bother to follow up on offers to go out for a drink, who will happily friend me on Instagram and I’ll never hear from again. I’m a gregarious person, always chatting to folks at bars and mix easily at parties, but conversations never seem to go beyond a single meeting. My husband and I can spend hours chatting with a couple we’ve met at a brewery, exchange details, follow up and never hear from them again. I don’t have friends from childhood or college – for very good reasons. I grew up in a hellish racist Middle England pit, and went to an elite college where I was constantly looked down on for my humble origins. This means I have no circle to fall back on. I constantly read and hear about women’s WhatsApp friend chats (oddly I rarely see men’s WhatsApp chats mentioned, a subject for another day perhaps). I do not have a WhatsApp friend chat (or as they seem to be referred to on TV, ‘the group chat’), and my lack of one feels like a rehash of being the kid at school with the wrong trainers. Many days I’ll speak to no one except my husband, with thoughts flying round my brain that I’d love to share with a friend, a quick text, a laugh, a mutual recognition and understanding. Finishing a book or a TV show, sharing a magazine article, reminiscing about an event or planning one. These are all things I miss out on, and it’s very lonely.

I meet people through my work regularly, but the vast majority are careful to hold me at a distance. This is, up to a point, understandable, but at times it can feel hurtful and exclusionary, especially in an industry where many of them are friends with one another. People say adults are always too busy to make friends, but then where do these women find their WhatsApp group comrades? Yes, some will be old school and college friends, and some will be through parenting. This is the cultural curve I keep coming back to. I feel like my choice to be childfree means I lack access to that instant social whirl of parents whose children socialize presenting them with the opportunity to socialize with one another. Of course, having children is also a bonding experience. I’ve sat through enough conversations between parents to know that there exists between them a common understanding that in many cases precludes the need for small talk. They are in the trenches together. My choice not to be in said trenches is one I am completely happy with – except that there are no similar structures or bonds for childfree people. We get screwed on this twice: firstly when our existing friends move out of our circle to procreate, and again when there’s no means by which to replace them.

I grew up in a house where a premium was not put on friendship. My mother was insular and didn’t like people, and my father socialized outside the home. We were also not a close family, so I have no familial bonds to fall back on. I’ve basically been on my own in the world all my life, and feel that for all my trying to get on with people I have very little to show for it. Sometimes I wonder how much of this comes from people’s expectations of me based on my colour. I am not a timid, acquiescent South Asian woman. I have strong and unapologetic opinions. I wear clothing that might be seen as outlandish, and like to party. At 44, I still go to nightclubs and intend to do so until I am physically unable to. If I were a straight white man, would people still find these things about me so offputting? I will never know, but I do know how many friends step back from me because they want to live some outdated caricature of middle age that escaped from a 1980s British sit com. I remember hitting my mid 30s and many of my friends at the time telling me ‘oh thank goodness, I don’t have to pretend that I like going out anymore!’ I could not empathise and still do not. Are there really no other 40somethings who actually want to live a little?

I thought moving countries would be a fix. That this was a British problem, a cultural issue, and while life here has been a little easier, our social life somewhat fuller, I am still missing the kind of connections I see and read about other women of my age having. When I make friends, I usually discover they already have their close WhatsApp-group friends, so I am a casual acquaintance, an add-on to go for drinks once in a while and come to parties. I have by no means found my tribe in any sense. As we get older, we are, quite reasonably, less inclined to compromise, less inclined to put up with bullshit. We won’t take the same crap from a new friend that we would from an old friend whom we have complex ties and memories with. This is all normal, rational stuff, but can there really be no one out there in the universe with the same interests and values as me who wants to form a friendship that consists of some level of trust? I did post about this briefly on BlueSky and received many supportive messages, but meeting people in real life who feel the same feels increasingly out of reach.

I don’t think my tastes or interests are especially unusual. I like reading, listening to music, watching films and TV and food and drink. Nothing especially weird there. Maybe nothing weird enough. Certainly nothing subculture-worthy. Here in Austin, subcultures are definitely a thing, but I can’t really fake one. And I don’t feel I should have to. I look back at my in-laws’ photos of their time living in the US, and they are filled with social events, parties, group holidays and joy – all with friends they met in America. They were around our age at the time. Yes, they had kids, but is that the only thing keeping me from that kind of social whirl? Or are people just different now – if you missed the boat when you were young, you missed it for good – people just don’t have the time or inclination to make new friends anymore? Is this just another way our generation got screwed? Spending Christmas and New Year on our own was hard. It felt like we were being punished for choosing to be childfree, choosing to move countries, so basically choosing to be ourselves. Not to say we didn’t have fun, we are fortunately very good at amusing ourselves, but there’s always this nagging feeling that we’re alone because we’re disapproved of or not good enough in some way.

Anyone who says you shouldn’t need validation from other people definitely grew up with plenty of validation from other people. But validation isn’t the only reason I want friends. I genuinely enjoy company, conversation, closeness – the nice little buzz of finding things in common, shared values and opinions, and making memories. I worry because of the way so many people I’ve met have dismissed me and put me down for not sharing their values that I’ll never find people who share mine, but I’m not prepared to bend to social pressure and pretend to be someone I’m not just to fit in. Any friendship contingent on obedience isn’t worth having, and certainly won’t bring joy.

So there we are. My goal for 2025 is to find my tribe, be in a chatty WhatsApp group, not feel like a weirdo or a failure cos we’re spending our third weekend in a row on our own and maybe, just maybe, experience that joy of connection, of shared experiences, opinions and interests. I don’t think this is what Kimberley was after, but it has certainly made me think about my hopes for 2025, if not how to actually attain them.

The visceral long-term impact of racially motivated snubs, slights, and singling-out

Lovely JB and I stayed in last night and spent the evening catching up on Blue Lights, the BBC’s excellent new police drama set in Belfast. Midway through episode three, I felt my dinner start to curdle in my stomach. Main character Grace’s son Cal, who is mixed race, is in a corner store with his friends. The shopkeeper is seen eyeballing him in a way that all people of colour know only too well. After Cal pays for his purchases, the shopkeeper insists on checking his – and only his – bag ‘in case he has stolen something.’ When his white friend tries to step in, he’s told to ‘keep out of it’. Cal is innocent, and the shopkeeper is forced to let him go. While his friends are supportive, he is visibly shaken, and a few scenes later tells his mother that he wants to leave Belfast for university, citing London or Manchester, which he believes to be more accepting, cosmopolitan places to live. My heart broke for Cal, because, as everyone whose eyes are open to the current state of the world can see, these days nowhere is safe.

Microaggressions like this trigger hyper-anxiety, panic attacks, depression and PTSD. And they don’t just hurt, they can kill. They can kill in a myriad of different ways – from early deaths related to mental and physical repercussions of stress and anxiety to suicide, the end result is the same. Names do break your body.

This kind of bullying is a constant chipping away at your mental health, and when it happens over and over again, the constant feeling of unsafeness, of being on edge, of having to scope out every place that you go, consider everything that you do and say and how it will be perceived within the context of your skin colour can be just too much to bear.

Whether you’re being singled out for unprovoked harassment, singled out and ignored, subjected to crude stereotyping, unfairly dismissed and insulted or simply being eyeballed – given a clear signal that you do not belong in a space, it weighs on you. And the more it happens, the heavier it weighs. The more you try to outrun it, the more you are forced to change the places you go and the things that you do, even the places you live, to find a safe space, the more you are aware of the difference between your life and the lives of white people and the more psychological anguish you are subjected to.

At Cal’s age, I still believed that I could find a safe space, a place where I wouldn’t have to keep looking over my shoulder and modulating my voice. At the age of 43 I can assure you that such a place does not exist. It does not exist, because while there are many ways to enforce an implicit colour bar, see all the microaggressions cited above, there is, in all my experience, no effective way to enforce a racist bar. And all it takes is one racist, one microaggression, for a space to become unsafe. And once it’s unsafe, for a person of colour, you are triggered back on that long dark road of PTSD, feeling every other time that you’ve been singled out, abused, ignored, laughed at and glared at and not only do you want to leave, sometimes you just want to leave the whole fucking world.

Your brain tilts wildly, every spark of joy that you’d been experiencing previously to that moment evaporates, and suddenly you feel completely naked and exposed, the only crystalline knowledge in your head the fact that this has now happened and there is absolutely nothing that you can do about it. Absolutely nothing.

You can’t call the police. Aside from the fact that these days they would most likely be sympathetic to the perpetrator, unless you can prove that you have experienced a deliberate racial attack, you don’t have a leg to stand on. Your friends can try and intervene, but the perpetrator will either ignore them or extend their abuse in their direction. No one, nothing can be done to undo what has happened, and like all the assaults before it, it will sit inside you, this fizzing ball of hate that lets you know you cannot go about your daily business with the simple freedom that a white person can, and you never will be able to.

It’s that ‘never’ that really gets me. Growing up, my daily encounters were fraught with exchanges like those Cal experienced. I would never have imagined that all these years later, I would still be experiencing the same thing to the same degree, if not worse. Moving to Austin felt safe. The liberal Texas capitol where hippies have been roaming free for decades. After the obscene and relentless level of racism I’d experienced in the UK in every single area of my life, I couldn’t wait to feel safe, to feel normal. To let my guard down and just live. Somewhat inevitably, it wasn’t to be. Ironically, while I gird myself for difficult encounters when we leave the city and venture into self-proclaimed Trump-land, it’s been in the heart of hipster Austin where I’ve been spirited back to the place that Cal found himself in – eyeballed with suspicion, singled out and quietly humiliated in casual displays of power and superiority designed to show me very clearly that these were spaces a woman of colour was not welcome.

The first time it happened here was at a then-new hipster bar called The Far Out. I remember lovely JB and I looking at each other, both thinking ‘is this actually happening?’. After the incident, we contacted the management, who were exceptionally responsive and the person concerned was fired. Unfortunately, this did not set a precedent for things to come. After an incident at Home Slice pizza, the management responded defending their behaviour, citing the need to be ‘overcautious during Spring Break.’ So overcautious that the only person in the restaurant denied service was a woman of colour – clearly far too old to be on Spring Break – asking for a second beer, not the large groups of young white hipsters drinking freely. Most recently, at Barton Springs Saloon, I was refused service while between a white man slumped over the bar and a group of young white girls giggling and saying how drunk they were. All were served. When my husband (the sober designated driver and first person to say if I am ever three sheets to the wind) questioned the barman’s decision, the manager came out, physically assaulted him, and called him an English cunt. Not even any pretense of being anything other than racist. Not even trying to pretend that we just were not wanted there.

Most upsetting in many ways was when I was at my favourite karaoke night at local (now shuttered) venue Indian Roller, performing, only to be asked to leave because my performance was too enthusiastic – clearly indicative of drunkenness. When my husband noted that a drunk person can’t leap around the stage in 6inch heels, he was also asked to leave. Never mind the multiple white people who could barely stand up in the room, the fact that I was enjoying myself performing in their bar clearly upset these people so much that the only solution was to take my fun away. And that’s what it often comes down to. Having the power and ability to deny the right to relax and have fun to someone whom you consider to not deserve them. When recounting this experience to a friend (also of colour) she commented, “ They looked at you and thought, she’s not allowed to be so free.” So they used their power to take my freedom away – because they can, and they enjoyed it, just like the shopkeeper in the show enjoyed watching Cal squirm, singled out while knowing he hadn’t done anything wrong.

At venues, I’m regularly body-searched while white patrons walk straight through the metal detectors. I am now self-conscious when dancing at shows here, waiting for that tap on the shoulder, and I can’t bring myself to go back to karaoke. I feel stung, bruised and it has to be said, lesser. If I can’t act with freedom, express myself without fear, I feel I’d rather not do anything at all. Yes, that means they have won, but I’m just so very very tired.

After these situations, we look up the reviews of these venues and more often than not there will be other people saying they have experienced racial harassment. So, before I go out am I supposed to check reviews for every location I visit? Does this not smack of the days of the Green Book? How is this a way to live?

Every day we see international politics shifting further and further to the right, the perpetrators of these behaviours finding themselves vindicated by the media, celebrities and politicians, no longer shy or afraid they are increasingly out in the open and rubbing their hands together at their new freedoms to express their racism and bigotry, knowing they will be protected by social and legal structures that are in the process of validating their views.

I love going out, and I don’t want to change my life or my lifestyle, but always having to look over my shoulder is a grim and painful burden, and the weight of it can outweigh the joy that I’ll have in certain social situations. I sometimes go out and see other people of colour like me, looking around the room, checking there are others of us there, that this is a safe place, a place we can relax. A look sometimes passes between us. We have numbers, we’ll be okay. If I see a person of colour serving, I become less physically tense. But life should not be like this for anyone.

The fundamental understanding that all human beings are the same, have the same rights and the same worth is so totally absent in our society right now that I couldn’t promise a real-life Cal that things would get better in his lifetime. That he won’t always have to watch his back, check his surroundings, and be prepared for hostility, abuse and the pain and misery that come with them, wherever in the world he goes to. I wish I could, but I can’t.

Jada Pinkett-Smith, Anita Bhagwandas and the Guardian telling us all to put up and shut up is making me livid.

Women of colour – it’s okay to be angry.

At least, it should be. However you’d be forgiven for thinking this otherwise if you glanced through yesterday’s Guardian. Me, I want to know when exactly the accepted understanding of how women of colour navigate a world that is, beyond any doubt or discussion, stacked against us at every angle became a combination of benevolent acceptance and self-education? When the goal became understanding the mindset of our oppressors, all the better for us to forgive them. Is this now the accepted dialogue, or did The Guardian just happen to publish two articles pushing this highly unsettling worldview forward on the same day?

Yesterday’s paper featured an interview with Jada Pinkett-Smith, glowing under her Level Five Auntie halo, preaching about how great it is not being angry any more, conflating anger with youth and – by inference – immaturity. She even goes so far as to refer to it as a ‘stage’. She then goes on to emphasis living by her grandmother’s teachings – upholding the ‘traditional role of Black women as the glue of the family’ and curing racism with ‘love’. Her interviewer reacts positively. ‘She faces negativity with compassion.’

Before I get started on everything that’s wrong with this and why this made me so savagely furious, let’s skip on a few pages shall we.

Overleaf (or click), we have British-Indian beauty editor Anita Bhagwandas precising her new book Ugly, in which she attempts to contextualise her internalised negativity about her appearance that is the result of growing up in a world that only sees beauty through a Eurocentric lens. While acknowledging that her understanding of how and why our society has come to value slimness, whiteness, youth etc as the gold standard of appearance has not entirely ‘fixed’ her, she credits her research with giving her the perspective to value herself beyond her appearance.

While this may, on the surface, sound all very admirable, let’s stop for a minute and consider what exactly Bhagwandas is saying. She has put in a significant amount of work, both in terms of research about beauty norms and in understanding and monitoring her own reactions and responses to those norms – ‘policing negative self-talk’ – comparable to therapy, to cope with the self-hate that society has put into her.

So, like Jada, she is, effect, fighting racism with love, negativity with compassion. They are both saying that the key to a happy life is to understand why we are being oppressed, forgive the oppressor and move on.

No.

Forgive me for being blunt, but that’s just not good enough. I don’t want to forgive and accept, I want the world to acknowledge the damage it causes through it’s Eurocentric gaze and get its ducks in a row and give me and every other person who has been negatively affected by internalising centuries-old tropes of who and what our place is, who and what is acceptable, good, beautiful and desirable our goddamn money back. I do not consider it my responsibility to educate myself on the myriad of reasons for my oppression with the goal of understanding and forgiving, and I don’t believe it is my responsibility to make myself feel better. I believe, very firmly, that it is the responsibility of the oppressors to educate themselves on the reasons for their behaviours and the harm they have caused, and to take the lead in remaking our society in an egalitarian fashion.

A pipe dream, yes? Of course, but without those pipe-dream goals all we are doing is falling back under the wheel of acceptance, and therefore become complicit in our own subjugation.

Which takes us back to Jada.

Since forever, women of colour have been stereotyped as the family ‘glue’, praised for achieving the status of Level Five Auntie. The mind boggles that it does not seem to occur to her that she is not just conforming to but actively advocating for the exact woman-of-colour-as-sage-caregiver label that was created by white people for the precise purposes of subjugation. By dismissing anger at racism and injustice as youthful folly, Pinkett-Smith is casting her lot in with the oppressor, advising us all to accept our lot and move on, telling us that as women of colour it is both our duty and our privilege to take on a greater burden, and the more grace and dignity with which we bear our load and the less confrontationally we behave, the more praise we deserve, cos it doesn’t get much better than Level Five Auntie status.

Well fuck that.

For those of us who have actively rejected the role of matriarch and whose aspirations lie outside the nicely labelled box left out for us by white people, this reads like a huge slap-down. Pinkett-Smith has clearly internalised the colonial blueprint of Black and Brown womanhood and is now spewing it back from her own mouth to make it appear as though, coming from a woman of colour, it must be true. This borderline-absurd call to, in effect, Lean In to racialised and gendered norms and expectations is echoed by Bhagwandas and her efforts to change her understanding of herself rather than change the society that created her self-negativity.

While it would be easy to say well, each to their own, if these paths and behaviours make it easier for these women to live their lives then good for them, it’s not that simple. Pinkett-Smith is forever in the public eye, positing herself as an older women of colour to be listened and looked up to – a source of advice and encouragement for the younger generation. A Level Five Auntie. So this Level Five Auntie is dishing out her zen-wisdom-forgive-racism claptrap to younger women of colour who are internalising that it’s their responsibility to fix racists through patience and kindness. It isn’t.

Teaching the next generation that they will have more expected of them and less given to them and that that’s okay is fundamentally wrong. And dismissing anger in the face of prejudice plays into every negative trope about Angry Brown and Black Women created by a racist, sexist society that want us to deal with our own anger rather than have them deal with the structures that have made us angry in the first place. This idea that forgiveness and understanding is the path to happiness in effect completely lets both societies and individuals who have caused harm off the hook. The path to inner peace does not come from taking on the responsibility of healing your own wounds – this is another ridiculous social construct designed to victim-blame. Taking away the agency of righteous anger at social injustice, instead treating anger as a phase, a flaw, an immature response, is de facto accepting a society that is inherently unjust, and asserting that being the bigger person is the right thing to do is placing responsibility for handling the fallout of that injustice squarely in the hands of the wronged.

It is not our job to clear up a mess we did not make. The perpetrator must make right, not the victim.

Taking this a step further, this mindset also acts as a trigger against any women of colour who are angry and do push back, making our lives infinitely harder. It creates an expectation that not only can all women of colour think that way, they should. Because look, this person – say, Pinkett-Smith – who has suffered prejudice has learned to overcome it, they have put in the psychological work to accept the world as it is, so if they can do it why can’t you? And similarly, with Bhagwandas – if she can learn to understand and live with Eurocentric beauty standards, then why can’t all women of colour?

As a woman of colour who is losing her hair, until now I’ve felt a particular resonance with Pinkett-Smith. This article changed that. Speaking about coming to terms with her alopecia, Pinkett-Smith again nods towards self-improvement, referring to her diagnosis as ‘a great teacher’, and describing learning of a ‘a deeper beauty within myself.’ Again, no. Instead of fighting back against the social norms that tell us bald women are not beautiful, instead of pushing to change those norms, to be seen as beautiful by the world, Pinkett-Smith again goes full Level Five Auntie. For me, this is not a solution. I don’t understand why I should be happy or satisfied with the concept of inner beauty in the face of my hair loss any more than I should be in the face of my brownness or weight. I want, no, I demand, the right to fight for a society where the way that my genetic makeup has chosen to express itself will not automatically be seen as lesser, less beautiful, than the genetic makeup of a slim white woman.

We find ourselves in an impossible position where women who should be our allies are actively undermining the position of every woman of colour who actually wants society to change so that we can have the privileges, freedoms and status that we have been historically denied. Reading these articles makes me wonder if there is a new collective sense amongst women of colour towards just giving up, making the best of it, opting for Level Five Auntie status and making do. Or if it’s just that these are the voices that white newspaper editors are choosing to give a platform to. Either way, this is not a positive takeaway for women of colour. Being happy with being less is no more or less than accepting the status quo that leaves us forever lesser, and if that’s a Level Five Auntie lesson, I think we need to rethink how highly we hold up Level Five Aunties.

I am not well. Days that should be full of happiness and joy, fun and laughter, are poisoned by periodic outbursts of tears and rage. Sometimes I just lie in silence for hours, the helplessness and self-hate whirlpooling round my brain and seeping out through pores to infect everything around me.

I don’t expect other people to understand. A loving husband, nice house and good job should be enough, right? So what if I’m losing my hair and have gained two stone? It’s just perimenopause. Middle age happens to us all, it’s a part of life. Why can’t I just accept it like other people do?

I just can’t. Having no control over my body, my appearance, makes it impossible to like myself, and the sheer abject loneliness that comes with being childfree when everyone I used to know has peeled off to have kids means I lack the positive-reinforcing popularity to make me feel likeable. I liked my life before. No, I loved it. An endless social whirl of pubs, parties and nightclubs, picnics in the day and fancy dress at night – always something to celebrate, always people around to celebrate with. And my body. Something I could be proud of. Not perfect, but certainly good enough. No stressful dieting or calorie counting-staying out til the early hours every weekend meant I could eat whatever I liked. I didn’t take it for granted though. I’d been a fat teenager-horrifically bullied at school and at home, constantly told how vile and disgusting I looked, how no one would ever love me. I revelled in finally having a body I wasn’t ashamed of, spoiled it with stylish designer garb. Now my beautiful embroidered Pringle coat, sleek Vivienne Westwood jacket and figure-hugging Alexander Wang dresses have sat untouched for over five years. The knowledge I’ll never wear them again pierces me with disgust at myself. No necklaces that sit at the collarbone-mine is invisible now, hidden beneath layers of fat. My cleavage is crepe paper and pinchable wadges emerge against each bra strap. My chin wobbles gently, my thighs reverberate. Rolls of thick stomach make wearing this season’s cut-out styles impossible. Every scroll through clothing sites reminds me of every outfit I’ll never pull off again.

I was never one for beauty routines, always a wash-n-go kinda girl. Now I spend an hour a day on low-intensity cardio, like putting a really time-consuming plaster on a wound. Instead of reading books I enjoy or watching interesting films, I spend hours researching the difference between squalene and hemi-squalene, hyaluric acid versus collagen, the best creams for fine lines, the best serums for hair loss. The minoxidil isn’t working. The bald patches now cover most of my scalp yet the thin film of remaining hair continues to frizz and puff in the heat. Irony doesn’t even begin to cover it. Of course I no longer have the luxury of hair straighteners, as heat only exacerbates hair-fall. My resemblance to Christopher Lloyd in Back To The Future would be funny if it was in a film, but it isn’t. Apparently minoxidil can take up to a year to work, if it chooses to, and must be applied forever to retain effectiveness. A life sentence.

I miss being admired. Yes, I am vain. I won’t apologise for it-having spent my formative years being tormented for my unfortunate appearance, I understand all too well the value, the social capital, that attractiveness grants you in our society. It’s not fair or right, and I don’t agree with it or judge or value others by it, knowing all too well the pain it causes, yet I’m still trapped in the Stockholm Syndrome desperation of seeking that approval. Having been denied it for so long, I treasured every moment of finally getting it right. At my thinnest, a model scout approached me in Selfridges. I was prouder than when I got into Oxford. I don’t condone the way our society privileges those we deem worthy by virtue of their looks but I can’t change that on my own. It’s the one thing I have even less power over than my body. It’s absurdly contradictory that I’m able to rationalise the ridiculous unfairness of the expectations placed on me yet completely unable to change the way they affect me emotionally. I can see beauty in people of all shapes and sizes everywhere but in myself.

At 42, I could already be near the end of my life, or I could be less than half way. The thought of that, of living another 42 years being bald and fat, tolerated but not wanted, is more than I can bear. Seeing other women, my age and older, who have been fortunate enough to retain their hair and figures makes me unhinged with envy. I understand when my husband says I look good, not just fine but beautiful. I understand but I find it impossible to believe him because it’s just not what I’m seeing. I know how I was and I know how I am now and the two are so far removed I feel I’m drowning in that chasm.

My weight and hair loss issues are hereditary and I despise my parents constantly for passing on such wretched genes, and for failing to prepare me for a life without the social acceptance I crave so deeply, in part due to growing up without a loving home. I feel tremendous guilt for my first-world-problems when I know so many people in this world are fighting just to survive, and yet I cannot shake off my self-loathing when every time I look in the mirror I see a monster I didn’t choose to be and can’t do anything about. Dieting periodically shifts a few pounds but they always come back. Since my seizure I get faint and shaky if I skip meals, and yes I could eat more healthily but nice food is one of the few pleasures I have left. I drink less than I used to and try to swap out IPAs for lagers, beer for white spirits, but in five years, since this shitshow began, nothing has made a major difference. I used to blame my father’s side of the family, hoping that not having children would somehow shield me from the weight-gain genes I knew were lying in wait. Then I remembered how my mother basically starved herself and exercised constantly. I’m more like her than I thought – yet without the willpower to indulge the vanity. She’d lost most of her hair by her 50s and told me it was because our family had a curse on us, so you can see why I’m not so well-equipped at dealing with this. Ten year old me was trusting enough to believe her. Even as I grew up and knew better, I never quite lost the sense of being cursed.

I am not well. I don’t know if I can ever be well again. Perimenopause only heads in one direction which will make all this worse not better. I feel I’m now existing in survival mode, and the me that used to flit through life as a glowing social butterfly, maybe she never existed at all and this is who I always really was, the ugly squirming caterpillar underneath.

“The story has always been the same

A source of wonder due to their ability to thrive on poor quality soil offering very little nourishment

But weeds must be kept under strict control or they will destroy everything in their path

Growing wild, then harvested in their prime & passed around at dinner parties

Care for some weed?

So natural, so unrefined”

[Pulp, Weeds II, We Love Life, 2001]

Natural and unrefined about sums me up. Well, if you’re looking for nice words anyway. When I first heard this song in 2001 it was already resonating with me hard. Growing up, I was always referred to as wild which I mistook as a compliment. I imagined myself as some kind of brown-girl Marlon Brando instead of understanding that in the mouths of middle-class mums, the word acted as a thinly veiled euphemism for trash.

Of course, those same mums liked to show off how their kid had a ‘coloured’ (sic) friend as a faux virtue-signaling badge, but for once this isn’t a rant about racism. My presence was permitted as long as I didn’t encourage their precious offspring to be like me in thought, word or deed, that is. A sense of otherness had to be maintained. Of course, my piercings and tattoos didn’t mean I was disinvited to dinner, as long as there was a clear understanding that these life choices stayed strictly on my side of the class line.

Friends ditching me is a bit of a drum I’m banging right now, sure, but as well as being ditched for being too brown, too childless or too lefty, I also get ditched for being too common. So ironic considering I had no friends at school cos apparently I was too swotty (Americans, see nerdy).

Yes, I grew up in a bit of rough town, but I wouldn’t credit Swindon with bestowing my taste and style on me. I was always drawn to excess – to the bold, outre and fantastical. I always aspired to ooze indulgence, much more so than I’ve ever actually achieved in real life (ha), mentally positioning myself somewhere between the Bloomsbury Set and New York’s late 70s punk scene. Never let it be said I don’t aim high.

Embracing my trashiness has never been a problem for me, but it seems to have an ongoing affect on others that I’ll never fully understand. Whether it’s my propensity to leap on stage and karaoke, my willingness to do shots at pretty much any non-work hour, the neon makeup I sport even if I’m just going to the store or my spiky heels and slogan tees, everything about me falls squarely into the category pre-demarcated as immature, chavvy, superficial and ultimately just weird by the middle-class powers that be.

Of course, the parts of me they now ridicule are the same ones that drew them to me like eager little moths in our teens and 20s, when they were trying out personas with intent to shock themselves as much as anyone else. The very idea that I was always For Real (not a Richie Manic quote – definitely not) never even occurred to them. I was expected to grow up, start wearing silk blouses, listening to classical music, only drinking with meals and taking my makeup off before going to bed. And when I didn’t, I became a pariah.

These same people tried on my lifestyle, my values, as if they were thrift store garments of dubious cleanliness, gaudy, chintzy throwaway single-use partywear their parents absolutely wouldn’t approve of, and therein lay the appeal. They used me to guide them, to help them navigate the world of booze and nightclubs and loud, brash outfits when it suited them, dabbling their manicured toenails into what for me is at the heart of who I am and how I choose to live. Watching me with curiosity, mimicking me when it suited them but ready to wring me out and discard me as soon as they’d had their fun and wanted to move on to the next step in the middle class journey to success. Of course, a few kept coming back for a while, just to test the water, see if they could still get away with it. Keeping me at arms length but reeling me in with slippery lies to entice me into thinking I was part of a real friendship, not an exhibit in a zoo.

“Come on: do your dance

Come on, do your funny little dance”

Is there anything nastier than being treated like free entertainment? I don’t understand how or why my authenticity is so often treated like a pathological failure – I can (just about) accept being considered eccentric but when that crosses over into an aggressive critique of my lack of convention, my personal lifestyle choices dismissed as uncultured, uncultivated, unsophisticated and base, I feel the weight of white middle class judgement raining down on me unjustly in a way that makes me want to break shit.

Loneliness is another recurring theme in these posts. My isolation from both brown and white cultures, my unpopular opinions and my ongoing wranglings with sexist and racist attitudes and assumptions. I’d call this classism but I’m not even sure that fully does it justice. It’s more a sense of stifling-a pressure to change, to acclimate, to sacrifice my true self on the alter of inclusion. Which of course is not real inclusion at all. I feel I’ve often been treated like a butterfly in a jar – captured in flight, observed with interest, then left to die alone. I write a lot about being bullied and discriminated against, but being exoticized, fetishized and then discarded is the other, equally insidious side of the coin.

Yes, I still dress like a teenager about to go raving cos frankly why the hell not? I like my style, and I don’t care how many of my contemporaries look down their noses at me. I got this shit even when I was a teenager for heavens sakes – turning up for my first class at Oxford in bright pink bell bottoms while the rest of the navy sportswear-clad students stared and sneered. These days, I’m fortunate enough to have many diverse friends of different ages and backgrounds who are happy to just let me do my thing, which is amazing, but a trip back to London always triggers the disapproval-switch of just how much of a freakish anomaly I’m perceived as.

What even is mature, or adult anyway? A specific colour palate, bedtime and heel height? As I said in my last post, having a home, a career, even a marriage isn’t enough to cut it in certain social circles. Because it isn’t really about being grown up at all – it’s just about being the same and fitting in. Not til I swap out my mini skirts for Lululemon could I possibly be rehabilitated into the rank and file of English 40-something middle class women. And also, what’s with this book club thing? Everyone knows it’s just an excuse to drink wine so just cut to the chase and call it fuckin wine club.

I’m keeping my glitter. I’m keeping my strong cocktails. I’ll keep dancing in my 6 inch stilettos and you can keep calling them stripper heels all you want, cos that’s not even an insult.

“Bring your camera, take photo of life on the margins”

Damn, I could have just quoted the whole song, Jarvis says it all.

Honestly, I shouldn’t need to write this, but I do. The recent deluge of media content lionizing motherhood in addition to some psychological battering closer to home means I can’t stay quiet about this any longer.

I’m 41 years old and I don’t want children. I can’t help it and I can’t change it, yet I feel under constant social pressure to try. To force myself into a mindset I just don’t have. I’ve spent years looking around my body, around my mind, seeking out that part of me that I’ve been told over and over again must be there somewhere, but it isn’t. The promised craving never arrived, not at 30 or 35 or 40. It’s just not there. Maybe that makes me a broken person. I’ve been told I’m not really human. Defective. Deficient. And selfish, always selfish. As if this were my choice.

Since my late 20s, I’ve had to swallow down hammer after hammer to the heart as each close friend who promised me that they too didn’t want a family slowly succumbed to the lure of parenthood, leaving me emotionally high and dry and ever-increasingly lonely. As the camaraderie of young womanhood is swapped out for the bonds of motherhood, not a thought is spared for those left behind.

This is not something I would have chosen. As a queer South Asian woman from an abusive home and a lower socio-economic background with an unconventional appearance and strong opinions living in a white environment, I have already had to live my entire life navigating minority space after minority space, pushing back, standing up for myself. Being fucking different. I am sadly all too familiar with the nightmarish reality of falling unintentionally outside the realm of both the Great White Norm and its Brown equivalent, and if I could possibly choose to be what society wants and expects from a woman my age then yes of course I would. I’m tired of fighting.

I miss my friends, but they have gone where I cannot, in good faith, follow. Mostly too, their denouncement of me has been harsh, critical and without understanding. I’m cast off as immature and childish, refusing to accept adult responsibilities and live an adult lifestyle. Of course, having a self-supporting career and owning my own home as a single woman from the age of 29 are not sufficient evidence of adulthood. Instead of being respected as different, I am automatically marked down as lesser.

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We live in a world where it’s no longer considered acceptable in progressive circles to judge or exclude people based on their ethnicity or sexual orientation, yet it’s still absolutely fine to shame women for choosing not to be mothers. Childlessness feels like the last bastion of a woman’s life that the world is still not just allowed but encouraged to weigh in on, dividing women into the hallowed halls of motherhood and the scorned shaming-carrying non-mothers. It’s so unfair, so tiring and so fucking cruel.

The English are, by and large, a nation of busybodies. They see absolutely no issue with firing off personal questions straight off the bat. We are indoctrinated into this very early. First it’s ‘what do your parents do?’, then ‘how did you do in your exams?’. Next we’re asked about our own job prospects and relationship status, and each time the question keens with judgement – your answer will pigeon-hole you, there will be whispers behind your back. ‘Do you have children?’ ‘No – why not?’ is still considered completely appropriate conversational fare, and telling someone to mind their own fucking business will have you marked down as a difficult-social-outcast before you can spell judgmental. While, in my experience at least, the many Americans give far less of a shit about other people’s business, the questions is still one that arises frequently and I’m painfully aware of how strange I must seem.

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As a woman there is literally nothing I can do in this world that would earn me the approval that giving birth would get me. My extended family, who look down on everything I’ve ever done with my life and think my career is a joke, would suddenly hold me in all esteem they have denied me through every educational and occupational milestone should I suddenly announce a pregnancy. How in the fuck do you think that makes me feel?

There is no community for women who don’t want children. No Mumsnet for the childfree. No safe space, no support network to replace the friendships and intimacy we’ve lost to other people’s motherhood, and most of all no understanding that this may be something that is actually out of our hands. We don’t choose the things we care about in life, or the things we’re good at. As people we are all different, but when it comes to motherhood that established logic flies out of the window. Of course all women must want to be mothers because anything else is unnatural.

And yes yes I know this isn’t just targeted at me. Julia Gillard and the empty fucking fruit bowl. Theresa May. Kamala Harris. All shamed by the media for their failure to procreate. If you don’t give birth what can you possibly know about running a country? Or anything at all for that matter? Unless you’re a man of course. Because while fatherhood bestows its own form of inclusion and respectability, it isn’t considered the holy grail of male experience in the way that motherhood is revered to the point of sainthood. Of course not, men are too busy running the world, but that’s a rant for another day.

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In this sliver of a minority, everyone has different reasons for how they feel. Mine seem to be a mix of nature and nurture, not that I should need to justify them – but of course I do. Growing up in an abusive home meant that I have no first-hand experience of how to parent properly. Seeing my elder sibling become a parent very young and struggle horribly, steeped in misery, poverty and often unable to cope, did not sell me on motherhood either. But ultimately the buck stops with me. I don’t relate to children. Frankly, I don’t really understand most of them. Even when I was one myself I found them confusing-their silliness, the constant questions, the toilet humour, the incessant noise. I grew up with my head in a book, all my Lego pieces in the correct segments of the box and a strong desire to be an adult as soon as humanly possible. I didn’t play mummies and daddies. I didn’t have a doll I pretended was my baby, and at no point growing up did I ever dream of having children of my own. I just didn’t, even when I had to pretend to ex-boyfriends that I did. I guess I was always unnatural.

As someone who has never had the luxury of a close female relative in their life who wasn’t an abuser, my female friendships have been everything to me, possibly too much, but unfortunately I’m not able to change the circumstances I was born into. I’ve been a true, loyal friend, and valued my friendships highly, always making time, providing support and being inclusive. I’ve never neglected my friends because I’ve been in a relationship, and going through the process over and over again of being unceremoniously let go because I’m not joining the great wave towards motherhood feels like I’m being stripped down to my bare bones. With no immediate close family there is no one to fill the spaces left empty. I often go for days without speaking in real life to anyone except my husband. The loneliness is as crippling as the judgement. Knowing this is my life now can leave me in an unending fog of despair. This is the cost of being true to myself.

So what should I do? Fake it and bring a child into the world that would, frankly, be unwanted, resented, poorly parented and most likely hideously unhappy just to gain the respect of my peers? Or stick to my guns and soldierly through life as a second-class citizen, denied the privileges offered up so eagerly to women willing to give birth? When you grow up being abused, you develop a keen sense of what a parent should not be, and selfishness is pretty high up there. What more selfish thing in the world could there be than having a child I don’t really want just so that I can fit in with everyone else my age? As a mother, I’d already have failed at the first hurdle.

Over and over I’m told what an amazing life-changing experience motherhood is, how I’ll feel different when they’re mine. No one understands that I don’t want my life changed and I don’t want to feel differently. Not to mention the fact that I don’t fancy taking that kind of gamble – if I don’t feel differently what will happen to the poor kid?

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And yet. And yet. It’s hard knowing I will have to go through the rest of my life removed from other women, dismissed and looked down on, alone in my values, my aspirations, my experiences. Always being told ‘you don’t understand-you’re not a mother’. As someone who is intensely social and hates being excluded, my worst nightmare of being on the outside of society looking in has already come true, but there is nothing I can do about it. I see the warmth, the love, the acceptance that the world hands out in unlimited doses to women who become mothers. The indulgent smiles as tube seats are offered up, the conversation openers with strangers, the knowing nods and sympathetic sighs shared between women signaling that yes, they too are part of the great circle of life. They get it. They’re on the same team. There is no team for the rest of us, no special signals, nothing at all. I’m constantly lonely, removed from my peers who keep me at a distance for not speaking the language of motherhood. I feel less relevant, less human, less worthy of the space that I take up, the air that I breathe.

I was always told growing up that ‘if you can’t change the world, change yourself’ and believe me I have tried, but I just can’t. I can’t make myself fit in and be accepted and approved of in the way I want to be without going against my own nature, lying to myself and everyone around me, and potentially damaging another human being whose only reason for existing would be to stem the gaping wound of my loneliness, which let’s face it is a pretty shitty thing to do. So it is a life on the outside of society which I will inevitably slink back to, tail between my legs, clutching my shame at being unable to give the world what it wants. My failure as a woman, as a human, for which I will be eternally punished. Every day feels like another painful exercise in taking my medicine for daring to be different, even though it’s something I have absolutely no control over.

I’m so very very tired, and so agonisingly lonely. But most of you probably think selfish, unnatural women like me deserve that, even if you wouldn’t say it to my face.