The problem with the future...

...Is that it's completely unknown. A room full of darkness. I am seventeen years old and The Future is something that I'm currently having to feel my way through prematurely, tapping on the walls and sliding my palms around hazy shapes of university courses and job opportunities. What you might think is shaped like an A-grade might actually be a C in disguise. The bannister of work experience that you brush your hand along might lead to a solid shape of Well-Paid Job but the stairs might vanish into an unemployment trap-door instead. It's a dangerous thing to do, mapping out your future. It leaves no room for disappointment.

Right now I (and most other people of my age) are being shot at with questions about the future. Where do you see yourself in five years? Ten years? What they mean by this, of course, is: Which job will you be working in? How much money will you have? Will your education have been worth it? Work, work, work.

Like many people, my answer is an increasingly-panicked I don't know I don't know I don't know! Some people take an exploratory squint into The Future and immediately stub their toe on a vocation. From there the work may not be easy but the planning certainly is. If you know that you are going to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a vet, it's easy to see yourself in five years or ten. Once the distant shape of success is obvious in the landscape of your life yet to come, it's easy to make a route to it. If you know what job you are going to have, it's easy to imagine yourself performing it, easy to conjure up images of somebody with your face in the appropriate uniform, frozen in industrious imagery like scenes from a children's reading sample. For people who know what they want to do, it's easy to present yourself via your job, because your dream job is part of you already.

As a result of having no clue what I want to do, my answers are all slightly unorthodox. My visions of my future self all seem to revert to frivolity. I know I don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a vet. I know I'd like to see what living in a city is like. I see my twenty-seven year old self as a red-headed figure in heels coming home from an unknown job to a flat with books and house plants and a cat. I see, perhaps, a wedding to a man with a greyed-out face. Children who look like me for lack of any other factor. I want to be successful enough to shop in Waitrose on a regular basis, for lack of better job description, but that isn't as such an acceptable answer.

I want to study English and French at a good university (with old buildings and trees), and I want to write, and my vision of The Future doesn't stretch any further than that. A satisfactory answer for now, perhaps. But when I see myself in five years, a girl with my face but different clothes on, the one thing I know for certain is that this answer will not suffice anymore.

On paleo mothers

image via ren-hang at flickr

Recently I have gone on a crusade of healthy eating, which is partially due to a desire for slim, tanned summer wholesomeness and partially due to the crippling guilt of a recent impromptu lunch of pizza and ice-cream. As a result, I have been joining in with my mother in smugly declining bread and cakes in favour of salads.

My mother has been Paleo for a few months now, and the rest of my family has somewhat got used to it. There was the initial shock, of course, of the banning of orange juice and cereal and puddings every day. Pasta became a high-risk substance, sugar in tea became the work of the devil and talk of sandwiches was met with dirty looks. Suddenly chocolate was something furtive to sneak into the house wrapped in a jumper or stuffed into a bag, like attempting to smuggle alcohol under the nose of my parents, only ridiculous. My mum spent days on end reading health articles and constantly updating us on what she'd eaten and how it made her feel and the state of her health. Every conversation was warped by her into a discussion on her eating habits. It was as if she had become devoted to religion overnight, obsessing constantly about cauliflower rice and the Omega 6 content of almonds, rapturously quoting food statistics like Bible passages. Instead of urging miserable people to find Jesus, she would proclaim that all their problems could be fixed with a Proper Food. We (my brothers and I, that is) were her reluctant converts, rebelliously chomping crisps and sausage rolls in the Tesco car park as a sort of sullen refusal to conform, our vanilla version of dyed hair and tattoos. Blasphemy was confined to two words, always spoken with a definite capital letter at the beginning and a slight impressive whisper: Grain, and Rancid Fats.

It is only now after the fervour of resistance that I am perhaps realising that food as a form of rebellion is not necessarily the best thing in terms of health. It is a trap that I have fallen into before. As a child, my mother, ever well-meaning, was determined to feed us the best things she possibly could. And she did. We ate organic vegetables and cooked breakfasts, home-made dinners and whole-fat milk. Cereal was strictly banned if the of which sugars section on the packet was over 10g, and Nestlé was exiled from the house after a political incident. She worked her fingers to the bone keeping us well-fed. Not a single ready meal passed my lips my whole childhood; she never stopped working even for a night. And now, of course, I am incredibly grateful for her efforts, even though as a child I was blind to them. I longed to fit in with the other children, you see, particularly in primary school. This combined with a natural sweet tooth made my daily packed lunch a nightmare. I would pull out my squashed hummus and carrot or cheese and onion brown-bread sandwiches out of my lunchbox with weary distaste, gazing longingly at my classmates slurping milkshakes and munching on chocolate bars. My small tupperware box of nuts and dried fruit would never quite compare to the crumpling of packets of Wotsits and Skips. My dream was to be able to open crisps at lunchtime by squeezing the ends of the packets - POP! - like those in the lunch hall with effortless cool, the sort I thought could be obtained by eating the right things for lunch and wearing the right hair accessories. More than once, I have been met with the cry of 'Urgh, what's that?' upon biting into a radish, which was hell for a self-conscious wallflower such as myself.

Luckily these days I am more likely to have an impressive lunch if it unfalteringly healthy rather than the other way round, and hummus sandwiches and radishes are more likely to evoke the envy of my crisp-crunching coke-sipping friends. And while I am still reluctant to completely give up Grain, Sugar and Rancid Fats, I respect my mother a great deal more for her efforts to get us to eat healthily.

Girls who hate girls

image via cryybaby at etsy

Today, an acquaintance of mine announced in a conversation about one girl notorious for doing fairly nasty things: 'All girls are bitches'. A female acquaintance, that is. With one disparaging sentence, she condemned half the population, leaving the rest of the girls in the conversation to raise eyebrows and glance knowingly at each other. There will always be girls who hate girls: girls who are frightened of other girls, girls who don't want to be 'like other girls', girls who believe that other girls are weak or silly. I think that this particular specimen was a mixture of all of these things: a girl of the 'ladette' variety, fixed in the belief that other girls are drama-spewing mascara machines.

It's never entirely clear what the word 'bitch' actually means, and from what angle she was approaching it. Was she referring to cattiness, the assumption that a woman can't meet another woman without planning the right moment to stab her in the back? Or did it take on a slightly weaker connotation, the idea of a 'man's bitch', a criticism of the audacity of girls to have boyfriends and sometimes cry and occasionally get emotional about shopping? Either way, she deliberately isolated herself from these so-called 'other girls', casting them as a generic hair-flicking chocolate-guzzling mass of mood-swings and betrayal.

Aside from the obvious offence I took at being directly called a bitch merely on account of having two X chromosomes, I just felt sorry for her. Because if there's one lesson I have learnt in the past few years, it's that girls need girls. Oh, I believed precisely the same as her, even as recently as last year. Long story short, a drawn-out adolescent drama occurred which left me temporarily minus a group of friends. We were all very young, we were all hopelessly attempting to grow up, and none of us were particularly well-tuned to the feelings of others. Angry, frustrated and most of all confused, I found myself isolated from Girl World. Around me, friendship groups seemed to weave tighter into each other as I approached. I discovered flirting mostly out of desperation and to my utter wonder I found myself having easy conversations. Boys were just easy to be around, I found - no need for anything complicated, to feel guilty for not having organised a shopping trip or to wonder all day about slightly ambiguous remarks. No-strings attached, quick-and-easy friendship. The sort of friendships that were the equivalent of a pot noodle over a roast dinner, perhaps, but I would rather have eaten metaphorical pot noodles for the rest of my life than starved.

Months passed. I acquired a boyfriend and started talking to his friends: an instant, blow-up friendship group. Suddenly I was instantly invited to events and my social life picked up again. I was determined to be a real part of the group, to slot in perfectly. Embittered, I savagely convinced myself that I hated my girlfriends. I was determined for them to be boring and air-headed, not worth my time. That I had Real Feelings and Real Emotions, whereas they had pale imitations of the real thing. I truly believed that I had poetically suffered loneliness and therefore had bragging rights to some sort of tragic eccentricity. From afar, I watched them have sleepovers and worry about calories and discuss the events of Made in Chelsea, and thought them shallow. I, however, had substance - I was Not Like Other Girls, I was different and special!

Only, of course, I wasn't, and I'm not. Not unlike other girls, that is. After growing up a little, I discovered the astonishing truth: that all girls have emotions just as strong as anybody else. Real love, real hate, real happiness. Even girls who are nothing like me at all: even girls who have modelesque looks, even girls who play four different sports and go running for fun. As it turns out, they were sad that I'd disappeared from their lives and I was actually completely deluding myself about this so-called hatred and I discovered the truth: that having sleepovers and counting calories doesn't make you any less of a human being, and that actually, I was no less lonely in my attempts to be a girl in a group of boys.

Sisterhood is an anguish-ridden thing that utilises those Real Emotions in the best and worst ways possible. It's a feeling of belonging, of knowing that there's no possible other place to be. Of secrets and the sharing of secrets of varying importance. Of terrible competition and debilitating jealousy and sometimes absolute infuriation, and the most ridiculous, inextricable fondness. I still haven't watched an episode of Made In Chelsea, but I'm not entirely sure I need to.

a first post

Follow my blog with Bloglovin I am a 17-year-old girl living in Britain with an penchant for writing and a love of vignettes. I like girl power and the fauvism movement and charity shops (and the smugness that goes with a good purchase). Sometimes I wax poetic about 60's clothing and showy costume jewellery and fully believe that fashion is the best way to pretend you're somebody else. Though mostly, when I'm not rambling self-indulgently, I have a fairly dull life mainly consisting of cups of tea and over-usage of Tumblr.

So - welcome to my blog then, I suppose.