I mean, I spent a long time with a body-image specialist figuring out all that stuff I just told you and feeling really solid about it, and then all it took was a bunch of comments to make my brain explode into an identity crisis. I was just like, ‘Why the hell am I going on about fragile card houses and self-worth? Stephanie Williams from Brisbane is right – YOU KNOW NOTHING, YOU INSUFFERABLE FOOL. And if you really meant it you would have taken the photo from a less flattering angle.’
Having a clear sense of self is easy in theory, but maintaining it when things get tough is hard. And I fail at it ALL THE TIME. Even in important moments when I shouldn’t – like when I decide to make a statement by putting a naked photo of myself on the internet. Or when I agree to do a talk on how to be yourself, forgetting that I don’t really know how.
So, what do we do? If I’m meant to be the expert and I’m standing here telling you I’m a massive fraud and I don’t have a clue, then what do we do?
How do we figure out who we are, and spend every day being ourselves, when life gives us so many conflicting rules to follow, particularly as women?
Waxing your pubes is relenting to the patriarchy.
versus
Waxing your pubes is a powerful example of the autonomy you have over your body.
Don’t read women’s magazines or you’ll be betraying the sisterhood. ‘24 steaming hot ways to keep him happy in bed’ is an embarrassment to us all.
versus
Women’s magazines provide a much needed and important platform for women. ‘24 steaming hot ways to keep him happy in bed’ allows women to talk openly about sex.
Don’t eat sugar or carbs. Take pride in your health. Sugar is DEATH and carbs are the devil.
versus
Eat whatever you want, because crazy diets are just a multi-billion dollar industry designed to keep women in a food prison.
Don’t put off having kids in case your junk goes bad and your eggs die. You aren’t a real woman unless you have kids. Every period is a wasted opportunity.
versus
Concentrate on your career instead of kids because that’s what a man would do. Every period just gets rid of another egg that would have ruined your life.
You’re only sexualising yourself because the patriarchy has forced you to.
versus
Celebrating your sexuality however you want is brave and empowering.
‘Bitch’ is an offensive word to women. Don’t use it.
versus
‘Bitch’ is an empowering word for women. Use it.
Free the nipple.
versus
Don’t free the nipple. That’s just admitting that your body is the most important thing about you. Don’t be such a slave to men’s visual expectations.
If we’re going to call ourselves feminists, women need to support other women.
versus
Men aren’t expected to support each other all the time. Women should be able to criticise each other without it being about feminism.
Don’t say ‘vagina’. Say ‘vulva’. Not understanding the correct terminology for your body is embarrassing to your gender.
versus
It’s your genitalia. Call that special place ‘beef curtains’ or ‘lady garden’ or ‘fish taco’ or ‘fanny’ or whatever the hell you want. Just make sure you say it all the time, because real women talk about their vaginas.
Oh, and speaking of ‘real women’, be a real woman. Just don’t be too fat, too skinny, too sexy, too prudish, too aggressive, too passive. Be a role model for all other women but be modest enough to never think you’re a role model. Have it all, but also admit that it’s impossible to have it all. Don’t screw any of this up.
Seriously. Where the fuck does that leave us? In the face of all of that conflicting noise, how are we supposed to figure out, not only who we are, but how to remain true to that at all times?
I don’t know. The best I can offer you is this: have an idea of who you’d like to be, and aim for that, but always embrace failure. Which I’m helpfully providing you with an example of right now, failing at giving you the advice you came here for.
I know who I want to be, and sometimes I’m great at it. Other times, I’m not even close. I want to not care what other people think. I want to not be heartbroken that I haven’t found lasting love yet. I want to be confident in my opinions and never waver. I want to not be sad that Sportsgirl doesn’t make clothes that fit me. I want to give zero fucks that the cool kids think I’m lame because I don’t know any of the bands on Triple J. I want to not care that I was meant to be on the cover of Spectrum this weekend and I got bumped for the almost perfect woman that is supermodel/PhD candidate that is Tara Moss. I want to eternally embrace that I’m scruffy and shy and like drinking vodka on my couch in my underpants, but I even question that sometimes too.
I want to always be the Anti-Cool Girl that people think I am, but I don’t always get there.
We’re often told that having a strong sense of self will keep us on solid ground when life gets difficult. But I think that accepting that your sense of self is bound to falter when life gets difficult is the real advice we need to learn. Because it will happen, and we need to not be drowned by feelings of failure every time it does.
So, embrace the failure. Know who you want to be, but also be okay with not knowing how to do it all the damn time. Nobody is going to be perfect at being themselves – not even the people who have written books about it and are asked to give fancy talks at the Opera House.
Let’s all embrace failure. Let’s all accept that we can only be perfect at being imperfect. That’s about as close to being ourselves as we’re ever going to get.
So that’s it. That was my final opinion on the online scandal that saw me get sucked into the Fast-Food Opinion machine. A machine that I had spent a long time being a part of. I don’t begrudge that machine now though, I really don’t. I spend a lot of time hate-reading the Daily Mail Sidebar of Shame, and I will admit to still looking up Fast-Food Opinions about the scandal of the day. So I know people want to read that stuff, because sometimes I do. And I don’t begrudge the people writing it, because I know that paid writing jobs are hard to come by. Somebody has to write that stuff. It’s just that, after a couple of years, I was done writing it.
Posting a naked photo was the thing that made me realise that.
I still can’t believe people called me ‘brave’, though. THAT PHOTO WAS SEXY, DAMN IT. Clutch your goddamn pearls.
Hey mon frère with your derrière, something something cush.
Something something something yeah.
It’s Jack’s Subway Tush.
I had been in the hospital for almost twenty hours now, and I still couldn’t remember the words to that song from Will & Grace. I could see the exact scene in my head. It’s the end of the episode, Jack is sad that his Subway Tush thing didn’t work out, and he and Will are sitting in Will’s living room, when they start singing the jingle. I could see them singing it. I just couldn’t remember the damn words.
Hey mon frère –
Jacob had left a note for me, telling me that Jamila would be back in the morning, and he would be back at lunch tomorrow. He thought I’d been asleep when he wrote it, and hadn’t wanted to wake me, but there was no way I could sleep. I just really didn’t want him to feel bad about leaving. I could handle being next to the poo curtain on my own for a few hours.
Something something it’s Jaaaaaaaack’s Suuuuuubwaaaaaaay Tuuuuuush.
The hospital had most of the lights turned off now, which was the only way I knew it was night time. The day before, my friend Mia had flown down from Sydney to see me, and I didn’t believe her when she told me it was 2pm. I was so disoriented. Since being admitted, time had both sped up and slowed down. It could have been a week or a few hours since the ambulance brought me in. I had no idea.
I did everything I could to help my sisters.
(I didn’t.)
; I’m the reason my little sisters got taken away. I knew that Mum was drunk, and I knew that I should stay home and take care of them. But I was selfish, and I didn’t want to deal with Mum’s abuse anymore, so I left.
The police had taken them by the time I got back.
We lived in a very run-down little house in the Blue Mountains, on a street that was mostly bush. There was one house next to us, one across the street, and nothing else for a few hundred metres either side. It was the kind of place that would feature in a horror movie after the car takes a wrong turn and breaks down. This street definitely wasn’t from the ‘we’re still happy and nothing could ever possibly go wrong’ part of the movie. It was more from the ‘is it worth knocking on the door of that house for help when it’s fairly likely that the people who live inside collect the fingers of tourists’ part of the movie. It was an eerie, creepy, isolated street. But with a beautiful view!
The house belonged to Mum’s latest boyfriend, who she’d met while Rhiannon, Tayla and I were living in foster care. Brian, like all of Mum’s boyfriends before him, was convinced that he would be the one to save her; the one to stop her from drinking. Like he had some magic formula for sobriety that none of us had thought of yet. Even at ten years old, I would look at those guys and think, ‘Oh! You mean we just have to tell her that we don’t want her to drink anymore? That we didn’t really enjoy having our foster dad stick his hands down our pants and we would very much like to have a mother who doesn’t put us in that position again? That she just needs to be strong and choose Diet Coke instead? WHY DIDN’T WE FUCKING THINK OF THAT?’
When we first arrived at Brian’s house, there was a giant Confederate flag hanging on the main wall in the living room. ‘Oh good,’ I thought. ‘Mum’s choice in men continues to be top notch.’ (Seriously – if you were dating someone, got back to their place for the first time and saw that on the wall, how could you not immediately push life’s panic button and get the hell out of there?) But besides smoking pot twenty-four hours a day (which essentially turned the house into a giant Dutch oven – I’m sure I was permanently stoned from ages nine to fourteen), I thought he was a nice guy at the time. I didn’t know any better. Just another guy who got caught in my mother’s irresistible web, and planned to revolutionise the way alcoholism was treated – maybe even cure it! – through the power of love.
He did not cure alcoholism through the power of love. If he had, I would have been pissed off, to be honest, since Mum’s love for her daughters hadn’t cured anything. She would always love booze most of all (wine in a box was her favourite), and if she wouldn’t give it up for us, at least she wasn’t giving it up for someone else. That would have stung.
Brian did what he could though. He was the one who picked me up when I faked a broken ankle to get out of running cross-country. Granted, I faked the broken ankle because he had initially refused to pick me up and I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to get home, so I figured an ambulance could get the job done. (I hadn’t anticipated the ambulance would take me to the hospital and not just conveniently drop me off at my front door after maybe stopping at Maccas on the way.)
It all started when I came third in my primary school cross-country. I can’t remember how long it was, I think only about three kilometres, but I was not even close to being an athletic person. Sports, and the obligation to compete in organised sporting activities, was abhorrent to me. As far as my PE teachers were concerned, I had permanently had my period from birth, and would therefore be unable to climb that rope/swing or bat/torture myself in your horrific ‘beep test’.
When I ended up in a private school in Year 10, where sport is considered more important than learning to read, my period excuse was often dismissed by the female teachers, who seemed to have this magical way of knowing that I could not possibly have blood gushing out of me twenty-nine days of every month. Aware that I needed to try a different tack, I started earnestly telling them that I couldn’t participate in PE because I had ‘a bone in my foot’. I would always say it quietly, like I found it humiliating; like I was sharing a shameful secret with them that only a select few knew. At first I just wanted to see if I could use a ridiculously idiotic excuse to successfully get out of physical activity. I never dreamed that anyone would take it seriously.
‘So, you have a . . . bone. In your foot?’
‘Yes,’ I would reply, looking sad, with my head down. ‘I do.’ Yet, while I was quietly thinking, ‘Who fucking doesn’t, you idiot?’ it appeared, in my efforts to be a smartarse, I had lucked onto a bizarre excuse that actually worked.
‘Oh, okay,’ the teacher in charge would reply, looking concerned. ‘You should probably sit this one out.’
I never had to do the beep test again.
But back in Year 6, at a tiny Blue Mountains public school, there was no getting out of cross-country. It was a class activity that everyone had to participate in, no matter how many periods I insisted I . . . had. (I didn’t exactly understand how periods worked at that stage.)
I suppose, given I was ten and sprightly and TV still only had five channels, I was accidentally fit. Because about two minutes into the three-kilometre race, I found myself coming first. It was a complete shock to me – I had not expected to make it once around the oval, and here I was, one lap in, in the lead, and not even tired. I started to fancy myself as some kind of superhuman. Clearly, I had an untapped skillset that could only be explained by my having been born an exceptionally gifted athlete, which I was only now just discovering. I would need to change my whole life plan. Writing for television was out. I needed to pivot my fantasies of winning an Emmy and an Oscar to winning Olympic Gold. I was built to have the wind flowing through my hair, I was meant to be a runner, I was meant to wear an ugly green and gold suit during the opening ceremony, I was meant to . . .
A significant number of people had somehow managed to get ahead of me. I was slowing down. It turns out running gets harder the farther you go. My chest hurt. My legs hurt. My knees hurt. Oh, that’s right. Running is the worst.
My ego had been stroked by the amount of people cheering me on though, so I decided, for the first time in my life, I would try at sport . . . stuff. I at least wanted to finish, and not finish last. I was in pain, wanted to throw up, and knew unequivocally that this was not something I would ever put myself through again. So I pushed on, knowing it would be the last time, and somehow ended up coming third. (Out of about eleven people, but still – to me it was the equivalent of winning Wimbledon. Or whatever the most famous running thing is. The Super Bowl?)
When you come third, you get a ribbon, which was the first time I’d ever won a prize for anything non-academic in my life. I decided it was the perfect time to retire a champion. Knowing it was the last time I would ever have to do it was the only thing that motivated me to get to the end. I was done.
Then I was informed that the top three runners were required to represent the school in the ‘regional’ cross-country, a race that included about two hundred of the fastest kids from the entire Blue Mountains region.
Well, shit.
There was a lot of chatter about how the other talented athletes and I would go at ‘regionals’. It sounded like it was going to be a high-pressure situation, which I had zero interest in. But it was imperative that we represent our primary school and represent it well – that’s why the runners with the most talent had been chosen. Only the ‘best of the best’ went to regionals, obviously. Oh, and another thing, regionals wasn’t three kilometres, it was five. But that’ll be easy for the best runners, right?
I had almost puked up a lung as I crossed that three-kilometre finish line. This was not going to end well.
The regionals were being held at my sister’s high school about half an hour away, so we could run the cross-country on a fancy running track because we were all very talented, fancy runners. I could get the bus in with Rhiannon, but I was going to need someone to come and pick me up, unless I wanted to wait four
hours to get the high-school bus home. When I told Mum and Brian this, they responded just the way I had expected.
Mum was not exactly partial to the child pick-up. If we were old enough to read, we were old enough to get around without her having to sober up and drive somewhere to get us. It wasn’t unusual to wait over two hours for her to arrive somewhere, if she arrived at all. In the days before mobile phones, we would have to call the house via a payphone, which we never had money for, so we would use reverse charges, which Mum never accepted. The only way you could hope to get a message to her would be to try and scam the reverse charge system. Our calls all ended up sounding something like this:
Phone recording: ‘Hello. You have a caller requesting to speak to you via reverse charges. The caller’s name is:’
Me: ‘It’sRosieI’matthestationpleasescomeandgetme.’
Phone recording: ‘If you would like to accept this call, please press 1. If not, you may hang up.’
She would always hang up. She usually turned up eventually. Usually.
I thought this was mostly normal. It wasn’t until she made me go to a specialist doctor’s appointment by myself when I was eleven years old that I realised my wandering the streets alone seemed to bother other adults. I had been getting pretty bad back pain for a while, and the local GP had sent me to get X-rays, which showed possible scoliosis. The GP referred me to a specialist at Westmead Children’s Hospital, which was about an hour from where we lived in the Blue Mountains. I was pretty excited about this scoliosis thing, because I got to take the day off school and there was a KFC on the way back from Westmead, so I thought everything was coming up Rosie. The day came, however, and Mum didn’t want to get out of bed.
‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘Just catch the train. And there’ll be maps at Westmead station directing you to the hospital. That whole bloody suburb is just the hospital. You can’t miss it.’
Every Lie I've Ever Told Page 9