someone is staring at you in personal growth

aaargh, etc.

As I write this, I’m mentally preparing to spend the weekend in a youth hostel with twenty strangers. This is 1. an absolute nightmare scenario, and 2. something I voluntarily underwent a whole application process to be selected for.

I’m on a train heading to a weekend of oral history research training for a project I'm working on with a young women’s organisation, marking their centenary and celebrating the involvement of loads of different women over the last hundred years. v exciting, honestly, and extremely up my street. When I applied, I remember saying to them, ‘I love archives and I’d love to get in about yours’ in a manner that, immediately afterwards, I feared came across borderline lewd. but I really meant it.

So it’s not the weekend’s activities I’m apprehensive about, obv. It’s the whole twenty strangers in a youth hostel situation. I don’t love being away from home (unless it’s on a holiday with someone I know well). And I am so not used to being around strangers anymore that i’m just a bit, like, 😬😬😬. I mean, 48 hours solid with twenty strangers, no alone time even for sleeping, bunk beds, probably only one shower? 😬😬😬

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In fairness, I’m no stranger to this kind of arrangement, my previous lasting much longer than just a weekend. At the beginning of 2019 I was performing in a show in the National Gallery in London. While down there, everyone in the cast stayed in two rooms in a youth hostel in Elephant and Castle. We spent every minute of every day together. We rehearsed together 9-6, we travelled to and from the gallery together, we ate breakfast, lunch and dinner together, we would go to shows or galleries together in the evenings and then we slept in the same rooms at night. It was fucking insane. By day 4 I was making sure I was showered, clothed, makeup-ed and had eaten breakfast by 5am just to experience a brief oasis of solitude before anyone else woke up.

On our first night, within about two hours of us meeting, one of my many roommates declared that she was ‘two degrees of separation from Brecht’ (to this day I don’t know what that meant) and that ‘you’ve never eaten a mushroom until you’ve eaten a mushroom in Tokyo’ (to this day I’ve never eaten a mushroom, apparently). From the floor, whilst overhead flew boasts of specific details of their drama school educations as everyone else engaged in a good old-fashioned trauma-off (can’t relate, didn’t go), I texted my mum asking her to check train times back to Glasgow for the next day cause I could not see a reality in which I could suffer through this experience without becoming either homi- or sui-. After some text encouragement from my mother to ‘just give it a go, you never know, they might be okay’ I decided to stick it out for another day or so, just to see. Before even the end of the week, I loved every single one of them and we quickly developed a bond that I can’t quite describe to you. Scandinavian vibes, perhaps. Maybe Swedish. Stockholm, even.

We were making a physical theatre show in response to an exhibition in the gallery at the time, all about national identity. It was really good! And very exciting! And just so, so fun and I spent the whole morning before our first performance repeating, ‘I can’t believe we’re actually doing this, I can’t believe I’m about to do this!!’ That show remains one of the coolest things I’ve ever done and I could not be more glad I stuck out the all of us living in the one room situation.

The girl sitting on the bench next to me has gone on to have a fantastic acting career, btw. I stopped doing it altogether during the second covid lockdown.¹

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A couple of years before that—I was nineteen and in a Swedish pub while studying abroad—I was telling some amusing-but-not-significant anecdote to a group of friends. At the end of the story, an acquaintance, about a decade my senior, remarked that all my stories feel like they should end with ‘and then we robbed a bank’ because I just seem like I’m ‘always doing exciting stuff.’ I have no memory of the story I was telling, but that throwaway comment remains one of the most flattering things anyone has ever said to me.

And for a significant chunk of time that was true. Like, the fact that I was a person who did loads of stuff was an important part of who I was. At various points of my life I have had some very unusual experiences that make for some decent anecdotes, if I do say so myself. I was a competitive tug-of-war player (briefly, badly, you want to be tall and sturdy and I was neither). I raced across a country on a tandem bike with a German woman I referred to exclusively as Margaret Thatcher (the nickname does not correspond at all to how much I liked her). I was chased through the streets of Brooklyn by a gang of women threatening to kill me (having just arrived in NYC dragging a broken suitcase and searching fruitlessly for my air bnb, there has never been a more ‘wrong place wrong time’). I took a group of extremely famous Russian influencers around Edinburgh (even their translator struggled to understand my accent). I was nearly thrown out of a theatre for football hooliganism (falsely accused). I spent a summer in rural Maryland where there were no mirrors and I wasn’t allowed to be called by my real name (not a cult).

I had resigned myself to the notion that I left my Interesting Era behind in the pre-pandemic days. Not that my last few years haven’t been eventful. They have in fact been so eventful (read: constant and unrelenting stream of horrors) that if I was to commit said series of events to fiction, it would be correctly criticised for being ridiculous and unrealistic. But, as a result of this slew of horribleness coming thick and fast, I have become boring. I’m just never doing weird or interesting or exciting stuff anymore.

(I thought I did something spontaneous last week when I made a purchase online of something I defo don’t need (I never shop), but I just bought it! cause it was a good deal! how spontaneous, maybe even reckless! I then realised I’d spent £15 after contemplating it for 12 hours and concluded that it is imperative that I get a fucking life. Like, as a matter of urgency.)

I just never do the things that I would have done without a second thought a few years ago. I never even take on projects that push me out of my comfort zone anymore, which I used to do constantly. And where previously I would have pushed through feelings of nervousness to put myself in Situations, I now try to avoid Situations as much as possible. But I’m fed up of feeling unnecessarily anxious about things. Things like checking my emails (horrifying). Things like going away for the weekend with strangers. I mean, get a grip. I even started considering inventing some story to excuse myself from the overnight elements.

Until the other day when I was giving an interview about something completely unrelated and ended up talking about my recent work experiences. I was talking about how a couple of Christmases ago, I had this ridiculous play on in London and how the story of how that came to be was so unlikely and just great and lovely and wonderful. And how at the same time I was also writing the dictionary, like picking what new words go in it and writing the example sentences and researching the first ever documented use of various words.² This, btw, is one of the best jobs I’ve ever had—in the course of about a week I became, out of nowhere, so passionate about dictionaries and thereafter just loved every minute of everything I did. After the interview was finished, someone watching stopped me and went ‘god, you have such an interesting life.’

And it made me think, yes!!! I do, actually! I am still capable of interesting things! I am still doing interesting things, albeit in a different way than I used to. And I still have it in me to get back on my properly weird horse. I just have to start pushing myself out of my comfort zone cage of familiarity and when better to start than now?!

I don’t think anything exciting or controversial or adventurous will happen at a historical research training weekend attended solely by young academic women specifically selected for their academic-ness hosted by a feminist organisation taking place in a small city in central Scotland. But I certainly don’t want to be someone who is put off by something as risk-free and only slightly out of the ordinary as that. Baby steps in the right direction are still going in the right direction, I suppose.

But still, y’know, aaargh, etc.

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I wrote this on a train while listening to The Verve - The Drugs Don’t Work, a song I had completely forgotten existed until now. If you have also forgotten it existed, I recommend you remind yourself. It’s still lovely.

1. I think. I defo persevered through the first then at some point no longer wanted to deal with the covid-induced precariousness

2. other things as well obv but they would require a lot more words to explain and truly no one but me gives a fuck