On Hiding Yourself, and Learning to Love Yourself Again
On being authentically loved, and learning to find yourself again through make-up and clothes.
Please welcome guest writer Caz to our pages this morning, on the subject of escaping a toxic relationship and learning to be loved and love yourself again.
Many years ago now, I was in a relationship. An intense one, in its own way. You don’t need to know the details. What you do need to know is that, to begin with, there was kinship and laughter. Lots of laughter. For a long time that far outweighed the occasional cruel remark or snort of derision.
To start with, those other remarks were like little spitballs; chewed up lumps of paper launched across a classroom. Startling, but still underpinned by flirtatiousness. Not even quite pulling the hair of the girl you fancy.
But fast-forward a little, and any residual warmth has gone away. We are all mixed up with each other and I am drowning in cruelty. The spitballs are now waves, crashing against the sandstone of my fragile psyche.
My sense of self became so eroded that every time I allowed it to emerge, another wave would crash against me and wash another part of me away. New contours formed until I was unrecognisable. This was my new reality, as inevitable and eternal as the tides themselves.
I cannot emphasise how strongly I assumed this was all my fault. If they were angry with me that was my fault, as well as anything that resulted from that anger. I was crumbling, but only because I couldn’t withstand that which I deserved.
I pulled away from the people who cared for me because I decided that I must be toxic and that this toxicity mustn’t hurt them too. If I couldn’t even conceptualise the ways in which I was at fault for all this, surely that was even worse?
By some miracle, someone wonderful and unexpected appeared. They pulled me out when I was going under. They reached out their arm and saved me from drowning. The people I had pushed away, believing it was for their own safety, returned too.
Somehow being loved, properly and authentically loved, can pull you back. I haven’t spoken about what happened much. I can count on one hand the number of people who know at all. And for years I still believed I must have deserved it. Equally so the flashbacks, the hyperreal dreams, and the impulse to hide from the world.
I did not have one iota of doubt that I deserved all this. I was immersed in an environment in which someone I trusted implicitly told me so, loudly and often. If I didn’t then why would it be happening? Telling someone would mean revealing what an abhorrent piece of shit I was.
I’ll spare you the details, but a lot of love - both romantic and platonic - coaxed out of me the realisation that this was not true. Even now, I sit here typing and deleting the word “abuse” because I don’t believe it could possibly apply to me. In some cultures the term “victim” denotes blame and, for reasons I don’t have the space or clarity to address here, I do understand that.
What I now understand is that I did not deserve what happened to me. No one deserves to be coerced into the belief they are worthless and deserving of pain. No one should accept that with a shrug. As surely as the tides, as surely as the sun rises, nobody deserves that.
***
What I have written so far is really just context for the next couple of paragraphs and I’m very aware that they could sound like the most vapid, milquetoast, white woman feminism ever committed to print.
These paragraphs involve praising lurid clothing, my adoration of shimmering eyeliner, and all those trifles and trinkets that insipid liberal ‘feminists’ eulogise about in broadsheet lifestyle magazines. But I hope this piece is not, “How Charlotte Tilbury helped me return to the office”, or, “What that ba&sh dress taught me about the patriarchy.”*
Maybe it is, just a far grimier version.
Even before all this, I was never comfortable with my body. I came of age in the 00s, a time when an eating disorder was not so much a diagnosis as an aspiration, a world in which you physically cannot be thin enough to carry off skinny jeans and ballet slippers.
I didn’t realise that most girls were achieving that angular pallor by living off Red Bull and ludicrously cheap and strong Chinese amphetamine analogues. My flatmate made a living selling high quality acid, so, for the first and last time in my life I was too posh to know that!
In short, millennials were never meant to feel happy about their bodies existing in the world. Whenever I see a Gen Z girl in a crop-top with their plump tummy peeping out over their belted jeans, my heart sings for them.
A part of me wants to hug them tight and tell them, “you have done what no previous generation of women has ever achieved - you are comfortable in your skin”. They don’t know they’ve shunned the constant moralistic gaze because it has never been a part of their world and I love this for them so much.
I was never schooled in feeling good about my body, but I at least had a solid sense of style that brought me some joy. This faded with that doomed relationship, along with my self-worth, and finally blinked out entirely. I didn’t even notice that it never came back even when most of my faculties were restored. To go unnoticed was still my default.
I was existing in the world again, being loved again, and yet still buying clothes to disappear into. A Next sale three-pack of leggings. Another grey marl sweater. No one can see me in these, right? A blank slate of a figure that no one would bother projecting an image into.
It’s only now that I’m writing it down that I recall my partner saying, a pointedly casual tone concealing a genuine interest, “do you think you’ll dress like you used to when you feel a bit better about yourself?” I’m both tickled and charmed that the way he asked implied he enjoys looking at me like that.
Once again glossing over the details, around the start of this year I got high as balls with a beloved friend and declared, “I don’t want to disappear anymore”. She rightly asked, “the fuck you on about, you maniac?”, so I tried to explain. “I don’t love my body. I don’t even like it. And why should I? But I’m fucking sick of pretending I can make it go away”.
Quite a lot of these revelations occur in altered states. I’ve always been too scared of my own psyche for ketamine or psychedelics, although I expect they could teach me a thing or two about myself.
But this high, this warm interior hug of MDMA and cocaine, unsullied by alcohol, was a soaring revelation. My friend held me and told me I had to take joy wherever it was to be found, and she did so with a sincerity which implied that I deserve this.
Clothes and makeup, colour and pattern, were there for me to find again. I started tentatively and it felt weird and awkward, like an ill-fitting school uniform. Even swapping leggings for jeans was a concerted effort.
But little by little it became more moulded to me. I am not a rich woman - I am barely even a solvent woman - so my rule was that all clothing should be second hand and cost no more than two pounds. Makeup must be from the end of the line on Ebay.
Week-by-week I rediscovered those things I had once found so pretty, or handsome, or alluring. I draped myself in that colour I have an almost primal love for, that which is not quite teal nor bottle green.
I have rediscovered allowing my eyes to swim in an intricate swirl of paisley. I fantasised about being a woman who wore mustard cords … and people would think that was appropriate! “Oh, yeah, mustard cords, seems like something Caz might wear …”
Imagine being that person.
I even tried the looks I wanted to try as a teenager, but had felt unable to. I own no fewer than three men’s shirts, which I wear over cami tops and tie at the waist. I’ve always had a vague hourglass shape, even during the times I was very skinny, and I found androgyny alluring but unfeasible if you weren’t a tiny, rectangular pixie of a woman.
If I was a teenager now I would probably be toying with being a Them/Them** alongside my 80F:20M bisexuality, which I would now understand isn’t pure lesbianism. But here I am, a grown-ass woman, tied up in the men’s shirts I never allowed my teenage self.
I have discovered it is my eyes not my lips that I enjoy swiping with a rainbow of colours. The maxim “go big on eyes or lips but never both” is usually true, and for me it is eyes. I don’t love my face, I don’t love it, but I love how I decorate it. I love the colour and the shimmer on the parts of it I choose to make shimmer and sparkle.
This was the hardest part of healing, but probably the only part that became an active pleasure. It required looking at myself in the mirror and speaking to the person who broke me all those years ago. I told them that I understand they probably can’t conceptualise having done anything wrong, but that they hurt me, isolated me, and tried to erase me because they were projecting onto me pain from elsewhere, and that my proximity made me the target.
Or maybe they were just a selfish and spoiled little cunt. I don’t really care either way, because I refuse to let them be a presence in my life anymore. And most of all I refuse to cower before them. I refuse to be invisible. I won't ever let that pain stop me surrounding myself with beautiful people and beautiful things. These things are all that matter.
I may remain a cluster of frailties and glitches, but I deserve this.
*If this sounds scornful and mean-spirited it’s meant to, because these pieces are never aimed at normal women living normal lives. They are deliberately and smugly aspirational. And because for every one of them that has a grain of a relatable point, there are five by writers who simply have nothing better to worry about than the colour of their lipstick.
**I do mean “toying with” and find it peculiar that people find experimentation and fluidity makes gender and sexuality less valid. This is another thing I love for Gen Z. Have a play around and see what fits. For millennials, it felt as if we had to pick a side at 18 and be wedded to that forever, the way you pick a football team. This is another thing I love for Gen Z. Experiment. Find out what feels right for you and damn the bitter old bigots who would deprive you of this.***
***And Gen Z would probably be able to say the word “abuse” without shame, wouldn’t they? Gen Z, of all genders, mostly don’t talk about these things like their dirty little secret.