For a long time I considered writing an essay about why Gilmore Girls has become my favourite tv show of all time, eclipsing even Buffy. This essay never materialised because it dawned on me that it’s exactly the kind of show that you CAN’T persuade people to watch, no matter how well you evanglise it or espouse its many merits. Most people already know what they think of Gilmore Girls (if they’ve heard of it) and they already know that they hate it. You can only change their minds by forcing them to watch it (and even then… it’s hit and miss). So I came to the realisation that no matter how eloquently I sold the show to its many detractors, I would just be preaching to the choir, the converted and the eternally skeptical.

In its place, I offer to you a recap of my observations on watching Season 1 (for what must be the 7th or 8th time). I recently retrieved my dvd boxsets from my parents’ house and am watching it through with John, who is a Gilmore virgin. He was skeptical at first but it has slowly won him over and I even catch him singing the theme tune sometimes. It probably won’t ever be his favourite show of all time (I wouldn’t want it to be, we’re not identical people) but I’m really glad that he’s enjoying it so much.

Anyways. Just for fun. Here are some things I noticed this time round (warning: MANY SPOILERS HERE):

• Even though Dean is introduced as a potential love interest in the first episode, he doesn’t really reappear properly for another 3 or 4 episodes.
• Despite the cast insisting in interviews that the pilot episode is so different from the rest of the show, tonally, it’s really not. They talk just as fast, they’re just as pop-culture and coffee-obsessed. It’s fairly consistent compared to a lot of other pilots/first seasons.
• It’s actually really really weird that we never meet Lane’s dad.
• It’s a lot raunchier than I remembered. I mean, for a ‘family’ tv show. Sex is implied fairly often and Lorelai once jokes that she’s gonna buy Rory a bong (!).
• I know Drella the harpist is supposed to be a consolation prize for Alex Bornstein not being able to take the role of Sookie (she was the original casting choice and played her in the first pilot shot) but SHE IS SO ANNOYING AND I WISH THEY’D JUST NOT BOTHERED.
• Now that Melissa McCarthy is a box-office comedy giant and Oscar-nominated thespian, I can really see just how great an actor she is. I always just assumed that she was sort of playing herself as Sookie, but having since seen her in other roles, I can tell that she’s not, she’s just really talented and really fucking funny.
• Just as Xander is my least favourite Buffy character and I would gladly wipe him from the entire series, Kirk and Michel make me want to die and as much as I personally think Gilmore Girls is the greatest tv show ever made (SUCK ON THAT The Wire), I could really do without ‘em.
• Dean really, really changes as a character throughout the series. In the pilot episode he’s made out to be this edgy outsider dreamboat, perfect for Rory. They discuss literature and he’s reported to have excellent taste in music (feminist singer/guitarist Liz Phair is mentioned). Even by the end of season 1, though, he’s morphed into a different guy. He’s shown to be simpler, more traditional, he voices wildly sexist views in one episode. Rory tries to get him to read Anna Karenina but he complains that it’s too long. By the time Jess turns up, he’s become a caveman, redneck monstertruck enthusiast. I realise why they did this - they had to to work beatnik rebel Jess into the love triangle - but I think it was also because, to sustain a show for that long, you have to create obstacles to happiness or the show becomes boring. If Rory had met her dream guy in episode 1 - an edgy, tall, literate, outsider rebel with boyband hair - where could she have gone from there?
• Paris is also a character who morphs massively. When she’s introduced she comes off like a boffin Regina George: Hermione Granger crossed with a Heather. She’s got two faithful vapid minions and she seems to rule the school with an iron, perfectly manicured nail. But by several episodes later she has metamorphosed into a much dowdier, uncooler butterfly. A moth rather. Madeleine and Louise, her two lackeys, change from equally academically precocious rich bitches in plaid into ditzy, sex-obsessed bimbos. I realise that it’s possible to be both wildly clever and wildly sexy. I am a sex-positive intersectional feminist. But the flipsides of these three characters are very 2 dimensional and rigid. Their postures change, their attitude, their dialogue, their tones of voice. Throughout the rest of the 7 seasons, Paris Gellar becomes an overambitious joke. She simply exists to annoy Rory and give her someone to compete against. In season 1 they attempt to make her an interesting textured character by playing her obsession with Tristan against Rory’s ambivalence, but it feels too soap opera-ish to really be interesting. Paris has the potential to be one of the most multifaceted, intriguing characters of the entire show, but within the first half of the first season she’s already dramatically altered, changing from a confident, vain dictator into an insecure, frumpy wannabe.
• I really cannot express in words how much I detest and resent Tristan as a character.
• Even though it’s perhaps my last favourite, season 1 still has some really fucking funny lines and great, snappy dialogue.
• I forgot how early they plant the seeds that bloom over the next 7 years. I knew that the Lorelai and Luke romance is hinted at RIGHT from the beginning, but I thought it was ignored from hence forth. I WAS WRONG. Season the First is LITTERED with awkward Luke and Lorelai chemistry. They come so close to dating, kissing and professing their attraction in so many scenarios that you’d think their relationship was sure to happen in season 2 (it doesn’t start until Season 5, really).
• Also the inn that Lorelai and Sookie buy up and transform into the magnificent Dragonfly makes its first appearance in season 1! I forgot that it took them THAT LONG to do anything with it.
• I completely forgot Rachel even existed as a character, she’s so bland and such a poorly rendered cliché.
• I really wish Rory had been rewritten as a gay boy or Lorelai had been a lesbian or something. The show has such a dearth of queer characters, it’s embarrassing and upsetting. I realise the creators probably had nothing to do with this, it was surely the prudish American network. But it really bugs me. I feel like I relate so much to so many of the characters and they’re all fucking straight (except Michel and Gypsy but it’s NEVER MENTIONED).
• Also, why we’re on the subject, there are NO PEOPLE OF COLOUR EXCEPT THE TWO GAY PEOPLE: MICHEL AND THE ABSENT-SO-FAR GYPSY. And the Kims.) I know this is small-town America, but really. This show is almost as white as Girls.’

I understand that that was probably DEEPLY boring for anyone who hasn’t watched the show obsessively over the years like me, but I had to get it off my chest *shrug*

“It’s time to take the word back / fag is now a compliment / a sexy ass homo who runnin’ shit and confident.” - Brooke Candy, paraphrased

This is going to be my first, last and final post on the word ‘faggot’, but I really want to say something and whether or not anyone wants to read or listen, I’m going to pour out my meagre, unimportant views into tumblr.

I really don’t have a problem with people using the word ‘faggot’. In my head it’s a compliment, and that’s not just a coping method to combat homophobia, I really feel that way. When someone calls me a faggot, I think “yeah, I am, and so proud I could burst at the seams”. When someone uses the word ‘faggot’ as a slur to describe someone they hate, I think: “wow, that person is not using the word ‘faggot’ correctly”.

At the risk of patronising my clever followers and readers, there are queer and LGBT people the world over being beaten, teased into committing suicide, set on fire, imprisoned, separated from their partners and disowned, thrown onto the streets. Being called ‘faggot’ by someone ignorant does not seem worth getting upset about. It’s ONE small opportunity to reclaim ground by reclaiming a slur and it should be seized wherever people feel able.

I haven’t always felt this way, as a younger, more sensitive individual, I felt the broad, vile sting of being called that word. But the older I got, the more I understood that being called ‘faggot’ had nothing to do with me. When a person hatefully or ignorantly deploys that word or aims it at a queer person, it says a bible-ful of things about them and nothing about you. It reflects poorly on their choices and their lack of intelligence and the society that taught them that bigotry is acceptable. I realised that I didn’t have energy to waste feeling sorry for these people, so it had nothing to do with me. It was a freeing moment.

I’m not mad at Azealia for using the word ‘faggot’. I think it should be used more often, I think it should be totally disarmed until it’s as useless as smallpox post-1979.

I’m mad because she implied, quite clearly, that femininity in men is something to feel ashamed about and something to be chastised for. This is so beyond total bullshit that I don’t even know where to start. I don’t even think she meant it. I’m not an apologist, but I genuinely believe she didn’t really know what she’s saying. I don’t think she seriously equates femininity with grossness or yuckiness, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. But she said it. And in clarifying it she made it worse. And she still hasn’t apologised.

By all means call me a faggot, call Perez Hilton a faggot (although I don’t think he deserves that accolade) but don’t suggest to an army of impressionable young followers that men who act like women are to be abused in a public forum. Don’t be that bigot. The problem with Perez Hilton is not that he acts like a woman, or that he’s a faggot, it’s that he’s life-sucking, hypocritical pond scum without a shred of human decency. Express yourself (clearly) don’t repress yourself.

CLARIFICATION: I don’t want, nor do I wish, to shame anyone about their reaction to homophobia. I didn’t intend in my piece to make queer people who DO find the word ‘faggot’ offensive feel shit. That’s your choice and I don’t judge you for it. Also I’m aware that being called ‘faggot’ can be part of the ‘teasing that leads to suicide’ that I mentioned. It’s all about context, obviously, and context varies wildly.

However if you’re a straight person who’s butthurt at the word ‘faggot’, fuck off, I literally do not care what you have to say. 

Right I just want to get this out of my system NOW before I relapse into a deep depression and don’t see the point any more.

Anybody with any sort of vague involvement with twitter should know that Caitlin Moran, Times-columnist and sort of professional tweeter, seems to be putting her foot in it an awful lot lately. It seems like only yesterday that she was the darling of, not just the ‘progressive’ (*cough*) left, but journalism and the internet at large. She’s the kind of quick-witted, silly person who has thrived in the age of TWITTER but who was previously kind of not very well known.

Some of the stuff Caitlin Moran has said has been Really Fucking Awful And Unhelpful (the high heels debacle instantly springs to mind), whereas some of the stuff she’s said (gay seamonkeys, Intersectionalitygate, and her most recent gaffe “all of the ethnics”) is just really badly worded or very misguided or an unfunny joke or ignorant.

Today I woke up to an article by Helen Lewis which quotes and aims to dissect each of these individual blunders, basically writing off any blame levelled at Moran because she didn’t mean what she said, or it was misinterpreted, or she said sorry later and none of us is perfect. I mean, fair point, no one is perfect, everyone makes blunders, and certainly, I am as guilty of this as anybody (I briefly wore bindis as a fashion accessory earlier this year, before realising I was being an offensive culturally appropriating cunt, par example).

But let’s look at who Moran is, or purports to be. She’s often heralded as the face and voice of modern feminism, mostly down to a well-intentioned book, How To Be a Woman. I’m not saying Caitlin ASKED to be The Face of Modern Feminism (I don’t think she did) but whether or not she, or anyone else, likes it (and I don’t like it very much) she keeps being tossed this accolade and with this perceived role comes lots of VERY REAL responsibility.

Let me tell you a story. When I was doing A Level Music, my teacher told me about a concept which she referred to as ‘avant garl’. My teacher made me write down ‘avant garl’ with that spelling in my notebook. I was 17 at the time, preparing to start a music degree in a year’s time, and quite aware of the ‘avant garde’ movement, so I challenged her and had to show her that she’d spelt it disastrously wrong.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with not knowing how to spell ‘avant garde’. I would never hold it against someone. UNLESS they were my A Level Music teacher and responsible for helping me get into university. THEN I would judge someone for not knowing how to spell it. THEN I would start to get nitpicky and start to hold it against someone.

Caitlin, in many ways, is very much like that music teacher. She’s in a position of power (with which comes responsibility). She has an enormous platform, not just on twitter, but in her newspaper column as well. She wants to use this platform for good, which is admirable. But she doesn’t have the knowledge to back it up. She bandied the words ‘retard’ and ‘tranny’ around (she’s since apologised, which is good) seemingly without realising that she’d done anything wrong. That’s ok. Lots of people unwittingly use slurs, and realising this and then apologising is a great thing to do. But if you have written what (unfortunately), to many people, is the most important feminist tome ever because it’s the only one they’ve ever heard of, you have a responsibility to KNOW what is a slur and what is not without having to be educated on the matter.

If you purport to fight on the side of Equality For Everyone and you have one of the most widely-read columns and twitter feeds in the world, you have a responsibility not to shamelessly victim blame (as she did with her comment that women clicking along the street at night in high heels were attracting rapists, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of rapes are NOT perpetrated by strangers in dark alleys). You have a responsibility not to refer to gays as your army of extremely well-groomed tiny brine shrimp pets, even jokingly (because you should know that this sort of thing is taken at face value by lots of people on the internet, where it’s difficult to infer tone, and that implying that all gay men are grooming obsessed Ken Dolls, even as a joke, is really fucking unhelpful).

You have a responsibility not to effectively brush the needs and interests of LEGIONS of already under-represented women and feminists of colour under the carpet with a rude, flippant, swear-riddled tweet. You have a responsibility to express yourself clearly, and if you’re going to be humorous or deploy ‘parody’ or satire, to do so intelligently. When you’re Caitlin Moran, having your Heart In The Right Place and bumbling along making cock-ups and learning as you go along, is not quite enough.

Not everyone has these responsibilities - certainly, I’m not expecting everyone to be an academically proficient, thoroughly well-read expert - but Caitlin does, and she routinely flouts her power and platform with great ladles of ignorance and badly or unclearly expressed blunders. This is My Problem With Caitlin Moran. I’m not suggesting that every feminist, or even every person, needs to come with a degree in gender studies and an advanced grasp of semantics. But if you’re Caitlin Moran, and you’ve had this position thrust on you, you should at least have a modicum.

When social justice bloggers on tumblr (who have basically taught me all I know) are better-read, more eloquent and, yes, FUNNIER, than the supposed Face of Modern Feminism, you know you have a problem.

(picture via The master’s tools)

As you may already know, I met my boyfriend through tumblr. I fancied him for ages but didn’t have the courage to tell him because I didn’t think he felt the same. Altho we used to reblog from each other all the time, he started reblogging me less and less, and altho I’d made contact on Facebook, my attempt at flirting had fallen flat on its face. I sent him some anon messages professing my attraction and he was quite rude and sassy cuz he had no idea who it was.

Eventually thru the magic of twitter we talked more and more until I plucked up the courage to tell him I *really* had a huge crush on him. To my surprise, he felt the same way about me, but hadn’t had the courage to say anything! Eventually we met up and the rest is history and now we live together.

To think of all the time I could’ve saved if I’d just professed my feelings off anon! It worked out in the end, but basically what I’m saying is: if you crush on someone, tell them, they may well crush on you back!*

*I cannot be held responsible for what happens if it turns out the person you fancy doesn’t like you that way. Sorry. Also I realise that just because I took a chance and it worked out for the best, doesn’t mean the same will happen to you. But I guess what I’m saying is, in a very roundabout way, you never know.

The problem with privilege is that it is completely intangible to those who possess it. It is like an odourless, colourless gas. You only notice it when you experience - or your attention is brought towards - an absence of it. This is why explaining privilege to a white, cis, heterosexual upper class male is harder than climbing to the moon on a ladder. It’s almost impossible. It’s like gesticulating towards a giant ghost elephant that the privilege-denier can’t see or even comprehend.

This last Friday, my loving boyfriend took me to see Stanley Kubrick’s seminal horror classic, The Shining, in the cinema. I’d seen it once before, on my laptop, on a train, in broad daylight, when I was 19. But as any cinephile knows, horror, perhaps more than any other genre, morphs into an entirely different beast, and packs an entirely different punch, depending on, not just the medium by which it’s being transmitted, but also the time of day, the location, the fellow audience.

So, it came to pass, that on Friday the 2nd of November, 2012, in an old, dark, packed, arthouse cinema on the blustery south coast of England, in a large, comfy, red velvety seat, I had the shit scared out of me by a film I’d already seen and deemed creepy but not jumpy and certainly not with a lastingly frightening impression.

A lot has been made recently of the hidden meanings behind this film. A recently released documentary, Room 237, attempts to address some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories (note: I haven’t seen it yet, although I intend to) and I watched The Shining with this in mind. Perhaps this coloured my interpretation. I don’t remember having any ‘theories’ the first time I watched it, although I was much less knowledgeable or analytic in general, appreciating style, but not always substance.

But this time, not only was I much more aware, my powers of deduction heightened, but I felt the work more intensely. This time, not only did it seem to me to be a film about the horrors of isolation and domestic violence, but subtext started to rise to the surface of the screen like horrid, mud-laced lotus flowers of blood blossoming under water.

Suddenly it dawned on me that this was a film about misogyny.

In a remote, snowed-in hotel, Jack Torrance, a white, ‘western’, heterosexual man, slowly goes mad, propelled on by frustration at his creative impotence, the guilt from his previous irresponsible violence against his own son, and the attention of his doting, forgiving wife. 

Something I noticed, which had never previously occurred to me, was that Jack never actually lays a finger on Wendy. In my head I imagined him beating her, intimidating her with violence, but in actual fact it is Wendy who makes the first move of actual physical violence against Jack: she beats him unconscious with a baseball bat, leading him to topple down a series of stairs and later slices his hand with a long, quavery knife. In this sense, Jack and Wendy, play out, in an exaggerated, more physical way, a very traditional form of misogyny: the wind-up.

Throughout history, men have teased, cajoled, harassed and oppressed women to the point of hysteria and then laughed at them, pointed, degraded them for being neurotic, unhinged, irrational creatures of emotion. It’s a nasty sexist trick and very much the same thing happens at The Overlook Hotel: Jack’s increasingly short temper, threats, lies, new imposing rules, and eventual complete breakdown push Wendy to lash out in self-defence.

In the end, the character of Jack paints a very sad picture. He is a man unable to provide adequately for his small, undemanding family. He is incapable of protecting them, against outside threat, against himself. He attempts to control them, but is unable to. And he even manages to bungle their attempted murder (chillingly referred to as ‘correction’ by another character). Both Wendy and tiny Danny managing to outwit and escape him using only their smarts. His brute strength is useless. For me, the film became about the failures and increasing uselessness of the white, heterosexual man.

Of course, I understand about artistic intent. I understand about interpretation. I present this new theory only as my own personal translation. It might not make any sense to you, and it may never have occurred to Mr. Kubrick, but that’s how it felt to me. Whether ot not he intended to, Stanley made a film about a white, American ‘nuclear family’ - that peculiar obsession of the Christian American right, that supposed paradigm of morality and virtue - and shows it being torn apart from the inside by the violence, misogyny, hypocrisy, idiocy and even racism of the white, heterosexual man.

I was 5 years old when Alanis Morisette released “Ironic” and completely fudged the meaning of the word forever and for always. Now, instead of it being applied to situations in which irony has actually reared its smug, sneery head, human beings seem to intone “isn’t it ironic?” whenever something unlucky or unfortunate happens. You get a cold during the summer? Only ironic if that’s the week you attended a lecture on how to avoid getting a cold during the summer months. Get caught in a frizz inducing rainstorm when you’ve just spent hours straightening your hair? Only ironic if you’re on your way to the shops to buy anti-frizz rainstorm-proof hair spritz.

Anyway, I was introduced to the concept of ‘dressing ironically’, whether or not irony can ever really be at play in the arena of day-to-day dressing, when I was 13 and its been a downhill slide ever since. My best friend Jenna introduced me to it, as she introduced me to pretty much all aspects of modern or popular culture (I was totally clueless until she showed me the way) and since then I’ve been smitten with the idea. But recently I’ve noticed a spate of people criticising it as a ‘thing’. So here’s my defence.

To dress ironically, for the uninitiated, is to wear something that you don’t necessarily endorse, don’t necessarily actually like, is in direct contention with your views or personality, or plays with humour and pre- or misconceptions. It doesn’t strictly adhere to a dictionary definition of ironic (maybe it originally did and has gradually grown to encompass the less-than-ironic) but it continues to be deployed for lack of a better phrase.

For me, dressing ironically began with purchasing a hideous (I was 14 at the time, ok!) camouflage-print army jacket that jokingly played up the fact that I was a scrawny, terrified, anxious, pacifist, ballet dancer gayboy who was about as likely to join the army as Alanis is to have a hit this decade (oop, sorry babe, I love you really). Latterly this has manifested itself in my choice to don vintage American sportswear (letterman jackets, football jerseys, basketball vests) to play up the fact that I suck at pretty much every single sport, and have little to no interest in any of them, either.

For me, it’s a defence mechanism against people who would otherwise make assumptions about me by second guessing them or playing my insecurities up, but also a means of expressing my sense of humour. But for many more it’s rooted deeply in pretention, so I can understand the distaste.

One of the reasons for the recent rise in criticism of dressing ironically, is the rise of the hipster, the now ubiquitously but mostly inaccurately profiled subculture du jour: usually a white, middle class, educated urbanite with a penchant for referencing the 90s and inhabiting the gray area between goth, androgynous genderqueer performance artist, hippy and dickhead.

One of the hallmarks of a hipster is doing everything - not just dressing, actually - ‘ironically’ (or as one of the characters in Daria quips, moronically). To be ironic in the modern vernacular sense of the word, is to be nonchalant and wryly humorous, to not care, to have little or no interest in anything, to dip and dunk into different subcultures taking what nominally appeals, not bothering to do further research and passing it all off with the sort of heroin chic cool that looked like it might have gone away during the 00s but has made a riotous comeback (clearly it just skipped a generation).

So I get it, when people complain, old-man-style, that they can’t stand ironic dressers - “You’re wearing the tshirt for a Christian band you don’t even like and you’re not a Christian, you cunt!” - I sort of agree. But let me play devil’s advocate and say that, although I, like many hipsters (and no I don’t identify as one, just for the record), come from a (half-)white, urban middle-class bohemian background, not all ironic dressing is from spoilt privileged idiots with nothing better to do than shamelessly provoke.

When I pull on a tshirt emblazoned with a Hindu god, it’s because it reminds me of the time I spent in Nepal with my anthropologist parents, visiting Hindu temples for my father’s research, not just because I saw it on tumblr and I thought the pattern was pretty. When I wear my People’s Pope tshirt, I wear it as a nod to my Catholic upbringing and subsequent almost total break from it as a religion due to my latent homosexuality. When I wear my spiked leather jacket, huge military boots and acid wash punk zip up jeans, skinhead style, I’m not just brainlessly aping, but instead ‘IRONICALLY’ making reference to the fact that, as Aryan and white as I look, I’m actually ethnically a patchwork of oppressed minorities: Native American, Eastern European Jew, Mexican. It’s not always as intellectual as I might pretend in an essay on tumblr, but I think it through.

And that’s the important thing. By all means denigrate Peaches Geldof for ignorantly wearing a confederate flag tshirt, because she probably wasn’t even sure what it was when she bought it, and didn’t care (and even if she did, who is she to be knowingly ironic about the systematic oppression of an ethnic group she has no relation to?), but the next time you see a potential douchebag in the street flaunting a style that is obviously in direct contention with their personality, character, history or lifestyle, think: maybe it’s not, maybe they’re aware, maybe it’s ironic because ironically they’re aware that it’s not all that ironic. Maybe it’s not ‘ironic’ at all.

And other white people problems.

The end.

I had the 2nd birthday of my 20s yesterday and it went off like the sound of a balloon deflating, not with the veritable bang with which earlier birthdays have been celebrated.

Sure I got to be in New York surrounded by some of my best friends in the world. I had a really wonderful and cheering pink vodka lemonade-soaked catch up lunch with a school friend I haven’t seen in 4 years. I was wished a happy birthday by many of the lovely people I know in real life and on the internet, as tweets and facebook comments came rushing in.

But I also spent a significant portion standing with a heavy violin case, a huge suitcase and a stuffed tote bag in the most torrential rain I’ve ever experienced, desperately running through busy streets trying to find an ATM. I sat on a plane being kicked in the back. There was no surprise champagne or sing song or slice of birthday cake (no cake at all, in fact). I didn’t get to speak to my parents, they’re away somewhere and my dad’s birthday email had one line congratulating me and another referencing a hygienist’s appointment I simply musn’t forget. I fell out with my best friend of 10 years the week before. I didn’t wake up to any presents, any special gifts, any surprises. No one organised a group fun meal or day of depravity.

I sound ungrateful and mostly I am. I’ve had a lot of wonderful birthdays and a lot of other unemployed Londoners with a useless arts degree would kill to be in New York on their day of birth, downpour, lack of cake and presents or not. Also, this year was a nothing year: no milestones passed, no activities suddenly legal. What’s there to celebrate really? Also if I push the people close to me away, how am I expected to expect them to bother doing anything nice for me?

Fortunately today, on my birthday boxing day, my perfect boyfriend John-James was on hand to meet me at the airport with flowers, shower me with gifts and even, this evening, offer me a celebratory bakewell tart, candle and all (even if he was too embarrassed to sing for me).

As I grow older, I genuinely feel each birthday less. It’s more a landmark to be dreaded (how many more years of floundering failure?) than something to rejoice. But at the same time, my inner bratty princess tries to make herself known once a year. I know I’m lucky enough to be alive with people who care about me. I know that presents and cake mean nothing. I know I am a white, able-bodied cis gay man with relatively little to complain about. I know I should just shut the fuck up and feel the gratefulness wash over me. I know I only really have myself to blame, seeing as my friends asked me what I wanted to do and I said “oh nothing special, I don’t want to make a big deal out of it” (I secretly did).

But I wanted to feel that birthday glow and I felt nothing.

Oh well, thank god for brilliant boyfriends.

P.S. Happy Birthday Madonna.

People love to tell me that I’m wasting my time on the internet. Either that or they like to tell me that whilst they, like most 21st century humans, love the internet, I spend too much time on it. Go outside, they say. Read a book, they say. Get some exercise, they say.

Of course, I do all those things. This year I took up running because I could no longer afford the gym or ballet classes and I try to run between 3 and 6 miles every day. I read constantly. Not very fast, granted. But I always have something on the go. Even when I’m at my most anxious and depressed I manage to leave the house almost every day. I go somewhere. Preferably green. I convene with nature.

But anyway the intention of this blog post was not to apologise or explain myself, really.

This argument or idea that I spend too much time on the internet, often Tumblr specifically, really irritates me. And I’ll tell you why.

The first reason is that Tumblr isn’t just a waste of time. Yeah, sure, 90% of the time I just scroll through, mouth slack-jawed, not really thinking, zoning off, reblogging mindlessly, just passing some time. But that goes with most hobbies slash activities, doesn’t it? They’re mostly just there to pass the time. That doesn’t mean I haven’t genuinely learnt anything from Tumblr.

Aside from the fact that I actively seek to follow interesting blogs that repost art or ideas that I’m not familiar with, Tumblr has, more specifically, opened my mind to the fact that I’m a privileged first world white boy and I should shut the fuck up. This is important. Yes my mother is a POC. Yes I staunchly identify as a queer feminist pro-gay-rights-minded individual. But that doesn’t mean that my opinions are worth shit, necessarily. That doesn’t mean I know everything or that I have the right to be righteous or self-satisfied. Because previously I was. Just knowing that I was a biologically male feminist who didn’t identify with the gender binary and wasn’t totally Anglo-Saxon despite my white skin, made me feel so pleased with myself. Following various social justice bloggers has helped me realise that no, I don’t know it all. I am ignorant. But I am learning. I want to learn. I want to improve myself so that I can be active in speaking out against sexist, transphobic, racist, homophobic bullshit (in myself and others) that I wasn’t even aware of before I signed up for a Tumblr account. There’s stuff you can’t learn in any Queer Theory university module, that Tumblr taught me.

Secondly, the internet has been a safe haven for me since 2005. I know what you’re thinking. Why would a privileged gay boy from England need a safe haven? But I’m not in the habit of playing oppression olympics, and just because I’m much more fortunate than most, doesn’t mean I wasn’t terrified of and traumatised by the outside world for a large portion of my formative years. The first openly gay people I interacted with were on the internet. The first positive images I saw of queer people, gay people, lesbian people, people of indeterminate sex or gender, people with vitiligo, people similar to or like me, I saw on the internet. No one on the internet has ever threatened to beat me to death for being gay (and if they did I could block them or close my laptop). No one on the internet has ever spat at me. Unlike the real world, the internet hasn’t bombarded me with heteronormative white supremacist imagery for my entire life, because I choose what websites I look at and who I follow. The internet is a dangerous, wild place full of trolls and porn and idiots, but it can also be whatever you make of it and for me, it can be heartening because it’s the only place where I can not feel like an unemployable, mentally ill failure.

And thirdly, I met my boyfriend on Tumblr. Yes, again, I know what you’re thinking. It’s early days. I met him on the internet. What do I want? A social anxiety medal? But yeah. I met the man I love on Tumblr and as such I can’t and won’t log off.

Now, of course, I do try and regulate my use so that I don’t procrastinate myself into the ground, but the next time someone tells you that you spend too much time on Tumblr or the Intrawob at large, or that time spent on here is wasted or useless, smack ‘em in the face and tell them it’s from me*.

*This is a joke I do not condone violence.

Some recent thoughts:

A few months ago someone who flitted in and out of my life told me that they thought I wasn’t anywhere near as tortured as I like to think. According to them I am in actual fact very well adjusted and probably not depressed and actually quite happy, generally.

Aside from the fact that they clearly didn’t (and don’t) really know me very well and had based their diagnosis on a few weeks of frenzied flirting (as if anybody really reveals their ‘true’ or honest self - whatever that may be - when they’re flirting) this irritated me.

I’ve always maintained, privately, to myself that if I was given the opportunity to have my depression magically wiped away or even just reduced in size to about a quarter of its potency, I would take that magic blue pill immediately and exit the rabbit hole. Unlike some of the douchebag egocentrics in that tonally weird (and occasionally bordering on offensive) Stephen Fry documentary on manic depression, I DON’T think that my mental illness is an integral part of my personality or an aid to my creativity. (Sidenote: I don’t suffer from manic depression, I just gots the depression without the mania).

I don’t really want to speculate about the mental health of my musical heros and icons, but none of them (as far as I know) openly suffer with depression and yet their boundless imaginations, storytelling powers and open access to their emotions have helped them create stunning works of art. I don’t feel like I need this depression. I don’t want it. Contrary to what that person thought, I don’t egg it on or play it up for effect so that I can be The Great Romantic Tortured Artist. I’m not doing that.

Of course, the vast majority of human beings experience bouts of depression throughout their lives, I’m sure all of my idols have at some point or another. I can deal with periods of blueness or upset. But the depression I don’t want is the depression that’s plagued me almost nonstop for years now, with almost no sign of turning tail or improving. The depression that appears to transcend environment and circumstance, that cuts through periods of intense love and happiness like a squatter that just refuses to leave a disused room of your house, even if you’re ecstatically holed up in the rest of it. The depression that’s only getting worse.

I’ve recently fallen in love (at the last point I expected to but still) and it is the most wonderful thing ever and I would like to be able to enjoy every second of it without feeling sick with sadness at intervals. I know I would still be able to work musically to the same degree without depression. I don’t want to be depressed, perpetually. I don’t need to be depressed, continually.

I’m due to start therapy as soon as possible but because I’m poor and it’s on the NHS I’m probably going to be on a waiting list for 7 years. I’m not ‘doing’ medication again because the last time I had a breakdown.

I am not a tortured artist, forcing myself into mental contortions of anguish to play up to a stereotype for attention or artistic merit.

I am sick and I want to be well.

My experience of depression is unique to me, but may resonate with you. I don’t know.

It has been helpful to me to discuss it with other sufferers (and I find that word very apt) but it may not be helpful to you. Maybe this blog post will make your day, maybe it will make you sneer and roll your eyes.

I am mostly posting this to de-stigmatise depression to myself, but also so I have something to link people to if they don’t seem to have a grasp on my behaviour or are curious, bemused or frustrated by it. I wrote ‘de-stigmatise depression to myself’ as opposed to ‘de-stigmatise depression to others’ because I don’t presume to think that I am influential enough to do the latter, but also because my attitude to my own mental illness is part of the problem.

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I first felt depressed at the age of 14. I remember the day and the feeling vividly. I knew what depression was, because it runs in my family, on my father’s side, and because I was one of those irritatingly precocious children who strives desperately to be wise beyond their years. (By that age I had already read The Bride Stripped Bare, a brutal erotic novel I’m not sure I have the experience to relate to now, let alone as a 14 year old pubescent virgin).

I managed to distinguish it from your garden variety sadness or upset by virtue of the fact that, that day, there was nothing I could possibly think of to make me feel bluer than a broad well of blood under the skin. My life wasn’t perfect, sure. I’d even experienced a glut of horrible bullying, that I’d escaped by moving schools, but overall, up to that point, I had felt positive about life. There was no problem I couldn’t surmount, or so I had thought.

Fortunately I was still young and that feeling was fleeting. Depression came back in large crashing waves and shorter, more surreptitious stints, but because I was going through some other shit (bullying, struggling with my sexuality, sexual dysfunction, sexual abuse, self abuse) after that first day, I always managed to identify a reason that I felt like hurling myself into the sea or melting away into the air, in that melodramatic teen way, never to return. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t depressed, I was just dealing with adolescent life issues, and this sort of thing would clear itself up. I’d see. As soon as I was an adult and my career was off the ground and everything was going my way, I’d be fine.

Of course I was wrong and perhaps I shouldn’t have tempted fate (not that I actually believe in fate, but my mother is Spanish Catholic, and I am unreasonably superstitious, it is ingrained in me) but I couldn’t help being optimistic despite or in spite of my waves of depression. At that age, living in a tiny village and being unhealthily ambitious, I always felt that there was something better out there, as soon as I moved away to the big city. Again, of course I was wrong.

Perhaps ironically, my depression returned full-bodied and determined not to budge when I was 17 going on 18 and moving to London, at the exact time that I thought it would leave forever. That first year in The Big Smoke was the worst whole year of my life. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but nothing happened the way I imagined it would and I suffered an enormous lapse in self-confidence.

Whereas previously I had felt as if the world were mine for the taking, and my waves of bleakness were a temporary stop-gap, I then felt as if I’d botched my only chance at success and was watching my lifeblood swirl (agonisingly) slowly away out of sight, bubbling back in weak hopeful whorls, before vanishing again down the proverbial drain. I felt unable and unwilling to do anything about it. I felt paralysed with depression for no identifiable reason, and completely out of my depth.

The only thing that prevented me from walking into oncoming traffic or fusing myself to my mattress and wasting away, was my incredible boyfriend who visited me constantly and encouraged me to engage in activities that would distract me and improve my confidence. We’re no longer together, but parted amicably and I still love him and owe him a lot.

Throughout my three years at university, I continued to feel depressed, but again, I told myself that as soon as I started to make more friends, find a job, experience some career success, I’d feel fine. This, to cut a very long story very short, has not been the case. As a recent graduate (I finished my degree last year, aged 20) I have, at the end of 2011 and the start of 2012, felt the worst in my life, as if my body is droopy and heavy with misery almost every single day.

“Of course”, I can hear you say, “you’ve graduated during a double dip recession with little to no job prospects and you’re suffering the post-uni blues!” But if only. If only that were the case and I could put a name or reason to my constant, incessant suffering.

In actual fact, things are fine. More than fine. I realise this next paragraph could come dangerously close to smugness/rubbing it in, but I think it’s necessary to explain: I have it good, and I know it. I live in a beautiful, cheap apartment with my best friend of almost 11 years. My career is not off the ground yet, but I can feel it and see it on the horizon (*touch wood*) (see, told you I was superstitious to a fault). I have a loving, understanding, supportive family and despite being single, I have always been the kind of independent person who enjoys being alone and thrives on it. And I have a dedicated and loving set of friends who appreciate my dry sense of humour and my refusal to smile like a joyous drone, and have never tried to change me, or judge me. There is uncertainty in my life but it is exciting.

I feel like I’ve never ‘had’ it better and yet at the start of this year I suffered a nervous breakdown. I shaved my head, Britney-style (because if there’s a cliché to enact, I’ll enact it!). At one point, on my way back from seeing family in Spain, I actively willed my plane to crash (killing me but leaving everyone else unhurt) and was irritated when it didn’t because I genuinely wanted to die. As the airplane hurtled at impossible speeds towards the terminal in that way it always does just before it brakes, I leaned into it and made peace with death. At another point I became so stressed out over the simple task of getting my passport done, that I started crying and hyperventilating and tried to lay down outside the post office minutes before I was supposed to be at work. I was two streets away from my former work place and yet I was so panicked and wracked with anxiety that I couldn’t find my way and forgot where I was. I had to ring up my then boyfriend and ask him for directions. To find a place in an area I knew like the back of my hand. Two streets away.

What was most horrifying about this breakdown was that it came out of nowhere. Or rather, it came out of a great, dark nihilistic whirlpool of self-doubt, low-self esteem and negative energy that seemed to come out of nowhere. More frustrating than anything was the fact that I felt I was unravelling, with no way to stop myself and the breakdown was spooling violently from an unknown place. I knew my life was going great. I knew everything was going to be ok. I knew that humans were ultimately good and that I would find my way in life no matter what. I told myself these things and somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain I even believed them. But still this liquid, spreading half-insanity was pouring out of me and I felt split and ready to be put out of my misery.

I only ‘came out’ about my depression about a year ago, which is very late considering how long I’ve suffered. I told my (then) boyfriend and best friend first, and then slowly become open about it to friends I work with and then, now, on the internet. It felt good (or at least like progress) to put a name to it and make the first steps towards seeking treatment (which is ongoing), but unfortunately, my fears about expressing it to others were not totally allayed. My biggest fear was that other people wouldn’t believe me, or else they would tell me I was just looking for attention. I haven’t been totally proven wrong.

As well as enduring insensitive ignorant clots telling me to “cheer up, it’ll never happen”, to “get a grip” or to stop ruining social occasions with my miserable countenance, I have also experienced a former work colleague and friend telling me to “shut up and fuck off”, because I didn’t smile politely when he asked me how I was as well as various people (with no medical training) attempting to diagnose me or recommend useless treatments (“try exercise”, someone unhelpfully offered). Telling my manager at my former place of work seemed like a good idea at the time but it set in motion a series of events that ended in me leaving the job, almost exactly as I’d feared.

On the flipside, I have also experienced many, many people offering their support and advice, and for this, I am extremely grateful. In the intervening months since my breakdown and with the help of a great new friend, I have somewhat made peace with my depression and despite no cure, I feel at least that I have found a way to cope and prevent it from colouring or affecting my work life or social life as much as it did for the foreseeable future. This - considering I spent the majority of almost three years mostly alone, eating my way to chubby, crying, miserable, unable to find the motivation even to leave my bed, let alone the house, for no discernible reason followed by a breakdown where the stress of deciding what I needed to buy first at my local shopping centre made me want to choose death - is an achievement.

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I know it’s the convention to finish a blog of this type on a positive note, in order to give the reader a feeling of closure and comfort and emotional resolution, but I feel that I should also point out that I still suffer with depression and despite my progress in becoming more open/comfortable with it, it still pains me on almost a daily basis.

One of the most common misconceptions about the mental illness (and my god, there are thousands, I could write a whole book on them) is that a good dose of quality time spent relaxing and doing healthy, wholesome things that the sufferer enjoys (if they can think of anything that they actually enjoy), will clear it right up for good. A lot of people (myself included) find that this is not the case, and even if they are able to enjoy short periods of happiness and time away from the tedium of every day life, depression is always there in the background like the great roar of the ocean, or the hum of the refrigerator. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because you have noticed small amounts of positive behaviour, that someone is cured or that they feel great. You can’t see feelings, obviously.

(In fact, when it comes to depression, best not to do any presuming or assuming at all, considering the vast number of misconceptions surrounding it.)

I have mostly written this for myself, because catharsis. But if you enjoyed it or found it helpful or take issue with any of it, or managed to read it all without rolling your eyes in that internet-too-long-didn’t-read sort of way, that’s great too. I have tried not to concentrate on my experience with medication or treatment, as I am definitely not a doctor (or at least wasn’t the last time I checked) and don’t want to offer ANY advice on how to go about dealing with it, medically.

If, like me, you feel miserable and want some advice about coping, talk to your GP or a medical professional. I can’t and I won’t recommend medication or treatments because I’m not qualified to and I don’t know anything about it. I know what works/hasn’t worked for me, but everyone is different.

Artwork by Natalya Lobanova

I went to see A Dangerous Method at the BFI with a close friend and artistic co-conspirator the other night and I knew I wouldn’t necessarily be satisfied, so I can’t really complain. Cronenberg is wonderful, in my humble and meagre opinion, and I have a huge reserve of respect for Fassbender and Mortensen as well as personal interest in the subject of the birth of psychoanalysis, so I was still tingling with excitement, but cautiously so, in view of the mixed reviews. It’s worth noting, also, that I am by no means a Keira Knightley fan. In fact I might be described as a ‘hater’, if we are to use trendy internet parlance. Despite this, I attempted to be as objective as possible, not allowing my distaste for her terrible, terrible acting to colour my opinions with preconceptions.

The film itself - and here we encounter the irony of this review’s title - shocked me in only one way: how staid, undangerous and lacking in risk it was. This is a film by Cronenberg, famed for his graphic violence, weird gore and unflinching brutal depictions of sex. This is also a film about sadomasochism, incestuous desires, adultery, and above all, Freudian interpretation and innuendo. How odd, then, that the film feels so surgically preserved in green screen latex. Pristine and exquisitely shot, but still, dead, as if the entire thing, including the actors have been CGIed into lush but fake uncanny valley landscapes.

The film tells the story of Jung (Fassbender), founder of analytical psychology and his sadomasochistic affair with one of his psychiatric patients, Russian Sabina Spielrein (Keira K) who also goes on to become a psychoanalyst and doctor herself. Viggo Mortensen’s depiction of Freud makes up the third point in the triangle, as he acts as disapproving mentor and father figure to both.

It is adapted from a play by Christopher Hampton, screenwriter of Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement, who has also produced the film’s script. And perhaps here we’ve encountered the film’s major problem. It is so glaringly obviously adapted from a stage play that I felt at many times as if I was simply witnessing a televised version, filmed directly from a west end theatre. It may seem deeply patronising to point out, but the great beauty of film is that its magic lies in the ability to depict things that our eyes are never normally privy to experience. In the theatre, you have to use trickery, either in terms of dialogue, acting or set design to fool an audience who have willingly suspended their disbelief, to depict otherworldy or panoramic happenings, when in actuality people are staring at professional liars standing on a wooden platform.

But A Dangerous Method includes little to no filmic flourishes or indulgences. Dreams are discussed, extensively. Strange, disturbing-sounding dreams, but we don’t get to see them. We’re presented with some of the greatest academic thinkers of the 20th Century, who were doubtlessly in possession of great, boundless imaginations, Jung especially, who is shown to be (or at least believes himself to be) almost frighteningly clairvoyant, and the sufferer of apocalyptic dreams. And yet we never see inside his head. He is accused of being inclined towards mysticism, but the film is so frosty, despite being constantly bathed in heavenly sunlight, and so dialogue-centric that there doesn’t seem to be anything mystical about him at all.

Worst of all, Keira Knightley, who is one of the few people in the film to not speak in the standard English received pronunciation (she affects a semi-successful Russian accent, despite the fact that everyone’s supposed to be talking German anyway), turns in a performance consisting of some of the worst professional acting I have ever seen in my entire life. She gurns and shakes, self-consciously, constantly seeming to be aware that she is acting. She juts her jaw forward to show that she is convulsing with lust, and does the hammy drama school intakes of breath and exaggerated posture that is more acceptable in the theatre, where audiences are much further away and therefore unable to discern subtleties. This sort of acting translates disastrously to film and Keira, despite being a film stalwart and Oscar nominee, doesn’t seem to have worked this out. She portrays Spielrein as histrionic and even in later scenes where she has assumed normalcy and is studying (as opposed to being confined to a psychiatric ward) she imbues her with comically affected way of speaking as if every line is a children’s book reading.

She may be dreadful (and really, she is) but at least she provides the film’s only spark of the titular danger, throwing herself into the role with the dedication and passion that if applied elsewhere in the project, might have elevated it to the great, powerful, fascinating film it could have been. Let’s hope Cronenberg’s next project, 2012’s Robert Pattinson starring (*shudder*) Cosmopolis, packs a more devastating and less sterile punch.