the quitter
I stumbled into twenty-four with clammy palms and stringy bangs, the result of an uncharacteristic heatwave radiating through the Midlands that month. It was late May, the scales tipping ever so slightly towards summer, and I’d just come to accept that I was ageing out of the label I’d wished to embody all my life — that of the ‘early twenties’.
In the way that some children wish to be mermaids or astronauts, for most of my adolescence I wished to be ‘old,’ which of course didn’t mean old at all but instead brought to mind an image of studio apartments, friends with adventurous Barbie-esque jobs like veterinarians and florists, a strong sense of direction and the ability to navigate public transport. Beneath this sentiment ran the throbbing underbelly of romance — candlelit dinners, weekends away, men who weren’t ashamed to hold my hand in public. All of these images, to my sheltered, small-town heart, were evocative of a sultry and glamorous existence. After begging for someone to want me the way I wanted everyone, the only worthwhile kind of life would be one where I was adored at every turn. At the same time, I had completed such a long tenure as The Weird Angry Girl by the time I left home that it was impossible to imagine I would ever be seen as anything else.
Of course, the reality is quite different. I have plenty of friends, but they live scattered across the country (and in some cases, the world). There have been plenty of boys, but most of them have bored and disappointed me. All I really have to live on is what I find in my books.
I always knew I’d follow my friends wherever they went. Since we met I’ve clung to their ideas of taste, intellect, morality. I’ve ached to be near them, pining for them like lovers. In the days after we part I’m listless and weepy, I forget how to cook and how to speak; I barely know my own name. It’s not because I hate being alone, though it’s true that I can’t stand the quiet. It’s more that I’m so grateful to be included that whenever I lose that group, even for a second, I fear they’ll never want me back. My love for them is both grounding and weightless—it reminds me who I am when I begin to lose sight of myself and buoys me when I begin to sink under the force of my own neuroticism. It may be ungenerous to say that without them I am nothing. Conversely, it is only with them I am complete.
When Nell came to my birthday party last month they spoke about ‘the beautiful life’ I’d created for myself; a world full of everything I thought I wanted. As I watched my two friend groups mingle—I always think of them as my Birmingham life and my London life, even though we all met at university—and as I watched the table slowly empty of food, the paper cups leak sangria and tinned cocktails, Tom’s speaker run out of battery, I realised the only time I feel alive is when we’re together. I looked around the flat and thought, ‘this isn’t my life.’ All that next week at work, all I could think was ‘I have betrayed myself. This is not where I’m supposed to be.’ Everything I’d worked so hard for suddenly lost all meaning. And I knew then what I knew last year and the year before that and the year before that, but had temporarily forgotten. I knew that I’d only be truly happy if I could be near them.
When I went back to work after my birthday weekend, I couldn’t stop weeping. I clocked in at eight o’clock and had to excuse myself by five past. It wasn’t that anything was particularly wrong, though I’ve given up on trying to understand the movements of my body, the decisions it likes to make without me. It’s been two weeks and I haven’t stopped. On a particularly bad day, I made a list of all the things I wanted that didn’t seem aligned to my current life:
to be dirty
to wear sandals that show the cracks in my heels
to wear chipped nail polish
to wake up no earlier than eight o’clock every morning
to live somewhere with trees
to tie my hair up in a claw clip and watch little wisps fall about my neck
to be fat and hairy and beastly
the skinny, sleek body of a greyhound
to look like a maximalist collage
to be twenty-four forever
to be fifty-three
to work with my hands
to be the exception to the rule
I don’t have the resilience, the ability to compartmentalise, the relief of small joys, that will allow me to tolerate a life that I don’t love. I don’t have the guts. It’s embarrassing, how unable I am to push through, to ‘make it work,’ and yet I’m always determined I will. But at what point is it laziness, and at what point is it just the knowledge that I’m in a place where I don’t belong?
In the first week of my biochemistry degree, for example, I realised it wasn’t what I wanted and attempting to push through that ache only drew attention to it further. I requested a transfer after four months, only staying to complete my first year exams so I didn’t feel like A Dropout, though of course that’s what it was. It was humiliating, having to face my family after that. My father had bought me my own lab coat and goggles and called me ‘Dr Wells’ for two years. My mother had told everyone I was going to be a forensic scientist. I’ll never forget the barb on her tongue when she said, ‘I don’t know how you’ll ever get a job now.’ As if that was all it came down to.
I’ve never given up on London; if anything, moving away from it has only reinforced my blind love for the city, a love that cannot be explained or articulated beyond a vague claim of ownership. ‘Mine,’ I think as the country landscape gives way to Georgian townhouses and Wembley stadium, ‘all mine.’
Maybe it is a strength, that I can see so clearly what I do and do not want. Maybe it stops me from wasting anyone’s time. It would be so much easier to grin and bear it, to find meaning in my evenings and weekends. Instead I quit and quit again, looking for the right life to want me back.
love this and felt it deeply in my bones
you are so powerful