Girl on the Net

Usually when I split up with someone, I’ll wallow in wistful nostalgia and take a little time to say goodbye. I’ll be gutted, of course, but sadness is familiar and life has helpfully taught me that it will pass. This time it’s different: I’ve found myself frightened and destabilised – turning fear and despair inwards till the panic of it starts to choke me. Life goes on, though! Unfortunately, it kind of has to! Despite my most fervent wishes, I am not allowed to just shut down all my organs and give up the ghost! This is partly because my lovely friends won’t let me. Here are eight things I have been offered by kind people who want to comfort me in the darkness.

1. Cocktails. Actually, many different types of drink. I’ve had delicious rum-based cocktails and pints of Thatchers and buckets and buckets of wine. Naturally, drowning oneself in wine when you’re sad isn’t always a sensible option, especially when the friends who brought it eventually leave and I find myself drunk and alone. But still. It’s lovely in the moment.
2. A hard, thorough beating. Sometimes the only way to process emotional turmoil is with a large helping of physical pain to take your mind off it. Recently, I find myself wanting to fling my physical body as far from the past as possible: it’s comforting to know that there are firm hands waiting to catch me.
3. Dinner. I’m not hungry, but the offer means the world.
4. Flowers. It might surprise you to learn that I’m a ‘flowers’ kinda girl, but I am. I love being given flowers – it makes me feel pretty and special. I wake up every morning and look at my flowers and remember the friend who rushed round to bring them, and the ways she helped me remember who I am.
5. Solidarity. This is the most valuable one. Messages of support and sympathy and empathetic anger. In the absence of appropriate emotions of my own, I wrap my friends’ around me like a blanket.
6. An invite to a very kinky party. Am I going to do this? Am I brave enough to do this? Is ‘right now’ really the appropriate time to don a corset and fishnets and massive stampy boots and join in with strangers as they beat each other up? You bet your sweet bruised arse it is! Join the Patreon hangout for a fun little preview.
7. Getting off our tits and then going to a trippy immersive art exhibit. As one of my good pals often tells me: sometimes you have to cry about it, sometimes scream into a pillow about it, but sometimes you just have to do some drugs about it.
8. A trip to a rage room to break stuff. I’ve saved the best for last here, because I wanted to give this some space. Long term readers… do you remember Toyboy? The subby little fuck who once saved all his spunk for a month so he could drown me in it come the 1st of December? This one’s from him. We stopped shagging a long time ago but we’ve stayed in touch. He is a very supportive friend with huge ‘GO YOU, YOU ABSOLUTE BADASS’ cheerleader energy, and when I told him The Story of the break up, he immediately googled ‘rage rooms near London’ and started planning a trip.

We donned boiler suits, gloves and safety masks, put on our playlist of formidably smashy songs, then each grabbed a crowbar and fucked some shit utterly up. It wasn’t just the actual breaking that was satisfying – though honestly, if you ever get the chance, I thoroughly recommend taking swings at old crockery and glass with a solid, blunt object (in a safe manner, with appropriate protective equipment!). It wasn’t even the fact that I was so touched he’d be kind enough to plan a bucket-list adventure just to rip me out of my misery. Fundamentally, the rage room trip was powerful because it helped me remember that there are ways to deal with life’s slings and arrows that don’t all revolve around panic and self-hate. Anger’s a valid feeling too. As long as you don’t spit it into the faces of people you love, or externalise it in other harmful ways, you’re allowed to be angry sometimes.

I am allowed to be angry.

By the time we finished, we were both grinning and sweating and panting and utterly satisfied. Nothing in that room was left in one piece, except for our crowbars, and us. The shattered wreckage of the apocalypse we’d wrought did a great job of reminding me that I was still in tact.

GO ME! WHAT AN ABSOLUTE BADASS.

We wrote on the walls so that future visitors would know they were in hallowed company, then left on a massive high to find the nearest pub for a post-smash victory pint.

Photo courtesy of Toyboy. He is a wrathful god.

When bad things crash into your life, it’s often hard to find your way back to ‘normal’. You might cry about it, or moan about it, sometimes you’ll drink or do drugs. I am not necessarily recommending the latter, by the way – as with all this stuff, your mileage may vary. I’m just making clear that it happens so that those of you who do it don’t feel alone. Personally, while we’re on the subject, I also took up smoking again. Which is genuinely the most self-harming decision I could have made short of… well… you know. I’m trying to be kind to myself but present-me is incredibly fucked off with past-me for making this awful decision. I’ll knock it on the head, for sure, hopefully before I put this chaotic blog post live, but holy shit what a schoolgirl error. Those of you who’ve successfully quit smoking, I can tell you from the Dark Side that buying one pack ‘just to get me through today’ is extremely unlikely to end there. Don’t do it.

If life gives you lemons you can’t always make lemonade, at least not to start with. You cry about it, panic about it, get spanked about it, sometimes you do drugs. Sometimes smoke five cigarettes in a row about it, then hate yourself even more than when you sparked that first one up.

For recommendations on what to do when you find yourself utterly broken, my only universal tip is please please talk to your friends. The good ones will give you support and distraction – helping you find ways to deal with your pain that don’t end up hurting you further.

Because, yeah, Toyboy’s got a point: sometimes you’ve just gotta break stuff about it.

TB and I getting ready to fuck some shit up.

Note that there’s a time delay on publication – I am no longer in a terrible sad headspace, I promise. I’m not smoking any more, either, although that’s a wobbly promise – check in a month and kick me up the arse if you still smell smoke. I know this post is a right old mess, but I hope it is helpful for someone who might be struggling in the same way I was when I drafted it. Life goes on, there is happiness and opportunity right round the corner. So break stuff if you need to, drink about it if you like, just make sure you stay here to greet the joy that’s coming.