by
Amy Key
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Anyone who eats at my table is loved there – and I confess to feeling relieved that I don’t find myself preparing meals for people I might only consider an obligation. I don’t have to perform as someone’s partner with the joint diary, the tit for tat of mutual social upkeep. I try to think of the kitchen as a theatre of self-creation. Sometimes it’s as simple as putting pickles in a pretty dish and laying the table. Or slicing up fruit and arranging it on a plate that makes the colours vibrate. Other times it’s the rejection of restraint when cooking for one. I always feel defensive when people say ‘I don’t bother when it’s just me.’ It’s not that I don’t value convenience and simplicity – I love supermarket tortellini and instant noodles as much as anyone – but I infer from their words that they don’t think I am worth it. I’m not saying that cooking myself a five-pan, six-hour meal is a radical act, but it says my pleasure is worth investing in, is worth putting love into, even if I don’t always believe that, even if sometimes I feel profligate, greedy, unsatisfied.
i like this
Self-love has to include a disregard for how other people might perceive me, and living as though life is in the present, rather than something that will start in earnest once certain thresholds have been passed. I sometimes have to say aloud to myself: you do not agree that life’s worth should be measured in this way. Don’t give the idea the authority to direct your self-criticism for not measuring up. It feels like a life’s work. Repeat it until you mean it. Say it like a friend would.
My default mode of self-love hasn’t fallen into either of the categories I defined earlier. Mine has been to spend money. Through spending I hoped I’d find a way to like myself more. Be more confident. Be someone people wanted to spend time with. This false promise of love got me into debt, made me indulge every but why shouldn’t I voice in my head, buying things for myself, paying the bills when out with friends, never saying no when I couldn’t afford to do something, showboating, until debt became a way of getting through the month for necessities like travelling to work and the weekly food shop. Paying the minimum payment on huge credit balances and then spending back up to the limit. Ever since I was eighteen and was first offered credit and an overdraft, I’ve amassed heart-thudding debts, the kind that make you dissociate, as though the debt is a fungus growing in the dark that you have no hand in. How did it get like this? I’d ask myself, clueless.
ugh the self-pity in this is deeply upsetting
I know there’s a relationship between the way I’ve spent money to try to create an image of myself that might appeal to others, and the times I’ve desired to be loved by men who were indifferent towards me. To be cured of the want for approval from those who will never give it, those who I have ambivalent feelings about. That seems to be the task I will always work at. To spot when I’m craving a status that I don’t believe in. Then there’s the Liberty smock dress. My intuition told me the dress would most probably not suit me, but I wanted to buy it anyway, to be a woman who could look dainty in a loose, old-fashioned dress. All clavicles and flatness. Buying the dress was a rejection of my body, which would not fit the image of me in the dress that I had in my head. If the best things in life are free, the best of all is romantic love. How much do I need to spend to fill the gap love’s absence has made?
the self-pity!!! ugh
A fear I often return to is whether intimacy of the self counts. Does self-knowledge have to rebound from another, be in collaboration with someone, to give you the best look at yourself? Otherwise, might I only be hearing myself as echoes? I’m afraid that if I am not seen, heard and observed in the smallest, pettiest, most inconsequential moments of my life, my most basic nature might always be slightly concealed from me. As though my one true self is being withheld by the lack of romantic love. If I try to locate that nature myself, what comes to mind is someone whose ego can be hurt by returning home from a trip to find only junk mail has arrived in their absence. Occasionally I try to catch myself in the act of being me, listen back to the snores, coughs and murmurs captured on my sleep app. I find this self-surveillance creepy, can only bear it for a few seconds, but I do it because I am desperate for feedback. Desperate to know what it is I need to change about myself. I’m afraid that it was my fault I was alone when I heard the worst news of my life; that when I received the most joyous news in my life, again, I was alone. I’m afraid these things tell me that I have done my life wrong. I’m afraid I might not ever truly know myself. Then these thoughts clam up. I’m unable to face them and I hate myself for the indulgence. I know that if you ask yourself hard questions, you must be prepared not to find an answer. You must be prepared to admit sometimes your questions rise from self-pity, helplessness, envy.
i think i find self-pity to be even more repulsive when it's acknowledged. when the recognition of it is not enough to compel an overcoming
In my youth I believed that to go on holiday abroad was to acquire glamour. All it would take was one week in a sunny European resort, an immersion in strangers, and I would be granted access to it. Become liberated from my homeliness, small-town experiences, from the daily sense of making do with hand-me-downs, bland food, the thudding boredom of schooling. I perceived glamour as terrific ease in the world, erudition and imagination, with no labour or artifice to my conversation, mannerisms and style. A polishing of what was latent within. In this way, travelling abroad seemed to parallel the idea I had of romantic love, that it was my destiny, and with it I would step into a truer self. I wanted to be like one of the kids at school, who after a break would walk back into classes with streaks in their hair from the sun, skin pale around their eyes from wearing sunglasses, with the swagger of chaste holiday romances. A temporary celebrity in the playground. My own family holidays were infrequent, domestic and unphotogenic.
appreciate the honesty but this is sooo annoying
Each night the hotel staff would set up a table for two, with a small beach fire and hanging lanterns, at the apex of this view I first had. They advertised this as the ‘where the waves break’ table. I both wanted to eat at this table and knew I could not subject myself to the scrutiny of it. Is she a divorcée? Was she jilted? Why is she here alone? These questions were not simply the paranoid thoughts of someone holidaying solo, they were the questions in the minds of the couples holidaying there, who probed me – the why? pressing behind the actual questions they asked, the slightly pitiful way they invited me to join them for a drink or an excursion. I did not take them up on it. It can seem an affront that someone would prefer, would find it more enjoyable, to be alone. When I’m sat at a table alone, I wonder how I can indicate to others that I am not waiting to be joined by someone, I don’t desire that to happen. I am alone without regret. But it would be better to reach a point where I’m free of thoughts of how others perceive me.
omg lady CHILL
I’ve just returned from a week in Tenerife, my first out-of-the-country trip since LA. It made me smile when one of the waitstaff at the hotel said to me, ‘hey I love your style – eating alone, with your bottle of wine and your book and your nice blue shoes.’ I had ordered a bottle of wine from her to eat with my meal, asking to take it back to my room afterwards. I’d wanted to get into my pyjamas, have a glass of wine and watch TV in bed. I’d taken my habits with me. I inch towards my holiday persona, who doesn’t have movie star glamour, who isn’t concerned with artifice, but is in communion with her own wants, needs and pleasures. Even if I know a timidity might set in, as though all my powers of aloneness have been spent by the heroic act of arriving elsewhere, on every trip I relearn how to be alone. I’m still travelling, travelling, travelling.
this passage is closer to what i want from her. just do what you want lady who cares
In my twenties, air travel became illogically affordable. It was easy to buy return flights to Spain or Poland or Italy for the cost of a new pair of jeans. I took one or two trips a year – short holidays in European cities like Turin, Bratislava and Paris with friends. But the glamour I thought would break out of me, like a fascinating fossil concealed within a drab stone, didn’t seem to arrive. I still felt timid in the places I was in. Insecure and unsophisticated. I’d always be travelling on the cheap, eating emphatically beige meals in my hostel bedroom, drinking so much I’d come home feeling poisoned. I did get things from these experiences though – I became enamoured with the details of places. A spectacularly huge light fitting in the foyer of a run-down communist-era hotel in Bratislava, which looked like a retro schooling aid that would be used to illustrate atomic particles. A meal in Turin, at the point where hunger turns to derangement, of mashed potato and a slice of margarita pizza. The only things my friend and I could decipher on the menu. But I itched for the kind of travel I thought went hand in hand with romantic love. I wanted the staged photos at sunset, every cliché – hot tubs, candlelit dinners, a personal infinity pool, to suddenly look chic in a wide-brimmed straw hat. I thought this type of holiday was my natural next step. I thought that sort of romance was my natural next step. A progression beyond one-night stands, beyond the constraints of my earliest relationship, where I at first lived at home, then later had a student’s budget where even a romantic meal out was unlikely. I ached for the status of relationship that a luxurious holiday would make obvious. In my imaginings I was going to have epic day sex in a white-washed hotel room with the breeze billowing the curtains, sleep with a book over my face next to a pool, carefully adjust the straps of my swimwear to even out a tan. A man who loved me close by with sunscreen or a fresh cocktail. In these holidays, worries, self-consciousness, would fly away, easy as shaking a tablecloth free of crumbs. But this has never happened; in fact, the entirety of my sexual encounters have been in England, something that feels humiliating, as though my sex life has been hopelessly provincial.
this feels honest at least
[...] Looking back on my diary from that time was revealing. I wrote often about feeling suffocated by him, being repelled by his declarations of love, loving him but not feeling passionate about him, finding him pathetic. I was shocked by my cruelty. I’d written, ‘God, men must have felt this way about me a million times and it’s awful.’ Suddenly empathising.