Issue #45 Get Lucky

I said recently to Kate that my exuberance in the author Caitlin Moran (website, wiki, twitter, insta) and obsessing over her and her work, and by obsessing I mean I've read all five of her books (two fiction and three non-fiction), in the last two months with four them read back to back since mid-August while setting up a google alert to notify me when Moran posts a new column at The Times. These books, in their wonderful ways, gave me the permission to be myself, all backcombed hair, Docs/Chucks, and black eyeliner. This discovery, this tacit permission, was, and still is, a revelation

Kate had responded patiently that she always hoped I would be myself, which yes, yes, I get her point but it is not the same. There are very definite and defined Lisa things: Jane Austen, writing tell-all blogs and newsletters, Chucks, cardigans, British things, and MINI Coopers; but to get to the heart of myself, to my believed true self, sometimes you need a reminder that there is someone, somewhere, who is as similar to you, someone you can connect with and get, unintentionally giving you, preciously finally, the freedom to engulf your "youness" even more than you had once thought and was gone forever.
 
So permission and revelations.

But first, an interlude.

I don't know where my obsession for all things British came to pass. I can recall sometime in the mid-90s when the bands that I love all happened to be British, specifically from Manchester, and I liked British TV shows and movies more than American made ones, and the history! We do not have castles, Romans, or Viking hordes here! To be British, I reasoned, was to live the life and place I was meant to live and be. (I have not gotten so far as to affect a British accent. I am not Madonna and I have some lines I will not cross. Also, I am not (mostly) that pretentious.)

Coming of age in the '90s, which while in my eary 20's I can honestly say that is when I became more fully formed, and having these desires and barely knowing anyone who liked British pop music or television shows so I often felt lonely. I could not discuss my love of Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, or Joy Division or massive design to go to Reading Festival (I WILL GO ONE DAY) or the latest period piece that just arrived on PBS. Sure, sure, most people were found of The Smiths and The Cure in the US, but that's like everyone loving Britney Spears or Justin Beiber.  I did not set out to find myself loving things where I locally had no connections for discussion and fangirling, and this was pre-internet as we know it days and the likelihood of finding someone to discourse on my favs in Grand Rapids, MI was slightly laughable. It was all tape trees and 'zines. My love just formed for this stuff and their rarity in the States simultaneously excited me but I also became more lonely because I had no one to share it with.

(In 2003-04 ish, when the dissemination of worldwide information was starting to rev up, I went to my local in Grand Rapids record store to buy Shaun Ryder (of Happy Mondays) solo album,  Amateur Night in the Big Top. The owner happened to be the person who was helping me so I asked for the disc in a congenial manner and he looked at me incredulously as he handed me the CD and said, "How on earth do you know about this album?" As I walked out to my car, I felt like I had finally gained entrance to a secret society whose doors I've been banging on for years and was finally let in for my knowledge of an ex-heroin junkie for a band whose last disc came out in 1992. (Happy Monday's one-off in 2007 was an anomaly.))

(As Steph recently said about me, I am proto-hipster while I rather like the phrase "aging alternative hipster.")

(Perhaps my "random discovery" is not wholly true. As I wrote the above I found myself tut-tutting how could I forget the few years I wrote music reviews for my college newspaper which gave me access to music and bands I would not have otherwise found. But again, the point stands.)

(Back in the early '90s when Oasis was a mere blip, they did an American tour and stopped at The Orbit Room in GR, which holds 1500 people. I was interning at the local alternative radio station then so I got VIP seating. One of the Gallagher brothers, I forget which, got pissed at the audience, threw a shoe at them, and stalked off leaving the rest of the band to carry on for the rest of the show. At the meet and greet, I got groped by the bassist. Ahh, youth.)

(It shan't be any surprise that my favorite band, Elbow, is not only British but Mancunian. My ear tends to wander to the working class bands found in England's northern industrial cities. This is not a forced thing. I hear a new band and I bob my head, look them up, and I am not terribly surprised to find out they are from Manchester or Liverpool. It would be until my early 30s I found the genre of music I loved so much from the '90s is called "Shoegaze" (so named for the bands would often jangly dreamy pop while staring at their shoes) and the more specific early days of Mancunian sound is lumped "Madchester" which came to prominence at the start of the rave culture in the late '90s. I just called it "music.")

(I've seen Elbow on their last three US tours where they only come to six cities each time. I lurve them.)

(Caitlin, my dearest best friend, name checks Elbow in the epilogue in How to be a Woman as thanks to their music while she wrote as well as name checks them in Moranifesto several times. Because, of course, she did.)

(The recent '90s revival means more bands, American and otherwise, are catering to the Shoegaze and clothing styles which YAY FOR ME.)

ENOUGH OF PARENTHETICALS. I AM NOT SIR TERRY PRATCHETT.

So yes. Back to my story.

In the last few years, I've, as they termed it, let myself go. I stopped wearing makeup even though I kept buying it. I backcombed and bought volumizing products but with a few hours, the hair fell like unchecked flan. The different color strip in my hair came and went from a myriad of colors to brown. (Another scary thing is Moran and I have similar "we have stuck our finger in the light socket" hair with the random color strip of varying hues. I was so enamored of this likeess I moved my strip to emulate hers.) I stopped wanting to be silly and fun and instead waned around feeling isolated and lonely. I just didn't care. Much of this has to do with my mental health, up and down like a rollercoaster over the years and seemingly getting worse, and once, eventually, the stabilization came, much of the excitement of the things I loved diminished greatly and I had no interest in discovering new things. (I have an internal battle of drugs vs no drugs happening in my head but that will come later on this week but it will cover much of this paragraph.)

Everything went grey.

I should confess Caitlin is not new to me. I've known about her for years, read her columns on and off, and watched her scripted TV show loosely based on her life, Raised by Wolves, a few years ago. (RbW is currently on Acorn.TV which is a streaming service I highly recommend if you love British TV and live in North America.) Caitlin put me off some time ago on a flippant comment she made so I went "eh" on her but now I do not remember the why or what for only that I was sorely disappointed in her. I'm not terribly sure what lead me to pick her up again but I checked out How To Build a Girl from the library and thought, what the hell.

Yeah.

Holy fuck christ.

Yeah.

Caitlin hones into the '90s and clasps it to her bossom in a tight grip. I was more or less, in a myriad of ways, reading about me. I did not come from a large family, live on a council estate in England, or write for a national music magazine at 17,  but Johanna's attitudes, beliefs, and ideas were wholly mine when I was her age. It was like someone climbed through my eardrum and sucked out my life and captured it in a book.

(I chuckled reading Johanna's thoughts of being a Lady Sexadventurer because in my early 20s I carried condoms with me because you "never know." My friends, boys and girls, were aghast. How DARE a woman take charge of her sexuality! Now I just buy and talk about vibrators on the internet.)

For the first time, in a long time, I felt like someone really got and understood me. When you struggle, as I have over the years, of what being "you" meant, due to your mental health, this is huge. Phenomenally huge. Defining your "youness" is a topic I've near beaten to death of the years because I never felt I could articulate what losing "you" meant when you're mentally ill and when people point out to you, when you talk about it, there is a very defined "you" except you don't feel it. It's all a show of what you think people want you to be. That you feel you are a shadow of yourself and struggling to find out how to gain it back. There comes a point where your wondering changes from "oh god, am I ever going to be okay?" to "Everything tastes blank and why should I bother."

I bring up the music and my love for all things British several thousand paragraphs ago as reading How to Build A Girl, and the sequel How to be Famous, were the breakthroughs I needed to right myself that years of therapy, which helps, do not get me wrong, has not quite gotten to yet. This may come off as supercilious, and it's not meant to be, but as a product of being mentally ill, working the system and the drugs, the goal is to get stable and somehow garner a "normal" life by which I mean you can have a job, connect with people, and not want to constantly kill yourself. In all of my therapy in over 30 years, we never once discussed what made me happy. Really. Dozens of shrinks and the purpose is now and forward, not what formed you, made you happy, or you liked in the past. The reality often is to make sure any fires are tempered. If you can get through today, you can get through tomorrow. And if you're like me, and you're high functioning, finally, you're kind of left to wave in the wind without really good tools to do that figuring out.

I've never really been without hope but Caitlin's books, while granted are not curing cancer, actually allow me how to taste that hope.

So, I imagine conversations with Caitlin would be had while sharing cigarettes and hard ciders while we dished on the latest gossip on our favorite bands and authors or danced silly to pop songs. We could share backcombing techniques and favorite makeup product. I am so enthralled with this idea that in the last week I've started wearing eyeliner again, backcombing my hair to get closer to god, while smiling wide at the mirror image before leaving for work. This week I bought plaid pants and a new pair of Docs. To some of you, these may not seem like big things, perhaps even frivolous, but for someone who has not worked in the last four years and suffered a nervous breakdown in that time, these things mean everything.

Finally, we are at the end. Thank you, Caitlin. For everything. Our paths may not cross unless you come to middle America, or we happen to be at a music festival at the same time, but just be sure a 40 something aging alternative woman with big hair and winged eyeliner thinks you're the most fabulous thing in the world and raises a cider in your honor.



 

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