I’ve been listening to Alanis
Morrissette. I’m thirty-two. I don’t
know why this is happening. One day, a few weeks ago, I felt the need to start
listening to Alanis again. It came from nowhere. No obvious prompting, just a
sudden unexpected craving, like the day a few years ago when I sat at Latimer Road tube stop, and suddenly
out of nowhere wanted to smoke, despite not having picked up a cigarette in
over a decade. A moment later I realised my hands were hurting, which is this
odd thing that happens to me when I’m stressed and busy, and for some reason,
that day, my body had remembered a response to stress from years and years ago,
and asked me to feed it nicotine. And in a similar way, I think, Alanis is an
old response to angst that I thought I had forgotten, but that when the right
set of circumstances occurred, I remembered it. This musical stress release was
buried deep in my memory, but throw me a handful of emotionally, and (at the risk of sounding pretentious)
spiritually confusing situations, and I turn to this angry, angsty music of my
teens and early twenties.
The day after boxing day I find a
clip of Unsent on youtube. I used to
love listening to Alanis confess the things she would have said to the various
men in her life, had she but sent the letter. Sometimes, when I listened to
this song in my early twenties it made me feel normal. I had many unsent
letters written in anger, in bitterness, in jealousy, in stupid over emotional
teenage angst and melodrama. Never send those letters. Write them. They are
cathartic. Sing along to the unsent letters of a celebrity, imagining her story
is your own, but never ever send the letters. I have made that mistake. I
thought I had the answers. I thought I could fix the problems of others, as
though a neat solution was what they were looking for. I thought I stood on the
safe high ground of good morality. I was young. I was misguided. I was wrong.
On the 27th December,
2014, sometime around midnight, I lie in bed, exhausted but wide awake, and the
words of Unsent hover around me. I
find that though the words fall to the same emotional place, of love, loss and
longing, that place has changed in the intervening years. I’ve grown up, and
I’m hearing what I didn’t hear before.
… Where this belief sprang from
is not entirely clear. It started as just a little thing, a hint, a fear that
she was on the outside, the outside of cool, the outside of belonging, the
outside of success. The girl grew up, and as other ideas and beliefs took firm
residence inside her heart/soul/strength so did this one. The easiest
explanation is that she believed this about herself because nobody asked her
out, if indeed that was a thing that people still did. This wasn’t entirely
true. There was lovely boy when she was fifteen or so, who admired her in that
intense and embarrassing was that only a teenage boy can, and he called her up,
and actually did ask her out, and she said yes, or sure, or some such thing
because saying no seemed rude. That was a mistake. At the same time, she
started to follow a boy, in a niave and hopeless kind of way, for nearly two
years, craving his attention, his friendship, his approval, in the way that
only a very well behaved, risk adverse, church going private school girl can.
Another girl, a broken girl, who lined her eyes with smudged black mascara, who had a bad relationship with
food, who listened to Tori Amos would tell her that she was too beautiful. That
is why, she reasoned, in the self assured way of a fourteen year old who has
been lying about her age, that is why he doesn’t talk to you/go out with
you/act in anyway interested in you. No, the heroine replies. No, and hindsight
hasn’t changed her mind. No, that simply isn’t true. And for the record, she
says, I wasn’t overweight then and neither were you…
Verse three of Unsent, is addressed to Terrance, who
was ‘open hearted and emotionally available and supportive’. Alanis recalls
‘how beautiful it was to fall asleep on [his] couch and cry in front of [him]for
the first time’. Oh, that was the line that got me every time. I wanted that. I
wanted someone I could sing that to. I had so much longing for what I had never
had.
Excuse me for a minute while I
yell at Freud.
Hey, dude, what do you know of
women, of me, of my sexuality? Don’t you for a minute make assumptions about
me, and what I lack and what I long for and what I desire. And don’t tell me
giving birth will fill all my aching, empty spaces, because so many people spin
that lie, but none spun it quite as absurdly as you did.
I am aware that many women have
expressed this at greater length and with more intelligence that I have.
… the unlovable girl wandered
through adolescence and on through her twenties. She watched the other girls at
church get married. She imagined her feelings of not belonging, her fear of
missing out, her unhappiness, her lack of success might be resolved if she too
was lovable, like other girls. She could be just as good a wife, just as good a
mother. She could live that life, couldn’t she? But she knew, that although ever since she
could remember she had dreamed this happily ever after for herself, deep down
she knew it was not for her because she was still, and maybe ever would be, the
unlovable girl. She was the girl who went out with no-one, who kissed no-one. She
was busy, and anyway, romance bored her. In fact it practically revolted her.
It belonged in other fairy tales, but not in her own story. She got on with life, got a job, eventually
went to university. Ran a youth group on Friday nights, sat on parish council
at her church, planned a Christian summer holiday camp every year for ten
years. There she was this young, bright,
energetic, loud, opinionated girl organising children and grown ups, arguing
and reasoning with people more learned and experienced than herself, being
useful, having a purpose. Sometimes those who were older than her, would ask if
she was going out with anyone (yet), but as if she had time for that nonsense.
. .
… She never had any intention of
straying from the path, of stopping to pick flowers, of talking to the wolf.
But time, and time again she did, because at twenty four the unlovable girl
learned to flirt. Or rather, she learned who she could flirt with, because
she’d always flirted. Goodness, she’d been doing that for a decade at least,
but now, finally, in a world full of performers and artists and creatives and
intellectuals she found her audience.
And for her efforts, the wolf gave her the consolation prize. The
unlovable girl, learned something she had always suspected, was not, it turned
out, undesirable…
**
In 2009, at a church home group
meeting in London
This year, this Christmas, when I
go home to my own bed, and lie there in the darkness, the absence of your/his/a
body so tangible, you almost seem present, I have a picture that won’t leave my
mind. It is a picture of a memory, of another Christmas, of another boy, from
what seems a lifetime ago. It is unwelcome. I don’t want to see it, but it
persists. I’m in church, it is freezing
cold, its Christmas Eve. I am on my own. I can’t remember if I had walked there
on my own. I feel like we’d been fighting. I imagine I asked him to come, and
he refused. I can’t remember. Earlier that night we’d gone to mass at the
Catholic church. His brother had wanted to go.
We tossed the idea around at dinner. I can’t remember if anyone was actually
that keen, but it seemed like the thing to do. I would go. I was not going to
sit at home while they went to church. I didn’t mind about the branding. We
threw on our coats and ran down into town. The church was full. We sat, gloved
hands in our pockets, shivering, two atheist Irish boys with a strange love for
the rituals of a church they never ordinarily visited, and me, a Sydney
Anglican. Dumbly we sat through mass. Not one hymn was sung by the
congregation. I felt like a spectator, an uninvited, unwelcome protestant.
Maybe I told him this. Maybe I complained on the way home. Maybe I gave an
annoying and ill-timed speech about the reformation. Maybe I told him it felt wrong not to have sung. I wanted to
sing. I wanted to be involved. Probably
I cried. However it happened, I ended up at the quiet Church of Ireland
In the summer, at an open mic
night in Oxford South
London . You are beautiful, you are desirable, and you are in my
bed. [But]. There is always something we don’t say.
And now, this Christmas, four
years later, that picture of him outside, in the darkness, in the cold, won’t
leave my mind. He used to accuse me of having a remarkable ability to see
literary devices in my own life. How did I fail to see this example, this image,
this picture at the time?
This Christmas, I remove myself,
or perhaps am removed, from the gaze of another, who also tells me I am
beautiful, but… but there is the pull of my ‘other boyfriend’, and his love,
community, expectations, and ideal. And if I’m feeling less generous, his
restrictions, his cage. Sometimes, when you’re at the door looking in, the
inside is the place of warmth and light, but often, even though your feet are
freezing in the snow, it is not.
**
“dear Jonathon, I liked you too much. I used to be attracted to boys
who would lie to me…dear Marcus…you had a charismatic way about you with the
women…dear Lou…the long distance thing was the hardest and we did as well as we
could…”
Once when I listened to this
song, I longed to know what it might be like to be able to tell the stories
contained in this unsent letter. I projected the petty goings-on in my teenage
life onto this song, seeing my foolish adolescent grievances to be bigger and
more life changing than they were. I hit twenty, then twenty one. At twenty
three a delightful boy told me I was a spinster. I felt old. I wondered why I
was not more sought after. I was (am) vain. I was fairly certain I was
attractive, that I was as good an option as the next girl, yet, I remained the
unlovable girl.
…The unlovable girl became an
adult. She stepped out one day and got distracted along the way. She wandered
on and off the path and flirted her way through life, because though unlovable,
she was not undesirable and that was nearly good enough. But fairy tales, are
also cautionary tales, and it turns out that Prince charming is not a prince,
and charm is not a quality to throw your glass slipper at. Sure it gets you
free champagne and dinner, and a stack of cheeky text messages. But it doesn’t
tell you he has a partner or that she is pregnant. Mr slightly awkward and un-cool
might flirt with you online, act bashful, and be as suggestive as can be
without being repulsive, then finally after many weeks hangs out with you in
person, drinks till late in the night, and because he knows he is escaping
interstate the next day, puts his pudgy stocky hands under your shirt, all over
you, and suddenly he seems repulsive after all. The unlovable girl leaves the
country, she finds someone who loves her, because that is what happens when you
open the cage door and fly out. Your little metaphorical wings let you embark on
that great literary trope of journey and awakening. And the unlovable girl
learned she was a loveable woman, (and there is much more to say about this,
but goodness I’ve said way too much already), but this wasn’t the end, this was
not to be her happily ever after, because lovable women still have things they
long for, and they project their longings on to another, because they are young
and misguided. Lovable women can still be lonely, can still desperately crave
recognition and belonging, can still be cheated on, still be left, still be
broken.
She would work with men who thought they were
rockstars, one who would place his hands on her thighs (over her dress, mind
you) to ascertain if she was wearing
stockings or pantyhose – she would let him, she wouldn’t really mind,
she may have even implied she would be wearing her suspenders and stockings – but somewhere it stung that this was the only
way she could remain in his good books. Another would take her out when her
heart was dashed to pieces and feed her pinot grigo until she could hardly
stand, and tears were streaming down her face, and he would tell her all sorts
of pathetic things, and she would go home, alone, and wonder how life had come
to this, and still another would surreptitiously take her hand at a party after
his girlfriend had gone home, and they would look at each other and in a brief
moment seem to admit to each other an impossible truth they had been dancing
around for over a year, and then they would let go of each other’s hands and
the moment would be gone. And the unlovable girl learnt that she kind of hated
being a desirable girl. Maybe she was too beautiful. Perhaps if she could still
catch the attention of the right boy, perhaps he would think she was
intelligent, interesting, thoughtful, generous, patient, lovable.
Better still, perhaps she could
be the lovable girl, and not need anyone to tell her she was. And the still the journey goes on, because it
is life and not a narrative, and the happily ever after is not an end point,
‘ever after’ is happening all the time, every day, sometimes happily and
sometimes not so, but still…
Today, when I listen to Unsent, I feel like I have now met all
of the characters. I know these people, some well, some only in passing. I know
what it is to have had these conversations, these feelings, these moments,
these friendships/relationships/flings/encounters that lead to these
confessions, these unsent letters. The song now hits an emotional space that
knows, but still longs, not for unknown experiences, not for the magical, mythical
cure all relationship, not even for evidence of my own desirability, but for
calm, for rest, for comfort, for honesty, for enjoying vulnerability and
security maybe in the arms of another, maybe in friendship or belonging to a
community, or maybe just for contentment, wherever it lies.
… still, but still, I’m still
looking at you, arguing with you, and yelling at you, yes even you Freud, because
still she longed for much, still she felt lonely, still she wanted to know how
beautiful it was to fall asleep on your couch and cry in front of you for the
first time…
…Dear terrance, I love you muchly. You’ve been nothing but open hearted
and emotionally available and supportive and nurturing and consummately there
for me. I kept drawing you in and pushing you away, I remember how beautiful it
was to fall asleep on your couch and cry in front of you for the first time.
You were the best platform from which to jump beyond myself – what was wrong
with me?...
--Alanis Morrisette—
---Unsent---
