The Bower Bird

    I was born in 1985. My country was ruled by two women, Elizabeth II at the palace and Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. In my home, before I could walk or talk, my mother would become not just a single mother, but in her own way a single father, taking sole charge of discipline and DIY, maintaining the allotment and the car. My father was around, but he was more like an older brother than a patriarch, swooping in with his swish red BMW to give us presents, take us to the pub with his bachelor mates and let us watch violent movies in his chaotic home.

    I was always a very “girly” girl. Playing playmobile with my older brother, he’d construct elaborate battle scenes, always very detailed with front and rear fortifications, communication trenches, and battle command stations. I’d be working away a few feet away, preparing a canteen for the troops, and I’d make them all stop when I announced it was teatime. Our cuddly toys were all part of a big clan called The Mountaineering Teddy Bears. Whilst my brother’s bears were performing reconnaissance outings, setting up a base camp, second base and summit camp, my bears and I would have pilfered my mother’s homeopathy stocks for tiny white pills and these were carefully packed into little tins along with bandages and Kendall mint cake, because who knew what could might happen on the ascent up the stairs to the summit. When playing with my friends, our play invariably involved dressing up in heels and necklaces, a baby carefully tucked under one arm and a handbag over the other.

    Thus, you can imagine my surprise when I emerged from the cocoon of a village childhood and a small comprehensive school, to arrive at university and be told I was blokey. Perhaps it was because I needed to be shown how to apply eyeliner, perhaps it was because I drank pints not alcopops, and it almost certainly had a lot to do with my burping. But there were attitudes that separated me from the girls I lived with as well.

    I was always taught I could do anything, solve any problem, and I certainly wasn’t going to pretend otherwise to stroke any man’s ego. I might sometimes need help reaching the tin foil from the top of the highest cabinet, and I often can’t open jars, but I do own my own hammer and Swiss army knife.

    But under the tutelage of my new female friends – a species quite apart from my old friends – I learnt how to waste hours straightening my unruly hair. I learnt to wear heels that made me totter. I learnt the games that girls play to get boys to notice them. This was a very different skill to how I’d “got” my teenage boyfriend of two years (we hated each other, yet would end up together every time we were drunk, regret it in the morning and three months later we were in love).

    These new games involved knowing that your eyes look nicer if you point your face downwards and look up with your eyes. These new games involved sucking drinks through a straw. These new games involved a lot of pseudo Sapphic dancing. But above all, it involved feigning uselessness in order to get favours from boys. These favours would be requested in a baby voice.

    So my next romance went a little bit along the lines of … I fell for the darkly attractive dickhead in the year above. After an acquaintance struck up when I was the sixth girl snogged in one night as part of a bet (which would have been a warning sign to my previous self), I'd request he look over my essays (and deleted any changes he made, as he was an idiot), At the slightest hint of computer problems, I’d phone him up and ask for his help (and then bite my tongue as he pretended to know what he was doing). This almost total erasure of self-resilience and respect was complete when I pretended I didn’t mind that, although he didn’t want to be my boyfriend, he would like to have a lot sex with me.

    Six months later, I grew a bit of a spine and ended the situation, but the damage was done. I had gone from being pseudo-pathetic to really a bit of a mess. I’d lost my genuine soft, innocent side as well as my belief in myself and became wary, afraid and had genuine self-doubt where one I had feigned ingenuousness.

    This wasn’t the cute fragility that would make me attractive, it was more of a genuine weakness. Just beneath the surface I was an emotional wreck, liable to get drunk, take a stranger home and then cry once we were there. This continued for far too long. Waking up with strangers was a waking up call to myself, one that it took me too long to hear..

I was lucky. Life threw an adventure and a fresh start my way. I went to Spain and Morocco with a best friend, then moved to France and emerged, blinking into self-confidence. There were stops and starts. I went too far, people found me brash, unaware of how fragile I was beneath the surface. I still looked for my self-esteem in the wrong places (read: with the wrong men), but a year later I was well on the path back to loving my self. At the end of the year, I had a clutch of beautiful, supportive, loving friends, who gave me all the love I had been lacking.

    I still had one final step to make. I had to work on my relationship with myself. I now feel I genuinely love myself. This has nothing to with arrogance or egotism. Life is a long journey and there will only ever be one constant companion. In the past, I had treated myself in ways I wouldn’t dream of treating a friend or a lover. I lied to myself about what I really wanted. I drank too much, and I put myself into danger. I didn’t have the courage to seek what I really needed. I did not listen to my heart.

    And so now, it doesn’t matter that I probably am a little too self-resilient, probably a little too “blokey”. There are literally millions of men who will never find me attractive for this fact. But how about this fact: I wouldn’t want them to. I don’t want a someone who wants me because I need him, because I am just a pathetic little girl who needs a big, strong man.

    I want someone who wants me for my ‘feminine’ traits: because I enjoy to cook, to make a house a home, to talk about emotions long into the night. But I want to be loved for the parts of me that aren’t necessarily ‘feminine’ as well, for I am not afraid of spiders, I can tie a bowline knot and I love my tool box. In return, I will love you for whoever you are, wherever you fall along the spectrum, however you choose to define yourself.