Breakfast.

The first time I really realised the wonder of breakfast was during study leave for my GCSEs, aged 15.

Fifth Of July

One year ago today I was sit in my room, hungover, on a comedown, confused, upset, worried and generally “not in a great place”. On the fourth of July last year I spent the day with my friends; enjoying the sunshine and getting very drunk. It was a great night which I blogged about – but I missed out some of the background details of that time; details that were not fun, or joyous, or celebratory, and therefore had no place on my blog.

Dear Virgin

Dear Virgin,
Hey. What’s up? I wanted to tell you a few things today, because whilst I don’t know for certain, it’s possible that you don’t know all these things already and I want to make sure that you do. I don’t know how much people talk about these days, and what people know or don’t, and I just wanted to get my two cents in. So.

Birthday Day Out

It was my birthday last week and as I’ve already documented my thoughts on the whole thing, it’s time to share what I actually did! My birth “day” actually spanned about 5 days as I had gigs before and after the day itself, plus a big meal/pub night with all my pals at the weekend. 

Bad Things

Bad things, like nightmares, like monsters, like demons, like pain. Like crime, undiagnosed and forgotten, or grief, partially healed but ever present, or absence, like a splinter you could never squeeze out and is now somewhere too deep for you to reach. Like babies you’ll never meet and boys you didn’t want to, roles you didn’t try for and parts you didn’t play.

Bad things are sometimes like a boulder on the doorstep, sudden obstacles that together you can hoist and move and eventually forget all about. Bad things like a flood in the kitchen that will require a new hob and leave stains around the walls. Bad things like a seed that got under the floorboards and turned into a tree that threatens the whole house.

Bad things in endless forms. Not knowing who will fix your wing mirror next time it falls off. Rotten oranges. Three-way conversations at one in the morning, one person saying we all need to sleep, one person off their nut with worry and pain, one person too far away to reach even if you were all in the same room. Bad things like the things you do not know you do not know, because you are too stupid, or inexperienced, or young. Bad things you should not know about, but you do, and you wish more than anything you could not.

Bad things turning your brain into a place of primal urges; fight or flight? Fear paralysis, or pounce and attack? Bad things that you just simply cannot explain. Bad things that take away your words, your faith, your hope, your trust. Bad things that just accumulate, relentless ocean waves, so that fully escaping seems impossible, and eventually even keeping your head above water seems like some distant and unlikely possibility.

Bad things like tripping and falling, and one day somebody will pick you up, and even with a broken leg you can still make it round the world if you take your time. Bad things like being the one without the broken leg who has to take two steps forward and one step back for the rest of their life to pick the other person up. What is that? Is that fate, or a life condemned, or a life sacrificed, or youth, or love, or stupidity? You need to just take your time.

Boyfriends

Boy friends who are stuck at home ill in bed feeling rubbish, but give you a hug as soon as you open the door because you had good news. Boy friends who punch the air for you. Boy friends who buy you lunch and tease you about the little things. Boy friends who buy you water and boy friends who bring you wine.

Boy friends you shared a bed with because there was no room on the floor and it was the worst house party in history. Boy friends you shared a bed with because you were too upset to go home. Boy friends you shared a bed with because they came to hang out but sometimes you need to stay in bed all day and watch The Herbs and that’s ok too.

Boy friends just in time for Christmas. Boy friends who go to the pub with you because your date was late. Boy friends who hold up three Christmas jumpers each so you can try on a dress behind them in a busy market. Boy friends who tell you that you have to get the dress because any date would ask you out instantly if he saw you in it. Boy friends who buy you the dress because you’re broke and you can’t see what they see and there’s a hope that maybe one day you’ll get it; who knows if that will ever happen but it’s nice anyway. Boy friends who’ve known you forever and boy friends who’ve known you a month. Boyfriends.

 

Sailor Moon

Sailor Moon is a manga series written by Naoko Takeuchi during the 90s. The story follows a 14 year old girl who discovers in an alternate universe she is the Queen of the Moon Kingdom, and that in the present-day she (along with a group of close friends) possess magical powers to transform into a Sailor Scout and defend the world from various evils.

The anime spawned 5 seasons and became wildly successful outside of Japan, especially in North America. It was before Buffy, Sabrina, Power Rangers and all the rest of the butt-kicking magical high schoolers we’ve grown up with and loved. Sailor Moon has been credited with introducing a whole generation to anime and manga (myself among them) and revitalising the entire genre of magical girls. But I didn’t know any of this as a kid.

I first discovered Sailor Moon when I was 7 years old on Fox Kids, a magic extra channel my Dad’s TV had. Sailor Moon inspired within me something between breathless, head-over-heels romance, and reckless, heady, addiction. I was obsessed, consumed with a breathless devotion, scouring the programming schedule, watching the +1 repeats straight after the original airings, endlessly telling my Fox Kids-less friends about the characters and plots and trying unsuccessfully to convert them to the power of the Moon.

This was before the internet, and everything I knew about Sailor Moon was from the show itself. It’s hard to imagine experiencing anything this way now, but there was nobody else who had seen the show to talk about it with (outside of the friends I forced to watch my own crude video tapes), there was no way to find out what happened next in the series after the Fox Kids episodes (they screened roughly the first 65 episodes of a 200-ep series), and there was certainly no option to buy merch to express my devotion. I didn’t know it was Japanese, or based on a manga, or even if other people watched and enjoyed the series.

Screenshot from the 90s anime.

These days I could have joined an active fandom, tweeting my love, searching tumblr for fan art, purchasing official merch on etsy, reading plot theories and story arcs on a Wikia. But as a 7 year old in rural North Wales, I felt like I alone was the only person in the world who cared about the show. Over the years my parents – though utterly confused by my enthusiasm for an obscure, complex show – did manage to procure various bits of Sailor Moon paraphernalia for me; the summer in America where we discovered an anime merch shop, the random shop in Paris with Sailor Moon t-shirts, a festival of Japanese culture in London (these days grown into HyperJapan) where a lady told me she liked my homemade Sailor Jupiter wand.

I was about 12 when I was able to use the internet and learn more about Sailor Moon online. This was still before the dawn of “fandoms” and on web 1.0, but I learned how little of the vast and complex storyline I had actually encountered, and after finding out Sailor Moon was based on a manga I saved up my pocket money and trekked between comic shops in London to get my hands on the imported comics.

The manga was a lot more intimate and grown-up than the anime. There were less high-school hijinks and “monster-of-the-week” fare. Serious romantic relationships took more of a central place in the story, and the history and backstory had a tragic angle that the anime never quite captured. Even the drawings looked more feminine and delicate; more mature. I devoured the 18 volumes through my teens. I’ve spoken before about my loneliness during my teenage years, in Sailor Moon I saw the friendships I wished I had in real life. I spent my time in that universe and related ones instead; greek mythology, outer space, music, Japanese culture.

The characters as they appeared in the manga.

These days, Sailor Moon is still something I love dearly, and though in about 3 seconds I could pull up dozens of fansites and dedicated insta accounts and have numerous friends who are also fans, it still feels like I have a personal relationship with the show – the way I did as a child. I’m not entirely certain children these days could experience something with the same sense of isolation; it seems everything is marketed with tie-in games, movies and merch to within an inch of it’s life. It’s only in revisiting the original series that I realise how deeply embedded the show is in my psyche.

As a child I thought Princess Serenity was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen; 15 years later and I am always drawn to white and gold combinations, owning a number of vintage white and gold crystal tiaras and a white and gold guitar. For years I’ve only ever cooked as a way to impress boys, just like my childhood favourite character Jupiter did.

These days I get paid to transcribe songs, something I first did aged 8 with the Sailor Moon theme tune, spending painstaking hours to slowly figure out the melody I so loved. I recently realised that one of my most used chord sequences in my own songs mimics the tragic, falling, chord sequence used in the original Japanese theme tune. And I’ve been drawn to sailor collars and outfits long before they became a blogger staple in 2007. Of course, all of those things could be a coincidence, but it’s hard to know how various themes and aesthetics can be imprinted on young minds.

Neo Queen Serenity

Sailor Moon Crystal, a new adaptation of the manga, was released last year. The release was accompanied by numerous bloggers talking about their love for Sailor Moon; new fans adopting the themes of strength and female friendship to fit a new feminist aesthetic; new merch tied in with fashion trends and tumblr tags of the day: iPhone cases, bags with cat ears, laser-cut plastic accessories. Sailor Moon hysteria was still in full swing when I visited Tokyo earlier this year.

In a weird way, I didn’t really feel like I could join in. I’m a huge fan of the show, but it feels like something personal to me, not easily expressed in an instagram flat-lay or a round-up “my favourite shows” post. There’s some things in the world where I’ll always feel like the connection I have is ongoing and intangible, and it takes me a bit longer to try and articulate. Like Amy, like John, Sailor Moon is one of those things. It’s easy to write me off as some crazed adult fangirl but I’m still figuring out the ways the story has shaped me, and I’m forever grateful.

How To Cope With Grief

This post is sort of a sister post to my post last week – I promise no more morbid posts after this. I’ve mentioned numerous times that 2014 was a difficult year in which a number of people close to me died, three of whom were very young (22, 25 and 28). I’ve unwillingly learned a few things about coping with grief; I am a slow learner, but I’m getting there.

This year, two of my friends have in turn lost friends of theirs. I thought I’d write this post, not because I have the answers on how to deal with grief but just to pass on what helped. Grief is always going to be an incredibly personal and intimate experience, coloured by your relationship and contextualised by all sorts of nonspecific events. If I’m honest, my grief is something I’m still processing, and perhaps I will always be reeling from last year. But here is what I’m learning.

Allow Your Memories
All the deaths immediately sparked off a flood of memories for me – memories that had been long forgotten came zooming to the surface. I couldn’t stop my brain if I tried. I literally stared into space for a week whilst my brain regurgitated all sorts of random moments I’d thought I’d forgotten. I jotted everything down as fast I could – not because I wanted to go back and read them, but because I wasn’t sure if I’d remember them again. This also led me to..

Write Down Everything

I also wrote down how I was feeling every day. I was so aware that what was happening was bizarre and strange and uncalled for, especially with those who died young. I wanted to document that time, how I felt, what was happening to me and to us. After Pete died, some of what I wrote down made it out into the first three blog posts I wrote after his death. I’m not sure why I didn’t blog about the previous people I lost; I think I just needed a new outlet other than my diary by the time Pete died in November and I was so frustrated and exhausted from the people I’d already lost that year.

Don’t Question The Dead
Another knee-jerk, subconscious reaction was questioning the relationship I had with these people, especially the friends I was closest to. I started questioning what they thought about me, if they really cared, times we had bickered, times I had failed them. I wondered if we really were close or if I was making things bigger in my brain, and I questioned if I was entitled to my grief and deep sense of loss.

It was awful. I’m not at all anxious or neurotic normally but it was inescapable, thoughts spiralling out of control and my mind reminding me of all the bad times. After the fourth death and the fourth spiral into Paranoid Land I eventually (to my shame) approached a family member of the deceased, who I was on friendly terms with. He essentially took pity on me, told me I was being ridiculous and to not doubt my friend for a second, saying that I had been dearly loved and if my friend was still alive he would have chosen me all over again. I echoed these words in my post last week, as they have been one of the most enduring pieces of advice (if you can call it advice) that I received.

The final thought on this horrific line of self-analysis is that when you doubt somebody’s love, you undo all the things they did to SHOW their love for you whilst they were alive; you ignore all the pints they bought, lifts they gave, times they shared, hugs and kisses and compliments and all the rest of it. It’s insulting to the efforts they gave to you and a terrible way to recall them.


Stay Connected
There were quite large parts of me that just wanted to curl up and avoid everybody after my friends died. I think that is important at times, but I also think you will have more than enough time dwelling in your own thoughts without purposely isolating yourself. It’s SO important to stay connected with your friends, even if you’re justing sending a text that says “:(” and even if it’s just to one person. Even the tiniest effort can inspire a friend to make the tiniest effort back, and eventually that turns into all of you helping each other out.

Turn It Into Something Else
For me processing these deaths has taken the form of a 12 song album and multiple blog posts. Songs and writing is what I do anyway, so it was no surprise really. Other friends talked about drawing pictures, getting tattoos, writing poems, cooking huge meals and even just pointlessly chopping logs to try and turn the grief into something else.

You Don’t Have To Talk About It
With each death, I found that almost everybody else immediately asked what happened. Not how I knew them, or what our relationship was, or how I felt, but straight off: how did they die? One person actually messaged me to say I’d “forgotten” to mention how Pete died in my first post. It is very rare for somebody to die in their twenties, so people are bound to be shocked and curious, and I understand that. But I can tell you now the cause of death seems very superfluous. The fact that my friends were no longer there was the real crux of the matter, and however they died does nothing to diminish the simple and overwhelming fact that they died.This sounds strange but another one of the things that most bothered me after the first friend of mine died last year (which was a suicide) was the number of people who could not relate. Whilst I’m incredibly grateful to the people who offered to talk or listen, I also felt like I had such a conflicted and nuanced set of feelings that I couldn’t possibly open up to somebody hadn’t lost someone in a similar circumstance. It’s important to remember that you don’t have to relate and you don’t have to say. A lot of people had an opinion on suicide without having experiencing it. I found it hard to articulate to people that I didn’t want to endlessly question my friend’s decision because I needed instead to just cope with the pure fact that he just was no longer there.

What Others Made
Death has always been a part of life and therefore people have always had to deal with grief and bereavement. This means there are millions of thoughts about death, about grief, about coping and about loss out there. There are films and books and documentaries and symphonies and songs and you can study them all and see how other people coped and I promise it helps.I’ve made a list of some of the films, books, music and TV that helped me begin to process my grief, and I will post about it separately at some point. By all means please add your own coping mechanisms below. I very much hope none of you have cause to read through this, but if you, then I send you all my love and I hope there may be something in this post for you.

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