I was served a white russian. As I watched the cream slowly filter through the layers of ice, Vodka and Kahlúa, I heard a group walk over, their high heels clacking sharply on the marble floor. I found myself pressing into the bar. Adjacent to me were two of the people from this group but the third, a woman in a long green dress, was leaning against me. Actually putting all her weight into my back as if I’m a post to pose against whilst chatting casually.
I lifted myself a bit, pushed back and looked round but the pressure remained. I couldn’t fathom any explanation; how someone could think so lowly of someone they’d never met to acknowledge their presence in the same way they would a piece of furniture. This was an expensive restaurant, more expensive than anywhere I could afford. Alan Rickman sat across from me, sipping wine with friends. Keith Allen was draped across the grand piano, drunk and singing to an audience that wasn’t listening. One of the Jacksons etc… I was dressed in my Topman Sonic the hedgehog T-shirt and faded jeans. I was alone.
Was she drunk? I couldn’t tell. Did it make me feel unwanted? (Out of a room of suits and money I was the abnormality to be shoved aside without so much as a glance away from their drinks and prosperousness,) Yes it did make me feel unwanted, unwelcome, looked down on. I suffered a blow to my self esteem. But then had it already been low to begin with? Was that the reason I was singled out? Perhaps it wasn’t my clothes or my obvious lack of wealth but me thinking about those things in that surrounding and being insecure, hunched over the bar, staring into my drink as I waited for my then boyfriend.
At work, for years some of us have struggled now, struggled to be seen as more than what we think our colleagues see us as being. We’re patronised constantly and encouraged to develop and go for opportunities only to lose out to outsiders who do as good a job but certainly not better. A recent example being one of the managers leaving. Three of us were trained to do the job yet in the time until they find someone to replace her, it has been decided that staff from other departments should take charge of us? This may have been considered a responsible move by management but don’t they see how patronising it is to agree to let some of us train and work as managers only when an opportunity arises to make use of that training instead the task falls onto people who have had none but are considered more ‘full time’ than us. AKA anyone that isn’t us.
I’ve learnt over the years that if you’ve been in a job for a while and you’re not moving anywhere, it won’t ever happen. Not if you don’t ask. What can I say to these people, my fellow team members, to raise their self esteem? There is nothing you can say because the situation is impossible.
I myself have applied for a position in the building. Soon it will be a month since I applied, I have heard nothing. I have worked for this company loyally for four years even during my time at ITN and whilst working for other companies. I have shown I have more than adequate skills, drive and passion to at least earn an interview.
Alas, no word as of yet. Perhaps this will change. But in the meantime it has been driving me insane. This lull, waiting to hear anything. I said to myself ‘I’ll just see how long they’re prepared to leave it until they tell me!’ But why haven’t I just asked them? Of course, I’m not sure of their answer. It comes down to me. An inferiority I’d rather not inherit through their disregard of my efforts to be noticed and taken seriously. While I may not have always been the most confident person, growing up I always managed to remain level headed. When my parents divorced, talking about it later, I told a school counsellor ‘…No, of course I wouldn’t have wanted them to stay together, in an ideal world sure, but the fact is they don’t want to be and I’d rather they were happy apart than unhappy together.’ When I was 18, everything changed for me, it felt like I was washing away all the denial and confusion I had endured as a teenager. I was working, I was out and I was experiencing so many things.
Up until 2010 I was the most confident I had ever been. What happened was the degradation of someone who 1) lost confidence in himself 2) Didn’t see point B, from where he stood at point A and 3) had a lot of bad shit happen to him in the space of a year. Summary? Disappointment with what I was studying. Getting a place at a great Uni only for it to fall through. Not a single idea I could develop into something to write about and here I am in the same position I was four years ago (granted, with so so many more experiences since then)
I guess for me, it feels natural to move onto something I haven’t told many people about. (Something that plays on my mind from time to time,) It may not make sense in the context of this post. But if it still plays on my mind, it still plays its part along with the rest of 2010, in knocking my confidence and festering in the recesses of my thoughts. I woke him. I put my hand on his bare leg and he reciprocated the affection. We started to roll and kiss in his bed and he took my boxers off. Later we were in the motions of sex, the routine, everything was normal. This was someone I knew well. It started to hurt however. I told him this, he tutted and pulled me (and consider that this intimate form of sex is not something I engage in with just anyone.) I was pushed and pulled about until I was in a different position. But it remained awkward, painful and not at all caring. This was a fuck but my protests were being ignored. I put my hand on his chest and I said stop twice. He resumed. Only he seemed to, in his impatience with me and the way I was being, become more brutal (I suppose is a word I’d use). What makes me feel great shame and what is my regret about this whole scenario is that I didn’t stop it. In my head when I do think about it, I imagine being outraged, someone I trusted treating me like a piece of garbage, I throw him off and tell him how dare he treat me like shit. But it was easier to take it. To wait until it was over and when it was he pushed himself off me with his hands, pulled out and walked out the door.
I’m not angry. That day he was an utter prick and I’d call myself one too. What gets me is how I felt. By this point had I become so worthless in my mind that I would allow this kind of treatment? I tried to talk about it. It’s hard to describe something like this without people thinking the worst. He probably holds this event with no significance, along with the other shags he’d had that year. To me it was a time of shame and it was a point I came to realise things were bad for me.
Things got worse. But the saying goes “Things will get worse before they get better.” Things are better, 2011 is a clean slate. I still find myself living with the fallout of such an eventful and self-destructive year. But I want things to be better. I want my confidence back, it’s still there in me – I suppose it is me. Sometimes it seems as if its just one bad thing after another. That there is a spiral. It goes down but you know what, it also goes up. Which direction you face comes down to a choice you make.
“All things splendid have been achieved by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.”
~Bruce Barton
Like this:
Be the first to like this post.
James Reid are discussing. 
B is discussing. 
I was waiting for my friend Dan, I had found a good spot to people-watch and maybe perv. This blissful scene was only interrupted when I gave cautious looks upward at the formations of pigeons lined along the branches of trees that bordered the road. Then I noticed a fellow casually walking up and walking down, in circular laps, around me. I didn’t think anything of it at first but decided to move as his friend (a topless homeless man) kept looking at me – when I had moved further down the slope in the shade of a pigeon-less tree I looked round to scrutinise the men’s shenanigans. The one that had been lapping the park was now carefully dotting crumbs of bread around a snoozing sunbather, much to the delight of his friend, then hundreds of pigeons swarmed down and pecked and fluttered. I felt a small bubble of fear then, in the pit of my stomach. There’s something about being the subject of someone’s interest, whether it’s good attention or bad, that makes me so self conscious – so I wonder in that case how is it that I am an exhibitionist? Ha.
There it was, my first home for the first nine months of my life, looking like a bloated tongue or maybe a piece of used gum that was hanging off from where it had been stuck. My sister and I scanned the photos the doctor had given my mum. It was a comic strip featuring the last moments of my mother’s uterus, and there was the long rod that clamped the ovaries in place and then the gore; a bloody scene my fragile male mind couldn’t make sense of. We sat either side of her bed, trying not to pay mind to the catheter bag or accidentally squash the drip leading into her wrist. It struck me how quickly the roles of the parent and child can reverse and that’s quite something considering how dedicated my mother is to her role (to the extent she is offended if you do not want/let her mother you.)
WordShock and 
Jo are discussing. 
Mr. Magic are discussing. 
Although, and I can’t remember who said it, the words “Once you have a tattoo, you’ll never be naked again” come back and haunt me sometimes. It’s whether you hold much belief in the idea that the body is a temple. I once did a photo shoot with a photographer friend of mine, known for doing male nudes (tastefully of course) and I looked over the photos and thought, ‘Where could I put a tattoo? Where would be the right place?’ For a while it seemed as though there wouldn’t be a place I could without feeling like I was tainting a part of my body that was just fine as it is.
Seras is discussing. 
James Reid 6:13 PM on August 25, 2011 Permalink |
“Is that something you enjoy?” that’s exactly what my mum says, each and every time….. lucky for me, I can’t blush…
Matthew N 8:24 PM on October 9, 2011 Permalink |
Dude I had the unfortunate experience of watching an episode of Sex and the City, the one with them watching the full on gay porno…. with my very conservative (at the time) uncle and aunt. very very awkward.