Your Name's Not Down

Tracey Emin, Katy Hessel, Bryony Gordon and me.

Last Friday, on International Women’s Day, I was lucky enough to be invited to hear Tracey Emin being interviewed by the magnificent Katy Hessel, who has a Substack you should subscribe to if you’re interested in women and art (and an iconic book). I had, for the first and possibly only time in my life, been put on a guest list. My name was down, and I was going in. I couldn’t believe it.

And therein lay the problem, because for me that really wasn’t a turn of phrase. That turned out to be an actual, solid belief. I genuinely couldn’t believe it. I had told very few people I was going to this event because the voice inside my head said: ‘It’s a trick. Nobody would invite you anywhere. You’ll get there and they’ll look at their clipboard and say, NO. NOT YOU. That will happen in front of everyone and you will be drenched in shame and have to go home and relive that moment a million times before you die.’

This particular voice has been a constant invigilator of my activities. Over the years I had learned to drown her out. I was very much a ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway,’ not for any deep, spiritual reason. It was more a matter of practicality. I simply forced myself to shout: ‘LA LA LA - I’M NOT LISTENING’ louder than the voice that was telling me that I wasn’t allowed here. In these therapy times, that voice has got louder and the forcing myself technique has become more difficult. This is healthy. It means that I can’t just keep doing the same stuff and hoping for different results, which as we know, is a sure sign of insanity. It may be healthy, but getting from the: ‘This is a tiger trap and everyone is hoping that you will fall into it,’ to ‘I have a right to be here and I’m owning my space,’ is difficult, difficult, lemon difficult. That’s where I found myself. I was very much amongst the difficult lemons.

On the day I had a migraine. I dosed myself up and got through the event by white knuckling it. It was so difficult to sit still, to allow myself to be present and to take the gift that had been so generously offered to me. Afterwards, there was the opening of the exhibition; We Do Not Sleep, which we were all invited to stay and see. I managed twenty minutes before I called Jason to come and get me. In the car on the way home I heated up to a temperature approximating the molten face of the sun and sobbed for half an hour. It was intense. Far too intense for what was ostensibly sitting on a chair for an hour and then looking at a bunch of paintings. Naturally I took this anthropological experiment of me to my therapist this week.

This voice. This voice of NOT YOU and YOUR NAME’S NOT DOWN and BE ASHAMED. This voice is from school. This voice is from the bullies who said one thing and did another. It’s from the kids who said we were in this together and then left me alone to take the blame. This voice is about the kids who loudly talked about me and all my failings in my presence. It’s all the sneers and slights, the taunts and exclusions of childhood. I was never not invited to things. I was invited to things and then set apart. I had friends, but I had friends in the way of children whose tempers and whims were mercurial and who were as quick to turn their back as they were to welcome me in. I was comprehensively othered in so many ways growing up that I learned very quickly to fear what looked like the kindness of strangers because it might well be someone taking my hand just to push me into that tiger trap.

It’s not that all this learning was bad. This distrust has served me on numerous occasions. It’s helped me navigate the seething, school playground that is social media with aplomb. It’s allowed me to spot people who are not all that they seem and to survive in choppy social waters. My approach as an adult has been to fear the worst and allow myself to be delighted if I am proved wrong. It’s cynical, but it has worked.

The downside is that I get very weird around events like the Tracey Emin talk. I used to deal with these kind of things by dissociating madly and going through the entire event regarding myself through the wrong end of an emotional telescope. The day after I would always have a migraine, as all the pent up stress and fear in me galloped for the exits. At the Tracey Emin talk, I was fully present in my body and it was horrible, but it was better than hovering twenty feet outside the room in a bubble. Now I want to be present and enjoying the moment rather than anticipating torture round every corner.

Earlier, when I was describing the voice inside me, I initially described it as ‘toxic’ and ‘mad.’ I deleted those words. That voice is not toxic or mad. I am not mad for thinking that bad things might happen to me if I trust other people. Bad things did happen to me when I trusted other people. That voice is the voice of bitter experience.

I recently read Bryony Gordon’s book, Mad Woman (Bryony has a great Substack, too) in which she talks about the resurgence of her OCD and binge eating during lockdown and how she was and is tackling it. Something she wrote really struck a chord. She said:

‘Objectively, I have never actually looked madder. But something dawns on me…I am not mad and I have never been mad. The OCD, the alcoholism, the alopecia, the eating disorders, the depression, the endless fucking anxiety…they were all completely appropriate. They were my brain trying to show me what was wrong with my life. They were a complex response to a simple truth; that I have never accepted myself as I am.

My mental illnesses were actually healthy brain responses to living in a world that only wanted me good. A world that wanted me small, compliant, biddable; that wanted me not to take up too much space that might be better used by someone else,’

When I dissociated myself out of rooms into which I had been legitimately invited, I was doing the work of the bullies for them. I had learned to believe that I was so unacceptable, that it was better to take myself out before someone did it for me. I got my coat.

When I drowned out the voice in my head by shouting over it, I wasn’t listening to myself and my very real concerns. I was doing what adults had been doing to me all my childhood; ‘You’re not afraid of that. Don’t be silly.’

When I branded the voice in my head as other, as toxic and mad, I dismissed what it was trying to tell me. I had decided that that voice was the voice of the people who had hurt and betrayed me. I thought, when I began this piece of work that my job was to evict those people who lived rent free in my head.

What I realised was that this voice is my voice. It is the small, scared voice of experience that is trying to save me in the only way it knows how. It’s the voice of little me, trying to protect me. It’s not toxic or mad. It’s just tiny and lost and doing the best it can.

For all these years I have been treating small me like others treated her. I have made her feel mad. I have pushed her out when I should have invited her in. I have talked over her when I should have listened. I have othered her until the only way she could appear has been in extremis or through means by which I was able to continually reinforce the wrong message to myself. I’m telling myself the wrong story here. I had forgotten to put myself on my own guest list. My job is to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

That’s quite a gift to give yourself on International Women’s Day.

And Tracey? Well, she was the icing and the cherry on the cake. Tracey’s art always connects me to myself. It is work that opens me up and never fails to show me something deeper and wider than I thought was possible to experience in an art gallery. Every time I look at one of her pieces I find something I recognise, something viscerally alive and powerfully raw that points a finger right at me, that gets to the meat of the matter. Whatever the matter might be.

She said so many things that mattered to me during that hour on stage. It felt like I was at an evangelical prayer meeting at times. I wanted to stand up, throw my hat in the air and shout ‘Hallelujah!’ I am British and was on the verge of an huge panic attack the entire time I was in that room, so I sat quietly and did a lot of vehement nodding instead. It is the way of my people.

At the end, she was talking to a woman who had asked for advice as a 59 year old, who was just finishing her first year at art school. Emin replied by talking about how she was good at long distance running at school. She said that it was something she did her way. She said something like: ‘I just ran at my own pace. I ran and ran and ran. I didn’t look back. I didn’t think about anything else. I just ran for myself.’ It’s a pretty good metaphor for art and for life.