Make up

I grew up in a small village, I spent all of my time laying in fields, exploring woods, climbing trees. When I started secondary school I was terrified but lucky enough to find some beautiful souls who liked my naivety and joined me in exploring the world in all of the teenage technicolour magic. We formed a group of about 15 people who also spent all of our time in the woods or fields drinking, singing and dreaming.

When I was 17 I lost everything, our home, half of my family due to the death of my nan and my parents for a while as we all stood alone in our grief. Trauma does weird and wonderful things to your nervous system. Mine was destroyed for about 6 years but my survival instinct kicked in. I quickly saw that in order to survive you could not lie in a field you had to work the system. I got an apprenticeship and a job, survival.

I still remember thinking ‘this is what you people do?’ You sit inside all day until you retire then when you stop someone else comes along and does the same forever. And so I joined the hamster wheel, rat race, what ever you want to call it and here I am, surviving.

Looking around I feel like this is everyone’s story. There comes a point in this society when you have to choose freedom or stability and most of our nervous systems are not strong enough for freedom in such a restricted time. This year more than ever I am feeling this, I think we are feeling this. Are we protecting each other or destroying each other? It’s too hard to say. Are we secure? Probably not. Are we free? Definitely not. So where are we? What are we doing?

I thought I was going to write more about make up in this rant as the very first step I took down the secure path rather than the free one was when my friend taught me how to do make up, I looked better with it on and that was apparently important so I stuck with it. I remember asking ‘how did you learn to do this?’ ‘ my mum bought me a book’ was her reply. I thought this was the funniest thing in the world, why would someone write a book about make up?