I made a habit out of walking my way through every single morning. I also made a habit out of listening, while I’m at it. Hence, my ipod most often got stuck in one of my pockets, or on the dirty bottom of my bag, it must have gotten confused while there. No more exit, I’ve told myself, and sent it off along with my fear of strangers. In recent times, it would serve as my exit from all that useless noise and, how else could I say it, all those grumpy humorless people infecting me with hatred. So, I got to hear the clap of my heels again, the song of birds rejecting winter, the burst of pink flowers in trees barely feeling like themselves, then people shouting on and probably at their phones before breakfast, people crashing over and into one another, wind blowing into people, ’cause, hey, there wasn’t anything else it could blow into. One morning I even thought I could hear the wind punching my bare ankles and making my hair straighten, rising with sudden consciousness upon its being there, totally defenseless, and yes, ‘cause it’s a fashion to use this feeling as a word, useless.

And God, did I not regret having to pass my mornings like that, in the 8 and a half chill. I kept thanking for it, I’m alive, God, how good does it feel. Living any given moment as it were the best. Wasn’t it? The same park, the same light, pavement and persons to run into. The same depressing and lively street heading to the white offices, adorned with those objects of routine and responsibility-driven grey and screened, screaming and entertaining objects, throwing me into an energy consuming blender, blurring the edge between thought and reality. Where do I begin, now – do this and do that, no, I’m not in the mood, search this and find that, make coffee, drink coffee, make tea, throw up, eat cake, have lunch and raw spinach, smile, oh yes, that’s the thing, now I’ve got the hang of it. Real life, like real people live it. Then leaveeeeee, find the coffee shop right where I left it the night before, my drink right where I dreamt it a night before. My self-blame and struggle of breathing in, breathing out, right where I dropped it, a night and year before. Then, back on missing track and on my way home. Bed, where I never want to get up from. I must be a real hero, but not a human being.

But the thing is, I can stop wherever I need and want to. Or something like that. No one pushes me to do everything and say everything right now and here. There’s so much freedom in these cuffs, after all. They leak out at the first sight of April sunlight. That’s the beginning of the end of the beginning, or something like that. Pass me the wine, please, and don’t forget to drive on.

A choice less likely to appear in my typical sartorial scenario happened to resonate with an equally less predictable patience to explore areas of journalistic prose which unavoidably made me raise a question or two – and one of my freshly bleached eyebrows. The clothing in cause is this T-shirt, bearing a line which isn’t peculiar by meaning (I wouldn’t have picked it, otherwise), but due to its straightforward translation into a fairly call-to-action message. The written subject in matter is a piece offering a point of view on our innate neglectance of our brain’s rational puissance and a consequent attempt of embezzling a few of its awkward dysfunctionalities. I’m not going to go on with and through the article, in case you were wondering, but I am going to try to point out a few spots where it hit me. Personally, as usual.

Habits. Possibly the most annoying of all. Unbreakable for most, hard to shut down for a lucky few. A damned recurrence of certain situations which instantly awakes a linear reaction in us. Or, the other way around, the search for specific conditions which we see fit to accompany whatever act we’re trying to pull. Either way, habits are, dare I say, almost never perpetuated by the sake of the repeated action itself. There lies a certain familiarity which comforts us, a certain desire to draw a bunch of guidelines which we can follow religiously, the drive to procure ourselves an identity by faithful correspondence with our acts. So we stick to the familiar, and we barely notice it. We become strangers to the person who we could grow into. Now, while that article which brought me here altogether was focused on the impressive amount of irrationality which scrounges us and on the writer’s vague attempts at welcoming a bigger slice of slippery reason into his everyday reality, I felt the need to refer to our idleness and dumb obedience to our shabby selves. I am not particularly fond of the rational side of things. Not only is it not achievable in real life situations, but I also find it deeply unpleasant and completely unmoving. I agree that others might feel bliss while promenading along their curvy convolutions, sizzling with power and vitality. But I think that’s all in their head.

So, taming your instinctual intolerance, inadaptability, shortage and inequity of memory, tendency of blowing every second thing out of proportion, either by trivialization or exacerbation, revisiting everything that seems normal and self-understood, laying our fears on a table and opening them up, taking distance from our comfortable spot, looking around with at least the slightest interest at what we might have missed in years and years of self-indulgence and sweet ignorance – and this is just to sum up a part of the hard task that awaits those who try to really drop out of their routinely exercised unhappiness and look for better pieces in the bigger picture. 

I’m afraid I’ve been feeling the cuffs tying my days even tighter. Everywhere I look, I look either with anxiety, or with a sense of dubious pleasure which afterwards seems to prove itself, indeed, made up. I work by patterns. When a plan or pattern governs my day, it is more likely to be a decent day. It’s tricky, because I also fight with my habits. There’s always an argument, but even when I seemingly give up to a rationally valid (the reason in case is always doubtful, I admit) course of action in a spontaneous manner, I must say, it’s anything but spontaneous – it’s a plan which ultimately won the fight with its counterpart. I never just do things from the gut. Even in the damn tram, I always stand in the same spot. I decide what to eat a day before I have to. I must plan my outfits the night before. If not, I’m sure to have a breakdown early in the morning, standing in front of the mirror, changing several rounds of clothes and deciding that I’m way too fat for any of them. I take the same way to work everyday, and whenever I have to reach to a compromise solution instead, I start feeling uncomfortable for not having fulfilled my daily schedule of walking in 5 inch heels for 3 or 4 kilometers. I panic when I find myself on a rainy morning and don’t have a shoe back-up plan which allows me to keep my best shoes in shape. I always have trouble leaving the house, wherever I go, no matter how well I had felt 5 minutes before starting the get-ready rituals. For the past months, I keep setting my alarm clock at 7.30 am and making plans for the morning, even though in 9 cases out of 10 I can’t get my lazy ass up before 11. And when I do get up, I accompany my morning cereal-coffee with weekend swearing. For the past months, I’ve been expecting to make more time for.. I don’t know exactly what, but I’m used to a constant overestimation of personal resources, so I’m safe except for the ridiculously few occasions in which I actually slam the door to my hidden territory with a ‘fuck it!’ grin on my face, just to find a room eaten up by dust and spiderwebs, where light bulbs have already burst spontaneously from that much boredom. Of course, I slam the door back, in defeat. I’m never gonna change, damn it.

Doubt, question, confront and argue with yourself. You’re not enough for yourself. That’s the box you like to fit in. That’s the box where I’ve taken shelter. Knowing what I like, how I act, what I think, should never seal any deal. I might be wrong, and the more I prove to err, the less authority my judgement will have. Just, look, look at myself. Thinking outside the box is not really about thinking outside at all. Here’s to looking at yourself. You won’t sleep for a while, I promise.  

* Wearing T-shirt Factory T-shirt, H&M dress, H&M by Matthew Williamson men’s sweater, Next blazer, Bershka bag & shades, Asos wedges

I’ve been struggling a lot with gravity these days. My lack of confidence pours from my mouth and eyes, pours over my carefully layered surface, makes me pour poorness onto a stingy red onion, its layers open like the leaves of a rude flower. I am afraid of not being able to measure up to anything that I’ve defined to be a deceiving trademark of myself. Have I ever doubted my strength? Always. Fear has always been mainstream in my vocabulary, the main destination on my mind map, the silent torturing judge of my acts, the spring of all heartbreak and hurt breaks alike, the feed of my submissive ego. Have I ever fought with it? I thought so, but I fear that even that might fade into dust once I turn on the lights.

There were moments I never wanted to leave out of my narrowed memory. Taking shots of my feelings and perceptions seems to be convincing enough to make me hope that something out there has a shot at turning into a sudden state of relevance. This hunger hardly stops; and when it does, it vanishes with such profficiency, that whatever you might eat, it stirrs  your guts and makes you vomit the crap out of your overloaded stock of shitty attempts at self-reflection. Self-abhorrence, self-loathing, self-depreciation, self-negligence – this is what I’ve been taught to practice on myself, this is why I have to instantly attach myself to anything that comes in my way and figure out a use for it. Otherwise, what may come of me? Not much, not more than what I’m used to.

I am tired, I say it all the time, it’s my bedtime prayer: I’m tired, could someone please ease my trouble? I’m tired of dirt, tired of sickness, tired of all things unavoidable, tired of seeing things against my will, tired of trying not to watch. It feels like having my eyelids super-glued to the skin above them and being constrained to watch the gore of this world’s tireless bullshit. I am so tired of having to size my words to an either smaller, or bigger scale than that which strikes me as natural at any given time. I look behind and regret my yesterdays, either for being smaller than I would have liked them to be, either for me not being able to raise todays to that priceless instance of happiness. I never feel it, until it’s completely gone. That is the kind of girl I am.

* Photos by Stefan Statnic 

I was the first to jump in as soon as it begun. Naked wrists and frozen fingertips, witty vulgar zapping through transparent minds, bending over and gliding through simulated drama, songs that cluttered my guts and thickened my dark veins, showing them off whenever I felt a bit more dead on the inside-out. It felt exciting in the beginning, I felt untouchable in the beginning, I trusted that, in all that chaos, logic would never find me, that however badly I fucked it up, I could always trick my way into the limelight. I cried and knocked my fists into phantom walls, then moved my ankles faster and faster and twirled in the overbearing ruffles of dresses which have always drawn iridescent maps of irresistible snares in which I felt most at home. Some days were quickly sealed and sharp as a razor cutting at the root of my childishness; others were choppy and dull, casting a slippery tide of insecurity on my back-and-forth trial steps. I never doubted the power of the stars that had been pledged to pull me out of the threat of insignificance, however hard I tried to cover myself away from their forgiving shine upon my instinctive misfit.

I stood in fear of not growing fast enough and out of mediocrity, I feared not standing up for anything except endless excuses and procrastination, I feared not being able to weave the nourishing threads of a hurtful apprehension in front of all the structures I wished I had never fitted in. Then, I would run away, diving into the foggy waters of nihilism. What if getting to a shore never really mattered? What happened if the same  futility had greeted me on dry land? Such was the disappointment, that I killed the mere thought that at least swimming might take me somewhere, somewhere different. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been the best place, the one which I felt I needed to be in, but it would have been the outcome of a struggle I could actually account for. The anticipation of failure caused the very worst escape-engineering – turning my back from the burden of making a choice and facing the necessary evil tied the knot of the halter even harder. The only fad which I never refused to grant myself was misery, to such great heights that it eventually felt like genuine happiness. I recognised myself in the beseeching grief of aborting bare possibility, in the blame I treated my confusion with, in sky-scraper standards to which it seemed inane to even attempt climbing, in denial of how unbearable my life had become.

I know that liking what I see when I look in the mirror is of no helpful purpose, but hiding beyond the corner and swallowing pain, weakness and cheap fancy cannot and will not drag me to any given outcome. Masks don’t help cover up  damage, yet self-reflection can also snug the most obvious. What is there left? Anything, but for asking that question one too many times.

*

Dress courtesy to MsDressy 

Photography by Ana Tatu

Hair & make-up by Monica Popmark

I have often pictured myself in tall rooms with stark chandeliers spilling their spark over my perfectly trim cascade of blonde hair. I would carelessly display my ivory teeth in countless poses innocently caused by a myriad of loud reactions to enormities generously performed by a pack of guests hungry for courtly disdain and disapproving grins. My dresses would always be ‘oooh’-ed and ‘wow’-ed and end up in threads of gold and pretty harmless poison, leaving flowery prints on polished floors deflowered by hundreds of unstoppably cruel, dirty and drunk steps. My second nature would readily absorb offensive politeness and over-the-top meaningful remarks on the ideal size of a woman’s waist and wrists and also on ordinary men’s preference for closing all promising affairs with women on the opposite scale and mental strength than that of their late, dysmorphic mothers. I would be the unpardonable  image of discipline, playing the piano with nervous, but never shaky, hands and then jump on top of it, shouting and clapping to the entertaining whispers of an awry audience, while at the same time cautiously avoiding to show my underwear to such a distinguished crowd – but surely that would be rendered impossible by dozens of layers of silk and organza. I would never have a problem with sticking an arrow into any fool’s condescending quotation on Marx or with spitting a mouthful of costly champagne in the face on any crippled gentleman attempting to pay his homage to my exquisitely firm behind. But then again, that would be impossible, considering the size of those layers of silk and organza hiding away the distress of my body and piles of letters from my equally distressed mind.

I would fill closets and tidy dressing rooms with gowns bearing a story of their own, cocktail numbers with lace and beadings and ‘I’m sorry’ notes to all of my regrets for missing out on silent occasions of playing the smaller, yet toughest act of a shaky, tiny, blue-skinned girl trying hard not to stumble in the waves of a gorgeous claret ball gown.

* Dress courtesy to MsDressy.com - there are hundreds and hundreds of dresses to pick from! I spent more than 3 hours just browsing through all of them and I should add the list that I’ve compiled for Santa or whoever might fill him in (expect a personal top 5 soon). Moreover, when you place an order, you can provide your exact measurements, so that your wonderful dress will fit as it should.

* Photos by Ana Tatu (ana cu a mic)

* Hair and make-up thanks to Monica Popmark

(to be continued…)