cool

I have always wanted to be cool. Obviously thin and blonde would have helped too, in terms of catching the boys, but I knew that cool was what really knocked ‘em sideways. I realise that it still does. It does it in terms of getting a job, keeping a job, staying in a healthy marriage, dealing with telesales, bank clerks, life in general.

Life is messy. We pay for and are blamed for other people’s cock ups all the time. Most people just swallow. Why can’t I?

Yesterday an email from a powerful source informed me that I was fast becoming a ‘problem’. I know that I have done absolutely nothing wrong….. except not be cool.

So in the wake of the email I meditate. At first I sit with my fury at the injustice and the incompetence and the misunderstanding. Then suddenly I am aware of my tendency towards self-aggrandisement; of self-importance; of believing myself to be on the moral high-ground. (I don’t think six formative years in a specialist music school for forty-two exceedingly gifted children helped much but then not everyone turned out like me – some killed themselves or set fire to buildings). These are not nice things to sit with, so I swap them for self-loathing, disgust. And Shame. Then comes the sadness, the profound loneliness which has been there since I sat picking my face apart to David Cassidy‘s ‘Daydreamer’ in an attic room in South London; the actual physical tenderness in my body. It’s agonising but at least it is real.

Something softens. I go from hot cement tile to cool mozzarella.

It’s a small beginning; realising I have long confused cool with hard.