there was always a space especially for teenagers like us and I could relax and be myself there. I didn’t feel like I fully belonged, most of the other juves1 knew each other outside of these camps, their families and lives were intertwined beyond the time we spent in a field and in my mind this was their space. I wasn’t the same as them either. They didn’t seem to have the kind of ambition I did. They weren’t interested in things and stuff like I was. I wanted consumerism. I wanted the status a job title gave. I longed for the badge a fancy car provided. I ached for external validation and proof that I belonged. They belonged here, and I was an inbetweener, I wasn’t quite one of them and I wasn’t quite a normal person.
However these people were kind and inclusive and so I was accepted as one of them, and with them was the one place I felt most like myself. I am grateful for every single one of those people in their fields of tents and yurts and tipis for what they taught and instilled in me.
I lived for the summers and half-term holidays. There was always a gathering or festival to go to and I got to feel briefly that I was somewhat part of something. The people at these festivals have huge open hearts, it was always a big extended surrogate family, and they were kind enough to include and love me. I got to be out in nature and I could be all of myself there, I was just really unsure who that was.
Back in term time I still just could not figure out how to get the normal kids to like me. I tried my best to blend in, but I just didn’t get it. They didn’t get me and I so desperately wanted to get them. I felt sure that if I figured them out I could work out how to fit in. I could bend and sculpt myself to be one of them.
ME?
WHEN I THINK, WELL WHO AM I?
I TAKE MY TIME AND PONDER HARD,
I REALLY CANNOT SAY IN WORDS...
I’M FAT AND SHORT AND FUNNY AND PROUD!
I STAND UP TALL AND WATCH THE CROWD.
I LIKE TO LOVE, AND LOVE TO BE LIKED.
I JUMP, I HOP AND LEAP AND SKIP,
(AND WISH THAT I COULD BACKFLIP)
BUT MOST OF ALL I SLEEP AT NIGHT, AND DREAM...
AND HOPE...
THAT ONE DAY I’LL FIND A PLACE I FIT.
– EXTRACT FROM MY DIARY IN THE SUMMER OF 1993 AGED 12, NEARLY 13.
One day a group of girls invited me to come to the fairground with them.
Oh my God they like me!
So I went. As we dawdled at a snail’s pace along the pavement, dragging our heels and sprawling across the entire walkway, completely unaware of anyone trying to get past, one of the girls pulled out a packet of cigarettes.
‘I stole these from my mum. Who’ll smoke one with me?’
And I was in, I belonged.
I decided that the goal was to be normal enough to blend in, but edgy enough to be cool and hide the fact that I was not really at all normal. This meant pushing the boundaries in every direction but not drawing attention to my rebellion or recklessness in a way that would alert my parents or teachers who might raise the alarm.
During the years that followed I did many things to prove that I belonged, including but not limited to:
• Skiving off school, particularly maths lessons
• Shoplifting – I used police cars as taxis for a while, and tried to steal only from large corporations and not independent storeowners.
• Hitching from the countryside into town to drink in pubs
• Clubbing from the age of 14
• Kissing doormen and men about 20 years older than me who might buy me drinks and pay my cab fare home
• Drinking and drug taking
• Sex
• Starving myself, binge eating followed by throwing up, and a whole host of other creative ways to try and be skinny.
I wasn’t the only one playing this ‘how the fuck do I stop being a misfit and fit in’ game. I had a great friend who also went from a Steiner School and a ‘weird’ family to a ‘normal’ school. She and I went to different ‘normal’ schools, and in discovering each other’s secret we formed our own little gang. We smoked cannabis together, hitched rides together, snuck into clubs together and ran away from men together.
We looked out for each other. We took risks, knowing that we had each other’s back. One time I found her being assaulted by a guy 20 years older than us in a car park stairwell. One minute they were just behind me as we walked to find a taxi rank. The next they were gone. By the time I found them he already had his hand up her skirt and she was trying but failing to wriggle free. I screamed at him, kicked him and grabbed her hand – pulling her away from him with all my might. We ran away as fast as our drunken teenage legs would carry us and jumped into a taxi, laughing.
One time we jumped out of a moving car because the guy we were hitching a lift from started to lock the doors and was freaking me out. I was in the front, she was in the back. I got a bad feeling about the guy so I made eye contact with her in the mirrors and signalled with my hands and then we jumped, hitting the grassy verge with a teenage bounce and a giggle.
Another time I tried to stop a guy flirting with an uninterested friend in a bar and ended up being hit by him; I don’t really remember very much of what happened, only that I came to outside afterwards surrounded by a doorman and my friends. Up until that moment I didn’t think a man would hit a woman in public. Shocked and shaken, I was taken and lifted by a group of celebratory friends to sit high up on a red letterbox. All bloodied and eating chips I felt the familiar mix of significance and shame.
By the time I got to sixth-form college in 1996 I was snorting speed in the common rooms and giving boys blow jobs in bathrooms. I was so cool.
NOT.
It seemed that whatever I did I was still not cool enough.
Inside I just wanted to be seen for being me, but I was so scared of being rejected as myself that I perfected playing the role of ‘cool girl’2 instead. When people fell for my creation I secretly dismissed them. Every time someone made friends with, employed or fell in love with her, a piece of the real me got stuffed further down and away.
Looking back now, I realise that I even though I decided that I had become an adult at 14, I was still so young. So self-absorbed. Not in a good way or a bad way, just still learning who I was and how I fitted into everything. Somehow believing that there was a definitive answer. Fourteen was a big year for me; my parents separated and began divorce proceedings, I dyed my hair black, and I began numbing my feelings with drugs, sex and food.
My parents’ separation meant that on the one hand I got a whole heap of freedom and on the other, a whole heap of responsibility. Initially they tried splitting custody half a week each. Within six months we had moved to one week on, one week off, which was slightly better, but not much. The leap from year 9 to year 10 at school and the start of my GCSEs was also a big deal. My life suddenly got much more complex than it ever had been before and my hormones were all over the place. I got a stepmum and a stepbrother and sister, whom I now consider to be as much family to me as the rest of them, but who were then an added complexity to my ever more unpredictable life. I started having periods, often ones that would knock me over in complete agony for two to three days. I also started to feel feelings as if they were going to swallow me whole. My mum and I were at each other’s throats A LOT. By November of that year I was going to live with my Dad full time because my Mum and I were not finding it easy to live together. As with so many mothers and daughters, as with her own earlier relationship with her mother, the relationship between me and my mum was complex. I understand it a lot better now, I love her and have learned so much about myself and life because