HOW TO BE COMPLETELY NORMAL AND NOT AT ALL WEIRD
Part Two of A Brief History of Lies
My mother once told me that I wasn’t cut out for relationships. That was kind of a sweeping statement, and at the time I dismissed it as the kind of thing Mom would say just to annoy me. Which it did. But now I think about it properly, I realise she might have had a point.
I’ve never really managed to hold one down. A relationship, that is. A romantic one, anyway. There are probably lots of reasons for this, but maybe, as my mother suggested, it boils down to a constitutional inability. If that’s the case, I almost certainly inherited it from her. My mother wasn’t cut out for relationships, either. Certainly not for romantic ones. But also not for maternal ones, or sisterly ones, or for friendships. Maybe it was human relationships in general that she struggled with. (Although she wasn’t great with animals, either.)
That’s not to say that she didn’t want a relationship. She probably did. Most people do. I thought I did, too, but now I wonder if it was more that I just wanted to be like everyone else. Normal. For most of my young life, I went around feeling like an outsider, not really understanding how other people seemed to effortlessly get along with one another and manage complex stuff like careers and marriages while I was still awkwardly trying to understand the rules of basic interaction. One time, just for example, I saw a girl I knew in the supermarket, and instead of waving, saying hello, or doing any other normal kind of thing, I ran over, smashed my trolley into hers and screamed her name in front of the broccoli. She backed away horrified, and possibly slightly traumatised, by this approach. For my part, I thought she was being a bit standoffish. I just couldn’t understand why it was so hard to make friends.
I really did want to be like other people, but I (evidently) had no idea how to do that. I’d spent most of my childhood reading books so I wasn’t sure how real adult people behaved. (Later, I found out that it was just like they do in books.) Watching people and copying what they did was a reasonable strategy, but I suspect I often missed important nuances. Like that copying people is a bit creepy, for example, and you’re supposed to be yourself. Whoever the fuck that is.
One summer when I was in my early twenties, I worked for the head office of a large retail chain in Birmingham, and it was here that many of my personal and social inadequacies were brought into stark relief. I quickly made the horrific discovery that my colleagues were normal, average, ordinary people. Unlike in previous places I’d worked, they didn’t turn up late and still tripping from the night before, or spend all their time photocopying flyers for their DJ gig, or stealing post-it notes from the stationery cupboard for unspecified purposes. They were normal people doing their jobs in an averagely ordinary way, and I had absolutely nothing to talk to them about.
There was a smoking room on the ground floor of the office building, where I met other young people who hated their jobs, liked smoking cigarettes, and were often somewhat hazy-minded, especially on Monday and Tuesday mornings. Unfortunately it wasn’t realistic to have more than seven or eight cigarette breaks in the course of a working day, and in between these nicotine-stained islands of sanity, I had to be around people who listened to Radio One and weren’t afraid of microwave ready meals. Everyone in my office was relentlessly and offensively ordinary, and I felt under pressure to conform. So I invented a boyfriend.
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