Bad manners
What happens when your self-care turns into selfish b**** behaviour?
Today, you’re getting a note on my mood. My cycle is at the keyboard. I jest, my cycle is the lost ark. Don’t look for or at it. If you’re a paying subscriber, yesterday you got an interview with tech journalist Roisin Kiberd to read through. Check your inbox.
Ten years ago the otherworldly Jessica Biel starred in this low-key film called Easy Virtue. It was one of those British period dramas destined to languish in the Gosford Park knock-off graveyard. It even had Kirsten Scott Thomas and Colin Firth in it as a married couple who haven’t touched each other in years. Mr Darcy had PTSD from the trenches or something. Katharine Clifton likes things to be done a certain way. If you haven’t seen Easy Virtue before and want to watch it, you should probably stop reading now. However, if you can tolerate comparisons between my emotions and a movie which contained a jazz do-over of the song Car Wash, keep on scrolling.
Anyway, Jessica plays a glamorous American woman who races cars in the early 1930s, marries a good looking young English man, heads to the family pile with him, faces raised eyebrows and matriarchal drama, and in the end walks. Almost everyone is awful to her, including her fresh husband. And the fact she maybe helped her previous husband die sooner than cancer willed comes to light. It’s a brewing scandal but Jessica is like fuck you all, you are not sound. Colin Firth dances with her at the party when no one else will - it’s an emotionally charged tango - and then they drive off together, leaving the moaners behind. I don’t know if it’s a good movie, but I think of it every now and then. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if you could just start anew every few years and shove the weight of everything into the back kitchen for a ‘someday’ reckoning? Like a ‘fuck it I’m done and fucking off with this stranger see you’ SMS. Press send. SMS messages are the full stop of communication methods. Our generation will never have back kitchens.
Lately, about 18 months to be grimly honest, I’ve been dealing with a waterlog of fatigue. A damp in the walls tiredness. Some of it is medical. I have a condition with a vague list of symptoms. If they were all listed away from the diagnosed name, some arsehole with an affinity for podcasts, scepticism and the inability to imagine themselves in another’s body would possibly accuse me of making things up. (Grim video series idea: men tell you about their first time learning what a placebo is.) After all, I recommend acupuncture a lot. The people who roll their eyes don’t know that fatigue is being made up of heavy blood and magnets. It’s being short when you want to leave. It’s being unable to go from AM to PM with a thirst for everything.
I see all these nice illustrations on Instagram about what self-care really means. I read long statuses about looking after yourself. I practice some of the tips. I stay in. I don’t feel guilty about passing on invites, but I do get annoyed at their drying up. I do what I love, which is watching television and reading. I also do what I hate, which is watching the hours spent on my phone climb to sickening levels. There’s an app which monitors the amount of time you spend cradling the screen. I hope they tot up all the hours and read it to me on my deathbed so that my final rattle can be a roar of ‘Jesus Christ!’.
Gmail thinks ahead for you now. Three ways of saying thank you and acknowledging a request. You start a phrase and can choose, with the tap of the tab key, to finish the sentence as they suggest. Technology can save you the burden of summoning nice person energy. Technology can also help you diminish a friendship with minimal energy. You cancel plans with a ‘not feeling it’. You tick a box and let the IRL die. And that’s sad. But then again, your legs are heavy all the time, and that’s sad too.
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