CALM YOUR TITS!

It’s only 2025

After nearly 53 years on this planet, I think it’s about time to admit to myself that it doesn’t matter how many resolutions I make. I’m not going to miraculously transform into a slim, fit, young-looking, good-humoured, polite, easy-going gal who agrees with all your opinions, hates confrontation, and prefaces all her utterances with a tinkly laugh and the words, “I probably don’t know what I’m talking about, but”.

No. It’s time to face up to the fact that I’m a cantankerous fat old cow who has zero problems with confrontation and would sooner chew a 25 pound dumbbell than go to a gym and nod along while some childmanbro tells me to eat more protein and adopt a positive mindset. Positive mindsets are for losers, I’d tell him. I don’t need a positive mindset, because I’m a menopausal woman, and as such I have an inexhaustible supply of rage that powers all of my endeavours.

But even that isn’t really true. Apart from occasional flashes of inchoate fury, I have very little of the ‘female rage’ that poets like to wang on about these days. Not just poets, either. Even Taylor Swift got on the rage bandwagon last year, with her Miss Havisham wedding dress-style posturing about her lovebombing smackhead ex-boyfriend – all very embarrassing really for everyone involved. (All 20 million of us.)

Now that anger is the most popular mainstream emotion for women, I find myself suspicious of it. Where were all these raging hot millenials when I was debilitated with PMDD and only had one or two weeks in a month when I was sane enough to do anything, and then the next two weeks would be spent in a fugue of incandescent fury where I was compelled to destroy everything I’d just achieved? Drawing Goth eyeliner on their Barbie dolls, I suppose.

So no. No to your skinny, bambi-eyed anger. These days I get my power mainly from leaning against trees and eating crisps whenever I feel like it. And of course from a cessation of the hormonal havoc that characterised most of the previous five decades. Thank fuck for that.

As for resolutions, well. Why would I want to change anything about myself and risk any of this awesome brilliance I’ve so carefully cultivated over the years?

Much of my life has been a crazy fucked up battle that ultimately I’ve managed to either win or lose, I’m not sure which, but either way, the war against myself is over and now I can look myself in the tits and say, OKAY. Ultimately, I just had to drop all my standards and most of my expectations, and now I think I’m genuinely… okay.

You cannot possibly know what a huge, impossible, brilliant thing that is unless you also spent five decades hating everything about yourself, your body, and your being in the world, which I really hope you didn’t, because that fucking sucks, and is pointless, and a massive waste of time.

I mean, sure, it would be great to have a sexy figure and nicely uplifted boobs, but that would involve going to the gym or well, let’s be honest here, it would actually involve some seriously disordered eating and also some quite extensive surgeries – and all for what? The truth is that soft, flabby flesh takes on personality in a way that perfection, by definition, could never. Perfection is sexless and neutral. My body, by contrast, has character. It’s interesting, the way the geography of some small Eastern European country is interesting. You know, one of those places that’s had its borders redrawn so many times no one quite knows if it’s even in the right location anymore, or where it was supposed to be in the first place. My body may not be firm, but it has character, like a ball of dough that’s been kneaded, pummelled, twirled in the air, twisted into a rope and smacked repeatedly against a countertop. (Which incidentally also sounds like a fun way to spend a weekend.)

So what am I going to do? Hate my body? Get rageful about it? Make resolutions about going to the gym and eating more protein? Inject fuckloads of botox into my face in an attempt to fool you that I’m really still young and gorgeous?

No. I’m going to make peace with it. I am at peace with it. I have no rage or fury anymore, nothing to motivate me to punish myself in the pursuit of unattainable ideals. As far as I’m concerned, my body mostly works pretty well and I appreciate it hugely. I’m going to use it to travel and love and make art and have adventures and throw myself fully into the world for as long as I possibly can. And then when I die I’m going to come back and haunt some gorgeous artist, compelling her to make huge naked paintings of me that my surviving friends and family will be weirded out by for years after my death.

I wish the same for you all. Well, maybe not exactly the same. But I wish you inner peace, an end to anger, and all the life-sustaining adventure your heart desires in 2025 and beyond. Happy New Year, my beastly friends!

Saw this old banger about half an hour after I wrote this post… it was meant to be!