Facebook Book Cover Challenge - Day 1 - Spirit Walk by Richie Tankersley Cusick

For the Facebook Book Cover Challenge, the rules were given as follows: post one book cover a day, of a book that impacted your life greatly, with no accompanying explanation. Tag one friend each day to begin their own challenge.

Nuts to that, I said. I love to talk about myself. Posting an image without an explanation would be pointless for me. So here, on my long-forgotten Blogger blog, I’m posting explanations for each book choice, which I’ll link to my Facebook posts for anyone interested.

__________

Note: Spirit Walk is the publishing title for a 2-in-1 edition of two books: Walk of the Spirits and Shadow Mirror.

I fell in love to this book.

Jeez, that’s a weird thing to say, Sati.

I know, right? It’s a (slightly) weird story.

I first read this in summer 2015, the same week I encountered a guy online who happened to share a first name with one of the characters in this book. I barely knew the guy online - he was just an interesting fellow on Quora who wrote cool  answers about food - but I had a bit of a crush on him, even while finding him intimidating. When I picked up this book a few days later, and saw that one of the side characters shared his name, it gave me a little thrill. I’m strange about names.

And then the character died, and I was absolutely gutted. Not because I loved the character - he wasn’t in the book much, and I felt more or less neutral towards him - but because of the shared name. For a short time, I felt grief, like the real person had died.

What? I did tell you I’m strange about names.

The two books in Spirit Walk are two of my favourites for a number of reasons, but the book also had a big impact on me because it forced me to realise how crazy I was about this guy.

Six months later, we started dating. And a year after that, it ended terribly. Two years  post-breakup, I’m not quite over it. Still, I can’t regret the relationship. He was the first person in my whole life to really make me feel loved. He was the first person who taught me to enjoy food, and the main reason I got over a 27-year eating disorder. He was the first person I ever loved enough to go all-in with, and truly consider changing my life for. I learned so much from him: about the world, and about myself.

JML: I thank you for all that. Even while I sometimes want to throw frying pans at you.

And Ms Cusick: I thank you for your glorious stories.

Phosphorus Burn

Years ago, I wrote you a poem. This is unusual for me. I'm not given to writing poetry. But I had too many feelings for you, and I was afraid to let them out, knowing that they would come as a tsunami that scared the bejeezus out of you and left a soggy, wrecked landscape in its wake. I am an intense creature, and I scare people. So instead, I doled them out in little bites.

nine words

nine words
can break a heart
or make one whole.
they can creep down inside
and claw at you
or they can fill you
with such
Radiance
that your heart
wants to explode.

nine words
can fill my veins with crimson snow
or act
like a
phosphorus burn.
once spoken
they cannot be unspoken
but will consume me
until all their fuel is gone.

months later
i stare at
nine words
and
still
i do not understand them.
they could be greek
except
of course
i understand greek
better than i understand
You.

nine words
can confound
or make things simple.
nine words
make problems irrelevant
as all the issues
that came before
that came between
no longer matter.

because

nine words
say more to me
than all the others
you ever spoke.

nine words
can show me you
and can show me me.
because of those nine words
the path is clear
there is no other
possible way
for this to play out
and stay true.
to me.
to you.
and so
i pick up my suitcase
and i pick up my passport
and i pick up the phone.

Despite friends and family thinking of me as creative, I can't create. I can only imitate. On this day, I think I was channeling e e cummings, with limited success. Still, I liked the poem. The fracturedness of it captured the way I felt.

With your nine words, you asked me a question that haunted me for years after. It grabbed at my heart the day you asked - the one and only day I was unreachable, and the one and only day you ever let your guard down and showed me that you needed me. I both loved and loathed that day, for the next however many years. It was the day you called me for help, and the day I wasn't there to hear you, and the last day you ever asked. And I spent the next half-decade hanging around in case you ever asked again, both out of love and out of guilt. Offering friendship, offering help, offering an ear to listen without judgement, offering money, offering sex. Offering absolution, the few times you seemed to need it. Offering love, unconditionally, in any shape or form that you wanted it.

I did love you. I considered you a dear friend, as well as someone that I happened to be attracted to. For your part, you always appeared to consider me one too, though perhaps that was my imagination.

There aren't too many people that I would spend three months' salary to go visit, but you were right at the top of that list.

I told myself I was visiting with no expectations. I lied to myself. I had no expectations about love or romance or sex, that much is true, but I certainly expected to find a friend. I didn't expect to find a stranger who, after literally years of invites, after begging and cajoling me to visit, after making plans to spend Christmas with me in my country, treated me like my presence was an ordeal to be endured.

The late Red, who we all miss, used to say, "Nothing is real until you meet." If there's one sentence that always reminds me of her, it's that one. I argued that idea with her a lot, in blogs and comments. Both of us interested in each other's positions, both of us defending our own. Having met you, I can say Red was right and I was wrong. Everything that I thought I knew about our friendship evaporated the moment you picked me up in the airport and said your first two sentences: "My girlfriend really wants to meet you," followed by, "I'm afraid I won't be able to come for Christmas." I hated you for that, hated you for withholding need-to-know information that, had you told me even a week ago, before I booked my ticket, would have saved me thousands of dollars and a painful, exhausting journey for a girl who had been in surgery two days before she flew across the ocean. And I hated you even more three days later, when we finally managed to get together to hang out, and I asked you what you wanted to do, and you said that you didn't want to be here at all, you'd rather be with your girlfriend and you resented having to show me around.

And yet, I was also right and Red was also wrong. Our friendship evaporated, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist, any more than water droplets don't exist because they dry up. What we had before we met - it was real. I felt it. Feelings exist. They are real things, regardless of their intangibility or their impermanence. That's a lesson that took me my whole adult life - so far - to learn, and I thank you for it.

A few days before I left, my ex - one of the ones I'm on friendly terms with - sent me a bag of onions. Cam is a man with a brilliant, odd mind that sometimes requires a bit of lateral thinking to understand, but when I got the message, I laughed. He was telling me I should sleep with you if I had the chance. Onions are not shallots - something that Cameron, amateur cook and eternal perfectionist, was always nagging me about - and I am no Lady of Shalott, doomed to live my days out in a tower and experience life through the reflections in a mirror lest something dreadful happen when I step into the real world. With the onions, Cam was telling me to step away from the mirror and take a chance on something I wanted; to throw myself into life. Cam gave me the kick, but you provided the opportunity. Had I not come to visit you, I would probably still be living in my tower; instead I have a new job and a new cat and a new life and I thank you for that as well.

Life moves on. Sometimes it laps itself. I sit here now, mere hours away from taking another trip to meet another man who I have very possibly fallen for in a remarkably short space of time - and I am half-convinced that this trip will be as much of a disaster as the last. That worry, that wariness, is without a doubt a result of our emotionally crushing meeting. Yet I am not indecisive or frozen with fear the way I used to be, and that, too, is down to you. Meeting you taught me that whatever happens, I can not only survive, but thrive. Even sick and utterly alone in a foreign country, I thrive. Lost love will always hurt, but I will always pick myself up again, and I will be just fine. And it's you who showed me that I have that resilience.

Phosphorus is a strange material. White phosphorus, in particular, is exceedingly dangerous. A burn from it cannot be stopped - it will burn literally down to the bone. You were my phosphorus burn. I fell for you so suddenly, so much to my surprise and shock, that I imbued my feelings for you with a sort of supernatural strength. I always felt like I loved you against my will. Like I had no control over the way I felt about you; like it couldn't be stopped until I was utterly consumed.

Visiting you put that fire out. The fuel is gone now, and for that, too, I am thankful.

Chances are, I won't see you again. I occasionally miss the person you were online, but I don't miss the person you were face to face, despite the fact that parts of our afternoon together were pleasant. Still, now that I no longer burn with love or anger, I can wish good things for you; wish that you live a happy life doing the things (and people) that give you joy. And for that reason, I will always be glad I came.

Hana Yori Dango

People are ignorant. Half the time we seem to have no idea how our words hurt each other.

The guy I loved most in the whole world, the guy who was my best friend for fourteen years, told me last year that he couldn't be with me because I wrecked his relationship with God. Not other women, just me. I felt like that was an indictment against my character by the one person who should have known me better than that. I'm still not over it. Maybe I never will be "over" it.

But you know, part of that is on me. If there's blame to be had, it's not all of the side of the people who say this sort of shit. Because they don't know. People - men and women - have been socialised for centuries into believing that women who enjoy sex or enjoy nudity are unholy, unworthy, dirty and wrong. Sometimes humans don't even realise how much we've bought into these beliefs until something unexpected comes out of our mouths - or until someone gets hurt when we didn't mean to hurt them.

Change happens when we communicate. And that means part of the responsibility is on those of us who get hurt by such comments to say so. To say to our friends, partners, loved ones: that hurts me. I don't feel that's a fair comment. That remark makes me feel dirty / unloved / ashamed / judged unfairly / etc.

Lest anyone read this post as victim-blaming, I apologise. That's not how I intend it to read. I am not saying that victims have a ethical responsibility to stand up to abusers, or that they deserve what they get if they don't speak up. I don't think that, not at all. But I DO think that in the cases of friends and family members, and particularly lovers, it can be more productive - not a question of morally right or wrong, but *productive* - to tell our loved ones that their words hurt us, rather than letting them fester.

You know me. I'm far more interested in what's productive, what's practical, what's possible, than what's beautiful and ideal.

My relationship might have survived if I'd had the confidence to tell him: that's not an okay thing to say to me. And I wanted it to survive, because despite that one crummy thing, he was a good man. This is something I've learned in the last few years. Good people say and do shitty things. Quite often, in fact. They have bad moods where they snap. They have days where they're just not with it and say something thoughtless. And sometimes, they just don't *realise* something is hurtful...because nobody has ever pointed it out to them.

I wish I'd called out my friend for his God comment. I wish I'd called out my ex for the time he told me I'm not marriage material. I wish I'd called out the guy in D.C. for the time he told me he resented having to spend the day with me instead of his girlfriend (after flying 8 hours to see him). I wish I'd called out my brother every time he called me diabetes waiting to happen (because he judged my everyday eating habits by what I eat on Christmas and Thanksgiving!), and the teacher who made me wear a T-shirt in gym class because my body developed earlier than the rest of the leotard-clad 12-year-olds, and the coworkers who make Mrs Robinson jokes year after year, and the sister of my foster kid who insinuated that my hugging him (and him hugging me) was inappropriate.

My biggest problem has always been taking whatever people throw at me. Insults appear to roll off me like water off the back of a duck. Very few people have ever been able to dent my composure, because I've always felt like I have a responsibility to maintain the smooth, unruffled façade, so as not to make anyone feel uncomfortable. But I am starting to wonder if this doesn't do more harm than good. Is a relationship really healthy if you can't call the other person out on their bullshit at times? If you go on absorbing what's said and done to you, and never let your loved ones see the scars they've wrought?

I don't think it is.

This post originally appeared as a comment on a Facebook link.

The Last Message Received

I don't often talk about memes and viral internet stuff here, because - well, I'm usually woefully behind the times. Plus, it tends not to interest me much. I'd much rather talk about love, or Pokemon, or medicine, or cooking, or any one of a hundred things that interest me more than social media.

However, there's one site that's gone viral recently that's really captured me. It's called The Last Message Received, and it's a Tumblr page created by a 15-year-old named Emily Trunko, with a simple but captivating premise: people send in the last conversations, or last messages, with lost loved ones. Some have been lost to death, others to anger, or simply to the sands of time. Some of the messages are sweet, some are funny, some are angry - and some shatter your heart into little pieces.

I've had a lot of last messages in the last year. Four friends and a family member gone in the space of fourteen months. Perhaps that's why I find the page so spellbinding. Humans are incredibly complex creatures who exhibit almost unlimited variation...and yet in grief, as in love, we sing the same tune.

Sati's Message:

A couple weeks after this, I heard from his sister that they were trying to raise $80,000 to send him to the U.S. for treatment for an aggressive brain tumour. He got to the States, but they stopped treatment less than a week after they started - it was growing too quickly. All in all, it was around six weeks from diagnosis - or from hearing about his diagnosis - to death. And I knew, even before anyone told me, that something was wrong and I was going to lose him soon. It wasn't rational to think that. Eighteen years I'd known him and I'd never even known him to have a cold. He was a professional dancer, a nutritionist, and the healthiest person I'd ever met. I had no reason to think he could ever get sick. But I knew.

Love you, J. Every day for the last nineteen years, and every day for the next sixty-one.

Nothing Comes Easy But A Broken Will

I am still here, I'm just a bit tired and preoccupied.

Work is going well, though it's more exhausting than I expected. It's been quite a few years since I had a job that requires me to report in every day at a certain hour. I was unemployed from January 2015 until September 2015 (and had been mostly on sick leave since September 2014), and before that I had a year or two where I taught a few classes a week and marked homework and spent several hours preparing debate topics and essay questions and classwork, but that still probably only took 20-25 hours a week, and hours were flexible. And before THAT, I ran the helpline four nights a week. Which, fair enough, was longish hours - 48 hours a week, split into four 12-hour shifts - but didn't seem like so much time, because I did it from my bed and could lie down and read.

I think the last time I had a 9-5 job was some time around 2008.

The funny thing is that it's not the work that wears me out, it's the idleness. At home, looking after mom and the house, there's always something to keep me occupied. When I'm working on a project (clearing the hoards from one room, or stripping the paint in the bathroom, or clearing out the garage, etc) I might work 8, 10, 12, even 14 hours at a time - and that's manual labour. And I can handle that. Yet going in to work and spending so much time sitting in a chair listening, thinking and talking, absolutely wears me out.

On a typical day, I get up at 6.45 (5.45 if I'm running, but I haven't been lately because of all the slugs on the paths), bathe and dress, leave the house at 8, get to work around 8.30, busily set up the classroom while eating breakfast, and we're ready for students at 9.30. Then I have very little to do from 9.30 until 2.30 - mostly I hand out papers, write stuff on the whiteboard during class discussions, and occasionally help with spelling and stuff. (I did more the first week, but got reprimanded - gently, but still reprimanded - for overstepping my bounds.) At 2.30, I clear up the classroom and do paperwork, which takes me until 3.30 or 4. Then I go home, take a bath and go to bed around 6pm, only getting up to use the bathroom, and sleep until 6.45 the next morning. I had strep throat two months ago, and while it wasn't a bad strep (not like the one that nearly killed me in 2010 or 2011), it's changed me from being someone who sleeps 3-4 hours a night comfortably to being someone who can sleep 12 hours every night and still wake up groggy and tired. If I don't obey the call of sleep when it comes on, I literally fall asleep in the middle of what I'm doing. My body keeps moving for a few minutes after my brain turns off, so if I'm walking my feet will keep moving until I face-plant into the floor, or if I'm typing my fingers will keep going, even if they're typing crap. I've found a few status updates of mine that start out totally fine and then descend into gibberish because I fell asleep halfway through writing them.

(I'm actually falling asleep while trying to edit this post. I just have fallen asleep five or six times in the last quarter hour. Please excuse any typos that have occurred from my hand dropping into the keyboard.)

It's sort of a strange job. It's a frantic rush at the beginning of the day - an hour isn't really enough time to set up, but the security guards won't let us in earlier - and fairly busy at the end, with a lot of idleness inbetween. Idleness tires me. It always has. It's why I could never handle going on a show like Big Brother.

I've started taking my Japanese textbook to work with me, and working on lessons whenever I'm not needed.

I don't mean to sound like I'm not enjoying it, or that I'm not grateful for it. I am grateful, so much so. Whether or not it leads to permanent employment, the company took a chance on me when nobody else would, and I can't even begin to say how much that means. Yet I do feel like I'm not being fully utilised; like I could be doing so much more, giving so much more back to them. I find myself volunteering for things like coffee-making duties, things that aren't really in my job description, just because I need something to do and because I want to take some of the work off my mentor. He has so much on his shoulders, so much that I can't help him with because I'm not qualified. All I can do is make coffee and set things out and make sure the paperwork is up to date. I feel - not useless, exactly, but a bit superfluous at times. I suppose this is something I'll get used to. Over my lifetime, I've gone from being the only competent adult at home (even when I was a child) to being one of two (at any given time) who took responsibility for a centre and 25+ teenagers, simply because there was nobody else around to do it. I've never sought out responsibility; rather I've had it thrust upon me over and over, and I've always shouldered it because if I don't, nobody will. I'm a bit of a control-freak. I've had to be. So it's hard to adjust to being not only part of a team of responsible, qualified, experienced adults who don't need me to look after them, but also the FNG, the one who has to learn from everyone else. It's disorienting. I'll adjust, in time, but for now it makes my head whirl and I have to keep catching myself whenever I try to take over.

Hard work is sort of a compulsion for me. I spent so many years feeling like a parasite because I was lying around, sick and disabled while my friends were going to school, and then sixth form, university, working. I understand intellectually that disabled people are not parasites, and I'd certainly never judge anyone else for being unable to work or support their family, so I don't really know why I judge myself so harshly. It might be something to do with the years of being told (by teachers, parents, doctors) that I'm not really sick; that fibro is not a legitimate condition. Nowadays we know enough to understand that it's an autoimmune disease and a neurological disease - though we still have a dearth of knowledge on it in general - but England is still far behind America in acceptance of the condition, and in the early 1990s it was almost unheard of to find a doctor, let alone a layman, who would accept that it is a legitimate illness. For years I was told that I was attention-seeking, and then that I had school phobia, and then that I had Munchausens. I often feel like I internalised all the things that people (even my mom!) said about me during my teen years, and even though my head understands that I'm not lazy or unmotivated or selfish, my gut doesn't really grok it.

 Since I've learned to manage the fibromyalgia in the last ten years or so - it's still a painful and exhausting illness, but I've learned the tricks for handling it and pushing through it - I've been forcing myself to work almost nonstop. Since the brain damage I've been almost compelled to work myself to the point of exhaustion. For ten years I've basically worked, slept and read. My social life and love life have suffered for the last decade, and in the last few years they've been almost nonexistent. I've neglected my bio father's side of the family. All because I have this need, this urge to...I don't know. Prove some point, I guess. Maybe to prove that I can be a functional member of society, rather than a parasite. Whether I'm trying to prove that to others or to myself is unclear.

I will not break, dammit.

I could take time off if I wanted. I don't have to go in that early, or go every day, if I don't want to. My mentor keeps telling me to take it easy, but I can't. My brain won't let me.

My mentor - who I shall hereafter refer to as EG, since he reminds me of an El Greco painting - is one of the nicest people I've ever met. I really struck gold with that one. He was my teacher before he was my mentor - I took courses with him last summer and this summer just past - and I adored him from day one, but my respect and admiration for him grows by the week. My only concern is that he's so nice, he finds it hard to criticise anyone, and frankly, I need criticism. I'm going to screw up in this job, probably a lot, and I'm worried that he isn't going to pull me up on things and give me a kick up the ass when / if necessary. He's so gentle with his criticism (and effusive with his praise) that I have to read between the lines to see what he's actually saying, quite s lot of the time. And I don't always do well with subtleties.

I'm learning. Hopefully he's learning. I'm damn sure the students are learning. With luck, we'll adjust.

I have no idea how EG feels about me. With someone that nice, they could well hate you and just never show it. I like to think that he likes me, and that I make his job easier, but...time will tell.

Question: What do you think of men who cook?

I like men who can cook. I'd even say I have a definite preference for men who can cook. Cooking itself doesn't matter to me so much, since I'm not really into eating* (yes, yes, I know I'm weird), but I like what it says about the man:

- It says he's not caught up in old-fashioned gender roles
- It says he takes pride in creating something and in being self-sufficient
- It says he has the patience to learn a skill and refine it over time
- It says he's interested in the details

These are all good things, IMO. It doesn't have to be cooking - I also like men who sew, or knit, or garden, or fix cars, or refurbish their house, or a bunch of other things.

Attraction is a complex event that occurs when a lot of factors line up, but if I had to pick one single characteristic that I find most attractive in potential partners, it would be a can-do attitude. Not the cockiness of youth that screams "I'm awesome at everything, but don't you dare make me prove it!" but a quiet confidence, because you know you're a competent adult who can do a lot of things and can learn anything that you can't already do. I like people who say yes to things. Can you go buy me some tampons? Sure I can. Can you raise a child? If the situation comes up. Can you make a soufflé? Never done it before, but I'll give it a shot. Can you learn to speak Vietnamese? I don't see why not. Can we hike Mongolia on our next vacation? Sure, that sounds like fun.

I love men who can. And a man who can't cook (or clean, or sew on a button, or change a tire, or diaper a baby) is most likely not a man-who-can. Nothing wrong with that, you are what you are, but I probably won't be interested.


* I'm not saying I'd turn it down if someone offered to cook for me, mind you. I eat. I even enjoy it. I just don't adore food, the way most people I know do. I'd be happy eating the same thing every day as long as it tasted good.

This post originally appeared on www.quora.com .

Once More, Unto the Breach

I am starting a new job tomorrow.

This makes me nervous. I've had precisely one new job in the last thirteen years, which was organising and cataloging a private library. After doing that for a few months, drawing a fortnightly paycheck and wondering why my employers didn't provide me with the necessary equipment and told me to take the day off more often than not, I found out that the whole thing had been set up by an ex-boyfriend who was worried about my finances and living situation, but who knew I wouldn't take money from him. Several times over the course of our relationship, he proposed that we get married, more for the sake of mutual convenience than anything, and several times I turned him down because we weren't in love, so he found a new way to try to take care of me.

He meant well, and I can understand what he was doing - he's the type of guy who looks after his friends, and supports his girlfriends. But it crushed any belief I had in my own abilities. It was only the second job offer I'd had in my adult life. The first came from a man I did a great favour for a long time ago. On my thirtieth birthday, this man called and offered me the job of most writers' dreams - researching and writing articles for a magazine in Milan, with a generous salary and an excellent relocation package. Plus, y'know, Milan. But I knew it was to return the favour I did him rather than because he thought I could do the job, and I couldn't handle the thought of being the deadweight, the one unqualified employee who was hired out of nepotism and who everyone else had to work extra hard to compensate for. So after a few months of vacillating (because Milan!) I turned it down.

Plus, my brother's family had just moved away, and my father was dying, and I couldn't leave Mom.

So here I am, with only the third job offer in my adult life - because I'd been working at the youth centre since I was 17 - and all those feelings of inadequacy are flooding back.

I was recommended for this job by a former teacher of mine. I took an I.T. course this summer - offered for free through the Job Centre, to people who are out of work (including carers like me) - and I did so well on it that a few weeks ago, my teacher asked me to come back and be a TA for him when his coworker went on maternity leave. That wasn't supposed to be until November, but on Friday I got a call asking me to come for an interview with his boss today, and today they hired me, starting tomorrow.

Intellectually I understand that I got the job because I did well on the course. Not only did I manage to do three two-week modules during the two weeks I was there (so six weeks' worth of learning), I got 100% on both my exams. Yet there is always this little voice inside that says you can't do it, you're not qualified, you're biting off more than you can chew healthwise, you were only hired because he liked you and felt sorry for you. You're a fragile princess who can barely look after herself, and has no hope of ever being a functioning member of society.

People outside of my blog(s) rarely see my feelings of inadequacy. In person, I appear to be supremely confident, to the point that several bloggers here have been surprised - and a few have been quite put off - when they meet me. The cool, competent façade is almost always how I present in person. I wouldn't even call it a façade, truly, because it's something that I've worn for long enough that it's become a part of me. And the funny thing is, it's not a lie - when I'm in motion, I have every confidence in my abilities. I've always functioned best during a crisis, but any time that I'm actually acting, moving, I don't falter. I know that I'll get to work tomorrow, on time, well-organised, dressed appropriately, and do the job with no hesitations. I'll do it well, the way I do everything, from paid employment, to navigating a foreign country, to planning a funeral, to coping with the aftermath of an attack.

It's just when I stop that I get overwhelmed with the sense that I can't do it.

It's strange that I have these two sides to me, and that they're both so dominant. You'd think that the confidence and the inadequacy would neutralise each other, and I'd simply have an average amount of confidence with occasional bursts of anxiety. But no, I swing between the two extremes. As in just about every area of my life.

Sometimes I wonder if I am two people trapped in one body.

My tits and ass are certainly large enough for two. :)

Question - What do you think of Cara Delevingne's decision to quit modelling?

I definitely applaud her for realising that she wasn't happy, and taking steps to change that. So many of us stay stuck in things that make us miserable because we're scared of change.

I quite enjoyed modelling itself. I was at the plus-size end of the spectrum (though not in the way that Tess Holliday or Crystal Renn were - I wore a UK 14) so I didn't get quite the same amount of crud from people about staying skinny, which I think helped me to enjoy myself for longer. Plus, I liked the pretty clothes, and it paid my way through college, and it was a job where I could work and concentrate on working out chemistry equations in my head at the same time, which is why I got into it in the first place. *laughs*

But I didn't like the industry. I didn't like working for a machine that perpetuated what I felt was one of the biggest legal cons of all time. I started out working in art modelling, and when I moved into doing photography for one particular photographer, I insisted on one particular clause in my contract: no photoshop, no airbrushing. Naive, looking back, but at the time it seemed reasonable. This was late 90s / early 00s, and people weren't quite so obsessed with obtaining the unobtainable. The first photographer was fine with that. The second and third were fine with that. And then somewhere along the line, people weren't fine with it. They'd be fine when we signed a contract, and then they'd try to bully me into it, or "fix" pictures behind my back. And I found myself thinking - I've been in hair and makeup for four hours, I've dieted and exercised my way to a fairly decent (if curvy) body, my skin is radiant, my hair is glossy, and I have an excellent photographer. Why isn't this enough? If you want someone with a longer neck and thicker lips and less muscular calves and a smaller nose, why didn't you hire that girl instead of me?

A while after my personal dissatisfaction started, I started realising how much fakery there is in the fashion and beauty industries. It sounds so obvious now, but at the time I convinced myself that it was okay to lie to people, because we were presenting a fantasy. Turns out, it's a fine line between fantasy and fraud. Faking it digitally has become such a thing that we now have anti-wrinkle creams advertised by women who have all their wrinkles airbrushed out. We have whitening toothpaste where the white is digitally added to the adverts. And I'm just not okay with that. Nor am I okay with working to advertise clothes that are only wearable by a tiny percentage of the population. If any other industry produced a product that was marketed to everyone but was only usable by 1%, or 2%, or even 5%, you'd call that a flawed product. Yet the fashion industry has managed to create things that the majority of us a) can't afford and b) can't get into - and somehow convinced us all that it's US who are faulty rather than the products, and that we need to starve ourselves and spend insane amounts of money to prove that we're worthy of being part of it. That's what I mean when I call it the biggest con I've ever known. Machiavelli would have been proud.

Don't get me wrong, I still love clothes. I love pretty things in general. I don't mind spending a fair bit for beautiful things that are made to last. And things ARE getting better, in some respects. But I couldn't ever be part of the fashion industry again, not even behind the camera. It sucked the life out of me by the time I was 21.

People get so caught up in the "fashion" part that they forget the "industry" part. It's a money-making machine, at the heart of it. And that isn't going to change. It doesn't matter how many Sati Marie Frosts burn out and leave - or even how many Cara Delevingnes do. Because models are disposable, even the successful, famous ones. They get tired, they get pregnant, they get fat, and most of all they get OLD, and when that happens, the industry is all too happy to trade you in for the newer model. (Pun acknowledged.)

This post originally appeared as a comment on www.manrepeller.com .

For Apollo, Who Shone Brighter Than the Sun

I have a body wash in my bathroom that isn't made anymore. Imperial Leather Foamburst with sea kelp and birch bark. I came SO close to throwing it out today when I cleaned the bathroom shelf, because it's really not usable anymore - it's totally lost its pressure, and I can barely eke out the tiniest bit. Certainly I can't get enough to wash with it anymore. I couldn't throw it, though, because every now and then I squirt a teensy bit onto my finger, and inhale, and you're there with me. That's one of the things that I remember the best about you. The way you always smelled like the ocean.

I have a redcurrant lipsalve, that I bought back in 2001, and I can't throw that away either. I certainly wouldn't use it - can you imagine the bacteria it must have picked up after fourteen years? - but sometimes I open it and smell it and immediately think, "Ah, Jay." If you were watching, you would be able to see the tension melt out of my body with the first inhalation. You didn't wear redcurrant lipsalve - that I'm aware of, anyway *laughs* - but I wore it, back in the days of Batchwood and birthday parties and the bluest eyes in the world staring at me from across a darkened room.

God, I miss you.

I sometimes called you The SBD. People wondered what that stood for; assumed it was something dirty. I let them, because it was easier than explaining how a therapist of mine had once tried to teach me to meditate on the image of a blue diamond, spinning in my mind, any time I felt out of control - and how the diamond image had always failed, because every time I tried to think of a blue diamond I could only think of your gaze.

The technique worked, even if I could never get the right image. YOU were my spinning blue diamond. You kept me calm. You kept me sane. You kept me alive, during the worst times. You saved my life more times than I can count, and I would have given up everything I had if I could have done the same for you.

I talk to the dead. Sometimes the dead talk back. That's one of my bigger secrets, one that I don't hide, exactly, but I don't discuss openly with many people either. And I find it both comforting and heartbreaking that you have never once been here to talk to. I'm so glad that you moved on quickly - so many don't, you know - and I have faith that wherever you are is exactly where you need to be, doing exactly what you need to do. Yet...I miss you. That's all. I wish you were here.

Though maybe not tonight. I probably wouldn't want to face your reaction to the box of mozzarella sticks, half-bag of curly fries, or four shots of Aftershock over ice that I had for dinner. That kind of shit is best kept to myself, not shared with beautiful boys who I want to have good opinions of me. :)

Hey, I never claimed that lack of vanity was one of my virtues.

In another two months, it'll have been a year, and some days I still can't wrap my head around it. My emotions are complex and often irrational. I don't understand how someone like me, who's been dying for half my life, who's been caught and thrown back by Death SEVEN TIMES so far, is still occupying territory on this side of the veil, and someone like you, who I never even knew to have a cold, could just up and die like that. Six weeks. I checked my Facebook messages for the one I sent you the day after I started dreaming and worrying about you, and it was six weeks - almost to the day - between me knowing something was wrong, and you dying. How can a healthy, active person, a person who's dedicated his entire existence to nourishing physical and mental health in himself and others, a person who's barely been sick a day in his life, go from healthy to dead in six weeks? It doesn't make sense to me. It's not logical. I should be old enough and experienced enough to know by now that the universe doesn't always run on logic - and most of the time, I do. But all my practicality goes out the window where you're concerned.

The alcohol is wearing off - about bloody time, it's nearly 6am - and I can't remember if there was a point to this letter. Maybe it was just to tell you I love you. Always have, always will. I've loved you every day of my life since I was twelve years old, and I'll love you every day of the rest of it. 

Rules of Engagement #1 - Brutal Honesty or Polite Bullshit

We all have rules in our relationships. Some are widely used by many people, and some are very personal. Some are across-the-board rules, some differ from relationship to relationship. Some are set in stone, and some are subject to exceptions.

Two of my main rules, veritable social laws that I try (read: occasionally fail) to follow with other adult humans, involve honesty:

- Don't ask questions that you don't really want an honest answer to;
- Don't tell people things that you know they don't want to hear, unless absolutely necessary.

Rule #1 is easy enough to follow (most of the time), but Rule #2 is considerably harder for me. My desire to not burden people with information that is unpleasant, hurtful, and not need-to-know, wars with my desire to not infringe upon their free will. I could deal with this by simply choosing to not share personal information, but that doesn't come naturally to me; personal privacy is not something I place a lot of value upon. In fact, I find myself getting itchy and emotionally claustrophobic when I try to keep secrets about myself and my life. I'm not quite an open book - while you usually get the truth from me, you rarely get the whole truth, because the whole truth is usually complicated - but I'm not a locked one either. More like a library of books, where all information is available to you if you know where to look.

One habit that I've developed over the years is asking people if they're sure they really want to know something. I find that people's questions are often idle, and answering them candidly can mean dumping a lot of information upon them that they didn't expect and don't want. I'm willing to share almost anything about myself with anyone who asks - but I do need to know that you genuinely want to know, even if the answer is unpleasant, and your question wasn't just you making small talk.

Hence my return question, when asked difficult questions: Brutal honesty or polite bullshit? Which do you want to hear?

Polite bullshit isn't always bullshit, of course. Sometimes it's a face-saving lie, but sometimes it's just truth with a bit of sugar coating. Sometimes it's an alternative truth, because some questions have more than one true answer. Consider:

"Sati, why do you always wear white dresses, and rarely any other colours?"

The Polite Bullshit answer could be, "White cotton keeps me cooler." It could be, "It cuts down on the loads of washing I have to do." It could be, "I'm lazy, and a white sundress means I don't have to mess around trying to match my clothes up." It could be, "I think I look best in white." These are all true, and all reasons why I prefer wearing white dresses to any other clothes.

The Brutal Honesty answer would be, "White's not a gang colour." Also true, and at times - depending on where I'm working - more relevant. It's an answer that a lot of people find jarring, though, so it's one that I use with caution.

Likewise, brutal honesty may not be truly brutal. Sometimes it involves things that you don't want to hear about yourself. Sometimes it involves things you may not want to hear about me. Sometimes it involves things that I think you don't want to hear, but you actually are happy about. For example:

"Sati, are you okay? You're shivering, and your breathing changed."

The Polite Bullshit answer might be, "I'm fine, just chilly." Or, "Nothing's wrong, just need to catch my breath." Whereas the Brutal Honesty answer could be, "For some reason I just imagined you kissing me, and it was a surprisingly arousing image."

See, I might think that you don't want to hear that, while you're actually quite happy to hear it. It's hard to tell these things sometimes.

I'm a cautious person, and a thinker. I take risks, but they're considered risks. Spontaneity is not in my nature - though I've learned to weigh up the pros and cons of something in a split-second when necessary, so I sometimes appear to be acting spontaneously - and I'll never be comfortable with rash decisions. In addition to thinking (some would say overthinking!), I'm naturally protective of others, and the inclination to protect people from unpleasantness seems to be my default. Of course, that's not always possible, nor is it always beneficial - for you or for me. Asking people to choose between the honest answer and the polite answer allows me to respect your agency and free will, while still (mostly) satisfying Rule #2, and protecting the sensibilities of those friends and family members who are not quite as deliberate with their questions as I am.

So don't be surprised if you get the question during our conversations from time to time. You could take it as a potential trigger warning, if you wanted. A warning that the subject might be uncomfortable listening. Alternatively, if you're so inclined, you could consider it to be my version of a red pill / blue pill offer. Choose the one, and stay in the comfortable, friendly acquaintance levels of small talk. Choose the other, and learn things about me that might possibly make you either run for the hills, or love me passionately.

Your choice. As always.

Pounding Holes

So yesterday I had a guy over. A lover. No names will be mentioned, for obvious reasons.

We're upstairs in my room, "playing chess". "Playing chess" is what I tell my mother I'm doing when I retire to my bedroom with a date or guy friend (unless it's Adam, then we're watching anime - and we actually ARE). Of course she knows we're not playing chess. It's just a way for my dates to save face. I don't give a shit what my mom knows about my sex life, but guys tend to have this weird embarrassment about facing someone whose daughter they've been fucking. *shrugs* Whatevs. Not that I play much these days. Until yesterday, I'd only had one opponent in the last three years or more. But I digress.

We're in bed. Or on the bed. We're moving around a lot, and so is the bed. What can I say, our chess games have always been energetic ones. He's not a big guy, so the bed should take us fine (my last chess opponent was half a foot taller and maybe seventy pounds heavier, and we never had any issues) - but he's strong. Very strong. And we're really giving that bed a workout. So I'm startled, but not entirely surprised, when I hear something crack and the bed drops down half an inch.

"Oh shit, we broke the bed!" I half scream half laugh.

He slows down.

"Don't stop!" I screech.

And I forget about the bed.

After he's gone home, I collapse and fall asleep, but I keep waking throughout the night to a squeaking sound. I tell myself I'll tighten the bed screws and check out the break when I wake up, but I forget. It's only when I go to bed tonight that the bed sinks under me at an angle, and I lean over the side to check out the slats, when I notice the hole. And it's not in the bed.

We didn't break the bed, we broke the fucking floorboard. 

The Itchy and Scratchy Show

For all of you out there who think you're having a bad week...

...all I can say is, at least you don't have shingles on your lady parts.

(Apologies to anyone who's dealt with death or violence or heartbreak this week, and is genuinely having a worse week than I am.)

Question: What does it feel like to get shot?

I was shot in the leg when I was 11, by one of the sons of my mother's then boyfriend. No particular reason, they just felt like it. *shrugs* I don't know exactly what kind of gun or bullet it was - I'm English, we don't "do" guns - but I know it was a rifle. Not an air rifle. The bullet lodged in my leg rather than passing through, made an entrance wound that was quite small but larger under the skin, and left several fragments. Maybe someone who knows firearms can extrapolate something from that (if you care that much about the details), but that's the limit of my knowledge when it comes to the type of gun and ammo.

(Apologies if I'm getting any of the terms wrong.)

I'm going to try and explain the way it felt, but it may not make sense to readers, as I find it impossible to separate the physical feelings from the emotional feelings that I had at the time.

I remember that I was bent over at the time - I was hanging out washing - and when the bullet hit me, I pitched forward and hit the ground head first. I don't know if whacking my head had any effect on my thoughts and feelings at the time. It's hard to explain how the bullet wound felt - it hurt and it didn't hurt at the same time. I was aware that there was pain, but the pain felt sort of irrelevant, because what I was most concerned with was a feeling of shattering. At the time, I was convinced that I'd been caught in an explosion - perhaps that I'd stepped on a landmine. I lay there on the grass, feeling myself disintegrate into dust and vapour, and for a while - seconds, minutes, hours, who knows? - it didn't occur to me to get up, because I felt like there was no 'me' left to move. I fully believed I was dead at that point, and all I could think was, So I guess that's that, then.

The sound of the boys laughing was what brought me back initially. Neither of them came to check on me, but I could hear them up by the house. I glanced around and caught sight of my hand, which confused me - How can I still have a hand if I'm nothing but dust and red mist? Who is 'I' anyway?Then I became aware of the pain once again, but in an abstract way. I recognised that I was in pain, but it didn't really affect me.

(I should mention that this sort of depersonalisation is something that I'm prone to, and always have been, so it wasn't necessarily caused by the shock of being shot, though that may have added to it. I switch into "robot mode" when confronted with any sort of emergency, which makes me able to cope with most kinds of pain, as well as excellent in a crisis. The downside is an aloofness and lack of empathy during crisis periods. If you need to be rescued and taken to safety, or you need a situation resolved rapidly, I'm your girl. If you need comfort, hopefully there's someone else around to give it, because that's not my forte, though I'm quite capable of giving comfort and sympathy during normal times.)

I made my way to my bedroom in a sort of daze, and got the first aid kit from the bathroom. It never occurred to me to call my mother, or her boyfriend, or an ambulance, nor to ask the boys for help. I've always been used to taking care of myself. With the help of a mirror (and a lot of thankfulness for the fact that I used to take ballet and have always been limber), I started picking bullet fragments out of my leg. I remember thinking that the world had shrunk, because the hole looked so tiny, and I couldn't figure out how it was possible for something that felt so big to look so small. The pain got progressively worse as I worked on it, but it didn't really affect me. I had a job to do, and pain was irrelevant. I got out what I thought was everything, disinfected the wound, slapped a dressing on and took a nap.

Over the next few days, the pain got worse, and once the crisis was over I actually started to feel the pain rather than just being aware of it. It was hideous - I don't have a good comparison for it, but it felt sort of like a contact burn that went on and on; like putting your hand on a hot grill and not removing it. When I came down to breakfast with a fever and a sweaty face, about four days after being shot, I confessed to my mom. I don't remember exactly what happened then, but I know I ended up getting the rest of the fragments, and the infected tissue, removed by a professional under local anaesthetic, and getting a nasty course of oral antibiotics that put me off my food for a month or so. If I'd been in America, it probably would have been a hospital stay, but England is a patch-them-up-and-send-them-home country, and I was back in my own bed by nighttime.

It hurt for a long time. Once the infection was gone, the ache continued - the closest thing I've felt to it was having a tooth pulled. Sometimes it still burns, if I get extremely hot or extremely cold. If I let my skin get too dry, I occasionally get a tugging sensation in the scar tissue that's not terribly pleasant. Moisturising cream only does so much, so when it gets dry I find the best thing I can do is eat an avocado every day for a week or so, which seems to fix the dehydrated skin. Sounds weird, but it works for me.

I can still feel the puckered skin with my fingers, although there are times when it's obvious and times when it feels almost normal to the touch. Regardless of how it feels to my fingers, I can always find it without a problem - the sensitivity has never gone away. I don't know how visible it is - it's on the back of my right thigh, right below my buttock, and I've never been curious enough to try and see it with a hand mirror. The last person who asked to see it said it was really visible and clearly a bullet wound, but that was in 2003. According to her, it's about the size of an average thumbnail (perhaps 1.25 - 1.5 cm diameter), paler than the surrounding skin, and sort of shiny.

If I ever tell people the story - which I don't often - I make a joke out of it, and tell them I was shot in the butt. "Shot in the leg" draws gasps of horror; "shot in the ass" makes people giggle.

I don't think about it much these days, except when it's hurting. Life happens, you know? It's not the worst thing that ever happened to me. Probably not even in the top 5.

That said, twenty years on I still have dreams. Sometimes when I'm asleep, I hear and feel a huge explosion. Sometimes it's a bomb, but usually the image I get in my mind is a huge crystal - larger than a person, clear and brilliant with shimmering lights on a million facets - being shattered by some force inside it. Shards fly off in every direction, and even though I can see the crystal, at the same time I understand that it's actually me who's shattering into splinters and diamond dust. I jerk awake in shock and horror, unsure whether I'm alive or dead. And the lone thought running through my head is always the same as it was that day. So I guess that's that, then.

My doctor calls this Exploding Head Syndrome, which is a (very odd) parasomnia with unknown cause. I'm never sure whether the doc is right, or if I'm just reliving the memory, or if it's some combination of the two. Either way, it leaves me haunted and uneasy for several hours after.

This post originally appeared on www.quora.com.

Soundproofed

WARNING: Contains graphic references to sex. Lots of them. Thou hast been warned.

I'm a screamer.

People don't expect this. When clothed, I'm reasonably quiet. I think a lot. I like to watch people. I'm friendly enough and laugh a lot in the right groups, but I wouldn't say I'm loud.

In bed, I'm the opposite of quiet. I scream, I moan, I cry, I wail. I giggle and purr and talk, a lot. Sex with me isn't ever a quiet event, and some guys probably want to shove a ball gag in my mouth just to get me to shut the fuck up...but dammit, you'll never have to ask me, "did you come?"

I think this is one reason why I love hotels. Motels, Holiday Inns...it doesn't matter to me as long as they're clean, peaceful and reasonably soundproof. There are other reasons I love staying in hotels, of course - room service (or at least a nearby restaurant), an afternoon to read without guilt, and a night where I don't have to sleep with my eyes and ears open for disaster - but sex is way up there on the list. I don't take vacations - I haven't had a week away in fifteen years - but I occasionally spring for a night in a Travelodge or Premier Inn. If I'm there on my own, I always have a little devil on my shoulder that tells me to pick up a guy in the bar. So far, I haven't done this.

Travelling with, or meeting, a lover, is always the best thing though, because you can fuck me in a hotel room in ways that you can't in my mother's house, liberal though she may be.

You can press me up against the door the instant we cross the threshold, and tear off everything I'm wearing. Nudity is fine in hotels. You have everything you need right there. There's no need to keep a robe at hand to go to the bathroom. Nobody gives a damn if you don't get dressed the whole time you're there.

You can throw me on the bed as soon as I'm naked, manoeuvring me into position before I even get a chance to shower. Face down, ass up. I'm getting the sheets dirty - so what? At home, a set of sheets needs to last a week; here the maid will change them daily if you request it. And you can slam into me as hard as you want, really force your dick deep inside me, bang me up against the headboard - I don't care if it hurts. Actually, I lie. It's better if it hurts, just a bit. Throw me around, bang my head against the wall, fall on top of me like a ton of bricks. It's fine. This isn't my elegant white cast-iron bed with the bronze finials, made for gentle lovemaking and sweet snuggling - this bed is tough. This bed was made for us to fuck hard.

You can look out the window while I suck your cock, if you want. Five floors up, nobody's going to see my head bobbing up and down just above the windowledge, and if they do - who cares? Who gives a damn if passers-by look up and see how your face contorts when I take you deep in my throat, or even if they hear you groaning my name through the open window as I lick up every drop of pre-cum just before you spurt all over my face and tits? Even if they see and hear, even if the windowsill is low enough for them to see me on my knees with a face covered in cum - what are the chances that in a busy hotel, in a busy city, we'd ever have to see those people again?

Want to take a shower together? Shower's right there, and nobody else is going to be waiting in line for it. It's non-slip, and has that nice little seat for disabled people, so if you want me to sit there and wrap my legs around you, I'm quite happy to do that. We can't do that at home - I don't even have a shower, and you just have a tub with a curtain where I constantly feel like I'm going to fall over. But here, we can sit, or stand, or lie on the floor while the water pours over us. Want to introduce me to the joys of anal? Go right ahead. It's easy enough to get clean, and it's not like the water's going to run cold.

Back in bed, we can go all night, or at least till we exhaust ourselves. And you can talk to me. You know how I like it, with that hard dick forcing its way into me roughly, and a voice in my ear ordering me to cum. Nobody's going to bang on the walls to shut us up. Pull my hair, or reach around and put your hands on my belly and thighs, and force me back even further onto your cock, or press our bodies together as tight as they'll go. I don't care. Just hold me tight and take me rough and hard. Make me moan and scream and cry and beg for more. Nobody can hear. Nobody's going to call the police because they heard me sobbing and begging you. I know you like it when I beg, and I have no qualms about getting on my knees and pleading if it gets us both what we want.

I'm not saying I don't have sex at home. I'm saying I don't get fucked at home. There's a difference. My bedroom at home is for love and lightness and laughter, for cuddly afternoon sex while the rain pours outside the open window, for half-asleep morning sex in the pale light of dawn. Home is for shuddering breaths and staring into each other's eyes when we orgasm, for quiet passion and deep emotional bonds. Hotels are for nights when we fuck till we're raw. For spanking and clawing and biting and pulling my hair and making me hurt so good that I can't help but scream your name until I'm hoarse. For leaning over me while you're deep inside and biting my neck and throat and chin and cheeks until you leave red bruises all over me that I'll have to try and cover with makeup tomorrow, and probably fail. They're for coming inside me so many times that when and if we finally decide to get dressed and go pick up something to eat instead of getting it delivered, I'll be standing in line for takeout with my legs pressed together because I can feel your juices running down my thighs, and I have to wonder if everyone in the place can smell you on me, if they all know that you've marked me as yours, at least for tonight.

I'm always going to be an intense lover. That's just me, I can't be anything else. But whereas my own bed is a place where I weave a spell of love and affection and emotional attachment, hotel rooms are places where an entirely different type of intensity comes to light. Like rollercoasters or birthday cake, it's not something that I could deal with having every day - but any time I'm lucky enough to have a night in a hotel with a lover, the world simultaneously recedes into a dream-state and yet seems more bright and real than ever, and I find myself wondering how I can possibly go back to my sweet, soft, pastel existence when our rendezvous is over.

Babel Fish

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

― Nelson Mandela

I have an ear for languages. I rarely progress past a certain level of fluency - around the point when the grammar starts to get really hard, and I have to put a whole lot more work into it, I usually fall down. I don't always find the time or energy (or money!) to take classes, and I've never been someone who studies well on my own - I much prefer the structure of school to distance-learning, even if I only go to class once a week.

Common wisdom has always been that if you want kids to find languages easy, then raise them speaking more than one, because they're much easier to pick up as a child. I don't know how true this is for everyone, but it's certainly been that way for me. The surprising thing, though, is that some of the languages that come most naturally are ones I had little or no exposure to as a child.

I grew up in Menorca, which means I had to know Castilian (regular) Spanish and Catalan - schools teach in both, switching back and forth between, and businesses use both or either. (Government changed from Castilian Spanish to Catalan in the last eighties and early nineties, much to the horror of many of the island's inhabitants - even in 2014 it's still common to find road signs defaced and the Castilian spelling of things written in. Frankly, I don't blame them. I don't like Catalan either.)

In addition to Catalan and Castilian Spanish, many inhabitants of Menorca speak a dialect called Menorquín or Menorquí, which is spoken nowhere but the island. Kids don't want to be left out, and the town kids spoke it while playing, so I learned it too, though never as well as I'd have liked.

After moving back to England, I attended a private school for a while, where they taught Latin. Classics are avoided in state schools in England (though some let you take them as extras, after school), but my little private girls' school taught Latin as part of the general curriculum. I only took it there for a year - the school closed the year after I started learning it - but it's something I'd like to go back to at some point. I enjoy the structure of Latin.

In 1992, I had an au pair from Northern Spain, who gave me daily lessons in Basque. The uninitiated might think this is just another Spanish dialect, easily learned - wrong. Basque is what's known as a language isolate - it's not related to any other language on the planet - and I found it brutally hard, and never continued.

All English school kids learn some amount of French, or at least they did in my day. My school made you take French from Year 7 until the end of Year 9, and then a second language (Spanish or German; I took Spanish because I was lazy) for Year 8 and Year 9. In Year 10 you can carry on either or both, but you have to do at least one (I dropped French - there just weren't enough hours in the week. I needed Hermione's Time-Turner). So I took three years of French, plus four extra years of Spanish, and got to a reasonable level of fluency in both, though I wish I'd carried on with French instead of the useless art and drama classes I ended up taking. I also wish I'd tackled German instead of lazily choosing a language I already spoke - though I had a German boyfriend all through high school, it is one language that I've never learned and always wanted to. Though I did pick up ancient Nordic runes from my German boyfriend - not a language per se, but I've always liked symbols and codes.

I picked up basic Greek in my last two years of high school, purely for fun. I needed to know the alphabet anyway, for math and physics (and occasionally biology) so it didn't seem like a hardship to learn a bit more. It was handy when we went on holiday to Corfu for two weeks at the end of Year 10, too - all the road signs were in Greek, so I ended up the designated navigator every day.

After school, I fell into Italian, sort of against my will. I briefly dated a guy in Spain (when I moved back there in my teens) who was from Naples. He spoke no English; I spoke no Italian at the time. I figured we could meet in the middle and speak Spanish - we were in Spain, after all - but no. He couldn't handle Spanish. So I learned basic Italian. Though the relationship was brief, I used the Italian again when we had an Italian lodger who avoided house rules by refusing to learn English (I can say "please flush the toilet" with the best of them!) and a third time when my doctor ordered me to take up opera to help improve my lungs after repeated bouts of pneumonia. Now I'm supposed to be learning properly, in preparation to live in Milan, but my plans keep falling by the wayside - once again there are not enough hours in the day to do all that needs doing. The handy thing about being brought up speaking Spanish is that Catalan, Italian and Portuguese (which I don't speak, but can sometimes translate) - and even French at times - come much more easily, as the Romance languages have similar structures.

When I got the head injury in 2005 and lost my memory, I lost many of my language skills. D'oh. I can still read and translate - poorly - in Spanish and Catalan and sometimes Italian and French, but can't have a conversation. I can read the Greek letters but have no idea what any of the words mean. The funny thing about my memory since the brain damage is that I still have some of the information in my brain, but it's no longer organised the way it used to be and I often don't know that I have information about a subject until I need to access it. Even nine years later, it's common for a subject to come up (language or anything else), upon which I find I have a wealth of knowledge to impart. Afterwards friends will look at me like, "I didn't know you knew anything about..." (Australian snakes / the Dogon people of Mali / how to build ships / cross-pollination of pepper plants / 18th century French court clothing / etc ad infinitum...) Yeah, I didn't know I knew anything either, till I needed it. Due to this oddity, I hold on to the possibility that my language skills will make a miraculous return if I ever find myself in the middle of a bunch of Greeks / Italians / Menorquí people.

After the brain damage and the resulting fallout, I needed a change, so one day, out of the blue, I bought myself a DS game called My Japanese Coach. I was hooked from the first lesson. That autumn I booked myself on a part-time Japanese course at our local uni, and here I am four years later. Everyone thought I was crazy and tried to discourage me. "Why do you want to learn Japanese? You've never learned anything like it before. You can't use it in a career..." Both reasons were exactly why I wanted to learn it. Japanese was the first thing I'd ever done, in my entire life, that was mine. It wasn't for school, it wasn't future career planning, it wasn't because it would help me do my job better or because I was dating a guy who spoke it or because I intended to take a vacation there. It was for no reason other than it was fun and I wanted to. While I'd always enjoyed learning other languages - and everything else I learned - I'd never done anything in my life purely because I wanted to. Every choice I'd ever made, everything I'd learned, every book I'd read and CD I'd listened to, every hobby I'd done, had been about either pleasing my parents, taking recommendations from friends and boyfriends, or acquiring skills that might help me somewhere down the line. Japanese wasn't any of those things. I didn't think I'd ever use it. Japanese was mine.

I'm off school this semester, due to lack of money and the pressures of moving house, but in the autumn I plan to go back to Japanese and pick up Mandarin, if I'm near a school that teaches it. (My current university does, but I don't know where I'll be living come autumn.) I'd also like to start Cantonese, but I haven't found a part-time course yet. Those two are half-fun and half-future planning. With China being the economic power it is these days, it seems smart to speak the languages, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't enthralled by the challenge. It's been a while since I took up something right from scratch, with no prior knowledge - I think Japanese was the last thing, back in 2009. I always like to have something to get my teeth into.

Not all languages come well to me. I seem to have a mental block against Russian and Hebrew - I've tried to learn them several times, and it's never gone well. It's not the writing systems either - in addition to the western alphabet I read Greek upper and lowercase, Nordic runes, hiragana, katakana and some kanji; there's no logical reason why I shouldn't be able to learn Russian and Hebrew. It's just a mental thing. I've never tried Arabic, and that is one that I really should have learned a long while ago, given my job. There are a dozen languages that would help me in my job as a social worker in South and East London - Yoruba, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi are at the top of the list. And I want to learn Vietnamese and Korean some day, just because they're beautiful.

If I lived another hundred years I would only make a dent in all the things I want to learn.

I can never decide whether that fact makes me sad or happy.