My 30s identity crisis

Posted On August 27, 2022

Y’all may remember we recently started playing a game called Remnant Records.

The mannequin in this got me pondering about phobias. Then, in the research I was doing for that post, I had a blast from the past about a telecommunications tower that was in view of one of my childhood homes.

Since seeing that, I’ve been having a lot of nostalgic and wistful feelings, which are quite painful, and strange. They make me think about who I was as a child and teenager, and how I wish it could’ve been happier, and how I would’ve swapped out a lot of decisions. I’ll probably ramble more about that in a bit.

So y’all may also remember I made a capsule wardrobe a couple of years ago, before we knew I had Cushing’s. I’ve probably mentioned somewhere on here before that, from the age of approx 11, I was a Goth.

Here’s an extremely uncool picture of me from the past.

Looking back, 11 seems far too young to decide I wanted to get into a whole lifestyle, but I did a lot of things too young. Like I said, I would rewrite a lot of my life. I couldn’t change what my parents would do but if I could go back with today’s brain to specific moments and change what I did/chose, I would, as long as I would still end up with my husband, my dog, my snail, and the friends I’ve made since I started streaming.

But anyway, again, back to clothes. I kept some semblance of Gothness until my 20s, when I started to enjoy more colour. I also became disabled and didn’t have the energy for the big dresses and makeup I liked before. I think I kind of went off the rails in terms of colour for a while, but eventually realised I loved jewel tones even though I’m not sure if they look right on me, I remain eternally confused about my undertone (blue AND green veins = ?????). Now I’m 32, and I kind of think, you know what, a lot of my outfits are too bright for me. They aren’t right. It doesn’t help that I often wear those crop top-style bras and almost never wear a real bra, and those usually come in bright colours, and you can see them poke out of my clothes a lot.

Approx 4 year-old Pinterest board attempting to find myself:

So I’m feeling the urge to re-goth myself a bit, but I still want to incorporate some jewel colours, and also I definitely won’t call myself a goth because I am far too old to get into an argument with a purist. I just miss being spookier than I was.

With that, here’s my new capsule wardrobe concept.

This is of course with a time after Cushing’s surgery in mind, but who knows when that will be. I can’t remember if I mentioned before that someone in my patient support group actually got their endo to agree to surgery two years ago, and they are still waiting, even though they could die in the meantime. It’s preposterous that we are treated like this because we have “The Ugly Disease.”

There is less of a focus on underwear with this capsule wardrobe is this is more about style than number of items. I also could not be bothered to remove the background from pictures of longsleeve tops in every colour I talked about, so, use your imagination.

I should also address the tzniut part; tzniut, tznius, or basheydnkeyt as the Ashkes say, is the concept of Jewish modesty. It’s not just about clothing but about the way you handle life in general, and I realise this will be a snoozefest for most of y’all so I’ll keep it brief.

As a married Jew (even though my husband is a secular Christian) I felt compelled to have more tznius in my life. I prefer a higher neckline and longer sleeves around people I do not know well, unless it is simply too hot. It’s not that I think anyone is having inappropriate ideas about me, it’s not about them, it’s about hiding myself. It’s also about having discretion with your life and having a separate private life. I’ve been trying to keep more things private. I only use Facebook for Memories of my dog and our household chat now. I no longer let my entire brain leak out into blog posts. That doesn’t mean I don’t have any mental troubles, it just means people will never know.

As a whole, I need to make my clothes darker, and I need a lot of slouchy, loose things, thin enough to layer, and some things that are smarter but still not suffocating.

Seeing that tower for the last post unlocked a lot of memories for me. I’ll let myself have a bit of a brain release here.

I was a weird kid, I know I was a weird kid, nobody knows it more than me. I would change a lot of things I did. But some things weren’t my fault. I was Autistic and I wouldn’t find out until I was at uni. Nobody noticed and helped me, but it explains why I never understood what the fuck was going on. I would say I had pretty much no social skills until I met my husband, and despite not having any we still wound up together, one of many reasons I think we must be soulmates. In the last ten years I think I’ve been having an offset, delayed teenagerhood, and I’ve learned to bluff some social skills now. I am eternally bluffing, because none of it comes comes naturally. But I’ve got to the point where I can tell my husband he’s being rude to someone, so that’s progress, probably.

I was an easy victim. I was weird. I don’t want to talk about having abusive parents again, but I can tell you, they did not make my social life any easier, they did not give me any chances at life. I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair until I was an adult. I suspect it was a way for my mother to vicariously have big Celtic hair, but I don’t know for sure. Kids don’t like redheads at the best of times but they especially don’t like long-down-to-your-ass red hair.
We were vegans; I stopped being one when I left home. For a long time I believed I had allergies that I turned out not to have. But of course, I had to tell my friends at every opportunity or they would surely end up killing me, maybe even on purpose and getting away with it. My parents made me bring in leaflets for other children, one when I was approx 8 caused enough of a stir that the head teacher phoned them because kids in my class were refusing to eat dinner. At the time, I was proud of that, but now, I’m mortified. Activism from my parents stopped pretty abruptly when in my mid-teens I met other activists and started going to demonstrations; when they saw me building these social connections, they suddenly hated it and forbade it.
They always wanted me to tell my friends and their parents things about us that I now know are fucking weird and definitely alienated me further.

Sometimes kids are just cruel on their own. I would go back in time and not tell anyone I was being abused. Someone who was my best friend since junior school turned on me when we got to senior school and told people what I’d confided in them. I was sat on the corridor floor crying when her friend came out of our tutor room and said “What’s wrong, didn’t the man turn up last night?” I want you to think for a sec about who “the man” was and how this was these 11/12 year-old girls’ reactions to this information. Everybody mocked me for it, but nobody called the police.
And monoracials like to think they are the only people who can be targeted for anything, but there’s a reason me and my sister were called ch*nks at school. But I don’t want to make this whole thing about bullying either.

My brother is severely Autistic and, while he lives in a residential hospital now, he lived at home when we were growing up. He couldn’t control anything that he did, but knowing that didn’t make it any easier. He was violent almost constantly, he screamed at all sorts of random hours of the day and night, and he used to throw VHS tapes at us. This sounds bizarre to people but, they were his Autistic interest, he had piles and piles of them, and believe it or not, when they hit you, they wound you. And he would go on rampages where he screamed and threw them. As a result, we had to have those big iron garden gates put over our doorways to protect us from, literally, flying VHS tapes. I realise this was all very weird for some kids to see and I understand why some friendships never got very far.

I never knew what I was doing, I overshared, I had weird interests, I had a totally different household culture and people living normally was baffling to me at the time. Even among boys, playing videogames was not that mainstream, and if they did play games, it was a totally different genre to what I liked. I was too weird for most people, and people who were trying to be weird often didn’t like me either. I don’t think anybody ever really saw me as a human being who was like them.

So I guess it was weird, seeing that tower, and finding myself wandering around on Streetview to places I recognised, remembering a lot of people and things, trying not to think much about some others.

There are some people I kind of miss. People I didn’t deliberately stop speaking to, we just sort of grew apart, especially people who objected when I was no longer a goth or a vegan or both. I miss some of the times we had. I wonder how they’re doing now. I wonder if they wish we had better memories too.

Man, I remember the dumb arguments you could get into back then. I remember someone losing their shit when I started listening to Sum41 because it meant I couldn’t be a goth. Yes, Goth is largely a music-based subculture, but you don’t have to listen to Goth music only, forsaking all others. And then there’s the argument about whether Type O Negative are Goth. If only these were the most dramatic things from childhood.

Maybe that’s why I’m missing gothy things now. The idea that it could have been the biggest drama we ever had. Weird feeling.