*
The UK has been battered by a storm named after your favourite Auntie Eunice. And while the severe weather warning was completely OVERBLOWN (it was just windy out! We’re getting soft! No wonder the Chinese are beating us) the storm did have an adverse on my mental health, whisking away any sense of optimism and hope away into the stratosphere alongside several wheelie bins and a greenhouse in Kent.
I should’ve known that the week was going to be on some bullshit when it kicked off with Valentine’s Day on Monday, of all days. And while yes, you can probably assess by my tone and the way that I look that I’ve spent most of my Valentine’s Day single (96% of them) I don’t fundamentally have an issue with the holiday. It's fine. Go out with your boo for a 2-for-1 meal V-Day special and post about it. Caption it something like "we've had our ups and downs..." (yikes) or "putting up with THIS ONE for another Valentine's!". It's soppy as all hell, and he posted a picture of his Porterhouse steak instead of one of you, but it's FINE.
The problem is that all your boyfriends are literally SO UGLY, and it really bums me out. Girls, you’re all so pretty, and interesting, and unique, and fully fledged-out and yet you’re dating men who look like one of the transformation stages of an Animorph. “He doesn’t photograph super well”…"He’s cuter in person”…”This isn’t the best picture I have of him, I have one from a better angle, hold on”… I’ve heard them all, but I’m still tapping through your Instagram stories, and what can I say except: NOBODY WANTS YOUR MAN! Can you lot not date and post some beefcakes, some cuties, a little nugget of handsomeness for us to single gals to sink our teeth into? Give us something to aspire to, dammit! You’re making the rest of us feel like being single is actually not that bad, and that’s dangerous—don’t you know birth rates in the Western world are at an all-time critical low?!
Apart from that, the rest of the week blends into an amorphous long grey day of disappointments, embarrassments, and personal failures: got turned down from a job, there’s a leak in my flat, I accidentally grabbed a stranger’s leg doing backstroke at the pool, a handyman came to change my front door and my whole block saw me get in and out of the shower (I slipped). It’s the sort of cringe shit you can easily bounce back from when you’re well-adjusted, otherwise it makes you want to never leave your house again.
They tell you that you either win(d) or you lose, they don’t tell you that some weeks you repeatedly slam your face into the pavement. And when the sky has been grey for days on end, you ask yourself: what’s even the point?
Why would you extract your sweaty body from your warm, crumb-infested bed to venture out into the storm on your way to yet another let-down? Why take a chance to get knocked over by a gust of wind walking to Tesco Express when you could just as easily take a 4-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon and conjure made up fantasy scenarios about your own life? Why shower and get dressed and wrap up warmly to brave the mighty winds, on an aimless quest to your nearest coffee shop to “polish your screenplay” (ugh) when you can stay inside and smash through 3 hours of Candy Crush Saga while the Dinner Party episode of The Office plays on loop in the background?
Any way the wind blows, DOES really matter to me because I risk getting whipped in the face by a flying piece of garbage or yet another rejection. “This too shall pass” I hear you say, and so will the storm. Well, the weather forecast has just announced that, much like the West Indian uncle it is probably named after, Storm Franklin is on its way with a vengeance—so now what?
Personally, I'm going to stay hunkered down, and I recommend that you do the same. It's not so bad: come in, join me. Have a BBQ Pringle, the sheets are nice and clammy!
* the guy in the picture is not the wind he's just blowing cos he's exasperated trust me i am a art historian
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