It took an embarrassingly long amount of time to work out that my love language was actually physical touch and I was just gay. It used to be acts of service but I think that just cos I like men to do stuff for me cos when they’re doing stuff for me it means they can’t be having sex with me. 

Do you know that feeling when you’re talking to a group of people who are all speaking in butterflies and you’re afraid to open your mouth because a big fucking slug is gonna plop out? I’m getting that a lot at the moment because I’m having lots of stressful meetings with work and stuff. Big slugs everywhere when I talk. I don’t know how to get butterflies to come out but based on my research in the industry, I think going to private school might have helped.

Trauma gets passed down through generations, like, the body remembers. I think that’s why people have babies, cos they can’t be arsed to deal with their own trauma so they just pass it on to the next generation to sort it out. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what my mum tried to do with me, but that’s completely backfired and jokes on her cos I’ve been sectioned twice and given the chance would claw my way back inside her to experience a brief moment of respite from this grim life. 

As children me and my sister found it very difficult to relate to the film The Parent Trap because we couldn’t fucking wait for our parents to get divorced. If that was a movie, it would just be me and my sister individually listening to each parent tell us how they wished the other one was dead. Not as heartwarming, but I do think reflects more of the general population’s parental dynamic. I think it would be called Parents trapped and the ending would a big beautiful divorce, my mum running free, nicole kidman style. She throws the divorce bouquet at me, and because I lack a partner and exist as the human embodiment of the avoident attachment style, the sequel is me attempting to divorce my consciousness from my body – the last relationship I am yet to sever. My boss level.

I just had my birthday and I got three electric blankets from separate people. In the middle of April. Says a lot about my friends – either they know I’m perpetually cold, lonely, or they all secretly individually want me to die (apparently electric blankets are very dangerous?). 

Reading that last entry I did, I was in actual hell about that break up. Pathetic now, but looking back at my phone notes I wrote to myself, my god I was dying. I wrote some funny ideas during that relationship and I’ve got enough distance to write about them now, but the one that’s stuck with me most is this concept of saying “I love you” for the first time. 

It’s meant to be unexpected and heartwarming, if movies are anything to believe (and who do we trust if not media?) but for me it was very much a process of trickery. I Truman Showed her. 

When she finally said it, it felt a lot like I had been undercover as a cop infiltrating a drugs gang, and I’d finally befriended one of the drug dealers long enough for him to tell me when the shipment is coming in / fall in love with me. 

Her: “I love you”

Me, into the hidden microphone under my shirt: “boys, we got him.”

You arrive in a new relationship with baggage. They’re arriving with baggage too, and the combined baggage has to weigh under a maximum amount or they will not be letting us on the plane. But you’re both not admitting how much baggage you’ve actually got, and unless you chuck some stuff out you’re gonna be over the limit. 

I think there’s two people in relationships – the ones that get to the airport (relationship), assess the situation and throw all the stuff out of their suitcase and make room for their partner’s shit, and there’s the other person who shows up at the airport with two extra bags and refuses to pay for carry on. I’ve seen enough TikTok videos to understand that neither of these is the correct way to exist, but either way, every single time we’ve both still boarded the plane with too much baggage and that’s why each of my relationships has crashed and burned. 

We’re taught being single is bad so men get away with more. It’s so we lower our standards. This cultural phenomenon of the shame of being single did such a number on me that I assumed everyone else was miserable in their heterosexual relationships too and even that was better than being single. Both, for me, involve not having sex, and one involves having someone in my bed next to me to block out the thoughts of suicide, so the choice was obvious.

I’m queer, it took me a really long time to work it out though because i was plagued with being completely fucking oblivious. And also like a lot of men in my generation, I got confused by pop culture queer coding female love interests as “alternative” and mixed up being queer with being a manic pixie dream girl. It’s hard to tell the difference. One’s not like other girls, one likes other girls. Both like listening to The Smiths, having an interesting haircut and Doc Martens. You can see why that would have been confusing. I spent my 20s pretending to like Belle and Sebastian when in reality, it was pussy.

People say when you come out you often go through second puberty, but it’s in your late 20s and nobody has time for that shit anymore. I think this is definitely true and hopefully explains why my skin is so terrible, not my pathological inability to drink water (sorry but it’s yucky). I’m really hoping my tits come in this time around. Actually I don’t know if this is true…I’m very confused about my gender.

I absolutely love to hate myself but a discovery I’ve had recently is that having sex is the one place that you truly cannot be self deprecating. Cos when you slag yourself off, you’re slagging off both you and your sexual partner’s choice. People do not value being humble when you’re having sex with them. It can actually bring things to an abrupt stop. 

Them: [insert compliment here]

Me: What, this old thing? It’s disgusting, i’m actually ashamed of it. Don’t look at me. You should be ashamed of yourself for fancying that. Gross. Idiot. 

Plastic doesn’t degrade, does it. So that’s got me thinking. Every time I’ve started regularly seeing someone and got them a toothbrush, and then had a break up, well, that toothbrush still exists on the planet. It’s probably in some landfill now, but it still exists. 

That makes me a bit sad but also it’s nice to know it’s not just my problem, it’s also the planet’s now too. Oh, that’s given me a nice warm feeling inside. But maybe that’s just global warming.

My therapist has said I need to get comfortable being lonely, so this week I’ve crowbarred in as many people as it’s physically possible for me to see, within zones 1-5 of London (I mean, come on, let’s be reasonable here). Yes, I’m commuting all over town, like Santa with a sleigh full of trauma, all so I have the absolute minimum time alone time with myself. 

I’m in a non-ethically non-monogamous relationship with loneliness, because I’m compulsively seeing literally anyone else apart from myself. 

If it seems stupid that me, a woman who cannot follow advice, actually pays someone to give me advice for me to not follow, that’s because it is. 

I had the proper worst week of my life last week, my god, and I can’t even go into detail as to why, but it came from all fronts, from my tatters of a love life (boring, talk about something else for once in your life, Kat), to the fact I need a new laptop, to the fact I got scammed by the post office. I think maybe the universe caught wind that I was getting better and decided someone had to step in, cos things were looking just a little bit TOO stable. 

But, you know, if there was no disturbance in the force, Luke Skywalker wouldn’t have had to step up and become a jedi, creating a multimillion dollar franchise for the poor, hardworking souls at Disney. (I’m rewatching Star Wars at the moment, chained to my friend Abbie’s sofa, her dutifully asking me every few hours if I’m still alive.) If Luke didn’t become a jedi, he’d probably still be on the sofa, impotent lightsaber at his waist, watching Masterchef or something. Wait, that sounds really nice? Fucking hell, I’ve fucked it. 

It’s my fault really – earlier on in the week I’d been saying that I always have to be a little bit miserable to write my best stuff, and I’ve manifested exactly that, so maybe I’m actually a god.

Conveyor-belt-ing my friends has been fascinating; every self-indulgent speed-date consisting of telling the same story to a different face, and collating the information together in the blind hope that I will one day make sense of the timeline I’m on. 

It’s like I’m sat, alone in Yo Sushi, somberly watching the food on the conveyor belt pass me by,  grabbing small plates of whatever resonates from my friends’ offerings.

Some reactions to the story have been bad, some really good. It usually depends on the genre I’ve decided to tell the story in – whether it’s the sanitised version for my friends who are less close and agreed to the date to be polite, or the one woman show I’ve forced my best friends to sit through, in excruciating detail. They sit, sipping their latte, lemon drizzle cake hardening on their plate, baffled frown drifting across their face, as it slowly sinks in that they might have bitten off more than they can chew in agreeing to see me, blindly hoping they make faces at the right moments, lest they experience my wrath.

With my love life, I’m not sure what I’m looking for, forensically foraging through all the texts I wrote into my notes app but didn’t send. I worry if I die right now, and years into the future someone tries to create a version of me through artificial intelligence based purely through what’s on my phone, it would just be a very angry combination of different women’s birth charts and passive aggressive monologues written bleary eyed at 4am. In my head, it looks almost exactly like the album art from Radiohead’s The Bends. 

Being alone is okay, but isn’t it so much better when you’re with other people? 

Some people are born with the feeling that they’re good enough for the world, and some people have to spend their entire lives trying to justify their right to exist. I like spending time with people who make me feel like I have a right to exist through osmosis.

I don’t know how to create a right to exist on my own. My therapist says that it’s my hero’s quest to create one, to find that within myself. I think it’s my quest to abandon the need for one entirely, and just vibe it. But you try telling a 50 year old man that.

I watch a lot of daytime TV and I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s something about the comforting nature of eating toast with marmite, flicking on This Morning and watching people smile while telling me the world is burning and then going straight into a segment about gourmet dog treats is extremely comforting to me. 

I love it all. Antiques Roadshow, Escape to the Country, Homes under the Hammer, Dickinson’s Real Deal, Animal Park (if I get up early enough. Animal Park is the McDonalds breakfast of daytime TV) and also, in particular, Flog It. 

If you’re not familiar with Flog It (you should be) it’s basically where weirdos and old people bring some junk to an antiques fair and get it valued by a professional, who tells them how much it’s worth. 

I have recently noticed that this is a lot like going to therapy.

Every Thursday at 4pm I click onto the zoom chat (it’s lockdown as i’m writing this and I have therapy over zoom). My therapist appears on the screen, smiling, poorly framed, in a stripey top, with several plants behind her. Sometimes she has building works which means that my stories occasionally are punctuated by relentless drilling, and sometimes she’s sat outside which means it’s underscored by pigeons.

Each session I sit down, and begin to empty out the big sack of junk that is my brain. And she then takes each piece, looks at it, and then tells me how much it’s worth. 

Sometimes I arrive ready to talk about a really good bit – like when an old person comes on with some jewellery with a big fat diamond in it that their great grandmother prized off a drowning woman on the Titanic. That stuff is never worth as much as you think it’s going to be.

Sometimes it’s one of those really good episodes where I arrive with something I think is worthless and shit, like a postcard where the writing is illegible and I’ve spilled a bit of jam on it, only to find out it’s actually worth thousands of pounds (in therapy). Wow, so unexpected. If I’d have known, I wouldn’t have taken better care of it. I think she likes those ones the best, cos I think it’s funding half the building work I mentioned earlier. 

Sometimes she’ll pick out something from the bag herself, from a secret pocket which I didn’t even realise was in there. Um, hello? At least buy me dinner first. 

Those are quite intrusive days. After all, I’m a woman, not a lucky dip. She’ll make a big deal about whenever she’s retrieved – asking all sorts of questions. 

I start feeling private. I’d rather have her look at all the big, obvious stuff in the bag. Stop digging around at the bottom. There’s lots of stuff with sentimental value in there I’m not ready to give up yet. God, why are you so obsessed with me? All you’re doing is picking at the stupid fucking lint at the bottom of the bag. Are you like some lint pervert? What, you got a fetish for dust, or something mate?  

Well bad luck, cos that’s my lint, and I’m keeping it.

Anyway, so this week she’s put her prices up now that lockdown’s eased and I can’t afford her anymore, which is bullshit. I really thought I was making her feel like she was doing good work on the bits I already know about myself. 

So off I go, back out into the world with my sack of useless junk for a brain, on my own again, off to try my chances at the auction. At least I have a free hour back. I wonder what I’m going to watch?

I told my friend a couple of days ago that I was horny for spooning and she said the word I’m looking for is “lonely”.

Here’s something I wish someone had said to me 10 years ago: never be ashamed of the stuff you do for love.

So here’s some of the cringe-tastic stuff I have done over the years.

Rocked up unannounced after a 20hr long Megabus to Paris to meet someone I’d met ONCE. Didn’t tell him til I got there. Didn’t book back-up accommodation if it didn’t work out. 

told the first girl I ever loved how I really felt about her, got rejected and then let her use me as an excuse so she could meet up with a guy she liked. This involved waving at her parents every morning when they dropped her off at the station… 

…then sitting in a costa by myself for 7 hours until she got back from seeing her boyfriend. Then waving at her parents again as though she’d been with me the entire time.

cried so hard about a break up I was sick in a public toilet in a shopping centre on Sutton high street. 

went full manic pixie for one exhausting month. fully revised for a party. Walked up to him and said “oh, I love Belle and Sebastian! Colour my life with the chaos of trouble!” Then cocked my head like a dog and said “what’s that?” when someone asked me if I’d seen 500 days of summer 

got so many Ubers to try to save a relationship my bank called me because they thought my card had been hacked. If you think that’s embarrassing, try imagining me crying down the phone and telling that story to the representative at Santander. 

listened to an entire, 12+ episode long podcast about the Manson killings cos she mentioned it ONCE in passing 

went to a street dance class that I knew she’d be at. the class was so hard they made us learn a routine to Beyoncé’s Flawless and we each had to perform it in small groups – I sprinted out before she even finished saying “it’s that Yoncé” 

went to Anne Summers and told the attendant I needed help with a “hot date tonight”, proceeded to try on different bits of lace before deciding on a hot red push up bra. date cancelled before i got home

hid behind a bin outside my house 

actually used the phrase “do you fancy going outside so we can kiss?”  

hour minute long bus ride to the other side of London cos I thought they might be there. Didn’t have much of a plan for beyond this when i got off the bus. London’s massive 

Dressed as a sexy cat on halloween one year despite being invited to absolutely ZERO parties. Pretended to be super put out about the whole thing so I could send him a pic of me wearing it 

had a New Years party where I smoked a fat fucking joint to impress him, got paranoid there were old lady feet underneath my bedroom door, was found crying in my bed an hour, face drained, clutching an oversized teddy bear 

after a gig I walked to the station with a guy who offered me a cigarette. I said yes, despite having never smoked one. I inhaled once – almost directly into my eyelids –  and then when he wasn’t looking I shoved it, STILL LIT, into my pocket 

In a nervous haze on a date once referred to “my late father”. I don’t know my dad but I don’t think he’s dead. For final year at uni had to work out where the chain had got to to keep up the lie of his untimely demise 

went out of my way to say hi to a guy I fancied at the edinburgh fringe on the royal mile, who then ACTUALLY PUSHED ME away so he could keep flyering 

secretly got my belly-button pierced cos a girl I fancied had hers done so we had something to talk about. I am incredibly squeamish about my belly button. It has been perpetually infected since I am too scared to clean it 

let a guy swing a punching bag at me at the gym “as a joke to see how hard it was” I went flying across the room and pretended like it was hilarious when oh my god, it really fucking hurt 

dropped a gram of MDMA to impress a guy, ended up getting taken out of the club by a bouncer whilst I screamed “PLEASE, JUST LET ME BE SICK IN THE TOILET” 

(also this is an aside but people don’t warn you how much of the gay dating scene is just you paying £25 for two drinks for in a bar so a bi-curious girl can tick you off her list)

tried to steal a guys t-shirt so I had an excuse to text him the next day, forgot to wait until he wasn’t in the room to do it though. had to pretend like I thought it was mine. Also this technique has literally not worked once and I’ve ended up with a perfectly curated museum of people’s clothes they’d rather sacrifice than text me back 

listened to a boy recite his entire book of rap poetry to me while I sat there smiling and saying things like “wow, great enjambment”

Why do I do this stuff? Cos in 2009, my mum sat me down after my first sort of break-up-ish and said “as you get older, each time you’ll learn love with a little bit less of your heart.” I decided that day that my purpose was to disprove this by making myself look as stupid as possible all in the name of love. 

obviously I don’t endorse people harassing someone / Nice GuysTM / being creepy. I’m talkin about genuine attempts at putting your heart on the line for someone. Those moments of sheer, unbridled vulnerability that make your body fold in on itself like a parasol on a windy beach.  

Cos I know who I want to be friends with, and it’s the person running through the airport, deep down knowing they’re probably gonna get their heart smashed into a million awkward pieces.  

It’s the person with their hazard lights on, with their head in their hands, wishing they weren’t so stupid, wondering if the guy at the drive thru can tell they’ve been crying.  

Love is messy, it’s emotional, and when you’re 90 years old or whatever, you’ll be glad you have those moments, rather than the ones where you’re sat at home, staring at their name go online and offline, letting that moment fade away, wishing you had.

Things have taken a turn for the worse mentally, so today I’ve been trying to recreate normal life by mentally transporting myself to my favourite place to work, the cafe above the H&M in White City. 

Yes, it is pathetic that the cafe above the H&M in White City might be my happy place, but when you have anxiety and depression, there is no happy place – there’s just places where the screaming is quieter and you can put 12 sachets of sugar in a tea semi-judgement free.

I think for me that’s the cafe above the H&M in White City (it’s full title) because the internal cries of anguish are drowned out by the unrelenting sound of babies crying. To fully commit to recreating my not-happy-but-near-enough place, I’ve also been switching off the internet at random and whispering “please can you watch my stuff while I just run to the toilet” while sobbing into my own reflection in the mirror. 

What I would give to entrust my valuables with a complete stranger right now. The eye contact, the shy smile, the trust, I can finally, triumphantly release my bladder, all the while knowing that I’ve made a new friend – no, guardian of my belongings. Perhaps I am trusting you, reader, with my valuables: this blog. If you’re lucky I’ll share a secret with you later.

My head is screaming and it feels like everything’s on fire and I wake up with a tightness in my stomach that feels horrendous. That’s hard to say on a zoom chat, though, isn’t it? Particularly when friends can hear at maximum 20% of the words I’m saying, like a sad dubstep remix. I’m also getting pre-FOMO about post-lockdown events. I don’t miss going to the event, I miss seeing it a day later on Insta stories and realising I wasn’t invited. 

One of the main lessons I am trying to learn is to separate what is in my control vs what is out of my control. For example, I can’t control anything that is going on inside my phone beyond how much I am looking at my phone. I know that. But the problem is that I am looking at my phone fucking loads, and I can’t stop. 

It’s honestly incredible. I have single handedly proved that immersion therapy does not work. If I did a sit up for every time I check my phone in a day, I’d still be checking my phone constantly, but I’d be a lot happier about the images of myself I post online.

So I could cut down the amount of time on my phone, but we all know I wont, so instead, I’m making another cup of tea. I’m up to two cups of tea at a time, like I’m Noah and the teas are the animals coming in two by two into my ark, but instead of cleansing the earth of sin, I’m just going to get early onset diabetes. Do you think you could just watch my bag for a second?

These are both for me. Tea for two and two for me?

Cheeky update re bedtime chats with my best friend. We both got so upset with each other for being on a different call before realising we’d called each other at the same time. 

Unexpected highlight of week was fish and chip shop chips. Got them with salt and vinegar and wolfed them down and nearly the fork too, if I could have wedged it down my gullet.

Secret I said I’d share with you later: my nipples have started to chafe from not wearing a bra for so long. Genuinely. I have had to start putting bio oil on them. They sting so much.

Lockdown stats:

Number of times I’ve cried this week: 4. Don’t want to talk about it. Oh who am I kidding, of course I do. 

Number of broadway songs I’ve learned from scratch: 1. I think I look incredible when I lip sync it in my room but I recorded myself doing it recently and I genuinely look in pain.  

Number of times I’ve sat in the bath with my head pressed to my knees with the shower running with Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn in the background: 1.5. I gave myself half a mark cos couldn’t get the shower working.

Unexpected kindness of the week: Imogen, who stitched me this bag with a design I love and posted it to me. Incredible!

It’s very unfair of my brain to have been so anxious about lockdown to now also be so anxious about it ending. Pick a lane. It took staying indoors for seven weeks to remind me that I don’t even like going outside. Here’s me outside, not having a good time:

I’ve started listening to podcasts, which I never saw for me. Friends will tell you that I willfully avoid podcasts at all costs. I think they’re stupid – it’s like an inner monologue that you opt into. When I put one on it’s like I’m listening to two podcasts, the one that I’ve chosen to listen to, and the other one, my own one, which is like a director’s commentary of my own self loathing over the top.

But I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping at the moment. 

When Harry Potter thinks he’s about to die in the final film and he says “does it hurt to die?” and Sirius Black says “quicker than falling asleep”. Well it’s 4am, my eyes are bloodshot and Sirius is a fucking liar.

Shout out to the real MVPs of lockdown, Nytol sleeping tablets. My best friend is going through the worst mental health time of her life so we often take our tablets together and talk shit on the phone until one of us falls asleep. It’s been really helpful and I don’t know what I’d do without it. Sometimes I think about recording the conversations to listen back to at some point, but I don’t think anyone would want to hear us saying “my brain’s being a bitch” “a big bitch” “a big, disgusting, ugly bitch” increasingly drowsily until we’re unconscious.

I like to pretend it’s like the scene in the last Avengers film when Iron Man dies, and Pepper says, “we’re gonna be okay, you can rest now” but it’s not the world we’re trying to save, it’s just our piece of shit fucking brains. 

However, sometimes when she’s not around, I’ve actually started putting on a podcast. If I convince myself it’s a bit like listening to a chatty bedtime cassette like when you’re a kid, it can be quite nice. I used to listen to a book tape as a child called The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark. A gorgeous book but absolutely fucking pointless, because I still sleep my bedside lamp and hallway light on too if I can get away with it. 

When I was living in London I was up to three – bedside, main and bathroom. A full house. By which I mean, full of ghosts, which I repel by keeping all my lights on. 

I do think that book tape might have caused more damage than good because once when I got the the end of the cassette as a child, the story finished, I was gently drifting into sleep and then a very loud voice said “PLEASE TURN OVER THE TAPE” and I was given the shock of my absolute fucking overbite-riddled, prepubescent life. 

I can’t express this enough. Blind. Fucking. Terror. The world went black. Satan climbed out from under my bed, wrapped his hands around my neck and said “feel fear, you little shit” and so I did.

Luckily, I already slept with 5 cushions and upright at the time, so it took one fluid motion to run straight into my mum’s bedroom to tell her there’s someone inside the radio. She told me it’s just what they put on the tape to make you turn it over. Well, who would do that, mum?? Who knows I’m listening?? What do they want??? Why would they break the fourth wall like that??

Okay, no, I didn’t ask that last one, I was too busy being force fed Calpol and told to go back to bed. But I’ve never forgiven book tapes since, so podcasts are a real leap of faith into unchartered terrain for me. They have been okay so far. I do not trust them. 

Not like my best friend, TV, which I would die for. I only really become aware of time passing when I reach the next christmas episode of the TV show I am watching. I was watching 30 Rock yesterday and they had a Christmas episode and I thought, didn’t they just do that episode? And then I looked back and realised I’d gotten through 25+ episodes of a TV show in one day. 

It’s been sunny outside which has been lovely, but also I am a bit afraid to go into the garden because I am worried about what my family will say about my body and body hair. 

Yeah, I said it. I have body hair, but it makes me embarrassed because other people don’t feel the same way and sometimes it offends people. I ruined my shoes after I fell into a waterfall in Newcastle, and I ended up going to try on shoes with my two best friends. 

One of them didn’t like standing next to me in the shop because she didn’t like the fact you could see my leg hair as I tried on the shoe. Similarly I went to a wedding last year and my mum and sister made me shave my legs and armpits before it. I felt naked after I did it. I was quite upset after that second one, watching all the hair that I had lovingly grown go down the drain. 

I like the hair because it makes me feel like a powerful ox sometimes, so it’s sad that it also makes me want to hide. 

Money is tight and I said to my friend Andy that I should probably just give up this whole thing and marry a banker. He said, “I don’t think you’re what they’re looking for” and he’s right. Then we both paused and asked, at the same time, who is actually looking for me. I’m the worst of both worlds – not the stereotypical fun kind of gay and I’m not smart or politically engaged enough to be a misanthropic lesbian, so here we are. I’m kind of like a manic pixie dream girl,  but instead of helping someone learn to love life again, I actually just push them over the edge.

If I did settle down and marry a banker, I think a lot about how I won’t be a good wife, but I think I’d be a really good ex-wife. Being married to me would be hell but I’d be excellent about passive aggressively picking the kids up on a Sunday night and bitching about you to my sister. The same way I don’t think I want kids, but if I do have them, I think I’d be really good at taking ages to put my glasses and say “what am I looking at here” whenever my kid tries to show me a meme.

I don’t want to do stuff to be accepted by people. I was thinking about the time in my first year of uni where I drank a shot of washing up liquid because I thought it would make them be friends with me. In the end I don’t think anyone actually watched me do it and my throat burned for a whole day. It was very stupid. I also forced myself into a washing machine for the exact same reason. 

Pathetic.

I don’t think that’s hugely about fighting the patriarchy and conforming to society’s standards, it’s more about me being an idiot, but the point still stands. 

Anyway, back in this house I’m still that little girl, terrified about a premature fourth wall break, four cushions propping me up, main light on. But it’s not ghosts this time. It’s my own brain, inside me. Like when Professor Quirrell takes off his headscarf in the first Harry Potter and he’s got Voldemort on the back. I know that’s the second time I’ve referenced Harry Potter, it’s because we did a Harry Potter-themed quiz last night and it’s on the brain. A lot like when Professor Quirrell takes off his headscarf and- well, you get the idea.

My bedroom’s been redecorated because my mum wants to rent the house out. Some parts are still the same. Including the stain on my windowsill from when I gave a blowjob to my first boyfriend, he came, I gagged and didn’t know what to do with it, so opened my window and spat it out onto my windowsill and we spent the rest of the summer watching it slowly crust over. A modern day Romeo and Juliet, I prop myself up against my balcony, look out over the world in lockdown and think, please turn over the tape.  

This has been a very strange time in my life – there’s been heartbreak, I spent Christmas in hospital, my birthday in quarantine, and I’ve lived out of a suitcase since the start of the year. I’m kind of like a gay Paddington Bear, and, now that I’m thinking about it, with largely the same fashion sense. 

Just like my internet connection, I am unstable. Like the Zoom chat yesterday when it dropped out and I got so angry I ended the call and tried to listen to “Killing in The Name” by Rage Against The Machine but couldn’t load it because, oh yeah, I don’t have any internet, I have to suck it up and live with it. 

 When I’m depressed it often feels like your brain has been taken over by a clueless intern who hasn’t been given the induction. I’d quite like to stick L plates to myself so people drive really slowly around me, and can’t get cross when I momentarily blank on which side of the road we drive on, decide to take a 50/50 chance, get it wrong and my examiner has to grab the wheel, causing an instant fail.

Tenuous metaphor aside and as much as I’d like Jesus to take the wheel again this time (my examiner’s name was Jesus) (ok no it wasn’t but imagine if it was), I have sadly meandered back into the pits of thinking about topping myself. 

In The Sound of Silence, Simon and Garfunkel sang, “hello darkness, my old friend”. In my brain’s cover version, there’s a verse where darkness is actually forced to take out a restraining order against me because I won’t leave it alone. 

I harbour a lot of resentment towards myself which, sadly, no amount of posting thirst traps on Instagram can sort out. 

I saved up and had two therapy sessions before the lockdown happened. In the last one, I got so frustrated I didn’t go back.  She’s been trying to help me work on my confidence – weird because I didn’t explicitly say I don’t have any.

This happens a lot with friends too, they often say, you just need to work on your self esteem. Which is true, but after a while, it does make you wonder – is it that obvious? Long answer: yes, short answer: double yes – you’ve worn the same outfit for four weeks in a row.

I think I get up in the morning and at some point between that and shutting my front door I subconsciously douse myself in eau de l’ow self esteem and absolutely reek of it, but have no idea that that’s what other people see, too. 

Mental health is invisible but in some ways it’s also really not, and I am a case study for that. I came downstairs yesterday and my sister said I look like “the poster girl for mental health”. I agree, here’s what I’ve worn for the past three weeks. The only difference is that when I’m in bed, I take my socks off. 

Back in my therapist’s office, while I sat stinking up her room with self resentment, she asked me what I see in the mirror. I said, well, I don’t really give myself a chance to look. And she said, “well why’s that?” And I said, well because I’m not really letting myself think for that long. If I’m looking at myself in the mirror, I’ve got music on and I’m singing along. Or I’m watching Friends in the background, so I’m not looking there, I’m looking anywhere else but there. 

She said, “well, why are you doing that?” and I said “because I’m scared”. I explained I watch the same thing over and over, I do the same things over and over, don’t let any feelings in. Because I’m scared that if I do let those in, I’m going to get back into the place I was in back in 2017 when I tried to end my life.  Because if I don’t have my coping strategies in place, I’m afraid I’m going to make one bad call and my entire life is going to fall apart. I constantly feel like I’m one bad decision away from a complete and utter breakdown. She said “well, you need to let yourself feel things” and that’s when I got very angry and left the session never to return, because, duh bitch, obviously I would if I could. Also 50 quid is a lot to be told what you already know. 

Sometimes it’s a toss up between whether you want to pay rent so you can live or whether you should pay for therapy so you can live with yourself. And, sadly, rent comes first. 

But weirdly she’s been kind of prophetic now I’m trapped back in my family house because – jokes on her –  thanks to lockdown I can’t afford either. And now and there’s nothing I can do except wallow in introspection and let those feelings in. And I HATE IT. 

I would like to be emotionally numb, watch Homes Under The Hammer and let things fall apart. I’m such a deer in headlights about making decisions in my life, I’ve accepted that it’s totally fine if the car hits me, because I couldn’t possibly have seen it coming if I’ve got a podcast about Scrubs on.

Also, you know what else? Every day I spend in quarantine I think about the moment I was packing, looked at my vibrator, thought nah, this won’t be for very long, travelled all across London, and how much I fucking resent myself. 

I’ve been volunteering with my family doing a food drop every week to the sick and elderly. It’s been nice to feel like I’m doing something helpful, but a lot of people don’t actually know they’re on the register for it and they’re now classified as elderly – and a lot of them are not happy to find out via me. I feel like the Grim Reaper but instead of a scythe, it’s a cardboard box full of pasta and loo roll.

I’ve also been running. My mum is a personal trainer so we have a treadmill. I texted my friend Andy to say I was on a treadmill and he asked if I was on a drugs trial, which sadly says a lot more about me than I’d like. I chalked it up to a one off but turns out this seems to be largely the collective opinion of my friends. 

Basically, like Batman going to those caves in arguably the worst of the Batman trilogy, (honestly I hated it so much my left hand is balled up as I type this) I’m trying to rebuild myself again, baby. And your girl does not like it one bit. 

But I reckon some of you might be using this time to do the same thing, maybe. And if so, maybe keep an eye on this blog so we can feel it together? But also, two metres apart. Fuck, even the idea of that is turning me on. 

Lockdown stats before I go:

Books read: Zero

Scripts finished: One. Barely. 

Number of awkward silences on Facetime when we’ve run out of things to discuss: a zillion

Number of times I think about that vibrator, sat in the cupboard under my sink, what it’s thinking about and whether it’s missing me: every goddamn fucking day. 

Alright, I’ve got to go – I think darkness has blocked my number by this point, but I can’t be sure unless I call it every thirty seconds to check. But I’ll be back

When I’d been seeing my first boyfriend for a few months, he invited me to come and meet all his friends for the first time. And go swimming with them.

It was difficult to say no because he’d already met all my friends – Ellen – several times, and at one point had rubbed his foot against hers for quite some time when we were playing Capture The Flag on Call of Duty before she asked him what he was doing and he realised it wasn’t my foot.

So off I went, with Ellen, obviously, to find a bikini.

We’d been shopping for underwear together before. My much cooler and feminine sister had been buying Gilly Hicks underwear for years. It sounds fine that you’ve got a sibling that can show you cool stuff, but mine’s three years younger than me.

I can best describe our relationship as one time we were on holiday and looking at jewelry at a stand. The man behind the counter started chatting to us and found out we were sisters. “Ah, so you’re the boss then?” he said, looking at me. In front of a whole market stall and my sister, I had to reply “no”.

So, copying her in a bid to be more popular, for Christmas Ellen and I decided to go to Gilly Hicks, which had a deal on at the time; 5 pairs of underwear for £20. We traipsed down the high street through the rain, and spent hours choosing different ones – even one thong. I’ll just sit here and readjust my beige, period stained underwear that let you guess which one of us chose that.

We then walked back to meet her mum in Kingston car park, excitedly carrying out our paper Gilly Hicks bags like trophies in the horrid December rain. I was particularly excited about the paper bag, so I could use it to carry my packed lunch to school in on Monday. All the popular girls brought their lunches in with paper bags from different stores – Abercrombie was a firm favourite. I’d watch them, and think, my god, what I would give to sit with you all, and eat my sandwiches out of a black and white torso of a damp, shirtless man. Not like this shit bag from Lidl, which by sixth form I was waiting and eating on the bus home after school. Still though, all the old people on the bus must think I’m such a loser.

“Shall we have a look at them?” I said, excitedly, in the car on the way home. Ellen got hers out and we all said how nice they were. Then I went to get mine out, reached into the bag, and realised my hand went all of the way through, and out of the bottom. We then realised that at some point the wind had burst my paper bag open and somewhere on the highstreet all of my underwear must have flown out into the street. Merry Christmas to me.

So here we were, back again, this time at Dorothy Perkins, trying on bikinis. I found one in the sale which was essentially a push up bra, but the cup size was way too big. It made my tits look massive, as long as you weren’t standing close enough to realise that my boob stopped a good inch before the bra cup.

Then, on the day of the meeting, I drove me and my boyfriend to Merlon Rise – the same pool my class had swimming lessons in when I was at primary school.

We used to have swimming lessons every week, where I’d sit on my own on the coach, eating dry cereal and sugar lumps out of tupperware because of my low blood sugar. If I was lucky I’d sit with Catherine, but she was very popular and people would book her to sit next to them weeks in advance. “Same time again next week, Catherine?” they’d say, as I peered on, staring at them through the gap between the seats behind, sucking on a Ricicle.

Our dinner lady Mrs Richards would come and supervise the changing room. And thank god she did – one time I put my swimming costume on and was about to get into the pool and I didn’t realise my entire lip was poking out the side and Mrs Richards had to tell me to tuck my labia back in. Imagine! Nearly turned as red as the rubber latex swimming cap on my head. I almost looked silly for a second.

Not this time though. I had my Dorothy Perkins bikini on. Whoever suggested the pool thing is kind of a genius; it’s the perfect excuse to see what your mate’s new girlfriend’s body looks like. May as well have just sent them nudes and a CV attached, if only my nice underwear wasn’t scattered across Kingston high street. I wasn’t going to look like a loser though this time, because I also had a full face of make-up on – lipstick and all. Nobody could possibly make fun of me now. I’d nailed it.

I walked out, like chilly a debutant at a chlorine-themed ball, all his mates turned around. I gave everyone a little wave, and lowered myself into the pool.

Instantly my bikini top dribbled open like a fountain as soon as enough water filled up, my nipples flapping about. Using one arm to hold my tits in, and the other to wipe away the mascara that was now all down my face, I successfully made small talk with his friends for nearly an hour. Somewhere now, I think, Mrs Richards is looking down on me and smiling. I don’t think she’s dead, but she was really quite old when I was at primary school, so you never know.

I was so pleased with myself, I almost didn’t hear it when I emerged on the other side of the pool to overhear one of his female friends say to the other, “she is quite boring though”.

51 pounds, if you’re getting technical. That’s the same as a ticket to Disneyland Paris. Right, fuck the Teacup ride. Let’s do this. I’ll fill you in on my week.

Sunday night, the taps in the house I’m lodging in in Shepherds Bush started gurgling. I didn’t notice, Alex my flatmate did. Alex is incredible – I thought the TV in the living room had been broken for the last two weeks while she’s been away in Nigeria, but then she came back and showed me that I just needed to change the batteries in the remote. Honestly, game changing stuff.

On Monday night, the toilet gurgling got worse, and also there was this eggy smell coming from the sink in the kitchen, which I just assumed were Christy’s farts, who was over to rehearse with me. He then asked me if I needed to go to the toilet, and we both worked out the smell was actually coming from neither of us.

Finally on Tuesday night, our downstairs toilet exploded. Exploded. Out into the downstairs floor, across the hallway. The kitchen sink also exploded with poo, too – which says a lot about Christy’s farts. It was everywhere. My flatmate Gerard – a 60 year old criminal barrister who, on my first day in the house, warned me that the area was “very ethnic” and not to bother recycling because we sell it all to China – was the first to discover the gates of a faecal-based hell had opened up in our house.

The plumber came yesterday morning. I let him in and showed him where the toilet was. I asked him if he wanted a cup of tea, he then told me I definitely should not be drinking the water, so I laughed, said “yeah I know” and pretended like I hadn’t already had three cups of tea that morning. About an hour later he shouted up to me that it was sorted. I shouted back “amazing” and closed my 14 tabs’ worth of research into Cholera.

I came downstairs. “I don’t clean it up though” he said, with a smile and off he went. I then spent four hours cleaning up pellets of shit.

We can’t have shoes in the house, and I’m so anxious about abiding by the rules of the house that a lot of that time was spent working out which one was more important – mildly irking my landlord, or treading in actual poo. I decided to go with wearing shoes. It was close though.

I’m at a weird stage. I’ve moved out of my mum’s house, I’ve started a new job. Things are moving forwards, whether I want them to or not. I went home to see my mum last weekend and we went for a pizza. It was nice to see her, she was kind enough to wait at least twenty seconds before asking my opinion on the ISIS bride. 

About a minute into the conversation, she put her favourite song on in the car and turned it up loud so I had to stop talking. It was “don’t you worry ‘bout a thing” by Stevie Wonder, used in my family’s favourite film, Hitch. Fair enough really, it’s a great song and I’ve not stopped listening to it since, despite the fact it was now being used as a mechanism to drown me out.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this financially devastating blog. To make it worth it, here’s a link to a cat answering the phone which I’ve had to watch on repeat to get through the day, and also a link to Nelly’s Hot in Herre – an absolute banger if there ever was one. There’s more I could tell you – I wear glasses now (what) and I like hummus (fuck), I still feel sad (NO!), I’ve pretended to be in an online relationship with my sketch partner for a show that’s caused so much drama it probably won’t happen anymore (oh dear),  I visited a sex therapist last year (tell us more), I’ve started being more open in public about the fact I like both girls and boys (we know), and-

Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing

Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, mama

An enemy of an enemy is my friend. Unfortunately, I am my own worst enemy.

In the confusion of trying to work out whether this means I am friends with myself or not, I have created several more enemies inside my brain. Chances are that some of those enemies are also enemies with each other. I am now infested with friends and enemies and I don’t know who is who, but they’re all me, so I think the best thing to do in this situation is to try to become friends with myself. This is tricky because I am the worst.

Whenever I am performing at a gig, it feels like that there is me on stage, attempting to perform comedy, but there’s also another me in the audience, on the front row, watching me, and she absolutely fucking hates it.

She hates every single second of this. “Who let this tiny baby bird on stage?” She says, angrily, right in the middle of my set. “Why is she so frightened? She makes me angry because she’s taking five minutes of my precious time away from me. And what’s with all the bloody chirping?”

At the same time, there’s this other part of me, a tiny voice that says, “bird seed”. No, it doesn’t say that. It says, “hey, remember when that person said that joke you did was funny? Remember how that felt better than anything has ever felt in your pathetic life, and you rode that pitiful high for weeks?” That voice hates me as well, but she can’t argue with the delicious endorphins, because she wants them too, the selfish bitch.

I was recommended Propranolol for stage fright by a friend, which I made an appointment with my doctor about. I got so close to getting it prescribed, and then at the last second her screen flashed up, outing me for having asthma. Propranolol can trigger an asthma attack. I said I was willing to risk it, but at this point she had stopped listening and was busy trying to shoo me out of her window with a massive tea towel.

I am built on fear. Sometimes I think the only reason I allowed myself to be born was because of my fear of enclosed spaces.

Feeling MILD.

Everyone is the protagonist of their own story, but I have typecast myself as a background character.

I’m a big wuss. I see so many pictures of people out, enjoying themselves in the sun, sipping margaritas. The closest I get to drinking a margarita is when I’m making a cup of tea to drink in my bedroom and accidentally spill a bit of sugar on the rim.

I don’t really drink. But when I do drink, I get insecure. One of the ways this manifests itself is I start changing my friend’s names in my phone to “best friend”. I get insecure a lot, and this has happened so often that now everyone in my phone is set to “best friend” and I have no idea who I’m texting anymore. Which is a nightmare, because I’d really need my best friend in a time like this, and I’ve accidentally texted someone I stopped speaking to in year 11.

I’m also bizarrely in a stable relationship at the moment. I’ve started as many Netflix shows as physically possible with him to minimise the risk of him leaving.

I don’t have much else to say about it really, apart from recently we were alone in my house very late, and I heard a noise outside. Classically, I started to freak out about the idea of someone breaking into the house, and he spent twenty minutes calmly explaining to me how safe we were, and how the unlikely a break in would be.

The next day he told me that he then waited until I fell asleep to freak out, plan a detailed escape route for us out of the house and how he would negotiate if we were taken hostage. I think that’s love. Or gaslighting, I’m not sure. I’m going to go with love for now.

I should probably text him, but I really don’t know which ‘best friend’ he’s saved under.

***

Audience Kat (reading this, from the other side of her laptop): What a fucking piece of shit this blog is. I can’t believe I wasted my time trying to read it. That baby bird metaphor that went nowhere? That bit about a boy at the end? Jesus Christ, I’ve just vomited all over the floor. She’s the worst person alive, and now she’s going to share it, and the endorphins of a single like will make her feel like writing this was worth it. What a loser.

Me: Wait! Give me a chance! I can do this! I can find my voice, I can-

Audience Kat: Sorry, did someone say something? All I can hear is chirp chirp chirp.

Me: But I think I can really-

Audience Kat: CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP.

Me: Chirp chirp chirp.