As I wrote these pieces – vignettes, I suppose, from a life thus far – down, I felt embarrassed by how much power I have allowed men (so many men) to hold over me. I envy Jennifer Connelly’s Sarah her moment of rebellion. I long to echo her words: “You have no power over me.”
I might add this to my (growing) list of things to discuss with a future therapist, but for now I thought I’d share them with you. Because why? I don’t know. I think there is a sort of kinship in recounting the ways people’s words have hurt us, even if they didn’t mean them to, or if they barely remember what they said, anyway.
Sticks and stones? Those bruises heal. But words, they leave an imprint.
#1 Can’t dance? Don’t dance
In the very early ‘oughts, I started going to hip hop dance class on Aungier Street with my cousin Roseanne and, occasionally, one or other of my friends who fancied trying it out.
Run by a woman named Jane Shortall, the classes took place in an enormous sports hall within the Aungier Street YMCA. In each one-hour period, we would learn the choreography to a portion of a specific song, led by Jane, standing on a stage with one, sometimes two, assistant dancers.
Towards the end of the class, we would split into two groups and turn towards the middle, taking turns to “perform” for the other group. There was a dance-off vibe, but any competition was friendly. We were as likely to cheer on the other side as we were to feel any sense of superiority or satisfaction when we saw someone trip over their feet, forget the move halfway through.
That the one song I can remember performing to, in that time, is S Club 7’s Don’t Stop Movin’ speaks to how loosely we were interpreting the word “hip hop”, but I loved it. There is something so beautiful, so freeing, about moving your body to loud music, especially when that’s in communion with other people – and, a crucial aspect for me, takes place in a space entirely devoid of mirrors.
I understand the utility of a mirror in a dance setting, as I do in a weight lifting setting. It helps to see exactly what your body’s doing, where exactly you’re going wrong in one move or another. But when the experience of looking at your body is uncomfortable, alien or filled with shame, as it is for many of us, the mirror itself can serve, I find, to take us out of the moment, a reminder of the discomfort we usually feel towards, and as a result of, it.
In any case, my time under Jane Shortall’s tutelage was sporadic, at best. At no point would I have been considered “intermediate” or, even that consolation prize of “advanced beginner”. And I didn’t consider myself a great dancer. Maybe an “okay” dancer, “good”, at a stretch. But it somehow didn’t matter: I wasn’t dancing for any reason other than to dance, to spend an hour moving and sweating and celebrating movement itself.
The night I met my ex, Scott (not his real name), I was performing a dance routine, miming the act of removing a glove with my teeth, a move I had learned at the burlesque class I’d attended in the Liffey Trust Studios on Sheriff Street with my friends Clare and Emma.
There, we were not afforded the dignity of a blank wall to stare at, instead charged with looking directly into our own eyes as we shimmied and shook, ran our feather boas down our arms, reached a pointed finger towards a toe (resplendent in a heeled shoe, I barely remember the version of myself who was able for this), kicked a heel up behind us.
I did not, needless to say, feel exceptionally comfortable, or competent, at burlesque.
But that night, something came over us, as if we were musical performers of old, a kind of adorable, coquettish double act. When my ex and his friend came over to ask what we were doing, I was convinced that their tone was one of awe and incredulity. We had lured them in with our invisible gloves, those invisible fingers, gently grasped between our teeth.
There are many ways to ask someone what they are doing. I imagine it written down, as in a play. [seductively]: “What are you doing?” [curiously} “What are you doing?” [accusingly]: “What are you doing?” [mockingly] “What are you doing?”
I guess I’ll never know how he meant it, but it doesn’t seem important now. We were in conversation, then, and from being in conversation we were soon in bed and, later, in love.
It wasn’t long after this meeting that I danced in front of Scott for, I guess, the second time, although this one was in earnest, in a bar with a dance floor, no invisible gloves to be (not) seen. I dragged him with me and began to move, not in any specific or particular way that I remember, just in a way that felt good. He balked. [laughingly] “What are you doing?”
There is a very specific kind of shame that comes with having someone point out, quite calmly, as if they thought you knew, that you are bad at something you enjoy or, worse, that you look stupid doing it.
He was the type of person who did not enjoy looking stupid in front of other people, seeking to avoid that eventuality at all costs, which made his laughing at me all the more galling. He was embarrassed, second-hand, for me, for this false impression I had of myself as someone who could (who should) dance.
He wasn’t doing it to hurt me. I think, in that moment, he truly thought that I knew how bad a dancer I was, and that I simply didn’t care, an attitude he might even have admired, had he thought long enough about it.
But I did care, very much, and I suddenly felt as though a spell had broken, as if he was that mirror (the one I didn’t want to dance in front of), reminding me of how ungainly, how uncooperative and shameful my body was. I don’t think I’ve really danced – and I mean danced, thrown my hands in the air and let my body move and allowed myself to enjoy the sensation – since.
As I write this down, it seems painfully sad to me that someone else’s self-consciousness did so much to stymie what little joy I had once found in my physical body, but it’s a hole I can’t seem to shore up. The mirrors have come out and they follow me around now and I don’t know if I’ll ever get to dance like that again.
#2: “Shame about the face.”
When I was around 13 years old, I was obsessed with a boy named Barry Eustace, who was in the year above me in secondary school. I don’t remember ever actually talking to Barry – as in, what we talked about, or why – but I do remember calling him on the landline in my parents’ house, asking his mum if I could speak to him.
We kissed one night at a community disco, held in the same hall where, a year previously, I had cried hot, embarrassed tears when it was discovered that I had stolen a small tub of glittery play dough from the large basket of Santa gifts left behind after the Christmas bazaar.
Santa had long since left the building – he would arrive on a helicopter each year, and we would all stand on the tarmacadam a safe distance away, waving into the gale force wind whipped up by the helicopter propellor blades – and I figured that the toys that had been left behind were fair game.
I was wrong, of course, and someone else’s mother caught us red-handed, a small group of 11- and 12-year-olds, pockets full of someone else’s Christmas gifts. She marched me over to my mother, shouting loudly at and about me as I wept.
Now, I can’t ever imagine shouting at someone else’s child – maybe my sister’s, now that I think about it, but definitely not some other woman’s child, at a public school event. I guess times have changed.
Anyway, the hall was decked out differently the night of the disco – or, at least, the lights were dim enough that we didn’t notice the decoration, or lack thereof.
I sent a friend to ask Barry if he’d “meet” me, or maybe I said “shift”; at some point in my youth, one fell out of favour, and the other in, but I can’t remember when, or in which order.
He must have said yes, because we ended up kissing. I straddled his lap on one of the seats lined up around the edges of the hall. He put a hand up my top and squeezed my left boob in a way that felt thrilling, all the more so when an adult – some poor schmuck who’d been talked into chaperoning – marched over to separate us with a tsk-tsk and a “don’t make me kick you out!”
Much as I can’t imagine shouting at someone else’s child, I can’t imagine getting involved in the adolescent wranglings of someone else’s teenagers. I feel sick just thinking about it, mostly because it would make me feel terribly old, and desperately uncool.
I wonder if that’s how that man felt, that night when he surely drew the short straw and was dispatched to prevent the progression of our ardour.
The following day at school, I expected to begin the kind of dance that would precede the commencement of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. His friend would whisper to mine, and mine to his, and so on and so forth until we were holding hands at lunchtime and kissing one another behind the maintenance shed.
Instead, what happened was this: my friend Chris, being a neighbour of one of Barry’s friends, had been chatting to a group of lads that included Barry, the neighbour, God knows who else, and someone had brought me up. I don’t know how, exactly, but I can imagine: they heard we’d kissed the night before; “what’s going on with you and Rosemary”; a bawdy, “so… Rosemary, eh?”
What mattered, what matters, is what he replied, nonchalantly and with a shrug of his shoulder. “Rosemary,” he’s said to have laughed, and then, a summary: “Nice tits. Shame about the face.”
Of course, Chris should never have relayed any of this to me. I would have discovered, sooner or later, that Barry wasn’t interested in me or, honestly, I might have discovered that he was. Maybe this was all bravado, big talk in front of “the lads”. Maybe the whisper machine would have worked its magic eventually.
What did happen, instead, was that I cried. I cried in front of Chris, in front of my friends, who consoled me, assured me that Barry was a dickhead, not deserving of my time, my tears or my tits. I never called him again; I don’t think. I never even made eye contact with him again, I was so hurt and embarrassed.
His was a throwaway comment: cruel, and thoughtless but, ultimately, not something said to my face and probably not something he imagined would get back to me so swiftly.
But his opinion of me was something I internalised, picked up in my arms and tucked away inside myself, and for years afterwards, it rang in my ears as I got dressed, always choosing the push-up bra, the low-cut top, the nipped-in waist that would emphasise my “nice tits” and, I hoped, draw attention away from my shameful face.
It’s not that I thought I was a supermodel, before that, but I was somehow operating under the assumption that my own feelings about my face – it wasn’t great, too much chub and not enough eyelashes and why was one eye smaller than the other? – were mine alone, and that other people didn’t really notice it, one way or another.
But now I knew: I was wrong. They did notice it, and found it lacking.
#3 “How come you never learned to cook?”
Johnny (not his real name) was someone I never should have dated, for myriad reasons. I was just out of a five-year relationship that had ended, if not particularly dramatically, then traumatically enough, at least for me.
My self-esteem was at an all-time low and I was terribly afraid that I was too old, too fat, too depressed and too much of an internet pariah for anyone to ever fancy me again. This would have been the perfect time for me to throw myself into therapy, spend time with friends, take up a new hobby in an attempt to see life as having more to offer than romance and the validation of sexual interest.
But no: I did what I had always done, and threw myself into my next relationship with what can only be described as gusto, and within weeks of our first date we were spending Friday nights (and Saturday nights… and, honestly, a lot of weekday nights, too) in my house, cooking meals or ordering in, watching old movies and falling asleep on the couch. (I have never been great at dating, and “relationship mode” seems to be my default.)
It was on one of those early cosy nights in that he first began to criticise my cooking. I was making bolognese, I think, a recipe of my mother’s that’s pretty straightforward: a base of onions and garlic, ground beef, carrots, mushrooms, tinned tomatoes, tomato puree and mixed herbs, simmered for as long as you can simmer it, until it is a rich red colour and thick enough to coat a piece of penne, a bowl of spaghetti.
I have never been especially interested in cooking, and my repertoire has always been fairly limited, but I can follow a recipe and I try to make things tasty, at the very least, so when he stuck a finger (red flag #1, honestly) into my bolognese sauce and laughingly exclaimed at how bland it was, I was taken aback.
Still laughing, he asked, “How come you never learned to cook?” while rifling through my spice drawer, taking out onion and garlic powders, dried basil, then a small bottle of worcestershire sauce and a beef stock cube, neither of which I would ever have added to bolognese.
He mixed as he added, a drop of this, a soupćon of that, until it was to his taste, pronouncing, “I mean, it’s not great but it’s better”, before going back to the couch to await his serving.
His criticism was like that: dropped, seemingly out of nowhere, and then just brushed past (by him, not by me) as if it hadn’t been criticism or, at the very least, as if I shouldn’t have interpreted it as such.
“I can’t control how you choose to react to what I say,” he said to me once, weaponising the years of therapy he had done, a fact I initially thought would make him a great communicator, an understanding partner, a thoughtful lover.
Instead, honestly, it felt like it just gave him an excuse for his bad behaviour, and a reason to bemoan mine. His therapist agreed with him, he once told me, that there was no point in his apologising for something (terrible) he’d done. “I’ll just end up thinking about it non-stop and that will set me back,” he’d said, as if his were the only feelings that mattered.
Another time, when I pointed out that I felt – I used a lot of “I feel” or “it seems to me” statements with him, because anything stronger was met with an aggressive level of defensiveness – as though he never really asked how I was, or how my day had been, he took no time to tell me I was right. “I can’t ask how you are – because what if you tell me you’re doing terribly, and then I have to take that on? I have enough to deal with.”
Despite, really, his being an opinion I shouldn’t have had much faith in, his derision of my cooking abilities really knocked me for six (of course, that sent me down a rabbit hole: “knocked for six” a phrase that is said to have originated in cricket).
I don’t think I’ve ever really regained that confidence. Like I said, I wasn’t knocking out gourmet meals with ingredients like gochugaro or anything in “reduction” or “foam” form, but I had a few recipes I was pretty happy to whip up for friends. By the time Johnny was done with me, I was saying things like “I can’t really cook” or “I mean, I can make it, but I can’t guarantee it’ll be nice!” with a nervous laugh.
It’s taken more than five years, but the way out of the mire of cooking insecurity has, for me, been through the bellies of children. I’ve found myself making simple, straightforward dishes – orange chicken with jasmine rice; pasta, layered with (that very same) bolognese, shredded mozzarella and a little pasta sauce, topped with cheese and breadcrumbs and baked in the oven until golden; a kind of smorgasbord of sorts with celery and peanut butter dotted with raisins, pita breads and home-made hummus, chicken nuggets, tater tots and watermelon, feta and basil salad. That last one probably doesn’t count as cooking, but you get the gist.
Children, I find, are very straightforward food critics. They like something. Or they don’t. There’s no “this is bland” or “you should’ve added more salt” with children. (That could have something to do with the fact that they just add ketchup to everything, but that’s beside the point.)
In making food I know they’ll like, I’m slowly reminding myself that I’m not entirely crap at this and, in any case, you don’t have to be good at your hobbies. I’m not sure we’re quite at hobby level just yet, but we’ll get there.
If you’d like to read more of my dating stories, my menmoir, This is Not About You, is available now in most good bookshops and on Amazon here.
Wonderful read, I wish I didn’t relate to the cruelty of men (especially throughout my 20s when I was deathly insecure) but I really do. Thanks for sharing xx
I love the power you have over “words”. I wouldn’t worry about cooking Rosemary those rude men can cook for themselves!