Wearing chains like Keith Richards

Or how it takes most of your entire life to find out who you really are

I spent the majority of my adult life behaving in a way that conformed to societal norms. After dropping out of A’ Levels and running away to Amsterdam (every parent’s nightmare. I simply hopped on a Eurolines bus, and didn’t come back for 3 years), I then got back on the hamster wheel of life, and did my exams, went to university and chose a job because I needed money to live. There was less chat about meaningful work back then. That means it felt simpler in many ways. You got a job to live your life and that was that.

I didn’t hate my job or the people I worked with, but I consistently had this voice inside that told me I wasn’t right. Something about me was disagreeable. The fact that I was too candid. Too honest. Wore too much make up. Came into meetings in cowboy boots smelling of cigarette smoke. This was okay for men in the creative industries. This renegade and eccentric approach wasn’t okay for women. It was just plain weird.

‘You drink beer just like a man,’ my boss told me one evening.

Each time she looked at me there was disdain in her expression.

Instead of telling her to bugger off I only drank wine in front of her from that day on. There was something uncouth about me. Masculine. But also clearly not masculine at all. I made myself smaller. More polite. Less honest. The swashbuckling, mutant side was disappearing. The side who had worn tights on her head and pretended she was Kate Bush. The one who liked to do impressions at her parents’ get togethers.

I took this wilder side, the funny, idiotic, comedy, non-conformist side, and squashed it into a battered suitcase. It was battered because it contained the non-conformist sides of many women before me. Some were still hidden in the bottom, and others had turned to dust.

I bought blazers and owned them in different colours. I dialled down my make up. I pushed the cowboy boots into the back of the wardrobe. I listened to a lot of angry music too. This was my main outlet you see.

In my forties my life was consumed by trying to have children, and then having the actual children. I slipped on that decade like slipping on a banana skin and skidded right through to my late forties. I am still in denial about my age. I have noticed that only much older men look at me (men in their seventies), how I ache in the mornings, how I am bone-tired by the time I clamber into bed, and sleep like a log (I am lucky enough to rarely get insomnia but have a lot of trouble waking up nowadays).

What other things have changed?

Well the funny thing is all the stuff I hid in that battered suitcase has now exploded into my life.

And this is both liberating and scary.

In Zara I find myself holding a heavy, silver necklace made up of multiple chains. I buy it. I also buy several pairs of earrings. The earrings are all very bright or very long and all are highly impractical. I have a vision of myself bedecked in a lot of jewellery. Like a Queen but one that smokes Vogue menthols. I get home and put the chains on. I look like Keith Richards. I decide to wear them nonetheless. On Instagram I put on a baseball cap and pretend I am presenting an American podcast- I put on a loud, brash voice and record it in three minutes flat. Then without thinking I upload it onto reels and don’t bother checking to see if anyone likes it or not.

The contents of the exploded suitcase have come back into my life.

I throw the suitcase over the garden fence for someone else to use.

I start listening to a band that everyone has been raving about. It is not middle aged music.

‘This is the kind of music young people listen to,’ I tell my partner.

‘It doesn't matter. There is no such thing anymore,’ he replies.

I think about how this is true and how frustrating this must be when you’re young and don’t want old farts listening to your music. I am also liberated by this idea too. Perhaps I will go and see this band in my chains. And with the earrings. Perhaps I will be invisible and that will be fun. Perhaps I may smoke a cigarette.

The music is loud, anti-government - it’s angry music. The kind of thing I loved when I was a teen and felt the world was conspiring against me. The banana-skin-slip of time and I am here- a long way from my teen years and bewildered by how quickly it has all flown by. This is just fact.

I walk back from Lidl with my headphones on, music blaring, a lemon tree that was on special offer hanging out of my ‘Wu Tang Clan,’ bag (Primark- £2.99). An older man looks at me, a glint in his eye, I think perhaps he is drunk as he staggers a bit. Inside is a boy of about 18 who looks me up and down. I wonder if he knows that I am listening to this angry, music, that I am wearing chains under my T-shirt that make me look like Keith Richards. For a moment I think about how it would feel to snog him. I wonder if perhaps my HRT is making me malfunction. But no it isn’t that. It is just this essence of me that has been squashed for so long and now it wants to create mischief. It is the side that never knew when to stop. Who got told off a lot. That drank beer like men.

I decide against it.

‘You are not dead yet,’ I say under my breath as I try and hoist the lemon tree into the kitchen along with some shower gel which is an imitation of a well-known brand. I think again about how alive I felt when I was young. How everything was future- facing. How I never imagined this life but that I am also lucky because I am here and not dead.

I wonder if this is how Keith Richards feels. I think about all the boys I snogged and where they are now. I wonder if I should have been in a rock band and then I would have been able to keep the cowboy boots. The real me, the one hidden in the suitcase for years whispers in my ear.

‘Welcome back,’ it says.