In my last blog, I wrote about my newfound and inexplicable desire to run and how it was a great distraction from writing-induced-waiting which is so painful it probably should be an actual medical diagnosis. This time I want to talk about something else which has been occupying me: clothes. I know that sounds ridiculous – everybody wears clothes – but picking outfits and creating new combinations and looks has started taking up more of my headspace than you might imagine. It’s probably (definitely) taking up more than is strictly necessary but it’s fun and frivolous and I’m about to lay out my justifications for why you too should have some frivolity in your life (and maybe wear more colourful clothes).
I saw a tweet the other day in which the tweeter was complaining that you follow a writer on social media and all you get is selfies. I had a snort to myself because that is absolutely me and I make no apology for it. It all started when I finally succumbed to Instagram and got a sudden urge to post a picture of my outfit every day. It wasn’t really for anyone other than myself – I kind of liked the challenge of never wearing the same outfit twice and I was probably bored or hemmed in by a pandemic or something at the time. I’m not sure there was much deep reflection going on about the decision, more of spontaneous snap and post situ. However, I quickly realised that not wearing an outfit twice was quite a weak and environmentally unsound premise. Of course we should be wearing our clothes multiple times, preferably until they fall apart. So I tweaked the concept in my mind to maximising the possible combinations and permutations of outfits to make your wardrobe go as far as it possibly can without the boredom setting in. (This sentence has just given me an unsettling flashback to A-level Maths and I can’t remember the actual ins and outs of what that means mathematically so for any pedants out there please only take this sentence literarily!). What I mean is how many ways can you style a dress? You could change the shoes and make a different look. What about adding a necklace? Or some knitwear? You could highlight a specific colour from the pattern with your accessories or go for a striking clash. You could wear the same colours head to toe. You could go tonal. You could add a head scarf or a neck scarf or a waistcoat or a coat or earrings or bracelets. You could add socks. I love adding a sock. There are just so many options and I was quickly addicted to exploring them. I don’t think the posting part was/is entirely necessary except for using it as a record of what I’d already done. I did go through a phase of curating my feed by colour – just how many different pink outfits could I come up with in succession before moving on to red then purple then blue etc.? I realise it was entirely pointless as projects go but it gave me a weird sense of satisfaction. Or was that pointless? Do projects actually require themselves to have a point? I’m increasingly thinking it’s healthy to do things just for the fun if it sometimes. If I like thinking about outfits and it scratches some sort of creative itch and it gives me a little bubble of happiness, then isn’t it exactly what I should be doing? For some reason which I think might lie in my schooling, I have always struggled to prioritise creative pursuits. I’ve always had a significant creative streak which has displayed itself in various ways from painting to interior design to writing to fashion but I have always tended towards the apologetic about it. I still prioritise pretty much everything else over these types of hobby despite not believing that’s the right thing to do. I suspect this needs further unpicking but I like that putting outfits together is a creative thing to do just for the fun of it and something which can be done every day. Not with an aim like getting published and not with any pressure associated with it to do it a certain way. I just put different outfits together because I like it. And don’t we all need that freedom somewhere in our lives? (Also, it has to be prioritised because one shouldn’t leave the house unclothed, unlike writing which can easily be pushed to the side in favour of other arguably more pressing tasks.) It seems, on the surface of it, a superficial kind of pursuit; vain even. But I genuinely believe in the power of clothes to uplift. I do think that floating around wearing bright yellow is more likely to give others a moment of cheer than being dressed head to toe in black, even if one approach is generally considered chic-er than the other. My husband’s gran, Thelma, was a very warm and immeasurably likeable person. Everybody liked her. I loved nothing more than visiting her flat and having a good chat over a tiny cup of tea. We bonded over several things but one of them was clothes. She hadn’t always had many and had often made her own through necessity. So, in her later years, when things became more possible for her on the retail front, we often shared an intense trip to Marks and Spencer’s. I was regularly out-shopped by an eighty-something year old while we wallowed in the beauty of print and colour and pattern together. Then later, when she became unwell and couldn’t really wear anything other than her nightie, I purposefully wore different and exciting outfits whenever I visited because I knew she’d get vicarious joy from them. I knew she’d beckon me over so she could get a better look at a collar or rub a material between her fingers or more closely admire a print. If I could cheer her a little, just by getting dressed, why wouldn’t I? Even after we lost her (and everyone wore bright colours to her funeral), I continued to associate dressing with mood. When I very angrily turned forty, I wondered whether wearing clothes I didn’t associate with mid-life would help me embrace the new decade more easily. I think it has. If you’re uncertain about something, the answer frequently is power dressing, I find. A smart outfit can make you feel confident, powerful, capable. I often consider my approachability as an adult when I’m working with children - I don’t power dress for them but I do find they’re often intrigued by an unusual ring or lobster-shaped earring and it helps them feel comfortable with this new adult. If I have a meeting I suspect will be challenging, I one hundred per cent do power dress – it makes me feel as though I’m armoured and not to be messed with. If I’m a bit fed up or under the weather, I love a comforting knit or a shiny and soft combo. I don’t know why that’s comforting, it just is. And I always wear colour. I definitely use clothes to affect my mood and to impact those around me. And it isn’t just friends and family who notice – strangers often talk to me about my clothes. So I don’t think we should be too quick to demean a fascination with fashion – it can definitely be about more than the superficial. I’ve realised that I’m spending more and more time rummaging in my wardrobe or on Vinted or thinking of outfit combinations and in analysing why and if this is healthy, I’ve realised it’s often born out of me sort of wanting to write but getting caught in a negative thought cycle. It goes like this: I should write the new novel. But I’ve lost my momentum and got out of the rhythm. Yes, all the more reason to get back in. But what’s the point? What’s happening with the previous novel and the one before that? Weelllll…. The first one is with a really amazing agent who may or may not love it. We don’t know yet. When will we know? We don’t know. How long’s a piece of string? Write this one anyway. But… what if they don’t like the first one or the second one? What’s the point of writing another to gather dust? You know the answer to this. Persist, remember? Yep, must sit down and try. Can’t make myself sit down, brain starts drifting to what I might wear tomorrow or how essential it might be to acquire a trouser suit. Off I trundle upstairs to rummage in the wardrobe instead. I was getting quite irritated with myself over this but then I thought that perhaps I ought to cut myself more slack. Waiting to hear about the novel and holding onto the faith to keep writing are very challenging pastimes. If I’ve found another creative outlet to tide me over in the meantime, surely that’s a good thing? Does is matter that it’s shuffling clothes around on hangers and turning the bedroom into a boutique? I hope not. I think creativity comes in many forms and the more of it you have in your life the better. I think for people who crave visual stimuli especially, but maybe for any people, a creative outlet is nourishing. I think it’s good for your mental health to be able to express yourself without limits. Maybe sometimes you can offload difficult feelings through your creation, like an emotional purge or cleansing. When it comes to fashion, I really like the term ‘dopamine dressing’ – literally being able to boost your neurotransmitters (and those of others) by wearing something bright or beautifully clashed or madly patterned. Sometimes, of course, in being experimental, some bad creations are made. Some bad outfits are paraded. But there’s no real consequence of a dodgy outfit – maybe creative outlets are a good place to safely push boundaries and safely push yourself. I think many people don’t experiment with clothes, or with colour in particular, because they’re frightened of looking or feeling silly; perhaps of standing out from the crowd. I have never wanted to be in the crowd so I don’t really concern myself but maybe for those people, painting or writing or singing are more palatable ways to experiment. There is never just one way. But I definitely think there are benefits to engaging in something in which there are no real rules. I happen to like creating outfits. Maybe it’s a creative outlet and guilty pleasure rolled into one. Either way, as long as I can rein in the associated shopping addiction I’m claiming it’s more constructive than it sounds. (Re the shopping addiction which I’m well aware is bad for the planet and my bank account, perhaps everyone also requires a vice?!) I’d love to hear what other creative outlets you have and if any of them are guilty pleasures too. Secret graffiti habit? Tell me. Addicted to scrap-booking hot celebrities? I really need to know. And if you’re feeling a bit fed up, why not reach for something colourful to wear? I dare you to try it and see how it makes you feel.
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It’s a long time since I’ve posted anything on here and that’s mainly because I have dedicated this year to submitting my novel. Things are all quiet while I try to make headway. But instead of just staying quiet myself (I’m a writer after all) I thought I might share some posts about the other things I’ve been getting up to while waiting. Because there is an awful lot of waiting involved in trying to make a career of writing and a high risk of losing one’s mind. One has to find other things to do.
The most surprising thing I’ve been doing is running and I don’t think anyone is more surprised by it than me, with my long and dedicated history of non-running. In fact not just non-running but an actual life-long hatred of exercise – the getting sweaty, the feeling of breathing so hard you might puke or die, the increased requirement to shower. The general hassle and discomfort of it all. Even as a child I wasn’t very keen. I did do sport, particularly netball, but even then I preferred being goalkeeper because you only had to run around one third of the court. On sports day I preferred 100m because it was over the quickest. I could just about stretch to 400m if I really had to but that was my absolute maximum and I still probably would have chugged in last trying not to vomit up a lung. I do not have an impressive history of exerting myself physically. So what on earth drove me and my 42 year old peri-menopausal body to suddenly start running? Well. It was partly a hill, partly a man and partly too much cholesterol. I started the year unfit. I didn’t look especially unfit – I have always been an averagely sized human who would not have fallen into an overweight category except on the harshest of measures. A solid size 12. Perhaps that led to some complacence about my actual fitness. Early in the year, we went for a walk. My husband has a friend who is a very outdoorsy kind of guy. My husband and our boys and his friends and his girls have over the years formed a kind of Gang For The Intrepid. They go off adventuring with canoes and up hills and with camping equipment. They like a tarpaulin. Our friend has a grappling hook and he knows exactly how to use it and he would. Just so you can picture the level of intrepid we’re talking. I would equate it to Military. Anyhow, I think it’s pretty obvious by this point that though I am very fond of all the members of the gang, I am not actually in it. They adventure and I stay at home and read a book. Recently, they all went camping in torrential rain and high winds and I went to Book Club. If that doesn’t adequately sum up our differences I don’t know what would. But this one day, they persuaded me the walk was “easy” and I mistook military-standard easy for an amble around a country park easy and somehow agreed to it. Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. I thought I might die and I’m only slightly exaggerating. The incident played on my mind – not just because I felt like a tit, but because I am only 42 years old and how could I find walking up a hill so difficult? It made me feel bad about myself – not just about my fitness but somehow the whole of me as a person. I felt like I’d let myself go. I felt like I was failing at being a functioning, healthy human. But although this was enough to make me feel miserable, it wasn’t actually enough of a kick up the backside to get me running. That came later when I eventually went for my over-forties free NHS health check. I was anxious about that because like many people who have lost someone to cancer, my health anxiety is now a little out of control. In my mind, blood test obviously equals shock cancer diagnosis. I would have thought I was a little insane for making this leap but my best friend who’s been through a similar experience does it too. It’s cancer’s fault. So when I got a text message the evening of my blood test, my heart did a little fear-induced leap. The fear quickly turned to outrage when I discovered the problem was my cholesterol. And no, it wasn’t the good kind. As a teetotal vegetarian, I was fuming. How could this possibly have happened? Surely I wasn’t your obvious high-cholesterol candidate? I kept chunnering about it over the next days in ongoing outrage. But that hill-walking incident kept coming back to haunt me. I didn’t exactly exercise, did I? Could it be that I actually was a prime-candidate for clogged arteries? The daily dose of full fat yoghurt wasn’t helping either but perhaps I really did need to get my daily step count up. I started power-walking the dog. I stopped avoiding the village hill and purposefully included it in the dog walk. For the first while I predictably hated it. Bloody hills! Horrible things really. But I’m very stubborn when I set my mind to something and I wasn’t going to be beaten. Least of all by a hill. I had absolutely no intention of running. I would power-walk and tackle hills and do more steps and ta-da! I’d be fine. That was the plan. Until one really weird night when I hadn’t done as many steps as I’d wanted during the day and I got a sudden desire to jog around my living room. The thought came to me tentatively, creeping into my conscious. Could I, maybe, despite everything become a runner? No! Absolute lunacy! With this body which at certain points in the month was struggling to get off the sofa? No! At forty-two? Don’t be ridonculous! I wasn’t a running kind of person. My husband is. He always has been. My son is – he’s a budding footballer. But I wasn’t. I was a stay at home and read a book kind of person. Wasn’t I? Thing was though, did I want to be her? The person who couldn’t walk up hills? Could you choose who to be? Did I have a fit version of myself buried deep inside somewhere? If I tried really hard, could she be found? The next thing I knew I was huffing and puffing my way around a field. It was awful. Really horrible. I thought I might die. I was sweaty. I couldn’t really breathe. The whole thing was one enormous battle. Did people really do this voluntarily? Did they enjoy it? What was actually wrong with them? Then I did it again. And again. And for some reason that I don’t understand but was probably stubbornness, I kept doing it. I found a Fitbit in my son’s bedroom and started wearing it. I could just about run 300m and then I thought I’d die. I could run for about 3 minutes with some walking in between if I tried really hard. It was all very unpleasant. That was April. I kept going with the hope that I’d get better at it and maybe I’d feel better about myself when I did. If I could just make it to 1km I’d be pleased. It’d be the furthest I’d ever run in my whole life and surely things became a bit respectable when they ended in a km and not just a m? And I did make it to 1km. It took a while. I had to settle my panicky breathing and override the urge to just get it over with but I got there and I was so bloody chuffed with my previously non-running self. And I think it was maybe at that point when I began to see that running could be a really good counter-balance to other things in my life like my writing career. With running you could progress relatively quickly. You could set yourself little time or distance or speed targets and when you hit them, you could feel good. You didn’t have to wait months or years for something to maybe, possibly, hopefully happen – you could graft and make it happen yourself relatively quickly. You didn’t need to beg for tiny scraps of positive feedback, you just had to glance down at your Fitbit. Despite not enjoying physical exertion, I am suited to working hard or dedicating myself to something. It wasn’t long before I wanted to go further but I got a bit stuck at about 1.5km. A chance chat with my brother about heart zones was transformative and by keeping my heart rate purposefully lower, I could suddenly run 2km. I have since extended it to 3km which involved running non-stop for about 25mins. And I wasn’t even dying at the end. What has happened to me? I don’t even know who I am anymore. September me is literally running ten times further than April me. September me can keep going for more than eight times the duration of my first close to death attempts. And, whisper it, I think there’s more in the tank. I’m not quite sure what’s happened to January-couldn’t-get-up-the-hills me. I think what I’m saying is that running can make you feel differently about yourself in the best possible way. It’s a great counter to slower moving, more soul-destroying things like writing. It’s made me feel more capable as a person, at times even powerful. It’s helped me to gain some control over my hormones. The perimenopause supplement I’ve started is also a major game-changer but between the two of them, my energy levels are completely different. This is probably over-sharing but this month I have ran three times during my period – I can’t overstate how impossible that would have been for January-me. I was finding even daily tasks an uphill battle and would have laughed you out the room if you’d suggested I went for a run. (I wouldn’t have just laughed, clearly there’d have been swearing and hormone-fuelled derision. I may even have been tempted to launch something at you. Hard). And probably because I feel so much better in general, I’m coping with the lack of writing developments better. I still find the rate of progress and the over-whelming silence difficult but it isn’t as all-consuming as it could be. I’ve just survived the world’s longest summer holiday without losing my mind too. So, somehow, despite all the odds, I’m pro-running. I’d recommend it, especially to those absolute non-runners out there. If I can, you can. Plus, it makes you wonder what else can be accomplished if after 42 years of dedicated non-running, someone like me can suddenly become a runner… |
AuthorNicola Ashbrook Archives
September 2023
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