We are simply his slaves

I do not pull my weight in the house.

There are several reasons for this, some rational and some bad.

My flatmate, V, is much cleaner than I am, for example. She minds when the kitchen is dirty, and I don’t really. So she cleans it more often than I do. QED.

She is a natural-born cook and I am a learner. So she cooks more often than I do.

She has always done for herself, and I had a cleaner until last year. So she is conscious of chores that need to be done, and I still expect someone else to do them for me. I am quite happy to empty the bin and clean out the litter tray if reminded, but I do not remember on my own. So quite often she ends up doing them more than half the time because it’s easier than reminding me when I get home.

She does the garden. That’s not actually out of order per se, because I said when I moved in that I was not going to do the garden except for the odd bit of hired manual labour, so I am not reneging on the deal here. But it still adds to the imbalance.

I’m rather tidier than she is, but the problem with tidying is that you can only really do it for yourself, not for someone else. I don’t know where all her things live, and if they’re not in their places then there’s probably a good reason for it and I will muck up her system by putting them away. So I keep my stuff pretty tidy most of the time, but this is not a major contribution to the smooth running of the household.

There is one job that I do much, much better than she does, however. You guessed it. Laundry.

My endless passion for clothes is well documented. I’d write here more about it if it weren’t for the fact that (a) I am not sure SJ would approve, and (b) I can’t really convince myself that anyone else is interested in my wardrobe.

V does not look after her clothes very well. She leaves them all over the floor. She forgets to zip her lingerie into the protective bag before it goes in the wash. Sometimes she leaves her clean laundry in the washing machine for too long, and it has to be washed again. I am too narcissistic to do anything like that.

So, as of tonight, I am taking over the laundry. It kills three birds with one stone. Firstly, I will be closer to pulling my weight, which would clearly be a Good Thing. Secondly – and most importantly; we’re making a big deal about this at the moment – washing will be more environmentally friendly. No more half-loads. Finally, I will no longer have to be offended by the mess that V makes of her tights I will be able to contribute my particular expertise to the smooth running of the household.

I’m most interested in strengths. I am doing a lot of coaching around strengths right now, asking my clients: How could you use more of your strengths to get what you want? The answers are fascinating, and so is the energy around the question. People want to use their strengths. They are happy using their strengths.

Clothes is a strength of mine. I’m happy to do as much laundry as needed (although I draw the line at matching Hano’s socks). I just walked into V’s room and picked up all the clothes on the floor and folded them and I felt energised and cheerful doing it. I don’t feel like that when cleaning the bathroom.

This is a good way to divide up household chores. I probably have other strengths that can be brought to bear in this arena, although I’m not immediately sure what they are. We could maybe work on this.

Don’t get strung out by the way I look

I have been doing a lot of clothes shopping on eBay.

This is a quite different experience from normal shopping. For a start, they seem to sell the kind of clothes I actually wear. In addition to that, almost everything costs less than a tenner. (It would not be true to say that everything on eBay costs less than a tenner, but the clothes I buy do. Obviously no-one else has the same taste as me, which I could get worried about if I could be bothered.)

On the minus side, I can’t try them on before I buy and I have to judge from photos. So I’ve ended up with a couple of jackets that are all the wrong shape, and a ravishing pair of shoes that are too small for me. That’s okay – there’s always the clothes swap. And in the last month, I have acquired about seven jackets, the rapidly-becoming-fabled snakeskin peep toe high heels (for £4.50 including postage), black patents (also high heels, why do you ask?) and some very good face cream for about half its retail price. And a couple of dresses are winging their way to Foxtrot Road even as I write. (I’ll need jackets if I get a job. There’s the work connection. Hah.)

I’ve paid a little over £100 for the lot, and most of that was the face cream.

It’s a whole new shopping strategy. I put in very low bids on lots of items and get a few of them. There’s a pleasing randomness to it. It’s not consumerism – nothing new is being manufactured to feed my habit. It’s kinda disposable shopping, in that I’m expecting a certain proportion of purchases to be wrong. And that’s okay, because I’m paying an average of about £12 per item. I can afford for a certain proportion of purchases to be wrong. But it is not like any other kind of shopping I have ever done before.

And my wardrobe is being upgraded, because I am finding clothes that I actually want, rather than what is fashionable this season. I lived in a green velvet jacket for eleven years, and then it died (funny, that) and I was lost and bereft. And now I’ve found the identical jacket, in burgundy and exactly my new size. I have found a brown dress that’s almost identical to the black dress that I’d live in if it weren’t black, which doesn’t suit me. And it might not fit, but it’s worth the risk.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my clothes. I know this is not the kind of interest I should put on my CV, and I do still feel a little ashamed of it. I always feel I should have grown-up interests like politics or history or classical literature. (Actually, I really should write a post about this. My interests are so demotic compared to those of my family, with the sole exception of my love of Wagner.) But I get better and better at taking simple pleasure in my wardrobe. And it does make me happier than almost anything.

My confidence has increased, reality is here

I have always hated my voice.

I am not a believer in blaming my childhood for my adult woes, but there are reasons why I hated my voice. I was a very extraverted child brought up by a very introverted father, who was continually telling me to be quiet. I was a Southern middle-class child educated in a Northern comprehensive school, and my voice was wrong and mocked for being wrong. I spoke very fast and often people couldn’t understand me.

I remember how hard I would try not to say anything to the bus driver as I put down my 20p piece, so that no-one would hear my voice.

But I wasn’t silenced. It’s not possible to silence me. I have too much to say. I got more and more embarrassed about saying it, and hated myself more and more for not being able to shut up – but I couldn’t. Talking is one of the things I’m on the planet to do.

As I got older, things slowly started to shift. I discovered I could sing, which helped. I discovered that my voice might be odd but it was also sexy, and that was important to me. But I remained convinced that the way I sounded was wrong, different. I felt that my voice marked me as different, as an impostor, that people could see right through the sophisticated facade to the gauche teenager beneath. I cringed inside whenever I had to speak.

But I still talked. I talked and talked. I couldn’t help it. The more I tried to silence myself, the more I needed not to be silent.

I’ve worked on my voice almost as much as I’ve worked on my appearance. I’ve tried to slow it down, to change the timbre and the accent, to make it calmer, more modulated and controlled. I’ve done vocal exercises, breathing exercises, diction exercises. I’ve had a million singing lessons.

Then, at the end of last month, I sat down with some people to take a look at my spending plan. And they pointed out that I’m always spending money on things to make me a better person. I spend money on yoga lessons, which would be fine if I loved yoga – but I find yoga very difficult. It hurts. And similar. They asked me, ‘why are you spending your money on things that hurt?’ And they asked, ‘what do you actually want to spend your money on?”

And, without thinking about it very much, I said, “acting classes”. It was a bit of a breakthrough moment.

And today I had my first acting class. It was a revelation.

It was a revelation because I was able to admit something to myself, for the first time ever. I love performing. I am totally me when I am performing. I have believed all my life, with every fibre of my being, that I ought to be quiet. But in fact this belief is not true. I am not here to be quiet. Performing is one of the things that I am here to do.

And it was a revelation because I am really good at it. I am not the eight-year-old with the funny voice. I am an adult woman and I have talent. After I gave one of my presentations, the rest of the class was saying, ‘It’s a plant. She’s an actress, isn’t she?’

I am not writing this to be immodest, truly I’m not. This is really news to me. I kept expecting the feedback, ‘Change this, change that’. But instead I got, ‘Stop trying to change anything. Be yourself. Use your voice. It is perfect exactly the way it is.”

I don’t have the words to explain how huge this is for me.