Last Saturday I was having dinner with two girlfriends of mine and telling them abut the Elle writing contest last year and how I didn’t win. This led to a very interesting conversation about winning stuff and being lucky: from finding money on the street to participating to various contests or gambling. None of us considers herself lucky in this particular department although Diana told us she once won a spa day by sending a text message to some fashion magazine. She said she enjoyed the day so much and that got me thinking and asking myself whether we tend to enjoy things that we’ve won by chance rather than things that we’ve earned through hard work.
There are, of course, so many questions when it comes to luck: does such think actually exist? Do we keep fooling ourselves and avoid taking responsibility or action because we give luck too much credit and importance when making things happen for us?
This also reminds me of a Sex And The City episode when the girls go to Las Vegas for the weekend and try to have a jolly good time in tacky casinos. At the end of the weekend Carrie tries to put some thoughts on paper and says: “People go to casinos for the same reason they go on blind dates: hoping to hit the jackpot. But mostly you just wind up broke or alone in a bar. If we know the house always wins, why gamble?”
I have never gambled but I admit I’ve always been attracted to casinos and think they could be really great fun. Since a trip to Vegas was unlikely to happen after dinner on Saturday, I went home and started to look online for something just as sparkling, glittery and loud. Cheeky Bingo seemed the perfect choice: pink, girly and free. Thus I found myself on a late Saturday night wearing my nice dress, pearls and red lipstick while playing bingo and gambling. I spent a good couple of hours with Cheeky Bingo and boy, oh boy, was I hooked. The entire thing had a retro vibe to it and I felt like one of those dolled-up ladies who meet on Sunday afternoon to play bingo.
So why gamble? Simply put because it’s really good fun. And because we sometimes need not spoil the fantasy that it’s possible to hit the big jackpot. If you have some time to kill and want to do something completely nuts and fun, give Cheeky Bingo a try. You have my blessing. Oh, and let me know if you like it for we might as well organize some bingo Sunday afternoons. With cocktails, of course.
I remember those Miss World – or Miss whatever contests where all the girls said their hobbies were literature, fashion, sport, traveling and animals. Or those interviews in horrible local newspapers where aspiring models who dreamt of making it in the big city had the same standard answer. I think that if they wanted to make the list of hobbies more 2012, they should also add “saving kids in Ethiopia” or “fight poverty” because these are the kind of “after school” activities that I see quite a lot of girls practise nowadays.
I’ve always been sceptical when it comes to charity, saving the world and anything along this line because I have met only a few people who actually did good things in a genuine manner. I think there are those who give lots of money and actually help making a difference, those who go and take photos with a bunch of African kids but probably wash their hands a few times afterwards, and those who don’t wash their hands but probably wipe some kid’s ass. And those who are total hypocrites. I cannot put all the blame on them because our society is sick enough to teach us that there are things worth doing and there are shallow and superficial things we shouldn’t do. What I believe is that nothing is shallow if it’s done with passion and dedication. But wanting to save the kids in Africa because working in fashion will make people judge you, that’s truly shallow.
There are also too many misconceptions around the whole notion of helping others. I for one know what is like not to have money. I’ve never starved, but I had a few times in my life when although I was working my derriere off I lived for almost a week with £10. This doesn’t seem so scary, but for someone who didn’t grow up in poverty, it wasn’t easy either. None of my rich friends helped me during that time and now I wonder whether if I were from Somalia they would have done it. However, this is how I learned that in order to help others, one must first help himself. And by this I mean being able to stand on his own two, be able to learn something in order to make a living, know how to write and read properly, learn a few things about this world, be a nice person and the list could go on.
When I see all these girls my age going to “top universities” to learn about poverty, hunger and the Third World, I really feel like throwing up. If you want to help, you can’t study that in university. But there’s a pattern I’ve observed: daddy’s girls who need to go to top universities in order to validate themselves and also avoid to think -at least for a couple of years- about the fact that they have no clue what to do with their lives. Except from saving the world, of course. If they feel so guilty about having and spending too much of daddy’s money, why don’t they stop buying Burberry boots for half a year and send the money to some starving child? Oh, but they first need to study and find out why that kid is poor and what does the government do about it and more ridiculous blah blah. If you really want to know about it, you can surely learn outside university as well. And that’s the great thing about knowledge, there is only one thing standing between you and it: your willingness to keep curious and always learn about the world.
Under no circumstances I would claim that charity does not exist or that anyone who dedicates his life to humanitarian causes is a fraud. But for those who are doing it for real, meeting Bill Gates doesn’t qualify as dedicating time to a cause, but simply as a nice opportunity. And surely they don’t brag about it on Twitter. They probably don’t even exist on Twitter because they’re too busy actually saving the world.
Charles Dickens once famously wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And as far as time, or better said, timing goes, this statement couldn’t be more true. How many times do we say to ourselves that timing is everything? How many times do we ask ourselves what if we’ve been to a certain place at the right moment, what if we have met a certain person earlier or later? Perfect timing doesn’t happen too often. But what is this perfect timing anyway? Because to me it’s seems there’s no such thing. Time does indeed control our lives but we sometimes are afraid of at least trying to take control. It’s probably when we don’t like what is happening to us that we begin to seek for hidden reasons and explanations for something that we can’t quite understand. More often than not, things just are what they seem. They just happen and there’s no secret meaning to be later discovered.
If I look back, I can find many things that I’ve thrown away or missed just because I put the “bad timing” label on them. As my best friend says, in business timing is everything but there’s more to life than business. Maybe I would have had a father now if he hadn’t decided that 21 years ago wasn’t the right time for him to have a child. But on the other hand, I am quite happy that my mother didn’t think that at 23 was the wrong time to have one. After all, most of one’s life is just the sum of the decisions they’ve made. And the power of choice may overcome that of time because the fight against the latter is just lost from the very beginning. To seize the day might seem the best option in any circumstance and since both reason and feelings have failed me before, I tend to have less regrets when choosing to follow my intuition. Saying what I think, doing what I feel or what I want aren’t always easy choices to make but I know that this is what I owe to myself.
There is this funny saying “when life throws you lemons, make lemonade.” I say when life or people offer you something, a gift, an opportunity or just a smile, take it. When you meet someone and find that you have a wonderful connection or chemistry, jump. Leaving doubt, suspicion and fear behind is probably the lesson I try to learn everyday but even if I don’t make it all the time, I will not give up on this. And I will not do it for those rare moments when I realize that the only thing standing between me and something wonderful is my little stupid fear. Fear which is only built on past experiences or memories and on that futile thought that no matter what I choose, there’s always going to be another option. But for now, I really try to only choose the best of times and squeeze the last drop of juice from the lemons that I’ve got.
A few months ago I entered the ELLE Talent Contest and written a piece on an event in my life that has helped shape who I am. The winners were published recently and although I am not one of them, I am very happy that I finally found the courage to stop keeping my writing to myself and actually send it out. You can read my piece below and all my gratitude goes to Milo for being a wonderful editor.
More than perfect
I guess every woman goes through this at some point in her life. For me, it was late last year, on a gloomy November evening. I was crying on the kitchen floor of my flat in south-east London. There was a half-empty jar of peanut butter in my hand. What had begun as an attempt to do the usual Tracy Anderson workout had ended in tears and physical pain after gorging on greasy, forbidden food.
After months of living on raw carrots and salad leaves, I didn’t have the energy to lift a leg, let alone do 40 minutes of dance cardio. But I wasn’t on a diet; I wasn’t one of those silly girls who starve themselves to death. I was enjoying – or so I thought – a healthy lifestyle, eating vegetables, seeds, the odd bit of fruit. No more than 700 calories a day. No meat, no dairy, no cooked or processed food, no sweets or bread, nothing but fresh food; quantities measured and calories counted. But after four months of carrots and apples, my body was starting to betray me.
I missed my period for three of those four months. My doctor told me I was suffering from amenorrhea, caused by weight loss. But that was ridiculous: I was far from anorexic. Nothing like those 45 kilo girls on the runway. Surely a 17.7 BMI didn’t mean I was underweight? I mean, I didn’t look skinny. I wasn’t taking pills, or throwing up. I was just a rational 20-year-old girl in charge of her life… wasn’t I?
The truth is, I thought I could be perfect. Of course, I failed. I failed because my idea of perfection bore no relation to the person I really was. I’d been hijacked by a Barbie ideal of beauty since I was five, and never shaken it off. (Perhaps I’d replaced Barbie with Lara Stone). It didn’t matter that everyone told me I was beautiful, special, had a great body and so on. My response was always the same. “ I know it sounds superficial, but I need to be skinny to be happy.”
I argued with people who said I was a victim of the media. And I refused to blame the ten years in a Romanian ballet school where I’d traded chocolate for vegetables, and was screamed at every day for being fat. At the time it didn’t seem much of a sacrifice. (I only discovered later that what it actually meant was getting used to lubricating every mouthful of food with a generous dollop of guilt.)
It didn’t occur to me that jumping for joy when I fit into a pair of SX trousers was absurd. Nor did it occur to me that wearing heels for a walk in the park, or not sitting down on the tube because I wasn’t burning calories, was odd behaviour. But it was odd. As odd as checking a restaurant’s menu online before going out and ending up drinking still water anyway, while my friends were enjoying dinner. And as the weight crept back on, and my depression started to bite, I was in Hell.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of soul-searching, I got it. It was a lesson. I had to understand and learn something from all this. At first I thought it was about accepting and loving myself for who I was and all that kind of frothy stuff you read in self-help books. But it was about more than that: I now had the opportunity to decide the sort of person I wanted to become. I could spend the rest of my life comparing myself to models and feeling like the ugly duckling, locating my self-confidence in my dress size. Or I could forge my own identity and start living. Health for me was suddenly about feeling good.
I’d become a victim of obsession because I’d been looking outwards instead of examining inwards. Punishing myself for culinary indulgences wasn’t balance – it was madness. But the madness, the pain and the breakdown gave me strength to realise that I was in hock to an impossible, homogenous ideal of beauty. The day I realised that I saw optimism flood back in. And I felt hot.
I still love skinny models. But because I don’t take myself so seriously anymore, I’m not devoted to them. I’m not trying to imitate them. Because I have a sense of humour and perspective now, I can laugh at the thought of Lara having a bad day or looking ghastly in the Daily Mail.
That’s what’s made me determined to prepare for the day I will write, photograph, style and surround myself with beautiful girls. I should say: with other beautiful girls. Because I’m now ready to enjoy fashion in all its wondrous beauty, creativity, danger and excitement – without feeling like a slave to it. (Although I admit: I certainly haven’t shaken off my weak will when it comes to pretty dresses or handbags.) Maybe the runway only has one size, but the real world has plenty of them. And size ten isn’t that bad after all.
When you shatter your idols, you discover something even more compelling standing behind them. You discover you.
Last night I watched The Deep Blue Sea. It wasn’t particularly good, and except from a stunning Rachel Weisz and the beautiful soundtrack, the movie didn’t say much to me. Rachel plays a woman living in the 50s, married to an older guy- or should I just say old- who adores her. But she is unhappy and has an affair with a younger, more passionate guy. This is the classical Hollywood recipe of what great love is made of. And this is in fact what everything, from literature to movies teaches us. That the more complicated, twisted and impossible love is, the more it’s worth having. When Rachel leaves her cold, boring husband to go live with the man she loves, she is not prepared to face the inevitable: after a while, her man will start having more important things to do than make crazy love to her. And so she decides to kill herself. Not because of him, of course, but because of her incapacity to be happy. Or so she claims in her suicidal letter.
There is, however, an extraordinary moment in the movie. Rachel’s neighbour, and old lady who finds her after the failed attempt to commit suicide, is taking care of her dying husband. And she says to Rachel: “Do you think you know what love is? What you have is not love because love means wiping someone’s ass, changing the sheets when they’ve wet the bed for both of you to be able to keep your dignity and go on living.” Even though there is no such thing as the definition of love, we all try at some point in our lives to define it. And I can’t say for sure I know what love is, but I am certain is not what Rachel thinks. This is perhaps because she does what we all do: run. She runs from a man who loves her and after another who doesn’t love her just as much. So she becomes her husband. This movie made me think of how we get bored with what we have and keep chasing what is not making itself available to us. And thus the idea of love is just ego. Our needy nature , always in the pursuit of attention, validation and reassurance only to throw it in the garbage once we have it.
Lust, passion, sex, the thrill of something or someone new, excitement and attachement are not love. And the whole idea of romance is most of the time a fairytale. We meet people, we fall in love, we live stories- some good, some bad and some extraordinary.But maybe love is just the ability to be kind, to know forgiveness or to live your life exactly how you want to live it. Or maybe love truly is what remains in the absence of everything else.
The most valuable things I have learned so far came from what people are, not from what they do. I keep coming back to this little obsession of mine with people who become human doings rather than human beings and that is because I feel more and more how everything revolves around what we do. And what we do is about succes, and succes is usually measured in fame or money. I, for one, have never shared this commun belief that people can only influence or help others by building something big. And I know at least two of them who can prove my point.
The first is my mother who has never had the successful career most modern women are dying for. She wasn’t a stay at home mum either, but although she has always worked, she managed to be the most wonderful parent I could have ever wished for. She gave me so much love, attention and has helped me try to become the best self I can be. And today, she taught me something once again. She was telling me how my sister who’s studying in an arts school called her crying that she’ll never be good enough with her painting. And my mum told her not to give up every time the road gets rough because all she needs to do is have passion for something. She doesn’t have to be Michelangelo in order to be happy as long as she loves what she’s doing. Mum also said that even though you feel that what you are doing is shit, you could at least try to make that shit an original one. She is now translating a book about Tarantino and told my sister that he was a visionary man, intelligent enough to make art and to innovate something other people threw away. He used violence, kitsch and old actors in order to create an unique style that many have tried to copy years later. Tarantino only made 6 movies but he influenced cinematography simply by pursuing his passion. As a child, he started watching movies with his mother but he didn’t get an expensive education or a luxurious lifestyle. He only wanted to do something he loved and most important, he wanted to be himself. He didn’t want to be Fellini.
The other person is Hannah, my flatmate. She turns 30 in two days and was supposed to go on a lovely trip with her boyfriend. But today she found out he is trapped in Cape Town because of some issues with his visa and won’t be able to make it. I would have freaked out, been mad at him, probably yelled on the phone for hours and then be sad for days. Hannah, on the other hand, handled this with calm and didn’t, for one second, blame him for something that wasn’t his fault. We’ve been living together for almost 2 years now and all of this time I’ve admired her for her understanding, non-judgemental and compassionate nature. I have learned a lot from what she is like and am trying everyday to be kinder.
There are many other people I’m learning from, however, today I chose to write about those who didn’t build companies, made millions or became famous. And that’s for one simple reason: they are not less happy or less wonderful than those who have.
I have never been one of those happy people who smile all the time. I have never been able to feel better just at the thought that there is always someone in a worse situation than mine. I mean, how can I relate to a starving kid in Africa and all of the sudden feel grateful for being able to afford a steak? Happiness itself is a very vague notion and I would be a hypocrite no to admit that what the kid in Africa and I need to have in order to be happy might be very different. You could say being happy is not about having things, it’s about giving, sharing, loving and all that. Which is true to some extent. Being surrounded by people I love and who in return love me, fills my heart with joy and warmth. But so does affording to buy books, go to the opera, travel, or a new pair of shoes. Of course it’s not the same kind of happiness, many would say, but since when should we divide happiness in that worth feeling and the frivolous one? As long as I feel good, I see no reason to do so. A life full of Manolo Blahnik shoes and no one to love me would indeed be sad. And a life with someone to love me and nothing to wear on my feet would be just as sad.
Even though I’m not one of those people who are happy all the time, I’m not one of those who don’t have the ability to be happy at all either. And this is something to be grateful for. Sometimes is the perfect blue sky, other times a good book or a weekend in Paris. And believe it or not, most of the times is very small things like meeting a friend who’s going through difficult times but who hasn’t lost his optimism, sharing a horrible, microwaved pancake with my best friend or my mum posting on my Facebook wall that she misses me. All we hear since our early lives is that money doesn’t bring happiness, that it’s wrong to desire big and expensive things, that we should always put ourselves in the shoes of those less fortunate, appreciate what we have instead of complaining for what we don’t have and so on. In other words, we should all be the Dalai Lama or Mother Theresa. Call it Western civilisation brain wash, shallowness or whatever you want, but I never tried to be them. And this is precisely because I don’t think certain kinds of happiness are better than others. Just to be able to feel happy is enough for me, or at least enough to actually be, happy.
I was sitting comfortably on the tube earlier today when I realized that just next to me there were two Romanians: a man and a woman. They were talking quite loudly and I was able to hear their every word. Though I really wish I couldn’t. The man was kissing and touching his girlfriend in a very inappropriate way while saying the most obscene and disgusting things. I will refrain from giving any details here but all I can say is that I couldn’t believe my ears. I am not a prude nor one of those girls with a Virgin Mary attitude towards sex, however, I would never share my sexual fantasies on the London tube. Especially if they involve S&M or sodomy. But this isn’t about sex, it’s about human decency. A trait almost completely forgotten by most people.
Freedom of speech is such a misunderstood and abused liberty. Just because those two horrible people (who happened to be Romanian) were in a foreign country, they assumed no one could understand what they were talking about and thus released the beasts inside them. Which is perfectly fine in a more intimate environment. Sadly, more often than not, people just don’t know how to behave in society. They don’t care and won’t make an effort to show respect or to be well-mannered. But how would they know the first thing about manners when they probably don’t have an education? I know people whose parents didn’t bother educating their own children, yet they somehow managed to do it themselves. Therefore, I can’t think of any excuses- for acting like the subjects of my story- other than sheer stupidity and ignorance.
You could say this only happens with certain ghastly lower class people: the gypsies in Romania, the chavs in London and so on. However, the two Romanians were not gypsies. They were just two people who not only made me feel so embarrassed for being a Romanian myself, but also for living in this world. These kind of people suck all the optimism and positive energy out of me. They make me think of all the madness in the world: of those who aren’t satisfied with whispering sexual offences in each other’s ears but actually put them into practice. As most people, I usually ignore the newspaper headlines that scream about rapists and killers and the rest of crazy people out there. I too do my best at trying to look at the bright side and to find the good in people. But sometimes I just can’t. Not when I am forced to witness such loathsome behaviours. In the light of these events, you may wonder why I didn’t say anything to my confreres. Well, that’s because I am as scared of people who don’t know decency as of a wild beast who doesn’t know reason.
‘Hi, I would like one ticket to We Need To Talk About Kevin at 7.’
‘How many, sorry?’
(smile) ‘ONE”.
It’s been over 4 years since I last went to the movies by myself. I used to do it all the time while in high school and it never bothered me or made me sad. But today, while walking to the cinema, I could feel my heart beating faster and for a minute I thought I might have an anxiety attack. Then I stopped and realised it was all ridiculous: I had more courage when I was younger, where did it all go? I guess it went away together with those silly expectations other people and society in general have from you. You should be a certain way, you should act like this and not like that. Going to the movies alone is for freaks and people are meant to live together. That’s all very nice except from time to time people need not to be with other people.
I was quite a solitary kid who preferred the company of books and movies to that of other kids. I had a few friends while at school but spending all my time with them was too much. Things have changed and I’ve started to seek companionship more often and I am not one hundred percent sure this is because I truly feel this way or because I just know it’s right to do it. Yet I didn’t ask anyone to go see the movie with me tonight. And as I took my seat and looked around, I noticed there were quite a few other people with small popcorn buckets. Two of them right next to me. This might actually be one of the main avantages of going to a movie by yourself: you buy the small bucket so you don’t stuff your face that much and you don’t have to share. Small as it is, it’s all yours.
One other advantage is that you don’t have to negotiate where to seat so I got one of the last rows, just as I like it. But probably the best thing about it is that there’s nothing wrong with going to a movie by yourself and you actually end up enjoying it so much. If there are 2 things I learned today, one of them is that ironically, when we are at our lowest, are sad or heart broken we find the power to be kinder than ever- I smiled at the girl who made me repeat ‘ONE ticket’ and I didn’t feel resentment for one second. The other thing is that I truly feel sorry for those who can’t stand to be alone. For those who constantly need other people and sometimes choose quantity over quality because they are terrified to discover they can’t be happy or enjoy life by themselves. Maybe that’s because when we are alone we are forced to look into our minds and souls and we might not like what we see. And I guess you can’t be lonelier than by not knowing yourself.
Yesterday two of my friends got married. When the ’till death do us part’ moment arrived there were tears in my eyes. I still don’t know whether I was crying because I am not sure I will ever get married, because I am so impressed that they believe in commitment and marriage when less and less people do or just because the moment itself is quite emotional.
I don’t really believe in marriage and this has to do with the fact that my parents got divorced and there aren’t too many couples around me who didn’t anyway. Even the word ‘love’ makes eyebrows raise and people exclaim ‘oh please, you don’t really believe that, do you?’. I also think there are those too complicated, difficult and not so easy to satisfy who can never settle and those who are simply the marrying kind. You surely know stories about people who met in high school, stayed madly in love for 50 years and lived happily ever after. Then one of them dies and in less than one month the other one dies as well. I classify these stories as fairytales.
Yet just because literature, movies and art taught us that the great loves are the crazy ones where everything is twisted, complicated and impossible that doesn’t mean for some love can’t be enough when it’s easy and simple. I often wondered whether a love where there aren’t any tears and slammed doors in act two it’s worth waiting for to see what happens in act three. But there rarely is an act three or an epilogue in l’amour fou.
Right now I can’t picture myself promising I will love and cherish a man for as long as I shall live but I can imagine living beautiful love stories. As I was telling my best friend a few days ago, the one thing I believe in is beauty. And both getting married and not getting married can and have to be beautiful because that’s what life si about. That’s what I wish for my friends as well, to have a beautiful marriage and for the sun to warm them for ever as it did yesterday in the church. Since in my life I am always looking for beauty, maybe one day it will come my way in an unexpected form and I might then change my mind and say those vows. But not knowing for sure, well that’s what makes it beautiful.