That Girl from Derwent dwells on the value of religion this Christmas.
That Girl from Derwent has learned a few more things about prejudice since moving up North.
That Girl From Derwent reckons if you're going to be offensive, you should find a better reason.
That Girl from Derwent considers why it is that some words have wider implications than others.
And now think of how you secretly want to be them.
No, just me then?
Surely to be one of these blessed, controversial people, a person with opinions, a person who can get those opinions heard for whatever reason, and a person who, like Lord Byron or Kurt Cobain, seems so often be famous for all the wrong reasons.
Don’t worry, I don’t actually want to be any of these things – except perhaps tragically beautiful – I think it’s just that all my adult life I’ve struggled with the desire to rebel. As a literature student, I’ve read about plenty of deviants: artists and writers, especially bloody poets, who seemed devoted to making deviance, rebellion and generally self-destructive tendencies seem fairly cool. Think of the Romantics. Think of Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway and the traditional image of the “bohemian artist” living in a freezing garret drinking Absinthe and smoking opium. As a girl who sat inside and read books for most of her childhood, got the best grades and pretty much always did what she was told, I’ve always viewed these images with Romantic rose-tinted glasses.
Of course, I’m not saying that I want to live in a freezing garret in some Parisian street, drinking Absinthe and smoking illegal substances. What I’m saying is that there is a reason this figure has become so engraved on our collective imagination. There is a reason the Byronic hero has become such a stock character in literature and there is a reason that when I see stylish, talented young people with a lifestyle that I cannot even conceive of living, that my initial reaction is hatred.
It’s all about jealousy. But it’s not as simple as coveting their jacket, or their talent, or even their possible success over you. It’s about their nerve, their sheer daring to act out against convention: whether through their lifestyle, their opinions or their ambitions. Most of all, I think, it’s about freedom. In our collective imagination, we consider that there is something liberating about the poverty-stricken artiste. There’s a sense of having nothing to lose if you have nothing. Yet from a rational and an educated viewpoint, poverty is anything but liberating and self-destructive tendencies are anything but “cool”.
We imagine there is something Romantic about being tragic, when in actual fact, it really is, just tragic.
Nonetheless this image lives on.
But I tried being a rebel. Last summer term I tried to push out of my conventional boundaries and re-invent myself. I doubt anyone really noticed, but I felt different. Maybe it was because it was summer. Maybe it was because I was fed up being “boring”. I didn’t do anything too drastic, just a few things I wouldn’t have normally. I went out every week; I got drunk pretty much every week; I flirted with a new guy pretty much every week: I decided to be more open-minded with the way I viewed the world.
But I did it in a lot of wrong ways.
I ended up getting in a bit of a mess. I ended up hurting a few people that I cared a lot about. And I ended up hurting myself. I didn’t like who I’d become: it wasn’t me, it wasn’t even a new me.
All the same, I’m not sorry I rebelled – I gained a lot of confidence, and things turned out for the best in the end, though it took me long enough.
I’m just glad I have some good friends who kept me sane; without them, who knows what I might have done.
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