Apparently I am a smart kid. My parents, teachers, and a succession of bosses who fired me, have all told me this repeatedly. This hasn’t stopped me from dropping out of uni on 3 successive occasions, enjoying The House Bunny way more than I should, and spraining my left foot five times in one year. Neither has this stopped me from infrequently going mental.

Now when I say mental, I don’t mean having a barney and smashing a few plates up (though that is fun and I recommend it to anyone who is a bit cross about something, cheap plates only though). I mean mental as in suffering from mental illness. Over my life I’ve taken Prozac, Paxil, Xanax, and Valium, and had so many others prescribed that I forget their names. I’ve been diagnosed with everything from a psychotic episode, through generalised anxiety, to “I guess you’re just in the doldrums hey?”. None of the labels or meds really made much of a permanent difference, and so yet again I have found myself being struck down by a case of the summer blues.

When I was younger and more often out of a relationship than in one I was convinced that once the right person came along I’d be able to shake myself out of these ‘doldrums’ and get it together. Surely I could sort myself back out with the love and support of someone great. Often being with someone was enough to drag me into a happier frame of mind for a while but soon enough I’d sink back into a mire of sadness once the honeymoon was over.

Being depressed, or otherwise unwell, makes for a shitty relationship especially if the whole thing was shakey in the first place. Who wants to unload their many and varied neuroses on someone else and drag them down with you? And if you do will they love you? Will they understand? Will they even care? But keeping everything to yourself makes you secretive, grumpy, and prone to crying fits. Well, it does that to me: results may vary.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been sliding slowly into a miserable frame of mind, and feeling more and more pathetic about it. The same things run through my head over and over: I have somewhere to live, two pretty goldfish, a wonderful boyfriend who I’m madly in love with, a huge project that I’m excited to work on, the sun is shining, my friends are brilliant… and yet none of it helps.

On Friday I was sent on some bizarre course by the job centre, and my advisor said that I seemed unmotivated. She started to tell me to let joy into my life, and that all I needed to do was see the happiness around me and choose to make it part of me. Walking out of her office into the glorious sunshine I felt like I had the heaviest boots ever, my soul felt leaden and I had to breathe slowly to stop myself from crying. All her The Secret-esque talk had done was make me feel even more stupid and pathetic for not letting myself be happy.

On Sunday evening after crying my eyes out over my faulty MacBook charger I took stock. Sure I’ve got so many things to be thankful for, and life could be so so much worse. The people around me: my friends, family, pets, and boyfriend, are wonderful, without them things would be so much worse, but, and there’s a huge but, it’s ok to feel like this. It’s not a choice I made, after all why on earth would I choose to be depressed? That totally defies logic! Rather than being a way of life I chose for myself this is something that happens, and with time and the right strategies it will be something that I can deal with more effectively, without resorting to lying in bed watching Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) all day.

And so really what I wanted to say all the way through this rambling, narcissistic post is that I think I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. There are, maybe, some of you out there who are down in the dumps or worse and hope that being with someone else will sort you right out, or those of you who found someone and are cross at themselves for being unable to shake off a mood that’s been hanging around for so long. All I have to offer is something incredibly cheesy: you’re not alone; I’m there with you, listening to miserable songs, and feeling blue even though I have every reason to be happy. And maybe one day I’ll be a smart enough kid to pull myself up by my bootstraps and get it together forever.

Photos from Model Love and Matt Caplin

Between the ages of 12 and 17 I was kissed precisely three times. First after my 12 birthday by my childhood crush (I screamed and kicked him in the legs) then aged 17 at a party where I got so drunk I passed out face down on the grass. The third time was by the person I would later lose my virginity to.

Most of my teenage years had been spent wondering why no-one wanted to kiss me. Ok so I was spotty and had bushy hair, but around age 15 I’d tamed my eyebrows and shrugged off the thick tortoiseshell glasses in favour of contact lenses, and yet offers were still thin on the ground. When I met my first boyfriend 3 weeks before my 18th birthday I realised he didn’t just want to kiss me while I was sloppy drunk. He wanted to hang out, talk rubbish, and watch telly with me. While we’d talked about lots of things on our 3 dates, but we’d not talked about whether I was virgin or not; it just hadn’t come up in conversation. For two whole weeks I thought about whether we would do it soon or not. If I told him that I’d never done it before I was worried he’d want to make it ‘special’ and there was nothing worse in my mind. Rose petals and candles might do it for some girls but even then I knew they’d just make me laugh. Though the majority of my friends weren’t doing it I wanted to. I knew it was going to be great: adults never stopped talking about sex. There was a big secret in the world and I wanted in on it.

Providence was on my side.

My parents inexplicably went to Brazil for two weeks just after I started dating the boy. I called all my friends and told them that I was home alone and having a party. On Saturday night teenagers turned up in droves, clutching corner shop bottles of vodka and Panda Pops, and we drank ourselves silly. Sometime around 2am half a dozen of us were left to sober up and clean the house. After a cursory tidy we decided to heat up a pizza from the freezer. Everybody, minus the boy and I, went to the kitchen to figure out how exactly this would happen. We looked at each other and got down to some hardcore making out. As he scrabbled at my top I suddenly thought to myself “Oh my god, we could do it right now. Here. In my front room. On the sofa.” I pushed the door shut with my foot. We had sex.

For the next few days I wandered round thinking even harder than before. So that was sex. It must get better. Maybe I would figure out what to do, or he would, or maybe something would change inside me and it’d be like all those late night movies: thrashing, hair gone wild, screaming, that sort of thing. I still didn’t tell the boy it was my first time, I didn’t really care if he knew or not. He was my boyfriend, he cared about me and we were still going out. I figured adult life was going to be pretty awesome. I think I was right.

(Picture from Radioactive Lingerie)

For the last week and a half I have been looking for a lipstick. Not any old lipstick, I found 100s of those, but the lipstick. One that will make me look like a lady, and that will not rub off all over cups, cigarettes, and boys’ faces.

Back in this post I mentioned a party so terrible that I forgot sleeping with someone at it. While I erased most of it from my mind I have never forgotten a lipstick related mishap that nearly stopped that entire sorry blog post unfolding (why didn’t it?? why??).

At the start of the evening I bumped into someone I thought was my ONE TRUE LOVE. We’ll call him Chet. My primary reason for thinking this was because I’d met Chet while blissed out on some Es. The moment I met him was amazing: I looked up from my scrabbling hands and in a split second the world slipped away. For a few hours I followed him around, hands in his pockets staring at him like there was no-one else in the room. It was probably pretty creepy. A few days later Chet invited me to this now apocryphal party and most of the sheen had worn off him I was still fairly smitten. When I arrived he’d necked half a bottle of Ritalin and was gabbling at me about everything under the sun. I was horrible disappointed but followed him into an empty room anyway to put my coat down. Inside Chet grabbed me by the arm: “Nadia just kissed me.” My heart sank as he was smiling broadly. “She kissed so badly; let me show you.” and before I could say anything he was lapping at my face like a St Bernard. I seized the opportunity as he broke away: “How would you prefer it was?” and so we kissed. We kissed for some time stood in the dingy light of Nadia’s bedroom surrounded by coats and shoes and someone sleeping under a curtain. In my head I was going “Yes! Yes! Yes!” because I am an idiot and do things like that.

Then someone stepped in to drop a bag off and we stood about awkardly talking about how this was a terrible idea and that we should just be friends. Well Chet said that and I said “Oh yes I suppose so.” Mortified that I could have misread a situation so badly I had been staring at the floor, and when I finally had the courage to look up I realised my lurid red lipstick was all over his face. He was telling me, all serious like, that this was just something that we’d done in the moment, and that it would be best if we didn’t think about it again, blah blah blah. I gave him a tissue, told him to clean himself and left the room. It wasn’t until days later that I realised I too must have looked like Robert Smith when I walked back into the party. Subtle.

And so to avoid this ever happening again I have been looking for a matte lipstick that doesn’t smell like crayons, isn’t neon red, won’t dry my lips, and yet won’t leave a trail of smears everywhere I go. Any ideas? It’s rather important you know.

Photo from Le Smoking.

Someone once told me they were glad to be called shallow because it meant they were attractive enough to have that luxury. While this was, on their behalf, an utter fallacy, it’s an interesting idea. Shallowness is one of those things that we all fall prey to, and when we do, we tell ourselves it’s a one off, an exception, and that normally we wouldn’t behave like this, whereas to beautiful people who are used to getting by on the virtue of their looks alone it is every day sort of thing.

That’s not to say that beautiful people are also shallow, more that they benefit from it frequently, and rarely make a fuss. After all if you weren’t terribly bright, but had wonderful opportunities falling in your lap all the time, you’d take advantage of them too! It seems so unfair to those of us who are neither stunning nor infectiously charismatic, watching those who are less intelligent or driven than us suceed, but I like to think, like Earl, that karma has a funny way of sorting things out.

Let’s take for example, the time I attempted to put my brain on hold and date someone who wasn’t very bright. I’m not saying he was as stupid as my old flatmate who had anal sex ‘by accident’, or the intern who I watched stand outside our building for half an hour staring at the bell without pressing it, or even the girl who I convinced that ‘Smoksumgras’ was a nearby shopping centre, but just plain old not that sharp. My motivations weren’t entirely wholesome though, obviously. He was pretty, and sort of funny, and we’d had a drunken fumble and it had been quite enjoyable, so I thought that in the absence of a better candidate I would just hang out with him for a bit. Men, intelligent, funny, successful men, did this all the time I told myself. In retrospect this sounds really cruel, but he wasn’t picking out the flower arrangements yet either so it all seemed fine.

We went for exactly one date. One. In fact if we’re specific about this we went for half a date. In which time he had checked his hair behind my head so often that I had shouted at him, he had refused to eat any chips and marvelled at my capacity to pack them away, and told me I was being all fancy with my reference to Chairman Mao. The minute I finished my first drink I looked at my watch and asked if he wanted to hop it back to mine and watch a DVD. Although I thought we were both under no pretensions we did end up having to actually watch the DVD before making out, which seeing as I’d seen Vixen at least fifty times was slightly tiresome.

After he left I told myself it could be ok, we’d just talk about Hollyoaks (yay!) and people we knew. We’d eat separately and I’d just tell him to be quiet and look pretty if he started asking questions. Or start making out. Either way it was all going to be grand. After a while we’d almost definately have enough of a shared history for it not to matter anymore. Or we’d have moved on.

The latter occurred soon than I thought it would when, the next morning, I logged on to send him a message on Facebook to find him in a relationship with someone 7 years my junior. And that’s when I realised that he was way smarter than me any day.

Photo of Rock Hudson by unknown. (Please note I do not think Rock Hudson was stupid, in fact I am sure he was really really smart, as well as being smoking hot. Sigh.)

1. Call an ex.
Speaking to your ex will only make your current singledom all the more unbearable, and if you’re foolish enough to meet up bad things could happen. Worse than sex things. Like telling him how lonely you are, how much you miss him, or that you think you’re (still) in love with him. Or you could do all that WHILE having sex with him! Eek!

2. Go to the cinema.
While a good film can pull most people out of even the darkest moods, going when you are feeling like Bubbles without Michael is a terrible idea. Almost every film has a romantic subplot, and crying over Couples Retreat or Crank 3 is only going to make you feel more pathetic than you need to.

3. Tell a friend who has a boyfriend that you’re lonely.
While this person will, at first, be all ears and you’ll feel like your black little heart is about to be unburdened, you will eventually feel obliged to ask how their boyfriend is, and then that crashing feeling will smother you again.

4. Clear out your room.
It might seem like a good idea, out with the old, in with the new, that crap, but once you start uncovering all the books and t-shirts he lent you you’ll be sat, a gibbering wreck on the floor wailing about dying alone with cats.

5. Log onto Facebook.
Why let an endlessly updated stream of other people’s happy lives mock yours? Oh look! It’s Clara and her boyfriend snuggling in Devon on a long weekend. Isn’t that lovely?

Look, just light a fag, crack open a beer, and scream along to Live Through This till you think you might puke. You can thank me later.

Photo by Dash Snow.

Reading Platform’s piece on one guy’s distinctly unsavoury experiences with threesomes got me thinking about how shitty threesomes are. Logistically they’re a total nightmare: who has the time and resources to arrange one with three sane flexible people? And once you’re in the swing of it who’s going to be the facilitator making sure everyone’s having fun? Despite my total disinterest in these sordid situations being someone who is fairly obvious about wanting to have sex, and lots of it, I’ve come close way too often. I won’t go through them all because most attempts were just pathetic and boring, (touching my knee, then my boyfriend’s knee and then grinning like a maniac and saying you’re too drunk to take yourself home is NOT sexy thanks) but here are my worst moments:

• Candy and I had spent most of the night getting totally trashed at The Dolphin when an incredibly good looking bloke came over, flirted ineptly for a bit, then he invited her back to his. For some reason she invited me and soon we were watching the sun rise from his amazing flat. Smoking weed, drinking ice-cold pear schnapps: everything was brilliant. Then he started massaging my foot. Being a fucking idiot I thought I’d let it go as I was so mashed it felt pretty good. He lent over my lap and started talking to Candy then suddenly they were snogging. I watched them while his hand travelled slowly up my leg, totally paralysed with awkwardness. I blinked and saw him looming towards me lips puckered. The next few minutes are hazy,  I remember shrieking “No!” in his face, and Candy shouting at him before running off to vomit. She was adamant that she didn’t want to go back to “the Marquis De fucking Sade’s brothel” and so we snuck out while he looked for my jacket. Annoyingly we ended up trapped in his apartment complex for so long that we resorted to lying on the tarmac in the car park crying until someone came and unlocked the gates an hour later.

• It was my first year at uni and my roommate Brigid had a totally hot boyfriend Gerard. Brigid and I got drunk, made out a bit, and she asked me if I fancied Gerard, which I did. So we walked over to his and tried to get something going. I learned a few things that night: the threeway kiss from Laurel Canyon is totally rubbish, no matter what they say it is never ok to crush on a friend’s boyfriend, and that when your friend walks out saying “I’m not cool with this.” that’s your queue to follow. Thankfully/sadly it all finished rather early on while we were all mostly clothed, I mean I definitely still had my tights on. In fact I think this is my least sexy moment ever: sitting in my undies, ringing Brigid’s phone, and smoking a roll-up as she’d taken all my clothes, my coat, and my bag with her when she stormed out, while Gerard made a cup of tea.

It’s funny isn’t it how in your head the whole thing seems to move so seamlessly from ‘oh look me and my friends are by the pool and it’s far too warm’ to ‘hello!’ whereas in real life things seem, well, so horribly real and much less pretty. Everyone’s hairier and pastier, and boobs didn’t feel like I thought they would. Having said that to counter these two rubbish moments is that time when Sigrid crawled into bed with Evan and I that morning and… ahem. Yeah, maybe I’m not that disinterested in them after all.

Photo of the amazing Lara Stone from French Vogue.

During London Fashion Week there are only two things to do: work like a donkey and drink to celebrate no longer working like a donkey. Though my involvement in LFW has, until recently, been fairly minimal I can’t refuse a party with free booze and so it was at one of these strange sleep deprived designer and half starved model filled do’s that I saw him: Brody. Until that night he had been someone I had googled, who’s picture had lurked in a folder to peek secretly at when I was bored, and who I had stared at blissfully across party after party. It was time to make this real. High on sugar and rum I shambled over to say hello and told him I was a friend of his friend Audrina’s. We chatted until everyone sane had left then stumbled upstairs to his car. Foolishly we drove around all night until 5.30am when we found ourselves alone in Hampstead: too far for me to go home and too close to his house not to pop by…

When I woke up from my couple of hour’s sleep, and some sloppy drunken making out, I was dizzy with excitement. This guy, the same one who I’d been dreaming about for months, was here with me and mostly naked! I leapt on top of him and kissed him, grinning from ear to ear like a maniac. He just lay there. Last night’s sugary drinks had made me insane and I bounced up and down gleefully as if two hours sleep was no thing. In my head fireworks were exploding by the dozen: me! him! here! together! Everything was going to be amazing!! As I darted around gleefully putting my clothes back on Brody stared silently. Just as I was about to leave I asked for his phone number. He looked confused but gave it anyway. I chalked it up to tiredness and walked to the tube station high on alcohol and seratonin.

A week later I was sitting at lunch with Audrina discussing what would happen next with Brody. He had been in touch yet only seemed faintly interested in meeting again. Audrina shrugged, “I don’t know what his problem was. He really liked you when I showed him your picture.” My fork stopped in mid-air. “What? You know I did this! You told me to!” The fork was stuck there. “You said you liked him, so when I ended up back at his house I told him, do you remember when I called you all drunk?” I remembered. “And you told me to tell him you liked him.” Did not. “So he asked what you looked like, and I showed him a picture …” Oh god. “… and just to be sure he wouldn’t forget you I gave him your number.” It’s all a dream, a horrible dream. “You asked me to help set you up! I was helping!”

I sat there thinking while Audrina fiddled with her phone. A man, a quiet, shy man, is accosted by Audrina who is a ditzy, babbling, girl. She tells him her friend fancies him and shows him a grainy picture, then proceeds to save the random girl’s number onto his phone. Later, while standing soberly at a party, said girl comes up, blithely introduces herself, then goes home with him, and proceeds to deny him sex but be happy to roll around in her underwear. The next morning she leaps around like the Tigger of romance and giggles like a giddy teen. It’s mind boggling just to think about never mind live through.

Audrina shrugged off the silence easily and we wandered to the video shop when she darted down an alley saying she’d meet me in a minute. Two doors later I ran smack into Brody and his best friend. We exchanged awkward hugs and I asked what he was doing so far from home. “You should know,” he replied curtly, “Audrina asked me where I was having lunch then said you might both pop by.” Brody looked over my shoulder. “I think she was hoping we could all bump into each other by ‘accident’.” He looked back over his. “That would have been brilliant.” His voice was becoming steadily more monotone. “I’d have really enjoyed something as unexpected as that.” After scanning the street comprehensively he looked back at me. No matter what I said he would never believe I hadn’t followed him here, or asked Audrina to paint me as a desperate harpy, it was pointless. While I gawped, trying to find the right phrase, he squeezed my arm and said goodbye. Then he, and the friend, ran until they were out of sight, never looking back.

Photos by Terry Richardson, and Alex Prager.

Recently I gave up drinking. At first I stopped drinking at all, just to see if I could. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, so since then I have been allowing myself a maximum of one slightly drunk night a month, no more than 3 drinks at other times, and both of these things only on weekends. If this system sounds complicated you have to remember that a) I am obsessed with patterns and structures. I don’t believe in chance or random luck: everything follows a course and consequently I think rules are great. Oh and b) I’m English. This is practically a 12 step programme over here.

Two days into my new found sobriety I came down with H1N1 aka swine flu. However with a house guest from Amerikey over, and feeling totally fine, I broke my NHS imposed curfew after 5 solid days of sitting in my room alone eating Ritz crackers. That evening, after foolishly standing all afternoon in a rainy park watching hipster bands play 10 minute long sets, my friend (Joanna) and I went to the pub, met up with some friends, and hunkered down in a corner giddy on fresh air and diet cola. Next to me was a boy who was quite obviously a lot younger than me, but insanely beautiful. Like a deer with cheekbones that could cut butter. God that sounds horrible. Whatever, he was BEAUTIFUL. Beautiful I tell you! Ahem. Half way through the evening most of our friends had trickled away leaving myself, Joanna, and this boy, who we’ll call Justin Bobby, his friend, and a group of insanely loud Italians clad entirely in metallic spandex. Justin Bobby and friend were drunk, the Italians were drunk, Joanna and I were not.

The evening wore on and towards closing time Joanna and I decided it was time to walk home. As we got up to leave Justin Bobby mentioned he had missed the last train and wasn’t sure where he was staying. Being a shmuck I said he could sleep on my sofa if he wanted. Justin Bobby looked unsure, he said he needed five minutes to think about it. Joanna and I sat down with the crazy Italians. FYI I’m not being xenophobic they were mental. One, the most shiny spandex covered of them, kept doing yoga moves like putting her leg behind her head while sitting on a rickety chair and making gooey eyes. Justin Bobby’s friend was entranced. Ten minutes slid by and Justin Bobby was cracking onto another of the Italians. Joanna and I reasoned that we were no longer needed. We took him aside and said that though we were leaving the offer of a sofa still stood.

Justin Bobby thought long and hard. He ushered me outside to have a cigarette and thought about it. He then dragged me back inside, still thinking. “It’s really nice of you to say I can stay on your sofa.” He said eventually. “But the thing is, if I came to your house I don’t think I would be able to sleep on the sofa.” I reassured him it was really comfy. “No, that’s not the thing. If I came to your house I might not,” He paused and took my hands in his. “I might not want to sleep on the sofa.” In case the point was totally lost he looked into my eyes. “Do you understand?”

My face turned scarlet: I understood. He squeezed my hands and his eyes turned wide as saucers. It was like being seduced by a puppy. A really hot puppy. I took a deep breath and told him that he might not have to sleep on the sofa, but I couldn’t guarantee it, and that he was very nice and I did like him rather a lot. His unflinching honesty was making me flustered and I had no idea how I would normally answer this sort of thing.

I kept thinking that if he came back he would probably not end up on the sofa either way as it was where Joanna was sleeping. Then I thought about how drunk he was and felt horribly guilty. Then I thought about how pretty he was. Then about H1N1. And finally how if I was drunk I would probably not even be here thinking about this at all. Thankfully Justin Bobby was also thinking hard. “No, I don’t think I will come with you after all.” He walked us outside and lit my cigarette. Suddenly he seemed sad and I hugged him. “It’s not cos you’re not pretty, because you are, and you’re really cool.” He bleated into my hair. All I could say was “You’re really really pretty too!” in a high and tight voice.

When I woke up the next morning I looked at the ceiling, “I love not drinking. I love not drinking. I love not drinking.” I told myself. At one point I almost started to believe it.

Photos by Annabel Mehran and Erin Jane Nelson.