Introducing Irene

Irene was always the name for all my creativity, the things too pretentious, too risky, too much of me for the stability of my world not to be offended... In a sense I am willingly splitting my personality for this: Irene is free. 

In about a months time I'll be selling some of my creations at the Mill Road Winter Fair (1st of December to be exact) so look out or the red hood! But until then, I'm facing the intimidating world o the internet... 

Moral support very much appreciated. 

 https://www.instagram.com/rebeckairene/

A lost world.

Sometimes a glimpse of the past can show you just how far away you really got when you ran. And you can never really go back. Because you're not the same anymore.

Not one of them.

Details from A Social Study of 1873.

2011

Silence. (or, how loving men is a conatsant disappointment)

"What are you reading at the moment?"

My 24 year old beard-growing, fashionably-anxious, pretensions-bookreader of a coworker asks me as we are stacking baby clothes. I know he wants me to say something classical to balance out the paperback modernity of our less pretensions colleague. Or even better; The Infinite Jest.

"I don't have time to read. It's taken me 2 weeks so far to get half way through 'A social history of outrageous fashion'."

I'll live up to expectation another day. For now I quite like that he imagines my life to be a fast pace opium den full of men playing guitars. But fiction never drew me in as much as facts...

"..copycat female undergraduates has taken up smoking and so mimicking the superior sex. If the fashion for women wearing trousers ever extended to the college, men, in order to preserve the difference between the sexes, will be driven to wearing kilts!"

- master of Trinity college Cambridge,1936

It strikes me sometimes that being a man is mainly defined by not being a woman. Not wearing the same clothes. Not talking or behaving the same. Sometimes I wonder if that is the reason why so many of our generation resort to silence. Women can do so many things now that being "a man" is becoming being nothing? I have known literally 3 men in my life that didn't clam up in silence as a defence mechanism in the face of emotions or difficulty. 3 men in my whole life. Is disconnecting in silence really the last thing that's reserved for men now that we've got aggression AND trousers? I can safely assume one of the reasons I find silence so incomprehensible is that one of the 3 is my father. But I also remember how his need to speak made him weak in other peoples eyes. Silence leads to disconnect, to thoughts of being alone and to wishing for a fucking cabin in the woods. No one likes the strong silent man because he isn't strong, he is a half formed person in a fragile exoskeleton of masculinity and strength is no where near as loveable as warmth.
In the 'social history of outrageous fashion' is 50% dudes telling women how to be more attractive, more loveable. I think we should flip that one around because I am so sick of the silence and the exoskeletons. It's impossible to truly care for someone who constantly tries to disconnect or be different or think opposites attract (such a blatantly patriarchal saying btw) instead of finding common ground but somehow it's still expected. It is not in my nature. It's just a fucking disappointment.

All I can do is tell my son every day that he is loved and his feelings are important and that more words are better than less and that listening and talking go together like a dance. And much like "no glove no love" I'll just have to hope it makes more sense in the future.

"No time to read?! See, this is why I'll never have children, I'm just a selfish bastard that way"

Leaves with a teasing smile.

On the other side.

In the dim light of my Mill road bedroom I look out on the empty street. I think of the time I snook into the cinema to see Titanic as an 11 year old and how it started a teenage idea of adulthood that was finished off by Cruel Intentions a few years later. I am far far away from those days. A different country, a different language..a different expression on my face. Yet there were things first noticed then that I've never really understood until just now. 

Is this what they call a 30-years-crisis?

 The last 3 years have felt much like falling down a rabbit hole. I have screamed and cried and bled and fought for my life and loved and danced and risked and reached far beyond the lengths of arms. And wished oh how I have wished.. I have lost almost everything familiar and experienced things I never thought possible, both good and bad to the extremes. I have seen the highs and the lows, many times quite literally... From a rainy alleyway saying goodbye for the last time that taught me that silence is the difference between 'maybe' and 'never' to following the river and the cold rooms of nr 9 and the candle lit medieval halls.. I shall never forget where it was the underground wires led me.. Through loneliness and destitution, friends I made and lost while I found the dark side of this enlightened town. And one day, just an unordinary day, I felt the warm wind blow through my hair, the silence no longer enforced and I realised I was on the other side of the rabbit hole. It all looks different. But the ground feels stable again and I hear that familiar voice...the voice of my own mind. Quietly returning.

I know what it feels like now. Truly. I know how it feels to let go...to leave everything I ever wanted behind me and start again. 

Don't feel bad. Just like in my teenage films, I didn't leave empty handed either x

Waking up. 32, undeniable eye wrinkles now, vintage dress and on my way into the unknown.
Forever changed.

But I think I finally made it.