Gabriella

[It may be that she’s drinking here, and trying to think straight]
The thing about what that composition teacher told me – about the rules about what we should write – the thing about it is that it wasn’t the rules that really seemed important to me (although they were, in a way). No, it was what the fact of those rules implied, and what it meant for me to be told these things by that teacher.

Let me try again: what I realise now is that I was so accepting in those days. Whatever anybody in authority said must be true in some way, even if it didn’t fit in with what I’d learned through my own experience. I knew that there were sources of authority that were unquestionable – though I wouldn’t have put it like that back then, of course. I knew from my family upbringing that here was always a ‘man who would shout at me’ if I transgressed – for example, by drawing attention to the family in a public space, or entered a building through the wrong door, or jumped a queue – even accidentally.

I’ve forgotten all the specifics of those lessons and directions, and anyway, it was the generic lesson that was important. The lesson of the existence of externally-imposed, independent standards of excellence and behaviour – standards that wouldn’t live down to me, but which I had to live up to. And I had no choice about that.

Let me try again. I was never conscious of this. I just spent…a series of moments, reacting to what was put in front of me, trying to do what I thought was the right thing – the thing that would make people like me, or which would make them happy (or at least not unhappy). I have an image of acting, and then looking over my shoulder to check that what I had done was OK. And even when there was no adverse reaction, I was still not quite sure that I had done the right thing. The absence of censure/approbation (?) was no guarantee of increased confidence.

But what am I trying to say? It’s so difficult to think about the things that have become the basis of your behaviour over years and years, because the neural circuits that you’re using to do the thinking are dependent on – and partly composed of – those strata of circuits and protein and blood vessels…the tangled meat machine is trying to separate itself from itself so that it can look back at itself and report back to itself. Hah!

Fuck. What I mean is that I learned that there were higher things. Things that I knew second hand, but which were unquestionable. The unimpeachable authority of the things that weren’t me. They were everywhere you looked. So I did the right things, and behaved myself, and followed the conventions, and didn’t draw attention or make a fuss, even when people fucked me over, or served me crap food in a restaurant – I’d smile and say it was ‘fine’. And where has that got me? Fucking nowhere. Teachers, lecturers, journalists, managers, politicians, authors, film-makers, musicians – I thought that they all had the kind of special knowledge that I couldn’t ever get access to, mysterious stuff that lent them authority and credibility. Now I can see that that was all crap. I was just building myself an inferiority complex that kept me powerless and opinionless. All those wasted years when I was being a good girl and living to other people’s standards, thinking that they were my own. Fucking idiot.

You just have to listen to the radio in the morning, all those voices employed by our most august national broadcasting institution, privileging their narrow editorial focus – obsessions – through repetition. Ten years ago it was business, business, business – all the time: that was the thing that was most important to everybody – acquisitions, mergers, share issues and rumours boardroom changes. Today it’s the internal politics of the government and the intrigues and posturings of ministers, all trying to outsmart their interviewers and prove that whatever they’ve said or done, and whatever changes of direction they’ve made – they’ve always been right. Crap. And the posturing extends to those so-called rottweiler interviewers, whom we’re supposed to admire for taking these shifty bastards to task on our behalf, but who are really just going through the motions of their limited repertoire of studied incredulity and automatic gainsaying – the same generic questions with a thin veneer of topical detail (courtesy of a background researcher) which never really probe, because the interviewer and the interviewee know what the rules are, and that there’s only a three-minute slot, so you’re not going to crowd a proper exploration of any kind of complex issue into that time, are you? You make your points and I’ll pretend to press you. Shit. Shit. Shit. Pointless shit.