Charly Cox - Validate Me - A life of code-dependency

‘Remind me why we’re here again?’ Steph screws back on the cap of the vodka, wrestling with the cheap teeth on the cap that won’t quite align. Impatient.

I ignore her, transfixed in my own reflection. I do not look like my photos and although I have spent countless lost, and wasted, hours studying the planes of my face to an almost scientific degree on my phone, it feels like the first time I’d really seen myself in months. Vulgar. Vile. I do not look like my photos. Of all the places to be incarcerated as a fraud, tonight’s setting couldn’t have been more perfect. As we’d walked flat-palmed, pushing doors in the dark to find the toilet, I had spotted five men I’d at some point matched with on Hinge or Bumble that had later gone on to ignore my witty, well-thought and, through a series of screenshots to friends, well-vetted opening lines. I had arrived at a place of uncloaking.

The banging becomes more incessant and grows to a kick that shoots the brass lock up and off its holder, the four men fall in crying with laughter, pulling each other down to pull themselves up in a twisted rugby scrum. I may not have looked like my pictures but they certainly didn’t look like men. Little boys, still.

In the kitchen, it is much of the same tired scene we had left in the past of our pre-youth, where we were too young to be doing any of this at all but still stabbing at the perceived rituals of fun that we’d learned from films. Scattered plastic shells of shots and stepped-on crisps nestle deeper into the thin cracks of the wooden floor. No one here was having fun. Everyone is desperately ferrying around in a painted distraction, feigning merriment, if only to not feel cheated of the future they thought they’d be living for an hour or so. Thinking they’d have kids by now. A house. A holiday or two a year. A career. But here we were, acting fifteen, feeling forty-five, grappling for an artsy shot by the plugged-in disco lamp, rehashing unread articles that made one of us sound cultured and the other aggressive.

Empty.

When was ‘psycho’ so sexy

Yet still castigated?

Everyone here is married

But they’re all fucking, faking

When was dumbing it down

Cashing in as enough?

Who sold you the fear

That you need to be seen as in love?

They grin doe-eyed and warm

In every photo you post

Happy Valentine’s, Babe

I Love You The Most

It all screens so perfect

But I scream DENIAL

Am I bitter and twisted?

Just crave a number to dial?

Scroll

Where are you finding these partners?

Will you teach me your rules?

What do you serve them for starters?

Are you drugging these fools?

How are they harnessed

So tight to your hip?

Bzzzzzzzzzzzz

Oh

A DM!

‘I miss you gorgeous’

… sorry love, it’s him.

We are ruled by

A fool’s literature

Our settled Sunday readings

Map out an astrology-pulled apology

For the curves and quirks in our hapless week’s psychology

Clutching a passionate grasp around instruction

That limits our habits to the moon’s and sun’s seduction

We are led by the hand, willing participants in our own abduction

Lured by the romance of another world’s aura – chunked construction

Running blind from our own control

Two thirsty dogs lapping from a cosmic bowl

Two sapient dogs lassoing a leash to their own soul

Dutifully bowing to boldly meditate

Around Leo’s planetary heavyweights

Obediently howling at a weekly Mailchimp email to celebrate

A half-hashed understanding of Mercury retrograde

Cocking a leg to salute a sold faith

Doesn’t the whole infinite eclectic point sort of dissipate

When we hand a stranger a title that lets them control our own fate?

Darling

You and I are important

And what I thought to be suffering

Was an inkling and a drain

But what the world around you is doing

Is seldom progressive

Just shouting SAME

SHAME

SHAME

Never looking back at the woman

Who was privileged enough to realise

Those sentiments were a gain.

#whatafeministlookslike

Dyed of its natural conditions

Died of its misconvictions.

The glamour is better

When you’re less put together

It’s real it is felt

It’s authentic

All that you are and all you exude

Weighs out its aesthetic.

There is only a trace of anaesthetic

In the aesthetics

There is no truth, no freedom

No Holy Spirit’s leading

In the clang of rose-gold copper self care

There is only growth in muddled despair

There is help in the hurting

In the muddied soul searching

In pulling it all out of mind for your eyes to see

It’s mad – a cruel charade

For anyone to sell back your sanity

In bubble baths

Face masks

And breakfast in a bowl from Anthropologie.

Looking around, brush strokes of broad bored glances, everyone looks perfectly healthy. A little ruddy-cheeked from the December air and a faint suggestion of office-party regret, but no one looks like they are dying. Not that I know what the early stages of dying look like, but there is a disappointing lack of green gills, limbs hanging off, and intestines snaking the floor like stomped-on internal telephone wires. I suppose they think the same of me. Able-bodied, aggressively highlighted cheeks, bags of late Christmas shopping (the Urban Outfitters sale starts on the 20th so why bother buying all your crap prior?) and a fake limp so bad that I catch eyes with one man who gifts me a gentle ticklish cough, pulling it from his throat in solidarity, and we both do an awkward inward laugh. Ah, communion.

There is a lump on the back of my knee, which WebMD suggests is likely to be stage IV cancer or a golfing injury. I don’t play golf. I am clearly dying. I wonder if everyone else here has convinced themselves that they are dying too? WebMD has become a form of idle procrastination for me, sometimes even when I am perfectly fine I’ll click the parts of the digitised body and input symptoms just to see what they amount to. If they have any correlation. I am certain now that any time when I feel an organ fizz, I’ve got a spot on my right cheek or my ankles click, I can do some sort of WebMD-informed maths to convince myself I have a terminal illness. There is something about finding logical, even though it’s not, impermanence to life that soothes my anxiety. There is something about finding pattern and reasoning in my body’s shortcomings, and potential failings, that makes the notion of a suicidal thought seem quite quaint when I can convince myself my body is ready to give up before I give it permission to.

Not that long ago mental illness, albeit taboo and often dismissed even when as real and as profound as someone with suicidal ideation – there was a certain sympathetic coup for it. An arm rub. A waft of misunderstanding that means it is serious. Yes, it was saved for nutters and mad women, but it was also serious. There were institutes. Slurs. But now it just feels assumed. I don’t feel any new communion with the movement of celebrities ‘admitting’ their anxiety and depression, I feel annoyed. I feel ‘fuck’. There’s already next-to-no resource, what happens now more people use it? It also feels a bit self-aggrandising. This idea of admitting.