Alexander McQueen: post 1 of many

Only Alexander McQueen could be the subject of this first post. Because only Alexander McQueen anything. The man and the fashion house, the second his legacy. I imagine his ghost, freed on Halloween, trawling the archives of the last four years and nodding his head. (Not smiling. This man could convey emotion with a deadpan stare.)

This is my blogpost, so I won’t spend time on his background, influences blah blah. That is why Wikipedia exists, quite literally. What that site doesn’t tell you about is why I pin his dresses on to my Pinterest board ad nauseum.

Patrick Demarchelier | Vogue

It was love at first sight: women dressed in hundreds of golden butterfly wings, over variations of tight-fitting dresses – emphasised shoulders, ragged hems, excessive ruffles. Every dress is an in-joke: elegant and demure but self-conscious, constructed and confrontational.

When you pledge allegiance to the brand that is McQueen, you pledge all or nothing, bad with the good. Future lines use the bird feathers and butterfly wings, all dancing the dance of our in-joke. Full dresses of gold or silver and a suffocating chiffon veil, a bird’s wing stretching from the model’s throat, a fabric Mohawk. Soft scraps on tight leather bodices. Bad to the bone, not preacher bad.

The meaning of those first dresses hit me like a ton of bricks, to fling the hackneyed expression at you, like a Chagal painting once did. Like a song by Perfume Genius does or a James Meek novel or Hamlet. The meaning, to me? Devastation. The pretty face of everyday life with a nod to its true brutality. Horror laughing at us. No, forcing himself into our homes and sitting silent in our living rooms.

Except, in my home, he has a key and is annoyingly chatty.

My meaning, not his or yours, I get that. Still, part of me insists McQueen also lived with this sense of desolation in conflict with living and sewed it into every creation.

As evidence, perhaps, his suicide in 2010. He had tried overdosing twice before, but killing yourself is more difficult than most realise (more than 90% fail). Go big or go home. Don’t try, but do. He combined four methods: he overdosed, slit his wrists and hung himself. The fourth? There are rumours of asphyxiation. I’ll leave that to you to figure out.

Alexander McQueen in Vogue Italia

I get it. I see his suicide as an act of courage, not cowardice. In Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, he says “conscience makes cowards of us all”. Our tragic hero is more of a coward than we thought. He is saying that killing yourself is scary: even though living is a series of traumatic moments, there isn’t any guarantee that death is better than life (frying pan, fire). (Remember this next time someone uses the first line as some motivational slogan.)

My own words now: there’s some fear in failing to kill yourself, too. Of having lived that moment when you make the decision and carry it out, and have to remember it. That moment is one of pure desperation. Distress. Despair. Pure darkness that briefly has a pinprick of respite. Remembering it is worse than having to live. I am a coward, too.

Discovering that someone else has thought the same reviled thoughts is a shot of relief. These thoughts can’t be faked: when Hamlet talks about “the thousand natural shocks / that flesh is heir to…”, I hear him describe the daily traumas that are the return on investment of being alive. (Did you notice my euphemism? I am trying to avoid saying “being bloody meat”.)

The work of Alexander McQueen brings me out of myself. I recognise my awful secret in the world outside myself and see how beautiful the awful can be. A jolt of sublime pain. To step out of myself, my thoughts, my rabid emotions for a moment. To acknowledge that the world maybe might possibly exist. To take this into ridiculous depths now, to suggest that there is something that is just beautiful out there.

For me, clothes are one way of telling you how I feel and who I am, because I don’t have the language to tell you and because I have to censor what I can explain. My internal struggles become something I can wear and that others can appreciate, without necessarily knowing what those struggles are or staring at me slack-jawed. It is a way of saying the world is horrible and so am I without upsetting anyone. (Well, I just gave away the secret…)

McQueen is a constant reflection of the locust infestation that is my general interior. For example, their collections have a regular motif of a cowgirl-gone-Goth or a disillusioned former socialite. A woman who sees the awful but channels it into being strong. Someone who doesn’t let the awful define them and who can turn inwards themselves without breaking. Like Wonder Woman, but with more material.

Style is identity, not fashion. The creations of Alexander McQueen sum up the million avatars of who I have been, who I am and who I want to be.

People say the value of art is subjective, but I think art first talks to how I feel rather than what I think. And my feelings are fluttering all over the place, so pinning them down is a quest on its own. Alexander McQueen’s pieces went on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after his death. Every time I see one of his dresses, my breath catches. In them I see vulnerability and courage, because being vulnerable is more terrifying than it should be.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

All planes sound like they are crashing

Most mornings my family ate breakfast in front of the TV, watching CNN. As most modern families do. Although usually seen as a dysfunction of the family unit, I was glad. I am not a morning person. I think mornings are wonderful and sometimes I wish I spent more time with them but only if no one speaks. This morning featured a story about a plane crashing into a suburban home. A full-on commercial plane, not those light jobbies. I can't remember whether anyone died, but I suddenly had a solution to a problem that had plagued me for a couple of years.

See, death is a good solution to life and so rationally one should have the option of expediting this solution by one's own hand. However, (before I lost interest in even loathing a certain deity) my main worry was that my family would suffer, granted in varying degrees. Ok, I confess I was worried they would blame me. (This is still an issue, but now it shares the stage with my suspicion of, well, everything.) Car accidents are messy, drowning is too horrifying and so on. But here was instant death, for which I could not be blamed. Unlikely, but look, it just happened!

I prayed every night for a plane crash, where no one died but me, and every time I heard a plane fly over I would listen for the whining of a burnt-out engine until I heard whining every time a plane flew over. Sometimes, I would brace myself, holding my breath in until I couldn't any more, so exhaling signalled that I was not about to die. I still hear that whine, and sometimes will involuntarily take a deep breath and search the sky for telltale wisps of smoke.

I don't believe in mollycoddling. My metaphors will become more graphic and just more. Forewarned is forearmed so read on at your own peril. Also this is my blog (well, one of), my chemicals and hormones, my dysfunction, and my past and present. This is my catharsis.

Which leads me to my disclaimer: This is my experience. I do hope that it will resonate with parts of others' experiences but fundamentally it is mine and I am very attached to it. By this life thing. Please do not project onto my experience or assume that this is exactly how someone else feels - just blerry ask them. (Trick erm statement there: Don't take my word for it.)

So, back to my disappointing experience of planes. Take a guess how long ago this was? I am 31, as of publication. 19? 15? 22? To prevent cheating the answer is three times three minus zero. Yes, 20. Spot on.

I know this story and I have told it to my therapist, oh, and I have written about because I had a dream about a plane crashing, which my brain re-enacted a number of times. Just to ram home whatever oblique point it was making. So, I don't need to rehash it when the dream would probably make a more interesting and revealing story.

The beginning of the point is I started thinking suicidal thoughts at round about age seven. The narrative in my brain at age five was 'I hate myself.' You think I am projecting because at that age, individuation is only a bud of an idea? The finale of the point is that I have lived with depression since I was a tot and manic-depression at least since my early 20s. I was diagnosed at 29 and have religiously (in lieu of anything else, perhaps) worked on managing my condition for more than two years, with two specialists with a full line of degrees.

I guarantee you I know my behaviour, thoughts and condition better than you do, given we're all cooped up together pending a plane crash (although I won't pretend I understand any of it and my unconscious has tried to kill me more than once, but this should reinforce how little you know about any of this unless you have some qualification I don't know about).

I can tell you more stories, about how I have admired Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf for what I see as having the courage to kill themselves since I was in school, or that the boy's suicide in Dead Poet's Society made me conclude I don't have the courage to shoot myself if I were presented with a gun.

I have been depressed and occasionally manic for most of my life (although I'm told that I couldn't have been consistently depressed and when I stabilise I will remember other periods of stability, but maybe I just blocked them out as worse than the depression). Unless you can time travel and have 31 years to spare, we can rule out that you have any thorough knowledge of what I go through any more than I do or could have of your life.

You may remember (I wouldn't; short-term memory of one of those mining pans) that I told you to just blerry ask. (While I swear, the words are mostly approximations like blerry and effing. If I spell the words correctly. Duck. Cover. And crawl away slowly.) This blog is about catharsis for me, but also to try to help others understand me and my fellow Bipolar Bears. (Couldn't resist.) I know, first I tell you this experience is mine and mine alone, and now that you should to some degree project onto my experience (so tempted to use another polar bear joke). I dunno, I'm still figuring it out.

My tone has been aggressive so far. I am (justifiably) irritated - and don't worry, this story will unfold over many posts, and I promise to sneak in a few erm and har! moments among the blerries and effs. I don't like being told what to do under the best of circumstances (like 'You, here is a drone which we would like you to test', whereupon I would sneakily set up my own parametres). And I don't like to be told how to think about what I feel and my unconscious likes it even less.

To share another contradiction (setting the tone) I rely heavily on external feedback. My basic assumption is that I am an awful human being who like Atlas (but prettier) carries the world on my shoulders, so when you tell me that I needn't carry the world I get all confused because I don't know how to put it down, which obviously means I am worse than I knew and I don't know how it got there or why it's there but I do know it's heavy and hang on, it is my responsibility actually and so you can just eff off. But, just to be sure, do I look dumb standing here with an orb on my back?

When someone, no matter how saintly, tries to process my experience, I feel judged and angry and confused in addition to everything else ricocheting around my brain (we'll get to that) - because you don't deal with this alone for 29 years and come out unscarred - it's like a Transformers' battle except no one knows who is an Autobot or Decepticon because their eyesight is going as they age (I mean, rust) and then we add some Smurfs and some Nolan-type snow-suit baddies from Inception.

You're walking into that and saying, here is Batman - he has come to play. My brain should flatline at this point but instead I focus all my energy into imagining you, my dear, dear, well-meaning friend, with a concave nose and me with a bruised fist, and we all survive. You may remember I am not thrilled about surviving in the first place.

Well, this has been very instructive, for me at least. You may be worse for the wear. But without commenting on my experience, you have helped me to figure out that my irritation and anger at people trying to interpret my experience is partly my own confusion. I am still figuring out how to untie some of the strings that knotted as I swivelled and ducked for 29 years of working through the mess while trying to hide it. That's my experience and maybe someone out there feels similarly, but no doubt their story is different. Especially the bit about the plane. A train, for example. Lightning?