Answering Man Repeller's writers prompt: Escape your comfort zone

I remember this moment vividly as if it was only yesterday.

Lets start with a little back story, a young, bright eyed, naïve 22 year old, setting off on this magnificent European adventure with a girl I was soon to learn I did not know well enough.

Traveling, in a pair, with a friend I had not spent enough time with proved to be more challenging than I had expected. As these things often are. You have all of these romantic ideas of how you will both get along and it will be fun and easy. For the most part it generally is, with a few terse moments.

However, the terse moments began to outweigh the fun times. I was quickly realizing that perhaps choosing an only child to travel with when I was used to spending my holidays with siblings and cousins, and no real space to myself, was maybe a bad idea.

With a 14-week trip planned and only six weeks in, I was beginning to loose patience. But terrified of the prospect of heading off solo for the remainder of my trip.

It all came crumbling down one grey rainy day in Amsterdam. I had had enough. Tired of feeling like the bad guy whenever I tried to get her to compromise or to maybe consider doing something I wanted to do. Building up all my courage to talk to her and let her know that when the bus came to get us the next day that I wasn’t going to be joining her.

It was awful, I felt awful, there were tears and yelling. It felt like a messy break up. An uncomfortable 24 hours followed, then I saw her off at the bus stop, went back to my friends house and thought it was all going to be wonderful from here.

But oh boy was I wrong…

Off I went on the bus a couple of days later, it was fine while I was on the bus. It was when the bus got to that I began to freak out.

Off I get, struggling to find a cab to take me to my hostel, seeing as I a; didn’t know where it was and b; didn’t speak German (except for gutten tag and ja).

Every emotion was building up, I was feeling stressed, worried, scared and overwhelmed. Finally making it to the hostel, checking in and heading out to find something to eat. That’s when it all came tumbling down.

Walking out the front door, with instructions on places to find dinner, then proceeded to get lost and a little teary…

The little teary turned in to one of those amazingly, attractive, noisy cries, which are best kept for the private of your bedroom or shower. However, I was currently sitting on the steps of Berlin Hauptbahnhof Station.

And I cried, boy did I cry.

All I could think about was that I knew no one, no one in this country, no one in this time zone, no one on this continent. That if something happened to me no one could help me, that no one could console me.

I’ve never felt so alone and isolated, so out of my comfort zone. Strangers kept on coming up to me asking me questions in German, which were followed by me crying louder or very unattractively sniffing then blowing my nose.

I was alone, in all sense of the word. The first time in my entire life that that thought made me feel really truly vulnerable. This traumatic ordeal lasted all of an hour. But it felt like forever.

Eventually I ran out of tears, it began to get cold and I didn’t have a jacket and I got really hungry. Dusting myself off, heading back to my hostel all red and puffy in the face.

Walking in to my dorm room, that was empty when I left, to the sound of girls laughing. Upon opening my door the girls in the room that I had yet to meet looked up at me, saw my face, came running and gave me the hug I desperately needed.

Five years on, this one girl is still in my life, although she lives in London, that night I made a friend for life. So although I was thrown miles out of my comfort zone, I learnt a lot, about my resilience, about my ability to do a good ugly cry and about the kindness of strangers.

Just because.

 

 

 

Photos: Man Repeller, The Sartorialist, Jak and Jill, various unknown

Seeking Love, Finding Overalls

 

Those of you who visit my blog regularly will be aware of my love for the one and only Man Repeller, Leandra Medine. I think she is wonderful, I think her writing is wonderful and I think her take and attitude towards fashion is wonderful. Also, considering she didn’t run away calling for help, when I overenthusiastically came running across the street to say hello while wandering the Meatpacking District in New York, I think she has a wonderful relationship with her fans. Over excited or not.

When Medine first announced she was writing a book to be released this year I was over the moon. I was excited to take a piece of the Man Repeller and keep her in my life forever. Since first stumbling upon Man Repeller a few years ago I was hooked, my constant go to blog for fashion, but mainly for Medine’s refreshing, witty and humorous writing.

As a budding writer myself, I have taken a lot from her style of writing. She is personable without revealing too much, she is honest without being too harsh, and she is humorous and willing to poke fun at herself.  There are not a lot of people out there that manage to get that balance right. But my does she smash it! (Well I think so personally and if you have an issue with that it’s your loss because you have no idea what you’re missing out on, she is amazing!)

So the book, ‘SeekingLove. Finding Overalls.’ It was a long and tedious, three week wait for it to be delivered to my door. After some hiccups with the post office and one particularly incompetent postie I finally had the highly anticipated book in my hot little hand.

It took me five days, five highly enjoyable days to finish. I am generally a fast reader, but when you factor in that I was working those five days, it was a massive effort to finish it so fast. That said it was hard not to want to read it in one sitting. I was devastated when the last chapter came around. Funny, honest, open, witty, enjoyable and highly relatable, I loved every sentence Medine wrote.

Medine has written on what I assume are some of the most significant moments in her life, from her first love giving her “cooties”, to her first kiss, “my first kiss was with a boy who had seamen issues at a club called cream”. To her being told that the reason she was so hopeless with love was because of her clothes and nothing else.

I could relate to her stories, as she wrote about things all girls have gone through, weight issues, love, loss, falling in love with handbags and accessories, deciding a pair of shoes are more important than food. So on and so forth.

The chapter that I loved the most was “The Peplum”, which was written about her engagement to the one boy who loved her enough to see past her man repelling tendencies. From reading her blog I had seen the post on her engagement when she announced it to her readers, I was so excited for her. But I was totally unaware of the barrage of negative feedback she received after sharing such happy news.

As Medine does refrain from sharing too many personal and intimate details about her life, so this was a big moment. To read that she had received negative and hateful feedback after sharing some of the happiest news one could share was upsetting. However for her to be so open about it and writing it in her book, calling those who hated on her 'assholes', goes to show her refreshing and humorous take on writing about her life.

I have always been a fan of Medine and always will be. Regardless of whether you are familiar with Man Repeller or not, I highly recommend giving her a book some time. It will leave you smiling and also remind you that there are many out there that have experienced the same awkward moments in life as you and I both have.

Buy Seeking Love. Finding Overalls here.

Where do 'it bags' go to die?

 

 

I love the Man Repeller and I love this blog post stolen from the Man Repeller, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Standing outside a high-end designer boutique last month, I gawked at the delectable leather offerings shown in the window. While I heard myself fantasizing, “If only I could have that one, and that one, and that one too…” I stopped to think about whether my relationship with designer handbags is founded on the principles of Label Blindness. What is it that makes a bag so popular and why are we (or, I don’t know, maybe just me) so quick to conform to expensive trends that often seem to die before we’ve even completed paying them off? Unable to arrive at my own conclusion, I commissioned a pair of fresh eyes to assess the situation and comment. Below, Sophie Milrom investigates the It Bag phenomenon:
When I landed in a new and more upscale middle school at 13 years old, I had a very hard time making friends. After a few weeks of spending lunch periods talking to my mother on a payphone outside of the nurse’s office, I was fully convinced that my problems would disappear if I had a Kate Spade messenger bag, the backpack of choice for girls at the most coveted cafeteria table. It was big enough to fit one textbook (was it Einstein or Thoreau who said “the more impractical the more luxurious”?) and for its most fortunate owners, a Prada pencil case.

Even once my self-deprecating humor earned me favor with a group of girls who ten years later I still consider my inner circle, I believed that little rectangular logo would make my braces disappear, my chest look bigger – er, existent – and, as Joan Didion says in her prose on self respect, entitle me to “the love of a good man.” I was fixated.

A birthday and promise to stop biting my nails later, my prize arrived–in black, obviously. Because if I was going to pass it down to my great granddaughter it couldn’t be vulnerable to stains.
But when I finally retired my purple Jansport, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.

Nobody seemed to notice…or care. I couldn’t admit it to myself, or my mom, and pretended to love that expensive nylon messenger like a first-born child until the end of high school. But somewhere deep down, I took a vow of abstinence. Not from sex, which wouldn’t have been hard among the pipsqueak boys at my Jewish high school, but perhaps the hardest oath an adolescent woman can make: never again would I buy – or even covet – an “It Bag.”

[An interlude for humor: last summer, while admiring my parent’s photos from their trip to Europe, I realized my dad was wearing it proudly as, according to him, “the perfect
travel murse.”]

Here is my case against It Bags: they are beautiful, well made and widely accepted as classy, but attain their mass appeal by serving as a status-symbol for a moment in time. Women wear expensive handbags and men drive expensive cars, (I’d presume) often to validate the owner’s ability to (a) identify the right item and (b) afford it. If excessive spending could signal that you’re smarter than me, phenomenal in bed, or just plain likeable, I wouldn’t oppose. We all want to be and feel respected, accepted and even envied, but as I learned from my affair with Katie, it can’t be achieved through a purse.

Since high school, I’ve found myself tempted. I watched friends rack up an entire arena of the It Bags that have since infiltrated The Bowery Hotel bar and kept saying to myself maybe, I’ll get the next one. But not wanting to spend a small fortune at the tail end of the fad, I put off taking the plunge several times.

Eventually I accepted that what goes up must come down–and what is an It Bag eventually was an It Bag. And the only thing that seems worse than wearing something outdated is wearing something outdated for which you overpaid for with the sole purpose of it being on trend.

Like a girl who finally gets over emotionally unavailable men and is able to appreciate a “nice guy,” I gave up the chase and began enjoying – in fact, relishing in – knowing that the Mulberry Bayswater tote I splurged on 7 years ago will never be “so out” because it was never “so in” to begin with.

I often wonder where It Bags go to die. I frequently shop in consignment stores where the inventory of insert-brand-name-here satchels doesn’t seem to correlate to the volume sold during their Carry-Bradshaw-endorsed heyday. After many restless nights I’ve come up with two theories: there are either children in underdeveloped countries walking around in t-shirts that say “New England Patriots Superbowl Champs 2012” and holding Fendi baguettes, or, maybe, like every other cultural phenomenon that cant quite be explained, they are big in Japan.