Validate Me: A life of code-dependency

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by

HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Copyright © Charly Cox 2019

Charly Cox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008348175

Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008348182

Version: 2019-09-12

Praise for She Must Be Mad

‘This book of poetry and prose is divine … so refreshing yet familiar’

– Cecelia Ahern

‘Charly constantly astounds me with how inspired she is … [Her] poetry really encapsulates what it is to be a young woman. All the tensions and anxieties and new discoveries’

– Pandora Sykes

‘Prose and poems that have you laughing, crying and questioning your own life in no time’

– Glamour

‘Thoughtful, funny and wistful’

– Independent

‘Brave and Beautiful’

– Stylist

‘Charly’s writing is staggeringly impressive’

– ELLE

Epigraph

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Kurt Vonnegut

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for She Must Be Mad

Epigraph

Foreword by Elizabeth Day

Introduction

Objectify me

Love me

Suffocate me

Validate me

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword by Elizabeth Day

I first met Charly Cox in a hotel suite, which makes it sound like an illicit romantic assignation. I suppose, in truth, the reality was not so very far removed given the instantaneous nature of our connection. I loved her straight away, with a ferocity reserved for only the most special of kindred spirits.

I knew her by reputation only, after discovering one of her poems online and finding myself laughing at one line, wincing in recognition by the next and weeping at the last. I followed her on Instagram where she was funny and self-deprecating and talented (and beautiful, of course, but this was the least important). Everything she posted got thousands of likes. Of course it did. Everything she posted was brilliant. Everything she posted had heart.

When I met her IRL, she was even better. Yes, she had heart. But she also had soul. She claimed to be 23 but really I knew she must be lying because her entire being was shot through with the gold thread of wisdom. I had that thing – that curious, embarrassing thing that you barely ever feel when you’re grown up – of wanting desperately for this woman to like me back.

We were in the hotel to do a series of readings to mark its opening, while various guests from a party downstairs were shepherded through the suite to listen to us. It was surreal. At one point, Charly was standing in front of a bathtub performing one of her poems while I was perched on the edge of a four-poster bed reading a passage from a novel. Afterwards, we bonded over the glorious weirdness of the evening. Now, she is my dear friend.

So you won’t be getting one of those objective, academic forewords where I analyse the cadence and rhythm of her language, wonderful though it is. No, this is a wholeheartedly subjective take on why you should read this collection.

If you’ll allow me to tell you, from my unabashedly biased position as Charly’s friend, why I believe you should read Validate Me, it is because Charly gives voice to the things we think but never manage to say. She gives expression to the intangible qualities of loneliness and alienation in this superficially connected world, and in doing so she makes us feel heard. More than that, she makes us feel understood. She probes darkness with the same tenderness as she tests the light, from the position of someone who has experienced severe and debilitating episodes of depression, but who has found the strength never to let this illness define her wholeness.

The book you have in your hands is precious. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will make you nod your head in affirmation. And when you turn the final page, it will make you understand a little bit more of what it is to be human.

Introduction

Are you the friend that takes sweet secret gratification in others’ failures? Do you like to indulge in delicious disastrous irony? How about oxymorons? Do you have a few moments to spare to flick through a book that warrants no need for more attention than a glance at your phone? Or perhaps – here’s the clincher – are you a person that has a 4G connection and is currently alive on this here planet?

If you answered yes to any of the above, please take a seat whilst you sign away a few precious cells of your brain to the validation of my mental breakdown. A little scribble of thought with the tiny Argos pen you stole in your childhood is all I need. With that too take your own validation, you’re a climate change warrior, that could’ve been single use. Can I get you anything? A dog meme? An old photo of Paul Danan off his tits? A Trump tweet to make you question what is left of this already heavy and futile opinion on life? Well, get up and get it yourself because I am currently circling around Praed Street, Paddington, London, dictating this into my phone having just strolled out of Accident and Emergency with little but an offer of self-sectioning and a plastic festival-like wristband with my name and date of birth on it as a keepsake. I am busy and now you are too, so Lady Gaga and Piers Morgan can wait, we have got a lot to try and decipher about how it got this far.

Nothing riles me more [this is a lie as you’re about to read a book which is essentially a long list of things that rile me to the point of medication punctuated only by rhyme and the rare smatter of hope] than an introduction whereby the writer refers to the infancy of the book’s process. It leaves me with a bored, bourgeois sour taste of someone else’s self-importance, but as I’ve been hailed as an #instapoet I fear I owe it to some sanctimonious troll to exceed a slither of expectation. So let us suck the soured serotonin out of my life lemon.

I pre-empted this. I knew almost so certainly I was on the cusp of complete digital burnout that I pitched this collection thinking I was saving myself from it. Charly from the past, all omniscient, and evidently omnipotent, cackled her way through a Google doc, tripping over a cocktail of www.woes that she knew were exhausting but perhaps important and valid and witty, and hit send. Charly from the past but a few weeks later delighted at the idea of being able to use poetic licence for the first time in her sad, sad life. What fun! You need not sell the last fragment of your young and underdeveloped soul and past trauma! You can use FORESIGHT! And now Charly in the present is furiously walking to Marylebone station at 5am because her contactless card doesn’t work so she can’t get the tube and is desperately aware that everyone is staring at her in the night before’s party dress, mascara on her chin and a hospital bracelet. She’s also talking into her phone in third person, so I need not break this to tell you how far away from the grand dreams of poetic licence she is. This collection, albeit caricatured, is true. Some of it was written on grand spanking highs in expensive hotels in Los Angeles where I (ever the optimist in irony) searched for physical validation, a boyfriend, stardom and a good Instagram opportunity; some of it in bed wheezy on Venlafaxine, Propranolol and an algorithm that hates my content; some of it in Ubers and on trains; some of it to the soundtrack of the men in my local, little countryside pub; some of it leaving a hospital working out if I shouldn’t have run away from it. But all of it was written on my phone and all of it is because of the curse of exactly that.

There. That’s how we got here. This thing in my hand that stole all of my smarts so it could preface its own name with them.

Hello, my name is Charly Cox and I am code-dependent. So would you please, please just validate me.

My rhetoric is changing

My need for love confused

I’ve lost my inner monologue

And sold it all for views.

Click to Accept the Terms and Conditions

Shout a little louder

Come a little closer

Let me lead you to the void

The blank expanse

Let yourself fly in a seat

That is pants

Boom across a room

That cares for you little

Wipe off a slick

Of your new hungry spittle

That we’ll sell you as gold

Come grab a feel

Of a hand you can’t hold

Come be a person

That you never knew

Feel grand and feel gorgeous

Then feel worthless and through

Take a trip down the tubes

Get settled in

Welcome, you’ve signed up

It’s all about to begin.

Validate Me Part 1

Thought as much

Famed as such

Faked the touch

Of what excites us

Who we are and will always be

Unites us

But we seldom invite that side enough

Swapped it out to sell new love

As though it’s not inside us

Think too much

Fame is such

A thing we’ll fake as something that excites us

Spin it until we’re spinning plates we can’t dine off

Starving

Is this what we’ll die of?

Vapid monsters in a sea of breeding nonsense, jealousy

Portraits of unfulfilled and pretty

Best lives or misery

Rooted to mis-sold faith in a downloaded commodity

Do you like me?

Do you like me?

I don’t know who I am any more

I don’t know who you are

Fascinate me as I fabricate me

Castigate me as I congratulate me

Salivate as I let you navigate me

Masturbate at how inadequate I find me

I’m putting it all out to see

No idea of what I want or who I am sans vanity

No idea of how to please our grumbling society

No idea of where I can slip off silently

I am halves with who I’m wholly miscalculating

Please, would you just validate me?

#candid

You only take photos when you think something might die

You only post photos hoping that it’ll survive.

#fitspo

Smelling of fags and biscuits

Embers the colour of the bits that I missed.

The Party

The door opens quickly just as my earring falls out and breaks. Steph catches it and puts it in her pocket, seamlessly, and stares confidently at the man leaning and swaying on the frame. ‘We’re here for the party. Right house?’ She says this with a vague tone of annoyance because it’s bastard-freezing outside. Neither of us have tights on and he’s just stood there gawping, assessing, working out if he’ll get off with one of us by the dregs of the evening. Music crawls in muted tendrils down the tall staircase behind him. No bass.

‘Well, hello girls. Who are you then?’ An over-exaggerated mockney accent dribbles down his polo; when had people started to think that being mindful of your privilege meant performing a class act?

‘This isn’t Mahiki, mate. Let us in, would you?’ It wasn’t, thank God. It was a flat in Denmark Hill, with a door off to the back of a newsagents. Our legs are bare, shaking, and my mind clamours for space as it beats itself into a pulp wondering how I could’ve crammed another cigarette in-between the Uber and this unnecessary faux formality. ‘Robbie invited us,’ I say, meek in Steph’s confidence, staring. I feel shiny. My face feels filled with obvious pores. I feel an intense fraudulence, which I’m sure is about to be exposed. I do not look like my photos. I am catfishing myself, at best. ‘’Course he did,’ he stares at my boobs and Steph’s legs. It feels almost like a compliment that neither of us would ever admit felt like one, we’ve spent enough time slagging off how Robbie always must be seen with the next hot girl and how he always has a line of them waiting, and how horribly disgusting and misogynistic that holds. But to be assumed to be one of them? An ego boost. ‘So can we come in or what? Bloody hell.’ This is boring.

‘Yeah. Yeah, come up.’ He steadies himself on the bannister and the noise of the party engulfs us as he swings open the kitchen door. Everyone stops for a moment.

‘LADS! FOUND THESE TWO LOOKING FOR ROBBIE ON THE DOORSTEP,’ he shouts with smackable smugness. Some roll their eyes whilst others cheer, others pay no attention at all and the girls move in closer to the men they’re sat in front of.

‘Drink?’ Steph glares.

‘Bathroom first. I’ll sort out my face. Pour us one in there. Then let’s give this a go.’

I hadn’t been to a house party in years, the coy butterfly-sizzle of excitement about the hours of pre-game are lost and forgotten. Nothing about being stood in somebody else’s bathroom with a cheap bottle of vodka between our legs felt naughty, it felt a bit grim and regressive. The fists banging on the door outside were not of rowdy teenagers who’d overdone it, not of new-found couples burrowing away for the night for a private snog, but of four thirty-year-olds after the cold, flat porcelain of the toilet to rack up lines of cocaine, which they’d later learn was actually ketamine. We let them bang.

‘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.

Your Boyfriend in LA Loves Me from Across the Ocean

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.

Mercury in Retrograde

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?

‘I Know I Can’t Talk but …’

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.

Aesthetic

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.

Self Care

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.

The Walk-In Centre

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.

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