Starting from Scratch

I simply haven't had time. Or wasn't clear-headed enough to be able to write a word properly (meaning "hangover-to-the-point-of-not-having-any-brain-cells-left"). But that's because I was too happy. Yes, I know, that's a first. Being happy and drinking my arse off just because I could is something so rare in my life that it felt like it wasn't really me. Only that it is the real me, for the first time, in ages. Not afraid to fuck up anymore.

I'll tell you. Last week was one of those weeks when everything suddenly falls into place through a mix of luck, instinct and, well, balls. It started on Sunday, when I dragged my friends to see Lee Miller's exhibition at the V&A. The first time I heard, well, read about Lee Miller was in this novel by a Brazilian lady that I was slightly obsessed with when I was about 12. It happens to me all the time. Every now and then I get obsessed about some woman that represents part of what I am or want to be in life. Women like Tracey Emin, Virginia Woolf, Juliette Lewis, and more recently Amy Winehouse. All dramatic, emotionally intense, slightly crazy women with a drug or drink problem, but so, SO talented. Fearless women who pour their hearts out in their art, who don't draw a line between their work and their lives. In the novel, the heroine goes through shitloads of surgery to look like Lee Miller - the ultimate beauty with brains - just so she can catch the eye of this famous photographer. I read the novel way before I got access to the Internet, and back in my little Brazilian town it was as easy to find books about 1930s' photographers as it is to elect a Brazilian politician that is not corrupt, so I never really found out much about her work until a few years later - probably until I left Brazil. Then last Sunday I went to see her work at the museum. And it's not that her pictures were amazing themselves, or the fact that she, along with Man Ray, invented a technique to invert highlights in a picture, or that she was the first female war photographer during WWII. No. It was because she was FEARLESS. And passionate, and unstoppable, and audacious, and very, very ballsy.

The first Go For It muse.

Now, think: how brave a woman had to be in the 1930s to demonstrate she possessed  balls? She was a bloody genius, and on top of that, she was sex-ee.

So, after I went back home, I run a bath and while sitting there, like a boiling egg, I decided. This bloody stuckness has to stop. No more waiting for my life to start. Obviously I knew I was still powerless to deal with some aspects, but I could simply, you know, adopt the attitude. And make some phone calls.

So the next day I called my current job in that bar and told them I needed a few weeks off - with no intention to come back.

Then my landlord told us our rent was going to go up and we needed to decide if we wanted to stay and pay more or get out. I said we're leaving. 

Then I've checked my savings and made a few calculations and started to draw a plan to see how long I could be proudly unemployed, while also starting my little fashion business (more on that later) and write my book, the little bloody fucken' tormenting book. In the end I didn't really draw a plan, because plans scare me more than actually help me, so I simply threw caution to the wind.  Fuck the plans. I'm just gonna dive into the unknown for a while and see what happens. Carpe Diem for real.

Then my passport came back after endless, long months at the hands of the British authorities, holding my permission to come and go for years to come.

And so it is that now I've got no job, no home, little money and colossal (but limited) freedom. All in the tiny space of a week. 

I haven't been this excited in a looong, long time.