Fizzing with rage

I'm not easily offended, so I'm often astonished at how easily other people take offence at things that seem to me quite trivial.

Am I very resilient, very thick-skinned, and very self-confident, or am I just totally insensitive and unable to understand why other people feel so hurt and upset by something?

If you wear something associated with another culture, this is "cultural appropriation". If you don't agree that trans women are women, this is "transphobia". If you criticise female circumcision or honour killings, this is "disrespecting other cultures". If you don't accept someone else's version of reality, this could be a "hate crime".

There are no doubt plenty of people who would chastise me for being middle-class, for being privileged, for being well-off, for sounding posh, for being complacent, and so on, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I'm certainly not going to fizz with rage and demand grovelling apologies. People are entitled to their opinion, even if I think they've got me all wrong.

Obviously some remarks really are offensive - condemning homosexuality as an "unnatural perversion" or describing women as "crazy and hysterical". But other remarks are more tactless or tasteless or stupid than offensive. Getting worked-up over every stupid remark is a pointless waste of breath.

In a society that values freedom of speech, of course some people are going to say things that upset others. Yes, they might be offended for a while, but it's hardly the end of the world. If they stop to reflect, they might even see some truth in whatever's being said.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Celebrity blues

I'm fascinated by the downside of celebrity. The negative stuff you don't usually hear about when everyone's going on about the wealth, the luxury houses, the lucrative job offers, the fawning service wherever you go. The reality behind the apparent opulence and easy living is seldom so glamorous.

Gemma Collins, hugely famous star of the TV series The Only Way is Essex, has revealed some of the things that piss her off.

Complete strangers calling her a fat cunt or saying her car's being stolen. People who think she sits around all day doing nothing. Endless abuse about her weight. Fits of anxiety. Everybody wanting a bit of her. "People want all from you, absolutely everything. And everyone's got an opinion about you. I get so much criticism now."

"I don't hate my life, I'm not sitting here going I don't want to be famous. But it's come at a price, hasn't it? I just want to do my job, be entertaining and get paid like any normal person, but people think they own you. It's like bear-baiting."

She seems a remarkably resilient person who can cope with all the shit and just carry on. She's not going to let it get to her. But other less resilient souls like Amy Winehouse and Janis Joplin struggled to adjust to the hot-house pressures of fame, and finally went under.

That must be the worst thing, everyone latching onto you, treating you as public property and seeing you as fair game for whatever they want to throw at you. Criticism, abuse, harassment, death threats, sexual overtures, begging letters, stalkers, you name it. If you object, they argue that if you deliberately put yourself in the limelight, then you deserve everything you get. They don't believe celebrities are entitled to a peaceful private life like the rest of us.

No way would I want to be a household name. It would be a bed of nails.

Pic: Gemma Collins

Ow, that hurts

I'm quite susceptible to little hurts. A dozen times a day I feel hurt that I've been rejected, or ignored, or slighted, or not appreciated, or not understood, or treated brusquely.

But they're only little hurts, a bit like nettle stings or pinpricks. They only last a minute or two and then they're forgotten. I'm too resilient to dwell on them for long. I don't magnify every little hurt into a tearful melodrama. I shrug them off as a trivial part of daily life, just a sign of the rough and tumble of a hectic world.

The big hurts are a different story. The sort of hurt when a long-time friend suddenly snubs me, or my professional competence is doubted, or someone questions my sincerity or integrity. That goes deeper, like a thorn in my flesh. It pierces through the usual resilience and lodges somewhere, constantly resurfacing in bursts of bewildered pain.

That's the sort of hurt that can't just be shrugged off, though I'm still able to see it philosophically as an unfortunate but inevitable part of being human. I'm not the type of person who deals with serious hurt by getting bitter and vengeful, trying to cause as much hurt as was done to me.

I know some people would say that's a cop-out, that I'm bottling up my feelings and it's far healthier to ease the hurt by flinging it back where it came from. But that's not the way I see it. I want to drain the hurt, not add to it. So I keep it to myself and let it run its natural course.

Then again there's the biggest hurt of all, which is grief. Luckily up till now I've never experienced major, all-consuming grief, and I hope I never have to. I can only imagine how I might cope with it. Very well? Very badly? Probably the latter. Such excruciating hurt would knock me for six.

Years and tears

Are broken relation-ships harder to cope with as you get older? Are we less resilient, less optimistic, less forgiving? Do we have more invested in them, so that failure comes as more of a blow?

Personally, I couldn't say, as my present relationship is of very long standing. I can only look at what happened when I was young, when I did in fact get over doomed relationships quite easily.

Of course that wasn't just a question of age. It was also because the relationships had been short, or half-hearted to begin with, or I had my eye on someone else anyway.

The older you are, the longer your relationships are likely to have lasted, so they're harder to end for that reason rather than age in itself. Although I think it's also true that as you age you become more dependent on relationships and feel more bereft and beleaguered if they fold. You have less confidence that you can simply bounce back and carry on.

It also comes as more of a shock if someone you've felt totally secure with for many years suddenly announces that they don't feel the same and their affections have moved elsewhere.

I think it's true too that as you get older, relationships seem more important than they did when you were young, and break-ups seem more disastrous. All around you there are happy couples and close friends enriching each others' lives in a hundred ways, and anything that depletes that precious store looks like a tragic waste.

Or can younger people be just as traumatised and shattered by broken relationships as those who're older, especially if they idealise their partners more and expect a perfect emotional harmony that's unattainable?

All I know is that I'm very blessed to have a relationship that's endured for so long, when many people are battered by one disappointment after another, forever asking themselves what went wrong and why others seem to have the magic touch.