I read Gone Girl for the first time in a dingy Amsterdam hostel room. The room was tiny, crammed into a spot at the end of a dark hallway accessible only by climbing several flights of perilously steep stairs. It was basic: a bare lightbulb, a cracked sink, a sagging, broken springed camp bed squashed into the corner. But for three nights it was home. Most people go travelling to explore new places; I went travelling to escape. I would venture out into Amsterdam in the morning and wander down hidden back streets getting slowly lost in a city which should be impossible to get lost in. I would sit by canals and smoke by myself.
By the afternoon I would be back in my room.
Amsterdam is noisy even in the day time. I would crack open my rusted window and lie next to it listening to the sound of raucous laughter, singing, bottles clinking and smell the scent of cannabis slowly drifting into my room.
Everyone told me that Amsterdam was laid back; that it was the safest city for women. The only word I have for Amsterdam: seedy. I have never been more acutely aware that I am a woman than I was there. The lecherous stares as I walked down the street, the shops emblazoned with pictures of scantily clad women, the dead-eyed stares of the women in the Red Light District. Yes, it's laid back but there's also an undercurrent of menace, an urgency, a hunger. I felt safer in my hostel room.
It was while I was lying beneath my window, a book in my hand and the noise and bustle from Warmoesstraat below filling my room that I read the above paragraph and I had one of those brilliant moments that can happen with a novel. You know when you read something and it feels like someone has reached into your chest and extracted those exact feelings and you want to shout "Yes! YES!" because someone else in the world knows and feels exactly what you feel.
I have spent my whole life striving to be the cool girl. I have hurtled down make up aisles, fashion blogs and Instagram feeds always wanting to emulate someone cooler than me. The kind of girl who goes out for expensive cocktails and doesn't know where the night will lead, who always looks effortlessly put together, who will book a holiday to some exotic location on a whim and eat out at designer restaurants every night (not that you'd know it from her tanned, toned body).
The kind of girl whose life is a mystery in such a way that it prompts people to check her Facebook, Instagram and Twitter just for a little glimpse of her life.
For the record: it's bullshit.
There was a time when I was known as the Party Girl. I was the girl that everyone wanted to go out with because a night out with me would end in some ridiculous drunken escapade which would leave them saying "Oh Hollie, this could only happen to you!". I was the girl who always had a drink in her hand, who was always up for a night out and there was never a night that I didn't have an invitation to go out. I was THE girl to get fucked up with.
The truth is that I was an alcoholic. The reason why I was so loud and energetic was because I would wake up in the morning and have a drink. The reason why I never turned down an invitation to go out was because it gave me the opportunity to get so drunk that I would have a few hours relief from the chaos in my head. The reason I could drink so much was not just a lucky fluke but because I drank so much that it took me longer to get drunk.
They didn't see the nights where I would lie sobbing in my bed because my life felt empty and meaningless. Or how I felt lonely in a room full of people. Or how my friend would have to clean up blood stained arms after I tried to cut the pain out of me.
I let them see exactly what I wanted them to see.
I have a friend who has hundreds of followers on Instagram and they are all in awe of her life. Her glossy hair, her pouty lips, the designers clothes and the weekends away to Monaco. On Instagram she lives the kind of life reserved for the rich and famous. In real life she's broke, in debt and spends most of her time alone in her shared house in east London.
She lets them see what she wants them to see.
And the worst part is that we all know this deep down. We know that we're seeing the highlights reel, the incomplete story, the prettified version of their life. We know this and yet we still beat ourselves up over it because it feels like everyone else is living a more glamorous, more successful life than us. You only have to look at the money that is poured into the cosmetics industry, the success of fashion magazines and the rise of plastic surgery to understand that we are all striving to look better, to feel better, to be better.
The popularity of social media has made this even worse. With celebrities there's always the knowledge that They Are Not Like Us. But your cousin? That girl you work with? The old school friend? They are like us, it is attainable and it's so easy to beat yourself up because your life isn't quite as perfect as their life seems.
But that's exactly it: as perfect as their life seems. We all have the tendency to make our life seem a little better than it is, to hide things and say "I'm fine" whenever people ask you how you are even if that's unbelievably far from the truth. Everybody has a past, everybody has their own problems and I think if everyone remembered this, there would be a lot more kindness in the world.
