When They Won’t Keep On Saying Just How Special You Are

From the pages of Metro, where Ms Rachel Meghan is talking about herself:

The barbecue is in Hell. Did I mention that?

Or, “I have badges too,” she said.

Oh calamity. All that specialness – dashed to pieces.

And yet correcting people – constantly – attempting to make them mouth absurdities, remains a go-to impulse. An irresistible temptation. Despite those claims of exhaustion. Funny, that. Whether other parties might be fatigued by this habit is, alas, not explored.

Well, given observable reality, that will happen.

“Everything came to a head after I became a mother,” says she. Pretensions of themness, the craving to seem special – perhaps more special than one is – would, I suppose become harder to sustain. Given the arrival of someone more important, someone whose needs tend to come first.

That’s the spirit.

Not sure whether that’s a fear or an aspiration.

As women so often do.

Specifically, a woman’s body.

As, like, totally spiritual people feel compelled to say.

A spirituality of self. How terribly innovative.

Again, self. And repeated descriptions thereof.

So many badges, and they’re all so shiny. Also, my truth.

Better start saving for those counselling sessions.

As two-year-olds do, of course. I can hear those eyebrows raising from here.

Having known the author as a girl and then as a woman, presumably. Not as some imaginary, unsexed being. One who’s had sex and consequently a child.

Imagine the fun. All those corrections and self-corrections. All that pointed effort. The evenings must fly by.

No laughing at the back.

How very dare they.

You see, in a sense, she’s always in the room, policing how her self is being perceived. On account of being so spiritual.

Update, via the comments:

What’s noteworthy, I think, is how closely these things follow a familiar, if unconvincing, pattern.

Say, the feeble, retrospective excuses for ongoing pretensions. Ms Meghan tells us of not wanting to get her nails done as a girl, and not wishing to straighten her hair, as if this were the very measure of things. Or the complaints of being exhausted by her own chosen contrivance, as if her attention-seeking were only being done reluctantly, as if she weren’t the author of it.

And the rather implausible claim of not influencing small children to make them mouth the expected absurdities. The demanded affirmation. In madam’s case, the claim that her two-year-old son “just clocked my queerness on his own,” unprompted, while simultaneously boasting of telling said two-year-old, “Mummy isn’t a woman.”

And of course the strange lack of concern for those on whom these tiresome dramas are being imposed. Including her own child.

Update 2:

John D quotes this,

And adds,

Well, indeed. It’s not unlike someone who’s five foot five insisting that they be perceived by everyone around them as being six foot four. And then getting all tearful and pissy when this doesn’t happen. It’s scarcely less absurd.

You don’t get to control how others perceive you. Emotional blackmail based on demands that others must use fabulist pronouns, even out of earshot, will not change that fact. It may, however, make you look obnoxious and deranged.

‘Every time you refer to me, whether I’m present or not, you first have to clap your hands three times.’

Same vibe.

Even if it were the case that Ms Meghan feels “misgendered” – which would be assuming quite a lot – she has not in fact been “misgendered” by use of the words she and her, or by any recognition of the fact that she’s obviously a woman. She has been referred to accurately, in accord with physical reality.

Her mental health problems – any feelings of being “misgendered” – are not the arbiter of what is.

We can see what is.

And it’s curious how patterns of behaviour that until very recently would have been recognised as manipulative, abusive, insufferable, etc., are now being indulged and actively encouraged. Not least in the pages of Metro, where this theatre of the self is pretty much a staple and served up routinely.

This rickety barge is kept afloat by the tip-jar buttons below.