This Girl Can't - and She Doesn't Care

About three months ago I became one of those people who did yoga. I'm not going to try and downplay it, I absolutely love it. 

Just because I've found that I love it doesn't mean I'm any good at it though. In fact I love it precisely because I’m not good at it, because it doesn’t matter so I don’t care. Which means I get to have at least 3 hours a week where I don’t care if what I’m doing is perfect. More if I do classes at home. The only other time I’m not worried about building a life I love and achieving all my dreams is when I’m sleeping - and then I seem to spend most of that time cheating on my dream-partner or trying to stop myself being murdered by zombies.

My legs are long. When you're trying to put them behind your head that's a huge advantage, I spend a whole lot of time with my thighs right up in my face and nothing will help you appreciate the abilities your body more than having it all wrapped around you. When it works with me just the way I ask it too I love it and this is only enhanced when I do yoga videos in my room in only my underwear. Something that definitely helped me get used to myself, I can’t hide from myself and I no longer want to.

Sometimes though, the long legs are less of an advantage. Trying to reach my toes is a real challenge and one I can’t imagine ever overcoming. There's just so much thigh until you get to my feet and I struggle to see how I'm going to make my upper-body long enough to reach over it.

I can't even roll up the mat properly at the end of the class without having the re-roll it a couple of times. I tried to roll it whilst I was walking out of class and nearly fell over it.

I have no balance and yoga is really big on balance. The only thing I find harder than standing upright on one leg is standing on both of them. That isn't even a joke, one leg is about half an inch shorter so standing equally on both feet is actually very uncomfortable. My spine isn’t straight. Yoga loves straight lines and my body doesn't have any. I might never do a headstand or the splits.

I will probably never make a yoga instructor or even a half-decent Instagram poser, that's what I'm saying.

I don't have to be good at it because I haven't dedicated my life to being good at it. I do plenty of things I'm not good at. I go running and I'm not spectacular at that either. I learn languages even though I find that incredibly difficult. I swing between child-like excitement at learning new things and a very adult amount of swearing when I get something wrong.

If I was going to write a book about being in Jordan I would call it Jamal Waheed, because just when I thought I’d mastered the numbers in Arabic and used them to identify a singular camel on the side of the road, the whole car started laughing at me. The word for ‘1’ is wahad. Waheed means lonely. Close, but not my intention to comment on the emotional state of camels. There is no better story that demonstrates the ways in which I find Arabic an absolute and completely impossible challenge. Guess who still tries to speak it every day.

I am not perfect, nothing I do, is perfect. I am not one of those people who excels at everything they try, I don't find that success just comes to me without even trying. I don't learn languages easily, my muscles don't contort themselves easily, I don't even find writing comes to me without being a challenge. I would advocate more people admitting when they find things hard and doing things they're not that great at and continuing to do them anyway.

Our encouragement (especially sports, especially women) to try things always stems from the idea that we might be great at them - from success stories against the odds. But what if our drive to try new things was actually that we never need to be good at them, that paying the money for the class means you can go and be as damn well good at them, or not, as you want to be. You can keep going, not even getting any better if you don't want to train at home, and just enjoy it. Just do you for an hour. You can learn languages your whole life and never be quite fluent. You can just do stuff without having to be perfect at doing it. Which sounds pretty good to me.

Coming Home in the Middle of the Night

The time is 11.35pm, I’m somewhere just inside Manchester and someone is eating Burger King and I wish I’d asked them to get me one too. I just had my first cup of English tea in 3 months. I Snapchatted and Whatsapped and emailed the relevant people who knew I was travelling today that I had arrived, safe and sound. I got a few apologies that I had to come home when the country was in such a state. Mostly excitement at the prospect of seeing me. Someone had recently had a baby. My Mum apologised that it was raining. I haven’t applied heat to my hair in about 3 weeks and I am very much enjoying the natural curls that frame my face, not looking too bad to say my body believes it’s actually 1.35am. Claire 101 is pretty good at the moment.

I am happy to be home. I know it’s not popular to want to be here but I’ve been gone for 3 months so I let myself be excited about the prospect of being home. I am excited, still. This is home and everything is familiar and that’s nice actually when you’ve been gone for a while. Britain is my home and it always will be and unless things go very much more badly wrong, I will never not be happy to see it out of the train window.

Things do feel pretty bad though don’t they. I was heartbroken on Friday morning, I went to sleep on Thursday night just after the polls and thought everything would be fine and then woke up to see it wasn’t. Then things got worse. They’ve continued to get worse. I feel like I want to shut my eyes and take a break until someone can tell me what the hell is going on. That’s all I want. I honestly hate very little more than I hate having to give my opinion on things that might not happen at all. I hate speculation. I will never make a good journalist because I like to bury my head until I have a real tangible situation to deal with. I feel sorry for all of us at the moment. We have nothing concrete to deal with and yet it feels like things are taking a turn in every direction anyway.

I had that time though, I was on holiday when the results came through and I’ve had another 4 days to ignore the news and be in Jerusalem and go to the beach and forget about it. I needed a break before the referendum and I needed one from the referendum, I’ve had one now.

I was privileged to be able to do that because no one questioned my right to live in my home, no one ever has.

Now isn’t a good time to bury our heads. When I supported the Stronger In campaign it was because I believe we are better when we belong to something bigger than ourselves. We still can. We still need more tolerance, we still need to promote diversity, we still need equality and we would still be fighting for those things no matter which way the results went. Those things are still bigger than you and they still need all of us. So, now it feels a little harder? So, maybe progress isn’t as clear and linear when you’re living it.

But this isn’t just about you, or me. It’s about all of us. People are being attacked in the street and on public transport and that is not okay. That is not who we are. We can’t afford to ignore it and get annoyed and go to ground within ourselves. Our next Conservative leader might be someone who voted against gay marriage. We should all be looking out for each other, and we are all going to have to find the fight in us to say things we felt like we didn’t have to say anymore. You didn’t expect to be going backwards and neither did I but we won’t stand in the way of it if we become fed up with politics and bow out of it.

I don’t believe this result only spells disaster, there are real problems with the EU and its regulations and there are things we will be better off without. I would have wanted them changed had we stayed, and I wanted us to stay, but if we can’t then I’d like to try and focus on building the country I want us all to live in. I believe things will settle and get better, I have to have hope that this can end up being a chain of events that lead to a better Britain. But it won’t do that if we let the people who are currently leading the debate continue to lead. We had such a voice before, we were so vocal, and we need to continue to be so.

It doesn't really matter how you do that, whether it's campaigning for someone to be the leader of either party, or against Brexit, or for the terms of our renegotiation if we leave.

As long as it's for something good, as long as you want us to be better,the version of better I would write home about. The kind that values everyone equally and prizes our diversity. 

I bet we outweigh the number of people who don't want a liberal and welcoming country, I bet we are stronger than we think.