The Wrong Dentist

Sometimes things happen here and I just think ‘yes, this is peak life abroad’. The thing about being British is that we love rules and regulations and a set course of action. I’ve never known a people better suited to following recipes and flat-pack instructions, no country has produced a population more ready to fill in forms, than Britain.

The most embarrassing part of my life in any place that is not the UK is that I cannot get rid of this particular personality trait. I love a 5-stage process, I couldn’t be happier than when presented with a numbered list. Doing life admin tasks in a place with a system I am unfamiliar with is bound to be stressful, and in the case of going to the dentist, I was not wrong.

The main jist of this story is that two dentists tried to rip me off, one without even having an x-ray machine to assess my teeth with. I accidentally walked into a second one and even they tried to tell me my insurance wouldn’t cover the treatment I wasn’t having with them during an appointment I hadn’t booked. I am of course incredibly lucky to be provided with health insurance (although this experience means that I maintain that insurance systems are total bullshit), and I do have a wonderful dentist now who allows me to have my treatment in convenient slots. Doing the treatment in tiny increments is obviously much more convenient for me as it allows me to arrange them around work and take recovery time, I am under no false pretenses though, I am pretty sure the real motivation for this is so they can claim maximum insurance repayments.

Other updates include the fact that I have very noticeably been spending a lot of time in Lebanon. As predicted by numerous friends I have completely fallen in love and Beirut has planted itself on the list of places I would happily live in the near future, so watch this space but for now it’s no more travelling until I make the journey home in November. As discussed in previous weeks, I’m a bit lost for purpose right now but doing things like taking spontaneous trips to Lebanon make being far from home a little bit more intentional. It also reminds me, along with the friends who message to say they’ve been following my trips on Instagram and they look incredible (which they are), to be a little happier and more excited about the things I get to do during my time here.

Although I believe honesty is important, and I never want to pretend my life is perfect, I also have had a real word with myself lately about not talking my life down because really, it is pretty good. Every time I explore somewhere I love I learn more about myself and the things I want from my life and the place I live. I get to hone my tastes a little more and meet so many people, taste so much food and see so many beautiful places and things. I recently told my friends I needed to ‘dial down the life crisis’ and to be honest, yes, precisely that, a little less life crisis and little more just, life.

With that in mind, things around here are going to change. Which they obviously already have because for the third week in a row we are weekly which is both exciting and also much overdue. I want to talk more about politics because anyone who knows me knows that is an enormous part of my life and it seems pointless to keep it off this space, especially because it’s what I write about the most outside of this context.

This week of this year is seven years since I went to university, which you might expect me to declare unbelieveable but actually it’s totally believable, I would say it feels approximately seven years ago. I will probably write something about being a student next week (ideas box open) because I remember that time of my life as being distinctly average but I want it to be better just because the years that followed were both better and SO MUCH WORSE. I want to find a way to talk about money and career things without making myself unemployable/having to change my name when I go looking for jobs.

Overall, September was just such a weird month because I was away for so much of it, it’s meant to be the start of autumn but actually it’s only just become cool enough here to wear a jacket at night. I didn’t go to yoga and my back and shoulders didn’t thank me for it, I ate more dairy than I should and my skin didn’t thank me for it. The positives of this though are: 1) yoga is worth the money to stop me crippling myself in my sleep, 2) the water here was never to blame for my hair and skin woes, it was just the dairy!

I will be using October as my fresh start.

I’ve still never had a pumpkin spice latte, maybe this year will be the very basic year.

*****

I’m on Instagram - @clairegillesp - solid Lebanese content all round.

I’m on Twitter - clairegillesp - solid leftwing content and shit jokes all round.

I’m listening to The School for Dumb Women, the last episode made me laugh out loud in public so if that doesn’t recommend it, nothing will.

xx

Quarter-Life Prizes

Someone once told me that women stopped going through puberty at 25. Great, I thought, from 25 it’s all plain sailing then. What I didn’t quite realise until I saw an article claiming your body starts to die at 25, is that that was what the first person had really meant. Not such a cause for celebration after all, then.

If there was a theme for millennials it would be talking about how old we are. I’m simultaneously delighted by the things I don’t have to do now I’m older and terrified by the speed at which months seem to pass. Where is September? How are we in the 20’s already? How am I in my mid-twenties? Disastrous.  

Here’s the thing though, getting older is really excellent. Like, really actually wonderful. I love having more control over how I spend my time, I love having more confidence in my own opinions and my feelings and ‘I’m 25 I don’t have time for this/have to deal with this/just don’t care’ has such a great ring to it. 26 will sound even better, I’m sure.

These posts are cliche but here we are anyway, all the stuff I’ve learnt from my 25 years:

• I just cannot wear eyeliner. Yes I have tried that brand, no I will not sell a kidney to use that brand, I have hooded eyelids and some people's eyes are just not meant to be well-defined.

• Find your people. Stick with them. No matter how hard I try I cannot get everyone to like me (and God knows, I have tried). You will find your people - and not find them - in the strangest of places. Don’t question it, just get their number and hold onto them.

• You just have less time for people who will not find time for you. Mostly this is just because I have less time full stop. Friends who do have time for me will find an almost dictatorial schedule that they have to fit into.

• Jokes aside, I’m now almost certain that you’re not fooling anyone as well as you think. So you better just act like the person you want people to think you are. You are not a religion and you cannot ask people to have faith in things they cannot see.

• Be wary of people who only bring up anecdotes that make you look bad.

• I am only ever going to wear high-wasted jeans/skirts/trousers - me and my gangly legs are happy this way and no, I do not wish to appear in proportion.

• Laughing in the faces of people who have tried to insult you is the best of only bad options. Working in customer service taught me this, once someone has told you that you’ve ruined their Christmas, the only way to go is up.

• It’s not a myth, you really don’t give a shit anymore. I’ve heard you really stop caring in your thirties which doesn’t bode well because I’ve already been known to get up and leave a table to avoid unwanted interactions. There is a story to this but honestly it doesn’t get any better with context.

• With that in mind, forgiveness is not a bad quality, you do not have to be a bad-ass bitch who cuts people out at a moment’s notice. I’ve had so many wonderful relationships repaired this year and I’m so grateful I wasn’t hasty with my words when the problem emerged.

• That being said I could probably do with a little more haste when people have demonstrated they are not going to do any repairing.

• Trying, and I mean really trying, is not a weakness. You do not have to pretend you do not care about having people in your life, it will not help. You've just got to make sure you try with the right people, like, the people who actually show they care about you, not the people you wish would.

• As demonstrated, I cannot successfully wear pink as I will just become the human embodiment of pink.

• You do not have to be on a constant self-improvement drive, you do not have to clear out your life and start all over again. You’re probably completely fine as you are, and you are never going to be perfect so you pretty much just have to pick your flaws and own them at this stage.

• There really are no prizes for pretending you don’t enjoy things. I don’t know when it got so normal to be all ‘I wish I could not go to this event and stay home instead’ but please feel free to invite me to all of the things and I will definitely have an excellent time.

• Equally with other people, other people are the literal light of my life and I will not pretend any other.

• Going to the dentist/doctor/optician is annoying and inconvenient but you will get the sense of satisfaction of having your life together and taking care of yourself afterwards. So just make the appointment for the love of God.

• They say you get more conservative as you get older but I’m only get further from being any sort of #girlboss CEO with my near daily tweets about how our country needs a left-wing government.

*****

I am on Twitter - @clairegillesp - it’s literally just dentistry and socialism at the moment.

I am on Instagram - clairegillesp - where my profile says world-traveller but my saved collections says I just want a dachshund.

You can also look forward to more (!) Lebanon-based content on both of those platforms - which I’ll explain next week, maybe.

This week I've been watching The Expanse - it's about space and also politics so basically I love it.

xx

Don't Talk About It

I’ve sat in front of this Google doc countless times over the last few weeks, motivation levels have been low to say the least and I’ve written at least 700 words now that will never see the light of day.

It started as some thoughts about the fact a friend of mine had told me that sometimes it was best not to talk about your future plans because ‘you never know the intentions people have for you’. It is solid advice and I want to be better at it because I’m an endless oversharer and that’s fine except for the bits of my life I really could be flattened by someone’s opinion on. I will not be passive aggressive but I will say this: your twenties are hard and not everyone finds it as easy to be on your team as you (or they) might hope. People have their own version of you and it is sometimes a nasty surprise to find that it may not fit a life in which you are happy and successful.

I have, I hope at least, started to identify who I should be having those conversations with and who will just leave me feeling like I’ve just told them I’m going to donate my money to a charity which protects grey squirrels. The problem was partially how they made me feel, but also the things I thought they wanted to hear, which meant I was conveying that information hoping they would approve.

If they don’t want the things I want does that mean I’m wrong? Maybe everyone else does know better, and yet we are not the same people and I continue to make choices based only on what I want. I said I was coming here to do something and if it doesn’t work, and I come home, and I do something else then I’ll have to tell everyone why.

The problem with not talking about what you’re doing is that you would basically have to avoid human contact because everyone will ask what you’re doing. Out of genuine interest largely, and not because they’re trying to establish some sort of ranking of your success. I have no desire to maintain a level of mystery about my life but I do have a desire to not wrap myself in knots trying to pretend I have a master plan for my life.

The truth is I just don’t know. I just don’t know what I’m going to do or what I want. I don’t know where I’ll be in six months time and I don’t find any of this especially exciting as much as it feels like a lot of decisions I’d rather not make. I should find this exciting because it is exciting, but I don’t always.

I joke about falling into things but in reality so little of this is an accident and if I wanted certain things I know exactly how I’d go about getting them. Would it be so awful to just give myself a break and admit I might be kind of content with how things are? I mean I just spent a long weekend in Beirut and worked on a project I care about and now I get to live here and learn Arabic. I don’t know what makes a good life, but I feel okay about mine.

What I do know is what I think is important and I know it’s never been my day job. I have some things I’d like to do eventually, and I’m hoping I always make time to work towards them. I know I want to be better and giving these things space to actually take place. I know I want to think of my current situation as more of an opportunity to do more of what I want than a failure to have success in the way I thought of it. I know I rarely feel like that.

I know that none of this would mean anything without the actual relationships I have with the actual human people who make up my life. It isn’t very #girlboss to say, but I really hope there is never a time where the people in my life don’t get to have a good portion of my time, they are what makes me really and truly happy after all. Typing is wonderful way to spend your time but I categorically do not make myself laugh with the frequency my friends do - or ever, actually.

In other news, I have working shutters in my room which is exciting news for absolutely no one apart from a) people who want to hear me stop complaining about it, b) people who care about the impact of natural light on general health and well-being. True to form this problem has been replaced by the slightly more concerning one of discovering a series of rusted screws littered around my room, so that natural light will no doubt be put to good use identifying if I have tetanus in my foot.

Spellings of my name have taken a turn for the worse (see below). As a result of this continued confusion I have told my dentist my name is Clara which is less difficult on the phone but then I received a text from them saying ‘Hello Flora’. Time will tell how problematic it is to try and claim treatment when it looks like you’ve stolen someone else’s health insurance documents. Bad news for the oncoming tetanus.

Also just to address the big reveal of this piece, yes, I do write everything in Google Docs and then just copy and paste it onto this platform. It’s the only way I found to make sure everything is formatted correctly but it is also the reason every week we’re using a different font and text size. I could claim it keeps the writing fresh but it’s actually just that I don’t go back and check until weeks later and by then it’s too late and many people just have struggled through the sometimes minuscule font (thank you). I can be a bastion of professionalism but this is so not the place for it, pals.

*****

I’m on Instagram - clairegillesp - which is photos of my trip to Lebanon from now until the foreseeable future.

I’m on Twitter - @clairegillesp - where I am seemingly constantly mad about something.

This week I’ve been listening to Corrine Bailey Rae because she’s from where I’m from and I miss home and if you don’t think Put Your Records On is a fab tune then please tell me what it’s like to be that wrong. I was inspired to revisit it by this piece on Dancing in the Moonlight which recently came on in a bar I was in and changed my life for 3 minutes.

xx