Egocentricity and attention-seeking.

One of the things that routinely bugs me is when egocentricity and attention-seeking are seen as negative traits - or, more specifically, huge gaping flaws that somehow poke holes in the otherwise perfect moral fabric you have woven.

Here's the thing: we are all egocentric. We have to be. It's part of being alive, and having a single consciousness which is so acutely ours, not someone else's. We are not a hive mind, or a socialist collective - as awesome as that might be. We all live our lives in the first person present: I am writing now, you are reading now, you are experiencing these words now now now. Nobody else is inside your brain, reading this with you. We are all the heroes of our own stories, even though we're the secondary recurring characters in everyone else's. You, by definition, cannot actually know what it is like to be me, or someone else, or really anyone except you, because then you wouldn't be you. You are the centre of your own universe, and the same is true of everyone else. We are each other's little mental galactic neighbours.

So, being self-absorbed might not be the best situation to be in, but it's our standard state. And it's not necessarily a bad one. Think of all the awesome shit which wouldn't have got done unless brilliant people were so concerned with unpacking the jumbled contents of their own heads. Would we have The Great Gatsby if F. Scott Fitzgerald spent all his spare time tending his neighbour's allotment? Would we have Othello if Shakespeare had no had a compulsion to tell stories by committing words to paper? Would we have had the internet? Sure, it was invented with community and sharing in mind - which benefits the people who use it. Almost everything is created for our own benefit, and benevolent creations will still give the creator a nice little sense of moral superiority. Would we do anything if it didn't directly or indirectly help us? I'm not sure we would.

The extreme of egocentricity is, of course, narcissism, but that's a registered psychiatric disorder. Delusions of grandeur and all. You can see yourself as a main character in a narrative without assuming you have all the traditionally positive traits associated with it. It's just how things work.

It's the more mundane egocentricity we dislike, the attention seeking. We all do it. I'm doing it right now, writing this blog. It's just another way for me to scream NOTICE ME! CARE ABOUT ME! VALIDATE ME! into the roaring abyss that is the 'Net. It's why people dislike Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham so much, I think: they're like a mirror of us. When we look at celebrities, we want to see chrome-smooth perfection, all smiles and graciousness and perfectly crafted one-liners fed to them via an earpiece. Instead, with them, we see the ugly side of ourselves we'd rather avoid: the callous need to be noticed, to be complimented, to be loved back.

Most of us would rather pretend that knawing hole inside us doesn't exist. It's the part of us that makes us pine over people we can never have, do stupid outlandish gestures just for the reaction, the part of us we want to keep in the dark in our dingy headspaces. Swift and Dunham shine a light at it, those irritating OOH OOH ME ME! noises we try to keep quiet. And when we see something we don't like, a far easier option to confronting it is to shun it.

I crave attention. There, I said it. I fish for compliments. I post pictures of my hair on Facebook and feel a little warm and fuzzy when people press the like button. I've come to expect texts from certain people and I'm upset when they don't reply. I people to know who I am, and what I do, and have an opinion of me, even if it is that I'm needy and cloying. Because I know that they took the time to think about me, and devise an opinion, and so I took up their thoughts, if just for a little while.

You probably shouldn't have read this. You're just feeding my ego. But thanks. I appreciate it. Now go get on with your own story. This is nothing more than a paragraph in your day, even if it's a chapter in mine.

An accident of genetics.

I am always surprised when someone compliments my face. “You have fine features,” said the French mother of one of my friends. “You have lovely cheekbones,” said a girl in my Politics class, stopping me on the staircase to impart this knowledge. She said it in a rush, like she had to get the words out before they stopped being true. “You’re gorgeous,” said the first person I kissed. I didn’t trust him then, and I don’t trust them now.

Appearance is all an accident. My face is a mess, a random collection of biology and genetics that spawned from the freak meeting of an egg and a sperm. By all accounts, I should not exist. But by some fluke, I do, and how my face looks seems pretty irrelevant to me.

I stare at my reflection in the window of the train. We’re passing through a tunnel. I’m on my way home from the fourth day of my week of work experience, which is generously called an “internship”. It has been four days of writing blog posts and wondering when I’ll be told to do some admin.

I’ve spent the past two hours at a book panel for the company, listening to assorted people talking about LGBT representation in Young Adult literature. America is the spiritual home of YA literature, opined the only man on the panel, and his four co-panellists nodded and laughed. I liked him. He was camp and had a Yorkshire accent. I wanted to be his friend.

One of the panellists was a student at York University, a third year, and writing a dissertation on LGBT issues in business. She was surprised at my age, said she thought I looked older than her, at 21. It's not my face, apparently - more my confidence, the fact I hold up my head like my brain is full of helium - but I can't help but feel ancient. Betrayed by my own aesthetics.

The chairwoman gave me her email address and told me to stay in contact. I’ll email her tomorrow, once I get to the office, sending her a message from the sluggish Macs that need updating. It’ll make me feel like a proper adult contacting her for work reasons rather than a teenager typing away behind her laptop. 

Tomorrow is also important because I will have a date. The first date of my life which is a real, proper date, where I was asked out with the specific caveat that it was a date and I said yes. With my two ex-girlfriends, we never saw each other one-on-one; it was always as part of a group, where it was easier to pretend that our relationships were based on actual feelings rather than a shared interest in webcomics and a habit of texting late at night.

There was one other time I went out with a boy, but I'm not sure it was a date. He was hardly a boy - a foot taller than me, 23, with a job in publishing. We ate Chinese food in Camden and discussed how Tolkein presented evil, and I pretended like I'd read Lord Of The Rings and knew what he was talking about. That was three weeks ago, and I'm still not sure if it was a date. We put one kiss on the end of texts to each other.

We were meant to go bowling, me and this new date of mine (“of mine” – so selfish – like a person is a possession, like I already own a piece of him) but everywhere has already been booked. I imagine we’ll wonder round London instead, trying to make small talk that means something big. I will want to hold his hand, feel something warm and solid against my frozen fingers. If we don’t get dinner I’ll scream.

I’ve somehow fallen into the habit of not eating lunch this week, instead just snacking on biscuits and endless cups of tea throughout the day. It’s too cold to leave the office in search of food, and I have to walk half a mile every morning from the train station up a gentle incline anyway. Today the wind was blowing in my face, forcibly thrusting the scent of North London’s rubbish into my nostrils. I couldn’t breathe.

I’ve lost three pounds since Friday. It’s like I left them under my pillow – I haven’t noticed their absence.

If I mentioned my weight to my friends, I can imagine them complimenting me. “You’ve lost weight!” they’d say (when they mean "mass"), approvingly, followed by, “You look good!” as if those things were logically sequential. As if by losing a tiny part of me, I’ve somehow improved. Really we ought to applaud each other when we gain weight, knowing that there’s more of them to hold onto. Is a 143-pound girl realer than a 140-pound one? There’s certainly more of her, more atoms banding together in the shape of a person. Does quantity equate to reality?

My iPod has stopped playing, but my earphones are still in. To everyone around me, I am in my own little world. I could be listening to anything, Bach or Beyonce or Bright Eyes. Like Life by Lorrie Moore sits open on my lap, but I have stopped reading because there’s a quote I want to put on my Facebook page when I get home, about how guns are boys’ things because they boom, the way boys wished they boomed when they orgasm. Maybe I’ll tell that to my date tomorrow. Maybe he’ll laugh. More likely he’ll look at me quizzically, wondering why he asked me out. He studied biochemistry at university, where an unexpected result probably means you did something wrong.

The train leaves the tunnel. My face remains in the window, pale and drawn. My hair is bleached blond, murky at the roots where my natural brown is growing back through. Perhaps I should let it grow out, get long, fall to my knees in princess waves I can use to wrap myself up. Perhaps I’ll shave my head down to a soft dark fuzz, getting rid of all the dye and artifice.

The face looking back is still mine, but I’m seized by the notion that one day it won’t be. One day I’ll be on the train home from a job I hold as an adult, commuting to and from some shabby flat I can barely afford to rent, and my face will have been taken from me, worn smooth and featureless by a few years of mediocre labour at a mediocre job.

We arrive at my station, and I stand up. Nobody seems surprised when I drop my phone, and have stoop to pick it up. They’re too busy thinking of their own faces, their own emails and waistlines and dates.

On Monday I’ll be back at school, I tell myself. I will be back in a bubble where I can talk about dating and jobs as abstract concepts rather real things which really happen. Being a grown-up can wait. My face has some youth left in it yet.