Читать книгу: «Validate Me: A life of code-dependency»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for She Must Be Mad

Epigraph

Foreword by Elizabeth Day

Introduction

Objectify me

Love me

Suffocate me

Validate me

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword by Elizabeth Day

I first met Charly Cox in a hotel suite, which makes it sound like an illicit romantic assignation. I suppose, in truth, the reality was not so very far removed given the instantaneous nature of our connection. I loved her straight away, with a ferocity reserved for only the most special of kindred spirits.

I knew her by reputation only, after discovering one of her poems online and finding myself laughing at one line, wincing in recognition by the next and weeping at the last. I followed her on Instagram where she was funny and self-deprecating and talented (and beautiful, of course, but this was the least important). Everything she posted got thousands of likes. Of course it did. Everything she posted was brilliant. Everything she posted had heart.

When I met her IRL, she was even better. Yes, she had heart. But she also had soul. She claimed to be 23 but really I knew she must be lying because her entire being was shot through with the gold thread of wisdom. I had that thing – that curious, embarrassing thing that you barely ever feel when you’re grown up – of wanting desperately for this woman to like me back.

We were in the hotel to do a series of readings to mark its opening, while various guests from a party downstairs were shepherded through the suite to listen to us. It was surreal. At one point, Charly was standing in front of a bathtub performing one of her poems while I was perched on the edge of a four-poster bed reading a passage from a novel. Afterwards, we bonded over the glorious weirdness of the evening. Now, she is my dear friend.

So you won’t be getting one of those objective, academic forewords where I analyse the cadence and rhythm of her language, wonderful though it is. No, this is a wholeheartedly subjective take on why you should read this collection.

If you’ll allow me to tell you, from my unabashedly biased position as Charly’s friend, why I believe you should read Validate Me, it is because Charly gives voice to the things we think but never manage to say. She gives expression to the intangible qualities of loneliness and alienation in this superficially connected world, and in doing so she makes us feel heard. More than that, she makes us feel understood. She probes darkness with the same tenderness as she tests the light, from the position of someone who has experienced severe and debilitating episodes of depression, but who has found the strength never to let this illness define her wholeness.

The book you have in your hands is precious. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will make you nod your head in affirmation. And when you turn the final page, it will make you understand a little bit more of what it is to be human.

Introduction

Are you the friend that takes sweet secret gratification in others’ failures? Do you like to indulge in delicious disastrous irony? How about oxymorons? Do you have a few moments to spare to flick through a book that warrants no need for more attention than a glance at your phone? Or perhaps – here’s the clincher – are you a person that has a 4G connection and is currently alive on this here planet?

If you answered yes to any of the above, please take a seat whilst you sign away a few precious cells of your brain to the validation of my mental breakdown. A little scribble of thought with the tiny Argos pen you stole in your childhood is all I need. With that too take your own validation, you’re a climate change warrior, that could’ve been single use. Can I get you anything? A dog meme? An old photo of Paul Danan off his tits? A Trump tweet to make you question what is left of this already heavy and futile opinion on life? Well, get up and get it yourself because I am currently circling around Praed Street, Paddington, London, dictating this into my phone having just strolled out of Accident and Emergency with little but an offer of self-sectioning and a plastic festival-like wristband with my name and date of birth on it as a keepsake. I am busy and now you are too, so Lady Gaga and Piers Morgan can wait, we have got a lot to try and decipher about how it got this far.

Nothing riles me more [this is a lie as you’re about to read a book which is essentially a long list of things that rile me to the point of medication punctuated only by rhyme and the rare smatter of hope] than an introduction whereby the writer refers to the infancy of the book’s process. It leaves me with a bored, bourgeois sour taste of someone else’s self-importance, but as I’ve been hailed as an #instapoet I fear I owe it to some sanctimonious troll to exceed a slither of expectation. So let us suck the soured serotonin out of my life lemon.

I pre-empted this. I knew almost so certainly I was on the cusp of complete digital burnout that I pitched this collection thinking I was saving myself from it. Charly from the past, all omniscient, and evidently omnipotent, cackled her way through a Google doc, tripping over a cocktail of www.woes that she knew were exhausting but perhaps important and valid and witty, and hit send. Charly from the past but a few weeks later delighted at the idea of being able to use poetic licence for the first time in her sad, sad life. What fun! You need not sell the last fragment of your young and underdeveloped soul and past trauma! You can use FORESIGHT! And now Charly in the present is furiously walking to Marylebone station at 5am because her contactless card doesn’t work so she can’t get the tube and is desperately aware that everyone is staring at her in the night before’s party dress, mascara on her chin and a hospital bracelet. She’s also talking into her phone in third person, so I need not break this to tell you how far away from the grand dreams of poetic licence she is. This collection, albeit caricatured, is true. Some of it was written on grand spanking highs in expensive hotels in Los Angeles where I (ever the optimist in irony) searched for physical validation, a boyfriend, stardom and a good Instagram opportunity; some of it in bed wheezy on Venlafaxine, Propranolol and an algorithm that hates my content; some of it in Ubers and on trains; some of it to the soundtrack of the men in my local, little countryside pub; some of it leaving a hospital working out if I shouldn’t have run away from it. But all of it was written on my phone and all of it is because of the curse of exactly that.

There. That’s how we got here. This thing in my hand that stole all of my smarts so it could preface its own name with them.

Hello, my name is Charly Cox and I am code-dependent. So would you please, please just validate me.

My rhetoric is changing

My need for love confused

I’ve lost my inner monologue

And sold it all for views.

Click to Accept the Terms and Conditions

Shout a little louder

Come a little closer

Let me lead you to the void

The blank expanse

Let yourself fly in a seat

That is pants

Boom across a room

That cares for you little

Wipe off a slick

Of your new hungry spittle

That we’ll sell you as gold

Come grab a feel

Of a hand you can’t hold

Come be a person

That you never knew

Feel grand and feel gorgeous

Then feel worthless and through

Take a trip down the tubes

Get settled in

Welcome, you’ve signed up

It’s all about to begin.

Validate Me Part 1

Thought as much

Famed as such

Faked the touch

Of what excites us

Who we are and will always be

Unites us

But we seldom invite that side enough

Swapped it out to sell new love

As though it’s not inside us

Think too much

Fame is such

A thing we’ll fake as something that excites us

Spin it until we’re spinning plates we can’t dine off

Starving

Is this what we’ll die of?

Vapid monsters in a sea of breeding nonsense, jealousy

Portraits of unfulfilled and pretty

Best lives or misery

Rooted to mis-sold faith in a downloaded commodity

Do you like me?

Do you like me?

I don’t know who I am any more

I don’t know who you are

Fascinate me as I fabricate me

Castigate me as I congratulate me

Salivate as I let you navigate me

Masturbate at how inadequate I find me

I’m putting it all out to see

No idea of what I want or who I am sans vanity

No idea of how to please our grumbling society

No idea of where I can slip off silently

I am halves with who I’m wholly miscalculating

Please, would you just validate me?