They finally spoke at an Eighties-themed house party, up on the roof. Ellie had come in blue overalls, as Julia from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Way too highbrow – nobody got it. Nadine had pitched it about right, in a fluorescent visor and legwarmers. She was waving a toy welder around and pretending to tightrope-walk along the building’s edge. Bet she’s having a good time, Ellie thought, right before Nadine tripped on her peeptoes and tumbled – thankfully – towards the roof. Ellie ran over to help. It was the overalls, they gave her a sense of purpose.
‘Yeah!’ shouted Nadine, a heap of Lycra and tangled limbs. ‘S’Ellie, s’Ellie’s not a boring motherfucker, isn’t it!’
Nadine was from London, which in temporal terms meant she was about five years older than everyone else. She had what Ellie’s Ethics lecturer would call ‘a healthy scepticism’ about the uni system, keenly alive to the ways it constantly tried to persuade you that bullshit mattered.
The Chronicles of Narnia was terrible, but nobody else was in it. They took off their shoes and spread along the row.
Nadine had spent Easter temping as a receptionist in an ad agency.
‘They were well old,’ she said. ‘Quite fit though. One of them was. They offered me a job when I finish. I don’t want it but. I wanna travel. This is it, yeah, what you have to remember is, uni’s practically over. And no one’s gonna care anything about what you got in your dissertation. No one.’
Sex and the City was a parent and baby screening, but the half-dozen mothers and one lone dad didn’t seem to mind them crashing.
‘It’s sort of embarrassing, eh.’ Nadine didn’t bother to whisper. ‘Like watching your mum give someone a blowjob.’
‘It was good though,’ Ellie reflected. ‘On the TV.’
‘I remember it being good,’ said Nadine, through a Minstrel mouthful. ‘Miranda was all right. Samantha.’
‘They were all all right apart from Carrie. What’s fucked up is the way they all think they’re Carrie’s best mate. It’s dysfunctional. I don’t think the others even like each other.’
The strange thing was that nobody at uni seemed to appreciate how hot Nadine was. She perpetually complained that no one fancied her. Ellie found it unbelievable, unjust to the point of tragedy.
‘Do you know what it is, though?’ Ellie told her, as they wandered into Iron Man in their socks.
‘I dunno.’ Nadine threw her coat over the chairs in front. ‘Do I wanna know exactly why I repel all men?’
‘It’s not all men, it’s just the idiots here. I’ll tell you what it is. Honestly.’ They burrowed down into the seats. ‘You’re too sexy for uni.’
‘Ha! You’re so right. I’m also too sexy for this film, this VIP seat, these Minstrels—’
‘No, listen, listen to me.’ Ellie waved a hand. ‘This is my new theory, yeah. Most uni guys are actually afraid of sex. You’re too much for them. They like those safe, little blondy hair-straightened girls who wear leggings and Uggs, because they know they won’t feel intimated by them. You’re too sexy. It’s like . . . It’s not that they’re truly asexual, right, but it’s something about the place—’
‘It’s a sex vortex.’ Nadine nodded glumly.
‘Yeah! It’s as if we all turned up at freshers’ week, and to about seventy per cent of the students, they were like, “Hi, yeah, we’ll take your five grand, thanks, and you’re also going to need to hand over your genitals as a safety deposit. You’ll get them back after finals.”’
Nadine giggled. ‘Hand over your genitals . . .’
It was good to feel funny. Who was she kidding, it was good to feel like a functioning member of the human race.
‘You have sex, I used to have to listen to you.’
‘Justin’s not a uni guy though, is he. He’s . . . “Other”. Trust me, the minute you leave, it’ll be a whole other story.’ Ellie sucked the last, watery drops of Sprite through her straw.
‘Are you gonna stay with Justin?’ Nadine looked at her. ‘Or is it like a uni thing?’
‘Pfffff . . . Honestly, I don’t know.’ Ellie shook her head. ‘He just asked me to move into his.’
Nadine inhaled through her teeth and raised her eyebrows. ‘Maggie and Chris are getting a flat in York.’
‘York?’
‘She’s doing a master’s and he’s gonna . . .’ She shrugged. ‘See.’
‘It all depends what I end up doing.’ Ellie pressed her feet against the seat in front and screwed up her face. ‘And obviously I don’t have a clue about that.’
‘People who know what they want to do creep me out,’ said Nadine, with passion. ‘“I want to be a doctor and I knew that in time to pick my GCSEs”? Like, who are you? This is the truth, yeah, if we haven’t ended up in prison, or homeless, or dead in the next decade, that is a win as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Massive win.’ Ellie nodded gratefully. ‘I’m going to stick that over my desk. With Justin, it’s . . . I sometimes feel guilty that I’m not sure. Like I’m just hanging in, getting support, sucking him dry . . .’ Nadine laughed. ‘And then when finals are over I’ll, like, chuck away the empty shell. What’s he getting from it all?’
‘He’s getting you, you nutter. Are you joking me?’
Iron Man was all right. Ellie didn’t like seeing Gwyneth Paltrow running round as someone’s assistant, even an excellent and obviously underused one. It was beneath her.
After about five minutes of silent watching, Nadine gave Ellie a lengthy sidelong look. ‘So you haven’t seen it then?’
‘This is the first one, isn’t it?’
‘No, I mean . . .’ Nadine looked at her expectantly. Uncertainly, Ellie mirrored her expression. Nadine turned back to the screen, drumming her fingers on the drink holder.
‘What?’
They watched.
‘Honest to God you haven’t seen it?’ Nadine burst out, loudly.
‘Seen what?’ Ellie almost shouted. A man in the front row turned round to glare. Ellie raised a hand in apology. ‘Could you please stop disturbing people who are busy trying to watch Iron Man at three p.m.?’ she whispered.
‘I thought you were like avoiding mentioning it ’cause it was such a stress.’
‘Well.’ Ellie frowned in confusion. ‘I’m stressed about my impossible dissertation . . . What’s going on? Have I been evicted or something and I don’t even know?’
‘No! Your rant. Your mad rant about uni guys.’ Nadine turned to face her. ‘It’s an internet sensation. In, like, an insane-racist-comments-on-YouTube-crazy-trolling-of-women sort of way.’
‘What?’
‘So you posted it on Facebook, yeah—’
‘I was just venting—’
‘Then all these people started liking it and re-posting it. Then any dicks who could comment on your page started doing that, about how you don’t understand banter and you’re a miserable bitch. Then some other girl put it on her blog, saying how she loved it, then people started tweeting #uniguysaresexistdicks, giving like, examples. Then they got trolled, mad dark shit about women should stay in the kitchen or get raped and that . . . You honestly haven’t seen any of it?’
Ellie shook her head. ‘I’ve been . . . watching Dexter.’
‘Well, in good news, you’re sort of famous now. Not really, but you know what I mean. So.’ She paused, like a seminar leader who knows the answer and is waiting for you to come out with it. ‘What do you reckon?
‘Shit.’ Ellie was starting to feel slightly sick. ‘I reckon I’m never going online again.’
‘But you could do something about it!’ Nadine exploded. The man in front twisted round and cleared his throat. ‘Uni is fucking sexist, and loads of uni guys totally behave like dicks. Even the ones that aren’t dicks. You could start a campaign! Like, an awareness thing.’
Ellie looked doubtful. ‘But what would that even be?’
‘A message—’ Nadine corrected herself – ‘a less ranty message. I mean, yesterday, yeah, I saw this.’ Nadin
e pulled out her BlackBerry and scrolled through, digging out a blurry photograph of a woman in a g-string.
‘What’s that?’
‘Okay.’ Nadine sighed, reeling herself back to level one. ‘So in Planet Uni there’s a thing called the Safer Sex Ball. Remember? It’s themed, as in, like girls-dress-as-pretend-prostitutes theme. And they hand out condoms. Like, for charity or whatever.’ Ellie frowned. ‘Maybe you went in the first year and dressed in a corset and felt kind of shit and sort of inexplicably angry but not sure why, so you got totally shitfaced and then you were that shitfaced girl wandering round in a corset feeling shit and maybe crying?’
‘Nah.’ Ellie shrugged. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I did do more or less that in a lot of very similar circumstances.’
‘Well, it’s happening in two weeks and the poster for it shows this ridiculously Photoshopped girl in a tiny g-string with a vag like a Barbie doll. They got some famous uni anorexic to pose for it, know what I mean? We could target those posters. For a start.’
Ellie stared at the screen. Gwyneth had just leaned in to Downey Junior for a kiss and been left hanging. It seemed unlikely, when you looked at that goatee. Ellie considered. On the one hand, the thought of putting herself up for a load of public abuse made her feel a deep, deep fatigue. From her attempts at revision, Ellie knew that feeling was actually fear, fear so strong the only way out was to fall asleep. On the other . . . she did complain that uni was sexist, all the time. She hated the stupid wannabe-frat-boy-meets-hip-hop-objectification-meets-same-sex-boarding-school-cluelessness-meets-playground-‘girls are rubbish’ culture, and it seemed as if other people did too.
‘All right . . .’ she said, at length.
‘All right, let’s do it?’ Nadine perked up.
‘All right, I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m kind of shitting it.’ Ellie rubbed her brow. ‘But let’s do it.’
7
Become Yourself
Nietzsche understood the difficulty of pretending to be someone you’re not. Of course he did: he’d been a first-year undergraduate. In his first year at university, Nietzsche tried to fit in – he joined a fraternity and took part in a duel, the nineteenth-century German equivalent of half-man-half-beer – but he didn’t like drinking, which is most of what fitting in consists of, and he didn’t relish banter or girls either. His fraternity brothers called him ‘loony’ because ‘whenever he was not on campus, he could usually be found at home studying and playing music’. Nietzsche had the painful experience familiar to so many undergraduates: he did no work, spent too much money, got fat and felt shit about himself. ‘My fitful, dejected diaries of that time, with their pointless self-accusations . . .’ He was much happier when he changed subject and moved to the university of Leipzig, where he stopped trying to be a ‘fast-living student’ and worked and hung out with a small circle of close friends. He didn’t know it, but it would be the happiest time of his life.
This is the other way of thinking about gaining confidence, the opposite of the ‘fake it till you make it’ school of self-improvement. The basic advice is simple: ‘Be yourself.’ Forget trying to improve yourself; work out a way to be happy and live in the moment.
In the most general terms, Nietzsche agreed with this advice, because he believed there was a self that we could be. For him, human beings were the product of nature rather than nurture. The drives that make up our souls, he believed, are as unalterable as our genes. We are born with a basic constitution that we are powerless to change. We can’t decide who we are – that, he says, is ‘the American conviction’ – and the biggest mistake we can make is to try and be someone we’re not.
But Nietzsche didn’t like the injunction ‘Be yourself’. In it, he saw a trap: by accepting ourselves, we cut ourselves off from growth. Instead of taking responsibility for our forward progress and striving to improve, we let ourselves off, saying, with a listless shrug, ‘That’s just who I am.’
Rather than ‘being yourself’, Nietzsche believed in ‘becoming yourself’. ‘Become who you are!’ he proclaimed. This was his motto, one of the ‘granite sentences’ he laid down as commandments. It’s basically the equivalent of ‘Become your best self,’ which makes it sounds a bit cheesy, but when it comes to confidence, is probably just about right.
Self-improvement, for Nietzsche, was learning how to work with what you’ve got. We can’t change our core selves, but we can learn what we are like, and how to work within our limits. That’s what he was really getting at with his hyper-specific advice on topics such as the right way to drink tea. His elaborate directions were a means of emphasising that everybody has their own measure, and we should be careful to observe it. As he advised on digestion (always a Nietzschean fascination): ‘You must know the size of your stomach.’
By learning our limits, we also learn what we can and can’t change. Part of training is correcting – and if possible removing – unnecessary weaknesses. More important, though, is accepting the weaknesses that cannot be overcome, and working on them until they almost become strengths: ‘One can control one’s drives like a gardener and, though few are aware of it, cultivate the shoots of anger, sympathy, thoughtfulness and vanity as fruitfully and profitably as beautiful fruits on a trellis.’
There was no shortcut on this journey. ‘To become what one is,’ Nietzsche wrote, ‘one must not have the faintest idea what one is.’ He meant that we can’t go looking for ourselves the way we look for an object. He intended his writing to be a guide, not in the sense of a user’s manual, which tells you what to do step by step, but a travel book, which if it works at all, works by helping you discover what you were looking for at the right time and in the right way for you.
What we are looking for is not a thing but a sense of rightness. It will feel like finding what you sought all along, even though you couldn’t have said beforehand exactly what that was.
‘Charlie,’ Ben called over the din. ‘Would you say I “act first, then think” or “think first, then act”?’
Charlie scratched his chin. ‘Is there an option for “overthink, then don’t act, then cry myself to sleep”?’
The Barclays Wealth Multipurpose Sports Hall had been transformed into corridors of stalls, each with a glossy company banner. Trestle tables covered by branded cloths groaned with corporate USBs, pens and tote bags. By each table there was an eager-eyed rep, most of them barely older than Charlie, suited and poised for questions. The Careers Fair blurb had even suggested that attendees should wear a suit. Charlie owned one, of course, but the idea of putting it on to come to the Barclays Wealth Hall was bordering on the absurd, like dressing up in a white coat and turning up at a doctors’ convention expecting to be offered a job.
Ben (who had actually worn one) had not so much persuaded as begged Charlie to come with him to the Careers Fair. ‘My parents are giving me endless grief. If I just applied for something, it’d distract them for a bit.’ Graduate schemes and law firms weren’t that relevant for Charlie, but his schedule was pretty light – he could certainly squeeze it in. In order to make their brutally early timeslot, they’d had to set an alarm for half past nine. The whole thing had the feel of an excursion, as if they were off to Alton Towers. They’d tooled up with double-strength lattes and almond croissants while they queued.
‘I hope you selected “Some people may see me as heartless, insensitive or uncaring”,’ said Ben. They were kicking off at the Career Suitability Test station: ten laptops displaying a Myers Briggs-type test that purported to tell you who you were and what you should do.
‘Sorry, switched off there – must be ’cause I “prefer talking to listening”. But I’m nonetheless a “mixer and a mingler”. What an enigma.’
‘Mixer and mingler? You’ve gone out once since you split up with Sara.’
‘No one will come out with me!’
‘Besides, wait till you really break up. Then we’ll see.’
‘We are really broken up—’
; ‘Yeah, apart from the texts and calls and MSN.’
‘That’s part of the process.’
‘When you really break up, you’ll be full-time on Fantasy Football and celebrity biographies. I know you.’
‘Ben, Ben, you’re couldn’t be more wrong.’ Charlie tapped his screen. ‘According to Science, I’m Extroverted, Intuitive, Feeling and Perceiving, and my abilities know no bounds.’ Charlie scanned down his suitable careers and was relieved to find Entrepreneur among the options, nestled between Social Worker and Actor. (Social Worker! The lists seemed like they hadn’t been updated since the Seventies.) Really Charlie thought these questionnaires were baseless, but it was like astrology – if you more or less believed what they told you already, why not take the encouragement?
‘Yep, as I thought, we’re exact opposites. I’m a “nurturer and defender”. I’d be good as an Administrative Assistant or a member of the Clergy.’ Ben had a large, squashy face. When he was worried, which was often, it puckered in the middle like a punched pillow. ‘Fuck, this is depressing, I wish we hadn’t done this.’
‘Don’t worry about it, it’s bullshit anyway – it’s just some crap you can read online any time. I’m telling you, you can do this. Let’s go and find someone to talk to.’ Charlie mimed a three-pointer, indicating the sign strung from a basketball hoop to the wall. ‘“Your career starts here!”’
Ben puffed out his cheeks and scanned the aisles of corporate cubicles. ‘The one thing I did some research on was the Tesco Grad scheme.’ Charlie thanked the god of enterprise that no such hell awaited him. ‘So maybe we could look for them? Apparently it’s brutally competitive.’
‘Perfect. Let’s look for Tesco and bump into your future on the way.’
The guys who had worn suits looked like footballers sitting in the audience of those Saturday night ‘Evening With’ shows. The girls looked uncomfortable and stressed, wearing clumpy heels and hugging clear plastic folders of printed CVs. Was this how they’d be in a few months’ time? For a brief second, Charlie caught a glimpse of the future. The people still pouring into the hall were tiny and homogeneous, channelled into corridors that would convey them mechanically through the decades, building careers in HR or Project Management, inching their way up, only to retire in a bungalow at sixty-five, unrecognisable as the reasonably smart, funny, fit, sexy person they were at twenty-one.
Confidence Page 8
