Phoenix Writing

My, I'm tardy!  How I've neglected you!  I should apologise, but my friend Mark told me I need to stop apologising for things.  And he is right. I am too apologetic (this is where I'd usually say sorry for that).  I think it's common to many women who, as girls, received positive feedback for being 'nice', 'polite' or 'easy to get along with'.  Glowing with the relieved approval of teachers and parents ('thank heavans this girl isn't any trouble'), and bursting with joy at receiving each gaudily triumphant birthday invitation, I learnt early that nice girls finish first.     Yes I can cannot come to your party!

I become addicted to approval.  Now, at 31, I'm trying to break the habit of a lifetime.

So, to honour this decision, I will dedicate this entry to all the women who have recognised something they didn't like in themselves... and changed.  This is not going to turn into a motivational poster, I promise!  That kind of self-lacerating self-improvement (or self-hating self-love) belongs to a darker part of the soul than many care to acknowledge.  I LOVE a makeover, but I don't believe beauty is an ends in itself.  For example, by taking a bright, happy young girl with intellectual curiosity, imagination, and a kick-ass best friend:

...and gussying her up to resemble your standard issue glamazon:

...you'd be forgiven for  concluding that the next stage of the project should be somewhat more extreme:

Yes!  I'm aware that I'm being a little overly.  Am I suggesting that hair-straighteners and a modicum of eyebrow grooming is similar to a lobotomy?  Or that the fresh-faced Anne Hathaway of Disney vintage is similar to a vapid sexbot programmed to ape the behaviour of the butchered woman she resembles like some sort of zombie Martha Stewart?  No.  

Well maybe a little.  

Because these sorts of makeovers have a sort of brutal superficiality, a kind of self-erasure.  What excites me is seeing the woman within more profoundly expressed without.  So without further preamble, here is today's LOOK:

I just saw "Batman Returns" last night, and I loved it!  And god Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is fantastically dressed.  I wasn't expecting such an awesome look at all.  After missing it as a kid, and later becoming a huge fan of Chistopher Nolan's contributions to the series, I developed a groundless mistrust of the earlier films.  Even the Tim Burton stamp wasn't enough to shift my prejudice after his sausage-fingered attempts at "Planet of the Apes" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".  Perhaps the heart of my bigotry was my traumatic adolescent experience of "Batman and Robin".  Perhaps it was a blind loyalty to the searing fearlessness of the Chistopher Nolan Bat-verse.  But yesterday, I allowed my enthusiasm for Christian Bale's Batman to quell the nausea created by Christopher O'Donnel's Robin.  Chris + Chris - Chris = well, I don't know really, but a kind of Batman amnesty that meant I let my flatmates talk me into watching what I feared would be a bat-astrohpe.  

How wrong I was!  Michell Pfeiffer's Catwoman was a revelation, and, interestingly, some very big lace-up, spike-heeled, patent-leather boots to fill for the afore-mentioned Anne Hathaway, who is tipped to play Catwoman in the latest Batman flick, "Dark Knight Rising".  

Although I am confident the lusciously intelligent Hathaway will make this character her own, what I loved most about Pfieffer's Catwoman was her DIY 'tude.  Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman) sewed her outfit by hand (at times onto her very body), hacking up what appeared to be a private stash of BDSM latex she had hidden amongst the plaid.  As you do.  Every girl should have what my friend Ini calls an 'emergency sex outfit' at the back of her wardrobe!  

But that's a topic for another entry.  The point her is that after trashing her bric-a-brac and spray painting her candy pink walls, she sat down at her Bellvedere and remade herself.

That is the kind of superpower I want!  The skills, vision and determination to become the woman I feel myself to be, somewhere, inside (if I could just stop apologising).  

And that's another reason I love fashion.  You can dress like the person you feel yourself to be until that person is you.  Whoever that may be.