Please See Me

Give me attention. No, not that kind of attention.

Image by Dim Hou from Pixabay

Miss North was marking. I stood by her desk, quaking. It had been weeks since she had written ‘Please See Me’ by my poem, ‘The Goat’. Whatever I had done wrong, I didn’t know, but she was about to tell me, and as her red pen set comments against the last-minute work of one of my classmates (them hovering beside her), and I waited for her attention to shift to me, that run-away-and-throw-up feeling was gathering in my stomach.

Thirteen was a terrible age. Home life was a sickening mix of bulk-buy food and cognitive dissonance, my siblings and I suffering under the rule of the petulant five-year-old that was my stepfather while our mother sang and laughed and insisted on the quavering mirage of our golden childhoods. School life in an Essex comprehensive where intelligence was scorned and bullied was all about managing the fall-out of getting top marks. Meanwhile, my torso had set off on a journey of its own in which I had no say, transforming itself from a neat athletic body that was good at Cross Country into an awkward and painful hilly landscape which banged unexpected new-grown hip bones into bannisters and provoked jeering and ogling from grown men in the street.

English lessons were my refuge. I craved my two double lessons a week, especially the ‘composition’ session on Fridays, where we would be given an idea or just a title (‘The Visitor’) and given permission to set our imaginations free. The whole class would descend into the soothing peace of scratching pens, and I would dive into that pool of silence and fill pages and pages with words.

Miss North’s comments in our marked exercise books were always a highlight because she would write ‘Good’ (something I never felt at home) and ‘Well done!’ (quite the opposite of what the girls in the toilets would say) alongside marks that were never lower than 8/10. I felt valued by Miss North. But next to ‘The Goat’, she had written only ‘Please See Me.'

I was in trouble. What else could I think? No tick, no mark out of ten. ‘Please See Me’. Did she think I had stolen ‘The Goat’? When I wrote ‘The Moth’, she said it reminded her of Sylvia Plath, which felt like an accusation. Who was this Sylvia Plath? I’d never even heard of her. I certainly hadn’t stolen her poem.

At home, I was often in trouble. Pretty much every time I opened my mouth. Which is why writing was a sanctuary. With writing, you could put down all the words that came into your head without sharing them with anyone, and then you could change them until they were perfect and wouldn’t get you in trouble. You could select the right words and arrange them in a poem whose subject wasn’t obvious to read to your mum. (Metaphor! It was invisible armour!). That is if you could get her attention for a second. With her teaching job, demanding toddler husband, food-shopping, volunteering, tennis, the four of us and a busy social life, it was mostly ‘Not right now’.

The tiny window when she was getting ready to go out, and had to sit at her dressing table to put her makeup on and her earrings in, was a good time to catch her. Then maybe she would notice you. Maybe she would turn her body towards you on the stool and look you in the eye. Maybe she would say, ‘That’s interesting.’  And for a few seconds, you would feel happy, and then she would say, ‘Who is that about?’ and you’d feel a pinch of annoyance (she had spoiled it), say ‘Nobody’, and go back downstairs. The only other kind of attention was being told off because we had, by some petty and sometimes invented infraction, upset The Ogre my stepfather.

 ‘Please See Me’ could only mean I was in trouble. The only time adults ever wanted to see you was to tell you off. So for six weeks, I had pointedly not seen Miss North (apart from going to her lessons and then slinking out while she was ‘seeing’ someone else), and it had worked, and I was sure she had forgotten. But Miss North had not forgotten. This lesson, she had put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Stay after class.'‘

She handed my classmate’s book back to him and finally turned to me.

‘The Goat,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you come and see me.’

‘I don’t know,’ I lied.

‘Well, I’m sorry you didn’t come and see me. I wanted your permission to enter it for a national schools poetry competition. It’s too late now. The closing date was last month.’

‘Oh.’

The first marker of a pattern of ambition-thwarting anxiety that has dogged me for decades.

Wanted vs Unwanted Attention

My childhood (life’s unpredictability landing on a bright, hyper-sensitive person) set me up to be exceptionally anxious. By my early twenties, I was having full-blown panic attacks. I was so terrified for a time at university that scribbles in the margins of my biology lecture notes said things like, ‘Keep still! They are going to notice you are going mad, keep it in until you get home!’ A word which, at this point, meant a breeze-blocked room with a dubious lock in the student accommodation. Dubious because every tenth key was the same: one time, having gone to bed drunk during a corridor party, I woke up to find a male student had let himself into my room, climbed into my bed and was running his hands over my naked body. This was not a fun night. It was hard, after that, to feel safe.

Anxiety levels weren’t helped by the fact that I was being stalked before that word was in common parlance, so I had no way of describing what was happening to me. The Oxford English Dictionary tells me the first usage of ‘stalker’ was in LA the year I went to university, connected to celebrity obsession. But it didn’t reach the UK and the ears of this non-celebrity before I had been stalked twice (the second time driving me out of a poetry group), without any language to report it.

OED proof: ‘Stalkers’ (of non-criminal or animal targets) arrived in 1982

The first stalker was an Iranian student who barely spoke to me but did (to my mind) terrifying things like scattering yellow blossom outside the door of my room. What did it mean if I stepped over it? Was I making some kind of pact with him? He followed me all over campus, for weeks, about 20 yards behind me. I tried all sorts of things, including screaming ‘Fuck off!’ in his face, but it made no difference. The thing that put an end to it was me asking Julie’s friend ‘Newkie’ Jim Brown to pretend to be my boyfriend, go over to him, and threaten to beat him up.

But it didn’t put an end to the bigger problem. I couldn't always co-opt pretend boyfriends. Stalker No. 1 was the first of dozens of men who wouldn’t take No for an answer. I ran from them regularly, until I ended up running into the arms of someone with far more subtle predatory skills. Someone who felt like safety, but was the most dangerous of all of them.

Existential Threats

My first marriage is the subject of a memoir-in-progress so I’ll elide the details for now. But leaving a man who has issued credible death threats was terrifying. The first 18 months after leaving him were a high adrenaline drama that included being followed (everywhere, for weeks), a man surveilling me from the roof overlooking my garden, me moving into my front room and sleeping clothed on the sofa for safety, having my car tampered with twice (confirmed by the mechanic), getting a court injunction, having a police alarm installed in my flat, and finally – on Easter weekend 2000 – being drugged and assaulted.

Mostly through that time, I had no support from friends or family because my ex had persuaded them all that I was mad. Since what was happening sounded positively insane, something out of a movie, I could forgive them for not believing me. Indeed, I wondered sometimes if he was right, and I was going mad. A full-bodied example of that now too-lightly-applied term ‘gaslighting’.

I survived. But with what you might call Trust Issues.

I wish I could tell you it ended there. I seem to attract a certain kind of intensity. Another attempt to drug and assault me was sidestepped as late as 2016. I am a strong woman, and perceived as such, yet I have spent over four decades feeling like an antelope being eyed up by lions.

I am not alone. Half the population are antelopes. And any of us who don’t look like a bag of frozen peas have suffered the sharp end of unwanted attention. So how easy is it, under these circumstances, to chase the public kind of attention necessary to succeed as a writer?

The Exposure Gate

When I worked therapeutically with writers in the mid-2000s, my speciality was writer’s block. All my clients were women. And beneath every single case of a woman’s writer’s block was rape. Fear of exposure (to terrifying unwanted attention) would stop them, even on the verge of great success, from being able to write another word. One client had it so viscerally that when she tried to write, her whole body went into spasm, physically preventing her from even holding a pen. The freeze part of her subconscious fight, flight, or freeze survival sub-routine was still running. It had been running for 25 years. Alt-Ctrl-Delete.

This work got me wondering how many brilliant, talented women, over the centuries, just haven’t made it through the Exposure Gate because they were raped. The research isn’t there, and no one talks about it, but I couldn’t unsee those womens’ stories. When I shared an article on Facebook last year about women being written out of history, one man commented, responding (as happens on these inferior platforms) purely to the article’s headline,

‘Women are invisible in history because they just haven’t done very much, for some reason.’

For some reason. The whole history of female oppression had entirely passed him by. Women’s invisibility in the records of human culture was an absolute mystery to him. Never mind him giving thought for even a second to the very obvious disadvantages brought through our different biology: the risk or realities of pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, domestic servitude, and incapacitation via periods or menopause. Add to this, a lorryload of experience of unwanted (and sometimes dangerous) attention. You have to be an exceptionally courageous woman to live in the public eye. But he just hadn’t noticed.

Yet we all want to be seen. ‘Please see me’ is the true translation of every single post on the internet. Every comment on a newspaper article. Every blog, every post, every Note, every reel, every tweet. ‘I feel seen’ is the modern trope of connection.

Writing, as an art form, is hugely valuable because it is a way that not only writers but readers feel seen. Saying yes! That is me, too! Or even, in this case, #metoo. So it is important for women especially (whose voices are low in the mix), to find ways through the Exposure Gate.

This issue weighs heavier on women because they have already learned what ‘unwanted attention’ can mean, at its worst. But all creatives face this problem to some degree. The greater your exposure, the larger the target for attack. The higher the likelihood you will attract the attention of someone obsessive or unbalanced. The stronger the chance you’ll provoke envy or an irrational desire to tear you down.

Amygdala Bells

(like Tubular Bells but even more classic)

Not all the unwanted attention comes from men. either. A woman started commenting on my Substack Notes recently. When I posted excitedly about my new writing chair (something many writers would understand), she posted, “You sound boring.” “Yep,” I said, “Totally nerdy.”  I woke up the next morning to see she was sneering at all my posts.

Was it someone I knew in real life? The messed-up person I used to be made enemies. Was it the person whose fiancé I slept with in 1999? Was it someone I had recently offended in online correspondence? Being ADHD-blunt, I can still get people’s backs up. Or was it just someone annoyed at the attention I’ve been getting on Substack since a Note went viral (2,500 likes and counting) when she felt she wasn’t getting enough? I blocked her, but a little warning alarm began to go off in my amygdala.

Every time I have increased my visibility, and the unwanted attention has arrived on the back of the wanted, like fleas on a dog, I have gone back into my windowless room and shut the whole dog out. Shutting out, at the same time, any opportunities for a happy wagging tail and a big furry cuddle.

Vilified for an unpopular opinion after my first article in The Guardian became their highest-traffic book blog post in 2016, I turned down further invitations to write for them. In fact, horrified by the social media pile-on, and the ‘open letter[s] to Ros Barber’ being published on Wordpress etc., I stopped blogging even on my website. In 2021, after a very tiny wave of unpleasantness was directed at me on Twitter, I left my 20K-follower account dormant for two years. Now, following a surge of growth and engagement on Substack, the issue is kicking in again. How to push through rather than give up and vanish?

Here we go. I am all about solutions these days, not running away.

Step One

Recognise the causes. In all the decades this has affected me (and limited my career) I have only this year begun to understand the root causes, as laid out above. It’s strange that it has taken so long. Those clients, for example. There is an old wisdom in therapeutic circles that your clients bring you the very issues you need to heal.

‘Huh, weird, I don’t have writer’s block,’ I thought.

But I did have a fear of exposure.

‘I wasn’t raped,’ I thought, as if marital rape didn’t count. As if the stalking, the drugging, the assaults, the death threats, weren’t a big deal.

Step Two

With the root causes finally exposed to the air, step two is, neutralise the emotion: all that historical fear. EFT tapping has been my go-to healing modality since 2007, so it’s not difficult for me; it just takes application. The effect is to shut down all the ‘emergency’ software still running in my system. Where for my client, the default survival sub-routine was freeze, for me, it is flight.

Alt-Ctl-Delete.

This time, I’m not going anywhere.

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This weeks entries include an valuable misunderstanding, and a notable day from 2013.

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Post-it Notes

Since last week I have:

• Edited 17,000 words of the female pirate novel. ONE DAY TO COMPLETION!

• Give a short talk to the members of the SAT.

• Had Sir Derek Jacobi read my favourite Julius Caesar quote, at my request, which I memorised as a 15-year-old :-)

• Dropped a lot of sultanas in a hot tub

• And tonight, 90 minutes after posting, I’ll be watching my very talented friend Amalia Vitale play Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing at The Globe!

Conversation starters:

1. Do you have a fear of exposure?

2. Are you taking steps to alleviate that fear? 

3. Have you ever tried EFT?

4. Have you ever dropped sultanas in a hot tub?