THE BEGINNING ofall CRISES by REBECCA WATSON

I didn’t realise my first crisis was a crisis until a year after it had happened. I was in my late teens and, afterwards, I remembered the incident with a split lens. The reality of it lingered but I would evade it, planting on top a story I told myself. There wasn’t an exact moment I knew the truth; it was a creeping realisation that, a year ago, I had been raped.

In some ways, I had been prepared for this experience: not of being raped, but the aftermath. I had spent my early teens feeling outside of my body. I remember the first moment it happened: looking in a full-length mirror and seeing a sticker from a piece of fruit that had managed to plant itself on the bottom of my T-shirt. Glancing down to peel it off, I could no longer see it, but back to the mirror, it was there. Breasts grow slowly, but the revelation that I had them was sudden: an exhilarating, fearful Oh! Until then, I had never thought to pay much attention to my own body. But after this, there were two of me: myself, and the body I inhabited.

Those moments grew, training my eyes to look back at myself as well as out: a strange man saying something I didn’t understand as he traced the line of my newly curving figure with his eyes; boys at school insisting that girls must earn the right to sit at the back of the classroom by undoing the top three buttons of their shirt when the teacher wasn’t looking.

Years later, I would read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and come across the lines: ‘Men look at women. Women watch

themselves being looked at.’ I read this passage and was grateful. This was the doublesight! Being inside your body while feeling outside of it.

I thought a lot about these moments in the aftermath of realising I had been raped. I recalibrated my own memories: not just recognising that what I had considered aggressive, unwanted sex had been rape, but about all the times I had seen double. Those moments were tiny but added up. I had layered over reality since puberty. Sometimes it was a coping mechanism, other times it was an anxious reflex telling me to fear the worst.

These layers wouldn’t have been such a problem if I hadn’t kept them a secret. But during puberty I wasn’t old enough to deal with my own body. And besides, it didn’t feel like mine. I didn’t know how to articulate feelings I’d never had before. Somehow, I knew shame already. I would watch my hips grow, my boobs swell, my face grow longer, and I’d stay quiet. Where was the magic of becoming a woman? I wanted my eyes back inside my head, I wanted to return to not being looked at. Later, after I had been raped, I knew the pattern. What was the easiest way to handle the experience? Which way would not affront the man who had done it? There I was, outside my own body. Silent. Thinking not how I could help myself, but how I could make things easier for the man who had raped me.

When I confronted that, lots of other things began to make sense. I recognised the narratives I had built; the way I had often detached myself from my body. I realised I’d prioritised other people’s relationships with my body over my own.

Now, I am better at recognising how my mind and body play tricks on me. The realisation that I had been raped was in some way the resolution. It drew me back into my own body. Once I had realised it, then it became a crisis I could speak about. Little Scratch by Rebecca

Watson is out next January

I had just turned 3O when I drove a 12ft removal van around Lower Manhattan, navigating 2O blocks with a death grip on the steering wheel, too terrified to turn off my hazard lights. I was moving out of the spacious apartment I’d shared with my husband of five years, and into a cramped flat with a roommate. In my haze of sadness, I’d insisted on driving the van myself, in the misguided belief that it would help me to feel empowered as I embarked on my newly single life.

Cut to 32-year-old me. After publishing a book in my twenties, my second book proposal failed to get a contract. I’d naïvely assumed that one book would naturally lead to two books, three, four. That my career was on an inevitable uphill trajectory towards ‘making it’ – where I’d achieve critical acclaim, enough money to write full time, and invitations to parties thrown by famous writer friends.

At 34, I’ve finally got my bearings, professionally and personally. But wait, what am I holding? Surprise! It’s a positive pregnancy test! We’ve only been together for five months, but turns out that practising safe sex offers no guarantees.

Then there’s me at 35, sobbing with joy as I hold my baby for the first time, my heart full in the way you’re told it will be. And me a few weeks later, sobbing as I struggle to breastfeed around the clock, exhausted and overwhelmed, not to mention scared I’ll never have time or be rested enough to write again.

But fast forward six months: I’m celebrating a book contract. Followed by me as I am now, a 38-year-old single parent finally holding said published book because it took longer than expected: turns out balancing a baby, a breakup and one’s ambition isn’t as easy as Instagram makes out.

Our thirties are more of a biological and financial pressure cooker than ever, especially for women. Key demographic milestones – marriage, having kids, buying a house – are converging in this decade for more and more of us. It’s a time when we’re reckoning with various ‘shoulds’ – we should be married and have a baby (or two), be more successful, be happier. Even when we get what we wanted, it’s not always how we thought it would be, which is its own kind of reckoning.

” I RECOGNISED THE NARRATIVES I HAD BUILT. I had prioritised.

OTHER PEOPLE’S RELATIONSHIPS WITH MY BODY OVERMY OWN”

”I FELT WHIPLASHED WHEN EXPECTATIONS inevitably clashed

WITH THE COMPLICATED REALITY OF BEING AN ADULT”

Our current self-help culture insists that with enough hard work, grit, ambition and vision boards, we can achieve greatness in all areas of our lives. We’re encouraged to rebrand failures as opportunities, to believe that we alone control our destinies. It follows, then, that if life zigzags or veers entirely off course, we only have ourselves to blame. Even proactively changing course can feel like failure when you’ve been schooled to persevere at all costs because the only failure is giving up on something.

I spent the first half of my free-spirited twenties backpacking, and I was still screwed up from my parents’ divorce, so I never planned to marry young. But I was more shocked to find myself divorced. If I had to sum up the reasons with Twitter-type efficiency, I’d say we were one of those heady young romances that slowly disintegrates as each person grows into the adult version of themselves, and realises those versions are incompatible. In addition to the emotional wreckage, it left me feeling like by 3O I’d failed at one of adulthood’s Most Important Things.

A few years later, I had to admit that I wasn’t cut out for the financial insecurity of freelance life. I took a day job, as many artists do. It was a necessary compromise, yet I felt like I was giving up. Wouldn’t a real artist pursue her art, even if she was poor as a result? I found myself fantasising about alternate versions of my life as I grappled with the unanticipated zigzags. What if I’d stayed married? Been on The New York Times bestseller list? Had more talent? Made better choices, bolder ones?

For much of the decade, I felt whiplashed when expectations for my grown-up life inevitably clashed with the complicated reality of actually being an adult. Until finally, as 4O looms, it’s dawned on me that it wasn’t serving me well to spend so much time in ‘what if’ land with the ghosts of what psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius call our ‘possible selves’ – fantasies about who we’d like to be or might have become.

My thirties have been a convergence of unhelpful myths butting up against my lived experiences, and the realisation that only I could unravel them to grow into my actual adult life. The myth of ‘making it’: a subjective label bestowed on us by other people. The myth that we have total control over our lives. The myth that not being able to make your full living doing what you love means you have failed. The myth that we need selfimprovement more than we need self-acceptance. The myth of the shoulds.

I’ve had to grapple with feelings of failure and regret, as many overachieving recovering perfectionists must at some point in our lives. Not to convince myself out of these human emotions, but to move through them and ultimately learn to value missteps as part of my gloriously imperfect path as a gloriously imperfect human. To put it simply: I’ve had to learn to be kinder to myself.

Letting go of these myths enabled me to realise how my life, with all its twists and turns, has more potential and power than any fantasy. For me, that has been the biggest takeaway of this decade. Well, that, and to never, ever drive a moving van in Manhattan. And Then We Grew Up: On Creativity, Potential, And The Imperfect Art Of Adulthood by Rachel Friedman is out now