You will get this one day
Dawn French
Comedian and writer 9 October 2017
At 16, I was virginal. I thought about sex almost every hour of every day. Imagining it, anticipating it, fearing it and longing for it.
I was at a girls’ school and my brother was at a boys’ school so I fell in love with each of his friends. Mostly misguided crushes. Always asking, when will the moment happen?
There were points when I didn’t have much confidence. My dad gave me a talking-to one night, when I was off to a party in my purple suede hot pants. He told me what I was to him. A beauty and a prize. He told me any boy would be lucky to have me. A dad’s boost of confidence to his daughter is a very potent thing. I was very lucky to have him.
I was 18 when my dad committed suicide. If I could put an arm round my teenage self I’d say, one day you will understand this. I was angry, confused, bewildered, sad, blaming all the wrong people, including myself.
But as time has gone on I’ve learned about mental health, and understood that if my dad had lived in a time when he didn’t feel so ashamed of his depression, it might have been very different. At that point, for him, life was a sort of hell. It wasn’t until the middle part of my life that I began catastrophising. I longed for children and I was so happy when it happened, but the responsibility sometimes felt overpowering. Since then, I’ve made conscious decisions to live differently. There’s a Jane Hirshfield poem where she says: “I move my chair into the sun.” That has been the most useful thing. I’m starting to feel much more optimistic again.
If I could go back to any moment in my life, I’d be 18 again, in a tent, in the dunes on a Cornwall beach... the moment everything I’d been worrying about finally came to pass with a lovely boy.
It was a happy event. And then we went for a big swim in the sea. Bliss.