Dual Wielding: Autobiography of a Fangirl

If I've done a good enough job of characterising myself thus far, the appeal of the central message to my 17-year old self will be evident, but allow me to explain some of the finer points.

Firstly, the imagery wove the everyday into the weird, putting mermaids and the antichrist in the most mundane of settings, thus perfectly illustrating how strange and alienating "normal" life could be. For a teenager whose domestic world was at times incomprehensible, the impact of these lyrics was immense. I hadn't been searching for a musical expression of my own experience because it simply hadn't occurred to me that one could exist; songs about "real life" didn't resonate with me so instead I pursued ones about wizards.

More highlights: A Team 17 "Worm" dressed up as a Roman Emperor, several more pictures of topless Gary Oldman, and, pricelessly, a picture of me standing in front of a billboard advertising Chris Barrie's Discovery Channel series "Massive Engines" because I was totally in love with Arnold Rimmer.

Secondly, it created space for pain, fear, anger, love and self-knowledge to be woven together in a way that heightened the bittersweet honesty of each individual part. The beauty of the whole despite its discordant parts made me realise that I didn't have to run away from, block out or destroy the things that hurt me, that they could be incorporated into a life rich with multi-faceted emotional truth.

Some totally healthy self-expression shortly after my discovery of Tori. At the bottom right is a bottle, which has been opened to reveal the "message", a lyric from her spaced-out 1999 opus To Venus and Back.

Unfortunately, this emotional solace came too late to manifest itself in an improvement to my performance in the fields of either academia or familial relations. By the time school ended for good I had, like the crew of Apollo 13, turned off all systems not absolutely essential to life support, meaning that my moon landing, a university education, had been written off.

A scrap book page created shortly my failure to get into uni. I cannot account for the picture of Rosario Dawson, but the lyrics to Tori's "Pretty Good Year" reveal my preoccupations. The envelope still contains a letter to my future self, which, all things considered, it's probably best that I don't read.

I found a bar job and embarked on some hardcore moping, interrupted only by a phone call from a teacher at the school I had failed to grace with my presence for most of the previous two years. She offered to help he re-apply, and despite almost crippling fear of failure, I eventually obliged. She deserves a lot more credit for the way things turned out than she's going to get in Dual Wielding, but there aren't any funny pictures of me dressing up as her, so for narrative purposes, her part has been edited down.

The cover of my scrap-book, showing The Craft legend Fairuza Balk, Tori from the sleeve notes of Under the Pink, Lara from the cover of emo-tastic Angel of Darkness and Brian Blessed as Prince Vultan from the greatest film ever made, Flash Gordon.

I received a selection of rejection letters from places I wanted to go, acceptance letters from places I didn't (at this stage, I - quite rationally, I feel - did not want to join a club that would have me as a member), and one offer from a wild-card institution, Goldsmiths, which was dependent on me taking several exams I was too late to enrol for. None of them invited me for an interview.

At this point I did something wildly out of character, which was to get on the train to Goldsmiths by myself and tell to the admissions tutor, in person, that it would definitely be a good idea for him to let me study English there despite all the bits of paper that showed how bad I was at everything that wasn't English. I'm guessing he partly said yes just to make me go away, but it doesn't matter because after years of being convinced that despite some early promise, I would never amount to anything, I suddenly found myself staring at something that wasn't failure.

Reblogged on tumblr, original source deactivated.

When I got to uni, I did all the reading, ate all my vegetables and made friends by being nice to people, discovering that functioning people weren't members of a secret club with arcane initiation rituals, they just didn't turn setbacks into defeat. However, my elation when I realised that I could be one too soon turned to indignation. What? It's that easy? If I'd spent my energy on school work rather than trying to blu-tac fragments of my psyche onto anything that would stay still, where would I be now?

This reasoning sent me plunging into a hitherto unexplored corner of my own head I like to refer to as "Where Fan-Girling Goes Bad". I became convinced that if it hadn't been for my various setbacks, by now I too would have been bewitching the world with my artistic talents like Tori, fearlessly travelling the world like Lara, or both.


I'd spent so long trying to embody Lara's attitude that she felt part of me, and I identified with Tori's music so strongly that I had got her voice confused with my own. On some level I felt as if the facts that I didn't actually write those songs and couldn't sing or play the piano were just technicalities - the songs meant so much to me that I had actually started to feel that on some level, they were mine.

When my self-esteem was virtually non-existent, this mild delusion hadn't presented a problem, but my dazzling and hitherto unseen ability to turn in an essay on time led me to the conclusion that in a just world, someone as brilliant, sensitive and together as me would be well on the path to global domination by now. Unfortunately, I was really far behind schedule (at 20, I had yet to churn out even one Booker-prize winning novel), so for a harrowing few months, I found it hard to focus on my work or even my friends without plunging into a well of anger and regret.

Instead, I scrutinised the life and work of Tori Amos and the development of Lara Croft in a bid to uncover clues that would let me jump back on the train to success as if I'd never fallen off. Fortunately, what I found taught me a few good lessons about failure, and frankly helped me chill out about the whole thing.


Lara was conceived before the days of thousand-page style guides and committee decisions on the colour of a character's shoelaces (I work in licencing and have frequent anxiety dreams about signing off on a 100x100 icon depicting Batman's cape flapping the wrong way), so after the original Tomb Raider was released to runaway success, no-one knew quite what to do with her.

Lead designer Toby Gard, just 23 at the time, parted ways with publisher Eidos over the creative direction they took Lara in, while back at the studio, the pressure to churn out annual sequels to keep up with demand resulted in a steady decline in critical and commercial success, culminating in the ambitious but deeply flawed Angel of Darkness. Despite flashes of brilliance in the Crystal Dynamics years, the series and the character have neither totally recaptured the heart of the fan-base, nor returned to wider relevance. The 2013 reboot was an extremely good game, but more because it followed trends rather than set them.

It is interesting to compare original Lara's twin pistols with 2013 Lara's bow and arrow. In 1996 the pistols marked Lara out as someone different, but in 2013 no fewer than five major releases featured a grimly determined young woman with exactly the same signature weapon: Tomb Raider (Lara), The Last of Us (Ellie), Game of Thrones (Ygritte), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Tauriel) and of course The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Katniss Everdeen).

As for Tori, she might have won a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory at 5 years old, but she's better known for being asked to leave six years later as a result of her preference for rock music over classical, and her reluctance to read sheet music. When, after over a decade of gracing Baltimore piano bars with impassioned covers of "Feelings", she finally delivered on her early promise and released an album, Y Kant Tori Read, it was a critical and commercial disaster.

It would be another three years before the release of the monumental Little Earthquakes, but even since then, the incredible successes have been punctuated by horrifying record company battles, patches of creative stagnation, and no small amount of personal struggle.

This is Tori's 1988 hair metal album, Y Kant Tori Read. The doodles are part of the original cover design for some reason. Tori has expressed regret and embarrassment about it on multiple occasions, but I honestly think it's brilliant. Please bear in mind how much I like Meat Loaf before you devote bandwidth to downloading the bootleg on my recommendation.

A sensible person would have found this encouraging, but these women were my idols, and when I realised that their paths were fraught with struggle and compromise, I was disappointed.

Disappointed!

By the time Dual Wielding is released, I will be so admired for my genius and beloved for my philanthropy that no-one will think any less of me for explaining that at this time, I still believed that the world was divided into people who were destined for greatness and people who weren't. I definitely considered myself to be the first kind of person, so despite my detour, I was pretty certain that my innate brilliance would shortly put me back on the path to aforementioned greatness.

Thanks to the tombraidergifs tumblr for this gem.

Anyway, when I realised my heroes were flawed, it had to mean one of two things: either I had been worshipping false gods all along, or success was something you actually had to work at... and even then it wasn't guaranteed, or permanent. For a while I thought the former was true and started looking for replacement spirit guides, but when I couldn't find anyone who could handle more than one gun or piano at a time, I decided that maybe this "hard work" thing was worth a try.

Thus, my university experience truly began. My studies became about more than just handing things in on time, my friendships grew deep and life-long, and I lived on 8p noodles and tinned sweetcorn for six months so I could afford to spend the summer in Nepal, trekking and teaching English.

My time in Nepal was significant for many reasons, but the main one is the fact that it was the first of many trips I took with the secret aim of recreating one of Lara's exploits. To finish this chapter, here is a selfie of me doing just that.

Some readers will think it's sad that I required so much guidance from a fictional character and a famous singer. What about the wisdom contained in works of literature, the stories of people who have faced profound adversity, or even real-life friends?

The truth is that there are in fact many people whom I actually know who have helped me along the way, and you will hear about them all in my acceptance speeches for various prestigious awards. But this story is not about me (though I think you'll agree I did a good job of making it look like it is). It's not even about Lara, or Tori. It's about being a fan.

Me, last year. You can buy this T-shirt!