I have man flu, so this may all turn out as incomprehensive gibberish rather than insightful commentary. Christmas is nearly upon us, I’m 29, and 2007 is at an end. What a year. I’ve just booked my flights for my grand victory tour of the UK (London, Belfast, Glasgow, then back to London again), and tomorrow Kelly and I are going shopping on Oxford St after i sign the document that starts our investment process. Last-minute xmas shopping may not be a wise idea with the girl who drives a BMW convertible. There are so many shoe shops and handbag stalls that it can only end in tears – mine. I just know i’ll come back covered in glitter somehow. Just before Stella spends 3 days trying to convince me to meditate with her.

I’ve also become totally obsessed with the Killstream stuff as there is some incredibly cool-sounding guitar work being generated. I am officially the first Kill Junkie. I laid down some of the parts to “Every Last One” this afternoon and they sounded so nasty and vicious that they were almost ripping out of the speakers. It’s so in-your-face and moody and i love that.

It’s interesting that when you realise you have been, and are still on a journey, that you begin to see other people’s journeys and what stage they are at. Today i visited 2 dear old friends of mine from my teens, and i become very aware of just how lucky i am simply because they have not been as fortunate. A lot of us deserve a medal for just surviving what’s been thrown at us. I’ve gone so much further without even realising. It may still be early days for me but i’m headed somewhere very different than most of the people i used to know.

As much as i love, admire and am intoxicated by female beauty, i’m equally in love with the idea of a woman who can throw all the superficial junk down and get her hands dirty when she wants to. If you can’t or won’t come out camping in nature without the creature comforts then you’re not getting far with me at all. If you can’t appreciate what beauty is and how fickle it is, then i’m going to get gradually more and more pissed off. Roll up your sleeves and get muddy with me. Leave the make-up off and let’s go au natural. That’s my idea of a great chick.

I’m coming to see that a lot of things in a woman’s spiritual life are linked. I hear story after story of the same things – father’s absence, validation, drama/attention, eating disorders, beauty obsession, rape, love of a bastard, modern day frustrations and more. Slowly it’s tying in and making sense. There is the same undercurrent for all of it and so many girls walking around on this planet not knowing why they do the things they do and why they do them. I’ve never met a girl with a healthy sense of self-worth.

I may be infamous for tearing strips off the attention-seeking and drama creators, but i do actually find it interesting. I ask myself what they are *really* asking , as they’re seeking a reaction. What is the reaction they want, and why? Behaviour is repeated as it has a reward. What is the reward for the drama? Being noticed? Feeling loved and/or important to someone? When someone acts out, they’re asking you something and trying to fill a need, even without realising it. We need to learn to look inside and see what they need to know and feel.

Here’s a common story. Girl is brought up with a heavy-handed mum who she respects, admires and looks up to. Dad loves her but is absent, always at work or somehow disconnected from her so she never properly gets his full attention, approval or his validation. Mum nurtures her but the assurance that she is beautiful, loved and wonderful never really sets in as needs to, so her sense of self never starts at a good point. She grows up feeling unloved, ugly and alone, and like she’s not worth anyone’s time or beautiful enough. School makes it worse as girls bully other girls right in the spots that hurt the most. Her self-worth and self-esteem never ever get started as she’s little miss plain whose biggest dream and ambition is to marry a good man she desperately loves (as they do in the movies), and have a family. That is her measure of whether she has succeeded, and every moment before is a frustration that she hasn’t found someone who wants to marry her or in that situation where she has become a woman.

Then the teen years come, and boys come with it. Suddenly she’s sexual and it’s that sexuality that gets her noticed. She gets boobs, a nice figure and make-up hides the blemishes, and the boys fight for her. But something strange happens, as all of the change has totally confused her; because of the boys attention she begins to associate beauty with worth. It gives her power – power she never had when she was small and felt powerless. Beauty and attractiveness makes her finally worth something and she takes that deep need for validation of worth to the outside world. Being beautiful becomes a virtual obsession, she can’t be seen as weak or vulnerable in front of a man and to not be beautiful and/or slim is essentially a death sentence to a life alone without anyone to love her. Ugly = unlovable.

A man can’t heal that need, so she gets hurt as she lives her life for him and through him waiting on his every word and his thoughtfulness to let her know she is beautiful and worth loving. She gets cheated on and traded in as there is always someone prettier or skinnier, and she’s treated like a sex object because she puts herself out there as one and thinks that is all men want. She grasps on to beauty because it is the only thing that makes her feel like she’s worth anything. Pictures of semi-naked women are everywhere, men are stupidly led by them and her friends are exactly the same they make each other’s complexes worse.

Instinctively she knows all about the supposed beauty scale and thinks there is only one standard of prettiness – the eye of the beholder is irrelevant because men “choose” women from the beauty parade over the others. All men seem to care about is getting her into bed, all fancy the same women and some days she get s a kick from their attention and the power that comes with it. But it never goes away. Every time she bathes in the attention of a man and feels worthy, it dries up again when it’s gone. She keeps drinking but always ends up thirsty afterwards. Everywhere she goes, she judges other women on their attractiveness and knows every other girl is judging her on her attractiveness too, all day, every day, everywhere she goes. Every stare in judgement spikes her and makes her reach out to be validated and assured that she is beautiful. First call, her boyfriend. Next, random men in bars.

In some cases, she experiences the terrible anger and strength of a man in its rawest form and it terrifies her. Often that strength is corrupt and she is victim of violence, intimidation, stalking and/or rape. She is threatened by men but desperately craves their attention and attraction because it validates her as being worth something. Every man then becomes a source of fear because all men have the capacity to kill. She needs a man’s strength and protection so much but knows that the way she acts towards them often arises their anger. So she learns to manipulate.

The next step on this scale is not just being pretty, but being slim and/or skinny. Slim means beautiful and you can’t cover up a bigger figure like you can cover up spots with foundation. Men don’t like fat girls, girls bully other girls for being fat and they certainly don’t catch the right kind of attention that validates. Food makes you fat if you lose control of your eating habits (which means unlovable), so it’s time for diets. Food then becomes directly related to beauty and control, and the result is anorexia, which graduates to bulimia in a lot of cases. Food = fat, and fat = unlovable. Then food = unlovable. The vicious cycle of self-worth deprivation kicks in every single day.

Terrified of being abandoned and alone, and terrified of being unattractive. And what word crops up more than any other? Unlovable. It’s the little girl inside that stays there through all her life, and is only silenced when they have a child because it means they have value and are worth something because they are a mother. The very act of being a mother means you automatically have value and worth because you have created something wonderful and are nurturing a child. Ask yourself this: why does being attractive mean you are worthy of love, and why does not being attractive mean you’re not worthy of love? It doesn’t make any sense, but you feel it.

You can have the best parents in the world and not have received what you needed. I told my sis recently how i saw a woman putting on her lipstick in her rear view mirror and was shocked. That probably doesn’t sound too bad, you’re probably thinking. Well it wouldn’t unless you knew that she was doing 90mph on the M25 at the time. A woman would rather die than be perceived as unattractive. When they latch onto a man and make the relationship their source of validation and self-worth, it’s even worse.

It’s easy to become a woman – just have a child, and you’re done. You’re officially and intrinsically defined as a fully-fledged woman from that rite of passage. Until that point, you’re still a girl and yet to have joined the adult woman club. Not so for a man. In some tribes in Africa, you are not a man until you have killed a lion, and that’s one hell of a task. If you are 30+ and haven’t killed a lion, you live in shame for your weakness and are essentially a whoopsie. This is one of our biggest issues nowadays: that modern men in the Western world have no true nature-led initiation to manhood and therefore never become men. We have no equivalent of having a child to initiate us into our masculine stead, and that, girls, is why men never appear to grow up.

So what do you do about it? Well, you can wait and suffer, and eventually have a child, and that will give you some sense of self-worth. You can keep slapping on the make-up and make sure no-one sees your imperfections. You can keep the drama surging, manipulating men and canvassing for attention. You can just suffer in silence and hope someone marries you. You can stop eating, try and get one-up on all the other girls and then spend years in confusion, suspicion and terror when a man genuinely falls in love with you for who you are, complete with all those ugly times and blemishes. A guy who laughs at your crazy hair in the morning, gets affectionately pissed off with you farting and is your sidekick/companion through life.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do any of those things and there is a way out. I believe it all comes back to the father. Almost always. Once you realise what’s driving you, you can work through it. It doesn’t mean you’ll be become ugly or put on weight, it just means you might start to think differently. A man cannot fill the emptiness, nor can a career; being the most beautiful made-up darling of the ball won’t do it, nor will becoming a mum. The only way things change is when you confront and work through the deepest problem and strike at the root. It’s about being worthy of love, and when you first decided you weren’t worthy of it. After that it all spiralled. Somewhere down the line you forgot that the only thing you have to do to be “worthy” and lovable is just being you.

Another thing you have to understand is that no-one wants you to have self-esteem or self-worth. No-one will give it to you, even though you are entitled to it for free. You have to fight for it and earn it. You have to claim it. When you’re crushed and lifeless, you’re nice and silent and don’t threaten anyone. You’re in your place and not moving. If you got up you could outshine other people, have a bigger smile and make them feel inferior. Your suffering makes them feel better about themselves, so your shame and fear is serving them, not you. Your lack of self-worth is helping them, not you, and that charitable sacrifice is at your expense. You need to get used to the fact that the only people who give a damn about you are you, your family and your closest friends.

You will never be beautiful enough or lovable enough – it never ends. “One day” will never come and you are not Cinderella as must as you want to be. Every woman that’s come before you thought the same and lived a pretty miserable life because they never bothered to do anything about the way they felt inside. There is a big hole inside you; a massive emptiness that haunts you. You’ve tried to fill it so many different ways but it’s never gone away. Once you start to patch that hole, cauterise the wound and start getting what you need in a healthier way, you become a lot happier and all those things you really want (e.g. a career, husband etc) come along as naturally and automatically as the smile on your face that’s there for no discernable reason other than its own sake.

So camping out without make-up isn’t just some strange and kinky dogging variation – it’s knowing that the person you love and are with understands and appreciates that beauty is just superficial and they are more than their skin. It means their self-worth is based on more than just how attractive they think they are, and that material crap is ultimately empty and pointless. The most beautiful girls in the world can become the ugliest fattest troll mudbeasts imaginable when they are beauty-obsessed , vain and arrogant. Give me a heifer over that any day as the conversation would definitely be better. But more importantly, there is nothing in this world as beautiful and sexy as a spiritual woman who can take their make-up off, get mucky and make you howl with laughter.

I want you, i need you
Feed on you cos i feel
Watch me bleed for real
You can drive the nails in
Won’t beg, but i’ll steal
Yeah I’ll bleed, I’ll bleed for real…

“Bleed For Real” - Killstream