Less Carnally Traumatic Mattering

Blazing vaginas & how to matter on the internet.

A few years ago, on a January night, the water had frozen because it was bleak midwinter and all that. I was in my little house in a little village in the middle of a little valley in Bulgaria and my little daughters were sleeping and I was feeling a little bit mad and sad, to be completely honest, because I was wearing a very little nappy at that moment and wondering whether I had left civilised society. Yes, a nappy. Diaper. Loincloth for small humans. Having run out of sanitary accoutrements and being far from any late night shops, I made do with the one remaining Pampers Newborn that remained from an old stash in the tallboy. It could have been worse. I had a flannel and a kettle on the wood stove. A brandy. I wanted a man size bar of very wicked chocolate.

Thankfully, the internet hadn’t frozen and as I spoke of my predicament to forum-dwellers who were mooching a Ning network under the guise of business support, I bumped into a warm waft of accepting mirth and sisterhood. Oh, they said. Tamara said. Lauren said. Oh, you made me laugh-cry. Oh, it makes me feel so much better now, thank you. Oh, how funny, I wet my pants (irony). Perhaps we were all there simply scanning the waves for a reminder that we were alive human beings who mattered. Maybe we were there looking for smoke signals from far-off pyres too. Hello. How is it over there? Lonely-funny-sad-good. Oh wow. Me too. And I thought I was the only freak.

When the world had gone and done a one-eighty and it was late summer, I had that familiar creeping feeling of unmattering, only this time the blowflies were gallivanting around my head and I didn’t have time to internet really, as I had chillies and tomatoes and garlic from the garden to magic into something that would live in a jar and sustain us through those dark winter evenings we’d only recently left behind. By then I’d progressed to a more eco-friendly silicone sanitary invention known as a MoonCup and was in such a sprint that, having despatched the 150 or so fiery peppers, I failed to take proper precautions when touching soft tissues such as a woman must, and set my vagina ablaze.

Retrospective hand-scrubbing is of little use once the deed is done, once the burning powers of lyoot pee-pper are unleashed. As I gingerly mounted my bicycle to collect my daughter, I had a sudden and intimate understanding of what it meant to be rocket powered. Is this what it felt like to be truly alive?

And could I recreate it in a way that was less carnally traumatic? Did I have to literally set myself alight — to set a fire burning corporeally — or could I find a gentler way to work out how to matter in this hyper-communicative and yet heartbreakingly meaningless new world of internetted, remote-working pioneerhood I’d built around myself. Could anybody hope to achieve that?

I wanted to find out.

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