Taking up space

I’ve been busy for the past month. I’ve had a paper/talk accepted at a conference, so I’ve been working on that. The time limit is 15 minutes and I’ve genuinely been finding it difficult to fit what I want to say into that. BUT I’VE FINALLY CRACKED IT!! Yes. Now, I’ll just polish it. (I’m not going to tell you what the conference is because, even though my talk is on the subject of alienation and nothing “controversial”, I’m genuinely worried about Internet Crazy People deciding to bombard the conference with objections to my attendance.)

I’m also writing my MA research paper on exactly the same thing, which is why I was finding it so difficult to fit my talk into 15 minutes. I’d bashed out 5000 words a couple months ago and then threw all of that out a few weeks ago and started over again.

So… anyway… yea. I’ve been busy.

I was talking with a friend the other day via Zoom. It’s been a few months since we spoke and I always love our talks. We ramble on and on and end up in interesting places. At one point we were talking about how we identified ourselves with our careers and when those careers changed from a clearly defined job with an easy to understand ‘title’ into a much more nebulous thing, we found it difficult to kind of understand who we were.

I told him how I started to get anxious about going to events where I didn’t know people because I was worried about being asked ‘And what do you do?’ and, as I’d stopped doing the job I’d done since I was 22 (‘I’m a TV presenter’), I found it trickier and trickier to answer (‘Well, I do consulting work for media companies and produce live events and I consult in the film industry and do some work for marketing companies, oh, I produce websites and…’)… and no one actually cared what I answered. I could have said ‘I’m a vet that specialises in stick insects’ and they would have just said ‘Oh wow! That’s interesting. Would you like a drink?’… but I couldn’t lie and I could have just said ‘I produce websites’ and they would have had the same response, but I felt the need to totally explain myself (‘I DO MORE THAN THAT!!!’)…

And then I started talking about how ‘the Whole Brian Thing’ has really messed with my idea of ‘Who I Am’, as well. I wrote about this in the Guardian 12 years ago and though some of the things I mentioned in that have become easier to deal with- mainly because they’re no longer new, but are for better or worse ‘real life’ – there is still a pretty large hole where I am supposed to be.

By that I mean, out there in our shared world, I don’t feel like I’m taking up the space that I used to before this Whole Brian Thing happened. Partly, that’s to do with the fact that the Whole Brian Thing all happened when I stepped away from working in TV and partly it’s to do with the fact that no matter WHAT I do in my own world, Brian is A Thing that casts a shadow in my life.

Example: Several years ago I was doing an Art Foundation course. It was the first time in years I’d done something where I was ‘anonymous’. I was excited about the course and really nervous about people finding out who I was married to, but initially I loved the normality of it all. I knew that once they found out about Brian, it would change how people thought about me. Anyway, within the first month or so of the course starting, we were all sitting in the studio working and a few people were talking about celebrities they fancied. One of the women said ‘I really fancy Professor Brian Cox.’ My heart started thumping in my chest. My cheeks got hot. I felt like running away. It was the first crack in my own new, lovely, private world. I calmly got up and went to the loo and WhatsApped my friends in a panic. It took a few more weeks before someone Googled me and then I noticed the whispering and the changed looks on people’s faces and that was that, my world was no longer mine again.

When I started at Chelsea College of Art, I told someone in the first week about Brian. I didn’t think it was worth fooling myself that I could have that space as my own. My ‘gang’ there was super cool and normal, but not everyone was… (I’m sure you can imagine what being in a university doing a Fine Art degree in the early 2020s was like **huge fucking eyeroll at some of the bullshit**)

And now on my MA (not at Chelsea), I just assumed that the Whole Brian Thing would be there, too. And it is. And that’s… fine… I guess I’ve accepted that I just don’t have a space that is mine alone (except for with friends)… And… well… it is what it is.

And I’m 100% not fishing for all of the ‘I think of him as Mr. Milinovich!’ comments that I usually get when I mention this. That’s great and everything, but I don’t need to hear that. Like, I know who I am and am comfortable and happy etc etc, but there’s something very bizarre that goes on when your partner is well-known that really messes with Who You Are. It’s hard to articulate… I’ve spoken to loads of women (and a few men) who have well-known partners and they all feel the same thing.

Time and time again these women say they do not feel like anyone (apart from a very small handful of their own friends or family) thinks they are a Person that exists separately to their partner. In fact, for the most part they positively don’t exist at all separately to their partner. They are just a kind of real world seat filler, just anonymously taking up an empty space labelled ‘Spouse’. And it’s different to attending a dinner with your partner’s work colleagues or something and you sit there all evening bored. It feels cruel sometimes. It’s not intentional, but there’s definitely a cruelty to it.

The starkest example of this: Brian and I became friends with a very well-known and well-respected man and his very accomplished, but not famous wife. They had a very active life together, invited to film premiers and gallery openings and they did lots of work in the arts generally for years. Then he died… and after that no one invited her to a thing. People who she believed had been her friends for decades just stopped talking to her. Without him, she isn’t ‘real’.

My own example of this: there is a very well-known man that Brian is a fan of. He was at an event we were at, so I introduced them and we had lots of fun. He invited us to a party and we had a great time. Just a joyous night with lots of laughs. About a week after that, I was at an event on my own, he was there, I went up to say hello, reminding him who I was (I never assume anyone recognises me) and he just kind of looked at me and said ‘Oh.’ And that was that. It just made me feel tiny. Just so small that I might as well not even be…

One woman I know told me about how when she was standing with her well-known husband and a couple other (male) friends who were well-known, she was asked by a ‘fan’ ‘Are you anyone?’ and she had to reply ‘No, I’m no one.’

Another woman told me that she can’t think of anything outside of her house as ‘real life’, it’s all pretend, like some kind of terrible game she’s being forced to play.

Another calls it “Plus One Syndrome” – you’re basically just your partner’s ‘plus one’.

Another said that she basically just sits there silently because no one is interested in her and she prefers to have people round to their house so that she can just pretend she’s a clean freak and leave to go clean up the kitchen on her own while everyone sits around her husband…

Your *experience* of your life is one thing, then reality hits you and it’s often the total opposite to what you thought it was. It really is the strangest of existences. You exist as a kind of ghost in some ways. MY OWN experience is real – I have had great fun and loads of enjoyable nights out. That really happened. I really felt that. It’s just the realisation that if one was able to collect the memories of others who were there and turn them into a kind of simulation, I just wouldn’t be there. There’d be at most a bit of a blur where I was and my partner would be there in hi-def… As I said to my friend the other day, ‘I’ve kind of stopped being A Person.’

This is one of the reasons I don’t tend to go to many events with Brian now. Quite often it ends up with me just standing there on my own because people have kind of pushed their way in to talk to Brian and I can just see his back.

Occasionally, I end up against the wall (this one had a mirror on it) on my own and just look at the circle formed around him…

Or I organise a babysitter and get all dressed up to go out and watch him on stage at an amazing venue… and I end up sitting on my own with this view, because this is the seat for his ‘plus one’. (Note: I’ve had better seats at the RAH since this!)

And after events like these I just thought ‘Why didn’t I just stay home and read? I’ve got so many books on my To Read pile…’ So that’s what I tend to do now… But the result is that I take up even less space in the world and that isn’t my intention. I’ve read some great books – mainly non-fiction it has to be said – but… yea… it’s all in my own world…

Anyway, here’s a bit of space I’ve been taking up recently…