THE BRAIN EDIT - B

Okay I’m back for blog two, and in the week since my brain has only gone and done what it does best which is completely fucking overcomplicate everything. It’s decided that maybe the entire blog itself can be the Brain Edit, and that rather than try and cram everything beginning with B into one long blog I can just keep writing about random topics that pop up, and have a master blog to sort everything into alphabetical order. Heck, I can even upload old blogs and add them to the Brain Edit database, thereby uploading everything in my noggin past and present to the blog equivalent of an external hard drive - which honestly, isn’t a bad idea. Or is it? It’s hard to tell.

If you have already tuned out, I fully understand, I’m sure I will at some point also - but until then, let’s do it. Let’s just blog and see what happens and see how far we get. For continuity’s sake I will still blog about things beginning with B today, but the list won’t be extensive or definitive as I will more than likely add to it at a later date.

So, lets get started with…

B.V.

Jesus Christ, what a thing to start on. Curse this alphabetical process. If you’re not turned off now, I’m pretty sure you will be by the end of the next paragraph. B.V. is gross and it’s embarrassing, but I’m just going to lean into the embarrassment because that is 100% my coping mechanism.

B.V. is short for Bacterial Vaginosis and it is something me and my friend Von used to bond over back in the day because we both used to get it a lot. At the time it was this weird secret lady problem that no-one every really told you about because it’s rank. It’s not like you get told about it at school or anything, they’re too busy throwing condoms and sanitary towels at you and running away. Due to the dire state of sex education at my school I knew next to nothing about anything, and found talking about anything vagina-related intensely embarrassing as a result, so it was a relief to find a friend like Von who would just shout B.V. at me and make me see the funny side.

B.V. makes your vagina smell like metallic fish death - and it’s not necessarily an STD but it kind of is. You get it from shagging smelly boys who don’t wash, and it’s basically your vagina’s way of telling you to stop doing that. It took me quite a while to realise this blatantly obvious fact of life so my alternative solution was to find these little tubes of anti-B.V. magic from Superdrug that you would squirt up yourself and they would make it go away and that was my way of ignoring the real problem of my poor life choices for about ten years.

Obviously I don’t get it anymore because my husband washes twice a day (minimum) but I remember it being quite recurrent among my friendship group way back when in the dirty unwashed Myspace days. I don’t miss it.

BAKING

Probably not the most appetising choice to segue from B.V. to baking but I do love to bake a cake. Don’t like eating them, mind, but I like making them. You see, my biggest secret is that I am way more Martha Stewart than I ever make out and pretty much always have been because she has ALWAYS been my hero. I’m sure she will get her own blog at some point, but I discovered Martha from reading my grandma’s crafting books in the mid-nineties and through my obsession (back then) with America - which also needs it’s own blog.

So yeah, I am really quite domesticated - which I guess is what happens when you don’t leave the house a lot.

BAYWATCH

I fucking love Baywatch. I don’t remember ever being able to watch it when I was young (it was too low brow for my parents) but having binged the shit out of it on some free TV channel recently I have to say that it is a true classic of our time that should be studied like Michelangelo’s David. There is a reason it is the most successful syndicated TV show of all time and it’s not just Pamela Anderson’s tits, it’s everything about it: the colours, the slo mo montages EVERY episode, the dad bods… it really had it all. What a dream.

BASTARDS

I love a bastard. In fact, one of the reasons I was attracted to my husband initially was that he looked like an old-fashioned bastard from the 1940s, like a Hollywood villain. With his side parting and pencil moustache he just didn’t look like anyone I had seen before (outside of old films) and I found that intriguing. As I got to know him I found out that how weird and out of place and “bastard” something makes him look is actually a positive to him. He does it on purpose, but not in a try hard way. Gawd, nothing worse than a try hard.

BENZOS

Like most washed up models I have had my obligatory flirtation with Benzo addiction, although mine was relatively short-lived and only lasted for 6 months or so in 2010. During the summer of working for MTV in Europe I had to take a lot of flights and while I had never feared flying in the past the law of averages began to creep up on me and I started to get really vivid recurrent nightmares about being in massive plane crashes.

As I had a long haul flight to Japan coming up that I really wanted to go on I went to see my GP and he prescribed me a boatload of Temazepam, telling me to take one an hour before my flight. I did as directed and slept the whole way there, it was great! After taking them for a few flights I started to take them for other things, like when I felt sad or heartbroken (which was quite a lot) because they helped me to forget and again, it was great, until I took too many and had the worst anxiety attack I had ever had in my life and had to stop taking them.

Cool story bro.

BIRTHDAYS

I never remember birthdays. Part of my ADHD that I struggle the most with is discalculia. Numbers get mixed up in my head and while I can remember what month someone’s birthday might be in, I can never remember the exact date. Obviously I can remember my own, and my daughter’s, and Von’s (because it is 9/11) - and sometimes my husband’s and my mum’s - but for everyone else I draw a blank. I see it as being part of my time-blindness.

As you get older you realise birthdays aren’t such a big deal anyway. Coming from a family who really held grudges if you forgot a birthday or bought a wrong present, I think I have just completely detached myself from it as a concept and

I don’t really care about birthdays at all.

BJORK

I’ve written at length about Bjork before but as I am listening to her podcast at the moment I thought I would give her a brief mention as I see her as a human talisman of sorts. Someone in this world like me. I love listening to her podcast and hearing how intuitive yet methodical she is. It sounds silly but it makes me feel less alone.

I remember doing a Myers-Briggs personality test a few years back and being so made up that my personality type (INFP) is the same as Bjork, David Lynch, and Amelie Poulain - all entities I had previously felt a deep kinship with. INFP is a rare personality type that is sensitive, creative, and emotional with an imaginative inner landscape. We are driven by empathy, idealism, and are truth seekers. Basically we just want to help people and are really kind and perceptive but introverted. Like Amelie, which fully explains why watching that film is like a religious experience for me.

As a side note: because I am ADHD I never remember what personality type I am for long periods of time, so every so often I redo the test and it always turns out the same and I find so much comfort in that.

BLACK BOX

The black box is what I call the place where the bad memories go. It lives (and hides) in the back of my brain, and because it’s so dark back there it’s really hard to see what’s inside it or whether it is a box at all or more of a dumping ground or a living seething dark mass. I’ve done lots of things to try and shine a light on what’s there - including a whole year’s worth of EMDR - but it doesn’t really like me knowing too much and it is always an uphill struggle that after a while I lose motivation for tackling, so like a mould it festers and grows darker.

Part of why I am writing all this is to maybe see if it helps as I don’t think I am alone in having this, I think everyone has a black box and it’s a self-protection mechanism. If you experience anything that is too much, too big or traumatic or overwhelming, this is where your brain will put it to protect you - some unreachable place that it pretends is invisible (its not), where some brain gremlin will sit and stir everything all together just to fuck with you.

BLOGGING

Historically, blogging is the way that I cope. Writing about my problems is my way to process and deal with things, and in the past it has worked really well. As I got older I leaned more on therapy, self help, and even medication - but nothing hits the same as a good old blog. And I get that blogging is probably old fashioned now, that I should probably be doing this on TikTok or whatever, but TikTok is full of cunts so I really can’t be arsed with that.

BLOWJOBS

Hate to blow my own trumpet (lol) but I am really good at blowjobs. Not that you will ever know because it’s definitely not something I would ever share with the world in an audiovisual sense. I’ve been many things but a porn star is not one of them - and that’s not because I think there is any shame in that career choice - more that I am really shy and private about sex stuff and always have been.

Sex has always frightened me on some level so I got good at blow jobs partly as a way out. Early on, probably from age 15 or 16, I saw it as a way to be intimate with someone without really sharing anything private of myself. Everything else would creep me out so blowjobs were my way to diffuse situations and avoid drama, because who doesn’t love a blowjob, right?

To me, blowjobs were super easy to learn, something I could do with anyone (even people I didn’t like) where I wouldn’t be judged for my performance because honestly, unless your name is Tulisa it is really really hard to be shit at blow jobs.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy them because I do… with the right person, of course.

BOOBS

Boobs are so weird. I literally made an entire career with mine and looking at it now, in hindsight, I do find that pretty odd. Like, how was that even a thing? I mean, I do get it - I’m not immune to a pair of nice tits, and you can’t deny that women’s bodies are nice to look at - but so are mens! Why was it so one-sided? Why was it just women’s bodies on Page 3, not mens as well?

Having said that I remember the day I realised the power of tits quite vividly. I’d gone to see my nan in Hatfield and she had bought me (after a lot of begging) a leopard print Wonder Bra from the TK Maxx in the Galleria. First day back to school I wore it under my school shirt and I remember every single boy on the bus just going silent and staring at me until one boy shouted “fuck me, Alex has got TITS”. I was 14 and it felt incredible, just to be noticed like that when previously I had been completely invisible. I’ve probably been chasing that high ever since.

When you have a child you realise what your tits are actually for and it does change things. I won’t go into detail though, as a lot of my fans are creepy about stuff like that and it really grims me out.

BOYS

Just putting it out there but I have NEVER understood boys, or men (man-boys) and how their minds work… and as you can maybe tell from some of my posts I was not very popular with boys when I was younger. I was popular in a friendship sense and had lots of boy mates, but could never hold the romantic interest of someone I liked. And maybe part of that was my own insecurity. I was painfully shy back then, to the point where I was scared to even look a boy I liked in the face. It was like trying to stare at the blazing hot sun. I thought that if I looked at them they would know from my face that I fancied them and that was something that to me, should always remain secret. I didn’t want the people that I liked to know that I liked them because deep down I thought it was hopeless and that I would be teased or mocked for it. And that is something that came from my parents, from being teased by them over childhood crushes. There is nothing I hate more than being teased, and over time their taunts made me feel like there was something deeply WRONG with love and crushes, creating a link that would trigger feelings of shame and make me feel embarrassed to my core every time I developed a crush on someone.

This is one of the reasons why I relate so hard with the film Amelie, because I had never seen the way that I felt depicted so vividly on screen before - that feeling of wanting something so bad but it being something that felt so dangerously hopeless and self-destructive that the only option was to hide from it. To become a creepy little recluse that when confronted would turn into a puddle of water.

BRAINS

I realise I talk about brains a lot, mainly because I feel like mine is wired up so wrong that I am constantly trying to make sense of it.

I once described my brain to my husband as being like a log cabin. Inside it’s small and cosy and familiar, and outside of it is the dark woods where all the black box memories live. To do anything vaguely human or pleasurable I have to open the windows (or worse, the door) of the cabin a little bit, but as soon as I do the dark memories come hurtling through the woods like the camera from Evil Dead, heading towards the cabin trying to find their way in. It becomes this mad race against time and means I can’t do anything good for very long. Or at least I couldn’t do - I have gotten a bit better.

BRITNEY

Back in the late nineties, early aughts Britney was IT for me. The GOAT. She represented everything that I wanted to be, and more. She was sexy but innocent - the ultimate contradiction - and a juxtaposition that at the time I really related to.

And again, I have written at length about Britney before so it is a subject that I would like to revisit at some point in its own blog as she was such a formative influence on my sexuality and career as a glamour model. Without Britney I don’t think I would have gotten into any of it. I just wanted to BE her and I remember spending hours studying and meticulously recreating her makeup and outfits… bringing me onto COPYING - which I will talk about next week.

BULLET JOURNALS

As an ADHD person I find it super hard to just stay on top of things and organise myself like a normal person. I just don’t have those inner systems that neurotypical people have that help them visualise time or remember to wash or eat or drink. I don’t recognise hunger or thirst, and things like brushing my teeth or having a shower feel overwhelming and composed of too many steps a lot of time. The natural state of my head is a fuzzy mess, and when I close my eyes I struggle to visualise anything at all. I find meditation impossible.

So I bullet journal. And honestly, it is the only thing that has worked so far. I may not be able to do it every single day, and I fall off the wagon a lot with it, but it’s easy to get back started again, and there is something about visually planning and writing everything out by hand on square dotted paper that soothes me.

BUM HOLES

I went through a massive phase about ten years ago where I got completely obsessed with taking pictures of my own bum hole, which was funny for a while until I realised that it was a knee-jerk response to being sexually assaulted by a friend. So I don’t find bum holes quite so funny anymore (although they are still pretty funny).

BURPS

Fun fact: I can’t burp. Well, I can, but I find them so terrifying that I have trained my body not to burp. Honestly, not much scares me more than burps - I find them absolutely vile.

And that’s it for B for now! Do you know what? I’ve not been very inspired by B - it’s been pretty BORING so I am holding out for next week’s C - what do you think should go in that one?

Sim xx