Z is for... Zoe

My name feels like the inevitable end to this blog for me. It seems appropriate as we all venture into another year and once again I’m travelling alone, I should look at myself. As some of my friends plan weddings, start new relationships or once again brave the wild west of online dating, perhaps I should think about who I am, why I am still single and whether it matters.

So, who am I? I’m Zoe. A daughter, a sister and an aunt. I am a friend. These words seem too small to encompass how much of my life this takes in, how much shared joy and sadness can sit in so few words, how many adventures and disasters and - let’s be honest here - how many bottles of wine and cups of tea. What else? I am a writer who works every day to try to capture the anticipation I feel starting to read a new book, to somehow bottle that whoosh I feel at a perfectly turned phrase. I don’t know, sometimes I feel like I’m getting there, sometimes I feel I should throw all my poems in the bin and mostly I just keep plodding along because that is what I do. As reaching the final letter of the alphabet blog shows, I am a finisher of things - a dig in your heels, grit your teeth and see it through kind of person. 

That’s putting the best foot forward; for every part of me that works hard at my writing projects there’s a lazy soul who would rather eat toast every day for a week than make a dinner I have to wash the pots for. I’m often praised for my brains but the truth is, I also laugh at the most terrible, tortuous puns and people falling over. Sure, I can talk to you about clever film releases from the past year like Boyhood or tell you what I thought of the documentary Blackfish, but I also have a fondness for Mark Wahlberg movies that is in no way ironic and in every way tied to the fact that he has a tendency to take his shirt off in most of his roles. 

Here I am once again lingering over Wahlberg’s abs to avoid moving on to the next part of this article - why am I still single? That’s not something I’ve really figured out. The only thing I’ve figured out about it is that I probably never will. I’ve long since stopped asking for advice because people offer well-intentioned platitudes that usually end up making me feel more lonely than if I had kept it to myself - everyone holds the pieces to an entirely unique puzzle. It’s a labyrinth you can’t really navigate on your own. Sure, you can take a turn down the road of “maybe if I make more of an effort to look prettier”, the street of “I’m too weird, I should be more normal” or the alleyway of “perhaps I need to meet more people” but there lurking at the dead end of every false path will be a couple who prove you wrong, who show that none of that really matters.

Does it matter that I’m single? I don’t think it matters much to other people, I don’t feel any judgement from people who really know me - I get the odd pitying sentiment from a half-known colleague at work, maybe, a dismissal from the type of person who thinks being one half of a matched pair is the apotheosis of human existence but really, truly, fuck those people. Neither my family nor my friends ever make me feel like they’d like it better if I turned up to meet them with a fella in tow. It matters to me sometimes, though. Sure, I can stand on my own two feet, I can enjoy my life without someone to share it with but sometimes, ah sometimes… 

Back to those questions again - who am I? why am I still single? does it matter? I have one answer to all three: I’m Zoe. I know, it utterly sucks as a dating profile but it’s all I’ve got, in the end. That and Marky Mark’s mighty shoulders to lean on once in a while.