Hello baby, you called?

Posted by Isabel Dexter at 15:20 on 21 Jul 2010

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K-kinda busy, I don't wanna talk anymore. Sometimes I think the whole reason I actually moved to Paris was to avoid The Talk. See this is stuff that I don't really share but two years ago I was to all intents and purposes happily engaged. Living The Dream apparently. Loved my boy, loved my flat in Shoreditch, loved my job writing about beauty and fashion for an American website, loved the DJ-ing, loved my friends (which mostly involved a lot of Eighties themed nights). Then something happened and like whenever anyone tries to describe such Things Can Change In A Day moments it always seems a bit banal so I'm not quite sure how to put this. I just sort of woke up and decided that yes my life was Perfect with a capital P, but it was my 14 year old self's version of Perfect. I was having my very own 13-going-on-30 moment except that unlike Jennifer Garner I didn't leave the house wearing my nightdress (that was another time ok, and it was a theme party. Look Serena Van der Woodsen wears that kinda thing all the time).

So I decided on a whim almost that everything had to stop. I left my perfect would-be husband (and I don't regret this but still maintain he is possibly one of the nicest people on the planet), quit the job to freelance, organised to flat swap my apartment with a friend of a friend's place in Bastille and took the eurostar to Paris with just one huge pink suitcase and a very poor knowledge of French. I'd spent the last four days crying, cleaning the oven for the first time in the five years I'd lived in my flat and crying a bit more. At least my house was clean to French girl standards I thought as I practically passed out exhausted on the train. I got to Bastille and her apartment had three day old food on the duvet (I mean a plate of food - and I thought French girls did not eat) and cigarette butts spilling out the ashtray but frankly it was like having escaped.

My friends in London thought I was crazy and having some kind of quarter life crisis. Mostly I refused to tell anyone what was going on. In my defence I could barely talk for sobbing. La Blonde helped me bleach my sink, made me get dressed and taught me the French for "I don't want to talk about this right now." My ex got together with some other girl and told me he was still in love with me and when I walked away it felt like I had just lost a piece of internal organ (so that would be the heart then). My sister made me promise to avoid The French and in fact it was him who avoided me as I minced around the 11th arrondissement trying to figure out what was going on with my life. After all, where better to have an existential crisis than in Paris? How very Sartre.

Mostly though it made me realise how little what is on the surface has to do with what is real. I stopped envying people whose life seemed perfect, who had ticked all the boxes. I have stopped looking down on people who celebrate the surface. This isn't necessarily superficial, sometimes it is about survival. As the writer Linda Grant put it "You can't have depths without surfaces." Equally, when everything is a shiny, glossy surface to cover up the complicated, messy, frankly heart-wrenching business of being a person then this is when it's time to start decomposing the myth.

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