My name is Daisy, and I’m a fan girl friend. When I meet a new pal, and like them, I am incapable of behaving normally. I am crap at remembering I’m an adult with my own personality. If they like the dark arts and Cherry Lambrini, suddenly I do too. They are Justin Bieber, and I am an eight year old in purple trainers, in metaphorical leggings emblazoned with their face. I cancel plans and drop calls for the tiniest bit of their attention. I do truly awful things to impress them (and if you went on Oblivion on the same day as I did, after the Jaegerbombs, I still can’t apologise enough). And I basically behave as if fancy them. My exasperated, long-suffering mates call it Mindy syndrome, after the Simpsons episode where Homer can’t stop banging on about his hot co-worker. If I chat about a new friend crush for too long, someone will hold my gaze and say, 'Mindy rides a motorcycle.'
I still remember the first girl I ever fell for. Her name was Hannah Boyd. She had long, blonde, straight hair and the countenance of a Flemish painted angel. This meant I was blamed when she broke her great grandmother’s Victorian rocking horse while pretending she was Leonardo, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and it was an enemy that must be defeated with her katanas (a draught excluder and a big stick we found in the garden. I knew she was The One, or A One, when we were singing a song about a humming hummingbird in assembly and she was sent out for changing the words to ‘BUMming BUMmingbird’.
All I ever wanted was to be just like Hannah. She was perfect. She had sausage rolls in her lunchbox, not sandwiches. She watched Heartbreak High and Neighbours. I gave my Barbies buzzcuts to impress her. When her mum got pregnant with her baby sister, Amelia, I asked my parents to have another baby every day for about three months. And when, after a happy year, Hannah told me we couldn’t be friends any more because she knew, deep down, that no matter what I told her, I loved Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan much more than Madonna and Michael Jackson, I wept harder than when Ariel off The Little Mermaid had when her voice got stolen by evil Ursula. The volume of salty liquid that came out of my face was at least equal to my body mass, and I was a particularly sturdy child.
When your best friend dumps you for MJ because, at five, you have failed to mould your personality into her shape, you’d think it would be time to make like Fleetwood Mac and go your own way. But I still believe imitation – and obsession – are the most sincere forms of flattery, and I’ve seen Single White Female over four times. There was Leigh, who I attended a Korn concert for (we went our separate ways when she discovered that my hair was not capable of forming a single dreadlock), Alice and the chilly, stinky spray tans, Sasha and the taxidermy courses, and Jo and the threesomes… Whenever I make a new friend, with special, dramatic interests, I can’t just ask polite questions. I spend six months getting weirdly obsessed and swept up in their stuff, to the understandable irritation of my existing mates, who already like the same things as me. Going to the pub and eating food covered in melted cheese.
I was hoping that as I got older, I could hang out with a nice, new person and not lose my cool. Then I met Angela. She’s a fashion booker who had written a book. She has a collection of vintage tea dresses that I would clamber through a pit of live, venomous snakes to steal. She lives in a beautiful house with co-ordinated cushions and a bronze bathroom. The first time I went to hers, I immediately bought one of the ludicriously expensive scented candles she has in her hallway, hoping to bring some of her magic glamour to my tiny flat. I spilled hot wax on the floor, set fire to my fringe and went forty quid overdrawn. Something had to be done.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t my old friends who staged the intervention, but Angela herself. Sweetly and smartly (because that is how she does all things), she pointed out that she was drawn to me because we’re different. She’s surrounded by neighbours who spend their days banging on about frocks and candles. She wants a mate who never runs out of mucky jokes. One who will not turn their nose up at a warm £11 bottle of Chenin Blanc that has been purchased at 2AM in a bar in Aldgate that might actually be someone’s house. Also, some of my long-term pals pointed out that perhaps I was a bit obsessed with her because she was a cool, inspiring woman in her thirties, and maybe I was so scared about entering my late twenties that I was copying her in order to ease my own path. They love her, and they were thrilled that I had brought her into the group – but they knew this was less about Angela and more about me thinking, 'Oh, shit! When should I start reading Country Living?'
Angela taught me it’s natural to spend your twenties figuring out who you are, and fan girling over the people you think you want to be. But ultimately, getting older has everything to do with becoming comfortable in your own identity and nothing to do with laying your personality eggs in your friend’s nest, only to end up with an unwanted collection of matching towels, or tattoos. It’s taken a long time (and a lot of sausage rolls), but I can finally say I am slowly becoming my own woman. I can be a friend without being a fan and, no matter how strong your opinions are, I will always love Kylie more than Madonna.
Follow Daisy on Twitter @NotRollergirl
Picture: Lukasz Wierzbowski
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.