When do you stop being two people?

And, equally, when did you start?

Left: at the Red Women of the Year awards 2012 with Lisa Faulkner; Right: last year at the Edinburgh Book Festival (by Chris Close). Spot the difference!

At what age do you stop being two people? That question, from

Ruth Crilly

, as we chatted for this week’s episode of The Shift podcast brought me up short. It was rhetorical. I hope. Because she certainly didn’t get a sensible answer (or any kind of answer, to be fair).

Ruth was talking about her past life as a model (which she’s written about hilariously in How Not To Be A Supermodel) and how, throughout that time, and to a certain but lesser extent since, she has felt like she lived two parallel lives, for two parallel Ruths, zipping up and down the M40 from her parents’ home in Birmingham for model castings in London rather than going all-in. She even dressed for the other Ruth. Well, shopped for her. And sometimes still does. 

“I think there are two people [in me],” she told me, “and I dress for this other person as well. It’s insane. I buy clothes for this other person. I’ve got a pair of Christian Louboutin sequinned heels. I mean, these boots, I can’t even stand up in them, they’re so high. And I’ve got a whole wardrobe full of these crazy things that I buy every now and again for this other person that I think I am. Or maybe I think I should be… you know, one that would have lived in New York for six years and aced it. Or one that goes to London and is really glitzy and wears sunglasses straight off the train and shoulder-robes their coat!”

This brought me up short.

Not just because I too once had a pair of glitzy Louboutins I couldn’t walk in, alongside many other stratospheric shoes, bought for… who? A person I sometimes was? A person I wanted to be? A person I thought I should be? A person who, looking back with no small degree of trepidation, I have to concede was often more form over function, a person who was trying to be what she thought other people expected her to be. To fit a mould made by someone else. (She, not I, you note, because it’s so much easier to call yourself out in the third person!) 

A person who, as Ruth brilliantly put it, shoulder-robes her coat. Yes, reader, I have done that thing. I blame the front row. But, oh the shame!

But it’s not just the stupid shoes - and countless other garments - none of which take up (much) space in my wardrobe or my brain any longer, but because of what it says about our (her? My?!) identity. 

Maybe before we can answer, when do you stop being two (or more) people, we have to address another question: when do you start?

How long is a piece of string? 

We all put on the “work us” before we leave the house. And that’s OK, as long as the public you and the private you intersect healthily on the Venn diagram of your life. For me I’m not sure they always did.

For me, I think it was school that made me realise that one Sam – the one that was happy to sit at home and read - wasn’t going to be anywhere near enough to get me through. School made me see the unfortunate link between appearance and popularity. That if you couldn’t have the right face or the right hair (not a hope of either of those), if you couldn’t say the right things (nope, no good at that either) then wearing the “right” shoes, the two-tone T-bar ones like Jessica Morgan and Tracey Newman had (what can I say? It was the seventies) could cut you a pass. Leaving aside for the moment that I couldn’t have them because my G width feet were far too fat. Thanks, Startrite, for getting that complex in early. (And also leaving aside how appalled I am that I can still see those shoes in my head and remember those girls names.)

Like most girls (I’m guessing not exclusively girls - comment and tell me, I’d love to know) I discovered clothes, makeup, hair, could act as camouflage, armour, they could make you seem like someone else entirely and conceal the real you. 

This week I’ve been reading the thought-provoking memoir by cross-bench peer Baroness Lola Young. Eight Weeks is not out until November, but it’s about growing up in care in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and is well worth putting on your wishlist. There is a point, when Lola is about 14, when she is taken shopping to buy some new clothes for the first time. Until this point she has only had hand-me-downs and can count everything in her wardrobe on two hands. The shopping trip is a revelation for a young girl who has only ever found herself wanting. “If you had money, it seemed, you could buy the latest clothing and become whoever you imagined yourself to be,” she writes.

Fashion as a gateway drug for building a whole new identity.

For me it started with my Goth years* - you didn’t need much much money to find an outsize men’s coat in a charity shop and an overwashed t-shirt at Digbeth market. (Which used to be behind the bus station in Birmingham and I’ve just discovered still exists.) When my bank balance and my expectations changed, as I worked my way up in magazines, that morphed into whatever designer the fasherati were praising to the roof tops that season and/or I could just about afford to buy. Suddenly I could be whoever I wanted to be. I could be one of them. Or I could buy clothes for someone who was and dress up as her, at least.

I’m far from the only one who has/had two (or more) distinct sides. Now I think of it there have definitely been times when there have been three or more of me (but that’s an essay for another time!). And it’s no surprise that it manifests in our wardrobes. Work clothes, home clothes, going out clothes, lounging around clothes might not feel like they’re even a thing, but they are. You’re putting on the work you before you leave the house. We all do that (don’t we?!) to a lesser or greater degree. And that’s OK, as long as the public you and the private you intersect healthily on the Venn diagram of your life. For me I’m not sure they always did. I’d swing from weekend bag lady to stiletto-clad magazine editor in the space of a few hours and, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure either were the real me. 

There’s an oft-quoted aphorism by Caitlin Moran: “When a woman says she has nothing to wear, what she means is I have nothing to wear for who I want to be today”.

When I first read that it was like a bomb going off in my life. I’ve oft-quoted it myself and I used it in the book, The Shift, to kick off the chapter about waking up one morning to discover my clothes hated me. I think it resonated so hard because I was at a time in my life - my early/mid-40s - when I was starting to look around and wonder, not just who I wanted to be today, but who I wanted to be full stop. Which camp, if you like, I wanted to spend the rest of my life in. Was it really the camp of unwalkable shoes? Or might there be a camp where I more naturally dwelt?

The shoes are a red herring, of course. This is not about four-inch heels versus trainers, it’s not even about looking in the wardrobe and recognising the person you see in there, about knowing who you are today and everyday. 

What age do you stop being two (or more) people? There’s that piece of string again.

Some days I think, this is great, this is me, this is who I am and I’m comfortable with that. A consolidation of the self-contained little girl I once was, the tortured adolescent and student I became, the blindly driven 20/30/40something who spent so long forcing herself into shapes she no longer noticed the discomfort. Without any one of those things I wouldn’t be the me I now see in the mirror. The me who stopped needing those Louboutins (and the rest) several years ago.

58, just, and one me. Finally. Mainly.

But the minute I step out of my new comfort zone, as I will tomorrow (today for you) when I’m heading to London to do some filming for a charity campaign, the other Sam comes creeping out. The Sam who believes she won’t be enough unless she goes shopping. To buy something she’ll wear once, if at all, and barely look at again until, in a cloud of shame, she pops it in a bag and takes it to the charity shop along with all the rest.

Do I really need to dress for the person I think I’ll need to be for those few hours on Friday, when I could, whisper it, do what I usually do and go as a scrubbed up version of myself? Maybe I’ll try it. Maybe I’ll just put on my trainers and shoulder-robe my blazer.  

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Listen to the full interview with Ruth here:

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*Don’t ask for photographic evidence. I think I’ve successfully destroyed it all.
**A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift.