I feel completely impermeable when I’m alone in public. Maybe that’s a strange way to feel (a strange way to feel for a female, perhaps) but I do. Even when I’m angry I stomp around and feel invincible. Nothing can touch me. Of course that isn’t true, especially since I now live in a more densely populated area than before, but maybe that’s why I feel impermeable. Maybe I built it up out of necessity. Occasionally I can feel strangers trying to make eye contact with me and I staunchly avoid them. I’m impermeable.

My other job is working at a hotel bar where I get home at 3am. It was very easy to realise that there’s a certain way to talk that tells people you don’t want to engage. I walk home and feel myself shrink into a cocoon or a vacuum where everything outside is shut off. Walking home one night somebody tried to get my attention, he was walking in the opposite direction, but it was only when he was metres past me did I realise that he even tried to make contact.