I wince at this state of affairs now, of course, guffaw, but there is something very real, very profound when you’re in the moment and your head is in the basket along with some hypnotised, narky snake and you will only be coaxed to come out when the DJ plays Dr. Dre.

Eventually you do leave – at least the bedroom – and the night will have soured. Sometimes you make it to the party, a hot mess yes, but still, there. And other times you will venture as far as your boyfriend’s arms and then the fridge, for wine. You will talk of your silliness and then you will sit amongst tattered sequins as your partner assembles Blade Runner, the Extended Edition. Whether this is punishment or not is lost on you because you will spend the rest of the evening casting your own images of this ongoing party that has now become the party of the decade and you have exceedingly missed out.

It still amazes – concerns – me that these are moments of madness and so readily achieved. It is laughable, and comforting when shared at a safe, retrospective distance with your friends – it will make a good story and you will have them cackle – but still, to dissolve into a crippling mental state – and I don’t use that term lightly – is noxious and perhaps something that one needs to address. For the very fact that such behaviour is something that needs to be “got over”, “laughed off” or even, “forgiven” means that women are still bracketed in, even if the cataclysmic reaction to your cellulite poking through your ripped jeans does seem perverse. Women are hysterical; end of.

I don’t want to be a snotty, wild-eyed mess. I don’t want to be so indecisive I’ll be excavating a top from my first year of Uni because I have decided it is the only, the only thing that will work – as I stand on top of 22 recently acquired items. I don’t want this evening to be filled with fury, frustration and eventually, forgiveness. I am attached to an unstableness and I am able to control it, most of the time. But if things got bad for whatever macabre reason how bad could it get? And would I really be able to control it? Is this just a hormonal thing? A chemical imbalance? Or just a tricky bastard gene?

And the most frustrating thing is that this exacerbates the notion by both men and women that women are erratic, flighty characters, prone to hysteria and bouts of unnecessary madness seemingly out of nowhere. Of course, some women are blissfully free of this sartorial paralysis but for a good bunch of us it is a part of everyday life. Is it because we care too much? Is it because deep down we are really quite shallow? Or is it because we are even more body conscious than we realize? And when we dress to go “out” we subconsciously churn up all the judgement we have had laid upon us – and we have laid upon ourselves – over the years, and we want to become the “vision” of all we aspire to and when that vision doesn’t look back at us in the mirror we really – really, genuinely – feel so dejected it takes the wind out of our sparkly sails and we wonder, even just for a second, if we want to go on living because it is so disappointing and it reaches right back, right back to your childhood, to the “awkward years”, to the posters on the wall, to Geri Halliwell’s thighs, to the swimming parties, to the sleepover when you wet the bed, to the little dress you bought and you hung up as inspiration to stop eating, to the many many nights you’ve been crippled, crippled by this wanting and could never utter the sorrow to anyone because it is so trivial and pathetic and so you gulp it down and pretend not to know this profound self-hate and you will only let it out when you are alone and safely out of earshot and you will cry all the tears for all the years.

So, in light of this, packing for a holiday has the same ramifications as being the person in charge of Trump’s hair care. The stakes are high and so are the winds.

We love fashion, we women. We love clothes, shoes, earrings, we love things, collecting things. Hell hath no fury than when a woman is in search of jeans. And if that beautiful day comes – and it is only said to happen to the very lucky, very few – and we find a pair that Fits and is Flattering and doesn’t make you look like you’re smuggling a bag of maris pipers out of Tesco, we will run down the high street with a happy banner and a tightly packed arse. This is not to be trivialized. Writing this I realize how integral these material machinations are to some construct of well-being that we all adhere to in some way or other, and while that is joyous and fun and a scaffolding for self-expression it is also trapping. We plunge in, and then we get to drowning. What are we searching for? A pearl at the bottom of the ocean? And so men regard us as creatures of the deep.

I wonder if over the years I had seen my boyfriend crumble at regular intervals, over an ill-fitting shirt perhaps, or the wrong shade of blue, and how that would have made me feel, how I would have come to regard him, and what effect that would have had on our relationship and our statuses within it? That fragility – would it linger there, in the background, often a beast, and I would gradually adopt the role of beast-tamer? I hadn’t asked to acquire this role but it was mine. Perhaps I was born to do it, perhaps it came naturally. Perhaps I did it out of love, out of duty, out of fear. And so is this so-called beast then a burden for my boyfriend or just our unsociable pet, that we love the bones of but also have to scoop up its shit?

There is no reason to say my boyfriend is the sole carer for my sporadically spilling, spoiling brain and I scoop up my own shit and put it in the designated bin. But it helps, boy it helps, having him there, and his energy to coax me out of my dark and stormy den. But then knowing someone is there – does that perpetuate the discovery of said den and the propensity to go and sit in it? Would you risk sailing in choppy seas if there wasn’t a lighthouse?

I do not write this lightly and although indecisiveness over what to wear and being debilitated by it sounds trivial and indulgent, it is about far more than that. It could be a condition so steeped in our make-up (psychological, not product, keep up) that we don’t even realize it and so we are chained up – when we open our wardrobe, when we scan a magazine – and unless things just naturally come together and you are having a “good” day then you might be, well, fucked, and you might question your very existence. You certainly won’t make your lunch date. And then, if you’re lucky, you might actually get to this party and all your wonderful friends are there and your best friend’s boyfriend is on top-up duty and so your Prosecco never diminishes and you leave when the birds are tweeting and then you’re sick all over your Uber driver’s head and your new dress so you have to throw it away and you don’t care because it was a bloody great night and all worth it.