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Listen to her She is telling you about her adolescence She is telling you about one particular ‘bender’ that lasted three days I was getting blacked out again in the morning, she says Smoking cigarettes Nine hours in her mum’s garden, unable to stand up It disturbed her for a long time She felt sick every time she thought about it, not because she could remember it, but because she couldn’t She could only recreate it That was the only time I wished that I was dead With survival comes loss – loss of sight, of time, of your sense of self She didn’t know what she had or hadn’t done when black out drunk, could never say because she lost so much time She was there but didn’t see it happen   Anita Harris would call her a ‘have-not’ girl Adolescent girls are made to embody society’s fears and hopes for the future, and as such are judged on their capacity for self-invention Adolescent girls are expected to make good choices for themselves As Harris writes in Future Girl, they have become ‘a focus for the construction of an ideal late modern subject who is self-making, resilient, and flexible’ Not everyone can be a ‘can-do’ girl, a good Future Girl Not all young women are ‘killing it’   The woman speaking in Jordan Baseman’s Blackout, on view at TAP in Southend-on-Sea, was a ‘have-not’ girl: she drank until she blacked out, was promiscuous and deceitful, and had no regard for her health or her safety She says she didn’t do anything for five years, that now she feels in-between: matured from her problem with alcohol and yet ‘behind’ everyone else She knows some things She thought her problem with alcohol set her apart from other people That it made her ‘interesting’ – she was living in a different way to everyone else She had chosen it But she was a girl who made bad choices, consumed the wrong substances and abused her body She was not, in other words, self-making, resilient or flexible in the ‘right’ way A have-not girl is a