Postcards from Melbourne (Part 2)

(Errrr.....this was not the post I sat down to write, it just came out. The final installment of my Melbourne reflections will come when my best friend passes on a copy of the letter I wrote her while there. Until then, here's this, and I'll be back in a few days with the post I thought was coming.)

Dear moment,

We have about fifteen minutes, I think, so it’s rather a long moment. It has been a very long day, a very hard day, and I’ve spent quite a lot of it talking myself up.  First there were the few hours before my presentation where I tried to convince myself it would be OK, and pictured Rocky pumping himself up in my head while I ate breakfast and drank a really good cup of coffee. Then after my presentation I had to skip the next session and try and talk sense into myself before the mentor collared me at lunch and actually managed to talk sense into me. If I trust him on everything else, maybe I should believe him when he says it was truly excellent, that I was truly excellent.

So I’m sitting here, having ordered what will be a truly excellent pizza I will eat in my plain little hotel room I have come to rather love (once I’ve stumbled there without the shoes on that have been killing me all damn day), and I am watching the very natty dressers who work here as they buzz around and tease each other on this quiet Friday night. The staff here are so friendly, and each of them seems to pause as they pass by me – I think I really must look every bit as shattered as I am. I’m thinking to myself that this day I have been working up towards for five months is here and almost over, and that this is probably a time for celebration. I did OK today. I didn’t make too much of a goat out of myself, I managed to not sprint from the room the moment the thing was done to throw up, and I had a number of lovely chats with people today, including with almost all the people who came to my presentation and wanted to speak with me about it. This is a day worth remembering.

It occurs to me that I have some money, the money I have been stashing away for five months so that I could actually live a little while I was here, on this very important trip. And the wine list is right there, oh look! The glass of red I really want will almost surely make me fall asleep right here and now, so instead I order a pinot gris and I’m happy as I smile and ask the waitress for it.

I’m waiting for the wine and for a moment I hate that I’m here by myself at the end of this day. One of the worst things about being single, one of the things I rarely think about, is that when the good stuff happens you don’t have anyone with whom to share it. I feel this very strongly because I am terrible at celebrating. I don’t know how to jump up and down for myself and get excited for something I did. It does feel very lonely, and for a second I hate that it’s just me in this little restaurant with the friendly, well dressed staff and that I will go home by myself to the little yellow room.

But here’s my wine, and I suddenly know that no one else is going to toast me, no one else is going to acknowledge how momentous today was and what an achievement it has been to just get here in one piece. I got on the damn train to Melbourne rather than walking in front of it. This was my day, this is my moment, and although I’ve spent most of the day shaking and close to tears, it really was one hell of a time. I raise my glass to myself, just a tiny bit so no one knows what I’m doing. And I blink the tears away and try to breathe.  There’s no self pity here, I promise, it’s just the way it is. It’s quite OK. I need to get better at cheering myself on.

I’m alone in this moment, and it feels pretty damn good. This little space of time, for me and my glass of wine, is golden. For just a bit I am the luckiest girl in the world.

Love,

Me x

(Yeah, I know, it was a big postcard.)

Makeover

Hi! Looking a bit different here. I took a cue from Kirsty and went for a new look. You might need to adjust your zoom settings a little, because the blog header’s a bit big, but if you do that hopefully you get the impression intended.* The look of this blog has always been a bit dark and martial  (unsurprisingly so given the content and my own personal aesthetic preferences), and I thought it might be time to pretty it up a bit. As I am completely incapable of doing that on my own, I turned to the internet for help with a (small) fistful of dollars.

In real life, I’m going through a corresponding period where I just hate the way I look and wish it was as easy and as quick to fix with a blog template and a little bit of money. I know this is pretty common, especially for women, and I do all the typical things like avoiding mirrors and not buying clothes unless I absolutely have to. I spent some time with someone recently which ended up making me feel even worse on that front, and it’s not like I’ve ever had much confidence when it comes to my appearance. It’s just that any anxiety or discomfort I might feel about how I look has been drowned out by the misery in my head, and it’s been that way for a long time.** It’s absolutely one of the reasons I don’t post personal pictures on the blog.

I also know that aesthetics matter, and maybe if I pay a little more attention to the outside I might feel a little better on the inside. Obvious, huh? I thought it might be worth doing the same with the blog, trying to spruce the place up a bit might help alleviate the dark stuff I write about. So I’m going to try and post a few more pictures, and try writing about some more everyday things, in order to make this is a slightly better place to visit as a reader. I’m profoundly grateful that I have a small, committed group of you who read and comment, especially given the difficult themes and content up for grabs here.  I’d like to try and make it a more pleasant experience for you.

But how to do it? It turns out that just about every blog template you can buy without expensive custom work is all pretties and pastel colours and cutesy fonts. They’re all so feminine and imply that the blog to hand is filled with food pictures and teddy bears. The templates I could find are for bright and shiny blogs, filled with posts about how hard things were, and now it’s OK, I figured it out. How difficult but fulfilling parenthood can be. Or how to make a yoga mat out of cucumber peelings and a picture frame out of your baby’s first teeth. Those blogs are lovely and all, but that isn’t what I write about and probably never will be. I hope that I will eventually be able to write about some things with a measure of retrospection and experience, but it will never be an advice blog.*** ‘Here’s how you get through this’ and ‘here’s how I did it’ is not my style. I’m just groping about in the dark in real life, much like how I fumble writing this blog.

I started this blog because I wanted to write about things I couldn’t really find elsewhere, especially amongst Australian bloggers. I want to become a better writer and flesh out ideas for my work while I obsess over some of problems which have defined my life. But I also don’t want it to devolve into something so dark that you all only read it out of obligation.

I want to punch a hole in the wall for some light and air. I’ll be here, in my corner, trying to breathe and start over. Hope you all like the refurb.

*Thanks, Mel! There are some small changes, physically – you can now subscribe to the blog for e-mail updates, I’ve updated my bio slightly, and my blog roll is now current. There are some other bits and pieces I’m trying to figure out too, so with a bit of luck it should be easier to navigate around here and get in touch, should you need to. And no more word verification! I apologise for that, I didn’t even realise it was part of the deal.

**This is not, in any way, to discount the mental illness or distress caused by eating disorders or something close to them. I know exactly how devastating they can be (a very close friend nearly died from one), and that they are not simply a physical disease. It’s one of the reasons they are so tricky to treat - they are both physical and mental illnesses. My friend who went through it wrote a memoir about it that I highly recommend.

*** The only advice I can dispense with good conscience is about what music to buy. 

Will Do

This is not a carefully written post, for once. This is the written version of the life raft that has been bobbing in my head since the madness descended in earnest last December. This is the expression of the need I have to reach out today, on a crappy day - a need I have resisted thus far, in some 15 months of blogging. On a day when the rest* of my Honours cohort is graduating and celebrating, I am hiding under my bedcovers. Despite my careful screening of social media, I couldn't avoid the shenanigans completely. It doesn't help that I hate myself for taking others' joy so personally, I swear I am not usually this person. 

So today I keep telling myself what I have to believe to keep going:

I will finish my work. 

I will graduate.

I will get the mark I want, or something damn close to it. (A 93, if you're interested.)

I do not expect to win prizes, but all marks over 90 (for the combined thesis and seminar class results) are considered for the University Medal. The work is submitted for consideration to the Honours committee and read by lots of people. This has been my goal from the beginning. It is a lofty goal - although about half of the students who do Honours in this department get a first (it's a world class department), the majority of them get somewhere between 80 (the low cut off for a first) and about 85. It is a scant handful of people whose work gets to the meeting. But I have the talent, I have the help. I can do this. I HAVE to do this. 

I will do this. 

Keep me honest, friends. Please. 

(On a lighter note, come back early next week to see the blog's facelift.) 

*except for a few of us who dropped to part time. 

We Used To

I am shaking with nerves, and with something else. The something else doesn’t have a name, because at this point I can barely identify what is happening to me.  However, tonight I have a job to do. I am singing roughly half of the most important piece of music in Catholic liturgy all year, and I’ve learned it all in the last 24 hours. It is unaccompanied, difficult, and almost perfect for my particular skills, for my voice which has suddenly kicked into gear quite spectacularly. But I do not feel worthy to be here, in a house of God on Easter Vigil night. This is a place for believers, for those who practice what they say, and because of what is happening to me outside this place I cannot believe that I belong here, that this job is mine.

The Bishop has asked for me, urged on by my favourite organist. She spent an hour or so on the phone to me last night, playing the piece down the phone to me and, unbeknownst to her, to my father’s dictaphone which has been volunteered for this purpose (it’s amazing what my parents will volunteer when something Catholic is up for grabs). The piece of music is marked in pen (oh, the horror!), with bits scratched out in Marie’s elderly scrawl. My more modest cursive has made small circles around notes that bother me, phrases I have sung under my breath all day on a cash register serving frenzied shoppers not so far from here. I am not really ready for this, but I know the basic notation well enough that I can always return to the original key and starting point for the next phrase if I need to.

People are on their way back in to the chapel after lighting their candles and praying outside, where the Mass begins. My head is seething with a panic caused by a chain of events that was started in that same place as the cash register I worked today. My job is my one place of refuge outside of school, but it has also become a place of darkness, marked by spaces where I cannot go for fear that HE will seek me out. It is bad enough that when he tells me to meet him at his car around the corner from work I have to do so, but now he might hurt me at work too – this is where it started, you see. It has been going on for a few months now, and for some reason, here in a place of worship, my mind lingers on the traumatic details. Why now?, my mind protests – I mean, really? Is it somehow part of God’s plan for me to be panicking while I sing His praises?

The Bishop goes first, his voice really quite decent for a man his age. Priests are rarely singers, and even more rarely good ones, but his does his job. I am conscious of Marie close by, she has not a doubt in her mind that I can do this, she pushed for me to take over the job from a man unwilling to let it go. I remember that I am in a venue where the acoustics do most of your work for you. I breathe in, and sing out, and I hear a voice that has changed so much, so very recently. I am a mezzo now, a grown up singer, still changing, but definitely more adult. I look up into the vaulted ceiling and hit the notes just so, as needed. I do not falter. I hear my voice ring out in a beautiful venue with a full chapel beneath me, and I realise that although my life is falling apart, I can do this. This is still mine, and that small moment of pride stays with me, even as the shame and pain of everything else colours my life, both that night and for the rest of the year. Tonight I become a little more like a woman.

It’s all thirteen years ago now, but it’s so easy to write it all in the present tense. This last Saturday night I sang the piece again, as I do every year. Easter all about the rituals within the liturgy, but it’s also the rituals created around the practice of it. For me, even though I no longer consider myself to be Catholic, it means singing at Maundy Thursday Mass, the Good Friday ceremony at 3pm and then Easter Vigil on Saturday evening. I stay in the family house with people who fast and take this stuff very seriously. I walk to and from this lovely chapel, still with the beautiful acoustics, that remains such a feature in my working life, and on a piece of land where I exercise almost daily. And I sing the Exsultet in full, by myself now, feeling a connection with my past and my future and with the faith that still has elements of beauty that move me. I still use the same copy of the music with Marie’s handwriting all over it, marked up terribly in a way that would make me ashamed to show it to anyone else. (Marie doesn’t sing with us anymore, she’s in her late eighties and now has trouble placing me when I call. The Bishop retired some years ago, and I have no idea where he is these days.) When people talk about the exciting things they’re going to do over the Easter break and ask what I will do I smile and say ‘lots of singing’, because I know exactly where I will be, and what I will be doing. I will be upstairs in that hot, stuffy gallery, singing beautiful music with people I care about, gently touching the music marked by someone I love, and then walk home in the crisp Autumn air.* I think of the man who tore my life apart, wonder what happened to him, and am filled with regrets. I remember a time when I was even more trapped and confused than I am now, and am grateful for how far I have come.

* Autumn in Sydney always seems to only kick into gear at Easter, for some reason. Doesn’t matter whether it’s early or late, Autumn waits for Easter.

I See Red

A close friend has a bad habit of reading comments on news sites, especially on articles which provoke him enough on their own. One of the things I love about him is that he’s passionate about the things that matter, but during the last two years or so I have regularly reminded him that there’s a fine line between being educated on the issues, engaging in important debate, and raising one’s blood pressure unnecessarily. It’s advice I haven’t always been the best at following myself.

A few months ago, when my mental health took an abrupt and unexpectedly frightening turn, I realised I really had to review how I read and engage with the news and, to a lesser extent, with people on social media. It wasn’t just puff pieces on celebrities and trashy magazines, or the endless regurgitation of the same five ‘women’s issues’ that fill certain publications and various blogs, it was the articles from esteemed news organisations and publications that were also taking up too much emotional space and causing me pain. I was already very fragile by mid-December, but when news hit about the massacre in Newton, Connecticut, I just lost it. The news in the aftermath of that tragedy just solidified some things in my mind I had known for a while, and finally made me act to change how I approached my reading of news, current affairs and silly crap on the internet.

So here are the rules. I don’t always obey them to the letter, but following them has made a significant change in how I feel on a day to day basis. It can only help, right?

      1)      No hate reading. This has meant deleting blogs that once were excellent and now only serve to piss me off (none of you on the blog roll, obviously), not buying or reading any magazines except for the excellent Frankie and The Monthly, and barring anything written by conservative pundits.

      2)      No reading anything that I instinctively feel will lower my IQ. You know those articles that you can actually feel are making you more stupid as you read them? No more of those. This also means not reading really dense pieces about celebrities or feuds between media personalities and commentators. In a time when opinion now passes for journalism, among both conservatives and liberals, I also stopped reading almost every regular columnist for major newspapers, both here and abroad. I make an exception for the wonderful Waleed Aly at The Age, and I occasionally read Anne Summers or Annabel Crabb if I think the topic is interesting, but op eds are now only up for grabs if the topic and the writer is completely unknown or very talented, if the subject at hand is something I SHOULD read about in the interests of being educated and up to date with issues that matter, or is really unexpected. The writer also needs to be someone who is actually learned in the field at hand – for example, today I read a column written by one of my heroes, Geoffrey Robertson, about human rights and international law. Because this is something he knows about and has built a career around.

       3)      No reading stuff that is a trigger for me. I deliberately avoid reading much of anything about sexual violence (the young woman gang raped in Sydney this week) or tragic events that are just too awful to contemplate but are isolated incidents (like the baby who was initially saved after his parents were killed in a car accident and then later died).  There’s a way to know about the world without actually absorbing the specifics, and after some of the stuff in my own life and that of people I care about, I have no morbid curiosity about other people’s trauma. A close friend astutely pointed out to me last winter that if you’ve experienced trauma yourself you generally lose any interest in others’ tragic pain. She is absolutely right. The title for the link is usually quite enough – you know it’s happening, you can make a donation if it’s something that needs attention, but you don’t need to know just how bad it is.

        4)      No reading the comments. EVER. No, seriously. I’ve said for some time now that we need an internet equivalent for the old adage that you shouldn’t pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. The internet equivalent is surely proven by the people who comment on news sites and have long fights there, even the people I agree with.

        5)      Following funny or especially witty tumblrs and blogs is quite OK. Also feel free to indulge in cute animal pictures or funny threads on buzzfeed. No reddit. reddit is the Bermuda Triangle of the internet.

        6)      I don’t care how lauded a particular post or article is, if it’s by someone you despise chances are you will just hate it and then hate yourself for reading it. (Please don’t see today’s viral column from The Observer by Russell Brand.)

      I'm not perfect and I’ve broken these rules from time to time, but mostly following them has made a big difference. I am an idealist when it comes to participating in the political process, even mired in an uncharacteristically long and stupid election campaign here in Australia right now between a party in power that’s morally bankrupt and an opposition poised for a win that will result in catastrophe for the weak and vulnerable among us. I need to stay engaged and educated, but I don’t need to get bogged down in the idiocy that passes for ‘good’ journalism and debate right now. I need to see the woods for the trees, and in the interests of my precarious mental health, removing myself slightly from the incessant chatter of the news game was a very wise decision. How these people who participate in it are able to sleep at night and wake up to it every single day is beyond me, it is very close to my idea of hell. It’s hard because I’m someone who likes to read and know EVERYTHING, but seriously – my (very little) sanity is at stake. I have to do what I can to keep it.

How do you stay informed but still retain some semblance of sense?

Postcards from Melbourne (Part 1)

Thank you all so very much for your lovely comments on the last post and for the good wishes I received during last week. It meant a hell of a lot. This post is the first of three about my trip. I appreciate your reading and commenting very much. 

I’m not sure it’s possible for me to speak about my trip yet with any sort of perspective, but I’m going to try and talk about what it meant and how it felt. I took a very few photos the last two days with a disposable camera purchased hastily in a local supermarket, but I haven’t had them developed yet, and as photography isn’t one my skills I don’t expect much from them. It also feels a little inappropriate to use photos as evidence of my trip given that the conference I attended was based around presentations which rely on paintings, drawings, clothing, written texts and music as evidence – photos have no place in the work of an early modern or medieval specialist. I also noticed the absence of an official photographer or even just students and friends clowning around; there was no one snapping selfies at the lunch table or in the grounds. Even out and about I noticed very few people taking pictures at all, despite being asked for directions (hilariously) by other tourists several times. I liked the idea of not being overly eager to photograph everything, I was more interested in creating memories based on how things smelled or felt. It’s the experience that matters to me, not the evidence of it. Although what I saw was a big part of what this trip meant to me, it was not the most important thing. This wasn’t just a sightseeing trip (not that there’s anything wrong with those, of course), this was something much more vital.

If it’s possible to be shaking with nerves almost the entire time and yet feel like you completely belong, then that is what the week was like. The social side of it was terribly difficult, although I did get a little braver after my presentation was done and dusted. I managed to meet all four of the people I was most excited about, and one of them I ended up befriending  while I built a strong rapport with another. I saw some magnificent presentations, while others left me cold – I was gratified to discover I was correct in thinking that a conference presentation is not a mini lecture but an opportunity to present research. (What I mean by that is that we had a lot of talks that were all exposition and little analysis.) I certainly did experience what I always suspected these conferences make you feel at the best of times, an attachment to a broader academic and intellectual community, and although I occasionally despaired of ever doing work as good as some of the others presenting and speaking, I also know that my instincts and skills are much more on target than many others I met, including some much more senior researchers.

The postgrad students were a mixed bag. I did meet a couple of lovely people on the second last day of the conference, but by that stage it was a bit late. Everyone from UWA and University of Queensland knew each other, as well as most of the students from English universities, while the two big groups from the Victorian universities had been doing peer review on each other’s work for several weeks. So the only people at as much of a loss as me were from New Zealand or Canada. I tried pretty hard to try and make an effort socially, but frankly I had a lot more luck with the senior scholars than with the people in their twenties. I was hoping the comparison to school wouldn’t hold water, but the truth is that there were some serious cliques, and trying to break into those was too much for me. It didn’t help that the students presenting were overwhelmingly from medieval studies. Certainly I was one of the few students to attend many of the sessions I frequented, this may have made the social stuff harder than necessary. In addition, a friend from a complementary discipline told me several weeks before the conference that the early career researchers took these things more seriously than the more senior scholars, as a rule – I felt exonerated in discovering this was not the case. A lot of the early career researchers seemed much more nonchalant about the experience, and were mostly there for the social side of things.

Melbourne reminded me a little of the Emerald City, with its jewel toned buildings, reasonably clear lay out and comparative cleanliness. It felt like a place that had all the answers for me, and I delighted in not getting lost more than two and a half times and feeling like I mattered there. I did feel guilty about not getting out more, and very silly for not eating out rather than getting Subway for dinner twice while I was there, but it WAS a working trip, and there’s always next time. I felt like I did enough, that I made enough of an effort to be proud of myself and to look forward, to believe once again that I have a future in this line of work. As to my presentation, I think I did OK. I’m especially hard on myself about this as I was once a very successful public speaker and debater, and although I was out of practice I expected more of myself. My mentor assures me that I did a lot better than OK, and, as I usually trust his judgement, perhaps I should believe in his use of superlatives when talking about my performance. Having him there was wonderful, and although I had to be honest with him about how bad this summer has really been, he is still eager to take me on for postgrad. I feel very lucky right now, I want to be worthy of that help.

There’s no way this trip was going to be perfect. But part of me was hoping my presentation would be, and of course it wasn’t. But it was solid, and the energetic and enthusiastic question time after my talk tells me that my research hit its mark, whatever else happened. I spent a lot of time these last few days interrupting people who said 'but it was your first time, I bet it was good for your first time!'. I wanted it to be excellent irrespective of that, and I've been assured that was the case. Everyone at the session was shocked when they found out later, as the undergrads were introduced at an afternoon session, and I do count it as a win that almost every single person at the session sought me out in the remaining day and a half of the conference. I must have got some things right. 

Emma commented on my last post and her description of how Melbourne makes her feel was better than anything I could come up with: ‘If you find Melbourne anything like I find it, it will fill you with calm, a sense of adventure, a feeling of being at home, and everything will be right with the world.’ Anxiety aside, I felt like I was running towards myself on this trip, that I might have started to become who I want to be. For most of the week, being me wasn’t so bad, and I can only hope a little of that feeling came home with me. I need it quite desperately.

When I remember this trip I’ll remember the nutty, chocolate-y coffee I drank every day, I’ll remember the clang of the trams that came after the quiet and stillness as they came to a stop, and looking up in wonder at the cobweb of tram cables only a few feet above my head. I’ll close my eyes and try and summon the memory of the warmth that filled the room in an amazing session full of great people presenting interesting research and an audience wanting to listen. I’ll try to forget my shallow breathing and shaking as I spoke on Friday morning, but try and remember that people laughed when they were meant to, and the look of pride on my mentor’s face when he asked a question afterwards (I was too scared to look at him during my talk). I’ll certainly remember everything he told me afterwards, and the few words out of many I caught him whispering to his friend, describing my work, while I was meant to be talking to someone else. I will bask in the memories of happy meetings with good friends who were generous enough to share their time and love for their hometown with me. I’ll hang onto the fact that people were mostly kind and interested and that I did OK.

I did OK.  

From St Kilda to Kings Cross

‘From St Kilda to Kings Cross is thirteen hours on a bus
I pressed my face against the glass and watched the white lines rushing past
And all around me felt like all inside me
And my body left me and my soul went running…’

                        Paul Kelly, ‘From St Kilda to Kings Cross’.

I’m currently on a train to Melbourne, at about the halfway point, so I’m actually doing the reverse of the trip in this post’s title. More Strathfield Station to Southern Cross. It is also, coincidentally, pissing down rain like in the song and Sydney was in the grips of a fierce thunderstorm as I left. It felt appropriate. There is nothing like the sheer, redemptive power of a thunderstorm to shake the city from its miserable, sweaty, heat induced torpor.  The storm always seems to induce a collective sigh from the city, and everyone wakes up a little. I watched the lightning crack over Sydney while I waited for my (very late) train and somehow managed to restrain myself from joining in with the little boy, dressed in his pyjamas, who was  jumping up and down a small stretch of the platform shouting: ‘Melbourne! Melbourne!’ Even though this is a train I have caught hundreds of time before, I‘ve never gone further than Albury, which we’re due to hit in a few hours.

This probably sounds supremely stupid, not just because I’m 29, but also because it’s unheard for someone with my education level, background and interests to have never even gotten around to going to Melbourne. (It sounds especially silly and insignificant given that my sister just got back from a tour of the UK and a little of Europe.) My family didn’t travel at all, growing up, and then I was too busy working or I was ill. I like the idea that I will know exactly when I cross over into unchartered territory, it’s significant, and one of the reasons I like travelling by train is the very strong sense that you’re going somewhere. You’re earthbound, but on the fast interstate trains you fly through parts of the world that most people never get around to visiting. The trip feels so familiar, and yet so very different. Because it’s bigger and better than what I’ve done before. I have deep ties to many of the communities my train is flashing through, but this time it’s not about what I’ve done, it’s about what I have to do. I am going somewhere new.

When my supervisor first suggested this conference as something I might like to consider I was immediately taken with it.  I knew in just a few minutes that it something I wanted, badly. A big part of wanting to do it, however, was because back in September I thought I could surely transform my life between then and now, that I could lose some weight, be better, not hear voices and that I would be perfect. Of course it’s crazy that I expected that. The short version is that my summer has been horrendous; I have hidden the worst of it from you all, even those of you with whom I speak on an almost daily basis, and I have spent the equivalent of weeks in hospital, trying to stay alive. This conference has been my life raft during an unbearable time, and now that it’s here I’m going to try and get everything out of it I possibly can. I will hate myself if I don’t. The version of myself that will arrive in Melbourne in a few hours is desperately trying to believe that it gets better, and that I have a future within my grasp. I have to believe that I won’t always feel this way.

This week is about my future, and for now I will try and enjoy it as it comes. I can only hope that, by the time the train gets to Melbourne, I am ready.