Author: Noni

WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Season 4 of Doctor Who, as well as references to my menstrual cycle. If either of these things leaves you feeling angry/uncomfortable/queasy/indignant, you might want to click this link. It’s full of puppies and is sure to make you feel better.

As of this week, I have started a race with my friends Lizzy and Alex, who are both superb, regular bloggers. (See their names there, all hyperlinked? You should definitely click those, because what you find there is going to be infinitely better than what you’re about to read. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.)

It was an entirely selfish move – I was desperate to be constructive to some degree and I needed a significant amount of motivation to get me out of my recurring emotional funk. Luckily, I have some of the best friends in the world, and they are totally going to kick my butt at this, but I don’t care, because right now I have ten fingers that are flying across the keys of my Macbook and letters are coming up on the screen, and that is far better than the alternative, which was lying in bed, clutching my cramping guts and hating the world. Yes, this is definitely better.

Today has been a bit of a mess of a day, and that is why this is a bit of a mess of a blog post.

As I briefly mentioned previously, my dad has spent the last two weeks in hospital. There’s a magnificent story behind it, but all you need to know right now is that he broke his foot quite badly, but is otherwise okay. This morning, he came home, and he is currently sitting in the lounge room, watching TV. Things are quite good in that respect.

The other major thing that happened today (and this is an ICK WARNING, so if you don’t like hearing about lady things, RUN AWAY NOW) is that I got my period.

Now, this isn’t that big a deal for most women, but for me it totally is, especially since the bastard came early. Again, not worth a song and dance, but do you know what an early period means for me? It means a special kind of period pain.

In order to give you the full scale of how much discomfort I was in, I want you to imagine the following: you have a migraine. It is so bad it is making you nauseous, and you are actually moaning and whimpering in pain. You can’t deal with sunlight, and you just want to dissolve into atoms and drift away on the breeze, like Astrid Peth in the Titanic episode of Doctor Who.

*whimpers*

Got that? Now transfer the pain to the region about a hand’s width up from your junk and you’ve got a rough idea of how I spent half of my day.

Naturally, this meant that writing was pretty much impossible. Granted, I had started a piece last night about social media and how it can turn the most well-meaning of left-wing activists into group-think almost-bullies, but it was only half-done and by the time I sat down to give it another go I was so exhausted by all the kafuffle of the day I had just lived through that it just ended up coming out as bitter and slightly racist. It was completely irretrievable, so I put it aside and started again. This brings us to our current predicament – where do I take this post from here?

Whenever authors or poets or any other purveyor of the written word is asked about how to be a better writer, their answer is always, in one form or another, summed up in two words: just write.

It is a tiny little sentence, and yet it is so hard to follow through on sometimes. Whether it’s been due to depression, being incredibly busy or plain old lack of inspiration, it’s been the thing I’ve wanted to do most over the last few months, and yet the one thing I have been completely unable to do. I keep getting wound up in concepts of quality and offence and whether my efforts are good enough, and if sitting down was really worth it. Look at all those hours wasted on that piece on social media that is completely unpublishable! I could have used those playing Pokémon, damn it!

That’s why I needed this challenge. This is why I need Lizzy and Alex being awesome, and this is why I need to have something to aim for. “Just write” isn’t enough for me, not at the moment. I need some metaphorical fire in my belly to get over the hurdles, like the literal fire in my belly I endured today. I need a push until I can gather enough speed to keep rolling on my own. This is the push I needed.

After all, I ended up writing something today, didn’t I?

Thank you, ladies. Here’s to the next six months, eh?

Have you ever woken up with your head on fire?

I don’t mean in the literal sense. I mean, suddenly you’re awake and every thought you’re going to have that day is alight and rapidly burning a path through your brain, destroying every positive emotional response as the flames rush through.

Maybe you’d prefer the electrical analogy, where your brain consists of thousands of televisions, each turned on to a different program and each with the volume blaring so loud that the sound waves shatter any remnants of happiness and pleasure you’ve been hoarding into tiny, tiny shards that seem like they can never be recovered, let alone be reassembled into something meaningful.

These are my bad days. These are the days when getting out of bed is the biggest hurdle to be overcome. Everything after that is a little bit easier but still stupidly difficult.

I may seem like I’m being melodramatic, and to a point I am, but these are experiences I can’t talk about in half terms. When you spend the first hour of waking howling on the bathroom floor about how pathetic and flawed you are, toning down the way you express what you’re experiencing doesn’t just feel like lying; it feels like you are just confirming the cycle of failure the voices keep insisting you are doomed to repeat.

In my last post, I talked about taking advantage of the good days. Fortunately for me, I was lucky enough to experience two remarkably good days following that entry. I got bundles of stuff done for Gigs Out West, minded some of my small cousins, and even made a public performance at an Open Mic Night. Just a week ago, all of those were unthinkable, but my sudden awareness and dedication to the good days meant that I not only wanted to do these things, I felt I had an obligation to do so.

On Saturday, the clouds started gathering again. I woke up restless, my brain whirring on every topic I had managed to avoid on the two days previous, and getting out of bed before noon was impossible. Nothing got done. I didn’t leave the house until well into the afternoon, and when I finally did, the clouds whirled me into a frantic attempt at retail therapy that ate far too deeply into my dwindling savings. The final tally: a Chiko roll, a bottle of water to negate said deep-fried disaster, two cans of deodorant, Pokemon Heart-Gold and Soul-Silver (they were on super-special!) and a Nintendo DS (well, no point owning the games if you don’t own the console, right?). I ended up spending over $200 that I really shouldn’t have, and that I will probably need in the coming weeks and months, but none of that matters when you’re just desperately looking for something to fill the hole that exists right here and now.

Sunday was worse. It took longer to get out of bed, and when I finally did, it was only because I had a sudden babysitting obligation. I have no idea how I managed to gather the patience to get through those couple of hours, but the fact that the pair of brothers I was looking after were chirpy and already liked me certainly helped. By the time Mum got home and picked them up, I was completely emotionally exhausted.

Again, none of the things that I needed to do got done. I was meant to write a blog and prepare a playlist for Cheaper Than Rubies and attend a gig to support the Dubbo Jazz Club. On Friday, all those things had seemed vibrantly possible. It took less than 48 hours for the reality of things to reveal itself.

The worst of the storm came on Monday. I initially woke at 11am, but everything was so bleak that I just turned over and went back to sleep. The day didn’t feel like it was worth my time. My mind was running at breakneck speed, throwing up everything from Matt Smith-faced triplets, to the guilt of not having written anything the day before; from the varying applicability of Paul Kelly song lyrics, to the heart-wrenching reminiscences about an old flame and how I really should have stopped missing him by now. The noise was only broken by the sleep I would occasionally slip back into, before I found myself awake again, mentally running for my life all over again.

The only reason I got out of bed was because I got a text from a local musician asking where I was: I had completely forgotten I’d arranged an interview with him. He was already at the café where I had said I’d meet him.

It was easy to understand how I’d done it: Dad had been in hospital all week, waiting for an operation on a broken foot, so things at home had been a complete shambles since the previous Monday. Add my own personal mood-based rollercoaster to the mix and it’s not hard to comprehend why I wasn’t keeping a particularly close eye on my diary.

Nevertheless, I sprung out of bed, completely disgusted with myself, communicating back and forth with my would-be interviewee, conveying my sincerest apologies. At the same time, I was verbally berating myself, calling myself every name under the sun, eventually ending up on the bathroom floor, pawing at the tiles and letting out massive whoops of despair at yet another spectacular life failure.

And still, my brain was running races; only now the thoughts were all vindictive and bitter and hurt rather than just melancholy and ridiculous. I was painfully aware of how much I had fucked up. I went from being overwhelmed with everything in existence to being surrounded and taunted by a gang of imagined thugs, all out to get me with their own spectacular variety of aggression.

Thankfully, the guy I was meant to meet was remarkably kind and allowed me a raincheck. I told him that Dad was in hospital; I didn’t tell him that at that moment, I was having an emotional meltdown in my parents’ bathroom. For some reason, even though it was the more legitimate reason of the two, I simply couldn’t say it.

It’s odd that this feeling of taboo still persists about depression and other mental illnesses. There are plenty of campaigns that tell us it’s okay to talk about it: beyondblue is almost 15 years old, R U OK Day floods my Facebook feed every year with the same four letters repeated over and over, and I have lost track of the number of times the two amazing Hyperbole and a Half depression posts have been linked to me either directly or via the great void that is social media. Tumblr is awash with different communities helping (and sometimes hindering) people in their struggle to come to terms with what mental illness means for them.

But the biggest problem I have with my personal journey is this: it feels melodramatic, and therefore it feels like it’s not genuine. When it hits, it’s not always lying in bed feeling loathsome and hating the entirety of existence. Sometimes it’s explosive, like it was yesterday, with the pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth and wailing and crying and noise and all of those televisions flashing, flashing, flashing and all I want to do is just make it all stop. Sometimes it turns into a seizure, other times it just peters out into exhausted numbness, and other times I just fade into a kind of auto-pilot where I can at least give the impression that I’m back in control again.

Eventually the good days come back, sometimes sooner than expected, and I finally feel well enough to walk outside into the world. I wander around, feeling perfectly human, and people see me and wonder what all the fuss was about. See? All better now.

The thing about depression and other mood disorders is that nobody wants to talk about them when they’re outside the media-endorsed box. You must be sad, or empty, or numb. That’s what it is. That’s all it can be, and it has to be consistent. The concept of “good days” doesn’t seem to register; it’s the end, not something that can occasionally happen in the middle.

It’s time to call that perception what it is: complete and utter bullshit. I have heaps of friends who’ve experienced depression and none of them have had the same experience. Some do what I did when I was living in Canberra and just soldier on, just using all their strength to keep the public weeping to a minimum. Some withdrew from society completely, like a wounded cat, and I’ve done that too. Some have gone on self-destructive rampages through the lands of drink and deviance (been there, done that), and others have howled and wailed and beaten walls in despair (wow, that sounds awfully familiar). Some have months or years of consistent blackness, while others experience it in short, intense bursts.

No matter how it’s faced, it always feels huge and unbeatable, especially when choruses of voices are telling you that your experience isn’t good enough for the label. These judgements can come from inside the head of the sufferer, the medical profession, or from the community that claims to support those stuck in the depths. Where the dismissal comes from doesn’t affect the final result: they just make it harder to get better.

Our inability to comprehend that depression isn’t a one-size-fits-all condition is a massive issue. Sure, there are some who self-diagnose far too willingly, but that shouldn’t be a free pass for everyone else to discount whatever it is their fellow human being is going through. Depression isn’t one easily labelled thing; it’s a patchwork of dreadfulness, and it needs to be acknowledged as such if those in the hole are ever going to get out again.

A lot can happen in two years.

On this date in 2011, I was experiencing my first day in my new job in radio. I was in Canberra, a big step for a lass from the country. Despite the fact that I made a complete mess of my first commute (the bus driver pointed me to the wrong bus stop, leading to an hour of unnecessary walking, tear-filled calls to my mum and my new boss begging for directions, and a pick up from a colleague I’d never met before), I was so incredibly keen to get started and take on the world in my chosen industry. I was 5 hours drive away from my family, or a total of 12 hours, taking into account my reliance on the questionable public transport between there and home. I was sleeping on an air mattress in the early weeks of the Canberran winter (not the brightest idea, but I coped), I had just moved into my first share house, and my whole being was thrumming with the excitement of living in a place with so much more life than the town I had grown up in.

I was standing on the top of the world and I could see everything panning out beautifully below. The problem with being so incredibly high, however, is that you have so much further to fall.

Like I said, a lot can happen in two years.

I didn’t get back to my family for the first seven months, something that was unthinkable for a girl who’d been able to take weekend trips home from uni and had lived with her parents for the rest of her life. I struggled to make friends, stuck in a cycle of fleeting pub conversations and questionable internet-forged connections. Slowly, I lost the passion for my work, as office dramas piled up; and the pressure of jumping straight into what I saw as a big city began to mount. Unrequited love interests took their toll, and the money was disappearing from my bank account far too quickly, and I spent so much time on my own that I started to get uncomfortable socialising at all. The fall was gradual, but it certainly happened. I was changing, and not entirely for the better.

However, the year and a half I spent in Canberra was also completely magical. I saw live music almost every week, found new haunts that immediately felt like home, read more than I had in years, and indulged in magnificent food at little cafes and restaurants in the city. I fell in love with people, places and pastimes that are now so distant and greatly missed. I wrote ads that thrilled colleagues and clients alike, and I picked up experiences that I wouldn’t trade for the world. I met folks who inspire me and make me want to be better and more interesting and worldly than I am. It’s ironic that most of these things happened in the final months of my Canberra residence, but the fact remains that by that point I was well and truly on the road to ruin. Not even the sweetest elements of my existence could save me from the inevitable crash and burn.

Things have changed so dramatically, it’s hard to believe the life I used to lead was actually mine. These days, you won’t find me sitting in my favourite pub, reading a riveting piece of literature as I sip on a glass of red or a Coopers Pale Ale. If you’re looking for me, you’ll probably find me in bed, wishing the sun would go away or the neighbours would stop yelling at their kids or that for the love of god I could just stop crying.

You won’t see me in an office, working cheerily on a commercial script that I have crafted from the scantest of briefs, or picking voices and music beds that are just right for the specific occasion. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: the idea of writing terrifies me most days, and having to interact with anyone who isn’t a close relative or best friend sends me into spirals of panic. The idea of talking to a client or business contact is completely unthinkable most days, and that fact only deepens my feeling of disgust at the way I have let myself go.

I had so many great plans for my time at home: I was only going to be here for three months, then I’d be back in the workforce again; I was going spend all my time working on a novel or two; I was going to create a website that would reinvigorate live original music in this town; I was going to blog and scribble and podcast and paint; and I would learn to ride a bike.

What do I have to show for the last nine months? A website that sputters along at a rate that makes me feel totally ineffective; a binder full of empty pages, still waiting to be filled with the notes still floating in my head about that story I was going to finish; a work experience arrangement I have let fall into a heap; a Centrelink claim, and a bike I still can’t ride. It’s no wonder I feel completely pathetic. I am.

Sure, there were other circumstances that contributed to this slump: the stress of my job and everything else I was living caused my epilepsy to flair up, leading to one of the biggest seizures of my life, a round of re-testing and a new medication regime; my attempts at a romantic life were a complete shambles, the last of which still aches with a bitter tenderness; I felt isolated, without close friends or family nearby. I was drinking too much and I wasn’t writing enough. Those are just the things off the top of my head. I’m completely certain there were others.

None of that really matters though. What does matter is the fact that I let the bad stuff win, and in doing so, I had to discard all the good stuff I had started to accrue.

I can’t help calling this my “Quarter-Life Crisis”. It makes it feel both important and flippant all at once, like it’s a character building exercise, but one that I can get over whenever the fancy takes me. In reality, it’s neither. It’s just a huge pile of manure that I’ve burrowed into and am flailing around in as I attempt to escape its quicksand-like embrace.

Nevertheless, I’m still trying to get out. Spending my afternoon writing all this out might help, or it might end up as incredibly unsuccessful as every other method I’ve tried. Tomorrow I could wake up in the blackness and the vicious cycle could start all over again.

But that’s not today. Right now, I’m giving all I’ve got. I’m doing something, and that’s better than nothing. It may not last, but today I’m trying, and that’s all I can do.

And it’s so much better than nothing.

Today, when I got out of bed, I was a different person to the one that I have been for the last 18 months. For the first time since January 2011, I was completely and utterly unemployed. For the first time in a long time, I had something that I wanted to do, and by god, I was going to do it.

And for the first time in a long time, I pulled out a typewriter and began to bash out something that felt right.

The last few months haven’t been good for me. (You may have noticed.) I’ve had a ridiculous cocktail of chemicals swirling around my brain, giving me seizures and mood swings, sending me off on ill advised lustful adventures and significant alcoholic benders. I have quite simply been on a trip down the road to drunkenness, sadness, anger, stress, fat, pain and poor health aka Ruintown.

Four weeks ago, I decided to act on my long ignored instincts (and the advice of friends and family) and started taking steps to get myself out of the rut I had backed myself into. I quit my job (finished on Friday) and stopped making plans. I didn’t, and still don’t know what’s going to happen with my life from here on in. And that’s really freaking okay.

Now I’m back at home with my family, where I will be spending an unknown amount of time, writing all kinds of things and not getting paid. My mum is calling it my ‘sabbatical’. I’m just calling it ‘that time when a plan (or a lack of one) felt totally perfect’.

Some of the pleasure of this is in the silliest of details. Yes, I wrote the first draft of this post on a typewriter, and by the stars, it is so much more enjoyable than writing on a computer. The mechanical racket it makes as I pound out each word is fucking glorious, and for the first time in ages, I feel like I am actually doing something. It makes writing a physical exercise. My constructive actions are all around me – letters popping up on the page before my eyes, underneath my fingers as I work to make every keystroke count, and in my ears, reassuring me that I truly am working. You can’t make that much noise without some kind of significant effort.

It may not be beautiful, and it may not be insightful, but this blog post is the first non-commercial thing I’ve written in months. It’s also the first thing I’ve written since I’ve been home.

And by god, it feels so good to be home.

I found a note on my iPod today. I didn’t write it. It was dated Monday 4^th July 2011 at 8.14am. It said:

D8? P

So it seems I’m the world’s most awesome subconscious typist (seriously, it would have taken turning on my iPod in my bag, opening the ‘Notes’ app, phasing between alphabet and number screens AND being coherent, albeit in text speak, all while being on the bus to work)…

That, or my pocket’s trying to chat me up.