Category: Personal

This is Amelia. Go on, say hello.

Yes, I just took a photo of my computer containing the blog that I was writing at the time, which you are currently reading. It’s like fully meta time travel or something.

When she first came into my possession in January 2009, she was shiny, fast and exciting. I had left my heavy, clunky, noisy Toshiba laptop behind, and I was ready to move into my second year of university (and the future) with a brand new Macbook in dashing aluminium. She was beautiful.

These days, she’s a bit battered and bruised. Her finish has been scratched and buffed into a scummy kind of dullness, the triple j sticker I slapped on her lid as a kind of ‘up yours’ to the establishment that was my Commercial Radio degree has faded so much that you would never recognise that it once said something, and there is a special kind of grime between her keys that can only come from years of love (also known as frantic typing, spilling of various foods and liquids, and general grossness). I have started novels, written countless blog posts, bashed out some (very basic) HTML code, and composed scripts, essays and reports on her screen. I have sat down in front of her tiny in-built webcam to chat via Skype, make videos and take endless selfies. I have used her to record podcasts, and occasional, poorly thought out attempts at making music. She knows more of my secrets than anyone or anything else. She is easily the most beloved gadget in my arsenal of modern technologies.

How she has managed to put up with the abuse I have put her through is a total mystery to me. The only time she faltered to any major degree happened after I spilled half a bottle of nail polish remover over her keyboard, resulting in her spitting out all sorts of foreign characters whenever I tried to type. When I took her to get fixed, the technician said it was a minor problem, not due to the spill but because of a spectacular bump that had left an indent in the top right corner of her lid. He fixed it in less than 24 hours and didn’t charge me for the service. Even he commented on her incredible toughness.

She is the most obvious connection between my university days, my employment in both Bathurst and Canberra, and that awful ‘between jobs’ period in which I currently dwell. Even though I have treated her quite roughly, I really do love her, and I struggle to comprehend living without her.

Hence it pains me to think our relationship might soon be coming to an end.

Today, I sat down and I recorded a piece of audio that I intended to use as part of this week’s blog. I exported it as an mp3 from Garageband, then saved the project so I could close the program while I worked on the written part of the entry. I finished the words, copied and pasted them into Blogger, then opened Soundcloud to upload the audio.

It was gone.

From previous experience, I knew that sometimes Garageband gets confused and forgets to spit out the exported file I have asked it to, so I shrugged my shoulders and went back to the project file to re-make the mp3 file.

But something was wrong when I opened the file: it was completely corrupted. The audio I had spent a good half-hour recording was completely gone, like Amelia had completely forgotten to commit it to disk.

I was confused, sad and angry all at once. All that work couldn’t have just disappeared! I looked through the sub-folders, searching desperately for what I’d lost, but it wasn’t anywhere. It had just gone. Amelia had let me down.

I can’t pretend that I was overly surprised. Over the last year or so, Amelia has been increasingly moody, refusing to charge and running with decreasing speed. It is to be expected of machines – they wear out and tire, especially in this current environment of ‘planned obsolescence’.

I checked Amelia’s stats in System Preferences to see what could be the matter, and it seems her battery is dying and will soon need replacing, but it’s more than that. My regular clean outs of her hard drive aren’t making a difference any more, and she struggles with processes that she used to wizz through with the mechanical equivalent of enthusiasm. She’s a fading star.

It seems stupid, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to deal with it when she finally decides that it’s time for her to go to the big Apple store in the sky. She connects me to so many people, places and characters, both literally and metaphorically, that I struggle to see a future with a computer that isn’t her. She’s my laptop, but she’s also my confidant, my co-worker and my friend. I don’t want her to die.

Then again, maybe it’s all just silliness. Perhaps I should just toughen up and remember that she’s just a machine, built for a task that has been done well.  Maybe it’s time to back it all up and get up to speed with a shiny new model. It’s what Steve Jobs would have wanted, after all.

But it is more than that. There’s a connection between me and the machine, even if it’s one way. I will miss Amelia when she goes, and therefore I can’t help putting it off as long as I can.

I’m not ready to upgrade just yet.

How do you tell when a friend is gone? When do you know they just don’t care about you anymore? How and when do you stop trying and decide it’s time to let go?

There are so many signs, but how many will it take?

Is it when they stop replying to your attempts at online interaction? You keep doing your best to start some topical chatter, maybe based on something they posted on Facebook; or maybe you drop your best conversation starter into the text box, only to be greeted with… nothing. You leave attempts at witty comments on their statuses, but never get acknowledged. You send videos and music that you’re sure they’d love, but all you get in return is radio silence. The quiet seems ear-shatteringly loud, yet you keep on trying, scrabbling for contact. You can’t let it go just yet; you’ve worked so hard to keep it! Why won’t they come through? They’re probably just busy, you say. Keep trying. They’ll be back soon.

Is it when the deeply personal and fascinating face-to-face conversations you used to have turn into five minute general life updates, occurring only when they just happen to be stuck in your vicinity with no obvious escape route? You end up wondering where all the vigour of previous discussions disappeared to, and long desperately for its return. Are they staying to talk because they want to, or because they have no alternative? You analyse the look on their face: was that an expression of interest, or an impressive attempt to hide sheer contempt? Were they only talking to you because they wanted to be polite, or to avoid a scene? Did they only acknowledge you for the sake of their career? They say you should never burn a bridge, but you thought you were their friend, not a piece of professional infrastructure. Don’t you mean anything to them?

How long does it take to recognise your own tactics in their silence? You start to remember those people from high school, old co-workers or dodgy former housemates you hid from your social media feeds long ago and wonder if they ever noticed your quiet departure from their lives. They were more persistent than you, and you were softer in your rejection; you accepted their “friend” requests and let them believe you were listening to their inane and poorly spelled musings on the world, pretending to soak up their wedding and baby photos. But this is different: you are becoming more and more certain that there is nobody on the other end, where there used to be someone you could turn to reliably for comfort. They weren’t just someone whose name you vaguely remember from a conference, gig or graduation ceremony. You care about them. You showed them your true self. How could they be repaying you with nothing when you have given them so much, and kept so many of their secrets?

Then it comes, the realisation that perhaps you are just being a pest, an irritation, a creep. You start to become afraid that you’re impeding on their personal space, harassing them, overstepping a mark that you didn’t even realise was there. You want desperately to make contact, but find yourself certain that you’ll just smother them with your attention. You count days and weeks between attempts at contact and toss and turn over the thought of a friendly message, phone call or letter. The urge to get in touch is overwhelming, wanting to know what they’re up to and how they’re going and what they think of the latest episode of Game of Thrones or Doctor Who, but you’re certain that you’ll just annoy them. Give them time, give them space, you think. Surely you can wait a little longer? (You can’t. You’ll crack soon enough, only to be greeted by more silence, which in turn makes you anxious that you’re pestering them, rinse and repeat.)

You’ll be suspicious that they’re trying to shake you off their back, but you’ll never know for sure. Don’t expect them to tell you that they’ve had enough, no matter how many times you run over the scenario in your head. It won’t happen. Nobody is ever brave enough to tell the friends they are leaving behind what they need to hear. Half they time they don’t realise what they’ve done until it’s too late, and you’re nothing more than an afterthought on a rainy afternoon. (You know it’s true – you’re just as guilty as they are.)

I let a friend go months ago, but that was different. I wanted to escape from the way I was letting our relationship hurt me, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of spectacular catastrophe, simply by believing it was the only logical outcome. There could have been other possibilities, but the continuing expectation of inevitable disaster and my woe at that circumstance meant that they were all ruled out. I did end up running, and cutting hard and fast, until there I was: lost, without one of the best friendships I’d made in months. I chose to fling it away rather than let it fade, but the latter was always going to be what actually happened.

I tried to patch it up, and it worked for a while. We hung out and we drank and we talked, and then it stopped. One by one, I ticked off the symptoms, and the denial ran deep. I fretted, I got frustrated and I felt awful, knowing all my efforts were getting me nowhere. The cycle had started. The silence is deafening.

Whether he knows it or not, my friend has called off the game. We’re not pals any more; we’re just acquaintances, barely connected by distant shadows of care and shared history. We know each other, that’s all. It’s nice, but it’s also unreliable. You need to be able to rely on friends, and thus we no longer are.

And so I come back to my first question: how do you tell when you’ve lost a friend?

The answer is simple: you will know when you become tired, when the effort outweighs the reward and you are left wondering why you’re trying any more. The card to end the friendship is in their hand, but once it’s played, you will know, no matter how many months or years of denial it takes before you acknowledge it, no longer able to ignore the ache in your head and your heart and everything in between. Maybe they’ll come back to you, but for now you have to accept the loss for what it is. It will hurt like hell, but you will both be free, and that freedom is the best parting gift you can give, both to yourself and to the one you have left behind.

Canberra Civic Bus Interchange – a place I know well.

The moment I stepped off the bus back into Canberra was magical. I had Clare Bowditch soaring in my ears and in my head, and a gigantic bag dragging behind me, and I immediately knew that I was in a good place. I felt spectacular, and the ridiculous grin painted across my face left a stream of bewildered public servants in its wake: how could someone be so happy to be in Canberra at 5:30pm on a Thursday?

The notion of home has always intrigued me, especially since 2008, when I left Dubbo for university. It took a good fifteen years to find the right way to articulate it, but the town where I grew up never felt like the right place for me. It was a town that is intensely aspirational, demanding validation in the eyes of the wider world, yet simultaneously unwilling to shake off the cultural blandness that had built up over its lifetime. It was looking to be better in the eyes of everyone, but it didn’t want to step outside its comfort zone. Living there felt claustrophobic, and even though I love my family and hate being away from them, I couldn’t help longing to live somewhere else. I didn’t really care where, as long as it was starkly different from where I had come from.

Bathurst: really bloody nice when the races aren’t on.

When I finally escaped its clutches, throwing myself into Bathurst’s embrace, I immediately felt a sense of relief. For three years, I had a new home, and I loved it. I found scenes and routines that felt comfortable, away from the prying eyes of all those hometown pseudo-acquaintances. I discovered new communities that didn’t have a parallel in Dubbo, and I found out a myriad of things about myself. I embraced live music at every opportunity, seeing the same local bands over and over again, watching them grow. I went to student theatre and politics at the pub and sat around in the dark, listening to songs I couldn’t name and may never hear again with people I miss dearly.

The trouble with dream states is that you eventually have to wake out of them. My on-campus study drew to a close, my internship was completed and I was shipped back to live with the folks again. I refused to let the book close, regularly stealing back into the town I had come to love for short visits whenever I could, but the journey was over, and as my friends filtered away to the harbour city, or further south to Melbourne, I found I was left with less and less of the dream I remembered. That said, I still feel a thrill when I return to Bathurst, even if it’s just a brief flash of recognition as I fly through on the way to Sydney. It was a place that felt like home, and where I would be happy to lay my head again.

After six months in Dubbo, I was restless again, desperate for another escape. Through an amazing stroke of luck, I managed to get a job in Canberra, and I was off again on another whirlwind adventure. Immediately, it felt completely right. I had found a new home.

The bond I have with Canberra didn’t have as long to build as the one I had with Bathurst, but it was more intense and intoxicating. My options expanded, and it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with her charms and her much-derided quirks. The cold didn’t bother me too much – it kept the dickheads out of the pubs for the better part of the year, and meant packed out gigs didn’t get too hot – and the political nature of the place only intrigued me further. Eventually, I met like-minded folks and occasionally hung around with them, but there were plenty of options for the hours I spent alone as well. It was Bathurst turned up to 11, and I loved it.

Even when it all came crashing down, leaving Canberra was a painful thought. I scrabbled through it, cutting ties with bands and sports and venues in an attempt to break the chain, but I couldn’t help myself heading back for a fix whenever I had the chance and the funds.

Eventually I got so desperate, I even sub-consciously tried to find a romantic excuse to keep coming back, and surprisingly succeeded, but when I realised that my love for him didn’t match the love for the city he lived in, I had to call it off. There were other reasons too, but I felt like such a scumbag for exploiting him that way, even though I didn’t understand that I was doing it at the time. I should have realised I had no room for a companion; I needed some time alone in a place I was comfortable, and in the end it was the fact that I had company that killed my affections. Ironic, isn’t it?

My love for Canberra felt dirtied for a while after that realisation, but it was still there, still beating. After almost two months away, I felt it when I got off that bus on Thursday afternoon. It’s still here, and it’s still the same.

Just past Baker’s Delight, out the front of Supabarn. I nearly hugged that bit of floor.

I looked up for the first time in weeks. I saw the grey winter sky and it made me smile. I wandered around Civic for a good half hour or so, just rubbing my face in all the sights, sounds and smells. At one point, I even seriously considered lying flat on the floor of the Canberra Centre in a misguided attempt at hugging the ground the city sits on. It was sheer madness, but that’s the kind of nonsense you expect when you’ve been away from home as long as I had.

Everything was as it should be. The painful places still ached, but the glorious places filled me with enough joy to fill all the holes in my heart. It all fell into place and it all felt perfectly right.

On Monday, I head to Sydney, which is a grand city, but one that I have never really felt truly comfortable in. I love it, certainly, and I would love to spend more time with the dozens of friends of mine that live there, but there’s something about it that makes it feel like it’s always judging me, or trying to shake my lack of coolness from its back. She’s always fun, but Sydney is only a short-term lover for me.

On Tuesday night, I’m back in Dubbo. While I’m keen to hug my parents and sister and sleep in my own bed, it still won’t feel right. I’ll go back to the humdrum existence of living there, the thrill of my latest adventure fading into the background of everyday life. It can’t be denied that in recent years, Dubbo has found a new lease on life that is more appealing to my tastes, but the spirit of place is still not quite right. I’ll do my best to be enthused, especially for the sake of Gigs Out West, but I doubt I’ll ever be out on the streets condemning any bad press it gets, or preaching her benefits to those who are yet to experience life within her borders. And you’ll see me dead before you see me in an “I Love Dubbo” t-shirt.

For Canberra, however, I think I will always be a bit of an evangelical. Bathurst gets its fair share of praise as well, but the national capital really does have my heart. Maybe I’ll move back here soon, but I really can’t be sure. I hope I do.

All I know is that as long as I have a travel bag and funds, I’ll never truly leave Canberra alone, for she is home, even when I’m not here.

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.