In the interests of getting ready for my next writing retreat and editing sprint in Bali next week, I’ve been dipping back into relevant journals. Much like the girl in the image, I’ve noticed my instinct as a writer is to water ski over the top of emotions, without lingering on anything painful.
When that happens, I turn back to my journals. They are sporadic. Sometimes there are pages and pages written on one day, or other times just one paragraph. Then nothing for weeks and months. I use my journals to work through the latest unholy mess I’ve gotten myself into. Or more likely, the same mess that shows up again and again because, well, I have the same habits.
Memoir and journals feed each other, so I tell myself as I pore back through the years. After re-discovering myself on the journal pages up until 2006 (I what? wanted to take golf lessons? Who is that stranger?) I found a gap between 2006 and 2009. I told myself I didn’t mind, it was for the best, but whooped with joy when I finally located the missing journal!
I had to go down to South Beach to celebrate. There, six jet skis were roaring about the bay, zipping through the water and over anything that looked remotely like depth and complication, whooping and calling out to each other, slicing the water like butter.
As a life-long learner I’m always signed up to some course or other, and last week I formally graduated from a pilot one-year course for people like me who’ve been a consumer representative for some time. Called CREST – Consumer Representative Education Support and Training, it was designed to support experienced representatives to become more involved in research. Worth one unit of a Graduate Certificate, the course was a mix of online learning modules and a research project. See the mini-graduation photo above, on the left.
When the CREST course started in January of 2024, the sale of Mum’s home of six decades had just settled, with her irrevocably housed in a residential aged care facility. As a family, we’d set ourselves the goal of her having a visit from someone every day, and in almost a year, there was only one day we missed. See photo above, on the right. I’d decided to do my CREST assignment on resident and families as lived experience representatives in aged care facilities. I’d even been along to a meeting at Mum’s facility about food, but was quite disappointed once I got there as there was no actual sampling. We were just talking about food and what menus people wanted.
Eight months into the course, in August 2024, Mum died after breaking her hip. Since walking behind her coffin out of the facility, sobbing and carrying the protea the funeral company had given me, I haven’t been back inside a residential aged care facility. But I carried on with the by now very melancholy project right through until submitting the final assignment in January 2025.
When it came time for me to leave the graduation ceremony, despite feeling confident that this time I’d conquered the giant sprawl of Curtin campus, I couldn’t find my car. I wandered around and around, clutching a takeaway container of snacks, leftovers from the generously catered event that had been pressed upon me. A kind volunteer about to start his shift on Curtin Community radio took pity on me as I walked past him for the third time. He offered to drive me around as I clicked my fob, looking for my car’s lights to blink kindly at me.
It seemed a perfect metaphor for how I’ve evolved as a lived experience representative. At the heart of this work is a life-changing experience of illness, injury, trauma, disorder, disability. A carer representative is someone who cares for someone going through any of the above.
For me, becoming a mother in 1998 was a life-defining experience that kicked off my consumer representative journey. Nothing bad happened. I just wanted to access the evidence-based model of midwifery-led care in a family birthing centre with access to a birthing pool. If I’d been having my baby in Sydney at the time that would have been quite normal, but it was not how things rolled in 1990s Perth.
When my daughter was three, another life-defining event of surviving a home invasion saw me pivot to victim support advocacy. The frustrations inherent in this work meant I drifted back to health advocacy, back to maternity care and women’s health, and over time, to a systemic advocacy role that spanned every conceivable area of health.
After the nice radio volunteer and I had toiled around four different Curtin car parks, my car finally answered my distress call and its lights flashed in a car park I could have sworn I’d never been to in my life. I thanked the volunteer profusely, tried to offer him the snacks as a thank you, which he declined. I walked to my car with as much dignity as I could muster, carer and a consumer representative graduate, and someone who should always catch an Uber to Curtin.
My new red collapsible e-bike is a beast, even on level 1. Zooms forward with a spurt as I scrabble for the pedals, jam on the brakes, turn it back to zero to co-ordinate my errant feet. Endless opportunities to look foolish at fifty-nine on this machine, but if my mother’s death has taught me nothing else, I know there is only now, and joy lies at the edge of comfort. I settle, push off safely, the thrill of cycling descends.
It’s a direct echo of the electric shock of joy when I first rode a bike in my childhood. There was just one bike in the holiday house between six children, and somehow I missed my turn learning to ride. I’d get astride the bike, push down on the pedal and feel the moment of freedom, wind in my hair, the body pushing forward and then stop with just one revolution of the wheels. Then I’d come to a stop and just be the girl who couldn’t ride a bike yet.
But one holiday the front lawn was spongy and deep, I was astride the bike, one foot on the pedal ready to take off as I had done so many times, pretending I could ride. Now the other foot sought and found the pedal. My gut felt a punch as the thrill of success overcame me. A new knowing entered by muscles and the rest of the holiday was an immersion in the thrill and practice of riding a bike.
Now I smile as I ride, teeth dry from the wind. Some of the people I pass smile back at me.
It would seem that there are consequences to removing my head from the sand of world politics. Much greater effort is required to ensure that my spirits remain buoyant in these interesting, interesting times.
So today I returned to the scene of my undergraduate degree. I left this beautiful, beautiful campus 38 years ago to make my way into the adult working world. I don’t venture here too often but today a Storyfest event was convened here which included presentations, panel discussions, workshops with a radical inclusion and diversity focus.
In the essay writing workshop I attended, this quote from Virginia Woolf surfaced. I wanted to include it in the Sunday Blog not just because it allows me to use the semi-colon (they are not at all in literary fashion any more) but also because the quote itself is a balm to my battered soul.
Creativity and writing are about communication. Not rhetoric, lies and propaganda. Not siloed realities engineered by social media platforms. But communicating, soul to soul. The point of writing is to communicate and share our truth. It is health and happiness to genuinely connect. So after a week with two writing rejections, one missed deadline and way, way too much Trump, I’ve taken Sunday off to sit in the glorious gardens of UWA and marinade in the words of Virginia Woolf. We’ve got to keep on writing, creating and connecting.
I have a card with the saying No Makes Way for Yes on my noticeboard in the hope it will enchant me to say no more often. It’s been there so long it’s yellowing around the edges. In 2019 I wrote a blog with the same title – No Makes Way for Yes. It talks all about the pressures of running a non-profit agency and how hard it is to say no all the important issues. At the end of 2021, I solved this dilemma by quitting said job, and hitting the open road on 1 April 2022, almost exactly three years ago.
And yet, since then, my diary has slowly but steadily filled up. I’ve returned to work a day a week and sprinkled my diary with commitments and projects. The yellowing sign tells me what I know already – that I need to say no more often.
I reflected ruefully as I skid towards the end of March that awareness is the first step. But too often for me, it’s the only step for weeks, months, years at a time. This month I had the fullest calendar since 2022. Echoes of the old days stole over me as I stood for hour after hour at the computer, working on project deadlines. Like a labyrinth walk (of which I’m so fond), I’m treading yet again the old, old path of over-commitment. Only this time, I’m a rung or two out from the centre.
Because now, since both my parents have died at very grand old ages, I’m spurred on by the renewed appreciation of my own mortality. That I only have so long to get shit done, to taste all the experiences I want while still earth-side. Somehow I have to reconcile this paradox — that life is short and I need to do less.
I recently realised that I haven’t ever really blogged about the volunteer work I do in my neighbourhood. I’ve been living here for twenty-three years, and for at least fifteen off those years, I’ve moved in and out of the dance of volunteering.
There’s something vulnerable about giving up this time. Most efforts are met with social media comments along the lines of “that’s lame”, or “why don’t you do ____?” Insert very time-consuming and difficult, thankless task.
But the thrill of being part of our neighbourhood once a year Cooby Fest is intoxicating. The challenge of working with local government to try and influence a more community-driven approach to how we manage our parks, footpaths and public buildings is bracing. The green shoots of hope, such as our small, annual budget for placemaking (which a fancy term for connecting and beautifying our suburbs, organising local events, planting trees, putting in seats for people to linger, getting murals on walls etc.) keeps me going.
Another motivation is the program I recently joined to mentor people like myself who want to be place makers. The Navy Seals saying “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast” was mentioned on one of the group calls. As someone who is always in a hurry, often impatient, unable to rest when I see an undone task, relentlessly driving forward until I collapse in a heap of burnout, this saying is now stuck in my brain. What would it be like if I slowed down more, wasn’t in such a dreadful rush to get things done? It’s not like my suburb is going anywhere.
One month ago, I took my head out of the sand and began re-engaging with world events. I keep repeating the Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” as I scroll through the news. The urge to re-cover my head is overwhelming.
But in a world where the bullies in charge need us to be frightened, polarised and fighting with each other, is neighbourhood placemaking one of the important solutions? People of all political persuasions, races and faiths live in my neighbourhood. Are low-key, organic gatherings of people one of our best protections to weather this clusterfuckery? I think yes, so will carry on with my thankless tasks in my neighbourhood, and look out for the golden moments of connection.
This month I’m participating in the March Micro Marathon with Smokelong Quarterly, producing a piece of flash fiction and non-fiction each day. Simplistically put, flash is a piece of less than 1000 words. Like throwing pots, one after the other off the potter’s wheel. After this month is over, I’ll have a range of misshapen pots to re-work, with the feedback I’ve received. And then it will be time to remember that yet again, writing is re-writing.
But I thought I’d share one of the thrown pots today.
The prompt was to re-write an conversation you overheard from the perspective of the one of the people in the conversation. This was a something I heard through the curtain in a hospital ward.
Through the curtain
The young doctor shouts against my deafness, looks at her checklist and asks, do I want to resuscitate my wife? And I can only think, once I work out what she’s on about is, what kind of a question is that? She looks back at her clipboard and I figure that at the end of this conversation, she needs to have a goals of care plan for my Betty, but right now Betty’s asleep with a body full of tranquillisers and an egg on her head. Sixteen times she’s fallen since she was admitted to hospital a couple of weeks ago. Can it only be that recently? Up until then I swear she was just who she always was. My wife. My Betty. But in the madness and confusion of hospital, she doesn’t know who I am, who our son is. Where do we want to live? The doctor bellows. I want to live with Betty, but Betty can’t go home. The doctor’s very clear about that. My son has to go back home to Queensland. He’s very clear about that too. I want to be with Betty so there’s nothing else for it. I’ll have to follow her into an aged care prison, I tell the doctor. I’m not so clear about that, but what else is there to do? She makes another check on her list, wraps it up and moves on to the next bed.
The nun with the small beard at University chides me for my bitterness at the Catholic childhood, the litany of endless sexual shaming, the nonsense tales of hellfire, the damnation and control. While at home the hellfire was more muted, but it still lapped at our feet, especially when puberty and normal sexuality emerged. Then it was essential to strangle this precious new side to ourselves.
The nun and I are supposed to be discussing literature, but now I’m seven years lapsed, it’s too tempting to challenge someone who’s right there and straddles the worlds of organised religion and academia.
“At least it gave you a system of beliefs to reject,” she said.
This phrase stays with me through the next decades, speaks to the nub of memory from age ten when I was washed through with the mystery of Easter that even the church couldn’t fully conceal. A never forgotten moment in a church that has since been demolished, when I was old enough to immerse in the gruelling story of the scourging, crown of thorns and crucifixion and young enough to to understand it whole. To this day I recall the precious washed clean feeling on Easter Sunday, awakening to resurrection after three dark days.
By my teens my belonging to this rigid religious world was being demolished, brick by brick just as the church was.
But this rejected system of beliefs pushed me out into the world to immerse myself into New Age anything – yoga, meditation, energy medicine. Today I find this light, this washed clean feeling in downward dog, again and again, and I’m free to be all the juiciness that I am.
It’s one of my favourite childhood photos, ever. And there are a lot of photos. I mean, a lot. I think it’s my broad smile. I wasn’t always a smily child, in fact I was something of a brooding scowler.
I’m sure I recall that perfect Perth Spring morning, when the sun shone, but wasn’t fierce. The wind was only slight, not the roaring gale of a Scarborough sea breeze that came in every afternoon.
Mum has us the six of us children posed on the five steps leading from our front door to the terraced lawn. We had to find a spot to perch for the image. As a four-year-old I took up the least space, and yet I’m leaning back, my blond bob skimming my shoulders. I got the centre focus of this shot at least, my eldest sister, the birthday girl is half in sun, half in shade, beloved cat in arms. Ages 12, 10, 9, 8, 6, 4. All the gang like a countdown.
With my favourite purple dress on, a lace trim and an embroidered animal on it, as cute as everyone said I was. I remember how light I felt that day, alive, at home in my body and family. That moment of connection, belonging and joy was captured forever by mum’s click on the camera. My memory may be true or false of how supremely happy I was in that moment. But that spark of the woman I would grow up to be was already there.
We relaxed from the shot. Who knows when the bickering started? Probably within moments.
When darling husband mentioned the UK Prime Minister’s name this week and I didn’t know who he was talking about, I thought perhaps I’d taken my news and current affairs sabbatical too far.
With the same tentative gesture of venturing into the shed, pulling a box from its long-held position on the shelf to see how many cockroaches are underneath it, I ventured in briefly.
But even a toe dip into current affairs requires significant amounts of yoga, breathing and lying in the dark on the shakti mat with an eye bag firmly weighting my scorched eyeballs afterwards. And yet, we mustn’t look away.
So the only comfort I can find is the perspective of history. That we have been through upheavals and entire nation wrong-headedness before.
So there was nothing for it but to return to my usual night-time listening of Tara Brach. Her reminder via Thich Nhat Hanh to keep our lights burning, never let the world dim our lights was important for me.
Where ever you are in your immersion into world affairs from full-body to a tiny toe-dip like me, here’s to your light blazing.
