This week I tuned into a podcast all about memoir and journalling, just after returning from my recent Bali writing retreat. While there, I finished transcribing my 2006-2010 journal. (Procrastination about editing the memoir? How very dare you!)
Among other things, the podcast episode highlighted that journalling can sometimes be more effective than therapy. While that may or may not be true, one thing is certain. A re-read of journals can be a chance to re-acquaint yourself with the people you used to be. (Like that stranger who wanted to learn golf!) Journals can also reveal how we may have re-told experiences over the years which aren’t strictly, well, true.
Take Engagement Ring Gate. In 2008 my partner proposed in a kind of “let’s build the extension and let’s get married” sort of way. There was little certainty in his wording, and certainly no ring.
Engagement Ring Gate has been one of our go-to squabbles. I asserted that I had wanted an engagement ring, but in fact, what my journal pages revealed was this. Many women had said to me if they had their time over again, they would skip the engagement ring and get diamonds in the wedding band. So that’s what I chose, and that’s what I got.
And yet I still whinged.
My journal pages gifted me a sharp lesson in practising gratitude rather than carping about the past. Accepting what is and moving forward.
Darling husband cautiously received my belated apology for EngagementRing Gate, and has only joked about it once. So far.
If so, that’s what my Mum cast over my life, leaving a trail of constructive kindness and unconditional acceptance.
Not to mention whimsical remnants of 1940s teen slang such as “I’m all gog-wozzled” when she was overwhelmed, confused, tired, temporarily deranged. With six children under the age of eight, she often was.
I shared Mum with five siblings, numerous nieces and nephews, grand-children and great-grandchildren, cousins, great-nieces and nephews, friends – the list goes on. And her long, bright shadow shone on us all.
Happy first heavenly Mother’s Day Mum. We sure do miss you down here.
Why does travel cast such a spell over me? Each time I travel, I imagine that this time, I’ll understand the mystery at last. Is the answer held in my body? The night before I travel I always remind myself that “it’s my last night in my own bed.” And I conjure images of where I will sleep that night.
My collection of cells that is my body walks up the ramp to the plane, off at the other end, to gather up the baggage and bundle myself into a taxi. And then here are my collection of cells, out of the taxi, into the hotel room, into my temporary bed. Overnight, my cells coalesce, a switch is thrown and I catch up with where I am.
This week I’m staying at gorgeous Nalini Resort in Amed in Bali, and I tell myself the trick about travelling to beautiful places is to be here while you’re here.
Don’t miss a moment of the bright morning light, the cool depths of the pool, all white tiles and turquoise water. The gentle trickle of the infinity pool as the water reaches the edge and laps over. The pavilion in the centre of the pool you get to by a narrow bridge to seek the precious early morning shade. The pair of triangle pillow cushion daybeds laid out in welcome on the pavilion, flanking the small idiosyncratic table which still holds the imprint of the hands that made it. A place to rest the journal and scratch out some words, every now and then looking up. There, two large leaves landed on the ground, divorced from their tree, curved up at edge and seesawing on the pool tiles in the wind. And through it all the endless call of the sea. Waves splash on the shore, now gently, now a thud, and then the glittering clatter of the stones, tumbled and tumbled and tumbled in the backwash of the wave.
Breath in, travel. Breath out, arrive. Breath in, be here. Breathe out, be here. Be ready to leave graciously when the time comes. Despite what I tell myself this will be more difficult than usual. I mean, look at this place.
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.
