As long as you’ve got your elf…

Sunday Blog 63 – Sunday 11th December 2022

I remember this cartoon from years ago–I can’t quite find the right attribution without falling into a black internet hole so I am taking the risk of just posting it, anyway. It’s so topical for me. Because, Christmas and Elf. Yes, mature people are always saying “as long as you’ve got your health” and a wag, sick of hearing this, riffed on it with a Christmas theme comic.

For over two weeks now, my health has been unpredictable and its absence has stripped away everything normal. Yoga practice, Sunday Blogs, writing… everything is weird.

I’m not convinced of the usefulness (or indeed the existence) of Elves. But my health is something that, when it is missing, I desperately seek it and remember its value.

The short story seems to be my neck is out. That has meant no comfortable way to lie, sit or stand. Migraines that won’t stop, even a trip to Emergency which helped with the worse excesses of the nausea phase. But every night now I am lucky if I sleep until midnight. Then it’s a cat and mouse game of trying remedies and distractions, repeat until dawn.

The very worst thing for me is I wake with absolutely no energy. To say I am a morning person is a vast understatement. My flat mate from the 1990s in London so hated my cheerful early morning trill of “Shower’s free!” that she has re-purposed it into a wake up call for her teenage son, so he too can suffer as she did.

Now the morning finds me on this strange shore where I wake feeling like I have been squeezed of every last bit of joy. I shuffle through the morning hours until about 9.30, when I typically would have been doing my yoga and feeling on top of the world.

I miss my health. I don’t know where it is, or when it will come back. But when it does, I will remember to lay my gratitude on thick. Without it, life is hard..

A year on…

Sunday Blog 62 – 20 November 2022

So clearly I haven’t had a professional follow up photo – but here I am, one year on from the 23rd November 2021 discovery within my gold diary’s pages that I’d had ENOUGH. It was time to quit the day job.

I decided as well as quitting the day job I would let my hair go grey, an outer sign of the massive internal transition. I still consider them two very good decisions.

And what has a year taught me? How close am I to knowing what’s next?

Well, I am still a health nerd. I sit on a handful of national and state health-related committees still. I definitely feel people are entitled to my opinion and rarely hesitate to offer it. I’m still tilting at plenty of health windmills.The wonderful thing is, I don’t have to run an organisation as well.

Informed health choices is still a core passion that burns with the heat of a thousand suns. This week alone I was able to help two people navigate our health system.

I am still working on the novella, and I have progressed a lot thanks to the Emerging Writers program.

I am still working out what I need to do to make a living, as it’s not retirement time just yet. I have been amusing myself looking at some of my scribbles from last year as I emoted over many diary pages what to do to earn a crust. Do I want finish the process of becoming a certified coach? Nup, I have finally worked out. But not before signing up to me an International Coach Federation member, re-engaging with my wonderful coach trainer and getting temporarily enthused about doing a Masters. Oh, and deciding against the Singapore Trip to become an Enneagram coach…

Do I want to be a consultant? Well, not if it means perpetrating yet more unread reports on the world. Alas I had already bought a Microsoft computer thinking that I would need that as a big shot consultant. I re-discovered how much I loathe Microsoft and my icloud and One Drive files have turned into a sort of glorious digital Eton Mess. Oh, and I registered for GST – because, thinking big. That has now been cancelled by my long-suffering accountant and I only need to do one more BAS.

I mean, it’s a hell yes to facilitating complex conversations and getting someone else to do the write-up. But not a full-on consultant, with writing pushed to the margins again.

Do I want to stack shelves at Woolies from 6am-10am? Well, after emerging from all that consulting I thought I might. At least that wouldn’t take up all my mental bandwidth like consulting does. I flew through the first few stages of the recruitment process for my local store (to be fair, they were all automated) but at the face to face interview the manager gently probed how someone with my ahem- sedentary work history would go with the hard yakka of stacking shelves. He wisely suggested I sleep on it and I awoke at 3am in a cold sweat. Imagine losing all my gorgeous morning hours I’ve just clawed back.

Do I want to look after my mum? Hell yes.

Do I want to do Airbnb the granny flat to assuage my aching maternal heart now my adult daughter has moved out? Hells yeah.

I was trying to work all of this out in November 2021. When oh when will I learn that it must unfold?

And that if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no?

Gracetown Cookfest

Sunday Blog 61 – 13th November 2022

I’m not sure if any of my other siblings even remember that holiday. But it’s stayed with me to this day. The Gracetown Cookfest holiday I am calling it. In need to differentiate it because every holiday since the 1960s we six lucky children went en famille to our asbestos beach shack in Gracetown, near Margaret River. This simple rectangle of a house was built over a couple of weekends by my dad and a couple of friends and was endlessly tweaked over the decades. He sold the house in the nineties. (I know. Devastating!!)

On this particular Cookfest holiday, my dad had decided he was going to do some cooking. That may sound revolutionary for a working man in the 1970s. But as the middle child of eleven in a family of nine boys he simply had to help his mother out. He worked beside his mother, who was a good cook, and he became one too. 

She would bake a loaf of bread I guess daily, using natural yeast starters like potato skins. Her scones were legendary and her recipe has been passed to her numerous grandchildren. My uncle John, just two years older than my father, was relegated to managing the dairy farm. His kitchen experience usually meant wolfing down food.

“I could swallow a scone whole without biting it,” he would tell us at many family gatherings over the decades. Nine boys are stiff competition for nutrition!

On the way down to our Gracetown beach house that holiday, dad stopped at a fresh food market. That wasn’t really a “thing” in those days. I can still recall the deep, vital green of the celery sticks he chose. The orange carrots, the enormous onions. The plumpness of the chicken he chose for his stock. I was entranced so entranced by the whole ritual I can still remember the larger-than-life celery looked and how good the meal he made tasted. It was like a whole world away from the apricot chicken, the tuna and almonds, the insipid, pale curry with currants or endless chops and over-cooked vegetables that were usually on the menu for us.

Today I googled chorizo chicken and prawns to find a funky new dish to combine those three awesome ingredients. (Jumbalaya. Delicious!). One minute I was chopping celery, the next I was transported back to that Gracetown kitchen, channeling my dad and cooking up a storm. He passed in 2020 and when I think of him the most when I am cooking.

Our headlines change…

Sunday Blog 60 – 6th November 2022

There is a trigger warning on this post as it talks about grief, sexual assault and trying to make a difference from the traumas that we experience. Please take care when reading or feel free to scroll on by.

I can only guess that it was around 10am in the morning on 10th May 2002-to be honest time was elastic that morning. I was in the unlovely concrete WA Police Headquarters and a weary female Constable and I were still hard at it getting my statement done. She had worked all night prior to my call coming in at I guess around 5am. As the only female on duty it was her job to be with me while I got my statement done. In my naiveté I thought it wouldn’t take too long. After all the horrifying home invasion and sexual assault probably hadn’t lasted longer than 15-20 minutes. How long could it take to commit that to paper? Hours and hours and hours, I discovered.

But at 10am on the 10th of May I had to say to that weary Constable that something good would come of this.

She looked at me and said “let’s just focus on the statement, shall we? And then you can save the world later on.” We both laughed. We had bonded by then and I have never forgotten her or her many kindnesses to me that night.

But she had a point. I still hadn’t done the forensic examination, and that too was many hours long ahead.

Fast forward to 2022. As a podcast fiend, and big fan of Maya Shanka’s A Slight Change of Plans podcast I was glued to the episode featuring Nora McInerny. She had also lost her father and had a miscarriage, all within six weeks. Nora was determined to make meaning from this clusterfuckery. She honoured her husband’s memory and worked through her grief by developing the peer support group called the Hot Young Widows.

Over time this consumed and depleted her, but quitting seemed unthinkable. Would that mean she was “over” her husband’s death, that his life hadn’t counted? There’s a moment in the second half of the podcast episode where she talks about the moment where she knew something had to give.

I had to stop the recording and capture it like a bug in amber for this week’s Sunday blog:

The headline of your story changes as life goes on. So there absolutely was a period of time in life where the most important thing that I could relay to somebody me was that my husband died. They needed to know that and it needed to be the first thing that they knew because that was the most important thing about me, to me in that moment. It’s a bullet point now. And that’s OK.

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/pushkin-early-listen-when-surviving-is-enough/id1561860622?i=1000584276298

I did listen to that weary Constable that morning and re-focused on doing the statement that morning. But I began writing the daily journal that helped me write my memoir Not My Story.

And I clearly remember in the weeks and months after 10th May, I too felt it was the most important thing for people to know that about me. That I had survived a home invasion and sexual assault. I even felt that if they got to know me without this “most important thing about me, to me in that moment” they may even feel that they had liked and trusted me on false pretences. That when they knew the horrid truth they would reject me. The impact of my early, uncontrolled disclosure was soon apparent to me. I learned that no-one would reject me when they knew the truth and that I needed to take care of the listener before blurting.

Nora McInerny’s description of our life’s headline changing over time really spoke to me. I imagined some of my life’s headlines, framed over seven year intervals.

  • Only Gen-Xer born into large Catholic family of Boomers
  • 7 year-old goes completely off school but sadistic nun says “nothing to see here”
  • 14 year-old goes to Europe. Mind blown.
  • Second keg saves 21st as party exceeds numbers expected
  • 28 year old Perth girl gets dumped in London, can’t stomach Bridget Jones’ Diary
  • 34 year old cheats medicalised birthing system by sneaking in a drug-free birthing pool delivery in a Perth hospital (I know, that’s way too long for a headline)

I was 36 when there was an actual headline after the sentencing of the man who broke into my home – it just said “Man rapes mother.” I think I might still have that clipping somewhere. I kind of hope that I don’t.

  • 49 year old self-publishes a memoir and has to keep her day job
  • 56 year old embarks on menopausal gap year

I mean, it’s kind of fun, isn’t it? Playing about with our headlines? But also, it’s absolutely true. It’s ok for us to have new headlines. Life goes on.

Have fun creating…

Sunday Blog 59 – 30th October 2022

It was the long ago, faraway world of 1983 and I was in Year 13 – the first year out of school. I was dating someone older than me so that meant I was adopting all his preferences, in this case music. I found myself camped outside of the old Perth Entertainment Centre waiting to buy tickets to a concert. This place has since disappeared but looked like the lid of a coke bottle. It has been replaced by something that looks like blue origami created by someone on acid.

There was some excitement back in 1983 as Perth often missed out on these types of concerts – and because it was David Bowie was back after a five year break from touring. At some point in the middle of the coldish night of camping out I found myself admitting “I don’t really like David Bowie.”

But I was swept along on the passivity of a young woman and helped that group of friends get tickets for us all. While that concert did not turn me into a raving fan, I had to acknowledge Bowie’s talent. This talent only continued to blossom and spread and iterate over several art forms over the years.

So yesterday I took myself off to see Moonage Daydream, not so much a documentary as an immersion into Bowie’s creative life. It does follow a chronology but is described as immersive. For me this meant I often felt a bit lost but on a very picturesque path which every now and then had a signpost for me to orientate. I had to google him afterwards and there were just so many interesting details I learned that might have been in a traditional documentary but this was really an anthem to creativity.

He got to go right through all the life stages of development to get to a tranquil but very creatively productive maturity. His advice towards the end was to enjoy the creative process. How radical a thought – forget the tortured artist and truck loads of drugs – just give time to your art and do what you enjoy.

What a radical dude he was, right to the end.

You are the sky…

Sunday Blog 58 – 23rd October 2022

Getting Covid right at the end of the “official” pandemic, when staying home is only recommended, not mandated, has been strange on so many levels.

What’s weirdest for me is wanting to stay close to home. Don’t get me wrong, I love my home, but I adore heading out into the world, hustling and bustling my way around the place. Sticking my nose in here, looking at something artsy there. Eating food and drinking wine and being with people.

It’s a strange in-between time for me. I have hit the six month mark of having joined the great Covid Resign trend by leaving my job. This pause reminds me of 24 years ago when I returned from Europe after a ten year absence, five months pregnant and taking my first break from work for a long time.

Stepping out of the powerful river of relentless working is a strange and wonderful thing. But now I feel stripped of ambition and the will to leave the house. Doing one thing a day is ambitious and I have an almost superstitious need to get back home.

I did leave the house for a walk, listening to a podcast as I meandered. It was a conversation between Marie Forleo and Danielle La Porte about Danielle’s new book How To Be Loving. Danielle discussed the Buddhist concept of likening ourselves to the sky. We are the sky – we are consciousness. The clouds are emotions which will pass. They are not us.

I looked up at the sky and it was completely covered in clouds, not a single bit of blue to be seen. That definitely reflected my state of mind. But it did help a little to remind myself that above the clouds the skies are blue.

“C” is for community…

Sunday Blog 57 – 16th October 2022

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the Town Team Convergence event held in Perth’s southern suburbs. It brought together people from Town Teams across different suburbs of Perth but also from our Midwest and South West – up to four hours drive away. Town teams are a partnership with community, business and local government to beautify local areas.

Alongside others I painted ugly asphalt–so exhilirating–and made a letter “C” to so we could make out the words “Connection” and “Community” in cardboard letters. We spelled this out over a pedestrian bridge for a moment and photo opportunity. The toots of one or two cars were like a standing ovation.

Today I am at a placemaking event held in a northern suburb of Perth to encourage the development of a piazza in a car park adjacent to a busy road. Children and families are having a turn painting ugly asphalt. There are politicians on hand who are promising follow through on the work required to make the piazza a reality. But none of it would have happened without a grassroots push from people in the community to make it a reality. Many unpaid hours have seen this idea come to life.

Several years ago despite my hectic work schedule I re-joined my neighbourhood association. It was as a form of therapy from the often soulless and ineffective process of creating policies, frameworks and reform reports. The practical reality of doing something at neighbourhood level was and is intoxicating.

I’m reminded of the interesting Brene Brown interview with Dan Pink, the author of The Power of Regret.

“What’s your passion is a stupid freaking question…The question we should be asking ourselves is… “‘What do you do when nobody’s watching? What do you do because it’s part of you?”

https://brenebrown.com/podcast/the-power-of-regret/

Community work is part of me. What’s your thang?

Homecomings and the spicy cough

Sunday Blog 56 – 9th October 2022

The suitcase was completely unpacked, the memory-foam neck cushion had its cover stripped for cleaning, the travel wash was flapping on the line, even the adaptor plugs were stored away.

Why did I feel so discombobulated and not quite here?

Travel is always a bit like that for me – scenes of places I have been flit and flip through my mind, waiting to be sorted into a memory box for future rumblings. Conversations and discussions with people I’ve met and re-met require reflection and integration.

I love to immerse in European culture, experiences and memories, and make new memories with loved ones. I love the feeling of being a “citizen of the world”, able to negotiate different terrains. But the pangs I felt in the arid house at Kew Gardens on seeing Australian plants with their incomparable shapes and smells tells the whole story for me. Australia is my beloved home.

But it turns out that it was not an existential crisis creating my befuddled mental state on my return to Perth. It was the spicy cough, which got me, most likely at Heathrow or on the packed flight home. I have done so many RAT tests over the years, but this time I was right.

I have taken to my bed with a clear conscience to rest and reflect.

Signing off from London

Sunday Blog 55 – 2nd October 2022

My first weeks in London, June 1990

I’ve had such wild dreams about this holiday. I’m hoping it will… slough the layer of apathy off the layer of calm, and allow me to look many fears in the face… But I suppose the closer I get to the destination, the more I mistrust romantic notions of a clean sweep I am, after all, still the same person, even the 14-year-old who last trod the moving walkways of Heathrow.”

14th June 1990 – diary entry written in Moscow Airport before I was due to land in London for an extended working holiday.

It’s always rather sobering to read old diary entries. The one written above was in Moscow airport, because in 1990 Aeroflot was a very cost-effective way to get from Australia to London. Obviously we stopped at Moscow airport en route and well I remember the grumpy staff at the airport who refused to serve non-Russians. I sat down to journal some of my confusion and fear while waiting to board the short flight to London.

My early London diaries are full of realisations of the Moscow entry concerns. Was I in the wrong job? (yes) Would I stick to my wellness goals? (nope, but eventually I would find yoga). They are also seeped in loneliness, occasionally interspersed with tales of unrequited love or disastrous romantic entanglements.

How wonderful it has been to come back to London and dabble in the nice things, and celebrate how the difficulties are long, long behind me. What a blessing to acknowledge all the good things London delivered for me. An investment. Career experience albeit completely unrelated to what I do now.

But how quickly London can envelope you in its enormity, and lure you into its embrace of anonymity and loneliness. The best bit of all about this trip to London has been connecting with old friends and visiting old haunts. Giving a nod to the 14 year old me, and the 25-35 year old me across the chasm of time, and letting them know all is well.

My sister and I in London – on the left in 1979, on the right in 2022
Me and Fi in London, on the left in 2006 on the right in 2022

Vale Hilary Mantel

Sunday Blog 54 – 25th September 2022

Recently I stumbled across this interview with Hilary Mantel from a couple of years ago where she asserts that writers can be productive by carving out just two hours per day. Admittedly these need to be golden hours where your energy is high and you’ve had enough time to warm up to your writing project. So not two hours with 25 tabs open and a regular check of your facebook feed.

I have lost count of the number of times I have read articles that tell me I have to write every day. I have baulked at this advice even though it has meant me dragging out my current writing project for seven plus years and umpteen drafts. It was not until The Mantel set it out in her interview that it just resonated for me and at last I was committed.

As I was on a self-guided writing retreat last week I decided my key focus was embedding the habit of my two golden hours of writing per day. I was pootling along very well (and who wouldn’t with the incredible surrounds of Hydra and the house we were staying it??) Then came the shocking news that this multiple Booker Prize winning author died suddenly of a stroke on Thursday – at just 70 years of age, with so many awesome books to be written.

I just have to stick to this new routine now. Do it for Hilary!