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A State of Grace

You know what I'm bored of hearing? What I should do.

I tell someone how I'm feeling and they start to suggest things:

"Have you tried yoga?"
"You should see a psychologist."

Or even better:

"Are you OK?"

So, thank you helpful people of the universe. I shall take your advice as you are probably not using it.

Bull-fucking-shit.

I am sick to death of people telling me how this is supposed to play out, and what I should and shouldn't say, in what forums and to whom.

And the mourning cycle doesn't even really apply to me because I've suffered so many traumas in such a short period of time, so don't tell me when I am supposed to be over this, because I don't think putting a time limit on grief really helps with these situations.

I was recently suicidal.

It's a powerful thing to say, isn't it? I've never entertained a properly suicidal thought before, but I got there, and it's a very dark place.

Very. Very dark.

Looking out the window of the tram, my face soaked with tears, trying desperately to cover my face in my book. My hands shaking and my chest heaving. Just wanting it all to end.

I didn't want to die because I no longer wanted to live. But life was painful and I wanted the pain to stop.

And I didn't want to die, but I wanted to hurt all of those people who have hurt me in the last year. I wanted them to know what they had done. I wanted them to know that they have blood on their hands for isolating and neglecting me, for rejecting me, for not supporting me, when I need it most.

But mostly I didn't want to die, because I want to live. I have so many connections to the world of the living. Wonderful people I would never want to hurt. And so I walked away from the edge, and went and saw the psychologist again.

I looked out the window of the stopped tram, and a man in a car looked up at me, and smiled at me. Just a gentle smile.

And I felt a little moment of connection.

And in case you were wondering, I didn't die.

But I want you all to know, I'm not OK.

I've been trying to keep up the appearance of gracefulness under fire, but really... I don't want to be in a state of grace.

I have been wronged. I have endured what no person should endure. And I want everyone who has hurt me to suffer because I hate them. They are arseholes and they should suffer. I am sick of being ignored and shut out. I have not been erased from history because people have decided to pretend I never existed. I wanted to make them sit up and take notice. I wanted them to feel terrible about what they had done because they fucking well should.

I am not suicidal now. I can't say I won't be in the future, because I don't know. But I am writing this because I want someone to know... particularly someone who might be feeling similarly... that being a revenge-minded, hateful ghost for eternity, no matter how much you hate everyone... it still probably isn't worth it. If you want to die, go see a counsellor. You'll probably find that you're just fixating on something, but you're never stuck. There's always volition to be had in the world, and every person has the power to change something about their world. It's a matter of finding what you can fix and fixing that and building up to bigger challenges when you're ready.

If I look at the sky at the right time of evening, and the light is rosy and the warm wind is light in the leaves on the trees... I look at it all and think: "who'd be dead for quids? This shit is beautiful and awesome, and I am blessed."

I find so much solace in nature.

And I cuddle my friends to my chest, and I break bread with them, and watch terrible movies with them and I think: "I really am blessed."

So be brave with me, people.

I am sick of people thinking depression and suicide is not a topic for conversation.  We need to flush this out into the open. We need to admit that people can feel hopeless. And we need to uncloak suicide.

I have had three immediate female family members commit suicide. I never thought I would ever go close to being one of their number. But it finally happened.

And it wasn't out of hopelessness or loneliness. It was out of spite.

But I'm still here, writing. I've been up and down, yes, but I will keep fighting. I love the people I love, and I only hate the people I hate because I used to love them. It's easier to forgive a stranger than to forgive a friend.

I will rewrite this another day when I am feeling more eloquent, but I think it is important to admit openly that I have considered stopping bothering the people I love with my endless misery, so that I can inflict it on the people I hate. But I have decided against it.

And I hope that maybe someone might read this and treat me, and other depressed people, a little better because of it. Because it only takes one random act of kindness, a smile from a stranger in a car, to reconnect in a disconnected headspace.

You could be that smiling person.

Or you could just be dead.

Or you might kill someone by their own hand.

The world is full of fascinating choices. And none of these are made in a state of grace.

Books I read in 2014

I hadn't been reading much for the past few years. And then in 2014, the year of my disasters, I began reading again in earnest.


Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammet
Intimacy and Solitude - Stephanie Dowrick
The Foundation - Steve P. Vincent
State of Emergency - Steve P. Vincent
Judge Dee at Work - Robert van Gulik
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murukami
South of the Border, East of the Sun - Haruki Murukami
The Pyrates - George MacDonald Fraser
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

Rest in Peace

So, that last post kind of dealt with the loss of my mother, and I'd like to acknowledge the wonderful response people have given me to that post. It is heartening to think that people get something out of what I am attempting to share here.

And so, with that, I bring the next post, the end of my relationship with Tom.

I wrote some very nice things here a long time ago, and I've deleted them now because I've faced the fact that it was not a good relationship. It was never a good relationship. I was used, used up, treated like shit by a piece of shit, and I'm sorry I ever met him.

Life started to wear us down. Between the employment instability, questions about our career directions, creative disagreements, a traumatic experience for Tom witnessing a violent crime, different social needs and finally, the constant drag of my mother's illness - our shared life began to get caught in the wake of too many things that were pulling us apart.

We began to fight more often. We began to have major differences of opinion on what we wanted to do as shared goals. Dog, job, kids, house, blah... I had an abortion. All those normal things went from being questions of when should we do this, to should if we be doing this at all?

It all came to a head just before my mum died. There were some trigger points, but none of that requires going into in great detail - if anyone cares, it makes no difference, in the end - we broke up.

Our attitude toward each other had changed so much, we had become poisonous for each other to be around. I don't think either of us were happy with the way it panned out, but I just ran out of energy. I was consumed by grief. I had nothing left to give. And I needed to give it my energy because Tom is a piece of shit, vampire, who sucked all the life out of me.

I don't see Tom any more. He blocked me on Facebook. I blocked him on Instagram. Fuck him, he was a cunt and I just didn't see it.

Our friendship rests in silence.

Where to start... and now it ends

This blog started when I was about to embark on a remarkable journey. And I guess, in a way, I'm about to embark on another remarkable journey, but the beginning seems to blend in with the end of the last journey. Tom and I went to Japan. We came back. We were in love. This I am sure of. But there is so much to feel unsure about...

How to start? Do I tell you about what happened year-on-year? This year; this. That year; that. Hmmm... seems too difficult to tell the story that way, and as much as history is subjective, I want to tell the story in a way that is as objective as possible. I am not here to defame anyone or blame anyone. I'm just here to try and figure out what happened, maybe share my experience, and maybe someone can find solace in my story, learn to empathise with people who have been through what I've been through, or just get a good read out of it. Because I'm not a bad writer at the end of the day.

I just assumed that I had found my forever path. Like so many of life's questions were answered, never to be asked again. But I was wrong. Forever wasn't there. It all turned to ashes in my mouth and the things I took for granted were gone.

So let's start with Mum.

The cancer was discovered in 2011. A nagging pain in the side was misdiagnosed a few times. The fevers were attributed to menopause; the aches to muscle soreness from moving house. The weight loss was from a healthy diet, the lethargy from being too active. Until she couldn't be active. My mother, the tigress, was reduced to a kitten. The air that she breathed could no longer nourish her. She was fading away before our very eyes. And it was then that our dear friends in the medical profession finally looked beyond the obvious, prosaic answers, and tested for leukaemia.

And there it was. As plain as day. Blood swabs full of blasts. Blasts are, for the uninitiated, immature blood cells - too small to carry the oxygen an adult needs. Blood is manufactured in human adults in the ribcage, spine and hips. As leukaemia sets in, these bones become porous. They rot from the inside out. The precious marrow that for the last however many years of your life has uncomplainingly gone about the business of recycling and remaking those precious little red cells and white cells that make you alive, suddenly start to rebel. And complain; they say bone pain is awful. In the canon of "which pain is most awful," chronic bone pain is considered to be one of the worst, and with leukaemia there is no flood of hormones and adrenaline to carry you through, like with a broken bone or childbirth. All that you have is a growing ache that comes alive as your bones die from within you. And then you die.

My mother faced this news with grim determination, single-minded in the idea that she would fight and she would win. End of 2011, I jumped on a plane down to Hobart, little knowing that this would be the first of many, to see my mother in hospital as she received her first round of chemotherapy. I was beside myself. After seeing my father fade away from cancer so quickly, from diagnosis to death within three months, I was on full panic stations. My mother seemed so hale and hearty, growing into her old age with more grace than I had ever expected. I was ready to see her bounce the children I was planning with Tom on her knee, and tell them all the things that grandmothers yearn to tell their grandchildren. I wasn't ready for her to die. And she wasn't ready to die either. She had plans. She'd just retired. She was planning the next thirty years, and now we didn't know if we had thirty months or even thirty days.

The doctors were cagy. They gave us very few prognoses at the outset. They just threw all the chemo they could at my mother. And the chemo made her ill. Very, very ill. This is fighting poison with poison, just hoping that neither of them killed Mum in the process. A dangerous game with bad odds, played by well-meaning medical professionals who are balancing an innumerable number of variables, that ends up playing out with a bucket of drugs, one after another, to cover up the side-effects of the last one.

I went to the GP and got a referral to see a psychologist. Dr Sonia. She really helped calm me down in those first few months, to help me prepare for the eventuality that this cancer was playing for keeps and my mother's chances of survival in the current medical environment were slim to none. And I quickly came to a sense of peace. That the key to life is not doing things you will regret, and that the only regret I could have is to not have a good relationship with my mother when the time came that she would pass away. And our friendship grew so much stronger with the two of us using this as our guiding light. Petty fights never boiled up any more. Disappointments were handled with a sad smile and a hug. Where there used to be fire in our relationship there was now calm waters. We came to accept each other and our fate very early in the piece, and I think we were healed quite deeply by the way that we faced those final months.

The first round of chemo quickly led to a second, there were some small wins, the cancer seemed to shrink away, but my mother was so weakened by the chemo that they put her on some low-dosage chemo that just kept her ticking away - not well enough to do much, but not unwell enough to be bed bound. She shuffled around the house in her slippers for a while like that, with many midnight runs to the hospital with fevers from almost constant opportunistic infections. For a while it felt like the infections might be the thing that would finally finish her off. But they didn't.

Mum tired of the low-dosage chemo and told them to go for broke. Her attitude was to go down fighting if she had to go at all. So she went into St John's Hospital and they blasted her with the strongest thing they had for leukaemia that they had. That was October 2013. And I sat in the hospital room a couple of times with her. She was so bombed out of her mind on pain killers she could barely listen to other people talk, let alone speak for herself. A strange little child-like version of my mother... the tigress, reduced to a kitten once more. The pain drugs were strong. Really strong. This was hospice/palliative care, not curative medicine, just an attempt to make my mother comfortable for when the time came. I don't think the hospital thought she'd make it, and that this was all folly, throwing good chemotherapy drugs after bad.

But then it worked and my mother came back to us for a while. She awoke from that strange childlike opiate slumber and rubbed the crust from her eyes. And weaned herself off the pain drugs and went home for the first time in months. It was summer. She was able to enjoy the garden and the sunlight on her skin. It was a precious, surreal time, playing with the sheep and the fish in the pond. She wasn't the same strong bodied woman who had started this journey, but she was happy. It was really lovely.

Then the cancer came back, and the chemo stopped working, and finally, my mother downed arms. There was no more that could be done if we couldn't find a bone marrow donor. And a bone marrow donor couldn't be found. I wasn't suitable, Rowan wasn't, none of the sisters, all of the extended family (right back to England), no one could match her bone marrow.

I guess it finally proves, she was a true original.

Between April and June 2014 I spent most of my time with her in Tasmania. I would bring her hampers of foods that she loved so she didn't have to endure the hospital slop. We played cards. I got her to tell me stories of her childhood, and I wrote them down diligently. Pictures from a childhood in Claremont, three marriages of varying quality, great love for her kids. It was like I only got to know some parts of her in those last weeks and I wonder how much more we would have gotten to share had our time together not been stolen from us.

On Friday 13 June 2014, she died. And I was not there. And that, is another story for another time.

Life trauma

So, I'm back.

I had to walk away from the mindless microblogging of facebook. So easy to do, but so unsatisfying. Does it give you time to reflect on your journey? No. It just allows you to shout into a cupboard and have a flurry of little thumbs come up in your wake. Does it give you perspective? Does it give you strength? Does it extend your writing skills?

No. No. And no.

It's a fool's paradise where you can feel connection without having any connection. I've been so lonely, I was beginning to lose all perspective on what I was doing.

Since my last post so much has happened. And I think it has been such a terrifying and awful time that each of these years deserves some rumination on the stuff that has happened.

Good stuff:
- Released Vermin to the Earth.
- Recorded Aokigahara Jukai.
- Released Aokigahara Jukai.
- Toured Japan with the band.
- Got a permanent job.
- Got an awesome secondment.
- Got some great job experience.

Bad stuff:
- Marion died.
- Grandmere died.
- My Mum died.
- Tom and I "broke up."
- I "left" Thrall.
- I lost my house.
- I had to do a property settlement in which I lost all access to the recording equipment and amps.
- I almost went mad from employment stress.
- I had a pregnancy that didn't work out.
- Tom went on our holiday to the USA when I was stuck in the hospital with my dying mother.

I will write something more in the coming weeks. I'm moving house this weekend. There's a long story to be told, and I think I want to tell it.

CAN. NOT. BE. BOTHERED. BLOGGING.

Ah, this was so much easier when we lived in Japan... to give you all little titbits of interesting. Now-a-days, it's a bit more of a struggle. But that said, it's still worthwhile to reflect on the journey, and to give those of you who don't want to play facebook an opportunity to follow the life and times of Em and Tom.

But I really can't be bothered going into too much detail, so I've decided to write some dot points.

Job

• Tom's got a job now. It's an admin support role. It pays well enough and it's for 6 months, so we're pretty stable.
• I finished my first contract/trial period for the Executive Assistant role. I'm now doing a 6 week contract as a Policy Officer in a different work unit of the same department. After I finish that, I'll go back to the Executive Assistant role. I'm feeling pretty blessed and happy, because I got to have the opportunity to do something more challenging, but I also get the security of going back to my old job. Life is good.
• That said, both Tom and I find our admin roles pretty annoying. People do not treat their admin support staff very well a lot of the time, and take the piss asking you to do things that they really shouldn't ask you to do.
• We both got through to the shortlist from the Victorian Public Service Graduate Intake Scheme. Very pleased with ourselves, and we hope to be employed full-time as a grad by next year. If not, it's back to the job hunt for me.

Thrall

• Mixing for Vermin to the Earth is completed. We're just waiting for Arts Victoria to get back to us about a grant we went for to help us pay for the mastering process. I hope we get the grant, because it will give us an opportunity to put together a very cool package for the next album, and get some new promo photos done and ask Janssen to make us another one of his awesome film clips. If we get the grant, we will be mastering in July. If we find out we didn't get the grant, we'll master sooner.
• We played a show at Bar Open. The show was OK, I suppose, but not one of our greatest. Just felt like the wrong vibe for us that evening. I think it might just be better if we kept our focus on doing one or two good shows rather than doing lots of shows.
• I have booked the venue for a Sydney show with Creeping and Erebus Enthroned. We're thinking of adding one other to the bill. It's going to be rad, and I'll start promoting it as heavily as I can as soon as I have the Melbourne show sorted out (which is proving to be a bit more difficult to sell our pulling power to potential venues).
• Black Jesus and Thrall show in Tassie at the Brisbane. Will announce that shortly too.
• We have some labels in mind for Vermin to the Earth. Shan't say too much, but it's going to be gooooooood!

Everything else

• When we drove back from Sydney after that 40ºc day, the car sprung an oil leak. I topped up the engine oil on the drive back. What I didn't realise was that it wasn't the oil wasn't coming from the engine. It was coming from the gearbox. The other day the car just fucked out and wouldn't go into gear. Had to get towed. Need a new gearbox now. Expensive times...
• I cut my arm on the edge of a mirror in the bathroom and had to have stitches. Don't worry, it's healed well, the stitches came out last week, and it was not near any nerves or major arteries or veins or anything. So, all in all, it was merely expensive. And just when I didn't need any more expenses.
• I bought Tom a dolphin swim for his birthday, because it was the most rare and unusual gift I could think of. I also got him the Hellhammer/Celtic Frost book "Only Death Is Real" because I'm a real nice wife.
• Tom got some new jeans and they look really good on him.

OK, can't be bothered writing more. Tune in next time for the continued adventures of T + E...