Orange, the Dutch, Toilets and Possums

If it was on today, I would be ready to go here without needing to get changed.

See?

Most likely a hideously garish combination of a darker orange top on top of a lighter orange skirt, my outfit is finished off with a pair of cruddy old beige ugg boots.  I just simply cannot get enough of orange today.

Today is the first break I've had for four weeks from taking antifungals.  The latest effort to bugger off the candida.  I don't think I've quite finished with it yet but I am happy for the break because it's been making me grossly irritable, anxious and life-tired. Thank goodness for molybdenum, that's all I can say.

For some reason, feeling little lighter in my being translates into the necessity for much orangeness ... putting me in solidarity with the Dutch.

Orange is a maligned colour.  I love orange.  Today, I am the ambassador for orange.

And now I feel like some poffertjes.  Which I've never had but see the sign for them regularly at the Ferntree Gully Market.  Only I can't have them, because they're wheat, and my body has told me incessantly and regularly that it really does better without wheat, thanks very much, at least in the meantime.

~

I cleaned up the toilet rolls that were piled up next to the toilet the other day.  Yes, I'm a slob.  But it's also very true that when my energy goes downhill I put off the things that are absolutely necessary to do.  Apparently taking the toilet roll out and putting it in the recycle bin in the kitchen is one of those things.

Sixteen rolls.  I'm impressed despite myself.



~

Continuing on with the toilet theme, the possum broke on through to the other side.

It is still occasionally sleeping in the hole in the wall which the cockies so kindly created.

But it's obviously not the most ideal of circumstances.  Too squishy and noisy.  As evidenced by the fact that it has busted its foot through the ensuite wall.

Days go by with nothing poking through, and then you get up in the morning to go to the loo and there it is.

A little bit of nature, brought right into the dunny.

Happy Friday and Saturday, y'alls.

After Having Left Facebook

It's been three weeks now since I've quit Facebook (again). 

So do I regret it?

Sometimes.  I regret it in those moments when I'm feeling empty and I can't turn to it to avoid the feeling.  I've also quit Twitter recently, so I can't turn there either.  What am I doing?  Where is this experiment going, exactly?  I need to remind myself of why I'm doing this, to quell the rising panic tide that threatens to rear up when seven empty moments in a row happen and I Have To Just Sit There And Let Them Happen!

I have quit social media to give myself (a) more space in my head, and (b) to try to keep in better contact with people I know in real life.  Although to be honest, it's not like I'm really going the whole hog with (a).  For that, I would need to get rid of the internet entirely.  And books.  And the TV.  See, those things in themselves have enough within them to fill up six lifetimes of headspace and emptiness avoidance.

When I consider this, and consider how I often feel a certain sort of emptiness that translates itself out into loneliness, I wonder why it is I am quitting social media, where Real Live People are, albeit pixellated.  Shouldn't I quit books instead?  Or the TV?  But then the TV has pixellated people on it as well.  And in my more cynical moments I think that that is all we become to each other on social media - like a TV that talks back.  As if we are all just packaged-up shows, not real people.  As if we are becoming our own reality TV.  That even though we interact with each other in those spaces, they make us to each other a little less like Real Live Boys and Girls and a little more like one more interchangeable pixel.

The problem with (b) is that I have hardly seen anyone in real life in the last three weeks outside of my lovely partner, and the dentist, and the assessing doctor at Centrelink, and the people I am doing a course with a couple of times a week, because I haven't had any extra energy.  So I haven't been able to put my non-Facebook-real-life into practice yet.

What complicates the whole situation is that when I am in periods of high anxiety, as I am now, my first instinct is to retreat from Real Live Boys and Girls in the flesh and go to something that feels safer in my anxiety for me to handle.  Which happens to be ... interacting with those same people online!  So you can see my dilemma, and why I'm feeling a little more lonely lately.


So do I regret quitting Facebook?  I regret it when I realise how many people don't seem to want to correspond with me unless I'm right there on Facebook.  I guess that's also the part that makes me glad to have left it. 

So I'm feeling a little bit Abandoned and Rejected and Not Loved and Not Cared About at the moment.  But perhaps my quitting FB made some other people feel Abandoned and Rejected and Not Loved and Not Cared About ... for seven seconds until they found another pixellated person to fill up the pixel-sized gap I may or may not have left.  How would I know?  I really don't know.  Perhaps there are people in my extended social circle who wish to keep in contact with me and who feel like I don't want to, and meanwhile I feel like they don't want to, and I will never know.


For all the awesomeness of technology, sometimes it feels to me that online interaction has taken all of our real-life relationships with each other and Picassoed them into a new version of themselves, where things that were once familiar are now all over the place.  Or perhaps it's just me.  You never can quite tell.  I mean, look at me - I'm complaining a little about feeling lonely and not cared about, yet I have a couple of people in my life who I call friends and who do do that.  So I am lucky.  But still this lonely feeling remains.  And what am I doing about it?  I am talking about it to the entire world.  Isn't there a disconnect here?  Feel rejected by people who in whatever fashion are within your social circle and you respond ... by talking about it online?

What a funny ole world, eh? :)

So, I am still to be able to see whether not being on social media changes my interactions with people offline.  Of course, what does worry me is that I will lose out on a whole bunch of stuff.  Stuff that people share online and then feel conversely like they have shared it with everyone and so then they won't share it with me when they see me.  Which would feel a little bit like being at a raging party without a drink ... or being out in the garden while the party goes on inside.  But still, I like it out here.  There is more space, sitting next to this tree.  And I hate parties anyway.  And I am not the only one out here.  Sometimes even those who are at the party come outside for the breather, after all :)

~ ~ ~

Edit:  Oh, and this.  This is why too.  With the Brittany thrown in as well, thanks.

A Wii Lad - one of JD Hancock's Little Dudes.

The Alchemy of Illness

"Much as sick people complain, ofter vociferously, about their isolation and the lack of sympathy from others (we constantly switch doctors and friends in search of the "good ear"), many come to recognize that this invisible wall between the sick and the well protects both.  Laura Chester wrote that "the isolation of illness did not seem to be a bad thing," for she was "left alone to revive the inner seed, which had withered under the intensity of interaction."  There came a point in the depths of my illness when I realized that the people closest to me could no longer bear to hear of my despair, which was inconsolable;  it seemed to short-circuit their capacities for attention and compassion.  After a long night of self-confrontation, I decided to keep that bitter nest of despair to myself from then on - and a curious shift occurred.  While I felt scared, like a lost child whose cries could not be heard, I also felt infused with power, a power I associate with mountain climbers and deep-sea divers, people who face their destiny and know their survival rests in their own two hands.  I felt, to use Chester's words, "my soul opening and strengthening, like a muscle."

Not only is it better for the sick to be left alone at times, it is also better for the well to leave them at times.  Healthy people can be contaminated by the gloom and depression of the ailing if they come too close or have too much sympathy;  it is commonly called burnout in the helping professions.  If that were to happen too often, as Virginia Woolf surmised, "buildings would cease to rise, roads would peter out into grassy tracks, there would be an end of music and of paintings";  for culture is created and maintained by those with the energy, enthusiasm, and idealism of health.  The well need to be well for the world to continue, just as the sick need to be sick so the world can be regenerated.  Each has a necessary job to perform."  Kat Duff - The Alchemy of Illness

I happen to like grassy tracks.  But the end of music and paintings?  Okay then, let the distance remain.

Economically Unviable

According to the Melbourne Institute’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, the majority of Aussies are better off now than they were ten years ago.  I am not one of those people.

I am in the process of applying for a disability pension.  It is horrible enough filling in page after page of personal details for faceless bureaucracy.  If I wasn't feeling small and losery and ashamed to begin with, this process would instill in me the levels of shame required for those who will claim support from the government.  After all, you cannot make this process too easy or else everybody will be rushing from their cubicles onto the social security bandwagon.

As a further insult to my flaccid confidence levels, as part of my application I have to provide details of my sole trader economic status for the transcription work I've been doing from home for the past three years.  Problem with that is that I haven't been keeping up with my tax payments.  Money’s tight, especially when you have a chronic illness, and managing my money well has never been one of my strong suits.  Which adds to my already flailing confidence because we are expected to juggle fiscal balls along with all the others  imposed upon us by a system that serves those at the top far better than it suits me at the bottom.  If we don't perform well in the areas that have been assigned to us as recognised markers of adultness – like being able to earn dosh – then we are failures, even if we happen to write some pretty good poetry, even if we say so ourselves.

This system pits its slaves one against the other, so that rather than feel sympathy for someone who’s struggling some may well be inclined to look down on me for being a financial mismanager.  It may be an occasion for them to pat themselves on the back, glad that they are not me.  It will also serve the purpose of getting them to focus on me, instead of the system we live under.  It serves its purpose well, (although there are signs of it crumpling round the edges as more and more of us question why the way we live is so completely alienating to us, the tellers of our own stories).

Some may be inclined to be glad they’re not me because of my chronic illness/pension-claiming/tax-dodging status.  Hell, I would.  Being me is not something you aspire to.  Unemployable (apparently, if job applications are anything to go by), I have been out on the edge of financial vulnerability for years.  I am the type of person who perpetuates that starving artist in the garret scenario by stupidly choosing as their passion writing, which does not pay well, if at all, and which is notoriously difficult to break into, requiring a hide of steel that was not made available to my genetic subset.  But then again, we do not seem to choose our passions;  they choose us.

I am the type of person who feels sorry for themselves, who complains on my blog about my situation instead of sucking it up and getting on with it.  But that's the problem with chronic illness – you can't always suck it up because you're ... well, you're not well.  I am the type of person who you cannot begin to understand because my illness is invisible and it's chronic and you can look at me and say, "But you look so well!" while I feel sick, and poisoned, and toxic and unhealthy.  I'm the type of person who is in bed for part of the day and then suddenly cleaning the bathroom at 10pm because I'm feeling up to it and feeling good and I want to contribute, and be useful, not a liability.

But I am the kind of person who has got myself into a bind so that before I can impose my small and defeated self upon the Department of Human Services I first have to fill in three tax returns and lodge them before I make a claim to the ATO to tell them that yes, paying this tax would mean that I would be not buying food or paying rent or paying for medications for myself.  Yes, it surely would, and would they mind it if I didn't pay it at all, or else if I paid it in lump sum installments?  And some most likely faceless person working in the cogs of those machinations will decide my future.  And whichever way it pans out, I will feel shit.  And some will judge me for not contributing.

Because there’s nothing we’re scared of more than someone else getting away with something we can’t.

But if it makes you feel better, whatever the ATO decides I will feel like I want to curl up into a small ball in the corner, a ball so small that I will complete some amazing magic trick of scientific law-defying and disappear into my very own black hole of economic unviability.

Memento Mori

You know, it really doesn't pay to trust people who are "up" all the time.  Or who insist on always looking on the bright side of life.  That doesn't ring true to me.  It feels like they're lying.  Or at least that they're hiding their less pretty sides. 

Sometimes I think that people who insist on always looking at the bright side are really in denial and terrified of what they may find if they go scrabbling around in their own closets.  Sometimes people who don't wanna go down are suffering from one of the diseases pertinent to our culture - the sort of excessive hubris that automatically comes after a while when you're up too long.  It starts to feel illegal to go down in a death-denying culture which insists that you must be always up, and that if you go down we'll medicate you.

That's insane.  That's like being a parent and allowing a red lemonade-drinking child to have as much as they want and to stay up for as long as they want.  Who isn't allowed to see dead Uncle Fred in the front parlour because that's too scary for children.  (But then what kid would see dead Uncle Fred anyway these days?  We secrete him away before he can give the game away.  Chances are Uncle Fred will wait out his closed-casket funeral in a funeral home.

It doesn't pay to shield ourselves from the dark, simply because we'll always be afraid of it.

When you are down, there are no end of advisers on hand to recommend how to change your viewpoint,  your habits, your diet, to quite simply harden the fuck up.

But no.  When you fight tooth and nail not to come to the dark place like I consistently do and consistently have, once you are here there is a clear-seeing that strikes you, that is beautiful in its starkness, so that you almost don't want to leave.  There is a space here and a silence that you wish to try to remember to take back with you when you swim back up to the surface.

You want to find a way to bring these anti-hubris eye drops back with you when you go back.  To remind you of that which you keep forgetting, that both sides of the coin belong. 

Darthdowney

And that your sadness is beautiful. Though it not be sociable, or you be palatable when you are in that space.  That's okay.  Let it be.  Despite what anyone else may say, your sadness and your darkness is a holy space.  It is sometimes best to walk the holy and dark space in your own solitude.  It's okay.

I think this is why people have skulls on their desks.  It is a reminder of the darkness, of that which is not able to be seen when you are in the light.  Memento mori - remember that you shall die.  It's not really as morbid as we've been led to believe. 

Connection/Dissociation

Been listening to Counting Crows this evening. I admire Adrian Duritz's sharing about his life with dissociative disorder. I imagine that would have been particularly gut wrenching to do so. I'm glad he did.

I find it really interesting how he describes dissociative disorder and performing as a particularly ill fit:

I have a fairly severe mental illness that makes it hard to do my job -- in fact, makes me totally ill suited for my job. I have a form of dissociative disorder that makes the world seem like it's not real, as if things aren't taking place. It's hard to explain, but you feel untethered.

And because nothing seems real, it's hard to connect with the world or the people in it because they're not there. You're not there. That's why I rarely saw my family back then: It's hard to care when everything feels as if it's taking place in your imagination. And if you're distant with people, especially women you're romantically involved with, they eventually leave.

What makes my case even worse is that every night I go out on stage and have this incredible emotional connection between me, the band, and the audience. Then, just like that, it's over. I go backstage, back to the bus, back to my hotel room, and sit there all by myself. That deep connection is yanked away in an instant. It's like breaking up with your girlfriend over and over again, every night.

Well, when you put it like that ... actually, fame has never been much of an appeal to me. I mean, sure, like most people I've indulged in fantasies about it. Especially at times when I'm feeling really bad, really raw. All that unconditional adulation - nice. At the same time, this sort of buffer between you and other people, like a mirage that sits between you, like a fur coat.

Except the emperor wears no clothes, and I think the knowledge of that would send me snorting substances up my nose to deal. That mirage would be a prison. Sitting in a prison on the shifting sands of other people's adulation and hatred - no thanks. I already have a couple of prisons of my own, thanks very much. Those will do.

My heart breaks when I think of how many people struggle with different mental illnesses. My homeless friend K suffers from some sort of undiagnosed disorder where she fades out, loses her memory. I feel some understanding of mental illness. I felt out of control in my teenage years from the things I was carrying, the deep dark hate, the covering over of it. I do not believe I had borderline personality disorder but I do believe I could have gone down that path if things had been different. Who knows? And I've got enough fuck-ups of my own to deal with, that's for sure. So many of us battle. It scares us so that we do not wish to talk about it, but humans are fragile things, and we break. I think our technology makes the situation even more dire these days.

Sometimes I wonder what things would look like if the knowledge was spread over the earth that God is a loving God, that there is wholeness in God, that there is healing and acceptance there. I think of that young bloke I saw at the train station a few months ago, screaming to the sky, "But I got nothin' to live for!" Is there something in his heart that is screaming for redemption? Something in every human heart that beats so tenderly but seems too good to be true.

I do think the reality of God is good enough to be true. Like a fairytale. I don't know know how my mental state would be if I hadn't fallen across God. Even just the concept of God, of redemption, of a pressure valve release. Hopefully I would have fallen across Buddhism instead. Otherwise I do not know, for me, how I would have coped.

My heart cries to God tonight for how hard this world is, and how much we despair, and how little hope there is and I wish God would wake us up. I wish the knowledge of God would fill the earth like water. It would wipe away our tears, swimming in God. It would heal our hearts and heal our minds. It would fill us so that we would be able to be god to each other, unhidden, naked, and unashamed.

It would be heaven.

You can read the rest of Adam's article here.

Pic: http://mavrixonline.com

The Wastefulness of Life

When a tree has barely enough life to keep itself going, it looks sickly; it's leaves become yellow or spotted, lacklustre. If it has enough life to keep itself alive and healthy, it will produce lovely leaves but no fruit. The fruit only comes when there is over and above what the tree needs itself to survive. Fruit is produced by pure excess of energy. Such excessive wastefulness. That's what makes the fruit.

Coming off two months of illness where getting myself through the day has been just about the extent of it, there has been no fruit for me. No creativity, no extra love or care for anyone else. It's been maintenance mode. I forgot how lonely it is in here. (But still, even in this aridity things take root, in the dark. Nothing is wasted. Nothing).

I have been re-experiencing a reprise of how it felt to have CFS. It's been almost unbearable returning back to the land of illness, a desert of the waste howling kind.

But still, it was much worse back in CFS land. As if it's not bad enough to experience the physical effects of being ill, you have to deal with the psychological effects of very few people understanding or giving any kind of validation for the horror you are experiencing. At least coughing up my own lungs with great regularity has produced an abundance of sympathy from horrified onlookers. If only there was some kind of outward expression like this for CFS patients. It is an invisible illness in so many ways.

The physical aridity of illness stretches its fingers inwards. Everything that makes life pleasurable becomes out of reach, like the fruit at the top of the tree that is too far away to reach. How juicy it looks. How pleasurable far horizons seem, and how impossible to gain them just when you need them most. This is where the evil is at its worst. To rest - spiritually, emotionally, mentally - when you are sick is almost impossible. At least, it is for me. It requires conscious effort and excess energy. I never really did learn to rest while I was ill. That has come when I have been well.

When I regained my health, being well felt like some kind of crazy cosmic high. It was the simplicity of life that took my breath away. How easy life is when it's been taken away from you and then returned! When you have died and been reborn, everything is a bonus and from that vantage point it becomes very apparent that the world is made out of the kind of playfulness that children live in instinctively and that we lose when we become way too serious and fearful and logical and analytical and Western about everything. We think that we have to strive and strain to reach the things which lie inside quietly, waiting for us to slow down to the "unforced rhythms of grace". It is all so so simple. So very, very simple. So simple, even a child can understand it. That's what's so frustrating. Because simple doesn't mean easy to reach.

The buds are unfurling. Very slowly. I feel like a creaky old chair that's been out in the rain for a decade or so. My thinking is as crusty as my body and my mind, too, must unfurl. Yesterday afternoon I came home from uni and took myself to bed. It felt way too luxurious a thing to do, which is exactly why I did it. The walls had closed in around me as soon as I walked in the door. The house, reflecting its owner's two-month low-energy status, cried out to me to pay it some attention. The bathroom has been overtaken by about 13 loads of undone washing festooned all over the floor. There are dishes everywhere, papers, dust, dirt, letters that haven't been opened for a month (my landline got cut off for a few days because the bill got stuck under pile number 17 in the loungeroom).

I felt my usual overwhelm at the amount of stuff there was to do around this place. That familiar sinking feeling of despair, of claustrophobia. So I did the best thing - I didn't do anything. I took myself off with my dog, and lay on my bed and read. And slept for about three hours. And when I did it felt good, and the leathery surface of my mind smoothed out again, and I could breathe. And everything became more manageable.

I needed to do this kind of thinking regularly when I was ill. But I couldn't. Or wouldn't. I couldn't see that there was a way out, a way to rest while I was sick. The violent stress of needing to control everything burst its banks and flooded my mind. How unattractive the land of control is. But the perspective is just not there when I am ill.

I think, why do I ever try to do anything when my mind is turmoiling like a washing machine? Of course, that's the time when the need to do just that is at its most screaming and desperate. Funny, isn't it, how when you are the most strung out it seems to be the time when you must, must, must solve all of your problems, and the Middle East crisis to boot. When I have a measure of health, the ridiculousness is apparent to me. As soon as I recognise my flustery thinking, the opportunity to escape presents itself alongside the recognition. The recognition and the ability to find the escape hatch has become a more automatic process since I have been well. But when I was sick, once again it completely flew out the window.

But yesterday, I managed to ignore the turmoil. And got the benefit last night by feeling like I had space enough to do something vaguely creative. And oh, how nice it felt :) I got to write some crap poetry. Felt the leathery surface smoothing out a little bit more. And I thought, here is that wastefulness again. It feels too extravagant somehow, living in the rhythm of life. There is an ease, a luxury, to it. All of the good things, creativity, love, music, reading, relationships, change, they all need to grow in this rich soil of extravagant wastefulness. The West has lost its sense of dreaming, and so we forget this. But our hearts don't.

Sometimes I think that we have been told so often that we are spotted yellow and diseased that we don't think that we deserve to have any fruit, or that it's unobtainable, or that it's tied up in how rich we are or successful or whatever. We become so tied up in striving outwardly that we become fearful of the silences within and so we cut ourselves off from our own fruitfulness. Yet even when the tree is spotted yellow and diseased, it still contains all of the potential for fruit within it. Even when it looks like it's dead. The sting is out of death's tail, swallowed up in life.

Wastefulness is seen as excessive, wrong. But it's not always so. Not when those things are good things, life things, like love, kindness, patience etc. The fruit of life. They live in the unforced rhythms of grace. The speed of life. God is wasteful. Terribly terribly wasteful in every direction. It's enough to make me laugh out loud.

Depression

I'm feeling seriously depressed today. Most of it is because of this continual sickness. Almost two months I have spent ill in some way. What a bummer.

I didn't go to work today. The thought of having to physically have a shower, get dressed, put makeup on and drive to the station just felt too hard to bear. Aside from the physical things, I am feeling emotionally wrung out. There was a situation that I thought I could handle, that I thought God was asking me to walk in. What was frustrating was that when I felt like I was walking in it with God, it was do-able and it was good. But I couldn't do that all the time, and whenever I walked in it by myself, my own stuff spewed out the sides. And that happened just a little bit too often. So does that mean that God didn't want me to walk there? I don't know anymore. It was pretty crystal clear to me at one stage that he did. But it hasn't worked. I can't do this because I am feeling too vulnerable myself, and for it work I would have to put my own vulnerability aside. I don't know if I am prepared or even able to do it without feeling like I'm being violated in some way. But perhaps, in the end, what it was all about was that I wasn't prepared to put my own stuff aside enough. I don't know. But however it has stuffed up, it's all rather depressing, really.

I don't know what I think about much at all, at the moment. I guess I'm not as together as I thought I was - at least, the two-months-after-sickness me is not together very much at all. And I wasn't even very together before that. I guess I should be grateful that I am not going out shooting up innocent people in post offices.

What was it that CS Lewis said, something along the lines of ascribing to our own character
what is actually due to good digestion, or something like that? Basically, he was saying that if you throw a few loops into the mix, then you will begin to see what someone's real character is like once they're having to deal with bad stuff. I'm not sure where I stand on that - I'm not really into the whole "you are actually a lowly worm" version of humanity (and I know that's not what he was saying). But gee, if he is right, then in all actuality I am a depressive, intolerant, insufferable bitch. And gee, somehow I don't think that is the heart of who I am. But it amazes me how little I can cope with when I am unwell. It really does bring out the very worst in me. Perhaps it's because I spent over six years ill with CFS that wallowing in illness brings out my worst. I'm tired of living with my grumpy, depressed side, because I think my standard personality is upbeat and positive and pretty excited and full of wonder about stuff. I look forward to re-engaging with my personality sometime soon.