Journal

The nice thing about being a writer is that you do things and you send them off and they frequently appear in the world at unexpected times. Case in point, my guest-post-turned-essay about writing processes and mental illness went live at Kylie Thompson’s blog over the weekend, giving me a little snapshot into the way my life was running a few months back.

So, here’s an addendum to that essay: I wrote You Had One Job back in April. At the time I was writing a novella that didn’t quite come together the way I wanted, and I’m not sure whether that was because it was actually bad or because anxiety got its hooks into me and started me obsessively rewriting the opening scenes over and over.

And despite ending my guest post on a relatively positive note, the days that followed writing that post were all kinds of not-good.

I knew this was coming, to some extent. Back when I was blogging for Queensland Health, I discovered that writing about depression and anxiety frequently caused me to become depressed and anxious. I thought I’d prepared for that, but I hadn’t.  I sank. I flailed. I panicked.

This is the challenge of writing about mental health. Stories and essays and blog posts end, because they have a structure. Life…it just keeps going. Good days turn into bad ones, and bad days turn into dark periods before you’ve noticed what’s going on.

Towards the end of April I finally pulled my shit together and called the psychologist my GP had recommended way back in January, which I’d been putting off for months because I kept getting an answering machine (I hate answering machine. They make me incredibly anxious. Making this call meant spending a week writing a script I could follow, even if I ended up ignoring it, and keeping a lid on the anxiety that then told me I should call back consistently until I got an actual person on the line).

Things got better, after that.

It’s been a familiar rhythm over the twelve months since I first went to my GP and said there’s something wrong.  It’s rebuilding stage by stage, fixing things as they crop up. And so the pattern continues: Things are okay, then things get worse, then steps are taken and things get better. Where I once felt broken, I started feeling merely cracked. Then, where I once felt cracked, I started feeling merely dented.

I’m remarkably okay with being dented, given where I was last year.

I’m on the highway, heading south, on a particular June winter morning. I’m doing hundred and the sun is shining and the road is almost empty. Just a few cars, far ahead, well past my turn-off, which means I get some space to myself in a world no longer fond of space.

I’ve had the stereo playing ever since I left home, and I find myself listening to the Stranglers Golden Brown for the first time in years. It occurs to me that I love this song. I’ve got things turned up a little louder than usual, and I turn it up a little more, and the music fills my head and obliterates everything else. I’ve got the car and the road and the ¾ rhythms of the keyboard and the harpsicord, Hugh Cornwell singing about the texture and sun and finer temptresses, that slow rise-and-fall of the music wrapping itself around my day like the last touch of a dream.

I feel good. I’m in the moment. I’m not thinking about the things I’ve done wrong, or the things I’d like to do right. I’m just driving a car and singing off-key and god, it’s so bright out there. The road is so empty. It’s perfect, in a way, for the length of a verse; the kind of scene that appears in movies, right before a character has a heart attack, or gets attacked by zombies, or finds themselves blindsided by a truck. Happiness as a portent of doom, because happiness does not last unless it occurs at the climax and becomes part of the denouement.

It occurs to me, any moment now, I need to die quite horribly. The narrative demands it.

I turn off Lutwyche Road and follow the street as it curves towards the baseball fields. Cross the road to avoid someone young and angry kicking the shit out of a chain link fence. It’s ten o’clock. I’ve walked down to the Valley and back again, just because I’m feeling restless. I don’t want to be in my apartment. Up ahead, the young, angry person kicks the fence six times, starts walking down the street again. They don’t swear or mutter or do any of the shit angry people usually do when walking through my suburb. I want it to be colder. Brisbane has been ignoring winter. I want it to be colder and I want to be thinking clearer.  The fence-kicker goes towards Lutwyche Road. I head towards home. When I’m around the curve, a safe distance away, I start whistling Ani Difranco ‘s Out of Habit underneath my breath. I tell myself that work is coming. That I will not have to think about how to fill the time anymore, sooner than I think.