It’s confusing. Although I didn’t make it, I actually got further than I have done in months, so I feel a million bucks.

Though I missed the concert, what I got was the sense that I won’t miss every concert.

When I quit my job back in February, I was almost to the bottom of the pit, but not quite. I was bad, but I knew I was going to be worse. I could feel the waves crashing and I knew that they were going to try to drown me, so I needed some secure footholds, and they came in the form of being wrapped up in my house, listening to all of you tell me it would be better than it was. And that if it wasn’t better, that at least I wouldn’t be alone.

For a month I cried every morning on my way to drop the kids at school. Some mornings I made it. Some mornings I made it halfway, then called for help (I have a very patient family). Some mornings I only made it to the end of my street. One morning I didn’t make it out of bed. My kids put their little hands on my shoulders, and sometimes it helped and sometimes it didn’t.

The truth is, for three months I have spent my weekends indoors and would probably have spent my weekdays indoors too, given the choice. From Friday night to Monday morning I have been inside. Actually, one Sunday morning I did sit on the front step in the sun for half an hour. But I haven’t even been to the corner of my block, let alone a concert on the other side of town. Some weekends I literally haven’t moved from the couch from 7am to 7pm. Not even to go to the toilet. I’ve been paralysed with fear. I’ve done a lot of work, and watched a lot of TV, but I have been locked inside my house by the great angry walls of fear.

So on Saturday just gone, with the concert looming, I armed myself with every kind of anxiety fighting tool I have: essential oils, massage bars, water, chocolate, affirmations, sleep, sunglasses. When it came time to leave, I buckled and I cried. I got in my car and cried. I drove down the street and cried. I drove around the block and cried. I drove and drove and I didn’t make it very far but I did make it somewhere.

Gaz called me during the concert so I could listen.

When I got home from my outing around the suburb, I felt empowered and strong more than I felt sad. I dwelled not on the fact that I had missed the concert but on the fact that I had faced a fear and made some progress. Not all the progress. Not as much progress as I might have liked. But some. A little.

The bottom of the pit is below me. Thanks for helping me out of it.

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I practised for months, with the choir on Wednesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays and in private on all the other days. I sang until I had the notes just exactly right and did the final, enormous dress rehearsal. I said to my parents, “This is going to be amazing!” and they said, “We can’t wait to see it.”

I got up and put on my blue robes and went to a hall on the other side of town. I stood in the second row and took a deep breath and looked for my family in the audience. My boyfriend was there, waving at me. And my dad was there, waving at me. And next to him there was an empty space that didn’t wave to me, where my mum should have been. So I sang to my boyfriend and my dad and the empty space.

Fifteen years ago my mum didn’t make it to the performance I was most proud of.

For ten years I held it against her.

Tomorrow my own daughter has her first performance with her choir. She has her embroidered t-shirt and her sheet music and her yellow ribbon. She says to me, “This is going to be amazing!” and I say, “I can’t wait to see it.”

It’s in a hall on the other side of town. We have six tickets.

I’m so afraid that my space will be empty.

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But you see, I’m coming unstuck. People keep saying that the core ingredients you need to write a great book are great writing and not being an asshole, but that the fundamental non-negotiable is a great story.

Some of them even say that the writing needn’t be amazing, as long as you have a great story.

The problem is, I am not a storyteller. When I think about what I’m planning to write, it doesn’t occur to me that things might happen to people. Instead, I consider how nicely the words might slip together and how I can use them as a metaphor for life. This is a source of endless frustration for the lovely people who are silly enough to offer their help with my writing. When someone says, “What is your plot?” I say things like, “The reader realises the main character’s reality is broken because she is haunted by a past that she doesn’t quite remember, and really, what do any of us know about truth?” And they say something like, “Um, that’s not a story. What if she finds another woman’s knickers in her marital bed?”

So I decided to find out whether it’s possible to write great book, if the best story you can think of involves the time you got a smack because you ate all the Iced Vovos.

Firstly, I found out that this seems quite closely linked to the war around literary fiction, what even is? which has evidently been waging since the dawn of categorisation by genre. My contribution to this is that yesterday I read Mateship with Birds, by Carrie Tiffany, in part due to my raging jealous literary boner and in part due to the excellent things people I know have been saying it. I read that book and I got to the end and I put it down and went, “HUH?” Because it is the kind of book that maybe has a story, kind of, loosely, but ultimately is an exploration of a theme broken up into chapters. What it says is not this happened, and as a result this happened, but actually, what does it mean to be human, and how can I become one, or do I really want to? To be honest, the more confused I am after reading, the better. Other books like this that I’ve read lately include Bereft, Steeplechase and The Age.

Secondly, I found out that the books people buy more than other books are written to be an escape from the real world. Unfortunately my idea of escape from the real world is much more Hunter S. Thompson than J.K. Rowling, leaving aside the fact that they are both also stellar storytellers. People want to turn the page to find out which exciting adventure came next, or whether she managed to score with the hot pool guy, or whether they escaped from the Nazis, or whether he was really the one who murdered the old man at the bus stop. Hell, I want to know what happens next and might not even finish writing this blog post before I do. Do people want to turn a page to find out whether a main character still hates herself or whether she’s managed to project that hatred on to her alienated sister-in-law? If I want to think about those things, I can just put the book down and call my nanna.

Thirdly, I asked some of my lovely writer friends (ones who are good storytellers) to explain to me the importance of story in a book. I told them to go easy on me, please, because maybe I was just born to write conceptual books, because I am a philosopher and possibly even a reincarnation of John Lennon. They told me to please stop calling them, and how did I get their new number?

Then I wondered what a story is, and how I could even know if it was a story until I had written it, which made me want to cut everything, so I stopped. It seems, then, that the answer to my question is another question: what do you want to write? Which is probably why I keep going back to the forums, where the answer is: whatever I want, as long as I don’t have to look at my damn manuscript.

But seriously, is it just a matter of taste? Have you ever read a book that you loved, but that had a shitty story? Am I confusing ‘story’ and ‘plot’? Is this blog post just another clever procrastination tactic?

* brought to you by several days with a cold, during which I wrote and wrote and wrote until my will to live was sufficiently diminished and I could sleep

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If I weren’t mental,
I’d be spending tonight
in a tucked away restaurant with lamps made from old carafes and half candles
and my foot would brush against another foot
but I would disappear into the night (in my easy, casual way),
and stand at the corner of the ocean
where I would find a long-lost lover waking from our mutual past
and laugh at all the things I thought had mattered once.

If I weren’t mental,
I’d be spending tomorrow
in a white cafe with six other heads behind their notebooks
and my words coming freely as I read the paper with the other eye
before I danced into the afternoon (which opportunity to seize next? so hard to choose)
and walked through a bookshop
where a hundred other people would be finding inspiration
and I would be one of them.

Which is why I’m on the couch
holding a paperback with the spine cracked open
and writing instead of doing
because that has to be enough.

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There are other ways you could describe it, too, like “What are you guys even doing?” and “I thought this already happened ages ago?”

I think I will choose to call it, “This dude is just right for me.”

I’ve been married before. It wasn’t even a bad marriage, really, but I was 21 when it started and 24 when it ended and it feels like a hundred lifetimes ago (except for all those times my ex-husband is in my house, shouting at everything). I got married at a fancy Catholic altar in a white dress and our guests had alternating main courses. The fact that I loathed Catholicism, couldn’t think of more than six people I wanted to invite and, let’s be frank, wasn’t convinced about my fiance mattered naught, because that was not my wedding. That wedding was for the people in my life who thought it was improper to have a baby and no husband. We had known each other 18 months, and our daughter was 5 months old.

Thanks, those people. You made sure I had Lily, and that is a good enough reason to be separated before you turn 25.

People ask me why I would want to get married again, and aren’t I jaded, and don’t I know better now? I suppose they can’t understand why, having failed dismally as a wife once before, I would subject any poor bastard to that process again.

Basically: love.

I know. What a ridiculous concept. Using a construct of the government to express feelings that everyone knows are just a chemical reaction probably to pheromones.

Gaz and I have been together for six years, and in those six years we have experienced pretty well every chemical reaction/feeling that can be experienced by people in a relationship.

Some of those feelings I have explored in words in so much depth that they are someone else’s feelings now: a metal bed with a hole at the crotch; watching High School Musical in an emergency room while our child died; the groggy relief of a decision made. Those were the years in which we tortured each other with our intense and immovable passion but also total conflict in all matters of the heart.

Some of the feelings have faded with the passing of time: discovering the other’s mental illness; fucking by the sea; smoking in the same beer garden week after week. These are parts of our history that are so old that they make up the fabric of our time together, mostly unseen in corners and under dirty sheets.

Some of the feelings are newer and cleaner: comfort in the familiar smell of soil and tree sap; a warm hand flat on my back; a shared sadness over something for which we both grieve.

I love this man with a ferocity that I know terrifies him, and probably his friends and family. The things that mattered in the beginning are not the things that matter now. I am not angry or tired. I am not isolated or alone. Instead of an enemy, someone who hurt me before, I have a friend in my life veteran. Someone who also didn’t understand, and did what was best at the time. Someone with whom I can occasionally reflect and wonder how it might have turned out differently, but also feel the solid form of support next to me.

This is a man who heads into the blackness with me and brings me through with just the right balance of sympathy and insistence. This is a man who finds me when I am at my most absolute chaotic worst and looks into my face until he finds me again and then tells me, “There you are, beautiful girl.” and then there I am.

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We stood in the salty air and it stung my eyes
and I looked to you to take my hurting away
and you hugged me and you were so warm.

We stood there for ages to wait for people to leave
and just let us do the thing with the damn balloons
and I couldn’t stop sobbing sort of like a sea cow
and it was embarrassing, kind of.

We stood and I couldn’t work out how to let go (of my balloon)
and I held the ribbon in my hand forever, which wasn’t long enough
but we had to go
so we left.

Sometimes I see that purple balloon and think of what it was like before
- before there was a purple balloon -
and I can’t remember.

And if you’re wondering why I’m crying it’s because
I can’t let you hate me and leave me
and take my balloon with you.

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It isn’t that I’ve forgotten how. It isn’t that I’ve lost the part of my brain that knows how to have a conversation or kiss my boyfriend’s neck or read a poem. But anxiety is a thief. It is a time thief and a pleasure thief. It comes in to my house–on the weekend, usually–and grabs the things I like and sits on top of them, so I have to hunt for them but always come across this anxiety squatter first. And it looks at me as if to say, I’m just looking after these for you for a little while, so I sit next to anxiety and talk to it instead of trying harder to reclaim those things that are mine.

Being an anxious person out in the open is good and bad. It means that people don’t push me when I’m feeling bad. But it also means that people don’t push me when I’m feeling bad. It means that on Monday morning, I asked my little brother for help and he said yes. But it also means that I could ask my little brother for help, knowing that he would say yes. It means that on Tuesday morning, he helped me again. And that every morning since, he has sent me a text message to ask if I’m okay.

My dad, bless his enormous and generous heart, has been reading about agoraphobia to try to understand it better. “I don’t understand it,” he says, “but I am trying to.” Then he says, “I’m worried that in helping you, I’m not helping you. Or that I’m helping you to rely on my help.” And it’s true. Anxiety is not just a thief, it is also an illusionist. With support, it disappears momentarily and you think it might be gone (not for good, probably, but for a little while).

But the next time it is back like a smug old man, staring you in the face, “You can’t do it.” So you say, “It doesn’t matter if I can’t do it, because someone will support me,” and call fifteen different people and take all the support they have and then suddenly, inexplicably, you are a thief too.

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I say ‘reading’, but I mean ‘shouting at’.

I think I probably understand her point. Mental illness has been popularised by shows like Girls and maybe United States of Tara and even Offspring.

I’ve talked before about how I don’t mind if someone exaggerates (or even fakes) a mental illness, if it means that people are at least having conversations about it. I don’t believe that portrayals of mild (or “functional”, as per the article) anxiety in popular culture could dilute wider understanding of them to the detriment of those with anxiety disorders.

Maybe people on the outside think we’re having a mental illness competition. You’re not as anxious as me. You’re not as detached from reality as me. I’ve attempted suicide eight different ways and you’ve only tried six. Evidently the severity of my illness will be diluted by other people with their pretend anxiety. I should be outraged by people saying “I’m anxious” when actually I am anxious. You’re not anxious! I am! You think you know what anxiety is? WELL YOU DON’T.

Anxiety in particular has huge variance in its manifestation: phobias, irrationalities, lack of control, detachment, fear, panic. Yesterday I literally drove to the supermarket one tree at a time (“Now drive to the next tree”) because I was so afraid, and yet I don’t begrudge anyone the right to feel anxious and to voice that feeling.

So why is the media outraged on my behalf?

This is semantics. “Anxious” means uneasy or nervous. If you’re afraid to get on a plane, you’re anxious. If your heart is racing because you need to give a speech in front of a thousand people, you’re anxious. If you can’t remember your name or where you live because your brain has packed up and left, you’re anxious. Using this word–this apt word–to describe these feelings does not make any of them less legitimate. It does not make my personal pain any greater, or detract from the things I am experiencing.

Perhaps it helps me to go to someone and say, “Actually, I’m not sure I’m up to that right this minute, I’m feeling quite anxious.” and the other person says, “I understand, my sister/mother/friend/daughter feels like that too sometimes.” They don’t need to know the ins and outs of my particular breed of anxiety; they just need to have some point of reference for “anxiety” as an actual thing that people experience, whether it is functional or not.

A man down the street has a twisted ankle. He says “Far out, my ankle really hurts!” And the lady across the road has a broken leg. She stands out on her nature strip and shouts to the man: “You don’t even deserve to say that your ankle hurts until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes!” That’s how it happens, right? The woman with the broken leg’s pain is directly (and negatively) affected by the man with the sore ankle, yes?

Or maybe what they’re both saying is, “It’s lucky everyone is aware that legs can hurt and we should try to mend them when they are broken.”

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This is a piece I wrote for the ABC’s very important disability portal, Ramp Up. None of this will be new to you, you poor, patient loves, but I truly can’t remember the last time something was this hard to write.

You can read it here: http://www.abc.net.au/rampup/articles/2013/03/28/3725722.htm

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Like tonight, Georgia had an open choir rehearsal, which meant all the parents could come along and listen. I lost my head about it all day: this is the kind of thing a kid will remember you not coming to, your mother didn’t go to your choir things and look at all the therapy you’ve had, you will let down every person in the world if you don’t go. As you might imagine, by 5:30pm I was crying in my bed like this:

(Don’t judge me; I’m growing out my fringe.)

I was under no illusion that I would make it to the choir rehearsal or ever again have a relationship with my daughter. Gaz and I sat in the car and I made strange hiccuping noises and said I caaaaaaaan’t a lot, so we drove around the block a few times because sometimes it helps to pretend you might actually do something.

Then my dad came around, because evidently this was now a huge ordeal and I needed multiple people to hold my hand, and we all sat in the car for a bit longer and I went No seriously I caaaaaaan’t. The two of them tried to trick me by telling me we would just go to the supermarket. I was wise to their game, but I humoured them and we went to the supermarket. Then I humoured them some more and went to the pub, where I had a small meltdown because no one would let me play the pokies.

But after that was over, I pushed on and we eventually made it to choir. We were 20 minutes late, and I thought I was going to pass a kidney stone, but Georgia didn’t notice. She sang, and we sang along (we were asked to, I wasn’t just being that creepy parent who is living vicariously through her child’s accomplishments, although I guess that could have been a small factor). Afterwards I felt like a million bucks, what with having gone less than 5 kilometres from my house (mostly just floating on a river of tears), so we all went out for dumplings.

The chasm between how it feels to succeed and how it feels to fail is monstrous. To fail means to disappoint everyone (mostly yourself), and next time to feel the fear again, and again. The brain is surprisingly quick when it comes to establishing routines, and if you give it a reason to think that ‘being afraid’ is the routine, that’s what it will do. On the other hand, whilst succeeding can be horrifying while you’re doing it, because what if you suddenly just fall off the world and into space, it’s about three steps forward. It isn’t just about succeeding that time, but also about pushing through a fear and demonstrating that you can do it, so that next time you try to, you’ve set a precedent. Precedent is everything in an anxiety disorder, whether good or bad.

“I failed to do it last time (and so I’ll probably fail again this time)” is the life blood of the anxious mind, but it settles in to “I succeeded last time” fairly quickly too, if you can find a dad who is willing to tell you ugly things that you don’t want to hear but need to, or just someone who can drive you while you close your eyes.

So I am not dreadful after all, at least not for today, and that’s about as far ahead as I can plan these things anyway.

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