Hit by pre-birthday depression

Every year without fail, around about mid-May, the air around me becomes distorted, unbalanced, distasteful. Things are not themselves. My life feels up for grabs. It’s a strange feeling, as if the future had been concertina-d and was being thrown at me.

The reason? My birthday looms.

The feeling lingers and hardens on the actual day, continuing into the evening, regardless of how I choose to spend the day. The following morning, I wake up and the horror has fled. Life feels normal, even a bit dulled and numb in a comfortable, comforting way.

I’ve spoken to other, more functional people about this feeling. No one owns up to experiencing the kind of pre-birthday depression I do.

It was so bad this year that I half-jokingly wondered to myself if I was re-experiencing some kind of birth trauma – as if every other person on this earth didn’t come into the world accompanied by various degrees of trauma.

Certainly it’s grown worse in recent years, and I think I know why it’s so powerful. On this one day, and leading up to it, I confront the difference between what I thought my life was going to be and what it is. Or rather, it confronts me.

Now that I’ve come to expect this feeling and grown familiar with its rise and fall, I’m better able to deal with it. I get stressed planning my birthday and then I experience some relief when the day actually arrives. But a grim shadow follows me around all day.

Melbourne’s been experiencing a spell of weather disconcertingly warm for this time of year. On Saturday night, the night before my birthday, there was a humid, windless, outdoor feel to the air although the winter darkness fell hurriedly. The warmth continued into Sunday, my birthday.

The first half of the day was spent as positively as possible. With a friend I saw a cheery film that was quirky without trying too hard. It didn’t matter that throughout the film I was comparing myself unfavourably with the main character (why don’t I own my flat? why don’t I have dinner parties?).

Afterwards I drove the friend and me to Elwood. We went to a tiny, familiar café and had the overpriced food you’d expect from somewhere so close to the beach. Again, no major problem. My eggplant parmigiana was an undersized runt served in a small round china baking dish, but rich enough to just satisfy me and tasty enough to evince a determination to find a restaurant that serves a parmigiana of decent proportions (I mainly keep off dairy but will gladly make the odd exception).

We strolled along a prosperous residential street to the beach. When we got there the air was still, the water hardly moved. It was a grey-silver, a beautiful corollary to the neatly patterned cloud flurry that lay low over the water and seemed to tilt upwards in the direction of the horizon. The light behind the clouds placed everything into relief; every grey-bone grain of sand and the densely layered chinks of shell-bits.

A patch of blue sky close to distant shoreline looked cinematic, almost green-tinged. There were a few people around, but the atmosphere was pretty quiet – I wondered if people had taken advantage of the weather and gone away for the weekend.

We lingered and walked and threw the problems of the world at the calm water. I was dark, but it was manageable. We drove back to East Malvern and I had a nap before going to my parents’ place for a family dinner.

This started fine, although later there was an ‘incident’ (unfortunately family gatherings are prone to these) that caused a feeling of being sabotaged. I don’t want to go into it; the truth is, I was feeling bad anyway, so it didn’t really have much of a long-term effect.

The next morning I woke up in a calm daze, apart from an initial downer as soon as I remembered the incident. But really I was feeling so much better than the day before. My birthday was over. Normality had returned. I got up and put the kettle on.

One year on, I've written an update on pre-birthday and birthday depression and my experience on the birthday that followed the one described here. The update includes some suggestions (not advice) about dealing with birthday depression. Click here if you'd like to read it.

Please note: birthday depression is another term for birthday sadness. If you are having suicidal thoughts or think you may have clinical depression, please speak to your doctor or a family member, or ring one of the numbers listed here. Please reach out and seek help if you need to.

Want some more insights into birthday depression? I've written an ebook about it. 

Do you have a story of birthday depression you'd like to share?  Head over to the Birthday Depression website and share your story with others experiencing the same thing.

For a short time I'm offering a free mobi file of the book if you share your story on the website. 

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A dispatch from the loudness wars -- compression and the future of music

With much ‘gentle persuasion’ (arm twisting), I’ve managed to convince an audiophile mate, Michael, to write some words on a development that disturbs many people with a strong interest in sound quality – the increasing use of compression in commercially produced music. Below, Michael explains what compression is and why it’s bad for listeners and the music industry.

When music is played there is great variation in the loudness of different sounds. Lots of recorded music now compresses the recording so that the loudest bits become quieter. This enables engineers to turn up the overall sound. As a result, the recording as a whole is louder but with little variation in sound levels.

If you compare a CD made in the 1980s with a recent CD, you’ll probably find that the old CD sounds very quiet compared with the recent one. (It makes an even better demonstration if you have a recently remastered version and can compare the two versions of the same track.)

It is when you turn the old CD up so that it sounds as loud as the new CD that you really hear the effects of compression. The old CD will sound alive and like ‘real music’. This is because it reproduces all the natural peaks of real music. Drums sound like real drums.

The new CD doesn’t sound like real music. Even on a really good system it sounds as if you’re listening to a radio program.

Because a compressed track sounds louder than an uncompressed track, and more and more compression is being used as each recording strives to be just a bit louder than other recordings, the overuse of compression is known as ‘the loudness wars’.

There is a clip on YouTube which demonstrates the problem. (Note that unless you have very good computer speakers you might not hear much difference in this short clip. Also note that it is now common to use much more compression than is demonstrated on this clip.)

A little compression goes a long way
Some compression has always been used when recording, mixing and mastering music. This is fine when carried out appropriately in small doses, like a chef who uses a pinch of salt.

What is done now to music is like the waiter sprinkling a tablespoon of salt over each meal on the way to the table.

In the ‘olden days’ it was more common to spend time sitting down and actually listening to music rather than doing other things while music played in the background.

When all the natural peaks of the music are cut off by compression the sound is very different. At first the ear often thinks the music sounds good – compression can make some parts of the music sound clearer. But after 20 or so minutes the ear rebels against this unnatural and distorted sound. Not only do you want to turn the music down, but you lose interest in it and want to do something else.

Just as a meal with too much salt might be tasty at first but become inedible after a number of bites, today’s compressed music can be unlistenable if you try to sit down and listen to a whole album at a reasonable volume. In contrast, listening to loud music for a long time is enjoyable when it has not been overly compressed.

The music on most DVDs has a much more natural dynamic and much less compression than modern CDs. This is why you can still enjoy the audio of a DVD even towards the end. If you’ve ever wondered why music in the cinema or on a DVD sounds better and more lifelike than the CD, now you know that it’s all due to the movie version having less compression.

The compression of the dynamics of the music – discussed above – is totally different from the compression carried out for MP3 purposes. A low bit-rate MP3 file does lose some of the musical detail (which is why MP3s sound better if a higher bit rate is used), but making an MP3 file from a CD does not affect the dynamics.

Related developments
Some music is now released on vinyl as an audiophile option. Some audiophiles think that vinyl sounds better than CD and are prepared to pay extra for it. Even though a CD can record a greater dynamic range than vinyl, it is now common for the vinyl version to be less compressed than the CD. Irrespective of the debate between vinyl and CD, the less compressed vinyl really will sound better.

One irony is that as compression becomes more and more popular with mixers (who assume, I suppose, that their listeners want it), so musicians themselves seem to be agreeing to it, thinking it sounds good. Also ironic is the fact that all this is happening at a time when the ability to effectively transmute all the variations and permutations of sounds through high quality digital means has never been greater.

But there is worse. When you buy a remastered CD that has been heavily compressed the original master tape will remain uncompressed. This tape can be used again one day to re-release an uncompressed CD. But as compression has become the ‘industry standard’ it is becoming common to record and mix compressed music. If the master tapes are compressed then this music is compressed for all time.

If you’re interested in finding out more about this issue or would like to join the discussion, check out Turn Me Up, a site devoted to the fight against excessive compression. This site includes lots of links to references and news articles, and is a great place to find out more.

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A musician's progress

I recently bought the latest KD Lang album, Watershed. As soon as I’d managed to unwrap the CD (a skill I have yet to master) I checked out the photographs.

I’m always curious about how Lang represents herself – Lang is the only ‘lesbian’ singer I follow so she’s my only touchstone where lesbian iconography is concerned. But I also want to keep tabs on her development as an artist.

And is she developing as much as I’d like to think? The photos accompanying the CD suggest that here she’s at least partly harking back to her Ingenue period. This album of torch songs, dripping with deliciously forlorn emotion and apparently fuelled by her love for a woman already spoken for, rightly catapulted her into the dizzy heights of superstardom.

A couple of the pics seem to suggest that the ingenue is still around. Both show Lang in profile with eyes dreamily closed, wearing a tailored white shirt with elegant long cuffs and a white waistcoat. In one of these pics her solid fingers are clasped and pressed against her forehead as if in prayer. In the other she leans back against a wall, her arms stretched up on each side as if some heavenly force pulls her upwards.

As before, Lang presents herself as caught up in an interior world. But here she looks more peaceful than she appeared on the Ingenue album, possibly preoccupied with spirituality rather than an unavailable woman. There’s still a sense of the lesbian as endless quester, still alone in the existential sense. And of course, as before, Lang is also inviting us to eroticise her, eyes closed and the ghost of a tiny smile on her face as if to say ‘feel free to look’.

A few pictures quietly counterpoint these images, showing us a mature, reflective but music-focused KD. In one she looks like a nerdy 1950s male pop star. She’s in profile again, dressed casually, listening to a playback perhaps. Her headphones are tight against her spiky hair, which sticks up appealingly at the front as if someone has just run their fingers through it. She’s wearing glasses and looks cute and boyish but at the same time completely focused and singleminded.

In another she’s seated at a keyboard, clutching a piece of music that she gazes at. She wears a casual shirt with sleeves rolled up and her glasses are perched on her forehead. The look is more posed: peaceful, reflective, at ease. Lang seems to be showing a plethora of selves: sexy ingenue, spiritual quester, dedicated musician and mid-life, comfortable dyke.

But her invitation to be eroticised is of course political. I remember the time when it was fashionable to be lesbian (with all the silly contradictions that sexuality being fashionable entails).

During this period a butch-looking Lang appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair sitting on an old-fashioned barber’s chair, her face lathered up and her eyes closed in bliss as she leant against the bosom of a very femme Cindy Crawford, dressed in high heels and a sexy one-piece, who was pretending to shave her. And who could forget Madonna’s remark: ‘Elvis is alive, and she’s beautiful’? Or the stories of Lang at large in LA, running with the likes of Martina Navratilova in what sounded like some sort of lesbian brat pack?

And who could not melt when hearing that velvet voice? I’ve listened to the album only a few times and it sounds overly lush bordering on easy listening. In Ingenue Lang perfected a wonderful lesbian camp – is she trying for this again? I’ve always assumed she would keep doing new things with her music but perhaps she won’t. It’s too soon for me to tell, I’ll have to listen a few times before I get a proper sense of it.

For the moment, though, it’s good to hear that gorgeous voice again.

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Creeping misogyny

Often when I write about an issue that ‘gets up my goat’, as Kath Day-Night would say, the act of putting my ideas down soothes me. But since I’ve been focusing on the issue of women’s rights in Australia, the picture just seems to get more drastic – we need some smart, quick action across many fronts to make this a fairer country for everybody.

As a feminist spawned in the wild, rebellious, radical women’s movement of the early eighties I assumed things would just keep getting better for women, and in the nineties they seemed to be. But the issue of women’s social and economic progress is now on the backburner, and women are slipping behind in so many ways. At the same time the portrayal of women in the traditional media has gone sharply downhill along with a general ‘dumbing down’ of content.

In writing the following about my own country I’m fully aware that the majority of women in the developing world are in a far worse crisis. I don’t think the two are unconnected, of course. It amazes and saddens me that feminism is considered a dirty word in the West, or merely unfashionable, when so many women in the developing world have no control over their reproductive lives, no safe place to give birth, and suffer the effects of obscenely high infant mortality rates.

We still live in a world where millions of women can’t leave the house without male chaperones, where child brides are raped by their decades-older male ‘husbands’, where rape is a routine weapon of war in the Congo, and where many wives and sex workers risk contracting AIDS because they don’t have the social power to insist on protected sex. In such a world, what exactly is the alternative to feminism? There is none.

Below is a summary of some of the main issues related to feminism that desperately need some government and community attention in Australia.

Domestic violence
An amazing one in three women will experience some form of violence in their lifetime, prime minister Kevin Rudd said in a recent statement.

In 2005 the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that more than 1 million Australian women had experienced violence at the hands of a previous partner since the age of 15; this represents 15 per cent of women aged 18 years and over (ABS 2006, Personal safety survey Australia,. cat. no. 4906.0, ABS, Canberra). Women and children’s lives are still being shattered by such violence in their hundreds of thousands, although I acknowledge that a minority of men are also victims.

We need stronger laws nationwide to ensure that the violent partner always leaves the family home. We need tougher prison sentences to deal with men who kill their partners who try to leave. We need more funding for anger management and much greater police protection for those women who have left their partners and live in fear of their lives. And we need to recognise that some men do not bash their partners but seek to control them by keeping total control of the finances.

Housework and childcare
The quality of the public debate around responsibility for housework and childcare has degenerated to an extraordinary degree in recent years. It’s a given now that women have the main hands-on parenting and housework role and that they are the ones who have to do the balancing act if they want to work outside the home. Women are now constantly advising other women about how they can do it better; the Australian Women’s Weekly is full of stories about such women, held up as role models for the rest of us.

Recently there was a debate on Radio National about a book a woman wrote on the challenges of combining parenting with artistic endeavours. The author confided without irony that she had squeezed writing the book in between caring for her children. The women involved in this discussion did refer to their (male) partners, but always in terms of the degree to which their partners supported them in their juggle/struggle – there was no sense in which it was a responsibility that might be shared equally.

Sadly, an Australian rural journalist lost her life in unfortunate circumstances about a year ago. She seems to have been one of those women who fell into the job and was naturally good at it. But the media coverage of her untimely death emphasised that she felt that mothering was her most important role. But why should she have to choose? And why is it suggested that this is the definition of a good woman – one who puts her children before her career – and not a good man?

Now, when it comes to gender roles and parenting the notion of individual choice is sacrosanct in our culture and I do not want to challenge that. Plenty of couples with babies and young children work it out in their own way; plenty of women want to be the ones to give up their careers for the first years of their child’s life. That’s fine. But the way things stand now, the debate is totally skewed in favour of the female partner doing this, even if she’s better qualified and earning more than the male.

We also need to remember that, sadly, a huge percentage of marriages end in divorce. Women who compromise their careers are leaving themselves open to poverty and lack of superannuation should they divorce – the statistics certainly bear this out. We need a systematic change in job design and employer attitudes to ensure that if women choose the role of full-time parent for the first years of their children’s lives they are still able to advance their careers.

We also need more options for part time work and family friendly hours generally, for both men and women, so that men can better share the burden of parenting as the children get older.

Body image
We bring up our young girls to be narcissistic and overly concerned with their appearance, and through the media and consumerism the culture as a whole sexualises young girls. This is leading to a situation where young children are developing eating disorders even before they hit puberty. Too much focus on appearance and their bodies detracts from the ability of young girls to act on and in the world.

Women in the media
According to commercial television, women now have a bewildering variety of career choices – whether it be porn star, neurotic housewife or emotionally over-invested mother.

Images of women on television are, I would argue, at a crisis point, even on non-commercial stations. Just one example: there is a very popular half-hour evening program in Australia called The Gruen Transfer. It’s an ironic, humorous take on the role of advertising in our society, featuring a host who is a stand-up comic, two regulars from the advertising industry, and two guests from the industry. I enjoy watching this show because it uses humour to tell some home truths about a form of media often taken for granted.

But the host and the two regulars are both male, and only one of the guests is ever female. This means four men on the panel and one woman! (The word ‘token’ springs to mind.)

This show should have been planned with gender balance in mind – the ABC is obligated through its editorial policy to provide a range of views from a cross section of the community. But let’s just give the ABC the benefit of the doubt for a minute and assume the show is reflecting the realities of the advertising industry.

If this is the case, it’s a worry for two reasons. Any industry that in 2009 excludes women to such an extent (and this is one where top execs earn seriously big biccies) has a major problem and should take a good, hard look at itself. If it’s a boy’s club it’s putting up major barriers against the talent and creativity of half the population.

But there’s another, just as pressing issue: the people who design the ads we’re bombarded with every day have a huge influence on our lives. And increasingly they’re portraying women in the most retrograde ways.

A recent ad for Nutrigrain breakfast cereal featured a 30-something mother whose sole aim in life seemed to be to see her son grow up to be an iron man (shades of Nazi Germany, where women’s main role was to produce male fighters for the Aryan cause?)

Another one showed B-grade celebrity Sonia Kruger, having taken her vitamin pill for the day and ready for a morning out. She was wearing heels so high I wondered how, despite the vitamins, she was going to make it out the door.

In fact, high heels – which can cause serious foot and postural damage over time – are becoming increasingly common on ads with daytime settings, ie with women dressed in ‘daytime’ clothes.

Yet another ad, supposedly hip and ‘with-it’ on gendered attitudes to housework, seems in fact to be trying to resign us all to the status quo. It shows a young couple expecting visitors, with the woman fussing over the state of the house and the man trying to reassure her. But she insists on cleaning the toilet, with the advertised product, as he watches approvingly. So it’s fine for women to be ‘neurotic’ about housework – lets men off the hook nicely. We desperately need more female advertising executives to show more realistic, wide-ranging images of women.

I don’t even want to talk about the skewing of programming overwhelmingly towards men in the area of sport – it’s too depressing. Of course some women watch sport and listen to sports commentary on the radio.

But it would be interesting to do a large survey on the breakdown of viewers and listener types in terms of gender, and my guess is you’d find that they were overwhelmingly male – so both our taxes and consumer dollars (ie what we unwittingly pitch in for advertising costs) are skewed towards male viewing and listening.

My local ABC radio station, for example, turns into a sports station on the weekend. And Channel’s Ten’s only HD station shows sport only, most of it being played by males – if that’s not masculinist, what is?

Sexist language
I’m troubled by the increasing use of the word ‘mankind’ in the media. This is related to the use of ‘man’ to mean ‘humans’ and ‘men’ to mean ‘people’ (the last is far less common but I think the connection is important).

Why not say ‘humankind’ instead of ‘mankind’? It’s one more syllable and two more letters. And it sounds kinder and more inclusive, because it is. It reminds us of our common humanity, to boot.

But what’s so insidious about ‘mankind’, you might well ask. Everybody knows it means women as well. Aren’t there more important things to worry about?

But ‘mankind’ and ‘man’ as collective nouns don’t clearly mean either ‘men and women’ or ‘all members of the male gender’. They mean one or the other depending on the context, which can change without notice. This very slipperiness of the meanings is the problem – the impossibility of pinning the meaning down. These words render women as ghosts or mere shadows, liable to appear one minute and disappear the next. At very best they subsume women into men, just as Eve was born of Adam’s rib and was originally part of him. At worst, they simply cause women to vanish altogether. The language ‘disappears’ them.


Male defensiveness
I am amazed at the defensiveness of some men when they feel confronted by what they see as reversed sexism, and it bothers me how quick these men are to jump to this conclusion – revealing a misogyny and fear of women’s power.

This male defensiveness can be really over the top. A few months ago I was listening to two female hosts on my local ABC radio station, filling in for a male host because it was a public holiday. One male talkback caller rang to have a whinge about the fact that two women were hosting, as if it was some kind of feminist conspiracy.

In another talkback radio program on the subject of equal opportunity laws, one man complained about the title of an ABC television comedy, Stupid Stupid Man. He seemed to miss the point that the show was mainly about men, featuring at least four men and only two women.

Why does all this matter?
It matters because it is morally wrong to effectively castrate and in some cases sexually enslave half the population.

It matters because if we allow misogyny to go unchecked it feeds on itself. More than 20 years ago, in her book The Reproduction of Mothering, feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow theorised that misogyny was so widespread because it was women who mainly looked after male children. She wrote: ‘psychologists have demonstrated unequivocally that the very fact of being mothered by a woman [I assume she means solely] generates in men conflicts over masculinity, a psychology of male dominance and a feeling of being superior to women’. She called for ‘a fundamental reorganization of parenting, so that primary parenting is shared between men and women’.

This makes perfect sense to me. It is overwhelmingly mothers who frustrate us and deny us by giving us boundaries as we mature. But in many cases children also live with the resentment of mothers who want to do more with their lives than look after them. If there was more of a gender balance in parenting roles, not only would girls grow up with broader career horizons, but boys would be less misogynistic.

It matters because, as Thomas L. Friedman says in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded, climate change and shrinking biodiversity threaten our existence on this planet, and we need all the human ingenuity and innovation we can get. We need the brains and energies of the 50 per cent of the population who are currently stymied in one way or another.

It matters on an international level because we desperately need every girl in the world to be educated, because she will have fewer children. I’m not being paternalistic here: educated women in general choose to have fewer children, and they may also have more economic and social power and more access to reproductive choices.

It matters because statistics show that the more rights women have in a particular country the more that country prospers. Ironic isn’t it? In those countries that oppress women the most, individual men may have undue sexual and social power – but the country as a whole will suffer.

Ideas for change
Here are just some possibilities for bringing the rights of women back into the spotlight in the Australian context.

A new book needs to be written about the state of women’s rights in Australia – what’s feminist Anne Summers been doing lately? There have been some new titles in the last couple of years but they’ve had a bit of publicity and then sunk. This new book should not have the word ‘feminism’ in it. Feminism is not the problem. Masculinism is. The book could be called something like: Masculinist Nation: The New Misogyny in Twenty-First Century Australia (even though it’s the same old stuff, just finding new inventive ways to manifest itself).

Start a new, national lobby group with a raft of aims/demands, something along the lines of the National Organisation of Women (NOW) in the US. It’s a great name and acronym – why can’t we steal it? We do have an organisation called the Women’s Electoral Lobby but it has a very low profile and the name suggests that it has a limited role.

Representatives from this national organisation could commence a speaking program for all schools, talking to both sexes about the history of feminism and the continuing struggles. (For non-Australian readers, the country is going through a drawn-out masculinist worship of all things warlike at the moment – this is not all bad, the average soldier needs to be remembered, but it must be balanced out with women’s ‘war stories’.)

For example, young people should know that in first wave feminism British women suffered force feeding (do they know how horrendous that is?) so women could have the vote. And in second wave feminism women put in untold hours of unpaid work to lobby for equal pay and equal opportunity, safety in the streets, equal access to uni education, safe places and legal safeguards for victims of domestic violence, legal safeguards against sexual harrassment, changes to divorce laws, etc etc etc.

Ask these young people to name one of the women who started second wave feminism in the US – they won’t be able to and no, Gloria Steinem was second generation – and then talk about and show images of some of these largely forgotten heroines.

Make a federal government minister responsible for improving the status of women, with no other ministerial responsibilities. She must report to parliament each year about progress according to set criteria. Don’t let her be Tanya Plibersek. She’s a nice woman but way too gentle. This woman needs to be a hard hitter, tough but fair.

Start an advertising campaign telling men they’re not doing enough around the house and that the house is just as much their responsibility as it is their partner’s. Make the ad cheeky and funny and suggest extremely subtly that they might get more nooky if they do their bit – but frame it mainly in terms of the fair go.

Start a new, non-government Australian website that is a portal to a range of Australian women’s groups and websites devoted to feminist issues.

Immediately legislate for paid maternity leave (no, we still don’t have it as a legal right in Australia).

Start an information campaign aimed at Australian male migrants to explain to them in their own languages the status of women in Australia and what the legal safeguards are. Provide funding for information campaigns in the languages of migrant women to inform them of their legal rights in relation to sexism, domestic violence, work and so on.

Bring back affirmative action, not just for women but for all minorities, gays and lesbians. Affirmative action is misunderstood: it is not about plucking women/minorities off the street to make up the numbers. It’s about looking at the barriers for full participation of various groups in politics, the workforce, education and training, recreation and the arts, and working to remove those barriers.

Empower Indigenous women to take leadership roles in their communities and provide funding for culturally sensitive campaigns and services for both men and women around domestic violence and alcohol addiction.

A brighter future
I guarantee you that life in Australia would be better, and over time our standard of living and reputation for innovation over many areas would improve, if the government and community worked together to improve the status of women in Australia.

South Australia was one of the earliest parts of the world to give women the vote, in 1894, and Australia was one of the first countries to legislate for a universal aged pension. We can recover our reputation for enlightened social policy – if we dare.

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