Book Review: Shy: A Memoir by Sian Prior

An attractive, forty-something woman peers around a gallery, trying vainly to find her partner in the buzzing party crowd. ‘A familiar sensation was sweeping through my body’, Sian Prior writes. ‘It was as if someone had spiked my drink so that instead of sparkling mineral water I was now sipping a kind of effervescent cement’. Unable to spot a familiar face, she starts to sweat and her stomach churns. Alight with panic she flees the party, not even recognising the ‘calm, confident blonde woman’ she glimpses in a mirror on the way out.

Prior, a successful arts journalist, choir master, public speaker and media consultant, suffers from crippling shyness. But this Renaissance woman is also a published author and writing teacher, and the incident jolts her into an exploration of the paradox of her life – that someone so comfortable in the public spotlight could also be felled by terror in unstructured social situations.

That paradox makes this book unique. Its author was born to tell her own story of shyness because her professional persona is the perfect vehicle for spreading the message.

Shy is no conventional memoir, but nor is it a self-help book. Prior ditches a chronological account of her life and replaces it with a panoply of elements – interviews with psychologists (including her own mother, Margot) and her own research; playful lists; play-offs between incidents from her past and theories of shyness – to present a frank account that is often funny, sometimes poignant and always engaging.

Although the result can feel anarchic at times, it works beautifully; experience and vivid recollection step in where the research evidence is simplistic, suggesting both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific definitions.

To cope with the shyness she has battled all along, Prior developed a persona she calls ‘Professional Sian’ – a confident, polished performer who knows how to fake it till she makes it.

But ‘Shy Sian’ surfaces when there is no script, no structure. And for Prior this has meant a lifetime of lost social and romantic opportunities  – from Sally, the school friend round the corner who the young Sian is too scared to visit, to ‘the beautiful dark-eyed boy glimpsed in the stairwell of my first high school’. She has missed out not just on sex but ‘the subtle semaphore of attraction’.

For Prior, shyness is as much about fearful thoughts – what she calls the ‘what ifs’ – as it is about the intensely discomfiting physical symptoms: ‘armpits drenched, throat clenched, locked in battle with myself’. While travelling in Europe in her twenties, Prior develops a stubborn throat lump: ‘Lying on my hostel bunk in the night I would feel it resting there, nuzzling at my vocal cords’.

There is a central narrative here that anchors Prior’s account to the recent past. For ten years she lived with the musician Paul Kelly (whom Prior calls Tom in the book) – an Australia folk hero, one of our national bards. She reveals their slow-burning courtship, which blossomed into a shared life, and the cocooning effect of this relationship on her sense of self.

Her relationship with Tom and other life experiences are held up to the light to examine what shyness isn’t as much as what it is. Is it genetic? What is its relationship to social phobia? Is it the same as introversion, or can a shy person be an extrovert? How does Tom’s fame relate to Prior’s own contradictory stance towards being in the spotlight? Is shyness related to hypersensitivity? She explores the positive character traits that go with shyness, like empathy, conscientiousness and a willingness to listen.

Then the unthinkable happens and Tom announces he is leaving. Suddenly the very rejection that all shy people fear has come to pass.

Upheaval follows, but it is viewed in the light of a formative childhood event – deepening the examination of the origins of shyness in ways that take it far beyond the biological.

Prior’s writing is fresh, visual, funny. She has a sharp recall of the quotidian detail but also the insight and hard-won wisdom of someone who has battled to live a socially and emotionally fulfilling life in the midst of a sometimes crippling fear.

Yet there is something implicit in this book that Prior herself doesn’t pay much attention to. Given the rise of positive psychology, I looked for the protective factors that enabled Prior to seek out significant relationships and pursue professional success.

Without diminishing her pain, I was also interested in the class aspects of her success – her psychologist mother is an obvious factor, as is her immersion in the world of classical music and love affair with the clarinet. But what about schooling – was a private school, with its small class sizes and individualised attention, a strengthening influence?

Prior, intent on exploring a trait that has been hidden and denied in her public life, seems mostly oblivious to these broader questions, although two things stand out that will be useful to anyone who is shy. ‘Professional Sian’ first came into being because Prior was able to find, in a high-profile environmental job, a cause far larger than her own insecurities. She also singles out a passionate curiosity about other people and the world as an incentive to push past her fears.

In public appearances since writing the book, Prior has discussed how risky it felt to break the illusion of her professional competence by publishing Shy. While her discoveries did not lead to the cure she originally hoped for, they have enabled a new-found acceptance, and Prior claims she is no longer embarrassed to be shy.

While Prior’s level of professional success may seem out of reach to many of us shy people, I found this encouraging rather than dispiriting. I suspect most of us have our own version of Professional Sian, and although she may not be as reliable or fearless as Prior’s version, this writer offers a bold role model for risk taking and a path to self-acceptance that many readers will benefit from.

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The Familiar from a Different Angle - Renting, Moving and Disorientation

Last week I was planning to go to a yoga class at a neighbourhood house in the adjacent suburb of Elwood. It's a place of picture-book picturesqueness with narrow winding streets and rows of art deco apartments and intimate shopping centres with independent boutiques and an oversupply of cafes (there's also a flashy, beachy aspect that we won't go into). It is heavily freighted for me because I lived at the Elwood end of (then ultra-hip) St Kilda for one year back in 1988. Nowadays both suburbs are just ultra-expensive, but they still carry for me the weight of the bohemian romanticism that blinded me to the necessity of home ownership for so many years. Much of the charm that attracted the young to these suburbs in the seventies and eighties came from the strong presence of Jewish people from Eastern Europe who had settled there after the Second World War, bringing their rich artistic and culinary cultures with them.

I mapped out the route I would take to the yoga class using Google maps. It was a trip of only seven or eight minutes, but I have lived in Melbourne all my life and although I am not really familiar with Elwood's mish-mash of streets it is not as if they are foreign either.

Yet I could not find the place in time for the class. I drove up the wrong street and then I was in the right street but with not a clue which section of it the neighbourhood house was in. The class started at 6.30 pm. At 6.45 I turned for home feeling cheated, my attempts to reforge my life in this new place stymied. Yet there was a deeper problem. I couldn't really imagine myself at the yoga class. There was something fairytale for me in my mental image of it. As if I was fated not to make it there, because it wasn't quite real.

This raises a mild mental problem that I don’t think or talk about that much because it usually doesn’t involve suffering. It's the place in my experience where dysthymia (mild clinical depression) meets depersonalisation.

I managed to get to the yoga class the following week – I had done the trip in daylight the Saturday before, determined to know in advance exactly where the centre was. And as I waited to give my money to the short, sweet-looking female yoga teacher with the kind, lived-in face and the Eastern European features – the sort of person I associate with my traditional idea of Elwood – I started to feel slightly removed from the situation. For a few seconds I felt as if I was experiencing a memory of this event – but not in the sense of deja vu; rather, in the sense that the emotional content was simply not strong enough for the episode to be taking place in the present. It had a recycled quality. I mentally shook myself and was back in the present again, but a little unnerved. It was as if I could not take in the reality of having managed to join the class.

These feelings are not acute or frightening. They hark back to my nervous breakdown at the age of 21, when they were infinitely stronger and more threatening because I fought them ceaselessly, scared shitless as to what they indicated about my mental state. They were accompanied some of that time by the distorted sense that everything around me was contaminated by being a manifestation of capitalism. Not contaminated in the OCD sense, just completely engulfed by this overarching political reality.

I wonder now whether the content of that distortion was less significant than it seemed to be at the time. Perhaps I have a constitutional inability to fully come to terms with life as it is without experiencing it as some sort of system that represents a threat to me. I wonder whether my ingestion of the bizarre worldview of Irish Catholicism at such a young age has forged this inability. Because now the distortion has a different theme. It’s been there for a few years but has grown stronger since my move – I see everything in terms of Melbourne’s stratospheric property prices.

The social and economic aspects of depersonalisation

The homes around me don’t seem quite real, because they are unattainable – completely so in my case, but also increasingly to people of the younger generation. The houses and old-style flats in Elwood seem to have regressed to the fairytale world of my childhood that I never really left. They are, in fact, fairytales because they look and sound like real homes while being the residences and future homes of millionaires, or the playthings of rich investors. (Mansions don’t have that effect on me, probably because they represent a class that has always been there and whose wealth has always been unattainable to most.) My continued romanticisation of places like Elwood is both a defence against the realities of Melbourne real estate and an acknowledgement of how surreal house values have become in relation to daily life.

It’s confusing because the architecture of where I live has very distinct delineations depending on the area. My suburb, Gardenvale, is more ‘comfortable’ and established than East Malvern, the suburb I left, yet it’s also much less showy (a large Jewish population; people who have bought there simply because they like the beach). But Gardenvale also has elements (architectural as much as anything) of Brighton, the posher suburb over North Road, which is different again (old money and cricket stars). Then there’s Elwood, to which yet other kinds of money are attracted (rock stars, rich new agers, young professionals who love the outdoors, wealthier young families).

Yet Gardenvale itself has felt fresh so far, a place in relation to which I have no emotional baggage. I have commented on the strange foreignness of this suburb, the sense that I have moved to another country rather than an area that is 15 minutes drive from my folks' place. This has also been profoundly disorientating, but not in a bad way.

There is a further complicating factor. When I lived in inner city Carlton for five years in the nineties I was always bumping into people I knew (I’m sure this still happens to younger people who are willing to pay inner city rents). I’ve long moved from Carlton but on my fairly regular visits there I rarely bump into people I know. So there’s a feeling that I have lost my peers, and a sense that they have all moved to the inner north and left me alone (Coburg, Preston and Reservoir, inner northern suburbs which were affordable in the nineties but a long way north of Carlton, spring to mind). I think this loss of community strengthens my feelings of confusion and disorientation when I go back to old stamping grounds like Elwood. Perhaps there’s an age factor also – does depersonalisation get more acute with age, as the brain tries to process an increasing bank of memories while also taking in the present?

Perhaps my dysthymia and depersonalisation are also due to my precarious place in the social fabric. For a while I seemed to be experiencing them less often since joining Grow, but since moving house they've come back. Perhaps they are the way my mental weakness expresses the fundamental puzzle of where I fit in now. Is there any of the old St Kilda and Elwood left? Even if there is, is it actually relevant to me? What am I doing here? What does it actually mean for me to live in a particular location as a childless single woman in her fifties, who’s on a low income?

But I shouldn't talk only of my disorientation and failures to arrive. I now live about five minutes closer by car to the centre where my weekly Grow meeting is held. And only one or two weeks after I arrived in Gardenvale I managed to find my way on foot to a local Buddhist temple that I'd found on Google Maps. That first walk there was taken with the near-certainty I'd get lost but luckily as I approached the temple, a white neoclassical mansion with a park behind it, other people were converging on the property. So there was a feeling of mastery, triumph almost, at having made it to the temple – a sense that I still had it in me to settle in a new place and find new places to go.

But the sense of formlessness still returns, especially on these winter nights that fall so quickly, so early. Who is this new version of me who lives in this in-between suburb yet rushes off to Elwood? How can she relate to anyone living in either area when most of her peers will have kids and own their places? Is she ever going to stop romanticising suburbs over which real estate agents have been greedily rubbing their hands for decades, or is it possible for a suburb to retain some kind of identity beyond real estate values, a retention some Elwood and St Kilda residents seem determined to achieve?

Ah what the hell. I'm going to give up analysing and join the artists.

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Fight or Flight Response: The Paradox of Anxiety Recovery

Pic: pd breen

My feet tap insubstantial, fleeting, on the narrow city pavement. Past closed stores with quirky displays shrouded by dark; car park entrances emitting the endless chug and smell of vehicles; the plaques of narrow, pretentious galleries; and the sleek miniature lobbies of boutique hotels. The human scale of this laneway is comforting in the early evening but my aloneness beats furious in my chest.

I am small but carry with me a scrambling, sabotaging energy. It’s a boiling liquid that threatens to bubble and spill over the situation I’ve so meticulously set up – an online date.

It is this anticipatory anxiety that I remember so well from my dating days. Those walks to the groovy little cubbyhole city bars were far easier to endure than the nauseous, low-level misery of the tram or train ride into the city, as once on foot my adrenalin had a limited outlet in the forward momentum of my limbs. (Trains were worse for some reason, perhaps the larger scale of the stations compared with the more human streetscape of the tram.)

For years I would fight this anxiety, through breathing exercises and ‘self-talk’. We’ve all heard of the fight or flight syndrome. Once you’ve used your will to deny the urge to run, there seems no choice but to do battle with the remains of that urge, to use every tool at your disposal to calm yourself down.

But I slowly realised that trying to damp down my fear was just increasing it. Fear denied has a way of making itself known. Why not try to harness this energy instead of fighting it? Why not run into the situation instead of away from it?

This is hardly a new idea. Back in 1962, in the quaintly titled Self Help for Your Nerves, Dr Claire Weekes used the terms ‘floating’ and ‘masterly inactivity’ to describe her remedy for anxiety, explaining it this way:

it means to give up the struggle, to stop holding tensely onto yourself trying to control your fear, trying to ‘do something about it’ ... It means to by-pass the struggle, to go around, not over the mountain ...

More recently, experienced sufferers and therapists alike urge a general acceptance of the brute fact of anxiety before we can hope to lessen it. On the HealthyPlace.com site, Tanya Peterson writes:

When we fight against anxiety, we inadvertently promote the belief that we’ll feel better, be better, once we’ve conquered anxiety – but not before. This puts pressure on us, makes us feel worse about ourselves, and it serves to increase anxiety ... Accepting ourselves for who we are, anxiety (or other mental illness) and all, is crucial for well-being.

When we react to anxiety with further anxiety, a vicious cycle is created. If we can stay with the initial anxiety and accept it as part of the totality of experience, it becomes easier to manage.

Or does it? In fact, there’s a very big caveat to this. If the anxiety is so overwhelming that you can’t breathe, speak or walk, the idea of going with it in the way I’ve suggested above is a bit insulting. The anxiety needs to be brought down to a level where it is manageable first. And this is a gradual process, not something that can be done in a few minutes, hours or even days. It’s the stuff of daily work and practice, and often outside help in the form of therapy.

Reducing anxiety is a long-term task

Bringing the anxiety down to a manageable level could require anything from medication and a course of CBT to simple breathing exercises in front of the tele. Mindfulness in the form of meditation or mindfulness exercises is a great way of doing this, because it fosters the very acceptance that anxiety sufferers struggle with.  or And unless you’ve been floating around in orbit for the last twenty years, you’ll know that exercise can also be helpful.

For years I had a very bad problem talking with clients on the phone. It was so severe that the kinds of advice you get on the internet for treating panic attacks were laughably useless. The irrational terror was so extreme I wanted to scream. Anything I could do in the situation itself was impossible, because the raw, visceral fear that eventually even the sound of the phone ringing provoked was just too high. Sometimes the only sensible thing to do was not answer the phone at all.

In the end, drugs were the only thing that helped. They gradually gave me a level of confidence that has remained to some extent even though I’ve now stopped taking them. (Which is not to say it’s fun, or easy – it’s just do-able now, most of the time anyway.)

Some basic CBT has also helped. I understand better now how sensitised anxious people become to our reactions. We become hyperaware of every bodily reaction and thought, and frantically try to interpret them. We react as if every sign of anxiety is inherently dangerous. This happens so quickly at the neuronal level it’s impossible to stop, but just being aware of the process has helped me become a bit more detached.

There’s another reason why riding with the anxiety isn’t as easy as it sounds. Often part of the anxiety itself is a fear of what others think, and the imperative to hide our discomfort sometimes seems to be a matter of life and death. I get annoyed at how scared I still get, in social situations, of looking scared, and the high standard I demand for my level of confidence. But at least I don’t respond to these expectations like I used to – in the past, I would either put on a show of extroversion which was painfully transparent anyway, or withdraw further into myself, horrified, if I could not hide my fear.

All this is to say that the very basis of recovery for me is that it is always provisional, always incomplete. (I don’t want to suggest that I’ve conquered my anxiety – there are plenty of situations that I still avoid, although I have made progress.) Recovery involves a major contradiction – a fundamental acceptance of the impost of anxiety, and a willingness to harness its energy, along with a long-term plan for reducing it. Embracing this contradiction is a daily challenge.

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Heatwave Hell in Melbourne - And Afterwards

Pic: Koshy Koshy

Last week, Melbourne endured four days of temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius, including three days over 42, and two days at virtually 44 degrees.

Adelaide fared even worse: 42.1 on Monday, 45.1 on Tuesday, 43.7 on Wednesday and 44.2 on the Thursday. On that day Roseworthy, north of Adelaide, was the hottest place in South Australia, with the maximum temperature reaching 46.4.

I wasn’t expecting to write a blog entry primly entitled ‘How I felt after the heat wave’, especially as I’ve just had a whinge about the difficulties of being green and anxious. But then a couple of friends talked about being depressed and tired once the weather had changed so I decided to make a few speculations about it.

It was a week when things got a bit too sci-fi for my liking. The level of heat was something I felt I hadn’t experienced before, but apparently things got this bad back in February 2009, culminating in Black Saturday, when the temperature reached 46.4 in Melbourne. (As you can see these extremes are turning me into a climate nerd!)

It seems there is something we lack when we think and talk about temperature. We don’t have the words to describe the spiritual and emotional effects of extended heat. We know that the very young and the elderly die in heatwaves, as do numerous small animals – bats, possums, birds – and in the worst hours we fancy we experience something of what they must have gone through, but we can’t possibly.

Nor are we able, as a society, to communally memorialise the heat. We commemorate the bushfires of course, and the terrible loss of life and home, as we should. But somehow the communal bruising of extended extreme weather doesn’t get memorialised.

Perhaps we should have some kind of public art work that can be added to over the years, recording the highest temperatures for each summer with accompanying statistics and stories. Some of those stories would be funny but some of them would be tragic – losing grandparents and young babies to heat stroke for example. More than double the number of people died of the heat in the week before Black Saturday (374) than died in the fires (173).

Maybe the lack of a vocabulary for this type of stress is why some people try to go on as if nothing has changed – there were still joggers on my street early in the the mornings of the hottest days. Routines are comforting touchstones in uncertain times, but it's important to adapt and bend. A friend of mine rode his bike to the local shopping centre for breakfast, but he rode slowly, and found it less tiring than walking would have been.  

Suffering the heat

With extreme heat and cold, it’s not, in a first world country, just about the temperature. It’s what battling the temperature, and the practical effects of the extreme weather, takes out of you physically and emotionally.

If your body is overheated for a long period of time, it’s a low-key, extended suffering. It’s exhausting in a way that is difficult to describe. I imagine that battling with extreme cold has similarly debilitating effects.

But why the mental effects, the lingering ennui and depression? Although there is a robust public discussion about the heat, with plenty of warnings and advice about how to cope with it, there is no advice on how to cope with the fears it engenders. Perhaps being very hot for a long period provokes ancient, preverbal terrors. There’s also the strange sense of anticlimax that we experience when the temperature drops suddenly, and we are expected to go back to normal straight away.

Yet it’s fundamentally wrong for the body to be this overheated and it feels that way. It took me three days to get over the physical effects of the heat. In those days I paced myself well and got everything done that I needed to. And there were small breaks, too, during the ordeal, like the Wednesday morning at quarter to six when I opened the front door and the morning air was cool and welcoming so I walked a couple of blocks and it was the most beautiful reprieve. To feel alive in the world and able to move freely without being overheated.

But by the last day I’d had it. I escaped the house at about 3, drove myself to Camberwell library, picturing the waiting beanbags, which no one usually uses – imagining myself on one of them. And when I got there, sure enough there were a couple of empty beanbags. On one side of me, a young man had fallen asleep. On the other, a young couple sat close and chatting quietly. An almost full bottle of spring water on the ground beside them. Forgot. The. Water. Damn. At Ashburton library two days earlier, the staff had put out a jug of water and plastic cups – a great idea. Camberwell library hadn’t done that so the utter joy of the beanbag was marred a bit by thirst, but it was manageable.

Anyway, the end of the ordeal was in sight, and came earlier than expected. On the way home from the library the temperature started to drop – by about 10 degrees Celsius in an hour. That was enough to provide immediate relief and then the full cooling came a few hours later.

It was a sobering glimpse into a future dominated by catastrophic climate change. When I was growing up, it was a big deal (and kind of exciting) for the temperature to reach 100 degreees Fahrenheit, which is ‘only’ 37.7 degrees Celsius. A few months ago the Bureau of Meteorology made an announcement – that the climate of Australia had changed, and that there was no point in looking at climate records to forecast the future. I try to imagine what would have happened if those four days had stretched to five, or six, or more.

In the future, will there be a number of days every year when certain places will be simply uninhabitable? I imagine there could be evacuations. Or instead will there be public places set aside with airconditioning for people to huddle in?

When it came to bushfires – which usually get worse when the cold change hits because the winds fan the flames – my state got off lightly. There was no repeat of Black Saturday. This was a huge relief, although in Victoria alone, the Grampians blaze burned for 52,000 hectares, one person was killed, about 4000 sheep lost their lives, and 27 houses and about 60 other buildings were lost. Terrible, but it could have been so much worse.

So – a huge impost on the body and spirit that probably translates into a huge dive in productivity across the state. I feel as if I’ve gone through some ritual ordeal. And yet in twenty years' time I won’t be boasting to my great-nieces and nephews about how I lived through the Great Heatwave of 2014 – what they will have to put up with in future heatwaves will make last week look like a pleasant spring interlude!

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Eco-Anxiety: The Challenge of Being Green and Anxious

Pic: Shehal Joseph

It’s going to be 43 degrees Celsius in Melbourne today – a ‘scorcher’. I’m at my PC, noticing how rapidly my hair is drying and trying to figure out how soon I can dash off to the shops for supplies before the air starts to bake. The milky blue of the morning sky is threatening somehow. It seems like a good time to complete my blog entry on the challenges of having anxiety, or any sort of mental illness, and being eco-friendly or simply aware of the issues, ie climate change.

There is a vague menace in heat waves for me that makes the difficulty in sleeping, especially early on in the heatwave, almost certainly psychological.

It’s not just the magic figure of 43 that is stressing me out today, but the fact that it’s the second day of what will be a five-day heat marathon, with four days of temperatures 39 and above. I picture myself by the end of it a frazzled, dried up twig, mentally scarred for life by my ordeal.

For the fact is once my double brick house starts to cook, if I don’t take adequate cooling measures I quickly go into an odd dissociated state of mind that makes me incapable of taking positive action. The trouble is that this state creeps up on me before I have time to prepare, so I have planned for it this time, and will probably end up in the local library by early afternoon. Later in the week, once the sun has started to set, you might find me wading into the dirty water of Elwood Beach, oblivious to the frenzied chirping and splashing of the crowds who actually think it is FUN to cool down on a hot day and not just grim necessity.

Heatwaves are made more likely by climate change, which leads me to the original topic of this blog entry – it’s not easy being green, and it’s especially not easy if you have any type of mental illness.

I need to acknowledge from the get-go that poor people – and many of us with mental illness are poor – produce very low carbon emissions anyway.

One thing that annoys me about this is that we don’t get social credit for our small carbon footprint. No-one congratulates me on not having replaced my 1997 Starlet with a new car in the last few years but they would probably pat me on the back if I bought a new Prius. Yet I am saving more emissions by not buying a new car, because the emissions involved in producing the Prius would probably be higher than the extra emissions from continuing to drive my little four-cylinder. Similarly, I get no kudos for not having an air conditioner to help me through the heatwave (although I do get plenty of sympathy!) I know someone on disability who doesn’t heat his house in winter, and he’s not earning any awards for Best Green Citizen of the Year. Of course, many of us don’t have cars (that may also be a conscious choice).

But what about voluntary green actions? These often involve extra effort, such as shopping at an organic grocery store that may be further away than the local supermarket. They also require additional planning, eg having enough plastic bags in stock, and remembering to take them with you when you go out. And often (but not always) buying green products is more expensive than the conventional option. As well, with automated checkouts, the anonymity of supermarket shopping can seem so much easier.

If you do have a car, it’s tempting to drive to a social event rather than taking public transport because you don’t have the stress of waiting for the train or tram, or battling your paranoia about the other passengers and any other worries common to anxiety sufferers; then there’s the quick get-away that a car makes possible if the socialising gets too much.

The irony is that people with mental illness can struggle just doing normal things, while conscious green actions require a kind of super-normality.

But being green is also important for many people, whether or not they have mental illness. This is because meaning and purpose are vital to wellbeing, and making an effort to be eco-friendly can provide some relief from the feelings of guilt, fear and anger that the ecological state of the world can ignite.

However, I have no illusions about the limits of said greenness in the scheme of things. In a free market economy where both major parties in Australia are centre right, the idea of doing the right thing – and being viewed by various industries as a niche market for your trouble – can be demoralising rather than empowering. The sense of helplessness this situation engenders can lead to depression, so it’s tempting to ignore the whole issue.

It’s true that nothing I do personally, in my day-to-day practical life, is going to affect climate change significantly. That idea is itself a form of greenwash, brought to you courtesy of the fossil fuel industry and big finance, which between them are investing in enough coal mining and exporting to send the planet to buggery in a few hundred years.

It is also a depressing fact that wholefood stores are generally just as profit focused as the evil supermarkets. It is highly likely that your local organic store is not using green power, for instance, and if it the company is growing, its carbon emissions may actually be increasing.

And buying a green product from a large company that mostly manufactures non-eco-friendly products is tokenistic at best. I bought a diary this year that was carbon neutral, but the company as a whole is anything but, and produces plenty of products that aren’t carbon friendly at all. If you’re going to buy green products, I’d suggest buying them from a company that is trying to do the right thing with all its products, not just one or two that have been created for marketing purposes. The book Greenwash by Guy Pearse has enlightened me on this distinction; it has all the dirt on who’s really doing the right thing in the corporate world, and who’s not.

Yet I don’t see my tokenistic green actions as a complete waste of time, money and energy. I see them as contributing to a more eco-friendly culture – one that will hopefully grow stronger in the long term, and is waiting in the wings for when climate change has become such an emergency that even the most cynical powerbrokers are forced to act.

Also, when I buy from wholefood stores I am at least protecting diversity (Australia has one of the most concentrated supermarket markets in the world, dominated by the duopoly of Woolworths and Coles) and supporting small suppliers. I’m also planning to put my money where my mouth is, by moving my term deposits entirely away from the big banks at the end of the month. This will not only increase my support for local credit unions but it will give me a lovely, revenge-y feeling – I can’t wait to tell the NAB that my money’s no longer going to support their dirty investments.

It’s also the case that being slightly greener can sometimes save money, for example buying from op shops or thrift stores. This retail model is flawed too, I know, because it relies on a certain amount of consumers to buy new products to donate. Yet there is so much good in op shops – the volunteers and what they gain and give, the programs that the profits go to support, and the idea of re-using someone’s discarded junk instead of having it consigned to landfill. A few op shops have been set up to include an element of repair and restoration, and it would be great if this model was adopted more broadly.

Then there’s the wider recycling movement, which is literally redesigning the culture of consumption – fix or repurpose things if possible; if you do create something new, build it to last; and borrow, share and rent rather than buy.

Well, my hair is now dry so I am dashing off to the shops – sadly, it must be admitted, in my car. The irony is that it’s even harder being green during a climate-induced heatwave, especially if you’re heat-phobic. Which leads to my conclusion, that I now take small green actions when I can, while voting for the Greens, the party that wants to take big action. And when I can’t be green because of mental issues or finances, there’s no point in bashing myself up about it.

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‘Is That All There Is?’ Anxiety, Exposure and the Adrenalin Crash

I was quietly, morbidly terrified. The cream walls pressed in on me. I sat on a swivel chair behind the clunky reception desk as if it offered protection from the ordeal to come.

To my right, the shopfront-style window showcased the darkening sky and the wide, bare street. On my left, visible through glass panels in the radio booth, my friend Melissa moved dials up and down, put discs into a console and spoke into a fat black mike. I could hear her voice on the speaker broadcasting into the room.

Melissa hosts a Sunday afternoon radio program on a community radio station, and I was about to read out a film review on it. Melissa had been suggesting for years that I start a regular review segment on her program, an informal arrangement every two or three weeks. I’d always refused, but now, thanks to taking half a Luvox a day, I thought it was worth a try. And I was suffering for my decision.

Sure, the radio station is a local one with a limited audience. But ‘stuffing up’ would be a definite setback. And anyone coming into the reception area would hear me stumble on that huge speaker, including the two late-middle-aged men who were due to come in any minute for the program running after Melissa’s show.

I had my review printed out, the sheet already damp from my sweaty fingers. I was too scared to do anything but glance over it, as sustained attention would remind me of the ordeal to come.

Finally Melissa summoned me. This was actually a step forward as the lonely anticipation was worse than being in the booth with Melissa, ready to roll as the last bars of the music track played themselves out. Truth to tell it wasn’t my first time in the booth: a couple of years ago Melissa had interviewed me about my self-published book The Inspired Shopper. That had been hard, but as an interviewee I had far less responsibility.

To cut a long story short, I sailed through it. I started with the high point of the film and went from there. Melissa and my on-air rapport helped. We often discuss films over the phone, so this was familiar territory in some ways. And she knew I was nervous, so could take over if I started to panic. It went so well that a friend who listened said he had been expecting me to sound okay with room for improvement, but that I had sounded much better than that – his only criticism being that I talked too fast.

Afterwards we went out for a drink at a large noisy cafe on a nearby corner. Walking to the cafe with Melissa in the hostile cold of mid-June, I didn’t feel the rush of victory and mastery that I’d been expecting; instead I felt empty. There was a sense of anticlimax. I had made a major breakthrough, yet nothing had changed.

I’ve had this feeling often when I’ve done something that caused what is called ‘anticipatory anxiety’. Instead of a sense of pride in having made it through a feared event in one piece, there is a feeling of flatness and disappointment.

Part of it is surely psychological. If you anticipate something perfectly ordinary, and then you achieve it without all the imagined catastrophes occurring, you realise that all the energy you expended on the anxiety was a waste of time. Not only that, but given that the feared event is probably something you were able to do with ease as a child, or even a few years earlier, you are confronted with the essential mundaneness of much of life. Your achievement doesn’t feel like an achievement at all, just a big let-down. The song that sums up this ennui perfectly is the 1970 Peggy Lee hit ‘Is that all there is?’

But there may also be a physical aspect. Anxiety produces the fight-or-flight syndrome. The sympathetic nervous system causes the body to produce stress hormones that include adrenalin (also known as epinephrine) and dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is associated with feelings of pleasure and plays a role in addiction.

If you’re a nervous person like me, adrenalin can seem like a sadistic enemy. It makes your hands shake, your legs turn to water, your heart thump madly and your digestive system melt, while it spitefully steals your ability to breathe. But it also sends energy surging through your bloodstream. It helps you to complete the challenge that has called it up in the first place, among other things by elevating blood sugar and  increasing blood pressure and the flow of blood to the muscles. 

After the challenge is completed, the body goes into recovery mode. The parasympathetic nervous system kicks in. Blood pressure and breathing return to normal, and the heartbeat slows down. Levels of adrenalin drop and remain low for a period that depends on the severity of the stress. It’s common to feel tired and listless.

But that's not the whole story. While adrenalin is released instantly and has a short-term effect, another stress hormone, cortisol, works differently. Cortisol levels start rising just as your adrenalin levels start to drop. Just as it takes longer for cortisol to build up in your system than adrenalin, it also takes longer for cortisol levels to drop. Wikibooks has this to say about it:

Together with the rise of cortisol and the decrease of adrenaline, come the nasty side-effects of the stress hormones. It is at this moment that you feel bad, anxious, and having [sic] lots of negative thoughts. And this is perhaps one of the critical features of stress which flies against common sense: you only feel its bad aspects when your body is stressing down and progressing towards a more relaxed state. When you are building up on adrenaline, in effect stressing up, you might even be feeling good! This explains what is popularly known as the adrenaline rush and the consequent adrenaline crash.

Perhaps the feeling of 'blah' afterwards is a combination of a lowering of blood sugar and blood pressure, a drop in dopamine and adrenalin, and the continuing presence of cortisol? For some people cortisol levels remain high after a stressful event is over, contributing to chronic stress. (There is also a link between elevated cortisol and depression, but it is disputed.)

The post-event blues I've described here aren't confined to the anxious. Google is filled with mentions of ‘post-event depression’. If you attend a fantastic concert, a dream vacation or even your own wedding, there is a flatness afterwards as you return to normal life. I suspect most people put this down to the boredom of daily life, but perhaps there is that physical element as well.

This article on the Psychology Today website talks specifically about post-wedding depression. One of the antidotes it recommends is focusing on life after the wedding, rather than seeing the wedding as an end goal. This suggests that seeing any kind of social or psychological challenge as the be-all and the end-all may be part of the problem. Perhaps it would be better to keep in mind that life will go on afterwards much as before, apart from the subtle internal change of meeting that particular challenge; and, once the challenge has been met, to look ahead to the next challenge.

But I think the most important way to cope with post-event let-down is to keep the bigger picture in mind. In my case speaking on the radio doesn’t necessarily translate to, say, being able to talk comfortably with my relatives at the next family do. It should, but it doesn’t. Nevertheless it is still a victory. As long as I am willing to stay in my discomfort zone, and to build up my tolerance of unpleasant feelings, I can gradually increase the scale of the challenge. A feeling of short-term victory would be nice, but more important to keep in mind is my larger plan for a greater involvement in life – that’s the hope, anyway.

Have you experienced a feeling of let-down after achieving a social or other goal? Please let us know.

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A Growing Concern: Peer Support and the GROW Program

These days, self-help groups for mental illness come in a whole range of shapes and sizes – or what the therapists like to call ‘models’.

There are men’s groups, long-term psychotherapy groups, personal development groups run by counsellors, self-help groups for specific problems, short-term courses for disorder management – and then there is GROW.

GROW is a 12-step program with a difference. Instead of being based on a specific addiction, it’s for anyone with a mental illness, recovering from addiction or simply finding life difficult to cope with. 

The aim of GROW is to bring people to a state of greater maturity – in other words to help them grow up. You’re not necessarily cured of life’s travails or the mental illness that plagues you, but not only do you learn how to manage your life better, you get support from others with the same goal.

Meetings are held weekly and include problem solving, study of GROW literature, readings and stories of recovery. Leadership of meetings is rotated among members. Some members are seeing therapists or on medication, while others aren't.

GROW actually began in Australia. It was started in 1957 by a Roman Catholic priest who had a nervous breakdown and discovered there was nothing to support him in his recovery. He started going to Alcoholics Anonymous, where he found other people with mental illness who were there because it was the only thing available. They started meeting weekly to share their recovery, and after the meetings Father Keogh would write up what came out of the group.

The priestly origins of GROW can still be found in some of the literature. Yet GROW is actually more enlightened than other 12-step programs in that it gives people the choice of substituting ‘Truth’ for ‘God’; atheists are welcome.

GROW now has branches in the USA (Illinois, New Jersey and Alaska), New Zealand and Ireland. A similar organisation, Emotions Anonymous, was founded in the USA and has chapters in Australia, the UK, Canada and elsewhere. Another option is Recovery International, on which some of the GROW program is based.

A quirky program that works

While GROW is based on 12-step programs such as AA, it differs from them in significant ways. These differences can be both a strength and a weakness.

Unlike most 12-step programs there’s a free exchange in the meetings themselves, with people offering each other advice and referring to useful bits of the program material. This means it's easier for meetings to get out of control. Some of the people in my group find it hard to stick to the structure and need reining in, and Control Freak here suffers from apoplexy as she bites her lip and refrains from making bitchy comments about the relevance of members' contributions.

Most 12-step meetings are up to one-and-a-half hours long. GROW meetings run for two hours, which is quite a long time, and this may put some people off, at least initially.

The older program material is very dated, and some of it is downright odd, but it's currently being updated. I worry sometimes whether the material is based on the latest evidence base for mental health treatment.

But if you're interested, you have to look beyond these surface elements to what it is about GROW that works - for work it does. A longitudinal study conducted by the School of Psychology at Curtin University found that it improved members' wellbeing, strengthened their identity, and resulted in fewer hospitalisations and a reduction in medication.

Why so successful? One reason is that GROW asks members to attend the same meeting every week. You can’t just float around different meetings, which is possible with conventional 12-step programs. What this does is build strong bonds between people, the ‘peer support’ that is now considered so important to successful management of mental illness.

There is also a huge emphasis on acceptance, non-judgementalism, and, that over-used word 'love'. Every week you say simple things like ‘In GROW we love one another’. These affirming words and the spirit that goes with them are a boost to the fragile self-esteem that mental illness both causes, and is fed by.

Problems are listened to carefully, and the advice of other members is down-to-earth and helpful.

The program literature includes many commonsense sayings and readings. After a while, you learn some of the basic things to read over and think about when the going gets really tough.

If you're having difficulty with a life event or mental illness, or just generally finding life hard going, I heartily recommend giving it a try. If there's no GROW program in your area, other forms of peer support may be available - and when it comes to offering advice and support for mental illness or struggles with life, there's no wiser resource than other sufferers.

Next time: GROW and me

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Back from the Brink

For the last four months or so I’ve been going slowly downhill. Not surprisingly my blog has reflected a growing distance from self. Sometimes it is impossible to write about something when you are in the midst of it, because you actually lose sight of what is happening.

Insight is a strange beast. When it comes to my evaluation of my own illness compared with those of other sufferers, it seems everyone else is genuinely suffering but me. I’m not mentally ill at times like this, just a mass of self-loathing surrounding a collapsed ego. There is no me left to say ‘Don’t worry – you’re just having an attack of whatever it is’.

And when I emerge into the light, and find that self again, the eternal self that hid from me, I wish I could provide a magic thread from that knowledge to the collapsed me so that the collapsed me would always know that the real self would emerge sooner or later.

I still don’t know if this latest outbreak is caused by OCD alone or from low-level OCD with, say, GAD and depression thrown in. But who cares? It’s my unique version of room 101 and my psyche cannot seem to let me off the hook.

Now that the antidepressants are kicking in, I look back and realise that I have been playing around with them almost from the very beginning. Still in thrall to the idea that they would harm both my short-term functioning and the long-term ability off my synapses to fire up. All I know now is that without drugs my brain is not a nice place to be any more. It’s a murky, guilt-wracked quagmire of morbid fears and misplaced connections. I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy to live there, let alone me.

With drugs, in contrast, my brain is like one of those characters in a 1950s Alfred Hitchcock movie - you know how in those movies everybody, even the extras, is so controlled as to seem to be obeying some invisible, internalised authority? Clip-clopping along in their hats and trench coats to whatever official or unofficial desk or meeting they're due at next. Even the crims - especially the crims - seem obsessively organised in Hitchcock movies.

I have a lot of vague hope right now – hope in my brain’s ability to renew itself, partly through chemical means but also through natural means – physical exercise, emotional support and perhaps some kind of mental exercise.

I picture a profound healing medium. It is an electric liquid, inkily reflective yet not wet – when you immerse yourself in it, it parts like a curtain. It is thick and dark but also ice-clear, not murky. A substance not of this earth but constituting it. A mysterious medium that renews and reawakens the essential self. Perhaps picturing this in my brain is helping me to move towards whatever healing the world might be able to bring.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might also like New and Improved Version? Or Slightly Nutty Does Drugs and Tiny Steps up the Mountain: Exposure and Social Phobia Recovery.

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Free Offer: Review Copy of Memoir

I'm offering 10 readers a free copy of my memoir, Compulsive Mind: A Memoir of Panic, Social Anxiety and OCD.

There's just one condition – that you promise to provide a review of the book on the Amazon website. This means that you need to have an Amazon account, and to have bought something using that account in the past.

At the moment no-one has reviewed my book on Amazon, despite it having been in the top 100 for Kindle mental illness categories many times. The fact is that many – perhaps the majority of – Amazon reviews are either set-ups, or an expression of extreme reactions to a book, whether positive or negative.

Of course I want reviews so that potential readers will have something to go on and feel more comfortable buying the book. But as a writer I also crave feedback. I would love to know what works about the book for readers, and equally what doesn't.

I want any reviews of my book to be sincere. I don't expect you to review the book positively, just honestly. And reviews don't have to be time consuming – Amazon reviews can range in length from a short article to just a few lines.

If you're successful I will send the book in the form of a mobi file, so you need to have a Kindle reader. But you don't need a Kindle – you can download a free Kindle reader for iMac, Windows and many types of smart phone and tablet, including iPad and iPhone, from here.

About the book
In this sex-saturated world, imagine for one minute that there's something you're more terrified of than anything else: love and intimacy. And that a nasty case of social phobia and low-level OCD lurks behind your terror.

This moving, often confronting memoir reveals how a devastating and complex anxiety disorder exploded into the life of an intelligent, creative young girl struggling to reach maturity in the Melbourne, Australia of the 1970s and 80s.

Adrienne McGill grew up with undiagnosed social phobia and OCD, and developed panic disorder at the age of twenty. The toll her untreated illness took on her career, relationships and emotional development is related here in sardonic, sometimes relentless prose that packs a punch.

This book is essential reading if you:

• want to better understand the dynamics of anxiety
• feel that your anxiety disorder doesn't fit neatly into the standard definitions
•  love memoirs of the 1980s
• are looking for a memoir about blushing
• suffer from more than one disorder. 

How to request your free review copy 
Write to me requesting your free copy at caetem@yahoo.com. I'm only giving away ten copies, so be quick! I'll amend this blog entry when the offer is no longer valid.

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New and Improved Version? Or Slightly Nutty Does Drugs

Please note: the following is my experience only and is not advice about whether or not to take antidepressants. If you are experiencing any serious side effects from pharmaceutical drugs, including suicidal thoughts, contact your doctor or a close family member immediately.

I am 49 years old, and it sometimes feels as if my evolution as a human has consisted of removing one inadequate story to explain my life – one veil over my eyes – and replacing it with another. The replacement story is never completely accurate but gets closer to the truth each time.

My latest revelation is this: not that it would be beneficial for me to be on medication, or that I would do better on it, but that I should not be let out of the house without being drugged to the eyeballs; and that this has probably been the case for my entire adult life (except they didn’t have SSRI antidepressants when I was 19, so I and the entire universe are excused from responsibility for my mental health until the creation and dissemination of Luvox).

Having been on ‘drugs’ for a grand total of six days I realise that this is just another story to explain where I’m at right now; whether relatively accurate or not, it’s too early to judge.

Crunch time

I had a crisis on a recent weekend. I’d come to a total halt. Just about everything had become hard, apart from buying groceries at the supermarket using the self-serve checkouts, and browsing in clothes stores. Hairdressers too hard, didn’t like the close contact, podiatrists too hard, what if you have a panic attack while they’re literally holding onto your feet? Dates too difficult, how not to hyperventilate when the date is sitting opposite you and you don’t even trust yourself to pick up the glass of mineral water, carry it to your lips and sip from it? Family gatherings increasingly too hard: this has been all too easy to be in denial about and to dismiss as a symptom because I don’t get on with my family – it’s their fault I feel so uncomfortable, not the fact that I suffer from a virulent combination of social anxiety, OCD and panic disorder undergirded by affect phobia and hypervigilance.

And even – get this – too hard to sit in the audience – not in the podium, but in the audience – at an author talk or discussion forum. What if I catch the eye of one of the speakers and there are not enough tall, big-headed people to hide behind? It feels as if the person on the platform can see right through me. Yes, folks, this is how bad my whatever-it-is actually is these days, how controlling it’s become. Extreme, but in a quiet, polite, implosive kind of way. I can’t even have a conversation with an uncle or male cousin at a family do without a panic attack hovering in the background.

How did I take so long to reach this conclusion? There have been so many warning signs. It’s amazing how many books you can read about people coming to terms with being on medication and not think it applies to you in the slightest.

I did make some progress when I saw a psychologist for a period in 2010-11, but when I stopped seeing her I started to slip backwards again.

My physical difficulties are the reason why I’ve been (mostly) undrugged for most of my adult life (along with my attitude towards them). If you already suffer from brain fog from food intolerance and low blood sugar, and an eating disorder that makes it difficult to stick to a restricted diet, and you live in a cold, mouldy old house with a gas heater that sends you to sleep whenever you lounge in front of it, why would you further compromise your precious grey matter?

Because you have almost nothing to lose.

Because there’s no other option.

Because you are almost two-thirds of the way through your expected lifespan, and suddenly it makes no sense to preserve future cognitive ability for some mythical perfect self, rather than make life better in the present moment.

Because you are curious.

What I’m hoping is that there’s a pay-off: the drugs will get me out of the house, especially at night, so that the mould and the cold won’t matter so much.

My not-so-hidden agenda is to be able to sit in meetings. Social meetings, support meetings at this point. Later, political meetings (a very big ask). I want to start off with a mental health meeting and take it from there.

My hidden agenda is that I’ll actually make some new friends. This has been a huge sticking point with me all my adult life, but especially in recent years. I made my last new friend way back in 2004, and no-one I’ve met since then in the world of internet dating has stuck, yet I’m haemorrhaging old friends. It’s time to go out in the world to find people with common interests.

Never have the words ‘easier said than done’ been more applicable. Some days I am confident that I am on the way to becoming the most socially phobic person in Australia. I have no confidence in my ability to sit in a circle with a group of people with the slightest degree of equanimity for, oh I don’t know, two minutes. This hurts to write, because I can chart how I’ve gone downhill in the last 12 years: it was never easy, but some one-off workshops and ongoing classes and meetings were once manageable, depending on where I was sitting and the combination of people.

So last Thursday I finally came to the end of my tether and made an appointment with my GP, whom I hadn’t seen in 13 months.

‘I want to go back on Luvox.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘I’m the kind of person ...’ I said, repeating my dramatic ‘drugged to the eyeballs’ line.

She was great. Scrutinised me in her no-nonsense, non-judgemental way, curious as to why, after briefly flirting with Luvox in 2010, I’d suddenly come to this decision. I mentioned the crisis but didn’t go into much detail.

Loving and leaving Luvox

I have a history with this drug that made the flirtation in 2010 possible. I first started on Luvox in around 2001, when I began a writing and editing diploma. It was a low dose, but it helped me sit in my classes more comfortably in the first year, and perhaps, towards the beginning, took the edge off my social anxiety.

Luvox is one of the SSRIs used to treat OCD as well as social anxiety. My psyche at the time, an elderly Freudian with compassion and wisdom, had chosen Luvox for me instead of a host of other SSRIs, so he perceived I was obsessive. But I regret that he chose not to suggest to me that I might have some low-level form of OCD, and that this might be affecting my ability to handle my social anxiety. To his credit he wanted me to increase the dose to 50 mg (which is still low: the maximum is 300 mg) but I was too paranoid about brain fog to comply.

But – and this is an indication of how all-over-the-shop I was in those days – I have no idea how long I stayed on it beyond the months in which classes were held in 2001. Whatever the length of time, and whether it stretched into the second year of my course, I must have at some point stopped monitoring its effects on my social life or believing it made much difference to my social anxiety, because when I did decide to stop it in early 2003, I was very blase (surely I must have noticed, though, its ability to reduce my obsessiveness?). Whatever the time period I was on the Luvox, I took only 25 mg a day. I feared a higher dose would turn me into a zombie.

I'm now curious as to whether I stayed on the drug continuously the following year, 2002, the second year of my editing course, but I marvel at my stupidity either way. If I did stay on it, I should have upped the dose: it was a year of accumulating social and emotional disasters. I remember being very phobic in a couple of classes; sabotaging some emerging acquaintanceships; starting a doomed fling with a randy right-wing barrister; and moving out of my Carlton cottage, which was in the centre of everything, to a lonely and undersized one-bedroom flat further north of the city that I eventually flooded. Towards the end of 2002 I embarked on a course of useless homeopathics, which just made my blood sugar problems worse because the only active ingredient in a homeopathy solution is the alcohol. If I was still on the Luvox then, I evidently put no thought into what the combination of Luvox and the alcohol solution would have been but I soon realised how spaced out I was becoming.

I finally went off the drug completely some time early in 2003 because I remember writing that it was making everything ‘white and exhausting like a snow storm’ and I wanted my brain to be as clear as possible for the editing business I was in the process of establishing. As I’ve said, I have no idea if my use had been continuous throughout 2002.

What I wanted then, and would still choose now in the best possible world, would be some kind of perfect non-drug therapy that involved a return to an infantilised state and reparenting. I have read about this kind of therapy and often thought it sounded perfect for me; I’ve also had the sense that given a strong, resilient enough therapeutic community that could deal with the acting out of my symptoms I would over time heal.

But in a perfect world.

First days on the drug

So now I’m back on Luvox again, starting with a low dose of 25 mg. Once I’ve adjusted to this dose, I am hoping to increase the amount to 50 mg.

The adjustment period is impossible to describe. I have felt very odd things that are difficult to put into words. None has been unbearable, but some are turning out to be pretty hellish. If these feelings persist beyond a month I’ll stop the drug but I want to give my system time to get used to it before I make a decision.

Last Saturday afternoon at the local mall: a horrible jumping sensation when I lift my self-conscious feet as I prepare for the escalator. I feel that I must focus on my feet in order to walk normally, but I notice that already I am less self-conscious about the rest of me. People aren’t staring at me all of a sudden; they’re not that interested in me. We are in our separate worlds.

Tiny beads of sweat like powder on my skin.

I am in an awful mental brace. Back at home, I go online and find other people complaining of things like ‘feeling medicated’ and a sensation, apparently common, of having two brains.

Hmmm. I can sort of understand what they mean. One brain feeling all the feelings, the other brain containing the feelings and stopping them from spilling out? Are two brains better than one?

Or two heads? Back in 2002, someone in my 12-step program said, of her battle with depression and her firm belief that drugs, however difficult to get right, were essential to her wellbeing: I don’t care if they give me three heads, at least I can function.

Once you can’t function any more, side effects and future risks become moot.

Saturday night: awful. I ring up one of the few friends I have left who is as usual too tired to go out, as she had promised. (If any of my friends are reading this: it is not a complaint. I’ve somehow set it up that way.) As we talk an unutterable, mildly suicidal depression kicks in along with that medicated feeling. A sort of terminal gloominess, like an extreme version of boredom. But I am bored, terribly bored, and I’ve been bored for ages.

(This feeling returns in the evenings of the following week from around 8.30 pm, seemingly when the drug starts to wear off and when the hormonal changes caused by nightfall have well and truly kicked in.)

Sunday is drastic. I wake with unutterable relief that the drug has started to leave my system and my intuition screams at me not to take it. I listen to it and don’t take the Luvox, wondering if this will be the end of my drug experiment; but I end up taking it every day of the following week – Sunday’s refusal turns out to be just my body telling me to ease into the new regime.

It’s a sunny afternoon and after going back to bed and nursing a need for an extra hour’s sleep I have plenty of energy to get out of the house and even brave Melbourne public transport’s new and fairly disastrous ticketing system (worth a blog entry on its own). And go to the National Gallery of Victoria (oddly named as it’s actually a state gallery with ideas above its station).

While the punters pay twenty bucks to see a blockbuster on Napoleon, I swan through the almost deserted eighteenth century art rooms, and my memory being shit, am pleasantly surprised at how good and interesting the collection is even though I’ve seen it before (the drug still lingers in my system, a positive offshoot of my sensitivity to drugs).

On that entire visit, not so much a sense of having two brains as two contradictory feelings: unutterable, yet low-level depression and a sense of meaningless and lack of being rooted in the world (I often get this in public spaces, as if I don’t belong in my society any more, but this is more intense) and an awareness of a new social ease.

Galleries are hard for me these days, yet today actually isn’t too bad, apart from the extreme aloneness that the drug seems to highlight rather than mask.

Things pan out a bit as the week progresses. I feel a bit hyped up and spacey in the mornings. At the same time, because of the increased energy, I have a sense of urgency about getting things done. There’s also a sense of my energy feeling scattered. These last two are both unwelcome, in the case of the former because I already experience obsession about getting things done, but it has seemed to dissipate as the week has progressed. I am still feeling shy, but on the other hand my brain is far quieter in ways that are impossible to explain.

Something else is happening that I did predict, because it occurred the previous time. Because I am less depressed and frightened on Luvox, some of the more objectionable parts of my personality, normally repressed by the depression, are coming out to play. The desperately competitive, ambitious girl who gave it up because she was too ambitious and didn’t want to be cut down. The narcissist who dreams of fame.

It’s not such a terrible thing, these personality factors coming up for air. They may make me painful but at least if they’re showing themselves they can be dealt with.

The drugs aren’t doing my blood sugar much good. I want to collapse at around 3 in the afternoon but this effect reduces as the week goes on.

Thursday: I brave a mental health group. The drug holds me like a mother, although I make a couple of inappropriate comments. I see my GP afterwards and she asks me about my OCD and remarks on how cheerful I am. I tell her it’s the drugs – they are making me a bit hyper. But at night, as the drug wears off, that guttering sense of angst that borders on despair.

On Friday night I have a terrible sleeplessness combined with a vivid sense of my brain being so alive it is playing, constructing nonsense sentences just because it can (as a wordy person, I’m used to this happening as I drop off to sleep, but this is occurring at an earlier stage and is quite disturbing). I wait it out and eventually get to sleep.

One other thing I’m noticing: in a minor way, my brain is more acute, especially in conversation; it’s as if the anti-depressant effects of the drug make it easier to make connections, be less self-conscious and think laterally. On the other hand the drug is definitely affecting my memory adversely and even more so my concentration: when I read, I have to sometimes focus on slowing down so that I retain the information my mind wants to skim over. Sometimes I find that I’ve stopped reading and started ruminating, and I have to jog myself into starting again. Still, early days.

Warnings

Information about Luvox available on the internet suggests that it is not suitable for children, adolescents and young adults as it can create suicidal feelings when first taken. It also seems to create that feeling in smaller percentages of people in the older age groups. The information expresses uncertainty about whether these feelings are caused by the drug or are simply a symptom of the depression for which the drug has been prescribed. My experience: it’s the drug!

I have no recommendation about whether or not anyone should take a particular anti-depressant – each person must use their own judgement. But I would suggest arranging to be ‘babysat’ by someone when you first start to take a drug such as a Luvox, at least for the first week. If that’s not possible, have someone you can check in with regularly. These drugs can have very strange effects on our brains, even if some of these effects are short term. I’d also suggest making an effort to eat sensibly and keep your blood sugar levels steady while on such drugs.

Onward and upward, with Luvox in my system and a song(?) in my heart(?)

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might like The Dilemmas of Therapy.

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Looking for Alternative Sources of Sustainable Energy? Try a Menopausal Woman

Picture: Retro Adverto

I’m going through it. It’s got me. It seemed as if I’d only just completed my second adolescence when it struck.

It was perimenopause for a while, a long while. Sleeping badly. Thinning skin and other signs of ageing. The onset of tinnitus, rosacea and a worsening of allergy symptoms. Losing more hair than usual with each wash, and constantly finding stray hairs on every household surface. Terrible PMT but longer and longer gaps between periods. Then my cycle seemed to have packed up and called it a day, and instead all the blood went to my head.

I didn’t mind the first set of hot flushes. I just found them weird and disorientating. The flush seemed like some strange form of energy, some odd kind of bodily weather, that started in my chest and literally moved up my body, expelling itself in a facial heat wave. As if I was suffering a kind of automatically induced induced embarrassment. Set and forget.

But then my periods started again, and the PMT was truly awful, starting about nine days before the onset, manifesting in heightened anxiety and reduced sleep, with extreme fatigue just beforehand.

Then the periods stopped and the flushes started again, as if my body couldn’t decide whether or not it wanted to end my child-bearing capacities. This is where I’m at right now. And this time, I don’t like the species of hot flush at all. It engulfs me quickly, fills the upper part of my body with heat, then drops me like a hot potato, going away somewhere to plot its imminent return. I’m left not only wildly throwing my outer garments off in an attempt to cool down (I can deal with that) but uncomfortably sweaty. I wish I could store some of this heat and use it to warm my house in the mornings.

Through all these changes, and starting from perimenopause, an increased level of body- and self-consciousness has manifested. No one warned me that my anxiety, already unmanageable, was going to get worse. That every bodily perception would be heightened and every fear increased. Menopause is like adolescence without the good looks and sexual opportunities.

Sorry to bore you with these details, but I can see why menopause has a bad name. The symptoms become tedious not only to those suffering them but to their partners and families. The awful thing is, you have no idea how long it’s all going to go on for. At least the progress of adolescence is entirely predictable – pimply and pained followed by lissome and love-hungry followed by substance-abusing and driving homicidally followed by reluctantly growing up. But how long will this transition take? And what will the new me look and feel like at the end of it?

Pharmaceutical help?

I have considered HRT, but I foresee many problems with it. 

I’m not worried about the increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease and stroke that was reported in a large and controversial 2002 study on the effects of HRT use. The study has since been discredited because the women who took part in in were older when first put on HRT than the optimum age of commencing, and because of dosage issues. Anyway, I’m on a strict allergy diet, don’t drink or smoke, have low blood pressure and no family history of breast cancer so am probably in a low-risk group.

It’s more the cosmetic side effects of HRT that concern me. As someone with body image issues, I’m not sure I want to risk the facial breakouts that are one possibility (confusingly, HRT can sometimes clear the acne that perimenopause produces). I shouldn't let this put me off, however, as I can always try an alternative medication if the first one isn't right for me. The possible weight gain wouldn’t bother me – I could do with some extra weight.

On the other hand, the protection from osteoporosis that synethetic oestrogen offers could end up being crucial to my future health. A few years ago my mother developed  osteoporosis  in a way that was both sudden and disabling, as well as incredibly unfair – she'd been eating yoghurt regularly for years, and her GP worked in an expensive practice that prided itself on its preventative care. As someone who rarely eats dairy, I need all the protection from brittle bones that I can get.

An upside of menopause?

I know there are women who want to reclaim menopause as a time of personal power, creativity and freedom. Certainly as a feminist I want those going through it to be supported rather than denigrated, and given a range of effective treatment options. And I don’t want to exaggerate its ill effects. I’m no vaguer than usual and while I’m sleeping less, I rarely lie awake trying to get to sleep – it’s waking too early that’s the problem. Also, oddly enough for such a low-energy person, I’m surprised at how much energy I have, during the day at least. I get up as early as 5.30 in the morning and work away at the PC for hours (although I do tend to collapse into a stupor of exhaustion early in the evening). And apparently women who experience hot flashes early on in menopause are actually at lower risk of heart disease and stroke.

But the bodily changes lead to difficult emotional reckonings. Women, it's said, are more grounded than men because our reproductive cycle never lets us forget that we are embodied beings whose lives are at least partly determined by biology. While we can make lifestyle decisions that influence our health, we are to some extent the playthings of an impersonal force that has far larger ends in mind than our individual health and wellbeing. Menopause is a bodily reminder of a specific kind: that reproductive life is at an end, and old age looms. I’m fine with not having had  kids, but in the years to come sex and relationships will be complicated by further bodily changes. And that part of my life is difficult enough for me already. In a way, menopausal women are reaching the pointy end of the life cycle.

But this forced change is part of an even larger story than the end of the possibility of motherhood and challenges to sexual fulfillment. In menopause, whether we like it or not, the force that is ageing our bodies has as its ultimate aim for us that great taboo of Western culture: death. It's an eventuality that  our consumer culture, obsessed with youth and endless novelty, fails to prepare us for.

To make things even more difficult, the timing of menopause means that it frequently coincides with a number of other life crises and losses. I’m currently coming to terms with the facts of parental illness, which I’ll write about in a future post.

Someone once said old age wasn’t for the faint hearted. I think the reckoning comes much earlier. As we face our fifties, we’re forced to jettison the illusions we had about life in our earlier years. We’re also challenged to take control of our health and make decisions about how we can minimise problems in years to come (something I’m signally failing to do at the moment).

It’s not an easy time by any stretch, but it can produce a great deal of strength and resilience. Without illusions, it’s possible to appreciate the present and enjoy life for what it is, rather than what we’d like it to be. It's possible, too, to make lifestyle choices that at least swing the odds into our favour where future mental and physical health is concerned. Accommodation to reality, while not succumbing to negativity – that’s my major challenge now, and it will remain so in the years to come.

If you enjoyed this entry, you might also like Vein Hopes.

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