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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Farewell to Jordan

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,

That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—

Jordan, my beloved friend, is dead. The lines from Wordsworth are perhaps a little hyperbolic, but seem to fit. The insult of death, especially when it’s sudden, has a melodramatic aspect to it.

Jordan (a pseudonym) was the ginger-coloured spaniel of my elder sister and her family. Only seven years old, he had a tumour on the liver. It wasn’t diagnosed until a few days before his death – he'd stopped eating and had no energy. My brother-in-law rang me on the Tuesday night at about six pm and told me that Jordan was going to be put to sleep the following day. Would I like to come over and say goodbye?

When I got there an open fire was burning in the lounge room and a lamp cast a soft light. Jordan lay on a rug in front of the fire, surrounded by his immediate family along with another of my sisters and her two daughters. At the sight of me he lifted his head and his bushy tail wagged for a second or two. I sobbed into his fur. But he was not the playful puppy I loved. He was a very sick dog who was focused on the business of dying, and who had to be stroked carefully for fear of hurting him.

For the first few years of his life I walked him twice a week, usually in mid-morning, at the nearby Ainslie Park. This was the source of the intimacy we shared, when we revelled in the wind and the trees and the feeling of freedom. I wrote a few blog entries on our fun times and travails, and the ongoing conflict with my sister and her husband over their treatment of Jordan.

I taught him to heel and to stay, and unsuccessfully tried to teach him to return the ball. Whether he would do the latter was conditional on whether you had a treat ready to give him – he’d have ‘a bob both ways’, throwing the ball down with his mouth and then quickly nosing at my hand for the treat, then picking the ball up again if the hand was empty. ‘Jordan, the point to giving the ball back is that I can throw it again!’ But all my efforts were in vain. Still, he heeled and stayed like a true champ.

On one of our typical walks, we stagger along the picturesque walkway with its crunchy white gravel, cross narrow Ainslie Road and we’re at the park entrance, Jordan pulling at the leash and frantically sniffing any dogs arriving and departing (his heeling skills would manifest in inverse proportion to our closeness to the park). Passing under the winding avenue of large elm trees, I tell him we are nearing the oval, knowing that dogs understand some English (the average number of words is apparently 165).

When we get there I lean down and unclip the leash from his collar, feeling the little torso quiver in anticipation. ‘Free!’ I yell like a demented army sergeant, wanting to make the distinction clear between the discipline of the paths and the liberty of the oval. He dashes off for a while as if I’m his sworn enemy and then slows down and seems to lose focus. He is caught by the rich cocktail of smells locked in the grass. From now on he will alternate between a complete absorption in these messages and a focus on me and the other dogs.

He is always a little lost, a little confused, a bit ADD. I don’t think he’s dumb though – I think it’s a case of overstimulation. There are too many messages pinging across to those extraordinary olfactory nerves. One of his favourite things to do in the park is to roll on the grass, bathing himself in the scents of manure and whatever else he can smell (apparently wolves do this in order to bring information back to the pack). He always has a far-off, blissed-out expression when he does this.

Under my uneven supervision, Jordan cheated death a couple of times, disappearing in the direction of busy Wattle Road on one occasion, and dashing across the quiet street at the back of the park on the other, when there luckily happened to be no cars on it. (The risk I took in regularly walking someone else’s dog – I shudder at it. There were other incidents too – dogs, people and sometimes kids and babies make for scary combinations and I was out of my depth sometimes.)

The saddest thing – which I don’t want to write about but must – is that I had abandoned Jordan before his death; put the relationships with my sister and her husband in the too-hard basket, and therefore my friendship with him. It was part of my growing ‘maturity’, to accept that I wasn’t close to the family and therefore couldn’t hope to be close to their dog. (Meanwhile my interactions with the neglected puppies in the semi-detached next door were childishly passive-aggressive towards their owner.)

But it was true, I didn’t feel welcome at his house. And his life was sad; he told me as much the last time I took him to the park. I think it was January, I don’t remember exactly, when I decided on a whim to ring up and ask to take him on a walk and the answer was yes, of course. He wasn’t getting enough exercise at this point and by the age of about six had become portly, as well as stiff from a disc injury. We had a lovely roam that day, but at one point he grew sad and we sat on the grass and he looked pensive, slowly blinking those impossibly long eyelashes.

That walk was the last time I saw him well, as the Jordan I knew and loved. I found his life hard to witness; easier to stay away and whinge about the way our society treats dogs and congratulate myself on not having one myself.

How much did my early support make his loneliness harder to bear? Did he wonder when I was coming next? How much did he suffer and how much of that suffering was related to me? There are no answers to these questions.

Yet it’s not guilt I feel exactly, just regret. What this has taught me is that you cannot simply sever a connection of longstanding with someone just because they aren’t human. The connection remains. I have no doubt that Jordan remembered me and regretted my absence from his life.

My initial grief was quite bitter and full of despair for the loneliness of his life. But now, less than a week later, I’m able to take a more balanced view. His life wasn’t all sadness. There were family holidays to the New South Wales coast, walks with my sister, and pats in the evenings in front of TV. He had wormed his way inside the house from being an outside dog, and for the last six months of his life slept in my sister and her husband’s bedroom. Also, various renovations of my sister’s house have been going on for years, and the builders often brought their dogs along with them (tradies often seem to have strong bonds with their dogs). And even though he was alone too much, he lived in the moment, and could rise to puppy excitement as soon as the prospect of interaction presented itself.

One impediment to the grieving process is that no memorial service is planned. In the absence of that, my perfect funeral for him is played in my head, a mixture of inspiring songs and stories about his escapades.

I sit at my computer and play those songs on YouTube. The following have provided much comfort: ‘Short note’ by Matt Finish, ‘I sing the body electric’ from the film Fame, and ‘The valley’, soulfully sung by the inimitable KD. Leo Sayer in his early emo period has been helpful. The soppiest Barbara Streisand standards have been inevitable.

The absence of a funeral also sent me on a return visit to the park last weekend, to see what it was like without him and to understand. I sat alone on a bench at the edge of the oval in my sunglasses, melodramatic as a movie star. The dead leaves from the elm tree above me tinkled down a few at a time. The sky couldn’t decide what it was doing – there were long brushes of cirrus as well as bits of cumulus cloud. The light felt wrong – overcast and glare-y at the same time. The few dog owners and their dogs seemed a long way away; the dogs looked like yearlings, just overgrown puppies. I didn’t know any of them. None of the people I had got to know at the park were there. The sense of time having passed was excruciating. I realised that the park and Jordan and I had long finished – and I was mourning that period of my life for the first time.

It’s the very physicality of dogs that makes it harrowing to mourn them. Our relationships with them have less cerebral content than those we share with humans, and are based on the shared experience of the moment. I find it hard to picture Jordan’s face, and although I hadn’t seen him for ages until the night before he died, part of the reason for the lack of a mental image is the sense that his essence was expressed in motion rather than speech. Jordan's essence - that of a sometimes daffy 'people person' with a stubborn streak, who knew his own mind, was loyal to a fault and endlessly optimistic - is still with me and I hope always will be.

Farewell, my darling. Thanks for the happy times. Your aunty misses you so much, but she knows that you're no longer suffering and is endlessly grateful for your loving friendship.

PS: The photo above isn't of Jordan, but is an uncanny likeness of him as a puppy from the Dogs Trust website.

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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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Secular Churches: A Bibliophile's Paean to the Library

Photo: Glyn Lowe

When psychotherapist Thomas Mann writes about the need to incorporate soul into daily life, he distinguishes soul from spirit. The latter is transcendent, visionary, concerned with going forward; soul, in contrast, is grounded: concerned with the past, with memory, with the earth. Libraries nurture both my soul and my spirit. They are about the familiar, the comfortable, the known, but also the unexpected leap of intellectual and literary adventure, and the very anticipation of those adventures.

Every time I enter my local library I relive one of my most pleasant early memories: my father taking me to Malvern Library in High Street when I was about four. Surely I must have accompanied one or other of my parents to the library before this, but on this memorable occasion he signed me up as a borrower with her very own library card. I have never lost my reverence for libraries since.

Church was another early experience of soul. It held a quantum of familiar faces, school mates and their parents, choir members, a community of sorts; but it dictated the hushing of the voice, the quelling of the body’s tongue and momentum while grumpy Father Riley droned on to a God who was depicted on the cross as, well, dead. Every five minutes I turned around and checked the clock that hung over the back door. Pacing myself through each segment, the lion’s share endured once communion swung into gear. That was always a change at least, watching people shuffling obediently up to the alter like prisoners queuing for lunch.

The library was different. Just as hushed, just as respectful, but this time there was a point to the quiet, enabling a very different kind of communion with an equally absent presence. It was the sound of a hundred minds encountering the bright imagination of an author via the words on the page. A hundred small adventures, a hundred serendipitous discoveries, a hundred love affairs with the written word being carried on silently in this homely, local place that nevertheless offered many windows to the wider world, like the magic windows of Play School.

But discovering books was as sensual as it was abstracted. When you pulled the covers of the books back, their spines cracked and the opaque plastic on the covers broke free with a squishing noise. When you took the books to be checked out, the librarian pressed each one against a grey metal machine that recorded the date of issue. The deep clunky sound this made expressed the most complete satisfaction, and seemed to deliver each book to me alone with a unique authority.

I soon became addicted to books. This was my weakness and my strength. I did not always attend to the present book closely enough; I was thinking of the next one. While we were still at the house in Manning Road, after a visit to the library I would sit on the step between the kitchen and the tiny sunroom and go through my stash. It had to be at least five at a time. I swallowed them like Tic Tacs. At first they were picture books but it didn’t take me long to graduate to the proper books with chapters that belonged on the freestanding shelving in the middle of the children’s book section, a large sunny room with child-sized reading benches set at the perfect angle for comfortable perusing.

It was the serendipitous find I craved. I still go into nostalgic reveries when I recall some of these discoveries. Most were English, probably some American, very few Australian.

I was especially drawn to books that had a poignant, nostalgic edge or tipped over into the darkness of the occult. Charley by Joan G. Robinson (now called The Girl Who Ran Away) is the wistful tale of a runaway who moves into a chicken coop near the aunt she is convinced does not want her, and gets to know the local community while playing a series of fictional roles. A Candle in Her Room was the darkest of Ruth M. Arthur’s haunting tales. It’s about several generations of an ancient Welsh family, all haunted by an evil doll called Dido; the spare illustrations by Margery Gill were as important as the text. It’s out of print now, yet so sought after that hardback copies in good condition sell online for as much as two hundred and sixty five dollars.

It’s heartening – and very soulful in Thomas Mann’s sense – to see the way the internet links older readers like me with the past by making new and old editions of these books available, offering Goodreads reviews and helping to jog our memories on titles and author names, with a little help from Google. Just yesterday I tracked down the name of another book I had loved, All About the Bullerby Children by Astrid Lindgren.

It's no surprise that there's now a forum where members can post requests for information about books they revered as children but have forgotten the titles of. This is perfect for those books whose titles and authors have fled from the memory forever, while the stories themselves, with their themes of loss and longing, linger in the heart.

I remember being transfixed by the tale of a young girl who accidentally left her favourite doll in the park one sunny afternoon. When she realised what she’d done she and her nurse rushed back to search for it, but the doll was nowhere to be found. The months passed and the seasons turned, and yet the little girl always kept a lookout. The more time that passed, the more beautiful the doll became in the child’s mind, the grander her outfit, the brighter her eyes, the lusher her hair, until she was the very model of the perfect doll.

And then one day, in the middle of a heavy winter, on a familiar walk in the park, the dog nosed out something under the snow – a wrecked, sorry thing that might once have been a doll, its clothes in rags, its shoes gone, wisps of hair and perhaps an eye missing. It was the little girl’s doll. Could there be a harsher lesson than this, for both the heroine and the reader, about the dangers of excessive imagination and the hard thud of reality (if anyone by chance has any knowledge of this book please let me know)? And doesn't this story resonate, making us think of old flames whose recent photos convey a distressing physical deterioration compared with the idealised image the mind has created.

The enduring charm of the library

Libraries are unique environments because they represent the communal spirit that made so much social progress possible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but is now under threat. If council-funded libraries had never been thought of up to now, and someone suggested them, the idea would be labelled bolshie, radical and socialist by the loony right. Libraries represent what we can achieve when we pool our resources for a common good.

When the conservative Coalition fought its successful election campaign in the state of Victoria in 2010, it failed to mention that it planned to slash funding to local libraries. In 2011 councils were left reeling when they were told that recurrent funding for public library operating costs would be cut by up to $7.1 million over four years. There was so much outcry that the government quickly backtracked, providing assurances that the funding would be maintained while it undertook a review of Victorian library services and funding arrangements; the fight is not over yet. (In the meantime it took an axe to TAFE colleges, but that’s another story.)

I’m always heartened by the sight of people kicking back in libraries and reading the paper at the communal tables, or poring over a novel in a secluded corner. I find this very hard to do myself. For some reason I can only relax to that extent at home, but for me, these communal readers are part of what makes the library worth going to. Because my local library is currently closed for renovations I go to a newly built one in Camberwell. It’s spacious and tall-ceilinged, and there are cushy beanbags arranged against one of the walls, inviting you to plump down and wile away an hour with the printed word. I haven’t seen anyone on those beanbags as yet; I’d like to think that when the nearby primary school finishes up every afternoon the local kids come streaming in and head for the beanbags, but if they do I bet they use them to play on their tablets and smart phones.

I still believe in serendipity, still comb the shelves for new discoveries; one of my recent browses yielded This Is How by M.J. Hyland and Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond, by Jane Haas. But I understand I can't rely on chance alone for my book thrills; I reserve books I've read about on the review pages of the weekend papers. I’ve just finished my library copy of Kate Atkinson's excellent Life after Life and I’ll be reading Christos Tsiolkas’s latest book Barracuda that way too, but I think I’ll be in for a long wait.

I am as hopelessly addicted to the mixed-lollies potential of libraries as I ever was as a child, and after all these years I do not have the willpower to  borrow only as many books as I have the time to read (I will often borrow new books while there are others sitting at home unread from last time). There are always a few that I have to return without having read them, having gone through the two renewals that are usually permitted. 

Memories of libraries past

I actually worked in a council library service for a year, in 1985. I lived with my parents and saved up for a five-month trip to Europe. I am glad I did this because it satisfied my curiosity – I decided I didn’t want to become a librarian, it was too dull. I did little else but shelve books, mend them, and check them in and out. However, although I was a library assistant only, because I had an arts degree I was allowed to do the occasional reference query; this was the 1985 version of googling and made a nice change from the endless wielding of the computer wand.

Now I curse my lack of imagination – this was an era before libraries had started holding the book discussions, author talks, adult storytimes and competitions that now pepper their calendars. If I’d thought about it I could have livened up ‘sleepy hollow’, our fond name for our branch library, which was surrounded by a vibrant Jewish community and not far away from the arty grunginess of St Kilda.

But I was only 22 after all. It took all my willpower to stay in the job because I had a bad case of love shyness (love avoidance would be more accurate) powered by OCD, panic and social anxiety. My fears centred on the young gay man whose job it was to transfer the books from one library branch to the next. He always did his rounds in the early afternoon and I would blush furiously when the glass doors swung open and he waltzed in. He ended up thinking I hated him, as I bristled if he approached me; the opposite was the case, I was a little in love with him, everybody was, but I couldn't and still find it hard to distinguish sexual feelings from feelings of love. He had so much life force in him, I could see it in the challenge of his liquid dark eyes, which reflected both a sense of anarchy and a narcissism that was forgivable – he resembled a short, slightly built version of James Dean, but was better looking. My fantasies of him were fairly chaste; we played hide-and-seek in a huge mansion with sweeping staircase and enormous chintz curtains of pale gold. When this clip for the new Tears for Fears single ‘Head over heels’ first played on Countdown while both of us were still slaves to the library service, I felt as if the yearnings of my soul had been bared for the entire world to see. Needless to say such tumultous emotions have done nothing to reduce the charm of libraries for me (he was only the first of a short series of male library workers I had crushes on; the women were unexciting). 

With the arrival of ebooks I refuse to fear the loss of the local library. I think it will stay around in some form or another as a gathering place for those who value the life of the mind, whether they’re two or eighty-two. Libraries are both a place of refuge from neoliberal madness, and the secular world’s answer to churches, and long may they remain so.

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The Secret and the Law of Attraction are Bad for Your Mental Health – Here’s Why

In my twenties I had two undiagnosed mental illnesses – social anxiety and pure OCD. I lurched from one crisis to the next, underperforming at work, leaving jobs when they got too hard and moving into dodgy share houses. My judgement was poor and my thinking was immature. I was incapable of an intimate relationship. I knew I had some kind of ‘neurosis’, but if asked what it was I would have launched into a convoluted description of my hang-ups that would have left you open-mouthed with equal parts of boredom and bewilderment.

After reading Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, I was convinced positive thinking was the answer. If I repeated enough affirmations I would be healthy, rich and nestled in a secure long-term relationship – all things that were singularly lacking in my life.

For three years I was a cadet journalist with the Hastings Sun. On the weekends I stayed with my parents in Melbourne, and on Sunday nights I would drive down to the Mornington Peninsula, to the brick veneer house I shared with a fellow cadet with anger management problems. She had thrown a coffee cup onto the floor in front of me once during an argument; as it crashed into pieces on the vinyl, I knew our friendship was over.

When I left my parents’ suburban home on Sunday nights my father would come out and wave goodbye to me as I drove off in my white Mazda 1500, which was chronically on the verge of collapse. Filled with numb desolation, I’d drive through sea squalls and lashing rain to the semi-wildness where no friend waited. How brave and foolhardy I was in those days, crossing the rural railway lines with a dodgy engine, a clutch that was about to fail.

Positive thinking kept me going on those Sunday night drives home. I remember the bloody-mindedness with which I set off in that lonely car, its interior a minimalist desert of brown vinyl and radio, which smelt of petrol. Every week as I commenced the journey I set my teeth and wheeled out my tray of positive thinking maxims. Carefully I recited all the things I was manifesting right now – a great job in a groovy workplace close to the city, supportive colleagues, a wonderful partner, a new car that never broke down, an interesting group of feminist friends. The list was Homeric in scope and grew longer every week. Reciting it probably got me along Springvale Road and as far as the entrance to the Mornington Peninsula Freeway. It no doubt included extended spells in exotic European locations, a year living in a great share house in Sydney, enough money to buy my own house in Fitzroy or Carlton, and an interesting left-wing cause to get my teeth into.

At the time I used positive thinking as a way of just carrying on. On the pathetic wage of a cadet journalist working for a rural newspaper, I was wretchedly poor. I had only a small number of friends in Melbourne, but I was too insecure to let go and explore life in Mornington. I felt unmoored and feared my youth was disappearing before my eyes, but I put my head down and stuck at the journalism, as there wasn’t really an alternative. But at least I had a job.

Fast forward to 1992, when there was a serious economic downturn in Australia. I was now working three days a week as information officer for a small community group. I’d fled from journalism the year before, when the panic attacks had started again; I figured that if I was too scared to talk to the CEO of the council I was covering at the time, I couldn’t do my job.

I was now in a more functional share house arrangement, living in a tiny house in inner city Richmond with a playwright who was doing a Masters in philosophy. Eventually her example would lead to the completion of my own Masters degree but in the meantime I was still in thrall to the promises of the New Age.

Then the community group that employed me lost their funding, and I lost my job. With no savings to back me up, I was forced to eke out an existence on unemployment benefit. I used to make vegetable patties from the okara – a waste product in the making of tofu – that I got free from the Tofu Shop up the road.

Positive thinking came in to fill the breach, but this time it wasn’t a willpower thing, but a flight into fantasy. Whenever I walked home from a train station or tram stop along the narrow footpaths of Richmond, past the rows of renovated workers cottages and Victorian terraces, I kept my eyes on the ground in case God or providence chose to put a two-dollar coin in my path among the trodden-over dead leaves and gold bottle tops. Small, thick and gold-coloured, two-dollar coins seemed to embody the fairytale idea of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This myth is more fitting than I realised at the time, because you can never reach the rainbow – it appears to move further away when you walk towards it.

The memory of this time makes me sad. Could I really have set my sights so low? With so little understanding of the world and my place in it, this faith in the slim abundance of stray two-dollar coins seems disempowered, child-like, embarrassingly unambitious.

The lure of the positive

The positive thinking that I sought refuge in has been thoroughly denigrated by science, and many of the people who espouse it have been exposed as shysters or even criminals. Yet in the individualistic, materialistic climate of the digital age it’s as popular as ever. The astonishing success of The Secret, the 2006 bestseller by Rhonda Byrnes, was due to Byrnes’s brilliant repackaging of the Law of Attraction, the idea that your thoughts alone can bring you unlimited health, wealth and happiness – and their opposite, if you’re not careful.

In 2009, Forbes estimated that the book and accompanying film had made $300 million. According to Wikipedia the book has sold 19 million copies and been translated into 46 languages; the DVD has sold more than 2 million copies. The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 146 consecutive weeks and was named by USA Today as one of the top 20 bestselling books of the past 15 years. The Secret is above all a triumph of marketing.

Not everything that positive thinking promotes is harmful. The realisation that your thoughts are not you, and that they are spitting out a constant static of negative commentary, is actually a valuable discovery. It’s the antidote that positive-thinking-based books like The Secret get wrong. There are plenty of thought-based treatments that don’t require you to make believe everything’s fine when it’s not, including mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and acceptance and commitment therapy. Below are just some of the reasons why The Secret, the Law of Attraction and positive thinking in general may be harmful to your mental health.

Repression of emotions

Books such as The Secret scare readers about the effects of negative thoughts. One of its many precursors, a bestseller in the 1990s, was actually titled You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought. The suggestion is that negative thoughts will attract illness, bad luck in work and relationships, and ultimately death. The Secret counsels: ‘Your life right now is a reflection of your past thoughts’ and ‘Your thoughts become things’. Louise Hay insists that ‘You are the power in your world! You get to have whatever you choose to think!’

This kind of advice is tantamount to emotional fascism. If you become scared of your negative thoughts, you’ll naturally try to repress them, and the emotions that go with them. Your psyche will start to rebel, and you’ll feel angry and unbalanced.

Carl Jung developed a concept of the shadow – everything that we consign to our unconscious mind because it’s inappropriate, not socially sanctioned or just childish. The shadow is the naughty self, which will not submit to culture or socialisation. It’s a very loose concept and it changes along with shifting cultural mores, but it can easily be applied to affirmations. If you recite positive affirmations all day long, your Jungian shadow will feel ignored and repressed and will try to get your attention!

If you have OCD or anxiety, you might develop an obsessive fear of negative thoughts and the consequences they could bring.

Narcissism

Books like The Secret tell people that their thoughts have a vibrational energy that the universe will respond to, magically delivering whatever they use their thoughts to envisage. This encourages a reversion to the childhood stage of narcissism, to the mentality of two-year-olds who believe they are omniscient and can have whatever they want.

While narcissism is a natural stage for children, it is a destructive worldview when carried through to adulthood. In fact, the very definition of maturity might be the understanding that we do not have ultimate control over anything except our own behaviour. The world may respond to a change in our attitude and behaviour, or it may not. We can’t control other people and we can’t control the ultimate consequences of what we think and do.

Learned helplessness

Back in the early nineties, as I wandered along the footpath in search of two dollar coins, I was wasting time I could have spent dreaming up ways to make money in a depressed economy. From this vantage point I am astounded by my lack of imagination. I see now that the abundant universe of the positive thinking books was actually a kind of parent figure and a substitute for the Christian god that I no longer believed in. My vivid imagination had gotten married to my learned helplessness, and together they made a formidable pair.

The need for challenge

In recent years neuroscientists have discovered that the brain actually thrives on challenges and novelty rather than pleasure alone. Our brains enjoy solving problems and achieving mastery of a skill. A world in which we could have whatever we wanted just by wishing for it would have been bad in an evolutionary sense; perhaps this is why the mythical Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden. Positive thinking doesn’t take these needs into account, instead preaching that the brain has to merely imagine something and it will appear.

Conclusion

All of the above doesn’t mean that motivation, optimism and idealism are bad things. Not at all. What could be called realistic or natural positive thinking has been around as long as cliches such as ‘Look on the bright side’. However, optimism should not be used to avoid rigorous planning. When embarking on a large project, you have more chance of success if you take into account the potential obstacles and work out how you will deal with them.

Nor should optimism be used as a way to avoid reality. There are times when sitting with unpleasant emotions and accepting unpleasant truths is the only sane response to a situation.

With all its mixed emotions, its difficulties and challenges, the real world is infinitely more compelling and worth exploring than a universe in which we manifest whatever our childish egos dream up.

If you’d like to read more on this theme, I’ve published a book on the subject, Why The Secret Is Wrong. You can sample the book here, or on Amazon UK here.

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Long Live Pippi Longstocking: Appreciating the Larger-Than-Life Friend

Friendships, like life partnerships, are not always simply about similar goals, values and shared interests. Sometimes they’re about complementarities. There’s a category of friend many of us make in our formative years, and sometimes maintain into adulthood – the larger-than-life, or LATL, friend.

The larger-than-life friend is usually fearless – not always completely, but in areas where we may quail. The larger-than-life friend is louder, sometimes physically broader or taller, and more daring than us. When it comes to her background she is a creature of extremes: her home life is likely to have been either more loving and nurturing than ours, or dramatically more dysfunctional; her parents are either poorer or wealthier than ours. The LATL friend may be simply warm, outgoing and exuberant, but she may also have a brilliant comic streak, a sense of the absurd that we aspire to, and a willingness to challenge authority. She is often a youngest child.

The key to a successful LATL friendship is not to try to emulate her, or put oneself down for being lesser in any way. The LATL friend will be drawn to us for what we are not as much as what we are. She may appreciate our average families, our more settled and boring lives. She may gain a degree of emotional stability from our company. She may draw from us strains of humour and brightness that we did not realise we possessed, and appreciate them more than we realise. We do not have to try to be like her, but simply continue to be ourselves.

LATL friends are not always real. I have no idea whether the average imaginary friend of childhood is a LATL friend, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Sometimes imaginary friends are created by skilled storybook authors. For me Pippi Longstocking, created by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren in the late 1930s – early 1940s, was the quintessential LATL friend who set the standard for the flesh-and-blood ones that came after her.

The beauty of Pippi is that she is entirely free of authority figures. In contrast to her next door neighbours, Tommy and Annika Settergren, whom she befriends and shares adventures with, she does what she pleases. She doesn’t go to school, cares nothing for social graces and is always breaking taboos.

Pippi (full name Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim’s Daughter Longstocking) is a virtual orphan, living happily alone in a home she calls Villa Villekulla in a small Swedish village. Her sea captain father disappeared in a storm but according to Pippi is living as a cannibal king on a South Sea island. She has two pets, a monkey called Mr Nilsson and a horse called Little Old Man. She is said to have the physical strength of ‘ten policemen’ and often picks up Little Old Man and carries him from one place to another. Happy and exuberant, she is a shameless liar and truth-stretcher and is always manipulating adults into doing her bidding.

Pippi’s bizarre appearance declares her eccentricity: her tight orange plaits stick out from the sides of her head, her stockings don’t match and she towers above Tommy and Annika. Although she protects the weak and encourages rebellion she is never violent. She owns a suitcase of gold pieces so is financially independent. I’m sure reading about Pippi’s many adventures (there were three books in all) helped me handle my early LATL friendships.

Real-life LATLs, while lacking the freedom and physical prowess of Pippi, often have so much life-force that they bestow a degree of friendship on the siblings of their primary friend. I was friendly with more than one of my elder sister’s LATL friends, but it is Philippa who stands out the most. Philippa and my sister went to school together then shared an Edwardian house in groovy, inner-city Prahran in the early 1980s, playing host to a regular stream of artistic friends and boyfriends.

I idolised Philippa. Of solid build, with huge blue eyes and golden blonde hair, she had a country exuberance and friendliness that were increasingly tempered by arty sophistication, a vibrant, anarchic laugh that could be heard above the loudest party music, and a private-school accent that was inexplicable yet charming. She had a romantic history that would have filled volumes and a nurturing, motherly side that I flew towards. Philippa’s drawcard was not that she was the funniest or even the most intelligent young woman. It was her ability to extract the maximum from those around her, delighting in the humour of others and the quirks of human existence. She was studying psychology and as her social and love lives became busier she tilted dangerously between chaos and order, seeming to know instinctively where to stop the seesaw so that chaos never managed to gain the ascendant.

Once, home alone at my parents’ place, I thought I heard a burglar and got spooked. Philippa answered the phone when I rang Eleanor in a panic. She immediately ordered me over to Prahran despite the fact that Eleanor was out. Dressed in her white bathrobe she made camomile tea for us both. ‘Things can feel really scary when you’re on your own,’ she offered as she tucked her feet under her, sat down on the other end of the couch and gazed at me in sympathy. Her large eyes shone as she clutched the steaming cup and I read in them two motivations, and was perfectly happy with both: the desire to be supportive and a hunger for drama, for a heightening of life’s ordinariness.

At the time I had my own LATL friend, who could not have been more different than Philippa. Geraldine was physically taller and broader than me but it wasn’t just her size that enabled her to dominate the space around her. She was thirsty for attention, would court it and suck it up from wherever it came. She was the youngest child in a dysfunctional Irish Catholic family dogged by the twin curses of mental illness and alcoholism. Like her siblings she was brilliantly comic; for many years I kept a tape we made on one nothing-to-do summer afternoon at my place when we were about fifteen.

In the background, a telephone starts to ring. ‘The phone rings’, Geraldine pronounces in an ominous male narrator tone as she lolls on the bed. ‘Who will answer it?’ She then begins riffing on a hysterical middle-aged reaction to a dodgy television program playing in front of an imaginary child: ‘Turn—the—television off! Turn it off!’

Geraldine is long gone, taken by the evil, self-hating sprite who dwelt within her and waited to claim her at a weak moment. Like me she grew up with undiagnosed mental illness but unlike me she forged a path to adulthood for herself, having a baby in an early relationship and then meeting the love of her life with whom she was living when she died, it’ll be fourteen years ago this year.

There’s just one other LATL friend I want to pay tribute to in this blog entry; she died young too, of breast cancer. In the last year of secondary school, most weeknights I walked home from the tram terminus with my younger sister Simone and our mutual friend Kathy; boy that girl was wild. Or so it seemed at the time: in hindsight, not all the wild girls were acting out; some of them just grew up more quickly.

Kathy was fearless and from an early age she drank and smoked dope and partied and had lots of illicit boyfriends. It would have been futile to even try to emulate her but she was a few years below me at the Catholic convent we all attended, so I never felt that I had to. Neither Simone nor I would have mucked around with her at school if we had been in the same year, yet the three of us got on like a house on fire on those walks home.

I picture her walking between Simone and me, skipping slightly ahead as she relates something outrageous she’s done or cackles about some dippy teacher. I see now that her main function was to keep Simone and me from tearing into each other; she held each of us at bay, neutralising our mutual animosity, our unceasing grappling for space and attention. She never would have played this role consciously but her optimism, warmth and fearlessness did the job.

She couldn’t have cared less how she looked; she had uncombed straggly black-brown hair, a sweet creamy lightly freckled face, wild, gesturing hands, very light-coloured eyes and a body that was always curving into a dance of exuberance at whatever brazen act she had done or was about to do. Like many young women who grow up quickly she ended up marrying young, having kids, and working in unskilled jobs; and then the breast cancer claimed her. But she crammed lots of life and laughter into those years.

The LATL friend can lead our adolescent selves into frightening new territory if we let her; if not she may leave us behind. Sometimes, if the LATL friend is too reckless or self-destructive, this is inevitable. It didn’t happen with Kathy, because she was secure enough to accept Simone and me as we were: a tiny bit prissy but witty enough to keep up, and always willing to offer our admiration and sympathy.

If you have LATL friends in adulthood, treasure them but never feel that you are inferior for being less attention-getting or having more mundane problems. You and your friend may be mirroring in each other the qualities that are undeveloped in yourselves. As long as you appreciate and enjoy these complementarities, your friendship will continue to flourish and nurture you both. We can’t all be Pippi Longstocking, but that’s all the more reason to relish her company.

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Writing a Memoir: Tips for Bypassing the Inner Censor

When you’re figuring out how to write a memoir, it’s sometimes easy to get caught up in the mechanics. Of course these are important. But unless your memoir is primarily factual in nature, getting to the emotional core of the story – the most profound version of what really happened – is vital if you want your writing to be compelling.

But how do you do this? I’ve written in the past about the challenge of finding your memoir voice. Your unconscious mind may be prey to all sorts of strictures about telling the truth that you’re not aware of. You may have an inner censor that metaphorically blacks out your most intense memories.

Yet this censor is often asleep on the job, and it may not be difficult to get past them. Below are some tips for doing just that.

Mind’s eye

Sometimes your inner censor is only working on the level of the writing itself, and not your actual recollections. It may be that you’re easily able to picture and remember whatever you were feeling at the time of the event you’re writing about, but somehow the link between this internal state and the writing process is missing.

You need to be conscious of the gap before you can bridge it.

As an exercise, start writing about a memory. As you write, focus on what is present in your mind’s eye. Does your subject matter accord with the picture in your mind’s eye? If so, chances are you’re in touch with what was really going on emotionally at the time.

If there is a discrepancy between the two, start to explore this inner picture. Ask yourself the following:

Which room or environment are you picturing? Why is this room significant?

What are the feelings or thoughts that circulate around this mental image? Can you put them into words?

Sometimes there’s a delay between completing a piece of writing and being aware of the underlying emotions that accompanied the original experience. You may complete the writing and only later become aware of a deeper layer of feeling and experience. Try to capture this deeper layer in words as soon as it comes up, and use this later writing to enhance what you’ve already completed.

Studying photos

Photos are a great way of jogging memory and unearthing perceptions about the past.

One option is to find a photo that appeals to you, study it, and start to write freely about anything that comes to mind. Think about what was happening around the time the photo was taken, and what the underlying dynamics were. If you're writing about relatives, a photo that appeals to your imagination can spark a search for more information.

Another option is to keep a photo nearby, or in your mind’s eye, as you write, as a general reminder of the subject matter. In this case you're not so concerned about whatever is going on in the photo, but of the individual character of the people that feature in it. Whether the photo is of you alone, family members or other significant people, use it to help you retain a strong sense of the character, emotional burdens, or general circumstances of those you're writing about.

Perceptions on waking

One of the times we’re most vulnerable to unconscious thoughts and memories is when we first wake up in the morning.

Sometimes a deeper layer of perception or emotion may reveal itself in a dream, or simply as a general impression when you wake. Keep a pen and paper or writing device next to the bed to capture these impressions, or alternatively write about them as soon as you get to the computer in the morning.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might also like Haunted by the Ghosts of Memory: Is Memoir Writing Good Therapy?

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The Lure of Hoarding: Keeping Our Appointments with Memory

I'm a mad thrifter and lover of op shops, but I also like the idea of decluttering. Indeed, thrifting and decluttering are both megatrends that have swept the consumer world in recent years, yet they have totally opposing aims. Does a love of thrifting inevitably lead to hoarding? Can a scourer of op shops like me actually lead a minimalist lifestyle?

My preoccupation with hoarding comes from the fact that my parents display totally opposing tendencies in this area.

My father is a hoarder of sorts. This trait took years to fully reveal itself, and remains limited to a few rooms in the house because my mother is a tidiness freak. 

While I was growing up my dad’s hoarding hardly impacted on me – except as an exemplar of untidiness – apart from the garage and garden shed, both almost unusable because stuffed with useless junk, including a canoe that to this day hangs upside down from the roof of the shed like some bizarre art installation, and is purported to have a hole in it. Oh, and my dad's huge glass-topped mahogany desk, whose surface was even then obscured by papers, that my mum had to suffer in their bedroom for many years. As she's gotten older, it's become harder for her to control my dad's messiness.

When we kids grew up and moved out of the house, Dad inherited a bedroom that became his 'office'. He used to complete his watercolour paintings in there, but it's so full of junk now, apart from a small space cleared for a computer and chair, that he’s abandoned it for this purpose. With its boxes of obsolete papers, discarded canvases, painting materials and plastic bags of electrical cables taking up most of the floor space, and the desk obscured by nests of manila folders stuffed with papers, it's a safety hazard.

Ominously my father has been 'given' another room for his painting, a tiny room at the back of the house that was formerly a spare-cum-sewing room. So far it's sufficiently free of junk that my dad can paint again but I predict that in a few months this room too will be unusable. He will occasionally create messy outposts in the rest of the house – for example, spreading his tax return documents around the dining room table, completing a painting project in the sunroom – but these are always temporary and are soon shooed back into the general chaos by my mother.

Dad is in some ways not a typical hoarder. Hoarding is often associated with compulsive shopping; Dad hardly ever shops for non-necessities unless he has to. Nor does he actively accumulate material objects in other ways (although he used to buy the odd broken-down car that he would tinker with on weekends). It's the past he hoards: religious pamphlets, old copies of journals, financial and administrative documents, and anything to do with his political battles with his teachers union, the local council and government bodies. He still has papers from at least fifty years ago.

While hoarding didn’t impact much on my childhood, its roots were present in subtle ways. For example, I knew one thing that would always garner my mother's approval (the usual things didn't really cut it with her): 'cleaning the kitchen' at night. What this meant was not just doing the dishes, but sorting, filing and taming the accumulations of junk that regularly spread themselves around the kitchen benches (this wasn’t just Dad of course – we are a family of seven). Organising this assortment of mail, torn pieces of envelope with phone numbers written on them, tiny miscellaneous toys, coins, sets of keys and so on, and creating sweet if temporary order, was something that my mother and I could both rejoice in.

Has Dad passed down his hoarding tendencies to me? Not at first glance. I'm a tidiness freak and I like to think I’m a great declutterer, but in that regard I’m fooling myself. I'm good at getting rid of some things but not others.

I hold onto clothes for longer than many, but I can get rid of the most treasured garment once I’ve made the decision; I actually enjoy the process of weeding out my wardrobe and dropping off a bag of goodies at my favourite op shop. Once it's time for a piece to go, I don't give it another thought.

But the fact is I do have my own hoarding weakness – books. I have five bookshelves if you don't count the one in my office that is stuffed with folders of edited educational materials.

I find it very hard to let books go. I have thrown the odd few out, but my decisions are extremely conservative. And I still have many books that I won't read again and that bear little relationship to how I live my life these days. Do I really need my secondhand copies of Emotional Intelligence and Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? (These books were both written before the financial crisis – if they were so influential, why didn't their sage advice for corporate types stop the Goldman Sachs executives plundering the USA and destroying the world economy?) To me the knowledge these books hold represents security, and a link with past versions of me, and I can’t let them go, not yet anyway.

Another thing I hold onto is appointment diaries. Mine go as far back as 1994. I keep them in my bookshelves so it doesn’t feel as if I’m hoarding them. I tell myself they’re useful as primary sources for memoir writing and so on, but they’re really just another link with earlier versions of my life and myself. In the rare times I go through one, trying to discover when some long-ago incident occurred, I’m strangely comforted by the mundanity of the various lists I was so fond of making. Whatever my emotional and material struggles, I continued to go to the supermarket, have my hair cut, drop my books back to the library and pay my rent.

Flyers relating to arts and cultural events – exhibitions, readings, films, plays – are another weakness. It’s so easy to forget the details of these experiences, and while there’s enough room in my filing cabinet, I can’t bring myself to throw away anything that jogs my memory.

In fact, the things I hold onto suggest that I’m more like my father than is comfortable to contemplate. Like him, it’s reminders of the past that I cling to. In the absence of a photographic memory, these refugees from my past testify to my changing life and the things that continue to sustain it.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might like Furni-phobia: the fear of buying big-ticket consumer goods.

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Haunted by the Ghosts of Memory: Is Memoir Writing Good Therapy?

Photo by Harmony and Home

Can writing a memoir actually help heal a painful past? Is it therapeutic, or does it simply provoke bitter memories and angry ghosts that are better left alone? Like an explorer returning exhausted but triumphant from a gruelling journey, full of information about the terrain she’s traversed, I can assure you that the psychic knowledge that results from memoir writing is well worth the effort.

But there is a catch. If you want your writing to come alive, you'll need to revisit the raw trauma of the original pain, and risk being seared and burned by it once more.

To write a memoir that I considered worthwhile, I had to relive painful experiences and periods. I was aiming for a sensual, immediate tone that strongly evoked each episode (I’m not saying I achieved that – just that I tried). So I plunged myself back into each stinging memory, and consciously tried to recall exactly how it felt to be in that situation at the time.

Not an exercise for the fainthearted.

That goes for particular episodes. But what happens when you’re writing about a significant period of your life for a matter of weeks and even months? When I was 20 I moved into a share house in the inner-city suburb of Fitzroy that was opposite an estate of high-rise public housing flats. This was way before Fitzroy’s gentrification and the culture shock was immense, not only in regard to the geography but to the lifestyles of my lefty housemates. I soon developed a crush on one of them, and the intensity of those feelings is inseparable from the bohemian romanticism of the shabby iron-laced terrace we inhabited.

While I was writing the scenes set in my Fitzroy abode, I felt haunted. I was living in two eras at once, the present and the early 1980s, and two places at once, the terrace house and my current flat. The contrast between my past and present lifestyle, combined with strong feelings of connectedness with people I hadn’t seen for more than 25 years, was profoundly disorientating. I was surrounded by ghosts who would not let me go. Perhaps – and here’s the kicker – I was releasing feelings for them that I hadn’t felt secure enough to fully experience (let alone express)  at the time.

When you’re going through something like that it can feel as if it will never end. You wonder if you’ll be permanently trapped in an emotional time warp. But it does pass. Not that the feelings don’t come up again every now and again – I believe now that if a traumatic experience is sufficiently intense it creates its own momentum in the psyche, and complete freedom from it may never be possible. But for me at least the intensity is now far less, and I’m a freer human being through having released those pent-up emotions.

Not only that, but in a strange way you may gain a stronger relationship with yourself. I know myself better now. I’m Adrienne McGill who experienced certain very human emotions at a particular time, not simply Adrienne McGill who went into meltdown when she moved out of home for the first time. I’ve become better acquainted with the non-pathological aspects of my younger self; it’s like meeting a scary stranger who is much less frightening once you get to know them.

Memoir writing and forgiveness

Sometimes writing the memoir involved not just reliving old emotions, but experiencing difficult new ones. A memoir forces you to examine your personal journey with a keen and bloodless eye. While you're working out what really happened, no one can be allowed to get off the hook.

So, not the most forgiving daughter at the best of times, I was faced with powerful anger as I put together the jigsaw puzzle picture of my life. The mistakes my parents made were routine rather than extreme, but they sometimes had profound effects. For much of the time of writing I was furious with both of them in a way I hadn’t been before, but particularly so with my mother.

But understanding something cognitively ultimately allows you to move beyond it. Discovering something new about the reasons for a pathology makes you realise that your brain is much more adaptable and creative than you'd given it credit for. You begin to perceive the perverse rationality of your dysfunction, to view it as a logical reaction to circumstances. Aha you say, this is why I closed up, or this is why I acted out. You gain more compassion for yourself.

You may also end up with compassion for the authority figures that once oppressed you. It took me a long time to escape from the deep well of anger for my mother that I was thrown into. I was angry with her even before I started writing the memoir and, in the way described above, my anger intensified while writing it. I’ll never completely lose the anger, but it has now substantially subsided.

This is partly because however egregious my mum’s perceived failures, writing about her has forced me to see her as a separate human being with a life independent of me, and her own story of parental failure. (Making me less narcissistic in the process.)

But it’s also because I now own my own story. I’ve set it out, and my mother’s an important part of it, and I’ve told what I believe to be the truth about our relationship. I’m somehow freed by the fact that the story of me and her is now on the public record. And this is not dependent on some kind of public naming and shaming – it’s all been done very discreetly.

This greater ability to distinguish my identity from hers makes it possible for me to go forward with the understanding and knowledge that I don’t have to live my life as an endless response to our story and relationship. Instead, I can live my life with courage, stretching myself and fulfilling the potential of the creativity that was buried so long under neurosis.

Publishing a book can give you a stronger sense of self regardless of whether it's about your own life. Completing my first book, which was about shopping, and having it out in the public realm helped me start to separate from my family. The memoir has boosted this process simply by being another book, but its subject matter has also helped to free me from the psychoanalytic aspects of my background. I’m now an author with my name on the cover of three books (even if it’s a pseudonym for two of them). I can begin to stop hoping that my family will one day be what I want them to be, and instead get on with being the person that I am.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might also like You Must Remember This.

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The home front

Last week was a time of a gigantic ‘autumn clean’ that left this blogger so exhausted she has not had to provide the usual excuses for her normally excessive telly-watching.

The clean-up was occasioned by a triple whammy: an annual property inspection by the property manager (usually presaging some kind of rental hike), a visit by a painter to give a quote on the ceilings (fear of the owners prettying the place up in order to sell it, and no, he wasn’t planning a postmodern version of the Sistine Chapel) and most serious of all, the owners themselves, asking politely (it’s their legal right of course) if they could come and have a sticky beak.

It was on for one and all. Well, not entirely. I didn’t clean the windows, and I didn’t dust the tiny horizontal surfaces that abound in this impossibly high-maintenance ‘villa’ (why have only one ledge on the skirting boards when you can have three!).

I damp-dusted everything else though, and rubbed grime off a series of cupboard walls and doors. But the most debilitating job was the garden. With a back and front yard, as well as a driveway, it’s a lot of work to keep it looking reasonably neat. The whole place is really too much for one person, and especially this person, who doesn’t have a lot of energy to spare at the best of times.

( I would be remiss here if I didn’t acknowledge that my dad actually provided mowing services gratis and even returned the next day to dispose of an unfortunate dead rat on the driveway that had somehow escaped both our notice – not a good look if left there for the owners to discover.)

The way I cope with the maintenance requirements of this place is to have a list of jobs that I work my way through but am always behind on. Thus, I am never living in total disarray and yet never basking in the sweet order that my obsessive personality adores.

Except for the last few days, of course. As I dragged myself around in deep physical exhaustion I was able to enjoy the sense of being ‘looked after’ – by me! Of course the house will slowly descend into its normal interim state of semi-dirty tidiness, but until then I’m enjoying the fresh aura of clean.

Even if I had the energy I don’t think I have the will to keep this level of maintenance up, but now I understand why people pay to have these services performed. I’ve also come to the conclusion that the results of zealous domestic work – this sense of being looked after and the visual effects of cleanness – are a compensation for living in unrenovated housing, and of course a way of exercising control over the space.

My mother was obsessive about housework. There was no question that it came first. I internalised this very early, and received her unalloyed approval only when I tried to help her in her endless quest against mess; how welcome were her happiness and attention on the rare occasions I felt motivated to ‘clean the kitchen’ after the evening dishes, removing the conglomeration of administration and junk that endlessly migrated to the kitchen table and benches.

Much of that mess would have been my father’s. He’s a hoarder, and I am only now beginning to appreciate the scale of the battle she has fought with his encroaching, largely paper-based chaos for decades. She’s been physically somewhat debilitated in the last few years, and it breaks my heart in a way that is no doubt excessive to see that his watercolour painting, small political battles and admin tasks now encroach on the dining room and sunroom of their house (his ‘study’ is so chock-full of boxes and papers that he can’t do anything in there besides use the computer).

In my twenties I was able to tolerate short-term messiness, as long as it was created by me and not an overly busy housemate. However, prolonged and extreme untidiness, I now realise, has always spelled chaos to me. I had a friend in primary school, T, whose parents were literary. The two front rooms were relatively tidy, but T’s parents were cheerfully oblivious to the accretions of long-term mess that beset the rest of the place. I once galvanised T and one of her younger brothers to join me in a clean-up of her bedroom; the strongest memory I have of this episode is determinedly sweeping marble after marble from under one of the beds.

Seven years ago I flooded my flat and ended up moving back to live with my parents for over a year, much to the chagrin of my mother. During this time her approach to housework became evident; I remember her once literally sweeping around my feet as I stood in the jarrah-floored sunroom. It seemed to me at the time that she would have loved to sweep me away.

Post-visit relief

After all that elbow grease, the house inspection went almost impossibly smoothly. The owners are an elderly woman and her husband, and the flat has been in the family for decades – the wife’s father bought the three adjoining flats new, and left one to each of his children. I knew all this already, but found out from the wife that the development, one of a small minority of art deco styled buildings in the area, was built in 1937.

I was very curious about who the first-ever tenants were, as I imagined them as some proto-yuppie couple moving into what would then have been a stylish ultra-modern apartment (the kitchen has a wonderful fold-out ironing board, complete with what appears to be original floral ironing board cover, that would have been cutting edge circa 1937). But the owner had no idea who they were, as she would have been only around six when the place was first tenanted.

Anyway, I’d only ever met the husband before, not the wife. The property manager turned up breathless at my door as the couple came up behind her, the wife helped along by her husband, the pair having inexplicably caught the tram. ‘She’s blind, you know’, said the property manager. As well as immediately obliterating my fantasy of this all-powerful landlord and inciting my compassion, the irony could not escape me – much of my cleaning had probably been unnecessary.

However, the husband and the PM both went away to have a good look through. It became clear that the only appropriate thing to do was to sit the owner down in the loungeroom and chat to her – she wasn’t interested in accompanying her husband on the inspection, and she was tired after the tram ride. She was frail and very cluey, with a guttural voice and a strong Australian accent.

I felt for her, because her blindness, seemingly acquired in later life, clearly annoyed her. As they were leaving her husband grabbed her arm and moved in the direction of the large spare room over the hallway. ‘There’s a front bedroom over here’, he said jovially. ‘Come on, I’ll show it to you.’

‘What’s the point?’ she responded angrily. ‘I can’t see anything!’

I have now got over my pathological fear of the landlords, and the whole episode did not suggest imminent sale to me, or a rental hike out of the ordinary. Also, the tattered ceilings are to be plastered and painted if an insurance claim goes through. So I think it’s safe to judge the visit a success!

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