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.

Tweet

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.

Tweet

Birthday Depression - Cured or Simply in Remission?

Three years ago I sat down to write a blog entry for Slightly Nutty. My recent birthday had been a day of dark thoughts, with a sense of underlying menace. Not because of anything that happened on the day but due to an undercurrent of feelings concerning what was then my forty-sixth birthday. I called the entry ‘Hit by pre-birthday depression’.

The response was strong. The entry became the most widely read of my entire blog, with 1,810 page views. It seems there’s a bit of a syndrome out there. A lot of people fall into a heap at this time, and then kick themselves in the guts because they feel guilty about not appreciating the efforts of friends and family to help them celebrate. Others simply feel sad because their loved ones don’t show their appreciation on the one day of the year that it matters most. Many of those who commented thanked me for sharing a common experience that doesn’t very often get an airing.

A year later I suffered a much milder bout of birthday depression and decided to record what I’d learned about the phenomenon to date. This second entry was also popular, with over 1,100 page views.

In that second entry I reluctantly gave some suggestions for dealing with birthday depression. I didn’t want to tell people what to do, or imply that they shouldn’t be feeling bad, when I knew many would already be feeling guilty. Much of the awfulness of birthday depression stems from the belief you have no right to be feeling so bad.

Well, I’ve just had another birthday. And like an eccentric doctor who operates on herself, I was curious to see how I’d go this year. It wasn’t what I expected at all.

A low-key celebration

First, I need to set the scene a bit. I have a rather fractious family. Given that we’re Irish Catholics, a group that tends to operate in closeknit clans, it’s taken me more than half my life to realise that this is an intractable situation and I don’t have to try and change it. So for the second year in a row, I chose not to spend the day with any of my four sisters. There was no acrimony. Three of them phoned me to deliver birthday greetings – I’m planning to catch up with one of them next weekend – and the other sister delivered greetings via Facebook.

So what did I do instead? I went out to lunch with a friend, to a cheap cafe in a vibrant, eclectic part of town that served the Middle Eastern food I crave (Balaclava Road East St Kilda for the Melburnites). Afterwards I had afternoon tea with my parents, who spoiled me with flowers and a very welcome monetary gift. Then I went home, answered my phone messages (which led to some cosy chats), and lounged in front of the television, alternating between watching it and reading a good book.

And guess what? I felt fine.

Why the change?

In reporting my experiences I want to make it clear that I’m not making any generalisations. The many comments I received suggested to me that the experience of birthday depression is different for each person who suffers it. ‘Depression’ is a catch-all term anyway that is often used to mean sadness or grief.

So while I would love what I say to be useful, I’m certainly not saying ‘I beat birthday depression – you can too.’ Quite the opposite: birthday depression is very common, and the only recommendations I would make is that people let themselves experience it, be nice to themselves, and take their needs into account when planning the birthday. But the mystery of why there was no birthday depression for me this year is still worth solving. Here are my theories:

Grieving in advance. Over the past few years as I’ve hit my late forties I’ve been grieving quite a bit for past mistakes and the direction my life has taken romance-wise. In the last year or so I’ve reached a much greater level of acceptance of where I’m at. Perhaps I am finally accepting ‘life on life’s terms’. (Not that I don’t get angry sometimes – I do – but for some reason the anger didn’t surface on my birthday.)

Planning the birthday to take into account my family’s shortcomings. From my years of celebrating birthdays with my siblings, I knew I’d end up feeling bitter and angry if I included them on the day. So for the second year in a row I spent the birthday without them. It was easier this year for everybody because it wasn’t a new thing. I felt not a shred of guilt. I freely admit that I’ve been lucky that my family have simply accepted this and yet were still able to wish me well on the day – not all families would be this forgiving.

Writing and sharing the experience. The experience of blogging about birthday depression and receiving so many positive responses to the entries has empowered me and given me the courage to explore the process more deeply in myself. I’m very grateful to all the people who have commented, and I sincerely hope you’ve been able to adjust your celebrations to minimise the pain.

Preparing for the feelings. I told myself it would be okay to feel sad on the day, and allowed any feelings to come up in advance.

Lowering my expectations. Just as I’ve let some of my most cherished dreams go (not completely of course – they are still there, but I accept my present) so over the past three years I’ve learned to adjust my expectations of the birthday. I plan ahead, choosing activities that are in line with where I’m at, and don’t expect the birthday to be super-fantastic. (I’ve had to learn to do this gradually – don’t feel guilty if you find this hard to do, or don’t want to.)

In fact I felt so light, cheerful and special on the day itself that the following day I found myself with a whole new phenomenon on my hands – post-birthday depression! No flowers,  birthday greetings, gifts or trips out for lunch. It was back to normality, and I didn’t like it one little bit.

Having said all that, my fiftieth is coming up next year, and if I don’t experience a new round of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the day and in the lead-up to it, I’ll be quite surprised. But at least I have a whole year in which to farewell my forties.

Please note: if you're suffering ongoing depression then you may need to speak to a professional. These words are no substitute for medical advice - please seek help if you need to.

Tweet

Tiny steps up the mountain: exposure and social phobia recovery

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions ... For the god
wants to know himself in you.

—‘As once the winged energy of delight’ by Theodore Rilke

I stumbled upon this poem by Rilke and was struck by how apt a description of exposure therapy it was, particularly the last two lines of the first verse and the first three lines of the last verse.

As a severe social phobe with obsessional and self-defeating tendencies(!) I feel as if I am really exploring exposure for the first time in my life. But as I begin my tentative explorations, I also begin to see just how difficult the tasks – for there are many – are. There is so much work ahead.

I’m agnostic about my chances of recovery, each foot planted in an opposing camp, that of success and failure respectively. For about six years, I more or less gave up on my anxiety. It just felt too hard. Now that I’m beginning the work, now that I feel I have some of the equipment I need, I see that I was at least partly right. I see that the path is so steep, so strewn with embedded rocks and stubborn tussocks of grass, that I won’t ever reach the summit.

Yet while I’m by no means convinced that I will ultimately succeed, all progress will constitute success. Certainly I have no plans to get a job in the ‘real world’, or join a class. These achievements are for the moment impossible and may remain so. I have to see what I‘m doing as very small or I’ll get ahead of myself, try to travel too fast, and stumble. If I raise my expectations too high, I’ll achieve nothing. My work must be rooted in and held down by the realities and intricacies of the present moment.

What I am trying to do is make myself more comfortable with feelings. I want to be able to tolerate frightening emotions and thoughts in the presence of others. Paradoxically, this includes a great measure of discomfort.

A deep-seated, powerful enemy holds me back. It thunders down on me if I get too uppity, too relaxed, stray too deeply into the social world. It works through my social phobia symptoms but those benign clinical terms cannot describe its force. In a funny way it must love me; fearing my total annihilation, it is ruthless in its misguided attempts to keep me safe.

There are two voices running through my head intermittently. One of them gently reminds me that I have run out of time and that my greatest battles are already lost. For years I took this voice to be the unalloyed truth, but now I’m not so sure. The other one screeches against such a passive attitude and orders me sternly to stay on track. Like a scolding parent, it drags my thoughts back into line when they veer off into fearful or childish fantasies, and when my self-talk gets too self-indulgent. This voice, in the best tradition of Monty Python, is ‘cruel but fair’.

Battling silly thoughts yet giving into panic. Letting myself breathe yet accepting the fact that I may not be able to. Acknowledging childish impulses but refusing to mistake them for reality. None of this will create miracles. There are huge darknesses, gaping ellipses of selfhood, gutterings of uncertainty and terror. There are unpredictable hormonal spikes and the plummet of low blood sugar, which feels like the carpet of common sense being swept from under my feet. It may not cause the thinking that leads to my panic, yet it is the faithful handmaiden of that panic.

The greatest contradiction: to fight my anxiety I must give up fighting. But this doesn’t mean an instant cure; in some situations I can beg myself into a rag-doll limpidity of submission and still feel breathlessness well up. A lack of physical defences can cause me to feel more unsafe than ever.

Sometimes I experience what holds on to me as simply a form of extreme shyness. This surprises me, because I have a stereotype of shy people as being very quiet. I can be loud and exuberant and at times even overbearing and dogmatic (who’d have thought?) with those I know well. But the extreme self-consciousness I feel in front of those who intimidate me (people my own age or thereabouts; those of a high status or intelligence level; those who happen to be particularly good looking and attractive) can frighten me so much I begin to disappear.

In these situations I feel like a bird picking its way uncertainly around a patch of suburban lawn, alert to the tiniest pulses of the universe. Every intimidating thought, every minute surge of blood into a vessel, a daring remark that could lead into dangerous conversational waters, whether one too many people in the room happen to be looking in my direction: anything can spark off a kind of emptying of the Red Sea of my interconnectedness. I draw the room and the separate worlds of others into myself and force them to focus their entire attention on me.

Once, at my sister’s place for afternoon tea, some family friends dropped in unexpectedly. We sat awkwardly round a circular dining table in the formal front room. I was already feeling hemmed in when my mother gave me what appeared to be a ‘significant’ look across the table. I left soon afterwards. Furious, I later asked her why she’d thrown me that sudden stare.

‘I thought how beautiful you were looking’, she said. It was some years ago now, but even as I write this, not wanting to sound boastful, I don’t entirely believe her. Instead I believe she was worried for me, and that her look was a badly timed attempt to see how I was coping.

Social phobia may be the result of having no reassuring parent figure to return to in the earliest years of life. A shy baby cradled in its mother’s arms will brave an unknown horde of new faces for a few frightening seconds and then bury its head in mother’s familiar shoulder as it smiles bashfully. An introverted child playing with friends will suddenly experience a surge of existential aloneness, and will run back to mum or dad to cling onto legs and arms until the equanimity of the world is restored.

Adulthood involves no such havens. If the parent cannot offer the needed reassurance, perhaps the child never moves through this stage but remains stuck in it. The need to hide may remain, but can no longer be acted out. As the child enters the unknown world of adolescence with all its frightening new sensations, he or she might create certain internal defences as a substitute. In my case, these became my symptoms, warding people off and creating the safety I craved. Yet it has been a lonely safety.

There was one small thing I did recently that I was proud of. Dropping into my local supermarket, I homed in on the Oral Health section and searched for my usual pack of bargain basement toothbrushes. A very scary man was hovering in the aisle in the same area. Scary because tall, statuesque, brown skinned and attractive.

Normally I would have been unable to focus on my quest in the presence of such beauty, and would have cut it short in despair. This time I continued to search as he stood one or two feet to my right, torso jutting forward as he conducted his own interrogation of the shelves. These minor exposures are exactly what I need to seek out instead of instinctively avoiding them. They are tiny steps forward that can lead me, if not to the top of the mountain, at least to a place that has a better view.

Tweet

Social anxiety and the challenges of exposure therapy

It struck me as I jumped into the shower this morning, in the split second as I registered that the cold was not unbearable anymore, that the problem with winter is not winter but summer.

I wrote a piece about minor mishaps a while ago. One of my points was that if a crisis remains unresolved for a while it may cease to be a crisis as one adjusts to it. Winter is the same. As long as you have somewhere to live that offers reasonable levels of warmth in some rooms, eventually your body adjusts to the cold.

And just as you’ve become accustomed to it and have your bedtime routine worked out (in my case a hottie and four doonas, as well as copious layers of pyjamas), the Earth stretches as if from a long sleep and starts to exude warmth. The blossoms unfurl, the camellias drop liltingly to the ground in their prodigal abundance. Everything wakes up, and you have to adjust again.

This is not some idle complaint. It makes me think of exposure, now a central plank of short-term talking therapies for anxiety disorders and phobias. Exposure relies on the concept of increasingly difficult forays into feared experiences. These forays are graded so there is always a carefully calibrated level of discomfort, while the difficulty of the task increases. The theory is that the sufferer learns to tolerate an ever-greater degree of risk and is therefore able to deal with an increasing number of feared situations.

Exposure is an incredibly useful concept. I’ve never practised it in conjunction with a therapist, but I have a friend who is an exponent of it (he even wrote a book about it), and I practise it in very small ways.

But the challenging thing about exposure is that it is aligned to life yet also pitted against it. Creating a list of progressively more difficult tasks is a way of creating order, but the chaos of life is constantly intruding. And, depending on your disorder, it may not always be possible to retain control over the level of exposure.

Work is an area of life where I gain valuable exposure only to sometimes lose momentum. Because my work stops and starts, I don’t often get into a pattern of work. This is bad, because once the work starts again I not only have to adjust to the discipline but I also need to refamiliarise myself with processes and even skills.

As well, I have to ‘expose’ myself to a lower standard of self-care and housecleaning, which leads to an increase in anxiety levels.

I believe that I’d be able to gradually increase the level of work I was able to take on if I could control the flow of it – but that’s not the way the real world operates.

Social anxiety is another area where the exposure levels are difficult to control. According to psychologist Dr R. Reid Wilson, this is because the unpredictable nature of social life is such that it’s impossible to grade one’s exposures; and because their lifestyle may require the sufferer to carry out social tasks that go beyond their current level of comfort. 'When you have social anxiety, events that are high up on your list of threatening situations may take place before you have mastered your lower level tasks’, he says.

Dr Wilson’s excellent website is the first time I’ve come across a therapist who identified the unique difficulties of social anxiety in this way.

Another difficulty with conquering social anxiety he identifies is that the sufferer must focus on so many anxiety management skills at once, sometimes while performing a complex task like public speaking.

One way to get around the unpredictable nature of social exposure, according to Dr Wilson, is to simulate the scary situation using friends and family. For example, you could practise public speaking in front of a group of friends, conduct a role play on bumping unexpectedly into someone in the street, or ask someone to look over your shoulder while you practise writing.

Life, the universe and exposure

The chaos of life may pose a challenge to exposure therapy more generally. Unexpected stresses or adverse events in one area of life may temporarily lower our ability to challenge ourselves in the areas we need to work on. Sometimes I need to withdraw and regroup because of some unforeseen blow.

This is not to argue against exposure but to demonstrate how important it is for the individual to be in control of their therapy. This is the view of Bronwyn Fox, a recovered sufferer of panic disorder who has written books on the issue and now counsels sufferers.

The important thing is to get in touch with your gut feeling and obey it. I have learned this lesson painfully and slowly, sometimes suffering from too much exposure and sometimes not enough. In my experience both are harmful.

If I’d known about exposure earlier, there are definitely aspects of my social and working life I would have fought harder to retain, rather than simply letting them go because they were too hard. But not knowing about exposure also led me to throw myself into situations that were too difficult, which meant I got overexposed and therefore more phobic very quickly. In both cases I wasn’t managing my anxiety well because I didn’t have the knowledge or tools.

I’m not saying that everyone can expose themselves and eventually rid themselves of their anxiety. In my case I think there are some things that are just too hard and will be for a while, and perhaps forever. However, I do want to create some sort of graded exposure program.

Exposing myself

Recently I visited an arts event alone. I’ve done this heaps of times but it was in a venue that I was unfamiliar with. I’m an expert at subtle avoidance – I’ve been practising it my whole adult life – and I noted that two very effective avoidance strategies were in play: getting there late, and sitting in the back row.

The getting there late was partly my unconscious mind at work. I just missed the tram! How convenient!

Next time I will resolve to sit in a row that is somehow more ‘threatening’ (this could mean, for example, a row where the people look interesting, or towards the front, or both) and getting there before the event starts. I might have to tackle one of these tasks at a time. Even being in a room with others and experiencing my reactions can be difficult for me sometimes. The important thing for me is to stay with myself somehow, to practise mindfulness without buying into my fears.

And soon it will be time to get exposed to a completely separate dilemma – the extreme heat of a Melbourne summer.

Tweet

The downside of anger

I’ve recently been forced to confront just how uptight I am all the time. This often translates into anger, but there’s always an anxious edge to it.

Recently I met a friend at a popular gallery in Melbourne’s green, hilly outer east. I got there almost exactly at the allotted time. In recent years, mainly because I hate the tension of driving along glancing at the clock every other second and feeling ridiculously guilty, I’ve become highly organised when meeting up with someone, ensuring I leave the house at a time that enables me to arrive at my destination neither early nor late.

Trouble is, my friends are often late. And increasingly I’m feeling an irrational amount of anger when this happens.

The friend I was meeting with at the gallery, D, isn’t always late; in fact, I can remember being a bit late when I met up with her a few months ago. Further back, I’ve been easily 10 or 15 minutes late and she’s always taken it calmly.

In this case, I realise it’s because of a growing neediness on my part. All my friends lead either busier or more emotionally fulfilling lives than I do (sometimes both). In the case of D, she often complains of being lonely and wanting a better social life as well as a partner, but her job as a primary teacher is hugely complex and involving. So I don’t see that much of her, and when she’s late I automatically take it as a sign of her low regard for me (I’ve just realised this, so perhaps I won’t react that way in future).

Ten minutes late, I know, is nothing. In fact it didn’t even inconvenience me; I didn’t even have to wait for her. I just paid, and went into the gallery, looking out for her at the entrance once in a while. No problem.

But I still – even though I tried not to – had a miffed edge to my voice when I greeted her. I apologised later on. But I can’t afford to alienate my friends; I don’t have that many! Why are my expectations of others so high when I frequently can’t live up to my expectations of myself?

D isn’t actually late all the time, but I have another friend, J, who is routinely late. Ten minutes after the agreed time is really pretty good for him. But he rides a bike and so I make allowances for him. I also think I understand his lateness – like me in the past, I reckon he is overly optimistic about the time it will take him to do whatever he has to do before leaving the house. I made these kind of miscalculations myself for years.

Given how reliable J is in his lateness, the simple thing to do would be to plan to turn up ten minutes past the time we’ve arranged. I tried to do this once and it didn’t work; there was so little traffic on the road and I still got there on time despite my best efforts. He was a good ten minutes late as usual, and I sat there reading the paper yet again (I’ve learned to take a newspaper along so at least I’ve got something to do).

I swear the episode at the gallery with D was meant to force me to a point of self-awareness about my anger. For another, small trigger occurred a couple of hours later when we queued for the cafe at the gallery premises. Recently renovated, it’s a stark modernist design in black, with sleek glass walls so you can see all the goings-on inside, and a paved outdoor area surrounded by a low wall. Lone cafes at recreational destinations are notorious for being poorly managed and ripping off their customers, and this one was a shining example. A good excuse for my underlying anger to come out and put on its own little show.

We joined the tiny queue, a patient young couple slouching resignedly in front of us. Glancing through the window, an empty table, and a few minutes later another two, became evident. The young waitress, who had kind, smiling eyes and was wearing a long butchers apron, patiently explained that the tables were being cleaned and they’d be ready any minute.

I moaned and groaned to D, admitting that I was becoming like the men in the TV show Grumpy Old Men (without the slightest bit of rancour, she agreed with me). The couple in front of us were stoically silent.

After the couple had been let in and more and more tables seemed to become empty while we continued to queue, I asked the waitress if we could go inside, and then I asked her if we could sit at the table before it was clean. Luckily for my sanity she agreed both times.

Despite my irrational response, it’s doubtless that these kinds of places are organised with the convenience of the staff in mind rather than the customers. D and I agreed that in the favourite inner city precincts we’re used to, as soon as you set foot in a place they rush you to a table, spirit a wettex out of thin air as they say brightly ‘are you eating today or just drinks?’, wipe down the table with slick efficiency and then before you can say Jack Sprat, park a bottle of tap water and two glasses in front of you.

Finally we were seated, table cleaned and orders taken, and the waiter managed to be overly generous with my mineral water (they’d run out of small bottles so he poured me two generous serves from a large one) and stingy with D’s cappuccino (served in a cup that was conspicuously smaller than a standard tea cup). But I’d confided to D that my anger – my inability not to take the world’s unending imperfections to heart – seemed to be getting worse and I wanted to do something about it.

Apart from my neediness, I think part of the source of my anger is a deep-seated anxiety, a sense that if I don’t get to do what I want when I want the world will collapse into chaos. Often as I’m preparing for some social event I’ll notice that my shoulders are hunched. It’s as if I’m unconsciously preparing for World War Three instead of meeting up with a few people. My brain’s on alert, expecting some social catastrophe to develop if I don’t steel myself.

At these times I consciously relax my shoulders and start telling myself that there’s no need to be tense. This helps a bit, but it’s a very strong habit. While social anxiety is different from the anxiety I felt waiting for a seat in the cafe (perhaps it would be hours before we got in ...) they’re both about wanting to maintain control of an outcome – a futile goal.

I think that lack of control is why I also have a problem with mobile phones. I hate it when my friends’ phones ring while I’m socialising with them (I get particularly angry when this happens while they’re at my place).

But I’ve devised a new strategy to deal with this – I hope it’s not passive aggressive, but the jury’s still out. From now on if a friend’s mobile rings I immediately busy myself doing something, whether it’s checking my own phone messages, reading the paper, or writing a list of some kind. If they’re visiting at my place and their phone rings, I can leave the room while they’re talking and clear dishes, or even hop on the computer if it’s already on and check my email. If I’ve run out of things to do, one option is to simply go to the loo and take a few deep breaths.

Anyway, whatever the causes of my anger, I don’t want to be that reactive. It doesn’t change the world issues that concern me so much, it doesn’t change my own situation and it doesn’t change the habits of my friends. It just makes me tense and unhappy. I need to learn to step out of my anger and back into the moment, however challenging and imperfect it is.

Tweet

Farewell to the park?

It’s been hard to write a blog entry lately because things have been in such a state of flux. A cold flattened me over Christmas, striking me down as a I struggled to finish editing a stubborn report (I always seem to get colds when I have big editing jobs to finish).

The cold was a convenient excuse for not worrying about not having enough social events to go to over Christmas. But it also presented an existential dilemma: I surveyed the coming year, and the perceived failures of the previous one, through a prism of exhaustion, which in turn made me feel helpless. Even present wrapping was tiring.

The cold took two weeks to work its way through my nasal passages, leaving me worrying about the state of my immune system. Thank God for the internet and Google – I’ve decided that the reason I get two colds a year is not because of lowered immunity but simply my plethora of nieces and nephews and our frequent family birthday celebrations (an excuse for seeing less of my family in 2010?).

A particular situation that’s been in my face for the last couple of weeks is still very much unresolved. For the moment I’m no longer walking Jordan, a mainly cocker spaniel who belongs to my elder sister, Andrea, and her husband Richard. I’ve been doing this three times a week for the past two years and it’s come to a temporary halt, with the final outcome still unknown.

Richard and I were bound to clash sooner or later. We’re both equally bloody minded. I in my pursuit of animal (Jordan’s) welfare, and he in his determination to look after Jordan in his own way.

Never would I let Richard and Andrea forget that I thought they weren’t treating Jordan properly. Apart from the occasional walk down the street to the shops, or taking the kids to school (normally a drive) they’d virtually stopped taking him for walks, relying entirely on my thrice-weekly trips to the park.

He badly needed a clip and a bath, and had knots of hair on his bum that needed shaving. I’d even offered at one point to come around and bath him – I didn’t get to do that, but my home clipping job was certainly not the best. (Although you’d never know it, Richard is extremely wealthy and could easily afford professional grooming for Jordan, even if only, say, twice a year.)

The thing that I wouldn’t let up on – that I continued to nag them about – was that they wouldn’t bring Jordan to family gatherings at mum and dad’s. If I am perfectly honest about this, my normally kind dad is inexplicably hostile to dogs. A former secondary teacher, he seems to view them as juvenile delinquents so evil they’re beyond saving.

In contrast, my mum, despite her disabling osteoporosis and concern for the domestic environment, is okay with having Jordan around. And my sister Therese and her husband Tony sometimes bring their ridgeback-cross Sarah (also a neglected dog, but in a different way to Jordan) to family gatherings. But Andrea and Richard can’t be bothered taking him in the car with them, even at those times he’d have a playmate in Sarah to keep him out of mischief.

So every time I’d turn up at mum and dad’s to find Richard and Andrea in the kitchen and Sarah in the backyard slobbering contentedly, knowing that Jordan was stuck behind his wooden fence half a kilometre away, I’d call them on it. ‘Where’s Jordan?’ I’d ask. Each time, they dug their heels in even further. Recently, Richard had been fixing me with a rather malevolent stare he’s perfected and saying in a crisp tone: ‘I’ll look after Jordan. He’s ours. He’s not your problem’.

I’ve clashed with Richard a lot in recent years. It took me many years to realise he wasn’t the brother-in-law from heaven I’d originally thought he was. He’s a charming man with a sly, subtle sense of humour and excellent social skills, and the extended family think he’s great. But he can also be a bully – he’s been dominating Andrea for years – and I heard a story recently about him that shocked me.

On the day of the recent byelection in our electorate, Andrea was working and hadn’t voted in advance, so risked getting a $20 fine. Apparently Richard and Andrea asked one of my younger sisters, Therese, to fraudulently vote on Andrea’s behalf. Therese refused, and Richard tried to make her feel guilty. ‘We’d do the same for you if you asked’, he said. Therese was furious at him for trying to manipulate her into breaking the law, but she didn’t give in.

On Christmas Day, the predictable happened and Jordan wasn’t brought to the celebrations. I made my usual protests and Richard got predictably annoyed. But the next day when I rang to arrange the usual Monday walk, he answered the phone, and said in the same annoyed tone that he’d look after Jordan while he was on holidays.

At that point I think I realised what I was up against, and I stopped fighting. My arrangement with Jordan’s family has been based on the false assumption that I and they share enough common beliefs to maintain the regular contact that is inevitable when you walk someone else’s dog. But we don’t, and my differences with my family don't start with Richard -- they’re as old as the hills, and the basis of the majority of my problems. How did I think I could skate over them so easily?

I considered at that point that perhaps it was time to give up walking Jordan. Truth to tell, I needed some kind of break. In the last two years, seeing the reality of Jordan’s life up close and feeling helpless to improve it had led to periodic depressions characterised by a deep sense of sadness.

And my whole park venture seemed to be coming to a close anyway. Jordan was a skinny, shivery, smell-crazy puppy when I decided to start walking him regularly. This arrangement would be partly for Jordan’s benefit and partly for mine, to help me deal with my social anxiety.

It seemed to be working okay, despite the occasional social disaster. But increasingly there were periods when I’d be convinced that a quiet park meant people were staying away because of me. I know this is distorted thinking – a friend of mine, who has a lot of knowledge about anxious and depressed thought patterns, shouted down the idea and called it totally whacky. But I think my paranoia was based on a deeper truth – that I didn’t really fit in with the wealthy milieu of many of those who frequented the park, despite the fact that they were ‘dog people’, and mostly friendly.

Also, a couple of people who were my anchors and as addicted to the park as I was had had their elderly, statesman-like dogs die in the last year, and although I still saw them sometimes, their visits to the park were much less frequent.

At the moment, the future of my relationship with Jordan is still an open question. Perhaps I’ll be able to come to some arrangement with Andrea and Richard, and perhaps I won’t – time will tell. If I don’t, then it will probably be better if I don’t see Jordan at all, because I won’t want to be reminded of my abandonment of him.

Tweet

A cafe rendevous: my internet dating adventure continues

Slightly Nutty recently got back into the internet dating saddle and wrote in this blog about a prospective meeting with an unattached Gentleman. I promised to provide a ‘date update’, so here goes!

The Gentleman and I arranged to meet in a café in the inner eastern suburb of Camberwell last Saturday morning. His choice of café was inspired: it was quiet, with upmarket but soothing décor, a fire in a closed grate that emanated a silent warmth, next to an intimate, cushioned conversation nook. A delicate morning sun outside. Blessedly no upbeat, irritatingly superfluous music to batter the ears.

Even the timing was good; he entered seconds after I’d sat down, and put out his hand for me to shake. All four people in the establishment stared and must have realised immediately that it was some kind of pre-arranged and probably internet-inspired first date, which I jokingly told him off for, but really, who cared?

Another good sign: he ordered peppermint tea. That’s exactly what I’d been planning to order and I’d been determined not to mention my food intolerances, initially at least. Such relief not to have to explain why I was not scrabbling for a coffee hit.

The Serepax was working beautifully. I’d taken it the night before, planning to capitalise on the double advantage of a good night’s sleep and the anxiety reduction that, for me, continues well into the next day. (I’m an extremely strategic user of benzos and may write a blog entry about this in future.)

I knew the Gentleman had a South African accent and, as it’s not my favourite accent, I was (at the risk of sounding racist) worried that I’d find it too strong. But it was a soft version that sounded almost English.

So what actually happened? How did we get on?

The Gentleman and I are very different – he’s a ‘financially secure’ executive who devours books on world politics and economics, I’m a delicate would-be writer struggling to carve out a living as a part time editor/copywriter. But there were commonalities. I love solving the problems of the world, as he does, and we wrangled with that for quite a while before going into detail about the kinds of films we both liked and why we liked them.

He sat opposite me with his half-smile, a sureness and strength there that I liked. He had solid, meaty shoulders I could imagine cupping my hands on. A goodness of heart, and no anxious desire to impress. Perhaps he is too strong for me but maybe I can throw some conversational punches at him that he won’t be fazed by.

Throughout the chat, in my benzo-induced calm, I struggled with feelings of disappointment: acknowledging them, and wondering what they meant. He was clearly not my soulmate: there was no perfect click, no pure and joyful meeting of minds. I had not found the ultimate home of my soul and my heart, the place at which I could finally rest my head, metaphorically speaking.

I’m embarrassed to read that last paragraph. My last post suggested that because I’d met the Gentleman on a dodgy site, my expectations were going to be lower and I would not be disappointed if we did not find ourselves so dizzily in love that locating the second date at a registry office would be an inevitability.

Bullshit. I brought to the meeting all my deepest desires, and every single girlish hope and fantasy I’d ever harboured.

But here’s the thing: they were tempered with the realism I’ve painfully acquired. I’ve come to a point in my life when I am prepared to compromise to a greater degree than ever before, but only if my intuition – my gut feeling – wills it. I can finally let myself follow that flow in matters of the heart, but I’m also intellectually able to recognise the reality of what’s out there for me now, what someone at my stage of life, and in my work situation and state of mind, can reasonably expect. If I can bring these two things together, intuition and a realistic outlook, it may be possible for me to strike a balance between my youthful dreams and the reality of some kind of relationship, even if that relationship does not live up to society’s current ideal, and cannot fulfil every single need I harbour.

But that’s all still just a possibility. The Gentleman and I will probably have a second meeting. And that’s as far as things have got at this juncture.

One step at a time.

Tweet

The perils of internet dating

After a long absence, Slightly Nutty recently returned to the exciting, unpredictable world of internet dating. What a ride it’s proving – and I haven’t even met the Gentleman in question.

I admit to being on a rather ‘questionable’ dating site, down a notch in the respectability stakes from RSVP, which I hate to give free publicity to but have to admit is probably the best known dating site in Australia.

But I prefer the dodgy site I’m on, for a host of reasons. And they don’t include posting naughty pics of myself in compromising positions with my face artfully blanked out.

I’ve only met one person through this dodgy site so far and he, like me, was a refugee from RSVP. And the Gentleman I’m hoping to meet up with in the next week or so also looks like he could easily be on RSVP – he’s fully clothed in all of the three pics he sent me.

So why do I bother? Why not just get back on the RSVP treadmill?

The main thing is the expectations are lower. RSVP meetings are fraught with danger for the slightly nutty. I’ve been on and off RSVP for ages (you can hide and display your profile at will) and, now that I’m in my forties, I’m finding that dates basically expect me to own. Yes, property. They don’t like genteel poverty and fear you are going to sponge off them. My one and only female date asked me if my job was full or part time, and whether I owned or rented. It felt like a job interview.

It’s not just that, but the general expectations that accompany an RSVP date, mine included. They evoke a host of long-buried needs, hopes and unrealistic expectations. In contrast, when I meet someone from the dodgy site I’m not scrutinising them as closely and asking the questions: ‘Could this be my next life partner? If so, does it matter that they like playing obscure board games/have appalling taste in restaurants/break wind in intimate moments?’ The thing I’m mainly interested in is the chemistry. Is there something there? Are there things to talk about? Do I want to spend time with them?

But there are still difficulties, the main one being the need to have a recent photo on hand for prospective suitors.

Because the site I’m using is a bit dodgy, I didn’t want to have pictures of myself on my profile for all the world to see. Even if I did, the last decent picture of me is two years old and shows someone who looks younger and prettier than I normally do. When this current Gentleman responded to my profile, sending me recent non-rude pictures of himself, I realised I would have to update my own pics and send some to him. (On the website you can post your photos on a ‘private gallery’ and tick a box when sending a letter to allow the recipient to view the pics.)

So I asked an obliging friend to help out. We went to the urban forest near where he lives and took lots of shots, in heaps of different poses, in the hope of choosing the best ones. Predictably I was disappointed with the ones he sent me to choose from. I’ve never been that photogenic, but I’ve become less so as I’ve gotten older. It didn’t help that I had bad PMT that day either. And it also didn’t help that the photos were on large files that gave uncomfortably detailed close ups! (Tip: if you're not happy with photos of yourself, blame the photographer!)

But no excuses. I would upload the best three to my ‘private gallery’. I did, asking the Gentleman to contact me if he still wanted to meet up for coffee. (The photo-taking friend and I had rationalised that it was preferable to supply ordinary photos rather than pics so flattering that the prospective would be dreadfully disappointed when he first clapped eyes on me.)

I uploaded the pics on Wednesday. I went away on an overnight trip on Thursday and was hopeful that on my return on Friday afternoon a response would be waiting for me.

No response. Saturday morning arrived. Again nothing. Saturday afternoon also proved unfruitful.

I reeled, I quavered and I quaked. This would be the first time I had been rejected on the basis of a photograph!

I spoke to another friend whose roles include being a kind of mental health buddy. We discussed the concept of exposure, a popular therapeutic tool in the treatment of anxiety and OCD. Exposure therapy involves putting up with discomfort in relation to a phobia, fear or obsession, and gradually increasing one’s exposure to that discomfort.

As someone with a minor case of body dysmorphic disorder (which in my stronger moments I admit is actually an impossible demand that I be beautiful) one of my worst fears is being rejected on the basis of my appearance. The silence on the Gentleman’s part suggested this might have actually occurred.

But in fact, my mental health friend and I agreed, there was no way I could know this for sure. Perhaps the Gentleman didn’t like my ‘look’ rather than my ‘looks’. Alternatively he might simply be away, or incredibly busy, etc etc. Staying in this state of uncertainty, of unknowingness, rather than forcing some unalloyed truth from the world is the essence of exposure therapy.

I told my mental health friend I had wanted to send the photos to him to get his opinion. But we both agreed that that would constitute seeking reassurance, a no-no in exposure therapy.

Anyway, on Saturday evening the longed-for answer finally arrived. Yes, the Gentleman would still like to do coffee. He explained his slowness by saying that he wasn’t addicted to the dating site and didn’t check his messages that often. This had the ring of truth to me, as there had been a lapse of several days between telling him I was going to post the pics and actually doing it.

We still haven’t spoken, but it looks like we’re going to catch up on Saturday morning. Wish me luck!

Tweet

The lost cousin

There I was in the backyard of a sterile McMansion, on a clear-skied winter’s day, having conversations with cousins I had known for decades – but one of them remained elusive.

I belong to an extended Catholic family on my mother’s side. On this side alone I have 21 cousins (one of them now deceased) and there are 26 of us altogether. The generations have remained close and still continue to socialise.

Big family Christmases presided over by my grandparents have continued, with the cousins who played together as children continuing to see each other at what is an annual gathering. As they’ve grown up and married they have brought along their own children, a bevy of rowdy third cousins happily mingling.

Family traditions stretch back for decades, like the children chasing Father (sometimes 'Mary') Christmas after (s)he'd handed out the presents and made a quick exit. The sole aim of this chase was to reveal Santa's true identity and remove by force the red hat and the snowy beard.

A decent number of all three (and soon to be four) generations – the third generation is just now coming of age – still come to family gatherings, like the engagement parties and sixtieth and seventieth birthday parties that are now going on. Of course not everyone is plugged in, and some who might otherwise be fixtures currently live or are travelling overseas. I’m somewhere in the middle, choosing the gatherings I attend with care.

Annette is one of my first cousins, the oldest daughter of one of my mother’s sisters. The sisters are only two years apart, but with hugely different personalities. Annette and I are almost exactly the same age, but as a child the peripatetic existence of her family meant our friendship took a while to cement.

In early childhood there was fierce rivalry between me and my older sister Georgia for the affections of Annette. One night she came to our place for a sleepover and the three of us slept on the floor in the sunroom.

Although at that point Georgia got on much better with Annette than I did, I insisted on sleeping in the middle. Annette and Georgia clasped hands over my prone body, symbolically affirming their closeness in the face of my stubbornness.

Soon afterwards I gave up on Annette and turned to her sister Miranda for friendship. An easygoing tomboy, Miranda was two years younger than Annette.

But gradually things changed. For about three years the family lived in Melbourne, renting a humble house in the same suburb we lived in. Annette and Miranda even went to the same local Catholic school my sisters and I attended. The two of us became close and I was often at their place after school. Sometimes I stayed the night and we held midnight feasts or pleasantly scary seances, and I was allowed to watch the Sunday night 8.30 movie, a privilege denied to me at home.

Then the family were on the move again, back to the country town they’d lived in when I was a child. It was one of the many small losses of childhood but it was not a complete loss – I went and stayed with them a few times in the country. By then, sandwiched comfortably between Annette and Miranda in the friendship stakes, I experienced some of my happiest times.

In a few years they were back once more, this time living in the hills outside Melbourne where Annette’s parents had bought a milkbar. I continued to stay with them sometimes, and when I was 14, during one school hols, Annette and I felt like honorary grownups when we stayed with a much younger aunty and her small family in her newly built 'display' home in the sprouting wilds of the outer south-eastern suburbs. Precious times all of them: for me Annette had become a sister without the jealousy, anger and sibling rivalry that stopped me from enjoying the company of my actual siblings.

But as young adulthood loomed we began to grow apart – only it was Annette doing the growing, not me. I remember the precise time that I felt the old Annette had completely disappeared. With her parents she’d dropped in to our place for a flying visit one weekend, and she and I were walking back from the corner shop.

We were 16. I was still a child in many ways, scared of boys and already suffering the crippling social anxiety that would continue to dog me. By that stage she was getting to know the wild teenagers of the Dandenongs.

As we walked along Darling Road she was looking around and swinging her arms and talking too loudly and animatedly about people I had never met and had no interest in. I looked at her and wanted the old, quieter Annette back, the one who retreated into herself when she was in the wars. But I feared she was gone for good. The new one was clearly a complete fake.

Even then, with no understanding of psychology, I dimly perceived that Annette had taken on a new personality to cover up her childish insecurities rather than having outgrown them. I did not change this interpretation of the new Annette for the next three decades.

I saw Annette again, for the first time in about four years, at a recent family event. I had no expectations. I’d long ago stopped bothering to talk to her at such gatherings because she always ran away.

In earlier years, when she was still with her first husband, after a minute or two of distracted chat she would start to look around in consternation and say ‘Where’s Martin?’ and then abruptly excuse herself to go and look for him. Even I, slow on the uptake, eventually gave up. She had no interest in my life or what I was up to, and I might as well gravitate towards one of the cousins who did.

Our lives couldn’t have turned out more differently. After a false start with Martin, and with her true love Arthur, she eventually had five children. She lives a prosperous life on a large property in a house they had had built near the Hawkesbury River.

So there she was the other day, down from NSW to attend a huge family do in a too-large house I’d never stepped inside before. Her hair was dyed a stark black and looked permed, and she wore a red jacket with black trimmings. Her strong features were still striking, but like me she was undeniably middle aged: we had both recently turned 46. After all these years, I still remembered that her birthday was three weeks and three days before mine, making her a Taurus.

I hadn’t planned to talk to her, but there she was in the courtyard, on the fringes of another group, looking in my direction, and it would be churlish to ignore her. I leaned towards her. ‘We’re Facebook friends now’, I said. Another cousin was standing nearby and the three of us formed a group as we began to joke about the shortcomings of Facebook.

‘Are you on Twitter?’ I asked Annette. ‘I think it’s a complete waste of time’.

To my surprise, she didn’t know what Twitter was, so I started to explain it as best I could. We were all laughing and I was beginning to feel the old click.

An older lady came up to the group and started talking with the other cousin. Although she was addressing us all, it was one of those conversational moments when you sense a branching off is about to take place: she and the other cousin were reminiscing about a prestigious school they had both attended. It was turning into an alumni-type chat.

I didn’t feel at that point like leaving the conversation, but I could sense Annette’s impatience. For the first time I noticed that she still had the old restlessness. Her body wouldn’t stay still, and her right arm was – well – twanging. She looked as if she could begin to dance at any moment. Her head began to crane, searching around for something better. Any minute I would lose her, and this time it might be for good.

‘I’m going to get a drink’, she said and she was off.

I wonder now why I hadn’t taken charge and asked her about her children – how old the youngest was, for example, or what her oldest was doing. But perhaps I’d already decided that she wouldn’t be interested in talking to me alone. Perhaps without realising it I was playing it safe.

Later I saw her from a distance, talking in another group, and again I noticed that fluttering refusal to keep still. For the first time I looked back at our walk along Darling Road all those years ago, when I’d been so dismayed at the change in her, and I read it a bit differently.

Sure, Annette may well have been covering up her vulnerable child self, and perhaps she still was. But perhaps she was also trying to allow a new, social self to emerge, a self that was interested in the real world of human beings rather than the fantasy world of childhood that still held me captive. Perhaps the Annette that had confronted me that day was the real Annette after all.

Of course the sudden change I’d perceived all those years ago may have partly been due to Annette’s complex family circumstances, as well as the demands of puberty. But although she went on to stumble around a bit as a young adult – as most of us do – her social self eventually enabled her to find her place in the world. It certainly hasn’t stopped her being happy and successful. Perhaps all along she’s had more psychological sophistication than I’ve given her credit for.

Tweet

Hit by pre-birthday depression

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

The reason? My birthday looms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweet