Giving in to the Madness of Christmas

I didn’t want to wish anyone on Twitter Happy Christmas (or happy holidays) this year. I had to force myself.

It’ s not that I don’t want them to be cheery. It’s just not how I’m feeling, politically speaking any way.

Christmas is always a strange time for the sanest of us, let alone those with an anxiety disorder or other condition.

As my doppelganger FCM I’ve had a Twitter account for a few months now. It consists mainly of links to articles about the terrible things going on in the world, with some interesting literary snippets thrown in.

In the lead-up to Christmas this year I felt such a strong need to stop the political hectoring, the calling out of bad behaviour, the keeping up to date with it all. Such an overwhelming desire to withdraw and to give in to the madness of Christmas.

Yet the world didn’t stop being messy and tragic. New tragedies kept happening. Some were human made, others less obviously so.

The unpredictably bizarre injustices of the Abbott government have had an effect on so many Australians this year. No-one likes Tony Abbott much, not even Liberal voters, and these days his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, is just as reviled.

On 22 December, just days before Christmas, Abbott announced that Scott Morrison, who as immigration minister removed the obligation that Australia follow the refugee convention, and set off a scale of death, torture and misery in the gulags  detention camps that put Australia to shame, will now be our Minister for Social Services.

To paranoid lefties like me this seemed a cruel joke, both in its substance and its timing.

Tragedy continued internationally. In Missouri yet another black teenager was shot by police. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes, and at least 24 killed, following massive flooding in Malaysia. A plane carrying 162 passengers from Indonesia to Singapore went missing mid-flight, and the wreckage has since been found with all passengers presumed dead. The international community has continued to ignore the plight of the more than 1 million refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria.

Yet the need to withdraw from the fray, at least partially, has continued. My Christmas depression this year was partly just a response to the hullabaloo of Christmas itself, which seems to be a little more disconnected from reality, a little more surreal, every year.

There is such a yawning gulf between the hectoring cheerfulness of the relentless carols and the mad spending of the crowds on the one hand and my own state of mind on the other that it produces an odd lurch into alienation.

But like birthday depression, I suspect much of what passes for Christmas depression is unacknowledged grief, which is rampant in our society. In A Life at Work, Thomas Moore talks about the difference between the human soul and the human spirit. The soul seeks the past, the familiar, and is rooted in the earth. The spirit seeks out the new, the unknown, creativity and challenge.

Christmas is a time in which the soul demands to be heard above the din. At Christmas, even more so than at birthdays in my experience, the soul longs for the certainties of the past. Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself driving past my old place, which I moved out of in May, several times. I realised that it was the first Christmas I’d spent away from the place for ten years, and my first Christmas at my current flat. My soul was yearning for that connection with past Christmases.

But perhaps notions of unacknowledged grief are just scratching the surface when it comes to the kinds of funk people experience on holidays, birthdays and anniversaries. I’m reading Horse Boy, an inspiring book about how an autistic boy was healed of many of his worst behaviours by a combination of horse riding and a series of gruelling healing rituals by Mongolian shamans.

This book has made me wonder whether my understanding of spirituality and its repression in the West has been incredibly shallow. The spirituality of the Mongolian shamans seems to allow them to harness powerful forces for healing that put our Western alternative healers to shame. The scale of what we have lost in modern life suddenly seems so much larger, and is perhaps the reason for all the mental illness we are experiencing.

Yet there’s no need to ditch the scientific method that has created such leaps and bounds. If science had an open enough mind to explore what was going on when the shamans healed Rowan Isaacson, whole new areas of study could be established.

They might include an expansion of human psychology. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs was an important milestone but perhaps it should also include the need to connect with the forces of the Earth and to balance them within ourselves. No wonder even the sanest of us goes a bit mad at Christmas. (In fact there have been studies of shamanism in relation to Western notions of mental illness. However, my sense is that interest in shamanism is still considered flaky within the mainstream psychiatric community.)

But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. My challenge for Christmas this year was just to let go. Not try to change my rellies, or escape the boring bits, or get angry because our family never – I repeat never – gets around to eating lunch before 3 pm by which time my blood sugar is lower than Scott Morrison’s ethical standards. What else was there to do but play that daggy Christmas carols CD, break open the Christmas crackers, put on the tissue-paper hat that never fits properly and read out the dumb joke? I just let the whole circus roll.

Okay, so there was one conflict towards the end of the night but it arose from another family member’s angst, not mine. I’m not wearing it!

Happy new year to everyone out there in blog land.

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Moving Up in the World - Literally!

Here I am, finally, post-move. Transported from a huge, mouldy, freezing cold, art deco semi-detached in stuffy East Malvern to a relative balmy first-floor medium-sized seventies flat in quiet, unpretentious but prosperous Gardenvale. Oh, it hasn’t been easy, but it is slowly proving to have been worthwhile.

Moving is just rife with metaphors: I got here in one piece but my sense of self is higgledy-piggledy. I am seeing already how a different space makes you a slightly different person. Your brain is forced to forge new paths to map out daily routines, for example.

It is quieter than living on busy Wattletree Road, despite several major arterials being close. The acoustics of the building itself are pretty bad but the other tenants are relatively quiet (except for last night when the people downstairs had their mates over – why are so many Australian males so boorish, loud, and unaware of themselves?) – Normally these people take to their beds at around 11 pm. One of them seems to get up at 5.30 am to go to work, but I am already up at that time with menopausal insomnia anyway!

The flat is also great for my allergies. My skin is clearer, my face less puffy and my scalp not itchy. I would probably have more energy too, if I wasn’t spending it moving things around!

The first week was challenging, because the forced deadline of the auction meant that everything was incredibly rushed towards the end, and because I just have too much stuff. It was impossible to find things that I needed and I kept forgetting to buy stuff at the supermarket. (Actually I still haven’t found my reading glasses, but without them my eyes are adjusting to normal type – did I really need them in the first place?)

The auction itself went like clockwork. I didn’t realise till the day afterward the extent of the sacrifice I’d made for its success. Keeping some furniture and pictures untouched for the final inspection (going against all advice!) meant that the Sunday before the move on Monday was just crazy. I had done loads of packing in the preceding weeks, and most of the in-depth cleaning (cupboards etc) but there was still an amazing amount to do. Luckily Mum and Dad came over to help in the morning, and my older sister and her husband did a couple of hours in the afternoon.

I swear having my stuff set up nicely in that sad old place must have added another 20 000 dollars to the selling price – it went for 720 000 in the end (and will need at least another 100 000 to bring up to any sort of scratch). But I am getting every cent of my bond back, despite putting my foot down about having to steam clean the carpet (this requirement is standard on Victorian rental leases but I knew the mangy, filthy thing was just going to be pulled up anyway).

Funnily enough, the move itself was relatively easy, because for a few hours we had three strong men helping us (I had booked two, but in an incredibly lucky break, a third came along for training and was more than happy to help with boxes etc). It was when the men left that the hard slog began.

There was a moment of crisis in the move itself. It rained for a short time (oh gloomy day!), and when the burly men started walking into the house they brought wet grass from their boots onto the pale, tubercular-looking carpet – calamity! Luckily when I expressed concern about this, the head honcho brought in blankets and spread them all over the floor. Disaster mostly averted.

There was a brief moment after they had put the lounge suite in when the place looked like a home and I even indulged in a brief sit-down. And then they brought in all the boxes – dozens and dozens! It just went on and on, the men bringing piles of them up the stairs on the trolleys until the lounge room was full. How had I managed to accumulate so much crap?

Gradually, over nine or ten days I cleared the mess and the lounge took on the look of a living space. There are still a whole lot of ornaments I am probably going to eBay, but it’s a really nice space. I couldn’t believe when I saw it for only the second time ever – which was after the removal from the old place was done – how big the lounge actually was.

My study is very cosy and there is a problem in this room (and the kitchen) with the slimline venetians not blocking out the northern sun. This will be a big deal in summer, but one advantage of it at this time of year is that it really heats up the room and will be great for drying clothes. In preparation for summer I intend to buy a laptop and put a table in the lounge room and perhaps work there on really hot days. I am also thinking about buying some kind of windscreen shield and just putting it on the office window.

The main problem at the moment is ongoing exhaustion fighting with a desire to be constantly out of the house (especially the beach, a shortish drive away). Physically I need to ‘marshal my resources’. I am still going constantly up and down the steps and moving things to the rubbish bins, or to the car boot for ultimate disposal at the op shop. And still there is so much stuff that I just don’t need. After giving a heap of it away in a flurry of downsizing before I moved (and wondering if I should have flogged off my comfy cream couch instead of putting it on Zilch ...) I have decided to sell off my prized (?) collection of kitsch pictures.

Which brings me to something that was a huge bugbear when I first moved in but is becoming less so. There were hardly any picture hooks and the lease requires me to ask the landlord if I want to affix anything to the wall at all – including those supposedly removable hooks – the small peeled section of wall in the lounge room testifies to the possible unfortunate financial fate of a former tenant who used  one such hook. This is the nature of the Australian rental market at work. As prices skyrocket due to insane tax breaks for investors, they get stricter about maximising the value of their lucrative investment, with the need to ensure their tenants feel at home coming a poor second.

But really, this is small beer. I know how lucky I am to be here and I’m going to make the most of it.

Being in an entirely new area is very strange. I can’t believe how different it feels from East Malvern, and that I didn’t know how large adjoining South Caulfield was. It seems now like a hidden part of Melbourne (whereas East Malvern wants to show itself off), so in some ways I feel as if I am almost living in another city. Weird and disorientating but in a good way.

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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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Four Free Relaxation Exercises that Can Improve Your Mental Health

I never thought I would be writing these kinds of blog entries for Slightly Nutty. Next thing it will be ‘Ten herbs that can change your life’ and ‘Four questions to ask before choosing a therapist’. (I have also considered writing a joke book called How to Write a Best Selling Self-Help Book – I bet there are people out there who would consider buying it.)

But please bear in mind but I’m really addressing myself here. Because what I’ve noticed over the years – and only recently been able to put into effect as much as I want to – is that everything in our culture teaches that we shouldn’t use our own resources, and that you have to pay for things to make your life better.

Now this is often the case. Other people have skills that are different from ours, and to pay them for those skills can improve our lives while keeping the economy ticking over. A good physio can do wonders for a sore lower back. A skilled therapist provides the objectivity that we cannot bring to our own lives. I get all that, but I still think that we are subtly discouraged by the culture to do the simple things that can enhance quality of life, and that don’t cost a penny.

So here are four things you can do yourself, that don’t cost anything. Two can be done in front of TV, and two probably not. You probably know about them already but a reminder won’t do any harm.

Please note this isn’t medical advice – please see a physio if you have serious muscular or spinal problems.

Self-massage

This is a great thing to do in front of tele to ease sore, aching muscles. This Wikihowguide gives excellent suggestions – not just for obvious things like a sore neck but also massaging tummy, arms, feet and even your back if you have a basketball handy. It recommends showering first and using massage oil but you don’t need to prepare in this way to benefit.

There’s no reason to wait until your muscles are sore. If you do self-massage regularly, sore muscles would probably reduce over time.

Progressive relaxation

No, this isn’t time out for left-wingers. It basically involves tensing and relaxing one muscle at a time from the top of the head down to the toes. It is best to do this either sitting in a chair or lying down. In theory you could do it while sitting and watching tele, but listening to relaxing music will be more effective.

You can also do this just before going to sleep.

The extent of the exercise is up to you. The longer you take in tensing and relaxing each muscle, and the more muscles you include, the more effective the treatment will be – but it doesn’t have to be long, or involve every single muscle. There are plenty of relaxation CDs, and they can certainly help you let go, but the point is you don’t need a CD; you can run through the muscles yourself.

The trouble with progressive relaxation is that so many claims are attached to it, such as its ability to cure insomnia and anxiety. Rather than focusing on grand claims, what seem more relevant to me are its immediate benefits. It simply makes you feel more relaxed, and after doing it for a while you will get better at letting the muscles go. I always think of a floppy rag doll when I do this exercise, focusing on letting go of the muscle when I relax it.

Meditation

Many people run a mile when they see the word meditation. They think that adopting it involves joining an ashram and sitting still for hours, or they go to a website that tells them they should meditate for at least ten minutes every night as well as every morning as a bare minimum. More than anything, I believe, we associate meditation with failure. We are not good enough for it; we fail before we even start because we know our brains are too chattery, too noisy.

The best way of approaching it is to clear your brain of preconceptions and the need for achievement. You are not going to move to a cave. You are just trying to change your brainwaves to achieve a greater mental serenity and stamina.

The important thing about meditation is that the trying – the early stages, which are so trying – are already doing some good, and that even five minutes in the morning has some benefit. Sure, once you start you may get completely enthused and build a little altar, or go on a retreat. But you don't have to do any of that. And even if you don’t keep it up, your brain will remember the degree of inner quietness you achieved. I have taken meditation up and dropped it again throughout my adult life, and every time I take it up again I don’t have to go back to the beginning. The learning from last time is still there.

Mindfulness meditation is a great form because it doesn’t just accept that the brain will chatter, or that you’ll lose concentration; it incorporates that assumption into the process. Every time your brain strays you simply bring it back to your breathing, and perhaps note mentally what’s happening. Through the mental chatter you continue to take note of the steady in and out of the breath. After a while the brain does tend to slow down, but the point is you will receive benefits before that. And there will be days when you slip into that effortlessly and days when the brain chatters throughout, and this is all okay.

Since getting back to mediation for all of a month, I’m already noting more stamina, more mental energy and calmness. I now meditate between five and ten minutes six days a week.

I meditate sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the side of my bed, with a blanket around my shoulders. To stop myself from putting it off, it’s the first thing I do when I get out of bed after going to the loo. If I turn my computer on first, my meditation practice probably won’t happen that day as once I’m in ‘doing’ mode, I’m a-goner.

Here is a simple, uncomplicated description of simple mindfulness meditation. 

Deep breathing

Deep breathing, sometimes called abdominal breathing, is great if you are prone to panic attacks because it retrains the breath so that even when you are nervous you have a greater sense of control. But I imagine it would be useful for any form of anxiety and especially useful before public speaking or a scary social event.

Practising deep breathing is great to do in front of teeve, because it’s a wonderful rationalisation for blobbing, something I love to do (another blog entry I am planning is – seriously – ten things to do in front of tele).

Here’s a good description of the process.

Hope you have fun with these exercises, and get something out of trying them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A simple but totally unproven exercise for getting to sleep

(I was very bored with the layout of my blog, so chose another template and mucked around a bit with colours – any feedback welcome, including feedback on readability. I’ve also rearranged the links and added subject headings. Lastly, though you would never know it, I got rid of quite a few labels, but the list is still too long.)

I developed this sleep exercise about a year ago, based on some reading I’d done on the brain. I decided to include the exercise in my blog because I’ve been having sleeping problems for the last few months and hadn’t been doing the exercise for a while. I tried it again recently and it seemed to work. I thought it was worth putting in the blog, but I’m warning you it sounds very silly, and is probably based on childhood memories of sci-fi films.

I would be very interested to know if it does work for anyone else (and if it doesn’t), or if readers make their own adaptations.

The exercise

• Do this exercise slowly.

• You can do it more than once at a time.

Picture the frontal cortex of the brain being turned off (picture the frontal area of the brain, along the forehead, being plunged into darkness as ‘electric lights’ are switched off).

Picture the visual cortex being turned on (picture the centre of the lower back of the head lighting up as if an electric light is going on).

Imagine you are a director giving instructions to an operator sitting at an operating panel that includes buttons. Picture the operator carrying out the following instructions as you give them.

• Produce 200 mg GABA ( as you ‘give the orders’, picture the operator punching the amount in, the substance, and then an ‘Enter’ button).

• Produce 200 mg melatonin (as above).

• Produce 200 mg tryptophan (as above).

Now order the operator to ‘Activate the sleep process’. Picture the operator slowly moving a large lever, like a gear stick, in a downwards motion.

Now, gently focus on any images your brain is producing rather than words. Let the images turn into dreams.

Please note the following:

• This exercise has no scientific validity – it’s only been tested on me.

• I don’t have problems getting to sleep, but waking up too early in the morning and being unable to get back to sleep. I therefore use this exercise in the early hours (4 am to 6 am), and it doesn’t plunge me into deep sleep but light dreaming.

• Part of the reason it does work for me may be habit – ie my brain now sees this exercise as a signal to move into sleep mode.

• It does seem to relax me a bit, perhaps because it occupies the mind.

• If I’m really alert it won’t work – sometimes it acts like a test as to whether it’s worth trying to sleep or just giving up and getting up.

• The exercise is based on my very limited and probably completely inaccurate knowledge of the human brain. The frontal cortex is the seat of active thinking, and the visual cortex is active during sleep.
  

• The exercise refers to sleep-inducing substances that the body produces, and I am in no way recommending that people buy these as supplements.

• The ‘amounts’ of these substances are totally arbitrary.

• Everyone’s different – if trying this exercise produces distress, stop.

I know this exercise is daggy. But it works for me, and I thought it might at least inspire others to make up their own exercises.

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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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Heroes and villains: food intolerance, hypoglycemia, candida and the Failsafe diet – Part 2 of 3

In my last entry I gave a rundown of my food intolerance problem. In this entry I’ll talk about the Failsafe diet, designed primarily for children with food allergies and sensitivities, and the unexpected discovery about hypoglycemia that my search for information about food intolerance on the internet led to. (This entry is way too long anyway so I’ve steered clear of discussing the role of food in causing or worsening psychiatric problems, a highly relevant issue given the usual flavour of my blog.)

It’s very common now for conditions that affect children such as autism, ADD and asthma to be attributed to food intolerance and allergies. That much I expected. What I wasn’t expecting was the extent to which reactions to refined sugar have been discredited as a contributing factor in these conditions. The hypoglycemic and anti-candida diets are out, and the Failsafe diet is in.

The Failsafe diet is based on the finding that many children suffer from intolerances to particular chemicals in food. These chemicals may be artificial or natural and include additives, in particular food colourings, flavourings, and flavour enhancers, as well as chemicals that occur naturally in foods, such as amines and salicylates (these aren’t the only natural chemicals that can cause grief, but they seem to be the most common).

The diet also acknowledges that children and adults may suffer a range of allergies along with their food intolerances, such as allergies to soy, egg, gluten, dairy, and peanuts. (The difference between food allergy and food intolerance is explained here).

The Failsafe diet avoids all harmful food chemicals. To say it’s a welcome development is an understatement. It was actually devised in Australia, at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, as a more up-to-date version of the US-devised Feingold diet, and has great scientific credibility.

The website of Sue Dengate, an advocate for the Failsafe diet who has researched and authored books on food intolerance and the diet, seems to have by far the most comprehensive information on Failsafe on the web.

The website has a wealth of useful free information about the diet. It is full of testimonies by relieved parents whose previously ill, inattentive, insomniac and appallingly behaved children (often it’s a case of more than one problem) are now themselves again.

However, the website includes an assertion that could be controversial if the problem it refers to were better known. It appears to dispute the existence of ideopathic reactive hypoglycemia as a cause of behavioural problems in children (ideopathic is a fancy word doctors use when they haven’t a clue what causes something).

What is hypoglycemia?

Symptoms of reactive hypoglycemia include irritability, headaches, and mental confusion, and it’s also been linked with panic attacks, depression and anxiety.

It's a condition whose actual process doesn’t seem to be entirely clear, or perhaps it has differing causes. The amount of glucose in the blood becomes low for everybody several hours after eating. Hypoglycemia is related to the hormones adrenaline and cortisol, which the body produces at this time to prevent the blood sugar becoming dangerously low.

Hypoglycemics may produce too little cortisol, which is associated with underactive adrenal glands. Apparently, the symptoms of shakiness, poor memory and so on are a reaction to the adrenaline that is produced as a back up. Poorly functioning adrenals have been associated with food sensitivities. But the central question is: what is the ultimate culprit – the adrenals or the food sensitivities?

Stress has been shown to be a major cause of hypoglycemia. This also suggests that it's relates to adrenal functioning, as long-term stress puts pressure on the adrenals.

Earlier descriptions of hypoglycemia focused on the pancreas and claimed that in hypoglycemics it produced too much insulin as a response to the glucose in the blood, shifting the glucose into the cells and causing a sudden drop in blood sugar. It’s been said that the level of sugar in the blood is not necessarily the problem, but the speed at which the level gets lower.

However, I deliberately haven’t called this condition ‘low blood sugar’ ( a common term) because it wasn’t clear to me after a very basic internet research that the blood sugar of hypoglycemics becomes lower than that of non-hypoglycemics; certainly the blood glucose test has been discredited as a diagnostic tool.

Reactive hypoglycemia should not be confused with hypoglycemic reactions from diabetes, or hypoglycemia caused by serious conditions such as Graves disease and pancreatitis.

Early diets to combat hypoglycemia focused on removing concentrated sugar from the diet and emphasised complex carbohydrates (eg using brown instead of white rice). Following a brief ascension as a fad diagnosis, this condition is all too often routinely ignored by doctors. It seems that research is being done on it, particularly in the case of children, but in my experience that research hasn’t trickled down to GPs.

It’s unfortunate that a condition linked to food intolerance in some way is in fact the province not of allergists but of endocrinologists. The failure to find a cure for another condition that straddles more than one specialty – rosacea – indicates the neglect that can occur when more than one branch of medicine is involved.

What is candida?

More recently, hypoglycemia has been linked with candidiasis, the overgrowth of candida, a fungus, in the digestive system. While yeast overgrowth in areas such as the genitals (thrush) is recognised and treatable, the existence of candida overgrowth in the digestive system as a condition has remained controversial.

Also scientifically unproven are the supposedly associated symptoms of this overgrowth, such as fatigue, and the anti-candida diet to combat these symptoms. Like the hypoglycemia diet, the anti-candida diet removes sugar and emphasises whole foods but it goes much further, also excluding all foods that might contain mould, including fermented foods and drinks (eg conventional bread, beer) as well as aged foods such as cheese and processed meats. The theory is that you literally starve the yeast overgrowth in the gut. Like the Failsafe and hypoglycemic diets, the anti-candida diet acknowledges that some sufferers might also have allergies and intolerances, for example to gluten and dairy.

Candidiasis is linked to so-called leaky gut syndrome, in which damage to the bowel lining is seen as both a cause and effect of hypoglycemia and ever-worsening food intolerance. Wikipedia puts the status of this diagnosis beautifully:

While many practitioners maintain that leaky gut syndrome is a bona fide medical condition, the area of ‘gut problems’ lies between conventional and alternative medicine, and includes other diagnoses such as small bowel bacterial overgrowth syndrome or small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), and yeast syndrome or systemic candidiasis, and remains controversial and scientifically unsettled.

Disputing the role of sugar

Dengate (and perhaps the developers of the Failsafe diet) disputes both low blood sugar and candida as causes of unexplained symptoms. The website makes the unequivocal assertion that ‘Contrary to popular belief, sugar does not cause children's behaviour problems’.

It goes on to say:

When mothers swear their children are ‘sugar addicts’ whose behaviour is affected by sugar, they are generally surprised on going failsafe to find that their children are actually reacting to salicylates. Sugar craving can be a salicylate-induced reaction.

Similarly, feeling tired, weak and shaky can be a delayed reaction to food chemicals such as salicylates, rather than hypoglycemia.

This is a breathtaking claim. Dengate seems to be saying that food intolerances only mimic hypoglycemic symptoms rather than causing them.

Yet hypoglycemia itself is certainly a distinct phenomenon, even if it is caused or worsened by food intolerance.

Indeed, the website itself admits this elsewhere, seeming to suggest that sugar can play some role in behaviour if ingested on an empty stomach:

It is best to eat sugar as part of a balanced meal (e.g. in a dessert) rather than in drinks or treats on an empty stomach when it can affect blood sugar levels.

Even if we admit that it may not be blood sugar levels that are the problem but the body’s reaction to low blood sugar, why do some people exhibit these symptoms and not others? All this suggests to me the possibility that some children react to their food intolerances with hypoglycemic symptoms and some don’t (ie they have other symptoms). If that’s the case, surely those children with hypoglycemic symptoms should be taken off sugar for a while because it might put extra stress on an already oversensitised system, even if the sugar wasn’t the original culprit?

And does this mean that that if I continue on my low-salicylate, low-amine diet, eventually my system will right itself? (At this point in my diet it’s impossible to say whether I am ‘losing’ what Dengate believes is faux hypoglycemia, but at the moment I would not experiment with cane sugar in, as they say, a ‘pink fit’.)

The claim that sugar is not the villain it has been assumed to be does seem to be borne out by some evidence.

According to the website, a study that successively fed children three different types of sweeteners without their knowledge – sucrose (cane sugar), aspartame (an artifical sweetener) and and saccharin (as a placebo) – found that regardless of the type of sweetener, the children’s behaviour was unchanged.

The study took place over a nine-week period in which the children were fed a diet that changed each week, with the sweetener used in the food being changed every three weeks. Half the children in the study were chosen because they were believed by their parents to have problems with sugar.

However, the emotional language used to describe this study (‘definitive multimillion dollar study’) belies the reality. It used only 48 children, and no children were fed no sweetener at all. The anti-candida diet, unproven as it is, says that all forms of refined sugar exacerbate candida, including sorbitol.

What would have happened if the researchers had withdrawn concentrated sweetness completely from the diets of a control group? Perhaps nothing, but such an addition would have enhanced the efficacy of the study.

One reason why the website supports cane sugar may be that the Failsafe diet warns against artificial sweeteners, which have not been proven safe; in fact some of these sweeteners seem to act like poisons.

And to be fair, the website emphasises that the Failsafe diet should consist of unprocessed foods. Dengate has researched food additives and Australian labelling laws, and it seems that few processed foods are actually safe.

The website also provides information about a form of intolerance affecting some Failsafers: fructose malabsorption. Fructose is a natural sugar derived from fruit, and it’s now added to processed foods instead of cane sugar, for example in the form of corn syrup. Fructose malabsorption can occur alone or in conjunction with other food intolerances.

Too much fructose can affect the most hardy, but it causes all sorts of digestive problems for the intolerant. Fructose occurs in some vegetables as well as fruit, and the solution is to eat only fruits and vegetables with low fructose, and no processed foods containing fructose.

Finally, if Dengate is correct, it’s feasible that some people with food intolerances would show some improvement if they followed the anti-candida diet even if that diet were a crock, because it removes all processed foods. It does allow fresh fruit, however.

My experience

Reactive hypoglycemia is said to have many possible causes. One of these is adrenal exhaustion. My hypoglycemia became worse after I had a ‘breakdown’ (an unfashionable word now) at the age of 21, when my adrenals would have been under an enormous amount of stress. Quite possibly intolerance to amines and salicylates and reactive hypoglycemia exacerbated each other.

When I look back at my food history, giving up most cane sugar at the age of 21 or so had a marked effect, although at the time I was ignorant, like most people, about amines and salicylates. During the period of withdrawing from concentrated sugar I could hardly get out of bed. Sugar acted for me like a drug; but whether everyone giving up sugar would have had a similar reaction, or only people with reactive hypoglycemia, is something I can’t be sure about. However, for reasons unclear at the time I never completely ‘stabilised’, that is, felt normally clear-headed and energetic. And I haven’t since. So Dengate’s assertion is, to say the least, interesting to me.

However, before the diagnosis and before I drastically reduced cane sugar in my diet (I didn’t fully succeed in giving it up for at least three years), I do remember experiencing these occasional, awful feelings of a kind of cognitive emptiness, a sense of vacancy, and I’ve never felt that degree of vagueness and disorientation since giving up cane sugar. My sugar problem still seems a separate issue to me, even if it is at least partially caused by food sensitivities.

To complicate things further, I went to Europe at the age of 23 for five months, developed a full-blown eating disorder and shivered in freezing, mouldy rooms. This period saw a worsening of both my sugar and food sensitivities, and I’ve always associated it with the development or worsening of some kind of candida problem, or at least a sensitivity to mould.

So, despite my interest in Dengate’s assertion, my completely uneducated guess would be that a proportion, perhaps only a tiny proportion, of children with food intolerance might also have hypoglycemia or candidiasis as a separate problem; and if even these were related to food sensitivities, giving up all kinds of concentrated sugar mightn’t be a bad idea for these children, at least for a while until their systems had time to recover from their food intolerances.

There’s a common sense element here: some of the symptoms of ADD, such as vagueness and poor concentration, are also classic hypoglycemic symptoms. If the Failsafe diet doesn’t completely cure the problem, mightn’t it be worth finding out if the child has a separate sugar or candida problem? (You would need a few weeks to check this because the body becomes physically addicted to sugar, and there would be a period of withdrawal.)

But in this case, computer definitely says no. Dengate again: ‘It is counterproductive to try to combine failsafe eating with a candida diet’. Elsewhere on the site, she asserts that a thrush problem ‘does not mean you need to eliminate sugar and yeast. The so-called candida diet is not scientifically proven’.

That puts me between a rock and a hard place. At the moment my diet is extremely strict, and I’m now doing what the website warns against, which is combining Failsafe with anti-candida (this is making finding a suitable calcium supplement, um, interesting). But I’ve done nothing to remove salicylates from non-food products. The website warns:

As perfumed toiletries, cosmetics, airfresheners, scent sprayers and household cleaners mostly used by women have become increasingly pervasive and over-fragranced, they can push you over your salicylate limit.

I can’t help wondering if removing non-dietary sources of salicylates would help my hypoglycemia.

What worries me is that ideopathic hypoglycemia is already ignored by so much of the medical profession – the Failsafe diet will just make this worse.

Whew! In my final entry on this topic I’ll ask whether sugar is good for anybody, take a horrified look at the allergy food industry and present a very shaky, unscientific hypo-hypothesis about the links between reactive hypoglycemia and food intolerance.

See also Heroes and Villains Part 1 and Heroes and Villains Part 3.

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In the land of Minor Mishaps

Recently I entered the land of the Minor Mishap. Those experiencing Minor Mishaps belong for a short time to a very unexclusive club.

A Minor Mishap doesn’t involve serious illness or death, and is not annoying enough to be soul destroying, but it usually requires that SOMETHING BE DONE. It demands to be given priority.

When you’re in the throes of a Minor Mishap you’re in a slightly different space from everyone else, floating a few inches above them. When you are speaking to anyone about the problem your voice carries urgency, purpose and a touch of desperation. You are driven by an overwhelming need to restore the world to exactly what it was once was. You no longer want a partner or more money or world peace. You just want what you had before – your version of normalcy, which, since it has been snatched from you, has suddenly become incredibly precious and sacred.

Minor Mishaps often involve parting with money that one would rather spend on fun and frivolity. Action is important, sometimes just for the sake of keeping the momentum going, even if it achieves next to nothing.

Minor Mishaps that can’t be fixed right away gradually stop being mishaps and become absorbed into normal life – in this case, the experience of ‘normal life’ changes to incorporate the Minor Mishap. I rent a crumbling semi-detached flat, so house-based Minor Mishaps in the form of needed repairs are incredibly frequent. If it’s not an electricity power point needing replacing it’s the hot water system in the roof calling it a day or the guttering on the garage detaching from the bricks and hanging down in a very undignified way.

But basically after I’ve reported the needed repair someone else has to sort it out. This doesn’t always happen straight away and if it drags on the Minor Mishap loses that urgent quality, and I stop noticing it.

A computer-based Minor Mishap is arguably worse than many others because sometimes, although you know something must be done, you don’t know exactly what. You’re like a detective hunting out the clues. You can call on experts but there’s no guarantee they will know either.

The Mishap strikes

One day last week at about 7 am, I turned on my right arm, I mean my computer. The green light went on but, apart from that, nothing happened. It was no longer a computer but a worthless box of tin. Or so it seemed.

I had reason to be devastated. A similar incident had occurred when I first moved into the place I’m in now, five and a half years ago. Back then, when I first set my computer up and switched it on, a flame briefly leered from the top back section where the fan is, and my computer died in a puff of smoke. I still have the disk drive, but such was the damage that it wasn’t apparent whether or not the files were retrievable – a specialised company charging a megafortune would have billed me for even investigating the drive to see if they could retrieve the files, and I wasn’t going to risk it. So when this second computer malfunction happened, I assumed at first that computer Armageddon had occurred for a second time.

Because I knew the nearest library had plenty of computers for public use and I had a file to send to a client (luckily saved onto a USB key), I planned to go there tout suite. But the library didn’t open till 10. In the meantime, I went to mum and dad’s, where my technologically challenged father, currently using a hard drive so ancient it is a priceless antique, has had a slightly newer hard drive sitting in his ‘study’ (storeroom) for a year waiting to be connected. My brother-in-law got it free from his work when they were upgrading. None of us had a clue what state it was in.

(As a bonus, I saw my recently born nephew Billy, as my sister from the country was staying with my parents. Last time I saw Billy he was too new to make eye contact: this time the bald-headed angel looked straight at me with friendly curiosity before his face crumpled as if he was about to burst into wails.)

I lugged Dad’s heavy hard drive to my place and set it up, hoping I could use it to send my work file. The screen came to life in a blaze of incomprehensible text. In my Windows-primed brain, I had simply assumed that I would see the familiar aqua screen with the reassuring software logos on it, good old Explorer and Word. Nothing of the sort. It was speaking to me in computer language I didn’t understand. At least I now knew that the problem with my own computer had nothing to do with the monitor, seemingly nothing to do with the external electricals, and was almost certainly in the hard drive.

In pouring rain, feeling alone and sorry for myself, I managed to get to the library and send the work file with a great deal of fuss and panic; so scrambled was my brain I had to make two trips because I’d left the email address at home.

Luckily my dad knew a computer man in a cheap part of town who’d sold him a monitor and also did repairs. It turned out to be one of those reassuring small shopfronts with disembowelled computers and equipment strewn all over table tops and the floor, a bit like body parts in an operating theatre. The very nice man, Mark, told me it was a simple electrical part in the hard drive that had died and he could fix it in ten minutes for only $75 – he actually showed me my computer firing up using his own electrical equipment: my files were safe! Normalcy, sweet normalcy, beckoned.

But then. When I took the hard drive home after Mark had fixed it, it did exactly the same thing as before. I rang Mark back, carefully presenting the scenario as an incomprehensible problem and not his fault. He told me to bring it back and he would test it again.

He tested the drive twice while I watched, using his own monitor, and it fired up beautifully. He was genuinely bamboozled. The plot had thickened.

Luckily, waiting to be served in the shop was a tall, solidly built man wearing an old blue singlet and shorts, with greying hair skirting his shoulders and the intense but calm gaze of the computer literate – the sort of man that you just know loves both computer games and a beer. He could hardly ignore the desperation in my voice as I spoke to Mark and to the concerned woman who I think was Mark’s wife. I can’t remember who said it first, but either he or Mark said something like ‘Have you got surge protection?’ The penny dropped. I did have surge protection – a power board that would presumably cut out in a storm surge. For some reason, it must have decided the power from my computer was a threat, and shut off the electricity to it while allowing power to the other components.

‘Just get a normal power board’, the blue-singleted man said. ‘You don’t even need surge protection unless you live out of town or in the hills.’

I thanked them all profusely and took my now rather scratched hard drive home again. This time I didn’t actually believe it would fire up – and it did. I’m now typing on it, but I’ve noted something else about a Minor Mishap – when normalcy returns, it takes a while to actually feel normal. My whole world had swayed and threatened to collapse. Without my computer, I now realise, I don’t feel quite whole – and I’m still recovering from the shock. Sad but true.

(I’m fine about spending the $75 – the part Mark replaced was five years old and usually dies after two, and he kindly removed all the dust from the insides as well – and there was a lot.)

Throughout my semi-ordeal my friend Simon was a calm voice on the other end of the phone – I rang him at least four times. He kept directing me to find out what the problem was rather than assuming I had entered the computer stone age. I think he has missed his vocation – with his sane, logical approach he should definitely go into counselling (he can practise on me any time!).

The other thing I learned from this experience, as I contemplated the possible need to get a new computer, is that I am a hopeless Windows junkie. No matter how alluringly the Apple shop beckons, with its blue-T-shirted, smiling dudes coolly offering me their insanely customer-focused tuition and support options, their impeccable and reasonably priced back-up software, and no matter how the pearly surfaces of the iMacs gleam as they power silently and wirelessly through their beautifully constructed programs, I cannot change, not yet anyway. I am yours, Windows. Another unavoidable if regrettable truth.

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