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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The social and economic aspects of depersonalisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweet

Farewell to Jordan

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,

That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweet

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.

Tweet

In the Eye of the Storm: Further Thoughts on Moving House

Photo by Mararie

I’ve finally found somewhere to live – and will be signing the lease this afternoon.

I've ended up somewhere that if you’d told me even a year ago I'd be moving to I would have laughed in your face. It’s a tiny suburb called Gardenvale that is between more popular suburbs, so marginally cheaper rent-wise. It’s close-ish to Elwood, which is all at once groovy, semi-suburban and increasingly upper crust but has lovely old style flats and a great beach, but also a short drive from the non-hipster-ish vibrancy of Glenhuntly Road Elsternwick, which has a Jewish flavour (always a welcome relief from the white bread I choke on in East Malvern).

There is also a charming little local shopping strip with cafes and an op shop!

I’ll be living in a cute little two-bedroom flat on the first floor, which means no footsteps above me – something I vowed I would never put up with again in this lifetime.

The emotions so far have been horrendous. Only now is the joy coming through, the realisation that I really am leaving what has actually been something of a hellhole, and a millstone around my neck for the last ten years. I opened this YouTube clip this morning almost by chance and it was uncannily appropriate. Its little admonition will help me with what I now understand is the necessary chaos and disorientation of moving. 

There is no getting out of it. Yes, I can picture myself in my new little nest – and not all my images are optimistic, in some of them I am defeated by the sounds of neighbours and the three busy roads nearby – but that is an escape from the present. The important thing now is to be in the chaos, the eye of the storm, to experience the profound sense of dislocation and not try to imagine myself elsewhere. It is a very slow, painful birth and I am deliberately doing it gradually. I’m actually ahead of myself on the packing, because I’m terrified of being unprepared when the removalists arrive.

A couple of quick observations about moving:

– If I was rich I wouldn't think twice about getting packers. What a great idea - except you don't get to choose what to throw out, always a positive offshoot of moving house.

– The sense of your possessions being upended and sent somewhere new has a profound effect on the sense of self, leaving you feeling exposed and bruised. Poet Kevin Brophy describes it this way (italics are his)

Moving house, it takes you all apart,
until you find your insides outside—
it's like a surgeon's video camera
making TV documentaries of your viscera.

– The sense that this is the right time to go is uncanny. Weather not too warm or cold (winter hasn't set in yet), and because of a council stuff-up, my parents' hard rubbish collection delayed for weeks, so I can keep putting discarded stuff on their pile.

– The loss of my dream of moving back to the inner city - Carlton in particular will always feel like my true home - is profound. It involves saying goodbye to youth, my hidden hopes of reviving old friendships from my 12-step program days, an idea of Melbourne that's now obsolete and a less dog-eat-dog society than we have now.

– My OCD is manifesting in an obsession with my neglected body - plaque on my teeth, calloused heels, blocked ears, hair that needs cutting etc. I am writing a list of things to do after I move, but that list cannot change the fact that I simply can't attend to these suddenly urgent matters now.

All this is complicated by the fact that the owners are auctioning the place two days before I leave. That’s not quite as messy as it sounds. In fact I’ve adjusted (we adjust to anything, we humans) to the twice weekly ‘opens’ that mean at least two hours preparation on my part to make the place fit for potential buyers to come in and inspect the place, piles of boxes notwithstanding. Having the auction and the move close together actually works well because it means I’m simply doing most of the mega house clean (for the ultimate auction-day open house) before I leave.

And there’ll be no doubling up on rent because the owners of my current place kindly agreed to a reduction in notice time of two weeks – so they should for the amount of hours I’ve spent making the place bootiful for the many people who crave a slice of East Malvern ‘lifestyle’. (The new flat was vacant when I applied so the owners of that place wanted someone in straight away, but we compromised.)

There are loads of offers on my place apparently (it doesn’t feel like my place any more even though I’m paying rent for it.) It is small compared to the other houses and therefore relatively attainable in what is an expensive part of town. It also has a garage and a back yard (for the requisite dog you have to own even if you hate dogs and never walk yours) and is semi-detached in a block of three.  Ambitious young doctors and nurses are apparently keen to buy their first home in easy reach of the well-regarded Cabrini Hospital up the road.

They will be competing with the investors that Australia’s ridiculous tax laws encourage. The sales manager – who has been much nicer than you’d think, although of course that’s his job – told me that some potential investors would buy it as is and not do much to it. I couldn’t believe it – I thought anyone buying this place would want to gut it.

So – in less than two weeks I will be sleeping in a strange new place, in a quiet, story book street that I loved as soon as I turned into it, in a block of flats that seems peaceful and settled but has unknown inhabitants. In a part of town that is within easy reach of my parents but still completely foreign in its own way.

But the process of finding my little home and choosing to stay on this side of town (not the inner north of my dreaming) has been a huge emotional journey that requires another blog entry.

Tweet

Stress City: A Melbourne Tenant Moves On

The unforeseeable, the impossible has happened. After almost ten years I am to be moved out of my unhappy little nest and forced to search for another.

The owner is selling – or at least her kids are. They are not turfing me out exactly but they may as well be. The new owners could be either home buyers or investors – if they’re the latter, they will probably turf me out anyway because the place is in dire need of much more than a spit and a polish to make it look decent, and they’ll get much more rent that way.

I have no idea how this is all going to work out. They want to sell in early May and I will be looking for somewhere to live and presumably packing while the sales manager holds open for inspections (or ‘opens’ as the lingo is). Life is about to become very interesting. Where will I hide the boxes and the washing when potential owners traipse through the house?

I got the phone call on Friday afternoon when I was looking at DVDs in an op shop. The only thing I felt for the rest of the day was numb disorientation. I wasn’t very well organised so only had time to look at two properties on the Saturday. It was a shock to discover that, if I want a two-bedder, there’s no way I’m going to be able to afford to settle on this side of town.

Private rental in Australia is almost uniquely unregulated. There are few restrictions on when you can turf tenants out (unless they’ve signed a lease, which is usually a maximum of 12 months) and you can put the rent up every 6 months, to whatever the market rate is. Tax breaks for investors encourage the cashed-up to buy properties for investment purposes. In a tight market due to high rates of immigration (a business lobby policy, nothing to do with asylum seekers) the cost of housing to buy and rent far outstrips inflation and wage rises.

Virtually all landlords these days are basically profiteers (except my father, who still charges a mere $140 a week for his tiny one-bedroom investment property, in effect subsidising someone he doesn’t know from Adam, whose rent comes out of a trust fund (!), to the tune of about $100 a week. It is confusing having a father who will drop everything to help you and who says things like ‘you can come and stay with us if you need to’ but who has absolutely no sense of putting family first when it comes to charity (especially when the family member has a psyche disability!).

It means that the question of responsibility – of how much power I have over my own situation, and the extent to which my difficulties stem from the immaturity that is an offshoot of my illness rather than the illness itself – constantly exercises me. But in a way my father’s own immaturity – he acts with similar blindness towards my mum – frees me. It doesn’t really matter whether the neoliberal state and my father have both let me down. The fact is I must bear the responsibility, like it or not, and make the best of things. This is actually freeing for me. It’s taken me far too long to realise that not only can I not rely on my family, but that they are also difficult people to actually help. Better late than never to understand the truth.

 Allied with this knowledge is another strange irony. I’d convinced myself that I was stuck on this side of the Yarra, dutifully close to my ageing parents. On this side there’s East Malvern, where I currently live and which is very white bread, and a range of suburbs that are increasingly less boring, culminating in St Kilda and East St Kilda which in the seventies and eighties were hubs of Eastern European Jewish people combined with penniless artists and musicians. It was a magic combination and one you couldn’t find in any other part of Melbourne. Its particular feel was completely different from the much more studious, serious dissent of the inner north, which basically houses those of my generation who went to Melbourne Uni – they couldn’t afford to buy houses in inner city Carlton or Fitzroy so they just kept going further north, and now the likes of Reservoir have inner-city style contingents.

But yesterday was a reality check so profound it has put me off this side for life. The maximum rent I can afford is pretty low for a two-bedroom and the place I saw in Elsternwick, next door to East St Kilda, depressed me so badly that I broke down in tears on the standard investment-flat carpet that you find in these places. But it wasn’t just the cost – I realised, traipsing to and from the real estate agent’s office to pick up and drop back the keys, that I don’t like Carlisle Street any more. There are few rebels left in St Kilda, they’re mostly young male backpackers here for a good time and a root. All the interesting shops are gone, and it’s mostly cafes, bars and two dollar shops. In fact, there’s nothing of street life that interests me on this side of town any more.

And this means that, after resigning myself to staying on this side, it may just be marginally more affordable to go back to my beloved inner city, the place I feel I truly belong. Moving all that way seemed too hard and self-indulgent until I realised it would be slightly cheaper to live in West Brunswick than in Elsternwick or even the slightly daggier Caulfield.

As I walked towards my car after seeing the Elsternwick flat, remembering that I’d put on mascara that morning, I thought ‘You’d better check your face’. At the same time another thought occurred, not so well articulated – that I might very well forget to check my face. I knew that there would be something deliberate about that. I felt extremely sorry for myself, and at times like this – the sense of crisis of having nowhere to place your head – part of me reverts back to the needy child who expects the entire world to look after her.

And guess what? Overwhelmed as I was, I did forget to check my face in the car mirror. It was only as I jostled my way along Carlisle street back to Wilsons that I remembered. I hoped it would be okay.

When I handed the key over, and told the receptionist the property wasn’t quite what I was after, she said ‘All the best for your search.’ Oh dear. I rushed back to the car and things were even worse than I’d imagined. I didn’t have just black under my eyes, but a grey mascara 'tear' down the lower part of my left cheek. Oh yes, the world was going to be made aware of Catherine’s dilemma, like it or not!

I despise this narcissistic part of my personality, but I also understand it. It has taken me so long to grow up, but the trouble with life in Melbourne these days (and I suspect most Western cities) is that simply being realistic and aware of how to get by isn’t enough anymore. The rental situation really is very challenging, however much I adjust myself to its realities. What makes me sad and angry and one of the reasons that I will try to fiercely guard that childish part (rather than parading her) is that if I had not been so immature I could have done okay. In the seventies and early eighties, if you were white and lower (or upper) middle class, it was very hard to stuff up getting on in life in Melbourne, but I managed. I am still suffering for silly decisions that I made decades ago, when I really didn’t know any better. Now that I do know better, and the inner odds aren’t stacked against me to the same degree, the outer odds are more stacked against me than ever.

Still, I know I’ll be okay. As my father assures me, I can always stay with my parents for a small interim period although I would rather die than do this. I have Grow meetings in which to air my problems. I have my intuition, which I have honed to a fine art in the last ten years and which I can use to help me sort out which flats to bother seeing, and to help me make my ultimate choice. I have a very open mind. I will continually test out ‘the universe’ – the energies, if you like – by trying things out and looking, and will keep adjusting to whatever realities I find. I truly believe and hope that life in the inner north will be better than here – not perfect of course, but better.

Tweet

The Return of the Muse: How Poetry Came Back to Me after Fifteen Years

Erato, Muse of Lyrical Poetry by Charles Meynier

I've been putting off writing my next blog entry – it was going to be about dancing in the lounge, a habit I've taken up this year, and I was reluctant to conjure images of myself cavorting around the room behind the closed venetians, arms flailing about, to the sound of 'Papa don't preach'. Now, thank the gods, I have something else to write about so you don't have to imagine that – instead you can picture me in a room full of drunkards, wannabes and has-beens, reading out my latest poetic gems on a bad microphone, legs shaking, head full of narcissistic enthusiasm.

After fifteen years lurking in the most obscure recesses of my unconscious, my muse has returned to the fold. And boy is she making up for lost time.

I wrote poetry in the 1990s, and even got a few of them published, but I never cracked the big journals. I was shadowed by the fact that a friend of mine was one of Australia's most significant poets. I followed her style religiously, as well as that of the poet I was writing my Masters thesis on, Frank O'Hara.

Then a few things happened. I met the love of my life, and spurned him. I studied editing and became a freelance editor. My brain became increasingly attuned to the nuances of prose, and I learned how to cut language short, to discipline and control long and waffly sentences. Somewhere along the way the tap of my poetry simply turned off. It was more or less gone. When I tried to write 'poetically' it came out as the most horribly strangled prose.

Now I look back at my earlier poetic 'career' and realise something very important. The immaturity that was a feature of my earlier life, and that I still battle, stymied my writing in ways I was completely unaware of. Already I am becoming a better poet than I was then, because I'm practising every single day and my mind is much more open to a wide range of influences.

Back then, the only poems that I ever finished were the ones that had tumbled out more or less whole, with only the need to edit – I did attend writing workshops and got great feedback from my poet friend, but I'm talking about fiddling around with something already more or less complete. There are many worthwhile ideas that come out as small fragments, or even different entities that you can combine. You have to morph these bits and pieces into poems by worrying at them, revisiting them like an anxious nurse, turning them over in your brain and letting your unconscious fill in the blanks. This is the kind of work I only did occasionally fifteen years ago. Who knows how many good ideas I threw away because they required digging, when all I knew how to do was pan for gold.

The other thing I didn't do then is read as obsessively and singlemindedly as I do now. Naturally when I was writing my thesis I read the higgledy-piggledy band of poets that influenced Frank O'Hara and that was certainly wide. And I was already familiar with the confessional poets – Plath and Lowell from school (who could forget Plath's 'Daddy' or lines of Lowell's like 'My mind's not right' ('Skunk hour') and 'Crows maunder on the petrified fairway' ('Waking in the blue')) and later Sexton. Yet I was a bit snobby and with some exceptions, poetry that wasn't surreal or postmodern enough didn't really interest me. Now I'm a happy mongrel and will read anything I think is any good.

I'm no poetic genius. That sounds if there was a possibility I could be but what I mean is I'm okay with that now. I'm okay with being one of the masses who has to slog away at something to get good at it, or just better. Perhaps that was another reason why my poetry stalled before stopping altogether – I didn't really understand how to apply myself, even though I read poetry a lot. I didn't know how to follow a thread of experience, or to trust my own perceptions. My poetry was shallow and playful because I couldn't express my own life, I couldn't be a witness to it.

And I'm already harvesting the fruits of slog. I can see a noticeable improvement in quality, sometimes from one poem to the next. I can read poems I was writing weeks ago, days ago, and see clearly that they just don't come up to scratch. But it's also clear that it was necessary to write them to reach the current stage. Even more strange, some of my recent, relatively strong poems bear cadences from weaker poems from fifteen years ago. Experiments are never wasted, because their lessons are unconsciously applied to later work. What alchemy! What magic!

The trick now is to keep that inner life alive while also ensuring the outer life is whole. Keep up exercise. Keep going to Grow. Keep trying to get more work. I have to stay in the world.

My major challenge: time. No longer can I waste it, yet poetry needs time for the brain to simply waft with no object or aim.

As I read the work of poets that I didn't have the patience or attention span to stay with a few years ago, the importance of reading beyond poetry becomes evident. Poets devour history, biography, the classics; they refer constantly to myth.

Yet this doesn't mean intellectual snobbery. Quite the opposite. Every perception has the potential to contribute to a poem. Nothing is wasted, therefore the attention must be on everything. Poets are not vague, romantic idiots. They observe the world keenly, sharply, with an eye for the finest of details. They are, of all things, journalists! Just much more careful journos than those you will find on the pages of broadsheets like The Guardian, because they identify and note what too often remains invisible and unexpressed.

Which reminds me – that newspaper, whose online version fell last year on the parched Australian media landscape like a cooling shower, recently published a very nasty little article pooh-poohing a poem by the much-maligned young Twilight star Kristen Stewart.

Okay, so the title is terrible and the first paragraph not much chop but there are some great lines in the rest of it. Damn the Guardian for being so snobbish and a tad misogynistic into the bargain (how dare a vacuous female Hollywood star believe she could write something decent!). But us poets had the last laugh – the poem got a much fairer assessment from Professor Brian Kim Stefans of UCLA, and being compared to Bernadette Mayer and Antonin Artaud is no mean feat. I'll concur with the professor's encouraging line 'I say go for it Ms. Stewart'. 

Tweet

Going off SSRI Medication – Pros and Cons

The following is my personal experience. Please make decisions regarding SSRIs with your doctor and any other trusted helpers. If you are tapering off antidepressants, please do it slowly.

I took the SSRI antidepressant Luvox (very imperfectly) between October 2012 and November 2013. I wanted to write some thoughts about this experience, and how I've been feeling since going off it.

Drugs are powerful things that change the workings of the brain and involve significant psychological risk. Depending on your condition it may be risky not to take them, and it may be risky to go it alone during the period when you first start taking them or when you are tapering off. This article gives no recommendations or advice. It is simply my experience. But it seems fraught to even write about that experience; drugs, for all their nuisances and imperfections, can save lives in the short and medium term, and sometimes the long haul.

For some people being on drugs, despite the side effects, turns out to be inevitable if they are to have any long-term peace or sanity. I may yet turn out to be one of those people. Then again I may not. For me at the moment, the process is important. I need to add that some of what appears to be recklessness (taking myself off Luvox last December) is partly because I had had previous experience with it and knew it was a drug I could safely wean myself from. Other drugs (and physiologies) may not be so forgiving. Also the dose I was on was very low, so it was never a case of having to wean myself off a high dosage.

Trying Luvox for the second time in 2012–13, I was a lot more self-aware; I don’t remember many of my reactions the first time around about a decade earlier. Adjusting to the drug the second time around was difficult, and ideally I should have been ‘babysat’ for the first few weeks of the new regime. This is something doctors seem unforgivably ignorant about. People going on SSRIs should be told to expect to feel very strange for a couple of weeks and to have a support system in place, even if it’s just someone to check in with by phone on a daily or twice-daily basis.

Doctors would also do their patients a real service if they checked for a history, say, of impulsive behaviour. Someone with such a history might need very close monitoring if going on a new SSRI.

First impressions

I was in the worst throes of OCD when I first started taking the drug, and the relief of those first few weeks is still sweet in my memory. What Luvox seemed to do for me was get rid of my obsession with embarrassing social interactions and mulling over possible interpretations of what I had said, done and thought. Everything was suddenly in perspective again. My brain grew still, and what a wonderful stillness it was.

But only weeks after my system had adjusted to the drug, difficulties emerged. There’s no doubt in my mind that it affected my work adversely. The silence in my brain seemed to result in a reduced ability to ‘take in’ the outside world, to grasp facts, and my memory was also affected. Now, that’s not to say it would do the same for most people; I have multiple food intolerance, low blood sugar and an incredibly sensitive system. As well, I’ve always been a bit slow on the uptake, and obsessively aware of this tendency.

My job as a freelance editor meant it was absolutely vital to be alert. I developed an elaborate system of moderating the dose if I was doing a particularly demanding job. I wouldn’t recommend this; it worked up to a point because my intuition is very finely tuned (I’ve spent years developing it) and because the jobs were short term. But it was a very unhealthy way to be, playing havoc with my moods – risk-taking behaviour for the sake of my work. I began to wonder what my brain would be like without the drug.

Deciding to quit

After about 11 months on Luvox, I noticed something that made my heart sink – it wasn’t helping with the OCD as much as it had been. In my newly quietened brain, the scary thoughts were starting to reassert themselves. One option was to increase the dose, but I was scared of turning into a zombie. Without really consciously deciding, I tapered the drug in November and December and by January was completely off it, and it began to leave my system entirely. As I was doing this I researched other SSRIs and found a new one, Lexapro, that seemed to have far fewer side effects. Early in January I was notified of a three-week full time job that would take place about mid-February. I decided to do the job drug-free, and to try Lexapro afterwards.

Without the drug in my system, my OCD was almost unbearable for a few weeks. This suggests I was taking a significant risk not switching straight to another drug. The only thing that kept me going was the thought that in a few weeks or months I would be trying Lexapro.

Having said that, I had time to work through some of my OCD issues. I did a bit of research and got a much better understanding of what I was up against. I gradually developed a more detached approach – no longer identifying with the OCD thoughts as much. Some of the fears and dreads that had banked up while I was on Luvox were gradually reduced, though never dispelled completely.

I have come to understand the difference between OCD ‘spikes’ when the thoughts come, and the ruminations that follow. I now have some post-it reminders near my computer screen about how to deal with the OCD. One of them says to accept the thought-spikes, and go on calmly without reacting to them; but to avoid the ruminations, which are much more voluntary than the spikes and more of a habit (the compulsive part of OCD).

But if I had had less of a long-range view I could have been in a serious situation. I am fifty now (it sounds so ancient!) and the brain as it gets older can take a very long-range view. So I consider what I did not to be recommended.

Back to the future?

One thing that was important to say was that some of the brain changes that took place while on the SSRI seem to have remained, to some extent. This suggests that short-term use of SSRIs could allow for behavioural changes (for example taking social risks) that, through brain plasticity, could remain do-able after the drug is no longer taken. For example, I am still able to sit through a two-hour Grow meeting, even though I only went to my first Grow meeting when I was already on SSRIs.

The meetings are harder though, and my social fears can produce some nasty spikes. Some of the ability to stay in the meeting is because I am very familiar with the majority of members. But I now have to make concessions to my fears; for example, I have been known to change seats if I felt where I was sitting was too prominent.

It became clear to me as the drug completely left my system that my general shyness was returning; Luvox had remained more effective in dealing with that than it did with the OCD. I find it hard to look other people in the eye and my OCD fears are worse.

The low-level depression I’ve gradually developed in the last 15 years has also returned. It’s certainly not the kind of depression that makes it a struggle to get out of bed, but the kind that means I’m always just on the verge of tears. And if I’m not sad I’m angry and having mini-tantrums where I throw my pillow to the floor and silently curse the great god of Destiny or Fate, the inescapability of Things As They Are. I can’t decide if this depression is the result of my lifestyle or something I’d have anyway – possibly a bit of both.

Here are the things I’m doing to counter all this:

• a few minutes mindfulness meditation as soon as I get up
• abdominal breathing exercises in front of telly every day
• free tai chi class in the park once a week
• dancing to some music with the blinds down in the lounge room most days
• about three times a week, some yoga stretches and muscle-building exercises
• University of the Third Age courses
• writing lots of poetry!

 What’s dropped out is the walking around the oval of my local park – must get into this again.

At this point, I'm not as desperate as I was before about trying out the Lexapro after the Big Job. I am basically monitoring the situation. A friend of mine who recently went off Lexapro said that he believed one of the side effects of antidepressants was 'an inability to love'. I smiled wryly at this, because while that kind of numbness could be incredibly frustrating – I couldn't always cry when I needed to, for example – in social situations it could be wonderfully freeing for me, supersensitive as I am to every tiny perception that passes through me.

So, I'm not sure what I'll do ultimately – the situation is fluid. In the meantime I am enjoying my greater brain power, trying to look after myself, and keeping a watching brief.

Tweet