Rewind + recuperate

Hey everyone. So my asthma is a bit chronic at the moment and I can’t walk. Darn. With this in mind I thought I would share a chapter from the memoir I wrote in Melbourne’s first lockdown. And perhaps when I can’t walk in future I will do this too?

I started writing this memoir back in April and it’s a very personal account of neighbourhood walking and how it can improve mental health.

This opening chapter sets the scene and is about what happened just BEFORE I started walking. Perhaps it sounds a bit familiar to you … or someone you know? (Sorry if so. And also solidarity.)

It’s also good to note that even though the chapter below seems non-okay … that I have wrangled my life into MUCH MORE OKAY now. Mostly thanks to walking and moving and thinking and making hard decisions.

In those early weeks of COVID I eventually realised that the foetal position was not going to do a thing for me. So I began to take walks and when I got home I wrote about what I saw and felt and smelled and wondered about as I wandered. Much like this blog … only a bit more unhinged! * titter *

I also spent post-walk lockdown hours working on a book I’d been commissioned to write (not aforementioned memoir, but a look-after-yourself guide for mums!) Plus I launched this mini-blog about walking. And I studied my little heart out for uni when it was too dark to walk, writing stories and articles and such.

So you see I walked and wrote AND eventually turned it all around and felt quite a bit better! Know this as you read Chapter One, below.

NOTE: The chapter below discusses mental health.

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CHAPTER ONE

The whole catastrophe began when the pandemic rolled around and I lost my job. 

I had been employed for 3.5 years writing for a parenting site with a bunch of brilliant women who I had worked with on and off for years. 

This job was the safety net that caught me when my (frankly very painful) relationship of 23 years broke down. It scooped me up (well, my boss Ella did) and gave me plenty of distracting things to do as I quietly threw more stuff on the broken things pile … broken heart, broken car and the creme de la creme of busted-ness - a nervous breakdown.

I wrote about toilet training and tantrums and Amy Schumer’s brilliant parenting style and the best names for the babies of literature loving parents. I also wrote endless stories about the royal family and their offspring, articles about how to look after baby genitals (it’s absolutely true!) and missives on how unforgivable shaming and judging parents is and how parents can wade back into the job market with confidence even if they’ve been tortured by their baby’s endless night waking.

To you, this may seem uninteresting or vacuous, but to me it was a lifeline. Speaking to other humans (mostly women) and giving them information about how to make their days a little better or more entertaining while my own life was neither of these things.

I could work from home and in the first months after my break up, I could work from BED, even.

It suited me down to the ground and I slowly rebuilt my life around my work which is clearly the wrong way to go about things, but I’m an excellent mistake-maker and at this stage I was sure my way was a genius plan.

I toiled away, pushing myself as hard as I possibly could, trying to be the best writing-about-baby-genitals writer in the history of the niche. I worked when I was sick, I worked when I was depressed, I worked when I was anxious. The work was the anchor that tethered to some semblance of a normal life. Whatever that was.

And then … I lost my job.

Losing my job came as a total shock. Well ,sort of. The day I got the dreaded phone call (I was working remotely) my boss was the kind of forced cheerful that makes one suspicious. Then came a town hall meeting which technology would not allow me to log into … and then after some furtive and worried messages with my co-workers, the call from the big boss to thank me for my work and explain that the pandemic was kicking the businesses bottom from here to kingdom come. 

I admit I didn’t hear much of what she said apart from ‘We’re going to have to let you go’ … or at least I think that is what she said. I have blanked it out. What I do remember is that I was thinking a) oh my god, what a horrible phone call for her to have to make and b) holy bloody heck … what am I going to do now?  I thanked her (truly) for letting me know (I knowwwww!) and empathised mumbling something about the awful nature of the call (for HER!!)

As I hung up the phone I felt a little bit of me floating away. I was untethered. My safety net had disappeared and as it did, a familiar defence mechanism began to kick in. A weird numbness began to descend, sweeping over me like a weighted blanket. My brain did some sort of Transformers style reset and then my son wandered in and I said “I lost my job” in a robot voice. 

Okay. I didn’t use a robot voice. But it FELT robotic and I must have seemed a bit out of sorts because he said “What?” in a disbelieving way and I said “No really. I just got let go.” and he sort of froze and then I said “It’ll be okay”.

We’re going to be fine, I told him switching from robot to Pollyanna. I’m going to work it out! Don’t worry!!

Inside the blanket was weighing more heavily, my blood had turned to ice and I forgetting to breathe, taking small sips of air every other moment.

This was bad, I thought. This was very bad. Not only did I have pretty much zero savings after the break-up had left me juggling the sort of big rent and everyday outgoings pretty much every non-home-owning family was dealing with on my own, but the entire framework of my getting-better life had disappeared.

Also? My book When Life Is Not Peachy had come out 2 weeks earlier. I was supposed to be on the mend and getting it together, but here came that familiar feeling of falling apart all over again.

Of course, I was not the only one who lost my job during those uncertain weeks in March. My kids all lost their jobs, as did many others across the globe. People I knew and people I didn’t know were suddenly rudderless and under pressure too. Lives were turned upside down, people were falling ill and worse. You know this already dear reader, but what I’m trying to impart is that the sequence of events that befell me was not unique, and I’m guessing even my circumstances i.e. fragile mental health which was carefully kept in check by clear routine were not unique.

I live with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety. If I keep my life in check and set up a trusty, gentle framework for each day I am pretty fine. But if things veer off course, it’s a big adjustment. I’m resilient, so adjust I do, but this adjustment was a whopper and it promised to have implications that would last weeks and months. Not to catastrophise, but possibly years even if you only consider the financial consequences.

Thus I fell into a pit of sadness all over again, reacquainting myself with those old buddies panic, fear, physical malaise, general wobbliness, mood swings, sleeplessness, nightmares and a feeling of wanting to cry a lot - but not being able to.

All these feelings and behaviours coexisted with the feeling that we were all living in a dream. The very idea of a pandemic confining us to our homes even now seems unbelievable. And that’s after we have seen the back of it. While it was happening it seemed even more fantastic (in the true sense of the word).

It was only when I watched the TV or listened to the radio from my curled-up position on the couch that the ‘stay home, wash your hands, physical distance’ mantra became horribly real, connecting up with footage of critically ill people, mass graves being dug in New York, deserted streets in Italy, people tweeting tributes to the loved-ones COVID-19 had claimed, hardworking medical staff leaving their homes for yet another shift on the frontline. 

Distressed people queued for welfare, homeless people were unable to protect themselves, elderly people were unable to see their families and people were dying without their loved ones by their side. It was incredibly terrible.

But you know all this. Bearing witness to the suffering of others was part and parcel of those quiet days at home, and while many of us were trying to pay our respects to those who were enduring such awful things, we were also trying to keep our heads above water financially, wondering if we’d become homeless ourselves. 

The weight of all these things, combined with pre-existing mental health conditions provided an extra-layer of difficulty.

Breakfast TV kept us up to date with what might happen next, in a bit to quell the uncertainty. Radio hosts reassured us these were unprecedented times. Meanwhile the lack of structure and the constant challenges were feeling mental health flare ups in lots and lots of people. Spoiler alert - one of them was me.

“Argh I am so knackered by the last week,” I wrote on Facebook, trying to balance my distress with what was going on around me. 

“I lost my job. My very cross 17 year old cat died. All my kids lost their jobs. Etc etc. But imagine if you were a healthcare worker on the front at the moment. Or a supermarket worker. Or a Centrelink staffer. Or a pharmacy person. Or someone else who is working behind the scenes getting us what we most need right now. Maybe I am not so tired AFTER ALL! Mimed fist bumps to the people who are ACTUALLY TRULY so tired right now. Hint - it's not me!”

My friends were sympathetic and kind. One of them, Kerry an old craft group friend and psychologist noted that other people’s struggles didn’t negate mine.

“You’re allowed to feel your feelings too, you know,” she wrote. “You are allowed to feel tired. Just saying. That does all sound extremely exhausting by the way. I’m sorry to hear about your cat passing away too. That’s very, very sad.”

“Just remember that even if you perceive someone else‘s situation to be ‘worse off’ than yours, it doesn’t make your situation any better. Suffering is relative. Your life has just gone to shit. It’s ok to acknowledge and validate that.”

My live had just gone to shit. I was teetering on the edge of a depressive episode, I could feel myself slowing down, retreating, numbing down, hardening up.

I wasn’t the only one. It’s no surprise that mental health services were slammed during this period. In Australia, these services were already stretched thin, with the bushfires and drought putting them under even more pressure. Anxiety and depression compounded by COVID-19 created unprecedented demand for assistance. Mental health support organisation Beyond Blue say their forums were slammed, attracting seven times more activity than its bushfire forum did.­

In Australia, Beyond Blue tell us that around 45 per cent of people will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime. Each year, around 1 million Australian adults will be living with depression, and over 2 million with anxiety, they say. Women are more susceptible to mental health conditions than men are.Indigenous Australians are more likely to suffer from mental ill health than non-indigenous Australians.

Clearly, I was not the only one curled up on the couch typing ‘what the hell am I going to do now?’ into Google. It seems that countless others needed a new plan, a new structure, a new safety net to keep them on track.

At this point, I would like to say that I devised a new plan and pushed on and everything turned out brilliantly. But that’s not really what happened. What I actually did was panic, begin some sort of manic burst of activity and then assume the foetal position on the couch where I spent a good couple of weeks searching valiantly for something that felt right to watch on Netflix.

More from me at Meet Me at Mike’s.

(Hopefully I’ll be able to walk tomorrow … or Saturday! I want to see my flowers and wandering characters again! Meet you back here very soon for the usual stories!)