Music Monday | You Can’t Rush Your Healing – Trevor Hall

March 20, 2023 / Tash / Leave a comment

Je travaille beaucoup. I work too much.

I have been thinking about how much I work. Why. And have come to the following conclusion.

Work is a safe space.

When I interviewed with my current employer, during the second interview I was asked:

What would you say your biggest weakness is?

I have been told never to answer this question in the personal, so I said that my weakness would be the limitations coming into the role being that it was not something I’d done before. My knowledge and skills would take time to build but that, having studied for a different technical role in the past, I didn’t feel it was out of my reach.

No, the interviewer (and manager-to-be) said, what is your biggest personal weakness?

‘I work too much,’ was the answer that immediately popped into my mind. Followed by ‘that is such a wanky thing to say, you can’t say that out loud.’ So instead, I said “I’m sorry, I can’t think of anything right now.”

Later, when I spoke to one of my referees, a former manager, he told me he’d answered that question by saying that I work too much; that I have a hard time saying no, that my work/life balance boundaries are non-existent and that they would need to watch me to make sure I do not burn myself out.

Fuck, I thought. That’s exactly what I had wanted to say—but who says, “I work too much,” and has the prospective employer both believe them and agree it’s a bad thing?

I am at work on overtime tonight.

Last week, I worked my two night shifts (12 hrs), one day shift (12hrs), and then attended a leadership training program in Melbourne for two more days; up at 4.45am, drove to the city (150km), participated in training, drove home, arrived approximately 7.45pm, ate dinner, walked the dog, and got ready to do it again. On the Friday, I had another additional eight-hour training day.

Which means in the last seven days I’ve worked 68 hours.

But other than the training, which is not in my comfort zone, I like being at work.

When I am there, I am surrounded by people who are largely like me. Most of us have specific, common traits that make us good at what we do, though perhaps not socially savvy. I am beginning to realise how sheltered I have been in this regard; protected in a way that I would not have, had I worked in a more relational role, or something that is front-facing with customers.

On Saturday, I completed the first of my autism assessment paperwork. There were nine documents to fill out in total. Plus, the standard consent and intake forms for the psychologist. On Thursday, I will have the first of several appointments to discuss my answers and undergo evaluation.

G is worried about how I will feel if the assessment is negative. It’s a valid concern. I am looking for something I can point to, something I can grab and show people and say “Look! Look at this here. This is why some things feel so impossible for me. Why certain supposed normal activities exhaust me. Why I have struggled so much.”

But as G observed today, I don’t look like I struggle. And that is the gap that I slide into—the crack I fall through—and have done, probably, for years. I have developed tools and strategies, whether maladaptive or not, to somehow maintain an appearance. And it is so goddamn exhausting. The struggle is almost entirely internal. And yet, it’s not. Because shortly after G said that I don’t appear to be any different to anyone else, he also admitted to adjusting his own behaviour and language to mitigate the impact of my behaviour on him, in particular circumstances. Which means my struggle with communication, my need for information and detail, does impact the people around me.

In Australia, and in Melbourne particularly, we experienced extended lockdowns during the early days of the pandemic before vaccinations were commonplace. Most people lamented being locked indoors with their families. Most people were ready to begin mixing in society again the moment they could. Most people were frustrated with the rules of when, where, and with whom you could leave your house.

Not me.

Despite the small issue of G undergoing cancer treatment during the worst of covid, I thrived. As someone who had previously believed they were an extravert, and needed people, I discovered a strange truth; that I’d rather be on my own. Or, at least, with very few people. And less frequently than I’d thought.

I learned I loved zoom because I could pretend to have eye contact without actually looking at someone. And, I could watch my own face to make sure it looked calm, relaxed, pleasant, happy. I found that I had been forcing myself to socialise in instances when I’d rather not because I believed it was what I was supposed to do. But I’d rather be at home, avoiding the world, and simply focusing on the things I found interesting. There are so many things I find interesting.

The shock of it has been unnerving. And joyful. It took until lockdown number six for me to become overwhelmed but I have realised that was due to the constant changing of routine, not the fact that we were supposed to isolate again.

Everything points to an affirmative diagnosis. But whether or not I will be able to prove that what I experience has been present my entire life is what will potentially pause the process and invalidate the final result.

Right now, I’m not sure if seeking a formal diagnosis is the right thing but as I have told everyone, my purpose in pursuing it is to more easily engage targeted assistance and therapy for very particular challenges of communication. For the rest of it, I am fortunate that I have set my life up in a way that generally works for me on most other levels.

And so, I work, a lot. Because at work, I feel safe.

The Reader

February 17, 2023February 19, 2023 / Tash / Leave a comment

The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear.

Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

My eldest step-daughter lives in the small two-bedroom house that is attached to, but separated from, our main house by a double garage and a small sunroom. Next week, she’s moving to Queensland to continue her university studies (a masters) in psychology and education. While we were eating dinner the other night, G asked me whether I thought that neurodiversity was increasing or if it was just becoming more widely recognised, and therefore accurately diagnosed, and whether that would offer my eldest step-daughter more extensive career opportunities.

Naturally, I looked for statistics. Data is the first thing I turn to for knowledge, understanding, and comfort. In 1997, approximately 1 child in 2,500 in the USA was diagnosed with autism. In 2000, the CDC began monitoring prevalence rates and by 2017, that number was 1 in 68 (Southwest Autism Research and Resource Centre). Although it was noticed that prevalence rates were increasing, long-term expectations and outcomes for adults were unclear. Most group living homes, which had previously and frequently been part of the care of autistic people, had closed by the end of the 1980s.

Despite the wording indicating that more people are being diagnosed today, there is no distinction made as to whether this is because there is a greater understanding of the diagnostic criteria thus more people are being identified, whether it’s because the diagnostic criteria for multiple conditions were rolled into one categorical diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder in the last DSM-5 in 2013, or if the number of people who experience neurodiversity in the form of ASD is increasing within the population. The likelihood is that it’s probably both; prevalence is increasing and awareness and recognition is increasing, thus leading to higher levels of diagnosis.

But regardless of the cause, if the number of people being diagnosed is increasing, it does allow for more opportunities to review and amend an education system that is largely failing the neurotypical community, and barely managing to help (and more frequently harming) the neurodiverse community. I advised that schools such as the Steiner School do already exist and function with a very different ethos to traditional education but that there’d certainly be room for other models if that was the area that my step-daughter was interested in pursuing.

My ex-partner’s current partner’s children (read it again if you need to) attend a Steiner School and I broadly explained the difference between their style of education and the traditional school system and curriculum. I am still friends with my ex, M. He is known as “the nice one” by my step-daughters, and I have explained on more than one occasion that we separated not because anyone was abusive or toxic but because we simply wanted to go in different directions. He was very good to me–better than I deserved–at a very difficult time of my life and it pleases me greatly to see him happy with his partner.

Unfortunately, he and I also have “cancer/caring for someone with cancer” as something in common. Back in September 2019, his partner received a diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer. She was given a prognosis of 12-18 months. It’s been three and a half years and, while she is still in treatment, she is also still here. In addition to her standard medical treatment (surgery, radiation and chemotherapy), she also uses complementary therapies. She had some sort of testing done by a company called Genostics which gave her additional suggestions of other therapies that may reduce the cancer (she has multiple tumors in multiple organs) or, at the very least, keep it in a holding pattern. At the time of her diagnosis, she was told she probably wouldn’t see her son’s sixth birthday but she’s just celebrated him turning eight and the cancer is not yet advancing.

Overall, cancer survival rates are improving. Unfortunately, cancer diagnoses are also increasing. And especially in people who have no family history of cancer. In 2018, a few weeks after my colleague was killed in a workplace accident, a close relative was the first person in our family to be diagnosed with cancer. His cancer is generally viewed as having reasonably strong survival rates but various treatment complications not dissimilar to G’s put that at risk. But he, too, is still here–five years on. Ten years ago, G would not have survived either his cancer or his subsequent neutropenic sepsis but we are now at two years. Medicine and miracles happen every day. Sometimes those stories of survival can be disheartening, though. When G was first diagnosed and I started the process of caring, I joined a couple of groups on facebook for support. They were “generic” carer’s groups, though, and I felt very out of place being so young (comparatively), caring for my partner rather than children or an ageing parent, and not being in financial distress due to our health insurance and workplace sick leave policies. We were extremely fortunate and each of our respective companies looked after us.

At the time, the idea of talking to other people who were dealing with my specific situation–or even just journaling about my specific situation–was not possible. My therapist wanted me to but I all but quit writing for eight months. I could not write about hope and I absolutely could not write about death. Instead, when I had it within me, I wrote about the stars.

There are so many ways in which our stories overlap; in which the tectonic plates of our selves bump up against other people, their experiences, and our own past. It is not fair that so many people I know have to process a partner or parent experiencing a cancer diagnosis and the caring that comes along with that. It is not fair. I understand this. Nonetheless, I find it hard to bear.

It is difficult to know how much to share, here in this forum; I am not writing a book about the year of cancer (yet) which is a different process to blogging. This is open-ended. There is no target word count, no theme to stick to, and no plot or outline to follow. Which means I ramble. Jump around topics, touching on whatever is floating around my mind at the time I sit in front of the keyboard. And yet, week after week, there are readers; you are here. Thank you.

I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not “audience”. Not “readership”. Just the reader. That one person, alone in a room, whose time I’m asking for.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Art of Fiction (Interview), The Paris Review

How To Move A Safe

February 10, 2023February 10, 2023 / Tash / Leave a comment

When I get in my car, my phone immediately connects to the Bluetooth. Usually, the audiobook I’ve been listening to begins to autoplay. But every now and then something glitches and I receive a random throwback to the iTunes library downloaded on my phone. There is not a lot of music on my phone—only around six hundred songs or so—but they range from Rachmaninoff concertos, musical theatre and TV soundtracks, through to my preferred genre; indie folk. Tonight, instead of my book, the last refrain of Walk Alone began to play.

For the last two nights, I’ve been outside between 10 pm and midnight with my telescope, waiting. Trying to catch a glimpse of the green comet. But the last two nights have been too cloudy. Tonight, I am back at work, and afraid I will miss the once in 50,000-year event. It will disappear from view tomorrow night and I will again be here, at work. I am trying to not be too distressed about it. Except I am. I want to be one of the relatively few (comparatively) people on earth who get to see the comet with their own eyes. I’ve seen plenty of pictures. But that’s not enough. Armed with new terminology, astronomy would be considered one of my special interests.

I have begun making lists of memories, events, and behaviours that may be relevant to my assessment; you could say autism and its diagnostic criteria have also become a special interest.

Just as G’s CNS lymphoma became a special interest.

In three and a half weeks, he will have an MRI. It’s been a year since his last. I’d like to believe my anxiety about him experiencing a recurrence of the cancer will reduce if the scan is clear. But I’m almost positive it won’t. I want us to have a more normal life. I want us to be able to do things. (Do I?) I want to be able to take my mask off. (I don’t.) But it feels like I should say I want these things. That I should want these things.

One of the guys at work asked me when I would feel safe taking off my P2 mask. And I answered that I would only do it when G’s immune system returned to normal functioning.

In truth, I love this mask. I mean, I love not being sick with anything, that’s great. But what I love more is no-one seeing my face. No-one seeing my mouth move as I run through conversations in my mind. No-one seeing the faces I make when I sit quietly at my desk, processing information in my head. I love it and I never want to take it off.

I have told a few different friends, now, that I might be autistic. And almost all of them have responded with some version of “oh, yeah, that makes sense” which has been validating. So much so, that I have wondered whether seeking a formal (expensive!) diagnosis is necessary—but without it, I don’t feel that I have the right to call myself autistic. Just as without my diagnosis of anorexia, I never felt I could say I had an eating disorder. I fluctuate in my thinking; between not wanting to pathologise the myriad of human behaviour styles and experiences but also in wanting validation that my lack of ability to communicate easily has impacted my life and I’m only now starting to understand why: That there’s not anything wrong with me (though people might say there is) but that I probably just process the world and everything in it differently to others.

What I wonder the most, though, is how I have been able to identify and celebrate these differences in others, while completely missing (and misrepresenting) them in myself? There is a grief in that—in how hard I have been on myself for not understanding, for failing at relationships and communication—that will take time to process.

A few years ago, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, G was in the family room on his bike trainer about to start a three-hour virtual race on Zwift. He was warming up, pedalling slowly, as the competitors gathered at the on-screen starting line.

“Can we move the safe?” I asked him, having wandered out from our bedroom.

I’d been reorganising our ensuite (master) bathroom and on the floor in a weird little alcove that housed the electrical switchboard was a small safe. The alcove was large enough for a set of shelves where we could store the towels and toilet paper and I wanted to put the safe in the walk-in robe so the space was useable.

He fiddled with his heart rate monitor, glancing occasionally at the race timer countdown on the screen. “Sure.”

I’d already measured the recess and found a set of shelves online that were in stock at a local budget hardware department store that would fit in the space. He would be busy on the bike for hours, enough time for me to run out, buy and build the shelves, install them and clean up. It was perfect.

I went back into the bathroom, pleased I could progress with my project, and began emptying the contents of the safe into a shoebox. Once I had everything out, I attempted to lift the safe but couldn’t. I noticed the problem immediately. It was bolted to the floor. I unscrewed the nuts from the inside of the safe and popped them in the shoebox with everything else.

Again, I tried to lift the safe, and while I could now raise it off the ground, I could not remove it from the alcove. The alcove had a small lip that wrapped approximately a quarter of an inch across the front of the safe, making it so tight that I could not tilt or turn the safe in such a way as to remove it from the space. I marched back into the family room.

“You said we could move the safe!!!” I said, loudly (and completely unaware).

“Yeah, you can,” he replied panting and puffing, the race now in full swing, “do whatever you want with it, it doesn’t worry me.”

“I can’t!” I said, even more loudly than before. “I can lift it, move it up and down, but it doesn’t come out of the alcove. Why did you say we could move it if we can’t actually move it?”

The conversation disintegrated. He was pedalling, racing, and through gasps and huffs, said he was done discussing it. He didn’t want to talk about it while he was trying to race. I didn’t want to do anything except talk about it. I wanted it resolved, and I wanted it resolved now. I felt betrayed. I did not understand why he would say I could move the safe, if I could not, in fact, move it.

I marched back into the bedroom and unleashed my anger in a text to a friend. Before her reply had come through, I already knew what I had to do. I had been using a tool for a few years–a process called “The Work” by Byron Katie. And I began the Judge Your Neighbour worksheet.

By the end of the worksheet, I had calmed.

G has not, nor will ever, intentionally hurt me. He has, on occasion, hurt me accidentally but I know these instances are exactly that; accidental.

And in that same way, by working through the questions Byron Katie has you ask yourself in The Work, I realised that we had been discussing two different questions.

My original question was “can we move the safe?” but what I actually meant was “is it physically possible to move the safe?”

He answered “sure.” An affirmative.

Because the question he heard when I asked “can we move the safe?” was “do you mind if we move the safe?”

One question; two very different interpretations.

That was why I became so distressed when I was unable to move the safe; because I had understood that he said “sure” to my indirect question of “is it physically possible to move the safe?” meaning that when it wasn’t possible, I felt he’d lied.

When he got off the bike some hours later, I explained all of this to him, what I’d worked through and what I believe had happened with our communication. Since then, when we find ourselves in a sticky confusing communication situation, we often look at each other and ask, “are we trying to move a safe?”

And then we start over and clarify exactly what it is we are trying to communicate. It doesn’t solve everything but it has helped having a shorthand signal to suggest we might not be looking at things from the same frame of reference.

I am not sure exactly what G thinks of it all—this autism thing. He says he doesn’t care, that it doesn’t change anything. That I am who I am and he loves me. And that if I am autistic, then that is part of what makes me, me. Of course, it shouldn’t change anything. But I still worry it could. Studies have shown that in cases of serious medical illness there is a significant gender disparity in the rates of separation and divorce (partner abandonment) if the woman within a heteronormative relationship becomes ill. Partner abandonment also occurs in instances of chronic illness. Because caring for a partner with a significant or chronic illness can be exhausting and debilitating. And while autism is not the same as a significant medical or chronic illness, and while I have mostly adjusted to neurotypical ways of life and have found work-arounds for the areas I find difficult (no matter how ineffective or exhausting), it does feed into my anxiety that a formal diagnosis could change the way he sees me and our relationship.

I would like to believe it will make things better; that a more thorough understanding of myself can only improve how we relate, that it will help us both navigate conversations more effectively.

I would like to believe that it will help us move more safes.

2023

December 13, 2022December 13, 2022 / Tash / 2 Comments

This is not a diary.

And also, it is.

I barely write in my actual diary; it sits on my side table untouched—because to write would require I feel. And to feel is overwhelming.

Instead, I stare at twelve screens for twelve hours at a time. That is my job.

I do more than stare. The screens are filled with trends and graphs, and pictorial representations of mechanical systems and items of plant. I monitor this plant, operate this plant—pumps, valves, mills, conveyors, a steam-driven turbine, and most importantly, the generator attached to the end of it that makes megawatts of electricity.

And I try not to think about the pandemic.

At work and across the country, people are going about their normal business. The pandemic, which once caused the complete lockdown of Melbourne for many months, has been largely forgotten. People are getting sick, yes. It’s inconvenient, yes. But it’s not stopping most of society from expanding their lives and activities to pre-pandemic levels.

There are only a few, now, for whom life has not returned to normal. And some of those, for whom, a small bubble was their previous life.

I sit at my control panel wearing two N95 masks because we’ve been told that one mask may not offer complete protection. And now that they’re no longer mandatory, I’m the only one wearing one. Two.

Although these may seem like extreme precautions and it would be easier to stay home unless absolutely necessary, I regularly say yes to overtime because I have no other life. I pretend that working so much is why I do not write. I do not write, though, because to write would require I think, and all I can think about is the pandemic.

Editors don’t want stories of the pandemic, anymore. (Did they ever?) We are over them. We do not want to be reminded of all we lost. We are post-pandemic, now, haven’t you heard? But my husband and I are not post-pandemic.

In the most recent edition of my writer’s centre magazine, the non-fiction entry that was runner-up in their competition was a pandemic story. So, I ask myself, are we really over them? Because stories of the pandemic are almost always stories of grief. The pandemic has not ended. And grief won’t end, either.

At the end of this month, it will be two years since my husband completed treatment for a rare and aggressive blood cancer. But then, it seems as if they almost all are. There are over 80 different types of lymphoma alone, one of which—primary central nervous system lymphoma—was his diagnosis. His still severely immunocompromised condition does not allow us to return to normal.

The details, though, are finally beginning to fade. The immediacy with which I can recall specific blood counts, dates of treatment, chemotherapy regimens, and the resulting complications has dissipated. Now, I must look at my calendar to remember everything except the most traumatic of events. Many of the events have blurred. Specifics have evaporated.

During his care, I emptied I don’t know how many bottles of urine in the months he couldn’t walk. I learned how to take obs, administer medication, give injections, connect and disconnect IV bags of fluid to his PICC line/port and other things I thought you needed a nursing education for. I kept meticulous records to provide to the doctors on each hospital admission.

Once, at a late-night emergency admission, after I relayed all the details of his latest treatment, the new symptoms, and the recent blood work results, the on-call haematologist asked me if I was a doctor. I shook my head. I’m not, of course. I just have a background in chemistry, and I sought safety and certainty in the data.

Before his diagnosis, cancer seemed an unlikely intruder. While it would be realistic to describe both of us as middle-aged, we were in general good health, ate a balanced diet, and exercised regularly. And although his mother had experienced breast cancer in her mid-life, she is still with us now, in her late seventies.

For months I blamed myself for giving him cancer. (It doesn’t work like that.) I had asked him to get the tooth implant. (At the beginning of his treatment, someone told me that oral health is linked to your immune system and his cancer is a cancer of the immune system.) Or, I must have given him HIV. (PCNSL is more prevalent in people with HIV—so I made my doctor give me a request for a blood test for HIV serology and was tested. Again. Found negative, again.) I was sure that something I’d done, or not done, had made him sick.

At two years, with no recurrence of the cancer, his chances of long-term survival increase a little. But with cancer, long-term survival is defined as five years. Five years. That’s the amount of time between the birth of a child and their entry into kindergarten. And while that time may seem interminable to new parents, it passes in mere moments. We are now almost halfway there. Relapse occurs in fifty percent of cases within two years. Only thirty percent of affected individuals survive more than five years post-diagnosis. As for anything longer than that? Fifteen to twenty percent of fortunate patients have no recurrence. The average survival after a diagnosis of primary central nervous system lymphoma is three years and eight months. Even my cat is eleven.

Until recently, the fear of his illness returning was safely stored away; buried somewhere in my body while I got on with the business of caring and working. I’ve been able to ignore the thoughts. The feelings. The overwhelm of loss. But the anxiety is starting to pop out in unmanageable ways. I find myself gasping for breath in hallways through blurred vision. Formerly suppressed sobs are forcing my shoulders to shudder, even as I swallow them back down. The constant pain in my chest is not a heart attack. Nor indigestion. Because it gets worse when I think about hospitals.

And so, in 2023 (because there is no time left this year), I have to do the only thing I know that will save me.

I have to think. I have to feel. And, I have to write.

Warm White

June 11, 2020 / Tash / Leave a comment

He shivers, hunched in the underground walkway between Berlin Schönefeld Airport and the train station, holding up a sign, an A4 sheet of paper that has been folded and unfolded one too many times. A lower corner is making a bid for escape, only held in place by frayed paper threads. Large block letters scribbled on it in blue biro read: I’M LIKING A TICKET PLEASE.

“Home,” I hear him whisper in English as I pass, “please, I need to get home.”

Me too, I sigh, I’m liking a ticket, too.

At his feet, a shoebox contains a handful of scattered coins in different currencies. There’s not enough change in there for a meal much less a ticket. He babbles in a language I cannot make out. His words catch in the whine and whir of the nearby jet engines and run away on the wind.

The icy air weaves its way into my bones. I pull my hat down to my ears and squeeze my gloveless hands into little fists deep inside my pockets, the crook of my elbow hauling the wheelie suitcase along behind me. My boots scuff the concrete as I drag my feet towards the terminal. I don’t stop to ask where’s home. I have no money to help. But his words continue to haunt.

Home. I’m liking a ticket, please. I need to get home.

Home, I scoff at the idea, what is that anyway? I’m more than 10,000 miles away from where I live but that isn’t home either. Not by any metric you’d normally use to gauge these things. ‘Home is where the heart is’ according to the adage but my heart is a restless wanderer. An aching nomad. Rootless.

My best friend from high school lived in the same house from the time she was born until after she graduated from university. If a house was supposed to be home, I had none. By the age of ten, I’d lived at seven different addresses. Mum and Dad renovated houses, doing almost all the work themselves to earn some extra money and just when one started to feel familiar, they’d sell it and buy another cheap dump in need of repair. At two in the morning, I’d find myself squinting into a dark kitchen with bleary eyes wondering where the toilet had gone before my sleepy head would register that we’d moved again. I’d bump into walls where there used to be doors. Do a double-take when I saw windows that used to be walls. Even after I moved out on my own, I couldn’t stop. Twenty-eight houses and three countries in thirty-one years. Each relocation a reorientation.

The first question you’re often asked when travelling is “where’s home?” My reply is always the same. “I don’t really have a one.” But always present, a feeling of searching, seeking, wanting, needing. The Germans have a word for it, the inconsolable longing for something unidentifiable; sehnsucht, they call it, the desire for a far familiar land one identifies as home. I’d felt it, sehnsucht, staring at the stars on a clear night. But my heart is an itinerant with no fixed address.

***

It is a warm sticky evening at the end of summer when the nights are beginning to cool. I am seven and a half years old, sitting on the back steps of the latest house my parents are renovating, with my dad and a pair of binoculars. We are looking for Halley’s Comet. In my memory, I see it clearly, a soft warm-white incandescent blob with a fuzzy tail alone in the black void of space. Without binoculars, it looks almost the same as all the other warm-white blinking blobs that surround it. Dad has borrowed the binoculars from a friend. We don’t have enough money to purchase our own. But he wants me to see it. “You’ll probably still be alive when it comes back,” he says, “I won’t.” I can’t imagine what seventy-five years means, to live ten times longer than I already have. I can’t imagine being an adult in my own home because every time I look at the warm-white glow from other people’s windows all I feel is sensucht.

***

The thin concrete path that runs from the laundry of the house to the clothes line is warm. The heat it’s absorbed during the day seeps into my skin as I lie on my back staring at the sky. More stars appear as I watch it fade from a deep midnight blue to black. It is almost summer and I’m in yet another house in another part of the country. They’re catching me; thirty-two houses, thirty-four years. And none of them home. I’m waiting for the warm-white of the shooting stars; every year in October, Earth passes through a stream of particles that Halley’s Comet dumped into our inner solar system on its last orbit to give us the Orionids meteor shower. Every time I look at the stars, I am reminded of my father. He instilled my love of the sky, incited my curiosity of the cosmos. And every time I look at the stars, I feel more at home than I do on this planet.

***

I am thirty-six when I move into my thirty-fifth house with G. A few years later, we stand together in a friend’s driveway in Angwin, California staring at the sky. We are at her family farm for her wedding. Howell Mountain rises in front of us, the oaks and conifers silhouetted against the deep blue. Silver pinpricks appear above the treeline.

“I don’t know which one is the North Star,” I say, scanning the skies, “do you know what it’s called?”

“Really?” he replies, squeezing me as he wraps his arms around me from behind.

I can’t see his face in the dark but I know his expression from the tone of his voice. His eyebrows will be raised wrinkling his forehead, a half-smile spreading across his lips, a small curl in the top one. I know all the lines on his face.

The night sky is different here. I recognise Mars, bright and orange-red but I pull out my phone, hoping for cell service and Google ‘What is the North star called?’

Polaris.

“We need to find Polaris,” I say.

“Yeah, sure,” he chuckles, “that makes it easier.”

As it turns out, we are staring right at it. “That one.” I point to a group of trees, “the one above the third tree from the left. On the end of the little dipper.”

He squeezes me again pulling me tighter, burying his face into my neck and for the first time while looking at the stars, instead of feeling sensucht, I feel safe.

Six months later, when the electrician replaces all the lights in our home prior to our wedding and asks what type of bulbs I want, I don’t need to think before answering warm white.

Perhaps home is not the length of time in one place as much as it is knowing all the lines on someone’s face.

The stars belong in the deep night sky, and the moon belongs there too, and the winds belong in each place they blow by, and I belong here with you.

M H Clark

The Last Exhale

October 2, 2019 / Tash / Leave a comment

You breathed out slowly
longer
softer
than a sigh.

And as you did you wondered why
I don’t know why you like me, you said
But it wasn’t a question.
Instead
it was a statement. (A feeling of regret?
Did you think you were breaking my heart? You weren’t. I’d need to have one for that.)

Would you rather I didn’t? I replied, thinking you wanted to end that non-thing we had.
No. (You stop. Whisper, softer, again.)
I just know it will evaporate one day and I need to not rely on it.

You’ve said more since about friends and other lovers (not that I count myself as such)
who were there, then weren’t, or weren’t enough or, probably, just couldn’t be bothered
and left.

But it was all too late
I’d breathed you in
and haven’t breathed out since.

So now I pretend that we’re just friends
with nothing to convince
me otherwise
as we scramble round the edges of half-made thoughts and silent glances.

You’re complicated. You’ve said. I know. It doesn’t scare me.
But love does. Love hurts. (Apparently.) And you’re the first I’ve found who might, maybe be able to break me.

So I’ll hold this breath for as long as I can and you’ll have to leave me, not the other way around (but you’ll like that too, I know full well.)
I’m not going anywhere, no matter how hard you make it, too bad, so sad. (Ssshhhh. Don’t make a sound.)

And in the end when I finally breathe you out (turns out I do have a heart)
that last exhale
will be
my
last.

2 December 2011

White Male Rage and the Socialisation of Violence

September 30, 2018October 1, 2018 / Tash / Leave a comment

Content note: sexual assault and sexual violence

Today, Jessica Valenti wrote:

A cruel irony of sexual assault and harassment is that the traumas which frequently determine the trajectory of women’s lives are just as often unremarkable to the men who have inflicted them.

This is why, I suspect, these men become so shocked and enraged when they’re asked to answer for their actions: When they say “nothing happened,” it’s not just a denial — it’s that they truly believe the incident was not a big deal.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Women understand this all too well.

—

“Men are shit,” she declared while gazing out of the kitchen window as she filled her water bottle at the sink. I gathered the recycling in my arms to take to the outside bin. At almost 17, she’s already witnessed and experienced too much sexism and misogyny. I wanted to reassure her. Tell her it gets better. That boys grow up as they become men and stop treating women like objects, or lesser. That men respect women as equals.

But they don’t. Not always.

—

A few months ago, I opened a message as I switched on the car engine.

“Don’t message and drive or I’ll have to come down there and kiss you.”

My stomach turned. Sour bile rose in the back of my throat. I put the phone down and swallowed, anger burning in my cheeks. I’d just sent a friend a car emoji in response to his hello, a signal I was about to drive and unable to talk, and this was his reply.

“Inappropriate.” I replied when I arrived at work, my fingers banging the phone so hard I thought I might crack the screen. “I’ve explained to you before why those sorts of comments are a) generally unacceptable to women everywhere, and b) particularly unacceptable to me. Please don’t speak to me that way. I don’t like it and it’s not ok.”

Later, I received a text rant reply about how his behaviour was all my fault.

—

I am tired of explaining why “jokes” about sexual assault are not funny.

Imagine if he’d said “don’t message and drive or I’ll have to come down there and punch you.”

Threatening to kiss someone against their will is no less violent or terrifying than the threat to physically harm them.

I had already explained my personal feelings of dislike of that type of ‘banter’.

I had already explained my boundaries. Which should have been enough.

I had already explained my history of assault. Which I had hoped might evoke the seriousness of why that type of behaviour was problematic when my initial boundaries were not respected the first time.

But he still didn’t care. What he wanted was more important than how I felt about anything. And I’m sure, if you were to ask him, the whole thing was “nothing, not a big deal.”

I had previously explained it all twice and refused to do it again, so I used the block function to eliminate him from my friendship circle. He wasn’t interested in respecting my boundaries and I wasn’t interested in a friendship with someone who had so little respect for me.

Women everywhere are tired of men whose mouths say they respect us but show us by their behaviour that they really don’t

—

I am too tired to keep explaining things, so here is a memoir about how men and women are socialised into perpetrating and accepting violence.

Boys Will Be Boys

Quantum Mechanics

September 1, 2018June 16, 2020 / Tash

The First Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the Law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another.

The light filters through the window earlier each day. Mornings are cold but spring is here and it hasn’t been a bad winter. Not like last year when we lit a fire every evening and the cat melted in front of it, becoming liquid. There has been little rain and very few frosts. The ground is hard. Dry. Bushfire season will be dangerous, according to the news.

I stand at the kitchen counter and pop a coffee pod into the Nespresso, slide my Tinker Bell mug under the spout and wait for the thick, black liquid to pour from the nozzle. Outside, the daffodils stand tall declaring winter is at its end. Buds are sprouting on the bare trees and some of the magnolias have dared to bloom. A kookaburra laughs in the gum tree at the front of the house. The whir of the machine stops and the pod clunk-clunks down into the receptacle, breaking my reverie on the garden. I grab my coffee and sit down at the table with my computer. It’s been months since I’ve written, months since I’ve thought about writing.

Years ago I blogged regularly, an almost daily habit of recording my life, of making meaning out of madness. But my storyline changed and I didn’t know how to segue into the next scene. I was leading a new life so divergent from the previous incarnation you’d suspect I wasn’t the same person. And I wasn’t. Which had kind of been the plan all along. ‘If I’m not different at the end of this,’ I wrote early on, ‘I won’t be better.’

We all have two lives, a dubiously attributed quote begins (really? Confucius? I think not), the second starts when we realise we only have one. (Tom Hiddleston? Perhaps.)

I’ve already lived more than twice in this current span of time. And yet, my handwritten journals would suggest that little has changed. Things look different now, sure; daily tasks and duties, responsibilities reshuffled and realigned. So much chaos from the past has settled out but my desires have not changed. My humanness – my energy, although transformed – is the same.

Heat is a form of energy. It always flows from the hotter body to the colder body. Heat can be transferred via conduction, convection or radiation.

In bed, my partner snuggles behind me. Dialogue from my old Bikram hot yoga class pops into my head. ‘From the side you should look like a Japanese ham sandwich,’ the instructor shouts during Pada-Hasthasana, the forward fold, ‘no gap anywhere’.

‘I’m very tactile,’ I tell him when we first meet, ‘you’ll probably get sick of it after a while.’ He laughs, eyes sparkling. Every night, going on four years, our bodies touch from head to toe. His chest against my back, breath on my neck, legs pressed against mine, feet tangled. No gap anywhere. The heat radiates between us and eventually drives us to roll over and reverse the position. We dance like this for most of the night.

Pauli’s Exclusion Principle says that every electron must be in its own unique state. In other words, no electrons in an atom are permitted to have an identical set of quantum numbers.

You might be reading this on your phone, holding it in your hand. Or on your computer. You pressed some keys to access it. You touched them.

Didn’t you?

Atoms are made up of three particles. A nucleus that contains most of the mass, protons, and electrons. Electrons are negatively charged and can exhibit characteristics of both particles and waves. Particles are attracted to particles with the opposite charge and repel similarly charged particles. So electrostatic repulsion prevents electrons coming into direct contact with each other in both an atomic and literal sense.

This, and Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, also prevents you, me, us…from touching anything. Instead, we hover above things at a microscopically small distance. Gaps everywhere. The sensation of touch is simply our brain’s interpretation of our electrons’ interaction with other electrons in the electromagnetic field, the medium through which electron waves propagate.

Electromagnetic fields are physical fields produced by electrically charged objects. They affect the behaviour of charged objects within the vicinity of the field. Electromagnetic radiation refers to the waves of the electromagnetic field which radiate through space-time, carrying electromagnetic radiant energy.

The human heart is the first organ to function during fetal development at approximately 20 days. The brain doesn’t begin to function until about 90 days. First the heart, then the head.

The heart generates an electrical field of up to 60 times greater in amplitude than that created by the brain and the electromagnetic field of the heart can be measured up to several feet away from the body. When individuals are in close proximity, their electromagnetic fields interact.

Perhaps, in the end, all we can touch is hearts.