memoir

Second Winter

/ Tash / 2 Comments

Last night while walking the dog around the neighbourhood, the smell of wood smoke permeated the atmosphere. February is typically the hottest month of summer in Australia with temperatures between 80 and 100F. Instead, as a light rain fell and the temperature was 50F, people were lighting their wood heaters.

Today is supposed to be decompression day after my shifts and, also, my mother’s visit. But I do not have much of a reprieve, as I have already agreed to overtime tomorrow night and have a four-hour work safety meeting on Wednesday, before starting my shifts again on Thursday night. Which means Tuesday will be my only official day off, as Monday has now become a zombie day.

A few nights ago, unable to sleep, I was hunting for an old blog post; something I wrote a long time ago that has been on my mind the last few days. I couldn’t find it then but I did find a post about the dog I’m looking after. I’ve been friends with the dog’s owner for over eleven years and in the post, I wrote: he told me the dog cries when I leave. I’m not sure why this stood out to me but it did. I had forgotten he told me this but I have always had a connection with the dog.

Tonight, I found the post I was looking for. I wanted to find it because it referenced two very specific scenarios, which, in my current state of exploring what autism looks like in women, seemed relevant.

An excerpt from my blog, first published in July 2011 (on the same day Goyte released Somebody I Used To Know with Kimbra):

I’ve been thinking about it for a while. The disconnection I have between experience and emotion. Is it odd, do you know, to be diagnosed with bipolar, and to have depressive and hypomanic episodes but not really feel all that different no matter on which end of the spectrum I seem to fall at a particular point?

I’ve spent a long time closing things out. People, mostly. Or at least, a connection with people. A friend reminded me recently of a conversation we’d had on my balcony. She said that she was pouring her heart out about an old friend of hers who’d moved to South America and whom she’d been planning to visit later in the year. And this day, or perhaps the day before, he’d asked her not to come.

She relayed that she’d laid all this bare on the table in front of us, over a glass of wine and a cigarette and had told me how upset she was. And then she said, you said “Isn’t the pattern of the lights on the apartment building across the street interesting?”

She was angry at me. She was angry that I’d feigned interest, pretended to care…but had, it seemed, been bored by her conversation. I was surprised by this. I’d not been aware of it at the time, that she was upset, not just about her friend’s request, but by my response.

I apologised. I wasn’t bored, I said. Nor pretending to care. I simply didn’t know how to respond. I explained that I didn’t connect with the feeling that she’d been having. I wasn’t able to relate to it. I don’t have feelings like that.

This episode with my friend has only served to confirm my suspicions that I do not feel things the same way normal people do. I do not see things or read things the way that others do. I do not. I don’t even know if this is a problem. It’s never been for me, but it seems it is for others.

I’ve been working with my new therapist now for almost 6 months. Every now and then, I’ve gotten teary during an appointment. Her first question is always “What’s going on for you right now? What emotions are behind that?” and my reply is always the same. I don’t know, I say. I just feel confused.

Last session, she reminded me of an appointment I’d had a few weeks earlier. My friend had moved overseas. I was…crying. But I couldn’t explain why. The feeling(s) that should have accompanied that reaction were missing. Absent. She said that something strange had happened during that session. She said that when she’d questioned me about it, I’d looked at her directly and held her gaze. Most people, she said, would have looked away, but I stared directly at her and “locked on” as she put it. She could not read me at all.

We discussed my perceived inability to feel. I asked her if she thought that it was possible to lose the ability to feel, that is, if you did not use it – this emotional thing…does it die? …in a similar way to the way that a muscle, when not used, atrophies. Because, I said, I don’t know that it’s even possible for me to feel.

Do you want to? she asked.

No, I said, not really.

Would it be helpful to talk about feelings from an intellectual perspective, she said, instead of from an emotional perspective?

Yes, I said. Probably.

And so we’ve started. At my last session, we discussed the emotional response. How there is a triggering event, the internal things that happen within your body, physiological responses, neurochemical responses…and the visible external cues that people see.

Except that I don’t see them in you, she said. When I think you are upset, that is when you’re hardest to read.

Sure, I said. That makes perfect sense. Why would I let you see that you’d upset me? Or that I was angry? That all just gets locked in…if it’s even there in the first place.

But I have a question, I said. What causes the shaking?

Shaking? she said. What do you mean?

Well, whenever I have to talk about something I find uncomfortable, I shiver. It feels uncontrollable. It feels like it’s visible to everyone. Sometimes it is. Sometimes I shiver and shake so hard that my teeth chatter. But I just look like I need another blanket.

She’s going to look into it.

My homework now is to keep a diary. To record the situations I’m in when I notice the shaking. What has happened. Who am I talking to. What are we talking about. To see if we can identify a pattern.

I like patterns.

Particularly of lights on buildings.

Earlier this afternoon I sent the dog’s owner a message and told him I’d been exploring the possibility I have autism and have referred myself for an assessment. He said: Well, as someone who knows you, and someone who spent two years working closely with people with autism, there could be something in this.

Warm White

/ 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 End: What To Do When You Finish Writing A Book

/ Tash / 4 Comments

Today I wrote two little words I wasn’t expecting to write until tomorrow. And yet, here we are. At this point.

My feet are tingling like they do when you have pins and needles, numb, as if you’ve been sitting awkwardly cutting off your circulation, but in that sweet spot, before the blood rushes back into the capillaries and it starts to sting.

The cells, the atoms in my cells, are vibrating with energy. The energy of having finished. It is a gentle excitement. Soft. Like the way you realise you are recovered. After the fact. You do not notice it at first because recovery, like writing, feels like a slog. Every step is an effort. You wade through concrete. You make progress. And you don’t. There is resistance. The task seems overwhelming and you pause at various points to take a breath. To rest. There is no ticker-tape parade upon success. No party. There might have been, if you’d noticed it at the time. But even as you were thinking your last disordered thought, even as you were writing your final sentence, you didn’t know. And then you did.

So what do you do when you finish writing a book?

  1. You write the end
  2. You drink cider in the sunshine with a friend
  3. You buy yourself some flowers
  4. You go for a run
  5. You make dinner for the family
  6. You water your plants
  7. You hug your partner
  8. You feed the cat
  9. You write a blog post
  10. You begin again, a new story

I have been finished with the story I’ve written for longer than I’ve been writing it. Soon, lovely readers, I will hand it over to you.

Science Sunday | Chemistry 101

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Chemists joke about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. Depending on its form – solid, liquid, or gas – direct contact with it can burn you, or freeze the tissues and fluids in your skin. If you ingest significant quantities it can kill you. Of course, not ingesting enough will kill you too. According to these consequences, dihydrogen monoxide sounds like a nasty chemical. But it is just the humble water molecule. (I never said chemists make good jokes.) All of the dangers are true, though. Dihydrogen monoxide – H2O – water – is a chemical which can burn you, cause frostbite, or dilute the salts in your blood so much that you die from water intoxication (hyponatremia). And just like water, chemicals are everywhere. Everything that you can see, smell, touch, and taste is made of chemicals. And everything you can’t.

It is impossible to see a single atom, even with the most powerful microscope. Although, scientists have managed to photograph an atom’s shadow. How few atoms does it take to cast a shadow? Just one. But while one atom alone cannot be seen, when many are joined together we see them everywhere. Or, we see the things they make up. Water. Trees. Cars. Houses. Hearts.

The Periodic Table of the Elements lists the species of atoms that have been discovered. There are one hundred and eighteen in total but only ninety-four occur naturally. The rest are synthetic and must be made in laboratories. Everything around us is a combination of these ninety-four elements.

At room temperature, some elements exist as liquids, some as solids and some as gases. They can be volatile like the metal sodium: soft, silvery white, and highly reactive. If you’ve ever seen a tiny piece of sodium dropped into water, you would remember it. The violent reaction breaks the bonds between the hydrogen atoms and the oxygen atom in the water molecule. Enough heat will be given off that the newly formed hydrogen gas explodes.

Some elements may be toxic like the gas chlorine. Like sodium, it’s too reactive to occur on its own in nature. When it is isolated, it is a yellow-greenish gas that is heavier than air. It smells a lot like bleach because it is just one of the elements that creates bleach. If you breathe in chlorine gas, you will feel like you’re choking and it can cause damage to your respiratory tract and lungs which is why it has been used as a chemical weapon.

But when sodium and chlorine join together into one substance, they become something necessary for life. Something we need every day to keep our hearts beating. They become sodium chloride – or salt.

Chemistry happens around us all the time. It is the change from rubbery dough to fluffy bread when heat is applied. It is how shampoo gets sudsy when you scrub it into your hair. It is why metals rust, or they don’t. Chemistry isn’t a secret or some sort of dark magic. It’s the explanation for everything that occurs around you and inside you – your heart pumping, or hurting.

Chemists study the composition, structure, properties, and relationships formed between substances, and how these substances can change. Reactions that are measurable. Changes that can be quantified. Attraction or the way elements and atoms bond. Why some bonds are hard to break apart and why others disintegrate, dissolve or separate easily. Chemistry is the understanding of matter.

Or maybe, it’s the understanding of things that matter. Relationships. Emotions. Attraction. Hearts racing. Body temperature rising. Stomach churning. It’s the properties of love and how it can change.

But love can’t be measured with a litmus test.

Homecoming

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Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end…
“Closing Time” Semisonic

The thing about time travel is that it’s much slower than people think. You can only go second by second, minute by minute, day by day.  And worse, you can only travel forwards. Eventually, after hours, days, weeks and months, you find yourself years into the future.

Sometimes, within those years, big noticeable things happen. You get divorced. You move interstate. You adopt a cat. You nearly die.

But most of the time, the days and weeks are filled with small incidental things. You wake up. You shower. You follow your meal plan. You take baths. You swim in the sea. You fold laundry. You swallow your meds. You learn to knit.

And then, one day, you make friends. You fall in love. You become a stepmum.

Life shifts you into the strangest of places, the lovingest of arms and the kindest of corners. It’s not all brightness and light, of course. Life doesn’t work that way, even for the most charmed. But second chances exist everywhere.

I began writing in 2010 as a way of processing both the physical and psychological aspects of the mental illnesses I was experiencing, although I never intended it as therapy. I blogged publicly but anonymously about my experiences for almost five years. Just over a year ago, having not written for some time, I chose to end the blog so that I could focus on re-configuring previous work, as well as new material, into something that resembled a memoir. As that process is nearing completion, I have been feeling confused about what to do with this space.

I could have started a new blog. In fact, I created several. But none of them had the captivating or familiar feel of this place. Coming here feels like coming home.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. This is my new beginning. This is my homecoming.

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