Category: Lately I’ve been reading about

Precarious

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Other people’s words about … fighting against entropy

Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy. Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense; we divide the interminable days into years, months, and weeks. We hope for ways to corral and control bad fortune, illness, unhappiness, discomfort, and death — all inevitable outcomes that we pretend are anything but. And still, the fight agains entropy seems wildly futile in the face of schizophrenia, which shirks reality in favour of its own internal logic.

From ‘The Collected Schizophrenias’
by Esmé Weijun Wang

It’s a strange experience returning to the salaried workforce after a period of time away from it. When I went freelance at the beginning of this year due to the closure of the Press for which I had worked as an in-house editor for the previous five years, I suspected that it would be difficult to make a sustainable living from a solely freelance income. And it was. I thought, at first, that it might just be a matter of making contacts, of building up a client base, of learning how to market myself: of learning, essentially, how to ‘hustle’. I thought at first, in other words, that it might just be a matter of time.

So I allowed time to pass as a freelancer, because I knew that I had to. And gradually, after enough time had passed, I came to understand that the passing of time would never be enough to change the precariousness of an income based solely on freelance work. I came to see that the gig economy, which relies on the work of freelancers and contractors like me (more about which, if you’re interested, you can read here), doesn’t just allow for precariousness: it depends on it. And I came to see that precariousness is not something I tolerate gladly.

I do not believe that precariousness is a synonym for freedom or flexibility, as proponents of the gig economy would have us believe. I believe that it is a synonym for anxiety. And anxiety is also something I don’t tolerate gladly.

So I have returned to a part-time salaried job, which I intend to combine with part-time freelance editing work, with an enormous sense of gratitude and relief. Though no job is ever truly permanent or secure, a salary brings with it, for as long as it lasts, certain things that are the antithesis of precariousness: regular hours, fortnightly pay, annual leave, sick leave, superannuation. Along with these financial benefits, a salaried office job, which is what my new job is, also brings with it a workplace outside of the home, and colleagues with whom one interacts every day. These things, too — which are, in essence, about belonging and community — contradict the concept and practice of precariousness. I am immensely grateful for them.

I took the first three photos in today’s post as I wandered the neighbourhood in my lunch break at my new job — a lunch break being yet another one of the ‘perks’ of a salaried office job. I’m working now in Port Adelaide, a suburb in the north-west of Adelaide which was once the heart of the marine industry of Adelaide. The wharves and docks of Port Adelaide are no longer busy in the industrial sense for which they were originally designed, so the streets I now stroll along during my lunch break are lined with abandoned warehouses and marine businesses. At the docks, dolphins swim beneath the bridge that spans the Port River, while trucks thunder overhead. The area has, on the one hand, a sense of history, beauty and purpose, and on the other hand, an air of loss, and decay, and death.

Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense, Esmé Weijun Wang writes in the passage I’ve quoted at the start of this post: we divide the interminable days into years, months, and weeks. She is writing about schizophrenia, and yet I’ve thought of her words frequently as I’ve wandered the streets of Port Adelaide. Because though it is true, now that I am working for a salary once more, that my feeling of precariousness has reduced, still, somehow, this fear remains. I still long for something that feels just out of reach: something that Wang describes as a way to corral and control bad fortune, illness, unhappiness, discomfort, and death, those things that, like precariousness, are, in the end, inevitable.

I took the fourth photo in this post, the photo below, last weekend, which I spent with a group of women in a holiday house in Carrickalinga, a coastal suburb south of Adelaide. The women I was with are all writers and artists. Some of them supplement the income they get from their art with a salaried or waged job; others exist solely on their freelance income. Each of these women is talented and successful in her own right, and each balances her sense of precariousness with a sense of purpose and joy and productivity in her chosen field of art.

I climbed a hill to take the photo you see here. I stood at the top of that hill and looked down at the world below me — the crumbling cliffs, the winding coastal road, the shining blue sea, the horizon at the edge of the ocean — and I felt the world expand around me, stretching out, out, out. The moment felt precarious, as the weekend had felt precarious, as the previous week — which was my first week in my new job — had felt precarious, as my freelance income had felt, and will always feel, precarious. As life feels precarious.

There was nothing I could do to remove the precariousness. All I could do was wonder at the view.

Lately I’ve been reading about …

Because we can

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Other people’s words about … making myths

Women who run: women with disabilities, fat women, women who’ve recovered from physical injuries, trans women, migrant women, Indigenous women, depressed women, women with no time, women with no kids, women ladies of leisure, schoolgirls, retirees, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, queer women, straight women, slow women. Scrutinise any one of these categories and a set of stories that defy generalisation will emerge, stories that destabilise the big stupid myths that say women can’t run, that only certain kinds of women can run, that it’s too dangerous, that it’s unfeminine, that it’s a sign of trouble.

From ‘The Long Run’
by Catriona Menzies-Pike

Next week, I start a new job in a new workplace. It’s been nine months since I had a salaried job, and though I’ve enjoyed the challenge of working as a freelance editor — and though I don’t plan to stop freelance editing any time soon, despite my new job, because my new job is part-time and therefore will allow me to continue freelance editing on a similar part-time basis — I feel both relieved and blessed to be returning to the salaried work force. At forty-nine, I am willing to admit that job security and a regular income is important to me. I knew this when I began freelancing. I know it even more deeply now, nine months later.

Winter sunset

I took some of the photos that you see in today’s post over the last few weeks, while I was out walking or running around my local neighbourhood. Running for me isn’t so much about, as Catriona Menzies-Pike puts it in the passage I’ve quoted above, destabilis[ing] the big stupid myths that say women can’t run: it’s more about destabilising my own personal, stupid myths about myself, one of which, for many years, was that I wasn’t an athlete, I wasn’t strong, and I couldn’t run.

Deep blue sky

In fact, some of the stories I’ve told myself all my life are true. I’ll never be an athlete. I’ll never be strong, physically or mentally. But I do continue to run, and continuing to run continues to make me feel good.

Spring flowers 

No matter how slowly I run some days — no matter how old or stiff or sad or achey I feel when I’m running — and no matter whether I have a stable, salaried income or an unstable, freelance income, I run. Not far, and not fast, it’s true.

Nonetheless.

I run, not just because it makes me feel good, but because I can.

Hole in the sky

Lately I’ve been reading about …

Take note

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Other people’s words about … gratitude

I am so glad to still be here. Every day, I do my best to see the colours. I take note. I breathe them in.

From ‘How it Feels to Float’
by Helena Fox

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, I know. I want you all to know that I have been thinking of you, and I have been thinking of posting. There just hasn’t been room inside my head to get to it.

The first groundsel flowers of the season
(Spring is coming)

But when I read Helena Fox’s words in the Acknowledgments section at the back of her wonderful novel for young adults, How it Feels to Float, I wanted to pass them on. Because no matter how crammed my head — my brain, my mind — feels at the moment, I, too, do my best to see the colours, to breathe them in.

Blue winter sky

The photographs in today’s post come from a walk I took a few weeks back. I hadn’t walked that path for a while, and I haven’t walked it since, but those moments were precious. I am still breathing them in.

Last rays

Sigh

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Other people’s words about … living by the sea

We walk back to our car, the morning seeming eerily quiet. I’m used to living close enough to the shore that occasionally we can hear the gulls in the distance, crying. Here, there’s nothing. With the cold, there’s no insect noise, no bird noise. Just the wind moving the leaves, the branches swaying, the world, faintly sighing.

From ‘Fragments of the Lost’
by Megan Miranda

Once, years ago, when I was in my mid-twenties, I left the house by the sea in which I was living to stay for a couple of weeks with a man with whom I thought I was in love. He lived interstate, in a suburb miles from the coast: a suburb of twisting cul-de-sacs lined with neat brick houses and small, grassy parks, each of which had a set of swings, and a see-saw, and a coin-operated barbecue.

With the passing of each day in that man’s house, I felt a terrible, growing sense of fatigue and disenchantment. At first, I thought that I must be ill. I felt tired, so tired: my limbs seemed stiff and leaden, and each night, as I lay in my bed in his guest room, sleep blanketed me so rapidly, so heavily, that I felt as though it was smothering me.

Then I thought that, rather than becoming ill, I was falling out of love. This was, in fact, partly the case: from the moment I first walked through his back door, I felt myself growing angrier and angrier with this man, whose life was nothing like I had thought it would be, and who (transported from the town where I had met him, my home town) seemed a different man, a different beast altogether, from the man I had been drawn to just a few weeks earlier.

But finally, as my days in his house passed, I came to realise that my strongest feeling of all, beyond the bewildering exhaustion, beyond the unjustifiable anger, was that I was lost. I mean the word in its literal sense: not as a metaphor for some kind of emotional loss (although that was undoubtedly a part of what I was feeling; I was, after all, very young), but as a geographical descriptor. I could not locate myself in the twisting, winding, circling streets of his suburb. I could not tell north from south, east from west. I felt as though I was in a maze. I knew that it was a maze of my own making, and I knew that I had to find a way out.

And it seemed to me that if only I could hear the sea the way I could hear it when I was at home (its sighs, its mutters, its roars), if only I could hear the gulls crying in the skies above me, the way Megan Miranda describes in the passage I’ve quoted above, I would know where I was, and I would no longer be lost.

Eventually, I found my way out of that maze, and I got myself safely back home. Still, I’ve never forgotten the weeks I spent in that man’s house. I came to understand, during that time, that the sea, for me, had become a kind of compass in my life, both literal and metaphorical. That the sea gives me a sense of place. A sense of direction. A sense of home.

Here, there’s nothing, Miranda’s narrator writes, describing her visit to a place far from the sea. Perhaps that’s what the sea gives most of all to those of us who live beside it: a sense of something outside of ourselves. A sense of presence.

Sea and sand

Lately I’ve been reading about …

Fragmented

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Other people’s words about … making time count

Most people miss their whole lives, you know. Listen, life isn’t when you are standing on top of a mountain looking at the sunset. Life isn’t waiting at the altar or the moment your child is born or that time you were swimming in deep water and a dolphin came up alongside you. These are fragments. Ten or twelve grains of sand spread throughout your entire existence. These are not life. Life is brushing your teeth or making a sandwich or watching the news or waiting for the bus. Or walking. Every day, thousands of tiny events happen and if you’re not watching, if you’re not careful, if you don’t capture them and make them count, you could miss it.

You could miss your whole life.

From ‘Addition’
by Toni Jordan

Many years ago, when I was in my very early twenties, and travelling through Israel, I climbed a mountain with a man I had just met. Perhaps it was more of a hill than a mountain, although in my memory it was a mountain. It was September, and it was hot, and later — perhaps that afternoon, or perhaps the following afternoon (time blurs a little in my memory, here) — we found a small cafe with tables outside, where we sat and drank glasses of mint tea, hot and sweet and syrupy, and we talked. We talked about fear (me) and excitement (him) and the lives that lay ahead of us (both of us), and I thought, in this one, tiny, fragmentary moment of my life, that the world was a strange and wonderful place.

But life, as Toni Jordan so eloquently writes in the passage I’ve quoted above, is more than the sum of such moments. And though I can think of other exhilarating moments in my life like the one I’ve described above, the moments of daily living are, I believe, what truly count.

Somehow, these moments of daily living have to sustain us. Somehow, they have to be enough.

Perhaps, as Jordan suggests, if we take the time to remark upon them, to capture them — even if only for ourselves — they will be.

Daily moments: winter sun, winter shadows

Lately I’ve been reading about …

Quiet days

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Other people’s words about … reading

For me, reading was never an antisocial activity. It was deeply social. It was the most profound kind of socialising there was. A deep connection to the imagination of another human being. A way to connect without the many filters society normally demands.

So often, reading is seen as important because of its social value. It is tied to education and the economy and so on. But that misses the whole point of reading.

Reading isn’t important because it helps to get you a job. It’s important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you’re given. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape.

Reading is love in action.

From ‘Notes on a Nervous Planet’
by Matt Haig

I love these words by Matt Haig. Reading gives me, too, the sense that my mind is merging with another person’s mind. Sometimes, a good book will make me cry; sometimes it will make me laugh. Always, a good book gives me a sense of connection, and a sense of escape.

I mentioned in a recent post that I was going through a quiet phase in my life, feeling my way through it. That hasn’t changed: I’m still there, still in that quiet phase. I’m spending my days learning the ropes as a freelance editor: working out the things I like about freelancing, along with the things I don’t; working out the things I can change, along with the things I can’t. Sometimes I feel as though my journey away from salaried employment towards freelance work — a journey that I was forced into, but that I have chosen to continue on, at least for now — is a hopeful, purposeful one, and sometimes I feel as though it’s a short-lived, doomed one.

Whichever it is, I’m still here. I’m still on my journey.

Still travelling.

A quiet day at the jetty

Most of all, I’m still reading. Reading helps me through these quiet days. It helps me make sense of them. It helps me feel connected.

It helps me, simply.

A quiet end to a quiet day

Lately I’ve been reading about …

The map of my face

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Other people’s words about … making peace with yourself

My face is a map of all I have lived. Some days, I feel beautiful and right in my skin. Some days, I don’t. The truth is, we never really get fixed; instead, we try to make peace, daily, with who and what we are. We learn to embrace the glorious, imperfect whole rather than punishing ourselves because of our flawed parts.

Anyway.

From ‘Before and After’, by Libba Bray
in ‘Hope Nation’, edited by Rose Brock

I wrote in a recent post about ageing and how I feel about it as I near the age of fifty. About how, as I’ve aged, I’ve grown more rather than less conscious of the way people perceive me.

Perhaps, in that post, I conveyed the sense that I thought beauty was solely an external concept, that it had only to do with one’s physical shape, one’s embodied self. If I did, I apologise. I have always known that beauty comes from within. As I age, I become even more aware of that than ever.

The dying of the light

You could read the words I’ve quoted in today’s post, from Libba Bray’s essay ‘Before and After’, as being about learning to come to terms with one’s physical imperfections and so-called flaws. Indeed, her essay is, at least in part, about how her physical appearance changed after she was involved as a young woman in a terrible motor vehicle accident in which she lost an eye.

But that’s not how I read her words. When she writes: Some days, I feel beautiful and right in my skin. Some days, I don’t, I take her I to mean her sense of her inner self, and how that inner, intangible self feels to reside in the physical husk of her body. When she writes: we try to make peace, daily, with who and what we are, I take her what to mean her embodied self, but I take her who to mean her inner self, her non-physical self.

Her soul, if you like.

We are each of us, in our daily experiences of living, enmeshed in both the physical and the non-physical aspects of life. Our understanding of beauty therefore encompasses those twin aspects. So, I think, does ageing, which we may experience as a sense of growing physical frailty or as a sense of growing wisdom (or, equally, of growing mental infirmity). The physical begets the non-physical — and, I suspect, vice versa.

So when I read Bray’s words, I felt an instant resonance with them. We learn to embrace the glorious, imperfect whole, she says, and I take the word whole to mean the whole of life: physical, non-physical, and everything in between.

Which I, too, embrace.

*

Bray’s essay is, in fact, about hope rather than beauty or ageing, and it is addressed specifically to teenagers and young adults. In it, Bray writes about how she, as a very young woman, found hope amidst despair. Despair, she makes clear, is primarily an experience of loneliness, and hope, therefore, is an experience of the opposite of loneliness. Of love.

Or, as Bray puts it in (spoiler alert) the last three lines of her essay:

You are not alone.
You are not alone.
You are not alone.

Growth

Lately I’ve been reading about …

Under big skies

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Other people’s words about … the moon over the sea

He lay across the bed on top of the bedspread [in his room in the cottage by the sea]. Moon shadows of trees outside fell against the pine-based walls. The bedspread was tinged a bluish white, its pattern of roses transformed to a lunar landscape. He had forgotten about the particular lustre of a seaward moon. How when a moon hung over the ocean they were not separate entities, but a third element fused from their continuous correspondence. The planks of the cottage walls appeared fastened together by this faint glow.

From ‘The Dependents’
by Katharine Dion

I love Katharine Dion’s description, here, of the moon hanging over the sea. Years ago, when I worked the late shift, I used to drive home afterwards to spend time in a beach shack south of the city. The drive took me just under an hour, and by the time I turned off the main road onto the esplanade, it would be nearly midnight. From my car, I could see the beach beyond the cliffs, the waves rolling in to meet the shore and then falling back. The water was the colour of black ink, and on clear nights the moon hung above it in just the way Dion describes: as though it was connected to the ocean, as though the two were in communication with each other.

I would turn off the engine and climb out of my car at last, feeling freed of the shift I’d just worked, returned to the life I wanted to live, by the ocean, under big skies.

Evening skies

I haven’t worked the late shift for years now, but I still feel the same gratitude for the house by the beach where I now live, for the ocean at the end of the road, for the moon and the sun and the sky over the water, which I see every night and every day.

Every night. Every day.

The ocean at the end of the road

Lately I’ve been reading about …

If only I’d known

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Other people’s words about … what’s important (or not)

I found a studio where I could practise a particular kind of semi-cultish yoga; I sweated on my purple mat for ninety minutes to pounding trance beats, drank smoothies in the vegan cafe, relished the feeling of freezing sweat on my cheeks when I threw my coat on over my leggings and walked in the snow to the Q train.

Maybe this will be the year I’ll learn to stand on my head, I thought, maybe a headstand is the thing I will accomplish in 2014. I thought about it a lot, like a headstand was a thing that was important.

From ‘This Really isn’t About You’
by Jean Hannah Edelstein

If only I’d known. That’s the feeling Jean Hannah Edelstein is describing in the passage above. In her case, these words applied to a period in her life when she didn’t yet know that she had Lynch syndrome, a hereditary condition that predisposes her to developing cancer later in her life.

If only. If only. Who hasn’t said that to themselves, at some point in their lives? If only I’d known, I’d have focused on other things. If only I’d known, I’d have made different plans. I’d have done more; I’d have said more; I’d have tried more. I’d have been more.

Don’t tell me you haven’t ever thought that.

*

It’s been a quiet couple of weeks over here in my nook of the world, as I continue to try to find my way in the freelance world. I don’t know whether I’ll manage to make a living from freelance editing, in the end. But on tough days, uncertain days, I remind myself that at least I’ll always know that I tried.

Which makes for one less if only in my life.

Grey skies

And meanwhile, in my spare time, I’ve gone wandering beneath grey skies, and blue skies, and cloudy skies, and clear skies. Because there’s no hint of an if only whenever I’m out wandering.

Blue(-ish) skies

Lately I’ve been reading about …

Rescue

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Other people’s words about … giving up

A few years ago I was living in a loft with a man and two cats and it started to happen again. In the morning, in the split second between sleep and waking, I would almost accidentally start to pray. I’d feel sunlight through the slits in the blinds, register that the alarm on my iPhone was going off, start hitting the bed and the windowsill and digging under myself to find it and tap its little snooze ‘button.’ There were cats on either side of my head, and my human husband, to the right, was snoring hairily on his back, his hands curling and uncurling on his chest like the paws of a tickled kitten. But despite how many of us there were in the bed, I felt alone and too small to survive, too permeable, too disorganized, and trapped in something I didn’t have the words to describe. And something in me stretched up in a physical way toward the place where God used to be. I’d wake up and remember: there is no God. But I wanted to give up anyway, as if in doing so I could be rescued.

From ‘Letter from Williamsburg’
by Kristin Dombek
in The Best American Essays 2014, edited by John Sullivan and Robert Atman

I grew up in a non-religious family, but I was christened and baptised, and from primary school onwards I went to a Church of England (now Anglican) school. At school, we sang hymns and said prayers in the Assembly Hall every morning; and we had weekly lessons in Christian Education; and we went to special services in the church affiliated with the school at Easter and Christmas; and we had a special school hymn, which we sang (off by heart) at Speech Day at the end of each school year. I can still recite the Lord’s Prayer all the way through.

All of which is to say, I was instructed as a child in the habit of faith. Maybe that’s why I remember talking to God and making bargains with God all the way through my childhood and on into adolescence.

Dear God, I would say inside my head, if you give me this, I will do that. And: Dear God, let me get through this. And: Dear Lord, make things get better. Please make things get better.

That kind of thing.

Stretching up (1)

The kind of prayer I was taught at school, the non-bargaining kind of prayer we practised there, is an art: it’s a ritual, a discipline. An act of community, too. But the other kind of prayer, the bargaining kind of prayer, the chatty kind of prayer — the kind Kristin Dombek describes when she writes, I would almost accidentally start to pray (my emphasis) — is instinctive. And solitary. It comes, I think, from something deep inside of us: a yearning to feel better. Or to do better. Or to be better. A yearning to be heard.

Because who doesn’t want to stretch up — in an almost physical way, as Dombek puts it — to something outside oneself, something bigger than oneself? Who doesn’t want to be answered?

Who doesn’t want to be heard?

Stretching up (2)

Lately I’ve been reading about …