work – twenty-one words

The soft clatter of keyboards

June 4, 2025Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the freelance life, Winter, work, writingTagged Anna Kate Blair, book-reviews, books, despair, fiction, Intimacies, poetry, reading, The Modern, writing1 Comment

Other people’s words about … crying at work

Anthea told me she went to the bathrooms in the basement, by the cinema, when she needed to cry at work. Joanna recommended the stairwell behind the librarian’s office. I just sat silently at my desk, staring hard at my computer screen, rubbing my eyes as if they were smarting from all the data entry.

I was lucky to be here, checking measurements and shining the sentences that would appear on object labels. The open-plan offices felt like a new-age monastery; we showed our devotion through our long hours and low salaries, our gratitude and obsession with our work euphemistically called ‘attention to detail’ in the job advertisements. These offices were almost always silent save the soft clatter of our keyboards and the occasional ring of the elevator doors opening when somebody left for the galleries filled with bright, white light, where the crowds gathered to take photographs of endlessly reproduced images, paying homage to our gods, to modernism.

I wanted to stay, forever, because of the paintings.

From ‘The Modern‘
By Anna Kate Blair

The lines I’ve quoted in the passage above, which make up the opening sentences of Anna Kate Blair’s novel, The Modern, have stayed with me ever since I read it, some years ago now. The novel is about art, love, self-doubt and work — most of all, perhaps, about how in our society one of the things that determines our conception of ourselves, the way we see and value ourselves (and others), is work.

The ethos of work.

What I love, though, about this particular passage (which in fact turns out not to be particularly essential to the course of events throughout the rest of the novel, at least insofar as what happens to Sophia, the narrator), is its tragicomic depiction of women crying in the workplace. Blair dispenses here with the need to explain why Anthea and Joanna and Sophia are crying, and why they assume they have to keep their crying secret. Crying in the workplace, she implies, and secret crying in particular, is a commonplace for these women; they all simply assume, in some kind of tacit shared understanding of themselves and their lives, that they’ll end up crying at some point during the working week.

Aldinga Beach, May 2025.

I’ve worked in several workplaces over the years, and, just like Anthea and Joanna and Sophia, at some point in each job I’ve gone in search of a private place to cry. When I worked the afternoon shift in the call centre of a community health provider, I used to take the lift from the fourth floor down to the car park, walk around the corner of the building to a little alleyway on one side and lean against the wall to cry. When I was a cook, I’d step into the cool room and close the door behind me to cry in refrigerated privacy, crouched in among the cartons of milk and bowls of pastry cream and half-wheels of cheese. I’ve also done my fair share of crying in the office toilets like Anthea, and, yes, like Sophia, I’ve sat at my computer furtively blinking and dabbing at my eyes, all the while hoping that no-one would notice. And/or that no-one would notice me.

What is it about workplaces that reduces women, some women, to tears? Is crying part of our make-up, or is there something about the conditions of our workplaces — the buildings we work in, the people we talk to and report to, the conditions we’re bound by our salaries to — that makes us cry? Or is it rather the space the workplace occupies in our lives, the way it’s crammed in uneasily among everything else that belongs to our non-working selves, those selves we perhaps think of as our true selves?

I don’t know. But I think of Sophia, fellow workplace-weeper, from time to time and smile wryly.

May 2025

Lately I’ve been reading …

I want to say one thing. And that’s this: if anyone ever tells you that you can’t write about the same thing over and over again, or that you can’t sink into your obsessions with a pen the way someone sinks into a couch or into a hot bath, show them today’s poem, ‘Hurry,’ alongside this other poem, ‘Walking Home,’ published by Marie Howe nearly a decade after ‘Hurry’: Devin Kelly, exploring the poem ‘Hurry’ by Marie Howe. Kelly is passionate about poetry and I’m thankful to him for introducing me to many poems I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. But also I love how he explores and acknowledges here artists who explore recurring themes in their work.
The Kiss, by Pamela Painter: Over the last year, I’ve been exploring, both as a reader and a writer, different forms of short fiction, including flash fiction and microfiction. Here’s a flash fiction story I recently read and loved.
We do not pay rent for the air we breathe: Poet and essayist Anne Boyer, exploring capitalism. If you read one essay this week, read this. It’s astonishing — an exhortation, a plea. A prayer.

Decoded

March 28, 2025Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the freelance life, work, writingTagged AI, books, despair, editing, fiction, Intimacies, novel, reading, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … language and interpreting

This was not aided by the fact that interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying. Language loses its meaning. This was happening to me now, in the conference room. I was absorbed by the task at hand, of decoding the legalese in which the content of the discussion was encased, so securely that nothing seemed to penetrate and nothing escaped. And yet — as I stared down at the pad of paper in front of me, covered in shorthand — something did seep out. I saw the words I had been saying, for nearly twenty minutes now, ‘cross-border raid’, ‘mass grave’, ‘armed youth’.

I reached for the glass of water. One of the junior associates was speaking now — a solid wall of language that barrelled towards me as I drank all the water in the glass, poured another, and then drank that. I set the glass down, I had lost my place, I looked at the notepad again, as if I would find a clue there. The associate came to an abrupt stop, the former president [for whom I was interpreting] turned to look at me. Is everything okay, the associate asked sharply. I just need a moment, I said. Could we go back — the associate answered impatiently, Yes, yes, of course. How far? He exchanged glances with [the defence barrister] Kees, who was watching me, one arm folded over the other. He had been silent the entire time, now he suddenly spoke. Let’s take a break. Five minutes? And the others immediately rose to their feet as if they too had only been waiting for an excuse to pause.

From ‘Intimacies‘
By Katie Kitamura

When I was a young woman I studied French, German and Mandarin at university. I had a facility for language, for words, and in those days I thought that I might one day become an interpreter in one of these languages, like the narrator in Katie Kitamura’s novel Intimacies. I studied all three languages for a year, having also studied French and German at high school, and then at the end of the year, which was the end of my first year at university, having achieved distinctions in all three subjects, I left university, left Australia, and didn’t return home to resume my studies for another three years.

By then I’d decided not to pursue a career in languages at all. I had understood from my travels that my natural shyness and introversion would make the kinds of context in which an interpreter works difficult for me, and I had decided not to challenge myself in that way. Funnily enough, this realisation came to me while I was living in Germany, where I had gone to live for a year to become fluent in German. Funnily enough, I should add, by the time I came to the realisation that interpreting wasn’t for me, I was almost entirely fluent in German. Anyway, I came back to Australia and left all of this behind, my fluency in German, my plans to be an interpreter, all of that.

Footprints in the sand, March 2025.

It’s funny, though, because Katie Kitamura’s description in the passage I’ve quoted above of the experience of being so immersed in the pursuit of choosing the correct word that you lose all sense of meaning is something I am deeply familiar with in another context — editing. As an editor, I have edited books in the fields of geology, medicine, history, literature and religion. On hearing this, people frequently say to me, ‘Wow, you must have learned a lot about geology/medicine/history/literature/religion!’ But the truth is, I don’t absorb that kind of information when I’m editing. Like Kitamura’s interpreter, I decode the language I’m working with in the material I’m editing — meaning that I make sure that the sentences are grammatically correct, that there are no spelling errors, that the writer has presented their argument cogently — but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I understand it.

You literally do not know what you are saying, says Kitamura’s narrator of interpreting. Likewise, I would say of editing, I literally do not know what I am reading.

There are times when I regret losing the languages I learned when I was younger. There are times when I wish I had tried a little harder, thought a little more laterally, about how a person like me might use her language skills in her career without needing to be a gifted conversationalist or gregarious extrovert. But perhaps in the end my love for words and decoding language are what led me to become an editor, even if only by default. And I am, despite everything, grateful to have found my way to an editing life. It has served me well.

Lately I’ve been reading …

So autofiction came to us as part of the language of commercial promotion, a way of marketing as new something almost as old as writing itself: the blending of the real and the invented: I’ve been reading up on autofiction recently, though I’m not a fan of some of the most famous autoficton novels by Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti. Here, Christina Lorentzen explores what autofiction is in all its guises.
The inspiration for this book arrived after a long creative drought, during which I came to accept that I would never write another novel: Melanie Cheng, on writing her Stella Prize-longlisted novel, The Burrow. As someone who has experienced many a long creative drought, I find Cheng’s comments, along with the comments of all the other novelists long listed for the Stella this year, fascinating.
Cyra is a young queer woman whose sobriety is not the driving force of the novel. Her recovery is a part of her story, but it doesn’t define her. (For a long time, I thought my sobriety had to be my entire identity. I didn’t know how to make room for the rest of me): I’ve read many books, both memoirs and works of fiction, about alcoholism and other forms of addiction, and I’ve always been troubled by the way they seem to present only one path to sobriety, which is abstinence and AA. But here, I’m glad to report, is Saratoga Schaefer on why their first novel depicts a different path to sobriety.
You would be surprised to hear that even the Mediterranean diet riles me. I don’t dispute that fruit, vegetables, nuts and olive oil are great choices. I eat them all the time and my desert island food is, probably, a Greek salad – tomato juices, olive oil, vinegar, bits of onion – mopped up with fresh bread. The trouble with the Mediterranean diet is that most of us don’t live in Crete: Yotam Ottolenghi on why intermittent fasting messed with his brain instead of helping him to lose weight, why eating isn’t only about nutrition and why the solution to losing weight isn’t dieting.
How AI is stealing our writing: Yes, my writing, too, has been stolen by Meta’s AI tool, and while I’m shocked and devastated, I’m sad to say that I’m also not remotely surprised that this is where AI is taking us …

End-times

August 16, 2024August 16, 2024Posted in a thought, anorexia, blogging, books, coronavirus, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, work, writingTagged Julia Armfield, Private Rites1 Comment

Other people’s words about … the end of the world

It has been so many years — a decade of this, another decade before that of almost this. People take supplements, for vitamin D, for energy, complain the damp has reached their bones. It rains constantly and the fact of the rain, of the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets, of yoga challenges, of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors and taking drugs on weekends and reading books and wondering what to do on dates. It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention — exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.

from ‘Private Rites‘
by Julia Armfield

In Private Rites, three sisters, Isla, Irene and Agnes, are living in the end-times of the world. Their world, their day-to-day, is one of endless rain, of land flooding, buildings subsiding, people drowning. It’s not the world we live in, not quite — and yet it is. When I read the passage above, I thought of the days of the Covid lockdowns, of 2020 and 2021 when on the one hand everything stopped — when no-one went out, when people lost their jobs and their lives — and yet on the other hand, people went on. They bought food; they spoke to their loved ones; they slept and ate and bickered and loved each other and tried to stay healthy and tried to stay apart from each other while also trying not to let go of each other. Armfield’s rainy, drowning world is a lot like that.

Pathway to Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

The pandemic is over now, at least officially, and no-one speaks about it anymore, except in passing, but it has changed our lives forever. Meanwhile, in the background, there is the climate crisis, which was possibly what made it possible for a pandemic like Covid to happen in the first place, and which continues apace while we look away and go about our lives.

Vines at Lameroo Beach, Darwin, August 2024.

For me, Armfield’s words in the passage above capture all of this, the worry and the refusal to worry, the going on and the not quite going on. It is exhausting, and it is boring. Writing about it, I think, is important.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Forty-three words, nine clauses, a single semicolon. Not a massive sentence per se, but one which violates much of the common-sense advice about simply getting to the point: Ed Simon on Zadie Smith, Annie Proulx, E B White, and the magic of the long, long sentence.
- I love writing! But I hate writing! But I love writing! Katie Williams, on struggling through the writing process, and why she still loves it.
- In all that beautiful solitude I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. I hadn’t known how much I needed this aloneness, after years of crowded work at a university, after months of eldercare, the phobias of the pandemic, and the stresses of a crowded, socially mediated, 21st-century life: I don’t surf, though I am close to someone who does. But I found so much in this piece by Mylene Dressler about surfing with which I resonate. Many of the things that Dressler celebrates in surfing are what I, as a middle-aged, non-athletic, non-competitve runner celebrate in running. I [surf] for a certain kind of peace, an assertion of body, and of choice, Dressler writes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
- And I’ve felt daunted by the decades that lie ahead, if I do indeed remain childfree: how will I generate meaning and momentum, entirely on my own steam? Elle Hunt explores childlessness and why women remain undecided. I think the most interesting aspect of this is regret, which Hunt explores several times, though I’d disagree with her concluding lines. Regret is inevitable, I think, part of the human condition, a reflection of the availability of choice in the first place. We can’t prevent it and we shouldn’t fear it.
- Memoirs and essays about eating disorders are often structured in redemptive narrative arcs — the writers describe the specific ways they starved or purged until their enamel wore down and their hearts almost stopped. Then they begin to recover, sometimes against their will, and from this place of tentative health, they write. I can’t find myself in these narratives: Billy Lezra explores what recovery from an eating disorder means when it doesn’t mean getting well.
- At no point did I feel as if I wanted to end it all, but my identity had shifted into something unrecognisable: Meera Sodha, British food writer, on how she lost her appetite … and slowly found her way back.

All grown up

March 21, 2024Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, favourite quotes, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, work, writingTagged Johanna Herman, The Trio2 Comments

Other people’s words about … becoming an adult

When he got his first office job, he got dressed each morning with a certain ironic remove. It was a game that everyone had to play to make a living. To be an adult is to sell out, but as long as there’s someone to recognise the irony you bring to this game it’s easier to maintain a sense of self-respect. These days there’s nobody in his life who would understand that irony, and he suspects that he’s transmitting his signal on a wavelength only he can hear. He knows that the outside observer will think of him as at one with his blazer and button-down shirt; there’s no crack for the irony to push through and unhitch the image of an indifferent, middle-aged man. When [his] students look at him, what do they see? A hypocrite? [His old friends] Thora and August would have laughed about it.

from ‘The Trio‘
by Johanna Herman (translated by Kira Josefsson)

I ran into an acquaintance the other day whose daughter had told me many years ago, when she was around twenty years, that she wanted to be a writer, like me. To that end, she’d enrolled in a Creative Writing degree. She wasn’t going to compromise, she said. Why do a vocational degree when what she wanted to be was a writer?

I hemmed and hawed and said quietly, ‘It’s useful to have a vocational skill as a back-up, though.’

I haven’t seen this man or his daughter for many years, and so when I ran into him the other day, I asked after him and his wife and then after his daughter.

‘What’s she doing now?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘she got her creative writing degree and now she’s working in the tax office.’

And then we shrugged at each other.

So it is.

Largs Bay Jetty, March 2024.

I still feel, when I’m getting ready for work, getting changed into my office clothes, that I’m taking on an identity that doesn’t match the ‘real’ me, though I’m not sure that I see the irony in this, as Johanna Hedman’s protagonist Hugo does. It feels more like a charade to me, a performance that isn’t very convincing. I doubt that I’m alone in this, though. As Hugo himself says: To be an adult is to sell out.

Indeed. Perhaps it’s unavoidable. In any case, here we all are.

Under the jetty, March 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- Every dog is a rescue dog: Sara Bader on losing a pet.
- Reading near-perfectly executed shorter books is naturally making me wonder ever more so, as both reader and writer, if less is, perhaps, more: Call me biased as the author of a novella, but I loved this article by Paul Daley, which came out late last year, in praise of short novels. (Full disclosure: Paul Daley later wrote some very favourable comments about my novella Ravenous Girls, which you can read here.)
- I have fallen in front of people. I have fallen in front of so many people: Devin Kelly on learning (how to live). People often link adulthood and maturity, adulthood and strength, adulthood and something resembling confidence, Kelly writes. Personally, I have nearly always associated adulthood with fear and shame. I have learned, as an adult, less about what I am capable of and more about the opposite. I have learned about my capacity for cruelty and the sense of safety I find in shame, how I have sometimes used the shame I feel about myself to excuse myself for what I’ve done wrong, little self-deprecating jokester I can be, little not worth it kind of boy. Lots to think about here.

Community

January 14, 2024Posted in a thought, anorexia, blogging, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, summer, the beach, work, writingTagged Jo Hamya, Three Rooms2 Comments

Other people’s words about … social media and the internet

My suitcase was a water bottle, a P60, my clothes without a wardrobe and brutalised with creases — but, I thought, I should not be complaining, there was always someone who had it worse than me. Whenever I forgot, I looked at my phone or self-flagellated with the Guardian. There was a proliferation of opinions on Twitter about what it took to be a good, inclusive, progressive person, but I read such lists and threads on the cusp of going to Waitrose or preparing for sleep, whereupon they were quickly replaced with other lists: sliced bread to be bought, teeth to be brushed. When I remembered I had forgotten them, I felt like a terrible person anew. I wanted to discuss this with someone, but there was never any time. Quickly, I realised the absurd wealth of the places I had been in over the past year: rooms in which such discussions could be played with in theory, without urgency, at any time, and then set aside to be taken up at a later date. The internet was one such room: a constant, useless distress in my pocket. I had resolved to stop looking at my phone if I could help it; to turn off my notifications and live less theoretically.

from ‘Three Rooms‘
by Jo Hamya

We all bewail the role of social media and the internet in our lives while continuing to use it unceasingly, it seems to me, but I found the passage above by Jo Hamza’s narrator particularly poignant.

Recently, I read online about what some people are calling the ‘Nazi problem’ on Substack. I gather, from my brief research (online, of course), that Substack has been accused of not proactively removing Nazi content, and that as a result, people are now querying whether it’s an acceptable platform to continue to publish on. Some of the opinions I read (again, online) were by people who had only recently moved from another platform to Substack, and they were expressing exhaustion at the thought of moving to yet another platform.

I sympathise. I think it’s impossible to keep up with all the news about the relevant platforms. I prefer to work towards longevity and sustainability in one or two spaces — either the spaces you are most comfortable with or the spaces that you feel are most suitable for what you are writing about. For that reason, I’ve been writing this blog since 2014 here on WordPress, and I don’t intend to move away.

I hesitate to use the word community (despite its very common usage in this context), but nonetheless, here I am, still blogging away. And here you are, some of you, still reading my posts. So thank you. Truly, thank you ❤️.

Beach tree and seaweed, Island Beach, Kangaroo Island, January 2024.

I’ve spent the first couple of weeks of 2024 quietly, catching up with family and working. Since the publication of my novella, Ravenous Girls, in 2023, I’ve begun writing something new, a continuation in the story of the characters I introduced in Ravenous Girls. I am a slow, doubtful writer, and the publishing world is, in contrast, a fast, uncertain world, but I am quietly enjoying my writing these days — for the moment, at least.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing over the last few years, it’s that you have to celebrate the moments of joy and hope. They are rare and tentative and they quickly disappear, but they happen — every now and then.

PS On that note, if you are curious about my novella or my writing process, you can listen to me in conversation with Elizabeth Walton over on WordRoom, where we discuss novellas, anorexia, literary prizes, the difference between YA novels and literary fiction for adults … and much more.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- The best I can do is to write books that are small but oblique enough to stick in people’s gullets so that they remember them: Rumaan Alam, quoting Helen Garner on her book The Children’s Bach. I loved reading a non-Australian writer’s review of an Australian writer, and there’s a lot to enjoy here on why Helen Garner has such universal appeal.
- I just couldn’t get over how voluptuous these wines were – how ripe, how velvety, how silkily smooth: Just for the fun of it, and to remain on the theme of Australian-ness, here’s Fiona Beckett on why Australian shiraz is so good. I’m a very moderate drinker — one glass of wine, never more, a few times a week — but when I do drink, it’s Australian shiraz for me, all the way.
- The 139 best book covers of 2023: Book lists are ubiquitous at this time of the year, but I enjoyed Emily Temple’s review of 2023’s book covers.

Please

January 20, 2023January 20, 2023Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, books, depression, gratitude, health, Lately I've been reading about, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, staying humble, staying true, summer, workTagged Oliver Mol, Train Lord7 Comments

Other people’s words about … chronic pain

I told [my parents] how that afternoon I had actually gone and seen another psychologist [for help with my chronic migraine]. I was just feeling so low and so down, and a friend had recommended her, and she could squeeze me in. I told her the pain would come and the pain would go, and that I couldn’t control it, that some days I would be fine, more than fine, ecstatic, but that other days the pain would return and I would slide into a depression so deep I could not see my way out. I told her I felt like a rat in an experiment, a rat made to drink water — sometimes the water was normal but other times the water shocked with an electricity so violent that I would swear never to drink it again, but then I would see everyone else drinks water and I would wonder why I couldn’t do that too. I told her I just wanted to drink the water. Sometimes I could, but mostly I couldn’t and I never knew when. I told her I just wanted to know why. It had been years since I’d had the initial migraine, but even now, right then, the pain had returned and I couldn’t read or write or — I told her I was sick of being an experiment, that I just wanted answers, someone to help. Then I asked her if she could help. I asked if she’d ever heard of anything like this before and then I told her please. I said, Please, I would just really appreciate it if you could help, and she just smiled and told me she’d seen it all before. Then she got out a piece of paper and a pen and told me to rewrite negative self-thoughts as positive self-thoughts. I asked her what she meant. She said, Well, you could rewrite ‘I am worthless’ as ‘I am special’; ‘I am alone’ as ‘I am loved’; ‘I am useless’ as ‘I am capable’. And then she sat back and pushed the pen and paper towards me and told me to try. I told Mum and Dad I just got up and left, then — because I knew she was just the same as everyone else — full of bullshit just like the whole world was full of bullshit. I told them it was like I was eight years old, and everyone was playing pretend.

from ‘Train Lord‘
by Oliver Mol

There was a period in my life some years ago when a headache settled over me which, despite all the cures and treatments I tried in response to it (both conventional and alternative) would not fade away. Unlike the chronic headache that Oliver Mol describes seeking treatment for in the passage above, my headache wasn’t a migraine: the pain I experienced was of a milder kind, what doctors call a tension headache. This meant that, unlike Mol, I could still function. That is to say, I could still present to the world an image of myself functioning. Unlike him, I could still read and write; I could still watch television and use computers; I could still get myself to work.

Still, the pain during that period was omnipresent. It varied in intensity: sometimes it was faint, just a light tingling sensation at the edge of my eyelids or (oddly) inside my nose; sometimes it was strong and persistent, as though someone had lodged a heavy, blunt object (a hammer? a mallet?) into the top of my head and was pressing this object — pressing and pressing it — down into my skull. Sometimes the headache made me feel dizzy and sick, and this, because of my phobia about vomiting, triggered bouts of anxiety that weakened my ability to cope with the pain. On days like that, I felt desperate. I made a mask of my face in social contexts; I disappeared from my desk at work to cry behind the closed door of a toilet cubicle; I made excuses and went home early from gatherings (or didn’t go to them at all). I felt myself, or the person I thought of as myself, slowly disintegrating.

I hadn’t known until then how much my sense of myself as a social creature, and as a socially worthy creature, was predicated on an assumption of my good health. I’ve since learned that this is an experience common to people experiencing chronic pain or illness, but I didn’t know that then.

Aldinga Scrub, summer flooding, January 2023.

Mol’s migraine lasted ten months initially (although later it returned for another few months). My headache faded away around the two-year mark. I still don’t know why, really — whether the cure was due to something I did, or to one of the treatments I tried, or simply to plain luck. Sometimes it returns, settling over me for a day, or a few days, or a week, or a few weeks — but eventually it leaves again. And because of this, because the pattern has changed, because I know now, or at least allow myself to assume, that the pain is only temporary, I have learned simply to wait it out when it visits. To let it run its course.

And yet. That word: temporary. And then I told her please, Mol writes, and that’s what it feels like, even now, when I’m in the midst of a long headache: a prayer to someone, anyone, to make sure that the pain is only temporary, that it won’t take over again the way it did for those two years. Because once you’ve felt it, you never forget it: the way pain changes you, the way it writes itself on you, the way it renders you powerless. The way it robs you of yourself.

This, I think, is what Mol’s psychologist failed to see. Perhaps the worst thing, when you are experiencing chronic pain or illness, is the sense of betrayal that accompanies your pain. You feel, first, as though your body has betrayed you, this body you have been lucky enough never really to have thought about before, which until now has performed for you mostly without pain or grievance; and then, second, as though the people around you — the ‘experts’ you have consulted — have betrayed you, too, with their so-called treatments and cures, with the promises they make you, with the money they take from you, all to no end; and then, third, as though the world itself has betrayed you, in its refusal to operate in a way that is manageable or meaningful for you in your pain.

If, in the end, you are lucky enough to get relief from your pain, what you never quite forget is that when you were in pain, you changed. You no longer knew yourself. You became a person who said, Please.

Lately I’ve been reading …

- The truth is that writing a novel is often a long, crude, insecure business with a dubious outcome. You can spend years and years not sure of what you’re doing, writing something that in the end may not be great, and that perhaps no one will read. No one may read it even if it is great: Suzanne Berne, in a wonderful piece on why novelists write novels and why readers read them. As both a writer and a reader, I find what she has to say here illuminating and encouraging.
- None of the trappings of literary success — which can be quick, and flashy, and very exciting — can substitute for the (singular, difficult, slow, and at times unbearable) work of writing: On a related theme, Carmen Maria Machado on writing for the sake of writing, rather than for the sake of success.
- Bio-based plastics are problematic for a variety of reasons: Matt Simon on the problem of replacing the fossil fuel industry with the bioplastics industry — and why, in the end, instead of replacing one product with another, we need to stop producing altogether.
- I felt stuck and couldn’t shake off the black, crushing feeling: Eric Kim on depression, solitude, beautiful boys and lobster tails.

Spectrum

May 14, 2022May 14, 2022Posted in a thought, ageing, anxiety, Autumn, books, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, the sea, the sky, workTagged anxiety, mental healthLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … being invisible

Sandra is the contrail of light left on the back of the eye by the sun. Like so much of Muriel’s life she is invisible. Muriel thinks that there is some dignity in that, yet it leaves a life so immaterial it may be erased in a blink.
From ‘On Swift Horses‘
by Shannon Pufahl

The older we get, the more invisible we feel, or so the story goes — particularly if you are a woman. I think it’s natural to feel some grief in response to this. For so many of us, it can feel as though we are losing something — our sex appeal, perhaps, or our looks, or our matriarchal role in the family, or our authority in the workforce.

Ragged sky, May 2022.

When I was a younger woman I was proud of how articulate I was. I was fluent with words, both spoken and written, and I felt that people were listening to me, hearing me, because of this. As the years pass, though, I feel this less and less. Moving from early to middle age and beyond feels to me like a process of being muted. That’s not the same thing as feeling invisible, I know, but it’s clearly on the same spectrum.

But I like Shannon Pufahl’s perspective on invisibility, particularly invisibility of the female kind. I like the way she weighs up both the dignity and the immateriality of an invisible life, its grace and its insignificance. It seems to me a metaphor for everything that we think of when we talk of a person’s life: the sorrow of it. The joy.

Ragged sea, May 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

More than one-third of us recover fully with no special treatment whatever, and many others with a variety of treatments and approaches: Joanne Greenberg on why she fictionalised her experience of mental illness and why there is more hope for recovery than you might think.

I think it’s more helpful to say that eating disorders are about coping; they are in effect a survival mechanism we have had to develop ourselves when nobody came to ‘save’ us: Nataliya Deleva, in another piece about recovery from mental illness (this time in the form of an eating disorder), offers a very different perspective on the same theme.

How to go on

April 17, 2022Posted in anxiety, Autumn, blogging, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, moments of beauty, nature, nature writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ..., workTagged moments of beauty2 Comments

Other people’s words about … hard work

He worked construction down on the river, where they were putting up a new footbridge. His own job involved the careful freighting of materials onto the platform where the crane rested on the water. There were times when he thought he’d get sick from the motion of the barge, the constant shifting underfoot. There were times when his hands hurt from lifting and pushing and turning, tightening the straps until they wouldn’t give, tightening them until it seemed impossible that anyone would ever be able to set them loose again. Days when his back ached and his stomach hurt and his hair was peppered with grit, when his eyes burned, and his nose burned from the stench of oil and of the river, which was dying a slow, choked death via a series of minor diversions. But then, on bright winter days, he’d look up and see the geese tracking across the sky, moving up there free as air, and he’d think that there was something beautiful left in the world. And he could go on like that, as long as there was something beautiful left in the world.
From ‘Filthy Animals‘
by Brandon Taylor

I work in a call centre, an office job, unlike Brandon Taylor’s character Hartjes in the passage above. It’s not a physically demanding job. Even so, there are days when my head aches from breathing in stale, recycled office air, when my hips ache from sitting too long, when my voice croaks from talking for hours on the phone, when my stomach hurts from choking down my emotion after a difficult phone call. In the end, just like Hartjes, I feel my job in my body.

Neighbourhood frangipani tree, Taperoo, April 2022.

What grabs me most in the passage above is the river, in all its symbolism, dying its slow, choked death. Like Hartjes, I find myself looking up from my day, seeking the sky, seeking the air, seeking a glimpse of beauty and wonder.

That brief hint of beauty. That brief reminder of how to carry on.

Lately I’ve been reading …

He was telling me how he liked writing, but he had a real block because it never came out on the page how it felt in his mind, and he just couldn’t stand the gap between the two: Aimee Bender on writing by the seat of your pants.

If Miocene Earth had the same amount of CO2 in the atmosphere as we have currently, why aren’t we living in the same conditions? It’s a matter of time lags: there’s a delay as the climate equilibrates with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The planet will eventually catch up. A Miocene climate is coming. It’s like seeing the flash of a far-off explosion, but the shockwave hasn’t yet reached us: Mark Bullock on how the human body will experience global warming.

We can never entirely escape from human-centric narratives of nature; they have always been our primary means of interpreting and coming to terms with the landscapes in which we find ourselves: Richard Smyth on why nature writing must not descend into poetic self-absorption.

Stumble

September 26, 2021September 26, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, native coastal vegetation, nature, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, What I talk about when I talk about running, Winter, workTagged coronavirus3 Comments

Other people’s words about … being an adult

I’ve joked all my life about my complete incapacity with money. Nothing has made me more anxious than dealing with finances. Trying to do my accounts caused a fog in my brain, a feeling near panic. I sensed, with the same primitive instincts that locate danger, that money is something that invalidates me, that cancels me out. I was afraid of it, afraid of its mysterious mechanisms. I loathed it, and yet it ruled my life …

Before I was in my fifties, I had no idea, until an accountant added it up, how much I earned in a year. I couldn’t read my financial records and I didn’t possess the smallest notion of what to do if I did. To me, all these things were as punitive and arbitrary as the love of God, which passeth all understanding.
From ‘Monsters: A Reckoning‘
by Alison Croggon

For the last few years I have lived with a similar sense of incapacity at the edges of my awareness to the one that Alison Croggon describes in the passage above. My incapacity is partly, like Croggon’s, about financial matters: though I finally learned to manage to file my tax return in my early thirties, for example, I have yet to come to terms with superannuation and all its requirements. (I make flippant jokes to friends about how I plan to live in a tent after retirement. And then I say: ‘Besides, what’s retirement, anyway? I’ll have to keep working to pay my bills till the day I die.’)

But that fog in my brain that Croggon describes descends on me in other areas, too. I have been aware since my late twenties that I had lost, or couldn’t locate, several crucial documents of identity — my birth certificate, my Australian citizenship certificate. I stumbled along without these documents, managing to get by using my passport instead, until, around the time I began to avoid getting in planes, I let my passport lapse, too, until it no longer qualified as a document that could establish my identity.

And still, even then, I put off applying for a replacement birth certificate or citizenship certificate. I was terrified that I would find once I started the application process that I wouldn’t qualify for those documents anymore. I was terrified I would no longer be able to prove that I am who I am. (Whoever that is.) I was terrified, in other words, that the application process would, as Croggon puts it, cancel me out.

Fog at Deep Creek.

I have lived my life like this for years. Decades, even. But in the space of the last three weeks — and I apologise for the clumsiness of the segue here, but it is all I can muster — in addition to re-establishing my identity and regaining my papers, I have bought a house and I have sold a house. Somewhere in those last three weeks I have also walked through a doorway out into the sunshine — a real, physical doorway, I mean, not a metaphorical one — and rolled my ankle, possibly tearing a ligament (still trying to figure that out). As a result of this I find myself now, quite literally, limping and stumbling through my days.

After the fog cleared.

I apologised earlier for the clumsiness of my segue, but the clumsiness I was referring to, though not intentional, was hardly coincidental. Though it shames me to say this, I find it impossible to talk with any grace or even with any sense of safe passage about the things I have been doing recently: proving my identity, applying for home loans, buying and selling and moving house. They are things that most people have to do at some point in their lives in our society, I know, but going through them makes me feel sick enough, my stomach churning, my head spinning. Talking about it, writing about it, processing it is too much. That fog in the brain again.

It takes a certain level of privilege to be in the position I am in, to have got through my life the way I have till now: no questions to answer, no endless need to prove who I am. The colour of my skin, the family I am part of, the certainty that I am lucky enough to feel about my gender and sexuality, the generation I was born into — all of these things have allowed me, and will continue to allow me, to choose to make myself powerless in the ways I have chosen to till now.

Deep Creek reflections.

And yet. That doesn’t mean the terror isn’t real. It doesn’t mean the choices I’ve made haven’t felt instinctive, primitive, inevitable; it doesn’t mean they haven’t felt like choices at all. It doesn’t mean I won’t keep limping through the days, wondering when I will be able to walk — or maybe, one day, even run? — again.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Through the Window: Rather than a number of articles, today I’m sending you this link instead, the Griffith Review‘s wonderful series of essays about the experience of living through the coronavirus pandemic. If you are interested in any kind of coronavirus chronicles, I can highly recommend any of the essays on this list.

Legacy

September 9, 2021April 23, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, blogging, books, coronavirus, depression, Lately I've been reading about, life, native coastal vegetation, nature, nature writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, walking, Winter, work, writingTagged COVID-19, nature2 Comments

Other people’s words about … a beached whale

For as long as there have been humans, the whale has been a portentous animal. A whale warrants pause — be it for amazement, or for mourning. Its appearance and its disappearance are significant. On the beach, an individual whale’s [beaching and] death may not prove ‘global’ in the way of its body powering down abruptly, like a switch being flicked, but, in a different sense, the deaths of whales today are global. The decline of a sperm whale — [its belly, when dissected post-mortem,] filled with sheeting and ropes, plant-pots and hosepipes — belongs to a class of environmental threat that, over the past few decades, has become dispersed across entire ocean systems, taking on transhemispheric proportions. This whale’s body serves as an accounting of the legacies of industry and culture that have not only escaped the limits of our control, but now lie outside the range of our sensory perception, and, perhaps even more worryingly, beyond technical quantification. We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is, within one cavernous stomach: pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, and the past. Inside the whale, the world.
From ‘Fathoms‘
by Rebecca Giggs

If you want to read only one book about climate change, and if you want that book to be one whose narrative ranges from the scientific to the literary to the philosophical to the emotional, and if you want it to be a book that explores metaphors and symbols right alongside facts and evidence, then Rebecca Giggs’s book is the one I’d encourage you to read. We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, Giggs writes of climate change. But if you read her book you will come closer to understanding.

Vista.

I’ve been quiet here on my blog recently, mostly because it’s hard to know what to say right now. The global pandemic continues. So does the climate emergency. And so, too, does my own little life, which I continue to pass by walking on the beach, by showing up to work, by writing a book that I hope one day will be published, by (maybe) moving house, and by growing older but not necessarily any wiser.

The pictures in today’s post come from a holiday I took last month in Deep Creek, a national park in the heart of the Fleurieu Peninsula. In my next post, I’ll feature more photos from the same part of the world, a part of the world so beautiful it’s hard not to feel your heart break with wonder and awe as you move through it.

Grasstree world.

Transhemispheric. That’s not a word I’ve come across before, but it’s an apt one to use if you’re trying to comprehend the size of humanity’s impact on the natural environment. I thought about that, too, while I was in Deep Creek. I thought and thought and thought.

Lately I’ve been reading …

With each new agent, each foray into the dangerous business of hope and each corresponding bevy of rejections … I found myself shrinking a little bit more, until one day the me I thought I was had completely disappeared: David Hollander on learning to surrender your expectations (and your ego) as a writer.

As climate change pushes rodent and sand fly habitat northward, scientists caution that in the future, an increasing number of U.S. residents could be exposed to different varieties of the flesh-eating parasite (the spread of Leishmaniasis and other flesh-eating bacteria): Agostini Petrini reminds us that Covid-19 isn’t the only contagion with zoonotic causes threatening us now and in the near future.

When your book is on submission, there’s a pressure of silence till you know the end, a secret you keep, assuming there will be a time when you can recount the story of how it all worked out: Danielle Lazarin on hope and despair in the writing life.