// 2022 //
The (last version of the) project
Many many moons ago I made a blog for the thoughts that raced through my mind: fleeting, transient, ephemeral.
It became a space for the thoughts I didn't want to think anymore; a repository of anguish and despair and a place of heartache and loneliness.
I tried to move on from it; to write differently, about different things, to find new wonder in words separate from those worlds.
Alas, it remained. A constant source of acknowledgement that I wasn't always okay.
Now, I am at peace with its existence as a part of me. Now, I have moved all content from their various corners of the internet into this new expression of my mind as a place of contentment and peace that has lived through some significant pain.
I was broken - shattered - into fragments of a human I left littered across the world. And then I rebuilt my soul and my mind into something stronger, more whole, and most definitely more human.
I know having a blog is rather self-indulgent, and expecting or even just wanting others to read the nonsense that forms in the caverns and crevices of my mind can be both burdensome and shallow, but I have found solace in the writing of many of these pieces and have returned to them periodically over the years to rediscover such a feeling. As I have grown into my new mind I have reflected more favourably on their existence as a snapshot of experiences that are incredibly difficult to define, discover, differentiate, explain. I am functionally incapable of recalling and understanding the one state of my being while I am in the other, so reflecting upon my depressive episodes while manic is only possible through words such as these. I hope that they provide some explanation of the way the mind can work; hopefully they provide a small insight into the suffering of those whose minds do not work in normative ways so that those who have the blessing of finding their mind uncluttered and unscarred may glimpse into our world and understand it a little better.
Me
Hilarious, really: to consider the archives of one's mind in the light of its continued existence. I am once again reorganising my limited online presence, which often requires engaging with what I have previously written. The passage below includes "a very nebulous and lengthy diagnostic journey... and while it has taken many, many years to get here I am content". Reader, please don't be surprised when I say that it was not the end. Some day I will update this, but today is not that day.
The first entry on this page recalls a colleague likening being in my presence to constantly looking for the cameras on a sitcom in which I play the lead character; more recently a friend said that I lived as the protagonist in a children's story. I don't know how to feel about being so publicly vulnerable in just existing, but I do know that there isn't much to be done about it. I'll happily be a character in a sitcom or children's book; I'll just try my hardest not to be the villain.
______________________
Me // Archive
~ 2020? ~
I'm Em. Or Emma (when I'm in trouble), Esmerelda (when I'm wicked), or Mem (because I couldn't pronounce vowels to begin words when I was very young so I became Memma).
I was born in Zimbabwe and still feel the magic of an African homeland calling me back every day. I grew up in Perth, spent a year in London, and now live in Melbourne. My spirit will always be split between my homes, but I am where I need to be right now and my soul is happy.
I have had a very nebulous and lengthy diagnostic journey, but bipolar 2 with psychogenic seizures and dissociative episodes is what makes most sense to me and while it has taken many, many years and tests to get here I am content. We cycled through epilepsy, situational depression, clinical depression, dissociation, anxiety... and finally rest here. My two states are discrete and there is no middle ground. I either have a mind alive with the roar of the world and a cacophony of voices screaming their creations into the void; or silence. Blank. And that's okay! That's just how we are.
I fill my world with the patterns and clashes and colours that fill my mind when it is alive, and I constantly create with my hands. This year I have started learning tapestry weaving and woodworking, and last year I returned to my sewing machine with gusto. The year before that I learned embroidery and relearned to draw and paint, and to be honest I just spend much of my time problem solving and challenging my fingers in new ways. If I am not constantly covered in paint, needle pricks or hacksaw cuts, hammer and clumsiness bruises, then I'm probably not having the best time of life.
I've been working on expanding my library to include more works on things I have not focused on in my life, so we are reading much more science and trying to learn art rather than simply doing it. The bookshelves are still largely feminist and Australian politics though, because annoyingly that is what I am good at.
I have had the incredible privilege of being surrounded by people who love and care for me beyond what any human should be capable of, and who have given me the space and time to break and reform. It's very rare for even half of my people to be in the same city at the same time, but those bonds grow stronger every day. The support I have received is tremendous, so thank you to my humans.
My writing is for my soul and love of words, but I'm putting it out into the world hoping it may provide some solace and understanding for others too.
And now, for tea.
~ 2018/ pt 2 ~
This is a reinvention of sorts. A public face for a private mess; a chronicling of a life that seeks something different to what was before, trying to find the essence of what came before that.
There are so many words swirling, forming sentences, finding errors, dissipating and reforming and being lost in the fog of a confused mind. It's a different mental landscape to what has prevailed in the last five years, and while it seems to be returning to a space where words and emotions and artwork exist and create new things and produce something beyond mere existence, it's less a return and more a reintroduction. A discovery of the power of the world, in new terms.
I know that everyone needs to go through a similar story: finding something on the other side of darkness, using it to push through the trees until the canopy opens and the rays of light become streams, the streams form rivers, and you find the ocean on the forest floor (I'm sick of tunnel metaphors), but it took me a long while to accept that I would be just like everyone else. So much of what I love is safe, and stable, and whole, and yet so much of my mind is paralysed with a pervading perfectionism that preys on my darker side: an unrelenting occupation with originality and a uniqueness that isn't like everyone's individual search for themselves, because that's what everyone's doing, but rather something entirely different, it's just impossible to know what. I've long recognised the problem with a duality of spirit that seeks stability yet also originality, in such an extreme way, but it hasn't been something I could compromise with until very recently. The voices were too strong, never fading, never working together. Two is enough; it's much easier when there's only one.
The point is that I'm here now, for better I should think.
So in the abstract, writing is a wonderful idea. Take a blank space, and fill it with the words that are taking up the same space in your mind. I know it is said of all writers, or at the very least people who write, that the best thing to do is to start writing and that you will generally suffer a crisis of confidence at some point in the process. The problem with the words in my mind is that they tend to have tendrils that snake across the forest floor, through sentences and ideas in which they do not belong, finding their way to places that distract and divert and destroy a thought before it is fully realised. In part, that is through my own tendency to edit sentences before I write them; creating such perfect examples of form and syntax that by the time you've constructed a clause you're utterly lost as to what its original purpose was.
I spent much of my childhood taking solace in worlds created in literature. It was partly an escape, partly an impertinent need to maintain hyper-competitiveness at all times: I learned to read over the shoulder of my (two years) older brother. I wanted to know all the words, to participate in all the worlds, to know of more places and people and ideas than my classmates. To be honest, it was mainly the words. Broadening my vocabulary became an art-form, and finding increasingly specific language fills me with a deep satisfaction. I often spend time, often while out walking, constructing sentences with duplicitous meanings or contemplating the correct word to convey the absolutely perfect sense of a situation. It is, quite honestly, debilitating in a way that only something you love can be. In fact, it is only through writing with a very strong check on the revision temptation that I can write at all. I would wager that my writing is better when I am merely constructing it in my head, in perfect form and resonance, but existence should probably factor into that equation and it probably favours an imperfect sentence that exists over a perfect sentence never to escape the tendrils of the undergrowth in my mind's forest.
I've used a forest as a metaphor for my mind for many years now. For much of that time, it was a tangled mess of branches and thicket, ivy and fungi, all working to strangle the trunks of trees and block the light from falling where it was needed. The canopy was too thick, the undergrowth too overgrown, the ivy and fungus parasitic where it could have been beautiful. Poetically, the recovery of my mental forest has kept pace (let's be honest, it was a little bit faster) with the discovery of the joys of an English spring/summer after the most gruelling, longest winter.
England is in many ways a bizarre country, and its obsession with the weather is in no small part due to the outsized influence it has on the national mood: it certainly had an outsized effect on mine. Perhaps it is slightly psychosomatic; perhaps it has become so after hundreds of years of brutal winters and brilliant summers. I moved here in the autumn, leaving a Perth of 18 degrees and climbing for a London of 18 degrees and falling. The leaves that lined the streets were slightly haunting in their beauty, the bright colours fading as they were pounded by rain and slowly started to rot, to smell, and to disintegrate. Every night I would walk home down a street of white houses, tall and clean; stark against a London that seemed to grow mould on render with every tiny drop of drizzle, and every day would count the fingers that began appearing on the plane trees with an overnight drop of leaves. I still giggle at the image of a leafless plane tree, resplendent against a night sky strangely devoid of stars and lit badly by street-lamps periodically rising out of broken pavement, its new growth like fingers emerging from the stumps left behind by the previous year's pruning. An army of trees, fists closed but fingers escaping, guarding closely against blue skies and interesting weather. I'd never expected to miss southern hemisphere rain, but drizzle has nothing on a thunderstorm. The sound of rain as it drums on the car, the roof, the canopy of a tree you'll need to run from when the thunder signals lightning is close; the feeling of the drops splattering against your skin and - in seconds - drowning your clothes; the smell of fresh eucalyptus and newly cut grass as a landscape drinks it in greedily, savouring the drops that may need to last for months: there's no equivalent in England. I still haven't bought an umbrella, and I don't know an Australian who has. But there hasn't been rain in months, so I may never have to. Upon moving I was constantly assured that I needn't worry, England doesn't get cold enough to snow anymore, and yet we spent weeks under 5 degrees and a few weekends under snow. It took a while to warm up, but once the summer arrived it likewise betrayed expectations and my cold Afro-Australian heart has been pleasantly surprised by the sun.
The snow is, firstly, a welcome reprieve from the rain.
~ 2018/pt 1 ~
I know I haven't kept to a consistent timescale on this page, and really that's because nothing is linear, is it? Such profound thinking; such shallow words.
I came back to this page many times last year, intending to keep to the completely arbitrary timeline I had set myself through a few tildes and some existential perfectionism. Each time, I failed. I should like to think that it was failure in a manner in which I wasn't upset at the resulting disruption to my arbitrariness, as is the case now, but I'm sure at the time each failure to form sentences from feelings and vague pictures and memories that seemed further away each time I reached for them felt like lead dragging me beyond the buoy and further into the ocean.
What a lengthy sentence.
If I was really intent on stretching some metaphors tonight I could write of escaping my sentence of depression, a prison of my own making and an escape worth a footnote in a sad song, but I shan't. It's probably not useful to languish. At some point I shall try to reconnect with that Memma, but there are multiple other Memmas we are reconnecting with first in anticipation of meeting again. It's like pokemon, except my pokeballs are only catching previous versions of myself; but each one brings its own health and probably its own powers.
So, how am I? Who am I? Excellent question Memma.
Let's start with my mind. Winter came, and it is spring again. It was a long winter. Trees were bare and the landscape barren. We've just had a very heavy week of snow here and I've been fascinated by how everything somehow exists in greyscale. The trees are suddenly a heavy grey brown; the sky a continuation of the stark white ground; the buildings darkening as they show their age and grime in contrast to the new snow. That's what my mind was like. Bleak.
I remember very little of the past five years. Much of it is out of fear, some pain. It's gradually coming back, but the first parts to return were memories of insufficiencies and problems, and it's a struggle to consciously forget those. Learn from them, forgive the scared young Memma who made the mistakes, move on, and forget. Useful for life, not useful for memory.
I spent 2016 having the best and worst fun of my academic career: researching really is wonderful, but crushing anxiety is deathly. Not being able to leave my room to make tea in the kitchen without the fluffy presence of a kitten was a low point, and constant panic attacks are probably not normal. We know that now. Well, we're more willing to accept that they won't just go away now. I got through that (surprising everyone I know, including me), and then dropped out of law school because lo and behold, it happened again. Mini recoveries are not recoveries, it seems. This paragraph has been rather blase, but there's not much else I can say about it. They are things that happened that we accept and move on from. Ta da. I ran out of my graduation ceremony to cap it all off, so we really nailed those first degrees. WooP!
The real fun starts when I dropped out of uni. I still graduated with two degrees, which makes me incredibly fortunate and bizarrely well educated for how little work I did in (on) them, but it is my first real moment of failure. In the traditional sense. To me, it was a huge relief, because I literally couldn't function as a version of me people recognised, but to me, it would have been a massive bummer. I wonder where that version went? The pressure to achieve is almost non existent from the other side of the world in a temporary position with no strings attached and no timeline for success. No linear progression for awards or achievement, no life to build. It's not only that. It's rather wonderful to live life on the other side of the void; to have finally emerged into something resembling a functioning version of a human.
I was diagnosed with situational depression the first time I was diagnosed with a mental illness. It'll pass, he said. The second time it took nearly six months for my psych to realise that my probably too high functioning anxiety was affecting my mood. I never came out of that first depression. Perhaps in patches. For weeks at a time. Never with any strength or gusto. I think I'm almost there now, three years later. That's a very long time to lose yourself to a shadow of a being. Two years with a brain that won't function on medication, three years in the shadows of depression and I'm finally almost a human again.
I wish that I was an evangelist for affirmations or yoga or exercise or healthy eating or almost anything that allows you to make conscious decisions that change your behaviour and magically affect your mood. I wish. I can't be though, because they didn't work for me. Running away did. Suck on that, psych. Avoidance is the best therapy.
If anything was situational, I needed a hell of a lot of distance from it to start processing it. From the places, the people, the pressures. The me. I fell into a heap so deep I am surprised I made it through without falling onto the train tracks or down the stairs. But I have been incredibly fortunate to have situations align with my needs for recovery. Not all - let's not think about housing. But I've fallen into a work environment in which I've been able to write emails, speak to humans, gain and leave responsibilities, create opportunities, and recover, all without really trying. Perhaps it is with hindsight that you can line my progression up to these changes at work, but perhaps it was fortune. We shall never know. (I lie, it is totally rationalisation post event. But it makes sense so let's go with it?)
Anyway, my point is that I am better now. Not completely, not solely, and not in a manner I would completely like to be. It took time and patience. That's all. I did the things and the things didn't help me. Just time.
And art! That's been my biggest vehicle for change. When I was I child I thought through art and lived through artistic expression. I lost that somewhere in the beginning of the mind break. So it's been a case of relearning all the things I thought I knew and couldn't do, and some new ones for good measure. Don't judge, just do. It's hard, but it's probably the only way I can grow. And look, I can write sentences now! With proper syntax and grammar and everything!
I really have rambled on. I don't even know what I'm trying to say. Sometimes nothing will heal you, and it is okay for that to be the case. Sometimes you just need time. Sometimes you need to run away. You'll have to face your mind either way, so it may as well be somewhere far away from there. Also art is the greatest and creating makes my heart happy. I'm glad I've found you, art Mem. You're the real MVP.
~ 2015 ~
Sometimes, it's useful to look back on ourselves. Sometimes it's a relief, sometimes a challenge, and sometimes downright disappointing.
A moment of introspection never really goes awry, but it can be difficult to arrive at the place at which any introspection will be truly valuable: a time at which you will be able to truly recognise your arc of growth, and pain, and happiness.
I'm still "that left-wing hipster child" living in the depths of right wing politics, a liberal in the purest, most classical sense.
I'm still independent, feminist and anarchistic: I still hate power structures, processes, and the people they shift and change.
But now, I've learned how to say no, and I wish I could truly say that I was better off for it. For if it was true that doing less, but doing it better, makes you happier, then I am living a lie. I've cut back, and down, and out, all for the sake of a project that has consumed my energy, my passion, and my heart. I feel nothing - no joy, no relief, no excitement - in the face of any achievements, and yet I wake each day with dread lining the pit of my stomach, slowly blackening the insides of a seemingly healthy character.
It's true, it really is, that 'busy-ness' restricts one's ability to expand a life to others - to reach out to another being and feel them grow with you. You spend time on too many things, with too many people, if you spend time on anything at all. But it is also true, really, that your busy-ness, and the time you spend fostering a life full of many things other than yourself, can be a mask for the true emptiness that lies within.
In 2013, I was still fighting my way through the fog of medically-induced mind games, of a constant wall between where my thoughts were and where I wanted them to be. I could hear shapes moving, I could feel them forming, but I couldn't grab them, couldn't snatch them, had to leave them to dissipate and fall back to earth. You'll never really know the pain of a brain injury until you feel that: the constant fight to express the thoughts you know exist, but can't quite find. It's a unique fight, the battle of the mind within itself, incredibly draining with no result to ever be found.
You would think, if ever, that it would be that point at which I would be most likely to crumble. Lucky for me, I was busy - too busy. Busy enough to delay my recovery, by trying to forget about the problem, and busy enough to make me feel happy, by forgetting about all problems.
So now I am no longer busy. Instead, I am tired, I am lonely, and I am sad. I no longer take all the opportunities, because I have no confidence in my ability to deliver. Ironic, isn't it, that with half a brain I was more sure of my capacity to achieve than with a more developed, more intelligent, more experienced mind.
I found a part of the world that I disagreed with, and one that I changed dramatically for the better, but it chewed me up, spat me out, and took away my soul.
Now, I need to find the parts of me that were taken, ripped from me by people who resented the upstart I am, the changes I wrought. It'll be a long way until I can figure myself out, but I'll continue with the pruning and the shaping, and then maybe I'll be alright.
~ 2013 ~
In my first year at uni, someone told me that they looked around for the cameras every time they saw me, because I lived as if I were the lead character in a sitcom.
I'm "that left-wing hipster child" who actually aligns with the right wing: a hippie, a conservationist, yet a libertarian to my bones.
I'm that girl who'll never say no - the one with all the opportunities because I know the right people, I've done the right stuff. I'm that one who's involved in everything, leading big organisations and setting the agenda for a number more: yet I'm the cynic who wonders why they even exist.
I'm independent, feminist and anarchistic: I hate power structures, processes, and the people they shift and change.
I'm finding my way through a world that I disagree with, that I would love to change, but I'm trying to figure myself out a little more first. My forest of a brain needs some pruning and shaping, and maybe then it'll turn out alright.