Juggling

It’s been a strange week. Sometimes, when people ask you “How was your week?” you can answer quickly, confidently, “My week has been great thanks, and yours?” or “Fucked. Shithouse. Don’t ask.” This week has not been one of those weeks. This week has been the kind of week where, when asked “How was your week?”, you have to consider your answer before speaking, weighing up the good and bad of the week before giving an answer. This week I have felt overwhelmingly that I am juggling all these glass balls are up in the air, watching them hovering, threatening to come crashing down at any moment as I cling on and try to cope.

Ball #1: pain
This week I have managed the dubious achievement of having every part of my body in pain at some stage. Last Thursday, where this missive begins, I fell down the fucking stairs. I had ducked upstairs to go to the toilet and in my haste, as I was quite literally going to wet myself if I didn’t go to the toilet that instant, I left my stick in my bedroom and took the stairs on my own. On the sixth step from the bottom I misjudged the distance and placed my foot right on the edge of the step, my centre of gravity on the wrong side of that edge. Down I tumbled. My arms instinctively reached out to break my fall: one gripped the banister tighter as I slithered down the stairs, the other went to my side, attempting to act like a brake against the carpet. Both had little effect. As I slid down the stairs I started laughing, maniacally, thinking about the spectacle I must look.

On Monday I had a killer migraine, on the fucking train no less, that saw me lying down across the long seat all the way to the city. I got a taxi home, took a caffergot (100mg of caffeine… just like a punch in the heart) and a sedative and collapsed into bed. Then I puked. I slept for four hours, waking at 8pm, in time for a very nutritious dinner of just-add-water-style noodles, before going to bed shortly after.

And then there’s the perpetual, and totally inexplicable, pain in my back and legs. While it is true that my legs have bothered me considerably less of late, they are still painful on the odd occasion. This fact would be greeted joyously if it weren’t for my back’s total overcompensation in the pain department. What’s worse is that it’s so fucking inconsistent. On Tuesday night it hurt so much that I had tears in my eyes, on the verge of a full-on cry, and no amount of any drug would do anything to dull the pain. Wednesday, on the other hand, was pretty much pain free. Today was pretty good too, still sore but bearable. WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THAT!?

Ball #2: depression
That segues nicely into the second ball, depression and its associated fun extras. As the back situation trundles forth into the land of the unknown, depression is creeping back into my life, ever so slowly. It is not the big bad blanket of despair that once it was; it’s a little more subtle than that. I have very little motivation to get work done, something I cannot afford to do since my workable time is so limited with my fucking back dictating when I can and cannot work. I often feel an overwhelming feeling of helplessness, which is then replaced by an overwhelming irritability in which I can’t fucking stand anyone’s shit and really only want to talk to or otherwise communicate with a handful of close friends.

The worst part of this ball is that in the last fortnight or so I have had the temptation to cut myself again. It hasn’t been particularly strong, but it is there nonetheless, and that scares the shit out of me. I haven’t picked up a knife or a razor, and very soon after the temptation crosses my mind I dismiss it as ridiculous, but it scares me.

Ball #3: existential angst
As I lay in bed, meditating, with the electric blanket on full and a hot water bottle over my chest, my mind wanders to such questions as “Why me?”, “What have I done to deserve this?”, “When will it end?”, “How will it end?”, “Where is God in all of this?”, “Does He care?”. I can’t feel God anymore. Maybe it’s because I’m a perpetually drug-fucked state, maybe it’s something else, but this is getting very lonely.

Ball #4: school work
Since I have missed so many classes and lectures, I am now a little behind in my subjects. Not only that, I have a 2000 word English essay due in a little over a fortnight. That I haven’t started. With my haphazard ability to walk or sit up comfortably, coupled with my occasional blue-tinted worldview, the likelihood of my writing a winning essay is pretty fucking slim.

Ball #5: I have no time for a breakdown
With all this shit happening, I just don’t have time for this. I have things to do, people to see, places to go, essays to write. I think I need a good hug and a cry. But as I am not one to cry at the drop of a walking stick, this is much easier said than done.

So many people have said that they admire my strength, but I don’t feel particularly strong. I guess I must have some strength or I would have given up long ago, but the truth is that at the moment I don’t have much choice in the matter… I either hang on any way I can or I end it all. And I don’t want to die, I want to live, which actually makes this harder because I really do have no other option. But this isn’t much of a life. If it hasn’t cleared up by the end of the exam period I am considering Drastic Measures. Like demanding an MRI. Or heroin. Somehow I will get through this… I just have no idea how.

Sick cycle carousel, part 3

May will be upon us in one week. With May comes the nine year anniversary of my various illnesses and trials. Last year I wrote a rather difficult post, Sick cycle carousel, documenting the progression of my various conditions, depression, and to a small extent my coming out journey. Below is the next part in the Sick cycle series. You might want to read parts one and two.

It seems that the ending of part two was a little bit too optimistic. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy (and I certainly was at the time I wrote that) but I can’t really say I’m all that content anymore. My back has been a lot of trouble lately, I’m downing drugs at an alarming rate, and I’m still kinda upset about Sister’s attitude in The Talk.

January 2007
After the loss of Pop, life was less sunny. I shepherded in the new year with Liz in a quiet ceremony with sparklers, champagne and Roger Rabbit. I spent most of January with The Beach Crew at Cal’s parents’ holiday house up north and on the Central Coast. My health waxed and waned, I was still popping pain killers left, right and centre, but for the most part I was excited at the prospect of starting at Sydney Uni in March.

February-April 2007
I turned 23 on the first and on the nineteenth we celebrated Pop’s birthday for the first time without him. Then I started uni and met a lot of really intelligent people who intimidated me very quickly. I had classes on three days a week, and as a general rule I was able to make the journey to Sydney at least twice a week. I did well in both subjects, gaining high distinctions in both. I enjoyed my time but the extra stress, walking, and sitting up took a toll on my already fragile health. Many nights I felt trapped, a youthful spirit caged up in an aching, ailing prison of a body.

I met Kate in March and we quickly formed a close bond. Within no time I began to refer to her as my sister, and her son, Lance, refered to me as Uncle Dan. Along with Liz, whom I consider my sister also, Kate is one of my best friends.

The day after St Patrick’s day I came out to Mum and Dad, which was, as you can imagine, a huge burden off my mind. After some initial teething problems, Mum came around; Dad didn’t give a shit from the start…finally I felt more myself in my own home.

May-August 2007
As the realisation that coming out to Sister was inevitable dawned on me, I suddenly suffered a bout of migraines at a rate of nearly two per week. Dr KHS, whom I started to believe was loosing his touch, advised cutting pain meds to see if they were the cause. Within a week or so I knew this wasn’t the case and went back to the normal dosage, however the migraines persisted.
As well as being migraine-prone, I found myself becoming depressed. The reason wasn’t clear at the time but with the benefit of hindsight I can see that it was all related to the intense sense of foreboding welling up inside me about Sister’s reaction. I sought shelter from the migraines and the depression in sleep. I was also struck at about this time that I forget how it feels to be totally healthy. Having been sick for eight years at this point, my last healthy memory was at the age of 14.

I came out to Sister on the 27th of May. We never spoke of it in any meaningful way for ten months. The migraines stopped soon after. The depression, on the other hand, continued. I felt trapped by illness and circumstance, hopeless, locked in a constant battle between my heart and my head.

September-October 2007
As the pain in my legs got worse and worse, Dr KHS switched the anti-convulsant (which I take as it blocks neural pain signals in the brain). I had every side-effect that the package warned against. I was nauseous, my knees were constantly inflamed, I was dizzy, spaced-out and all-in-all did a fabulous Anna Nicole Smith impression. I felt like a lab rat. The pain did go away after some time but the side-effects were way too much to bear. I couldn’t function at all and ultimately after a fortnight I switched back. The pain came back, followed by the vicious cycle of pain-drugs-nausea-sleep-pain. The high dose of pain killers left me in a perpetual haze. To add insult to injury I picked up gastro at some point.

I outed myself to the Family-at-Large by a rather cunning plan involving step cousins, the FAL’s natural propensity to gossip, and Facebook. Finally everyone knew and I didn’t have to lift more than a finger.

We sold Pop’s house. That was difficult.

November 2007-February 2008
I went to a neurologist; it was a waste of a morning. He was an odd little man and he told me nothing I didn’t already know. I did, however, get some stronger pain killers which made like a lot easier to deal with. I also changed anti-depressants from an SSRI (which I had been taking since the age of 17) to a tricyclic, which blocks pain signals as well as stabilising mood. I changed pain killers again and finally had a winner. CTs and X-rays revealed nothing. I started smoking weed to help with the stabbing pain in my back and shoulders. It helped too, it was a lot of fun in fact, but all in all no cause was found, nothing really helped in any permanent way… and so it continued. I struggled to get my head above water for a time but after I found my footing with the tricyclic antidepressant, my mood did eventually even out.

February 2008 onwards
I moved to Glebe into a house full of strangers. The Space Cadet makes life interesting. The Optimist and I are becoming good friends. The Guyanan and The Accountant I don’t have much to do with. Though my depression seemed to be under control, I was suddenly gripped with anxiety at having to fend for myself.

The pain in my back and shoulders continued to get worse; I continued popping pills (and have made a few faux-pas while under the influence…). As I write this, I am doped up and as soon as the effects wear off I will be writing again. Last night I got no sleep. I’m going to a chiropractor or physio on Monday. Someone has to be able to do something.

Life has to be better from this.

This is what is screaming in my head at the moment:

Our fabulous graffiti tunnel messages were whitewashed on Friday. No one quite knows why, but we know that the university hasn’t seen fit to whitewash the tunnel in quite some time. But Pride Week was fun. My back hates me, and lets me know this at every available opportunity. Consequently, I am often without the faculty of coherent speech and/or any meaningful level of typing ability or, at the very least, kinda spacey. It made its hatred plain in forcing me to leave the Queer Debut at like eleven-fucking-o’clock with back pain so strong I felt it in my stomach. I am still avoiding Sister, which is, luckily, insanely easy with her being in another state at the moment. That said, however, she’ll be back for World Youth Day and I’m sure we’ll be thrown into the same physical vicinity at one point or another. Not looking forward to that. I went to a family thing today and the Family-at-large persisted in asking me “How’s Sister doing?” I just smiled meekly and replied “I haven’t spoken to her in a while, but I imagine she’s fine”. We had fun, my baby cousins are so cute. As I trudged up the stairs to their flat, Zoe came tearing out the front door and crash tackled me into a big hug. I nearly cried. I needed that. I was looking forward to sitting down with Lala and telling her all of this but she had already left by the time I got there. While I’m sure that any resentment I now feel towards Sister will soften by July—it always does—she is not going to be pleased when she learns that I am involved in organising a workshop about gay and lesbian youth. I’ve told mum & dad about it, but I think they know better than to tell her about it, and I’m certainly not telling her until I absolutely have to. I don’t know what I think or feel about her right now. I’ve kinda shut down. Some seconds I hate her, others I love her intensely, but mostly I avoid the topic at all costs. Except in the middle of the sleepless nights, of course, when it’s no holds bar in terms of what I think about; that is when the inner demons come out to play. She’s gotten inside my head and I fucking hate it. I thought the other night what if she’s right? Where does that leave me? Or any of us? What shits me the most is that she has gotten to me at all. And I don’t want her to know she’s gotten to me.

So if I seem distant, please bear with me.

Locked out

By Tuesday night I was feel pretty sorry for myself after The Talk and the ensuing pondering and analysing. Suddenly I realised that my Sister, whom I do love dearly despite our differences, is not going to change her mind or beliefs, in the same way that I am not going to change mine. I knew this all along, of course, but it finally hit me on Tuesday night and suddenly I was overtaken by a wave of melancholy, the likes of which I haven’t seen for some time. I plodded through the evening: cooking dinner, eating, washing up. I did it all silently and moodily. By eleven o’clock I was ready to crash into my welcoming bed, to sleep through the drudgery.

I went out the front for a final cigarette. With all the crap that’s been going on lately—living with the Space Cadet, suppressing murderous rages and whatnot—I’ve been smoking way more than is perhaps generally considered as healthy. But fuck it. Anyway I went out the front and sat on the chair on the front steps, watching the traffic roar past. The sound of traffic has always been calming for me, like waves on a beach. I stood, after extinguishing the cigarette, and reached into my pocket to get my keys out. There was nothing there.

I checked my other pockets, all were equally empty. I remembered putting my keys into my backpack, ready for the next day. I was locked out. I stood for a moment and assessed the situation: I had no keys, no phone, no wallet, no shoes. I swore rather loudly and started the journey around the block, so I could get into the house by the back door, hoping that the door to my bedroom was not locked too.

Arriving at the back of the house my heart sank. The bedroom door was locked too. I went into the kitchen and looked at the benches, hoping that I had absentmindedly put them there while doing the washing up, all the while knowing exactly where they were: in my bag, in my room. Finally I walked out the back to go and find The Optimist so I could borrow his phone. I guessed he was in the common courtyard, drinking and being rowdy (which, I might add, doesn’t bother me one bit except that there have been so many complaints that the housing office has called a compulsory meeting to discuss noise pollution for all residents…not happy about that at all).

As I stepped out the back door I nearly collided with The Optimist, and very nearly scared the shit out of him. (He got me back two nights later: I was standing in the space outside the back door, lighting a cigarette, when he rounded the corner, rather quickly. This made me yelp in a very unmanly fashion and jump backwards, crashing into the two screen doors and coming to rest against the wall, cigarette and lighter on the ground, heart pounding, mouth yelling “Where the fuck did you come from?? Make some fucken noise next time dammit!”)

I told him the situation and he said, very consolingly, “Ahhh shit man, that sux. Of course you can use my phone; you should come over have a beer with us while you’re waiting for them”. I called security and was given an estimate of a fifteen minute wait. I silently prayed that this would be fifteen actual-minutes, not fifteen tradie-minutes, which would see me waiting for two and a half hours (one tradie-minute is roughly equal to about ten actual-minutes.

In the end the security guy arrived after about twenty actual-minutes (or two tradie-minutes) and let me in. I was so awake now after the night’s drama that I took up The Optimist’s offer to go over to the courtyard and have a few beers (or water, in my case) with many of the people living in our street.

It was so nice to spend some time with people who know nothing about me or my melodramatic dramas, especially when they are in varying states of drunkenness. So at least the night had a silver lining, noise complaints notwithstanding.

The talk, part 2

And so the drama continues. This is the remaining part of the converstion I had with Sister on Wednesday night. As I said in the other post, I've basically constructed a dialogue based on memory fragments, so this isn't quite how it happened but it will give you the idea...

“Look, God created man and woman for each other… it’s a question of complementarity.” She said.

“Sister, honey, I don’t disagree.” He thought that perhaps he shouldn’t call her honey, since she would consider it a gay thing to do, but then he thought fuck it. “God created man and woman for each other, I totally agree, but as I was saying earlier Sister, don’t confuse normality for ‘the norm’.” He paused, then added, “You see marriage as a union designed for one man and one woman, they are the key players right?” She nodded. “I see it as love and commitment make a marriage, not a man and a woman.”

“Well yes, of course they do, but marriage is also about procreation,” she countered. He was happy she had gone down this path, in a way, because he had a smart answer. But he knew this battle would not be won using smart answers to nit-pick his way to the finish line.

“If procreation is a key element of marriage, then old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry if they’re over child-bearing age. Even younger couples who are known to be sterile shouldn’t be able to marry.”

She didn’t really have an answer to this, but he knew that in her mind he had only ‘won’ this round on a technicality.

“What shits me about the marriage debate,” he continued, “is the way everyone says it will destroy the family. I don’t understand why people don’t see that the family comes in different forms and that the nuclear family is but one of them.”

“I don’t deny that, but marriage is a special institution between a man and a woman. Gay couples are like heterosexual de facto couples.”

“But they’re not. In some ways they are, but the Human Rights Equal Opportunities Commission did a report that found fifty-eight federal laws that discriminate against same sex couples. Rudd promised to remove the discriminations as an election promise but the problem is he also appears to have promised the Christian lobby that gay marriage would not go through, yet the Marriage Act 2004 is one of the fifty-eight. Anyway the attorney general found another forty or so more so the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby and all kinds of organisations are fighting to have them all removed.”

She mentioned at this point that sometimes discrimination is acceptable, especially when it comes to matters of conscience. She brought up the case of a Catholic adoption agency in the UK that was forced to close because denying service to gay couples was now illegal under new anti-discrimination laws.

He lay dumfounded, croaking “Do you really think it’s better to close up shop and have all these children not receiving placement than to give a child to a gay couple.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Right.”

“Lets move on shall we? There’s no point discussing politics tonight, it’s not what you came here to talk about.”

She asked him if he had ever sought counselling with the parish priest. He said no, but he was a part of a group for gay Catholics. She asked about their doctrinal beliefs, whether or not they were at odds with the Church’s teachings. He said they were and explained he had found out about them because he’d seen them marching in the Mardi Gras parade.

Her eyes widened. “You went to the Mardi Gras?”

“Yes and no… I went to a friend’s place on Oxford St and watched the parade from his balcony. So I was there, I watched the parade, but I wasn’t down on the street with all the punters. I’d never have survived; I’ve never seen so many drunken people in one place.”

“What did you think of the whole thing?”

“It was amazing… so many people, so much positive energy. And yes, lots of drugs, lots of alcohol.”

“What kind of people were there?” she asked.

“You mean who was marching?”

“Yes.”

“Well there were ten thousand people marching… Each group or float has however many marchers, sizes change, but there were community organisations, political organisations, religious ones, PFLAG and all that… just about everything.”

“There were no, like, paedophile groups marching were there?” she asked, wincing a little. He couldn’t be sure if she winced because she was thinking about paedophiles or because he looked like he was about to hit her.

“What?” he stammered, incredulous. “No, Sister, there were no paedophiles, no necrophiles, nothing like that. How dare you lump me in the same box.”

“Well you know there are groups in Scandinavia that do that sort of thing. Sorry but I’ve never been before so how am I to know.”

“Use some fucken common sense.”

The conversation moved to the way in which he had told her he is gay. She resented the fact he had done it on the phone and basically dumped it on her while she was away at the leadership camp. She told him she was angry at him for a while for doing it that way, even though she understood why he did it. He explained that in hindsight, yes, could have been handled better but he had planned on doing it in person while she was home for the weekend but by the time he had psyched myself up for it the opportunity never presented itself.

“Did it really take that much psyching up?” she asked, sounding a little offended.

“Can you blame me?” he asked, gesturing around him. “Look I was scared of telling everyone, even the ones I knew would have no issues. But when I came out to Mum & Dad I always knew they’d never kick me out or anything horrible like that, and even though I was shitting myself about telling you I knew that you’d never stop loving me. Ever.”

“Oh good. I'm glad you know that.”

She asked how their parents had taken the news.

“Good. Dad didn’t give a shit, Mum took a little longer but it’s pretty good now I guess,” he answered.

“I don’t know if Mum is as ok with it as you think she is.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I dunno, I think she feels guilty… she’s made comments about whether she caused it or not.”

“But I don’t care if she caused it. What’s done is done. I mean I believe we’re born gay anyway, but you know what I mean.” He recounted the story of his discussion with their mother in which he told her that if she did feel guilty for not picking up on it, he was over the teen turmoil so there was no need to feel guilt anymore as it was no longer an issue.

“Well that’s important that you said that to her.”

Soon after this the summit ended: “It’s late, Sister, it’s like 4am and you have to be up in three and a half hours. We’re going to have to agree to disagree on this shit. You can send me the articles you mentioned if you want, and I have one to send you, and I’ll even read them with an open mind. But like I said it took me twenty one years to work it out and I don’t want to take steps backwards. Besides, I am about to piss myself.”

The talk, part 1

The following story happened to me late last night. It is not necessarily a true account of what happened or what was said; it is my interpretation of the drug-addled, sleepy memories of last night. It is not fiction; more an amalgamation of two hours’ worth of memory fragments, interpreted into narrative form.

The phone rang in the lounge room as Dan lay reading in his bed; he’d recently started a new novel and was finding it difficult to put down. He looked at his watch and read the time: half past one in the morning. He emerged from his room and hobbled to his parents’ room, knees aflame with pain, to check the call was not the herald of some horrible emergency. Sister joined him, sitting on his parents’ bed as their mother spoke on the phone. The call was for their father, who was away; a lady in the States who has miscalculated the time difference.

He returned to his room and resumed his novel. There was a small knock on the door.

“Yes...” he called out.

“Are you awake?” the knocker asked.

“Yeh, kinda.”

The door opened and Sister entered; her demeanour tentative and unsure. “Can we talk?”

“Umm...” Dan stalled, trying to decide if he wanted to talk to her at this late hour. He glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly two o’clock. “Fuck it, what’s on your mind?”

“I’m worried about you,” she stated, sitting on the edge of his bed. “I’m worried about you and I want to talk to you about it. We have been avoiding this for nearly a year now and I really think we should discuss it.”

“Is this a gay thing?” he asked wearily, “It’s two in the morning.”

“Yes,” she answered with a nervous laugh.

Dan sighed. “Ok then, shoot,” he said as he tried to get his knees comfortable. He took some pain killers and waited for her to continue. His mind was reeling. He’d been waiting for this conversation for ten months, rehearsing it in his head. He had done reading, formed arguments.

After years of internal turmoil they all fled his head in the wake of the advancing attack.

“Well,” she began, choosing her words carefully, “I guess I’m worried about you reading those novels and watching movies and TV shows that show homosexuality as normal. I’m afraid that it’s going to normalise it for you and that you’re going to ultimately end up unhappy.”

“Right. Tell me, what do you think of it? How do you think homosexuality, or any non-hetero sexuality for that matter, fits into reality?”

She exhaled. “I think that man and woman were created by God to marry, have children etc...” She took a breath. “I don’t like the word ‘gay’ anyway—”

“Well ‘gay’ is a political distinction, I’ll give you that, it’s more than attraction or orientation... it’s an affirmation of identity.”

“That’s what worries me about you. You’re reading these books and seeing it as normal, identifying as ‘gay’ and I don’t want you lead down the wrong path. I don’t think that being gay will ultimately make you happy and I don’t want you to end up unhappy.”

“It is normal, Sister.”

“But it’s not. Same sex attraction, which I think is a better term for it, it’s...” she thought for a second, “it’s intrinsically disordered. That’s what the Church teaches.”

His heart sank.

She explained her reasoning. Catholic teaching holds that having desires for the same sex is ‘disordered’, but that the simple fact of them isn’t sinful or morally wrong. Acting on them, on the other hand, is. He listened, trying to formulate a rebuttal, but the late night and the pain killers were wreaking their havoc on his ability to form a convincing argument. He lay there, nodding, as she spoke. When she finished there was a silence.

“It’s easy for you, Sister, to tell me that same sex attraction and being gay, or not being straight for that matter, is intrinsically disordered. You’ve never lived it. You’ve never thought you were dirty or sinful or wrong or disordered.” He took a breath and steadied his voice. “All I’m saying is that it’s easy for you to right me off as disordered and accept the Church’s prevailing wisdom in this area, but let me tell you about my life growing up...”

“Ok.”

“When I was five, I remember having a crush on the male school captain. It was a childish crush, it wasn’t overly sexual but I remember looking at boys and being attracted to them.”

“Yeh, but—”

“Please let me get this out in one go. It’s not easy to talk about so I just want to get it said.” She nodded and he continued. He explained that at age five, he didn’t think it was wrong (he used air quotes around the word) or right for that matter, it just was. By the time he was in upper primary school, everyone said he was gay and they were merciless in their taunting and bullying. He was called horrible names on a daily basis and it began to chip away at his self esteem. By the time he was in high school he was still being called a faggot on the playground. She winced at the word faggot but after all these years of being called faggot, the word didn’t phase him at all.

“I didn’t realise it was that bad.” She said, quietly.

He continued that in eighth grade he had a crush on a girl and his world of internal turmoil plunged further into chaos. Then he got sick. At the time, he thought it was some divine punishment for not being ‘normal’. All this time he never could admit the possibility of being gay... but deep down he knew he wasn’t normal, not like everyone else. He went to the Church youth group camp and his health went downhill really really quickly. He didn’t understand why he felt closer to God yet got sicker and sicker, and these feelings about boys didn’t go away. He got very depressed. It started out just a black depression, like nothing mattered and nothing would ever be fixed again. He developed a crush on a friend of his, a guy, and that confused him even more. He didn’t see it as a crush at the time but the benefit of hindsight is 20/20 vision, isn’t it?

The depression deepened until he just wanted to die. Death was so much more desirable than the confusing life he found himself stuck in...abused on the outside by people at school, and on the inside by himself. It got to the point where he cut his wrists and arms to bleed the sin and dirtiness out of himself. He didn’t want to bring up these things, they are not something he enjoys discussing, but he wanted her to know how desperate he was back then...to know that he thinks about these times every time he showers and sees his scars. Her calling same sex attraction ‘intrinsically disordered’ did not affect him, but others were saying it to him at the time, and he didn’t want her to be one of these other people to someone else.

He summed up by saying that by the age of twenty-one he realised it wasn’t sinful, nor dirty, and that God loved him... he had been desperate for God’s love and acceptance throughout his teenage years and had finally gained it.

“Yes but just because God loves you doesn’t mean that everything you do is acceptable.”

“I agree.” He said. “My point is, Sister, that it’s easy for you to tell me that my sexuality is intrinsically disordered because you’ve never had to deal with discovering the hard way that it isn’t.”

At this point in the proceedings, he explained his stance: that sexuality is a God given gift to us all, that homosexuality and bisexuality are natural permutations of human sexuality (and as such are not ‘disordered’), that just because something is not the norm does not mean it is not normal, that Jesus never said anything against homosexuality in the gospels, that the Church’s teaching is damaging to so many souls and that it has fed hatemongers’ discriminations and vile actions, that love between two men or two women has the potential to be just as deep and fulfilling as that between a man and a woman, that love and commitment make a marriage not the genders of the participants.

They argued the points in terms of the Church’s doctrines; he was tired and couldn’t form very convincing arguments to counter her points.

“Look Sister, it’s late. I have a better explanation than ‘it feels good therefore it’s ok but you’re going to have to wait until I am more awake, ok?”

She agreed and changed tack.

There is more to this story, but I am exhausted. Emotionally and physically, so it will have to wait for tomorrow.

I could be brown, I could be blue

And so the rollercoaster and mood swings continue. The peaks, dips and troughs are becoming more even, but they are still there. Some days I feel like I’m watching my life in third person: a detached, soap-opera-like viewer of life. It feels like I’ve lived the gamut of emotions, back and forth from one to the other, over the past two-and-a-bit weeks.

Carefree.
New years eve. Singing along to Mika, complete with falsetto voice and camp facial expression, with a bunch of strangers in varying states of drunkenness—“Everybody’s gonna love today, gonna love today. Any way you want to, any way you've got to, love love me, love love me, love love me”—I was having a great time, I was with friends and family, dozens of cute boys, and I was very very stoned. For one night, one brief nine hour period, I had not a care in the world.

Frustrated.
Last week some time. I was given a novel for Christmas which, while an excellent story, was very badly written. Actually, to be fair to the author, it wasn’t badly written as such, more badly edited. There were seven times when the author used the incorrect spelling for words like your/you’re, waist/waste, or fowl/foul. The name of the street on which the character lived changed halfway through the novel and then returned to its original name towards the end.

Ecstatic.
Monday. I was woken by the phone. This is a usually a precursor of a shitty day, and often if the phone wakes me I just won’t answer, but luckily I wasn’t thinking quickly enough to think to ignore it, so I answered it on impulse. It was the lady from the housing unit at university. She told me I have secured on-campus housing. That woke me up. I would have done a victory lap of the house, except I was still groggy so I sat in bed grinning like an idiot for a few moments before emerging to face the day.

Smiling.
Tuesday. I was on a downward swing, sitting on the lounge with Rox watching inane daytime television when I received an email from a reader of this blog. He was very complimentary and made my morning, spelling criticisms notwithstanding. He pointed out that I had mistaken loose and lose and bear and bare on a few occasions, but unfortunately no matter how hard I try I don’t think I will ever be able to tell them apart. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me, considering how hard I had been on the author of my novel the week before for a similar crime.

Pissed off.
Wednesday. I was arguing with a computer at the office and I was losing. I had to call the tech guy to get him to explain something to me, something I knew was very simple and demanded only a simple explanation, but he managed to complicate it. In the end I got the stupid contraption to do what I wanted, after a good deal of swearing and snapping at poor Lala, Roxie and Olly who were the hapless victims of my wrath, guilty only of being in the room as my anger rose.

Content.
Thursday. Today. I am back home now for a few weeks before I make the move down to Sydney to live at uni. My back is still giving me the shits with the mysterious lower back pains, so I’m lying in bed while the rest of the family watches tennis in the next room. All I hear is silence, punctuated by the occasional “aww” when something good or bad happens. To be honest, “content” is the wrong descriptor for today; perhaps “flat” or “ambivalent” would be better? It always amazes me how homesick I get when I’m away, only to be replaced with holiday-sickness when I return home.

Oh well, I’m off to bed now.

Head above water

It’s nearly 4.30pm on a warm Thursday afternoon. Bin is asleep on the lounge next to me. Roxie, the mini foxy, has squashed her small frame between my left thigh and the arm of the couch; Olly, the poodle, is nowhere to be seen and a little to quiet for my liking. We’re watching Let them eat cake and I am putting on a smiling, brave face today, like I have all week. I feel like I’m drowning, struggling to keep my head above water.

I know it won’t last but it sux nonetheless.

Hoy me siento tan perdido...

...I feel so lost today.

Usually when I feel this way I write in a little notebook that lives beside my bed. It contains my deepest feelings, and only gets written in at the darkest of hours. Thankfully, it hasn’t been called upon for a while. I write in Spanish (hence the title); originally to stop any prying eyes from understanding the source of my angst—at the time it was being gay—but now its party habit and partly because its romance is cathartic. I decided to do it online this time.

I feel so lost right now. I feel so empty tonight. I don’t know why. I had a good day: I went to Chatswood to help out at the Society, had a lovely lunch with friends, but as I travelled home on the train at night my upper body was wracked with spasms and neural pain shooting from one shoulder to the other. It fucking hurt. Maybe SSRIs reduce neural pain too and this is just a part of the withdrawals? I hope so.

I snapped at my sister tonight. She was upset because I had made a mistake on the Christmas card list. She always treats me like such a child. I told her “use your fucken brain” and went to my room to sulk.

The last year I’ve rode the drug merry-go-round under the direction of Dr KHS, who I am fast loosing respect for, because it’s becoming increasingly clear that he doesn’t realise how serious this is becoming.

It struck me today that this is me, emotionally speaking at least, now that I am becoming anti-depressant free. Physically, too, this is me. Despite being under the influence of a cocktail of pain killers and other assorted bits and pieces, I feel this bad.

Imagine a me that was drug-free. It’s fucking depressing.

That’s all for now. I need to lie down to ease my back.

It’s good shit, but I hate it nonetheless

It’s been a rough weekend. I am coming off Zoloft (sertraline hydrochloride), slowly, slowly, and starting Endep (atriptyline) next week. It’s an antidepressant too, but it should, hopefully, block some of the pain signals. I’m concerned about stopping Zoloft because I am petrified about a relapse in depression. I’m also cutting down the codeine. Withdrawals are unpleasant. Yesterday I was hot, sweaty, lying in bed, feeling like death. My legs were killing me. I went to mass and sat down for the entire service, rather than standing, sitting, kneeling, standing with everyone else.

Last night the pain was bad. I took a lot of codeine and anti-inflammatories and doped myself into a nice floating state, just so I could sleep.

It’s good shit. But I hate it nonetheless.

Misery. Depression.

Tonight I feel miserable. My head pounds, my sinuses pulse, my neck, back and legs ache. I miss my Pop terribly, so much in fact that that it almost feels strangey physical. I need a hug. It probably won’t last beyond tonight, but for now, I’m miserable.

So, it’s been a shitty week. The pain has lessened, which is fantastic in a way, but on the other hand it just means things are back to “normal”, which is still no fun and still full of very real pain. I got the scan results back. No major problems, or minor ones really, just a few things pushing on other things in non-threatening ways. At least that is how it has been explained to me by a friend, who has surprised me with her knowledge of anatomy (and who I won’t persecute if she’s wrong). See, I may be miserable, but I still have a sense of humour about such things. But the point is that it isn’t showing much, except a “strawberry birthmark inside the bone itself” (again, these are my friend’s words, the report calls it something much more anatomical sounding). It also came with some pretty cool pictures.

Not only am I in pain but I’m feeling zonked and tired and really beginning to wonder how life will pan out when I can’t really do much because of pain, fatigue, nausea, or combinations of the three. How will I fare at uni next year if I get a place at the uni housing? Will I be able to cope? The logical side of my head says “of course you fucking will, quit your worrying!” but the emotional side wonders… Depression is like that: a constant battle between head and heart. In my case the head was never loud enough for the heart that steadfastly sticks its fingers in its ears and goes lalala while it wallows in its own melodramatic despair.

I’m sure that tomorrow I will feel better, I may even look back on this feeling and laugh, but for now the randomness of fate and inequality of life are weighing heavily upon my already pulsating brow. It’s an acute case of “why me?” I never get an answer, so with that somewhat mixed metaphor, I will go to sleep and try not to think of it.

Tomorrow will surely be a better day.

Heart over head

My life seems to be a constant battle between my head and my heart. For as long as I can remember I’ve been torn in a silent war of feeling one way and thinking the other or feeling one way and thinking that I shouldn’t feel that way at all.

The battle was first waged in primary school when my heart was attracted to boys while my brain told it that that was unacceptable, although it never really acknowledged the problem. As time went on, benign battles took place (I feel like chocolate/it’ll make you sick, you idiot) alongside bloodier encounters (I want to die/you have everything to live for). Initially, the heart wins. The brain, never content to be defeated, sends reinforcements of guilt to make the heart budge. Sometimes it relents; mostly it stubbornly stands its ground and lets the guilt set up house. After some time, be it days or weeks, the strong feelings of the heart diminish—until the next crisis.

When I am depressed, the tension between head and heart becomes particularly salient. I’ve used this analogy to explain how depression feels to a number of people who have never experienced it. The heart is saying life is shit, it will never get better and you would be better off dead; the brain tells you the truth, that life is bad right now but that it will get better, and you have so much to live for. Unfortunately, the heart is often stronger, or louder, or more persuasive, and its message is more readily believed.

So right now I’m torn between feeling upset and hurt by the decepción and knowing that he’s a fuckwit and I deserve better anyway.

The heart, for now, is winning.

Nada nos libra, nada más queda

I feel like shit today; my legs are killing me and I feel totally, and inexplicably, down in the dumps. I won’t go quite as far as saying that I’m depressed, but it’s getting mighty close. And I don’t know why.

I remember distinctly when I was 17 my Mum asked me “what’s it like being depressed?” She was desperately trying to understand me. The thing is that it’s hard to explain. On the one hand, it feels like there is no light and no goodness left in the world. It feels like no matter what you do you will never again be happy, or healthy, and as such you don’t care what happens to you or anyone else anyway. But on the other hand it doesn’t really feel like anything—it’s like time and space stop and you’re stuck in the hellish present, all the time in the world is yours to wallow in your misery. Today I don’t feel that bad, nowhere near that bad, but I feel flat and down. And I don’t know why.

Well ok, that’s not entirely true. I know why, I just don’t know how. What I mean is that I don’t know what happened to trigger these semi-depressed feelings, all I know is I woke up feeling like the sun is behind a cloud. In the past, when I was seriously depressed, there was usually a trigger before an episode; perhaps someone said something nasty, or did something (that in hindsight was a perfectly reasonable thing to do) that made me feel bad, or perhaps I was just so sick that I saw no end in sight. Today, I can’t put my finger on what it is. As for why, well that’s hard to enunciate.

I guess the short answer is that I feel trapped sometimes. And when I dwell on this feeling of entrapment I can get a little anxious. I feel trapped by my physical and medical limitations and by the consequences they bring. That’s about the size and shape of it. I’m not so naïve or vain as to think that I own the patent on human suffering—I know there are people out there in far worse predicaments than the one in which I find myself—but that’s how it is: I feel so trapped sometimes, and I wonder how I will ever get myself un-trapped.

Some days I don’t even notice my limitations. I fly high on the thrill of being alive, of being able to do what I can do and not worrying about what I cannot do. I walk around uni feeling I could take on the world—just me and my walking stick, ready to whack anyone who gets in my way—as the musical chorus sings in the background and strangers on the street dance a perfectly choreographed modern number in which everyone is smiling. That is how I am most of the time: happy-go-lucky, seeing the glass as half full and generally full of life. And then there’s the flipside: all I see are limitations. Some days I can’t walk without pain; I can’t even really lie down for any length of time without pain. I can’t drink much, certainly can’t go out at night. I can’t drive so I don’t see my friends (the few that I have) nearly as often as I would like. I sit in bed, miserable, as an oboe mournfully fills the room with tear-jerker music. Happy-go-lucky is replaced with wallowsome misery and the glass is always, always, half empty. If not moreso.

Life seems so hopeless. And I hate feeling this way.

So where did it come from? I mean I do get the odd twinge of regret and anger now and then—modern interpretive musicals numbers replaced momentarily by soulful ballads—but this is just ridiculous. The only thing I can think of as a trigger is purely chemical. I take three regular meds, two semi-regular ones on an as-needed basis for pain, another two as-needed for migraines, and two mineral tablets. All of them say to avoid alcohol, but that is fairly standard and I have been advised by countless medical professionals that I can drink a little (which I have worked out to be about half a standard drink every three hours). I had one drink last night, a simple kahlua and coke, so perhaps that has messed with my brain chemistry? Or perhaps it’s just a bad day. But the trigger isn’t the point.

What started as something random has grown into something real and scary, and I don’t like it at all. I had so many plans for my life: by now I was going to be living near a beach somewhere, with a beautiful boyfriend in my bed, a car in the driveway and a diploma on the wall. And I don’t have that. And I feel so trapped.

But I will go to sleep in my nice warm bed, my teddy by my side. Everything’s alright, yes, everything’s fine. I’ll close my eyes, close my eyes, relax and think of nothing tonight.

Tomorrow will be a better day.

Freezing for a good cause

It was 8am when my alarm went off: an assault on my ears at such an ungodly hour. I stumbled out of bed, got dressed in a pair of cargo army pants, a small white t-shirt, a footy jersey, a hooded sloppy joe, two white cotton socks, two black gloves and a brown scarf. Dressed, I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth and walked out the door bound for the train station. Sister, presumably, had a similar morning and soon joined us in the car five minutes after the scheduled departure time (it never ceases to amaze me how she is the most vocal the night before about the need to leave on time, but also the one who is running late in the morning). Upon stepping out of the house I noticed with some trepidation that the temperature was so close to freezing that it just doesn’t bear mentioning. I shuffled to the car, watching my breath cascade before me.

The air conditioning on the train to the city was on ‘cold’. I sat there, shivering slightly, listening to my mp3 player as I dozed in and out of consciousness all the way to central. When the train arrived it was like waking from a deep sleep for the second time that morning. I disembarked, convinced that the outside temperature couldn’t possibly be any colder than that of the train but I was bitterly disappointed as the ambient temperature plummeted as I stepped through the door. The next train was equally frigid. The air conditioning didn’t appear to be working at all, and the windows were open. As the train hurtled through the Sydney underground I tried to keep warm by hugging myself like a lost hiker in the snow.

Upon arriving at Chatswood, salvation was at hand in the form of a hot hot hot cup of coffee and a stroll around the (blissfully warm) plaza. I was in the mood for some retail therapy but didn’t quite know what I wanted beyond a nice warm bed to curl up in until I could feel my toes again. I wandered listlessly around bookstores, looking for more Paul Monette but realising very quickly I would need to go to Borders in the city for his books. I noticed that HMV was having a sale so I wandered around as my legs screamed at me to sit down, dammit, before they went on strike. I ignored them when I saw the “nostalgia” section and found, to my utter jubilation, a copy of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, starring one my favourite actresses, Bette Davis, and the illustrious Joan Crawford.

It’s one of my favourite movies, and I’ve been itching to own it for a while. It’s the story of the ageing Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis), a child star who never really grew up, and her sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), who always lived in the shadow of her beautiful sister when they were kids but who became a successful actress in her own right as a young adult, and their life together as fifty-somethings. After a terrible car accident, Blanche is left wheelchair-bound and dependent on her sister who is rapidly descending into madness. The movie is shows Baby Jane’s descent into insanity and Blanche’s struggle to break free from her crazy and overbearing sister. I highly recommend it.

With my brand new DVD in my bag, I trundled off to my appointment with legs moaning. Now full of hot coffee and pain killers I felt more alive and ready to face the world.

I’ve been asked by the ME/CFS Society to speak at an upcoming forum run by the teachers’ union health insurance company. The forum’s audience will be teachers and we’ll be speaking about the impact of ME/CFS on student’s education, and how to better accommodate ill students in the classroom and wider school environment. I will be speaking with another girl my age who has had ME/CFS since high school (like me), however unlike me, she had a terrible time at school. The idea is that we’ll talk about how we were treated differently in relation to similar issues and how we could have been treated better. Unofficially, it comes down to a lack of empathy on the teachers’ part in the case of my co-speaker, who had teachers tell her to her face she was a whinger and school-phobic.

Unfortunately, my co-speaker was unable to make the meeting so I met with the Social Welfare Officer and we ended up talking for a few hours about my history and my “survival tips”. The SWO is new to the job and is eager to learn more about the condition, so she took notes and devoured everything I said with rapt attention. She is writing a guide for youth that she wants to develop to a twenty-page booklet to send out to newly diagnosed young people (high school or uni students) but admitted she is only just learning details of the illness itself, so she was eager to get my input.

The funny thing is that although I could give my input and share my thoughts on strategies and coping techniques, I am a terrible role model. I can tell a newly diagnosed person with ME/CFS (known in local shorthand as PWC) how they “should” act and what they “should” do until the cows come home, but the fact is I don’t do it myself. For example, I explained the importance of good sleep hygiene—the need to go to bed at the same time each night, get up the same time each morning, not sleep in (too much) nor sleep too late, and what you might do if you can’t sleep—however, I often go to bed late, wake up late, and when I can’t sleep I get up and have a smoke. So, yes, I told her that although I know the mechanics of healthy living, I’m really not an ideal poster boy for good healthy living. She smiled, laughed, and said “well we won’t write that bit down” and got on with things. It’s a great project, and something I’m very excited to get involved in. I have made so many mistakes, and consequently learnt some valuable lessons that I think many newly diagnosed PWCs could learn from too.

I do admit that my arduous process of self growth and self discovery was complicated by the question of my sexuality and my clinical depression, however much of it is fairly universal to all PWCs. I made a point of talking about depression and the need to mention it somewhere in the booklet. It’s a tricky subject because many people with ME/CFS adamantly dig their heels into the dirt at the barest whiff of the “d-word” because so many sceptics callously write ME/CFS off as being “merely depression”. I totally understand that. However, I think it’s important to acknowledge that some young PWCs (like me) had underlying, concurrent, clinical depression that was present before the onset of ME/CFS and that some young PWCs develop “reactive” depression as a symptom (but not a cause) of ME/CFS. After my messy episodes of depression, many of which involved sharp objects and pain killers, I know only too well how important it is for young people with depression to ask for help. Unfortunately, I also know only too well how hard it is for young people with depression to actually ask for help; it took me a few years and many months of fairly serious (and self-destructive) depression.

I can’t wait to get this booklet printed and out on the streets, and I can’t wait to get out there at the forum and begin the process of re-education, to show teachers the realities of this illness and dispel the myth that it is “just being tired”. So, in conclusion I froze my butt off for a good cause.

Misery loathes company

Today was bad on several levels. Last night I felt thoroughly depressed and could barely sleep. My legs were aching and tingling and I couldn’t shut my mind off. What is it about being in a rotten, depressed mood that subconsciously begs strangers to attempt to engage you in conversation? I was sitting in a quasi-meditative state in my lecture this morning, which was very interesting but not enough to drag me out my 9am stupor, quietly appreciating what was being said but without actively participating. Apparently, however, the lecturer had other ideas. She was talking about racism as a social construct and she asked the crowd “what do you think that means? … Anybody … Anybody? … Come on guys, someone must have an opinion … What about you?” It was me. My first thought was “that it’s bullshit” but I managed to suppress the urge to speak my mind. I stumbled my way through an explanation. I groaned. “It’s way too early for this, but it means just that it’s constructed by society.” I realised that I had really just rephrased the question so I added “it’s not real”. She was happy with my answer and moved on. After the lecture she thanked me and said it was a good answer. I apologised for being less than enthusiastic and blamed it on an acute lack of caffeine.

After the lecture I had an appointment with the optometrist. He was a nice guy who was way too chatty for my liking. After each measurement he took he’d ask some factoid about my life. What are you studying? Does it take you long to get here from the mountain? What subjects are you doing? I did my best to dissuade him by giving barely monosyllabic answers and closing my eyes in between reading the second line from the bottom but he wouldn’t let up. Turns out I need new glasses. I did finally learn what “stigmatism” means in relation to eyes. So that was nice.

The last encounter was by far the weirdest but also the most positive. I was sitting in the chemist, by now a little less depressed but considerably more exhausted, when the old lady who was seated piped up “you’re very young to be walking with a walking stick, dear”. I hate it when people say things like this to me; not only is it stating the blatantly obvious but it’s a cruel reminded. I just smiled and said yes. We got chatting (or, should I say that she chatted and I grunted answers). She asked have you always had the stick? No. How long have you had it? A year and a half. Silence for a bit. Then she told me why she was there. She wanted to ask Bill, the pharmacist, about a throbbing vein in her forehead that she noticed this morning. She asked do you work? No, I’m at uni. What uni? Sydney.

“You’ll do well,” she said, “you have a kind face and intelligent eyes”. That made my day.

Sick cycle carousel, part 2

Part one: Sick cycle carousel.

After the watershed night on the beach, and the ensuing unpleasantness, life picked up. It was my rock-bottom. There was nowhere else to go but up.

2002
2002 was, predictably, difficult. My health improved slightly one month then bombed the next. I was dealing with losing my best friend so dramatically (and publicly) and with the rest of my friends dispersing to their various tertiary institutions. The loss of everyday-friends was very depressing.

22 February, 2002
Luke was born that February. I remember the first day I saw him. I slunk out of the car, tired and down, and went into the house. His parents brought him out and handed him around, each getting their turn to hold the baby like a pass-the-parcel. When the music stopped and it was my turn I held him and looked down at his tiny face. Although he was asleep he gripped his tiny little hand around my thumb. I realised as I stood there holding him, that he was so vulnerable, at that point in time he was depending on me for his safety. I was struck by how much I loved this little life in my hands, after only knowing of him for nine months (and knowing him in person for all of ten minutes). I saw the miracle of God’s creation in Luke. I knew it would all be ok.

I wish I could say that from that moment on, life become rosier and more palatable. But it didn’t, at least not in a Hollywood-ending fashion. School continued and I attended when I could, battling exhaustion and an acute lack of motivation. The depression abated after some time (it was more a case of becoming hardened and numb than any actual healing), and I started to smile now and then. I graduated from high school in September, accompanied by Lynne and my family. Many teachers said “it’s about bloody time” as they said their congratulations. I sat the HSC exams and got a university entrance rank of about 72. It was proportional to the amount of effort I put into studying, so I was happy with it.

2003
I had no clue as to what I wanted to do with myself after high school; the last four years had been consumed with finishing it so I hadn’t given a lot of thought to what to do once I got to that point. Without any clear aspiration to tertiary study I chose to take a year off from education (a “gap year”) and concentrate on getting better. My health picked up fairly dramatically in 2003, to the point where the fatigue wasn’t crushing anymore, but more of an ever-present, mild nuisance. I travelled down to Sydney once a fortnight to stay with Grandma, who looked after Luke on Mondays and Tuesdays and I visited Tía and my cousins often. I travelled to Melbourne for a week to stay with new friends who were involved in an ME/CFS charity and met many new people. Some of them were taking a somewhat experimental medication and they told me about it. I started taking this on the first of September, the first day of spring, and have been taking it ever since. The new medication took hold and I started to notice improvement. Spending so much time with Luke and my cousins staved off the depression until it was a mere bad-dreamlike memory. I was still taking anti-depressants, petrified of what would happen if I stopped.

2004
2004 was similar. My health remained at a fairly static level of not-quite-fixed-yet. I still didn’t know what to do at university so I extended my gap year by another 12 months. I continued to see Luke every two or three months and became involved with an ME/CFS charity group, joining the management committee in May.

2005
During 2005 my health took a dive. I became more exhausted and worn down and began noticing pain in my legs and back. I continued working for the Society and seeing Luke occasionally, usually once a month. As my health declined I was revisited by depression. It was often quite mild, certainly nowhere near as bad as it was in high school, but it did occasionally get bad. One night it did get to that low point and I cut myself again with a razor blade in the shower. This lasted for a week and ended when I saw the bloody cuts while getting dressed. It shocked and repulsed me. I couldn’t do this to Luke. I haven’t done anything like that since. I still have these scars on my arm, a constant reminder of that dark time. The pain became steadily worse and completely confounded Dr KHS. I asked him for stronger pain killers but he was reluctant to give them to me, since I was only 21.

I battled constantly with misconceptions. The FAL didn’t get the realities of my condition. I always put on a brave face and smiled at family get togethers. I resented their lack of faith in my word, they believed what they saw, not what I told them.

October long weekend, 2005
Cal and Lala took me to the north coast holiday house over the Labour Day weekend. I left my tablets at Tía’s, which meant that after the first day I began getting withdrawals. I could barely walk from the pain, barely stay awake for the exhaustion and ended up spending the whole weekend in bed or on the lounge. Cal and Lala took excellent care of me, bringing me tablets (over the counter pain killers) and breakfast in bed. It took two weeks to get back to “normal” after that.

November 2005
I continued popping pills and eventually bought the walking stick in November. It served the dual purpose of supporting my pained legs by taking weight off them (and allowing them a chance to rest to some extent) and reducing pain as I walked. It also gave me something to lean on when I was exhausted and walking like a zombie. I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia.

January 2006
2006 came with little fanfare. I was staying at Tía’s one week in January when I got a phone call from Sister. She had found a new uni degree and was going to transfer. She was so excited about it and it was infectious. I started thinking that I would like to go to uni too. I started looking at mature age entry requirements and found out about the course at UNSW. I enrolled and got a place and began my tertiary career.

In early January, I