Not dead yet.

‘The world is a skin around sorrow.’ Emily Dickinson

Days pass and you’re locked inside your body, you cannot escape much as you might want to try, especially from a body that falters more than it flies.

Have you had dreams, when you find yourself airborne? When you can simply, by wishing, lift off the ground and find yourself gliding along air currents?

Such dreams of bliss and I enjoy them occasionally for no reason I can fathom other than as a lightening of my state of heaviness, which crashes in from time to time.

This morning in those idle moments of lying in bed before the day demands I move, I mused on the history of my visits to hairdresser’s, unable to remember any such visits until I was in my twenties.

I’m in the grip of an internal editor who keeps tripping me up. I’ve made him a ‘he’ because he prizes objective reasoning above all else. It gets in the way. 

Alison Williams on the Brevity blog writes about the need for brevity. If you write something like ‘She picked up her phone and texted her boyfriend’, it’s better to reduce these words to, ‘She texted her boyfriend’.

Convert excess into one simple verb. 

Something of these reductionisms bug me.

I start to do it in my head, even as I’m thinking back to the days when someone else cut my hair. Not my father with his pudding bowl and scissors at the kitchen table. I want to create an image. But then there’s the image of my youngest child at three, shortly before we were off on a camping trip one Easter, when she took the scissors to her fringe. The result, a zigzag of impossibility until it grew out. 

Why was I so horrified? 

None of her older sisters had gone to this extreme. They only lopped off Barbie’s locks and it was enough to convince them Barbie’s hair never grows back. But the satisfaction of wielding scissors as a child never evaded them. 

It’s one of those mornings when I’m bogged down with the detritus of my life, its endless bric-a-brac of concerns. I can’t focus on anything. Times like these when the cruel voice trots in with its usual platitudes.

Who gives a shit about your visits to the hairdresser? Who gives a monkey’s? A rat’s arse? a fig? 

The derisions are endless. And all of them simply highlight the extent to which my internal editor keeps score of some hypothetical audience, who is even bothering to read this? He’s judging me all the way. 

As Virginia woold writes ‘On being ill’. ‘All day, all night, the body intervenes. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy- it cannot separate off from the body.’

And the conscious mind, the mind that flits there on the surface of your skull is part of that body, tripping you up at every turn as every muscle and sinew joins in to declare your writing, and by extension you, are of no value. 

At times like these, I go back to my reams of quotes gathered with pleasure whenever some other writer whose wisdom and modes of expression appeal to me. I’m thrown back to my childhood and adolescence when I was convinced I could never say anything as well as the authors of the books I read. Or my teachers. 

I preferred to quote other people’s words and not use my own. 

I’m past this now except in moments like now when my cluttered head becomes a clot of ideas and memories refusing to take shape.

‘I rode a red bus, in a clot of blood,’ writes Janet Frame after she learns of Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963. 

Now there’s some poetry for you. Tiny words that decant a myriad of feelings I can never hope to capture except as aspiration.

Then Jeanette Winterson reminds me: ‘Words create worlds’. 

But how to reach those worlds, creating images in the mind of readers, any reader who d8es not scuttle their minds ahead of closing the book.

Yesterday I received an email telling me the book I published in 2017, The Art of Disappearing is to be terminated. 

What a dreadful word. As if you can do this to a book. It’s not the book itself, but the publisher’s agreement to distribute the book and sell it in the event someone wants to buy it. 

From now, the book is in my charge, and I must care for it if I’m to hope it has a long life than less than a decade.

This I understand is part of the hideous world of publishing for those of us who are also- rans. For those who lack the dignity of a name that sells books. 

It’s a business after all. We must use language, not so much to enter the slush pile of unpublished manuscripts, so as not to join trashed pile of books which fail to get traction.

Still it’s not this that bugs me this morning. I can find a way around his, but it’s the state of my body which intermittently sends shots of adrenalin through my brain as though I have been given a shock and am left briefly in the aftermath of an adrenalin bath. 

A visit to the doctor later today bothers me for the hypochondriacal fears I tend to develop in the recesses of my mind.

What if it’s my heart, or brain, mostly my heart? 

I have long decided my heart will fail me in the end, which happens to all of us in death. 

My mother died of heart failure in her mid-nineties. I’m a long way off this grand old age, but something about the idea of heart failure dogs me.

At least in my mind where thoughts about a slowing down of energy can be challenging.

If I have the inclination and energy later in the day I will report back here on my interaction with the doctor. Just so I have a sense that you and my beloved page on which I write can find a way of controlling the story such I feel better than I do now when my mind is assailed by dark fears.  

The world is indeed a skin around sorrow.  

In the evening, post visit, blood tests will reveal all, it seems and I’m not dead yet. 

Ghosts in the nursery

‘How many times have people used the pen and paint brush because they couldn’t pull the trigger.’ Virginia Woolf.

In the autumn of 2026, my family met for a tenth family reunion. This time in Healesville. Family reunions can be a tense time depending on the family, when past and present come together in an unholy alliance between those who want to remember and those who prefer to forget. As if you could. 

My family is no exception and given there are eight of us left and four of the eight came with partners, we were a hefty load of souls vying for attention. Each in our own way. The most silent among us, paradoxically the loudest. Seated on the sidelines seemingly observing the antics of those among us who speak out and occasionally brawl.

For such is the word we chose in our postmortem email discussion on the fracas that erupted when one in our midst decried a former prime minister for collecting millions of dollars on his watch. Seemingly confusing the Australian Prime Minister of yesteryear with the American president. 

There’s no actual evidence for his assertion beyond some outlet like Sky News reporting as much, but after he spoke the furies ran wild in a post Covid stoush. We’ve seen it before, families ripped apart when some members refused the vaccine in the belief it might harm them, rather than save their lives, and some began to resent government intervention more than ever before, especially in our state of Victoria where ‘Dictator Dan’ became the prime minister’s title because he ordered a lockdown longer than elsewhere. To save lives.

And while it’s clear, to some at least, our state suffered the lowest death rate through Covid during this time, statistics like this do not alter the emotions of those who felt their rights were assaulted when the government issued edicts against those who refused to wear masks, those who refused to honour the evening curfew or travel further than five kilometres from their homes.

It was indeed a tough time for all communities and likewise for my family members, some of whom found the restrictions onerous but necessary, others who felt they impacted on their rights as sovereign citizens.

This polarisation hit our group and although the evening panned out well enough after my husband and one brother left the pack early – he’d had enough – the morning, like so many mornings after some type of abusive behaviour had hit was one of superficial agreeableness.

We never addressed the elephant in the room. And when I raised that possibility the evening before during the stoush in a bid to get away from the endless cycle of political discourse that tends to get you nowhere, I was challenged to name it.

I could not in that moment there then and wouldn’t have had much chance even if I tried. In a large group we tend to talk over one another, and people are lucky to finish their sentences.

So, I write about it here.

It’s a worn-out cliché this elephant, this sense that something huge sits in our midst but we refuse to address it, conspiracies of silence. As Eviatar Zerubaval writes about in his book on the subject, open secrets we embrace to spare ourselves embarrassment among other things. We do it out of a level of expedience. For instance in restaurants, we pay no attention to the staff beyond asking them to meet our wishes for food and drink and whatever other attention our table guests might need. Beyond this wait staff are intended to be largely invisible. 

The way the world is travelling at present through AI and technology it won’t be long before robots attend to us in restaurants, but for now we use people like invisible servants to serve us our food and we pay for the privilege.

In families, especially families with a history of transgenerational sexual abuse towards children and I’d include women generally, the pain is almost too much to mention. Even though in my family of eight remaining siblings we have acknowledged this truth and my elder sister the one seemingly most directly impacted, as she was the chosen one, beyond our mother for our father’s unwanted sexual advances, my sister as a child, my mother throughout much of her married life. 

There are those who might argue fair enough. She married him, but we have advanced far enough now as a society to recognise that rape, even in marriage, is not okay. My mother endured many pregnancies because of my father’s sexual appetite and her Catholicism, which dictated no contraception could pass between them.

All these things are acknowledged in my family so you might say the elephant has been well and truly explored. But not so. Not in the large group. Made more difficult by the fact my eldest brother experienced a different version of our parents, especially of our father compared to the rest of us. And he, as the eldest and a person who values his intellect and opinion, can find it hard to acknowledge the degree to which others among us have suffered in ways unfathomable to him.

Soon we will all be dead and our children and their children will carry the legacy of our lives, ghosts in the nursery as Selma Freiburg writes. Crowded rooms in anyone’s life.