Mania. I imagine it presents itself differently in everyone.

For me it’s the complete disorganisation of thought that I so desperately hate. I revert to completing the tasks that I know how to do as an expert without thinking, so that I don’t have to try to create the order I crave and need because I feel woefully unable to do so. On days like this I’m completely out of control and I cannot stand it.

Today is manic. I can’t sit still. My fingers ache. My entire body feels like it’s on fire and I keep agonising about all the things I need to do that just cannot find motivation to do. Everything is so heavy.

I managed to drag myself to work and back, without really thinking about it at all. I got out of bed, showered and got dressed. Auto-pilot.

I painted my face with horrendously expensive makeup to cover up the sins of a life well travelled, to hide the reality of my tired and ageing jowls. I brushed the tangles out of my hair, laced my shoes and hefted my backpack on, racing down the stairs into the brisk morning air.

I watched as my body carried itself to the train and departed the station like I’ve done every working day for the last six months. Today I’m a passenger on this journey. I have no control of what is happening here.

I walked from the platform to the lunch bar I frequent every morning, greeted the barista warmly as I do every day and sat amongst the freight trucks willing the sun to warm the chill that I haven’t been able to shift for what has seemed months on end.

People made jokes. I laughed. I told some of my own. I put headphones on and drowned out the sound of other people going about the same day as I, with Jeff Buckley’s ‘Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin‘ on repeat to quell the sensation of lightning splintering from every nerve ending. Again and again.

On days like this, I feel like I’m drowning. But today I carried myself home.

Home enveloped me in it’s arms and let me cry about everything and nothing. About the words that I can’t express, the truths that I can’t share, the horrors that will never escape my lips but remained trapped like prisoners – not for safe keeping, but for safety.

Home walked with me down the filthy city streets and got ice cream.

Home stroked and wiped the tears from my face and told me that the world wasn’t all bad.

I’m glad I made it home today.

As an empathetic person, I allow myself to develop strong emotional connections with people. I make no excuses or apologies for it. If anything, it’s allowed me to experience closeness with a spectrum of different men and women and afforded me deep relationships with many.

There are seldom situations where I won’t just say what I’m thinking – this often leads to me saying things that are out of context, a bit weird, misinterpreted or illogical.

It’s lead to me jeopardising employment, friendships – you name it, I’ve said something stupid that was ultimately limiting in some way. But it’s how I wish people would interact with me. I often feel like when I’m down in the weeds with people talking about big and meaningful things, we’re on the precipice of great discoveries about one another, but we’ll remain teetering there because the truth – well the truth is so much more complicated.

I spew out words that have little thought or construction applied, meaning often they don’t make a lot of sense as they’re charged little ions that sting on impact. So, I’ve been working on that.

I’ve been working on channelling my thoughts, speaking less about things that I don’t really comprehend – admittedly there’s so much in the world that I don’t – I’m not sure whether that has improved the way I interact with people, or stilted my ability to be fundamentally honest and myself. I’m not even sure if there has been a discernable difference noticed by the people that grace my life day-to-day.

Is it really a flaw to be empathetic? The dictionary defines empathy as the ‘ability to understand and share the feelings of another’ – on face value, I would have assumed that this is a good thing. But the adverse side effect of being intensely and stupidly sensitive is the on-going and ever-present internal dialogue that goes on and on in quiet spaces. Just strings of interwoven, not-really-connected streams of consciousness that echo through my bones, constantly leaving me shivering against their reverberation.

Like when recently, someone I met asked me if I did stand up.

‘Comedy?’ I asked curiously, as he nodded excitedly – I’ve definitely never done stand up, but have prided myself in finding humour in every tragedy. I responded that I thought the reasons that I used self-deprecating comedy was as a defense mechanism. If I make fun of myself for my very, glaringly obvious flaws – I’ll beat you to the punchline. It always hurts way less when you make fun of yourself about things you know are your shortcomings, than if someone else does it for you.

Being a ‘funny’ girl definitely stems from my experience as a strange, extroverted tomboy, growing up surrounded by beautiful, statuesque girls. My sister was a child model and one of my closest friends a jazz dancer, ethereal and athletic. When I was little, my mum enrolled my older sister and I in modelling classes as she was too shy to attend these classes alone, a precocious 11 year old.

If you’ve ever felt like a square peg in a round hole, you’ll have some semblance of an idea of how I felt, knobbly knees and chubby thighs rolling up to strut down a catwalk with other little girls, whose hearts were set on being the face on the next ‘Dolly’ magazine. I use this memory often to remind myself that I am a dork and will continue to be a dork because all I remember thinking about was how cool it was that I’d inherited my grandfather’s record player, and how excited I was to go home and crate-dig in amongst my mum’s own collection. Oh, and rollerblading.

I really don’t know whether there is a point to me even telling anyone about this, but I constantly feel this need to explain myself and justify my existence. It’s as if I’m arguing all the fucking time with no one – just listen – I deserve to be here, my presence means something. I really want to contribute. It’s all I want.

Do you ever wonder if people will show up for your funeral? Several years ago, I got a message request from an acquaintance of an old boyfriend on Facebook to tell me she was so happy I was still alive. Cool – thanks, I guess?

I was super confused, but came to learn that there were a tonne of people who thought I’d died in a horrific car accident that happened in their neighbourhood. The associated media only divulged that the passenger in the car, whose name was Charli, died on impact. Go figure.

But here’s the thing – I didn’t die. But not a single one of the scores of people who thought I was dead reached out to my family to send their condolences. They mourned me, in their own ways I suppose, but never actually made any efforts to attend the funeral I didn’t have. You cannot make this stuff up.

In summary;

If I say something to you that makes no sense, ask me to elaborate;
Don’t dance around subjects – if you want to tell me I’m an asshole, go right ahead. Will it impact me? 100%, I’ll probably recall the conversation for years and it will haunt me forever. Will I be able to cope with it better than your inauthenticity? Absolutely.
If I die prematurely and you and I shared anything – please come to my funeral.

My brain is full today. My heart aches today. I’m carrying the weight and burden of the hurt currently being experienced by so many people that I love truly and I need to place it somewhere.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been inspired to write anything; I mean, I don’t even know if inspired is the right term, because it’s not a sparkling desire to share anything with anyone in particular.

Right now it’s just a fervent need to get out the things that are floating around in my head late on a Saturday afternoon, to put them in some logical order and give them meaning.

At present, they’re just independent words in multi-coloured san serif fonts bouncing around the chasm that is me.

Someone I’ve known for a long time told me last night that by his estimation, I was 99% neutral good, and the remaining 1% of my character that is chaotic evil was nullified by this. This in itself to me is kinda strange conceptually, but it’s caused me to do some pretty intense thinking since.

But. It’s the 1% that keeps me up at night. It’s the 1% that stops me from believing I’m a good person. It’s the 1% that has me staring into space, agonising about everything.

I realise in writing that, I’m exposing myself as an incredibly and highly-emotional person. I used to think that this was a character flaw, but I realise now that this is what makes me human and is a distinctive part of my ego or self. It’s why I initiate conversation with people when I feel their energy shift. I recognise darkness in others as its so familiar and know that in these times, all we need is the suggestion of a shaft of light to echo through the black. These conversations are usually cumbersome words, spilling over each other and falling into the atmosphere, spoken in stilted phrasing and with nervous hesitation.

So you know – I see you’re broken. We recognise each other. I understand that you are pulling back the curtain, to let me understand how your machinations work. I understand you are vulnerable. I see you. I hear you.

Willingly, I carry your grief like ghosts. I haul them around with me, like they’re chained at my wrists and at my ankles. They follow me from room to room, house to house, haunting every single space I occupy.

These ghosts are the 1%.

They’re hurt, shame, disgust, apathy, remorse.

They’re agony, grief, guilt and resentment.

They’re hate, self-loathing, disregard and torture.

They follow me like shadows settling at dusk.

I feel like most people have a story to share about having their heart broken, shattered into a million pieces so much so that it’s a physical sensation, one that feels like all the nerve endings in your fingertips are exposed. It’s raw and visceral, like a persistent cat scratch, or the dull thud of a clenched fist taking shape, pummelling your internal organs like minced meat.

In my lifetime, I’ve felt this only twice. Bitterness at being left behind? That’s not heartbreak, not at least in the way I think about it . Your muscles twitching and flexing in anger at the thought of someone you thought was faithful to you – who wasn’t? No, that’s not it either.

The first time I had my heart crushed? I was 14 years old. Being a teenager was gut wrenching for me, a distant memory I visit infrequently because the very thought of the precocious, inspired little girl I was who imagined the entire world was within her grasp, but knew she didn’t deserve it? Even thinking back on it now, the lack of self worth and constant comparisons to other more beautiful creatures that graced the backdrop of my life is palpable. I looked to others to tell me that I was worth something, anything, and now when I think about that time in my life I’m angry at myself for ever being that…pathetic.

In any case, when I was 13 and in high school, I encountered a boy that would change my life and the way I would move through this world forever. I remember seeing him across a crowded block, shuffling from side to side waiting impatiently outside his English class as the schools’ bell rang out through the courtyard, signalling the end of lunch.

I’d recently enrolled at the school, after being frozen out of my previous college – but that’s an entirely different story. Relevant to the person I am today, but one less filled with heartbreak and with humour and irony.

As I was making my way to my science class with a bevy of new girlfriends, I looked up and noticed him immediately. He had a shock of the most amazing natural hair, that billowed out from his furrowed brow highlighted with teasings of auburn and blonde. I remember with curiosity asking my classmate who he was, and she told me his name with the distain in her voice loud and clear. I presumed this was because he was some kind of teenage lothario who really should be avoided for the sake of sanity.

But I couldn’t look away – and for further clarification, I was a 13 year old girl surging with hormones and ideals about love and romance.

As it goes in high school, the rumour mill began to fly thick and fast. My memory is hazy of that time, but I believe I wrote a note to him that said something along the line of wanting to get to know him better. I bravely handed the note to a trusted friend, who passed it along during a period where they shared a class together.

And then? I waited. And waited.

The embarrassment of knowing I had let this boy into my innermost thoughts was excruciating, and I took every opportunity to avoid him in the corridors, dashing into the bathroom when I saw his friends pass by. I would forever be known by them as the sad new girl who had a crush on their friend and the thought of facing any one them was excruciating.

After school everyday, I would make my way to the local depot to alight a bus home. The depot was the local hotspot for kids after school who wanted to socialise into dusk, meaning it was becoming more difficult to avoid the boy and his friends as more time passed. My friends told me I was overreacting and dragged me along with them to the depot, despite my protests that I could alight at a different stop by walking a little further from the school.

My anxiety reached new peaks one day as I saw him and his ever present best friend milling about in the local takeaway bar, waiting on an afternoon tea of deep fried treats. It was all I could do not to run screaming from where I stood, so instead? I checked the bus schedule and hid around the corner until the time came for me to dash into the safety of my carriage to freedom.

One of my friends came to find me and coax me back to the area outside the library overlooking the depot, where the rest of the girls sat in a huddled semi circle discussing the intricacies of high school life, boys they liked and just general musings. I told him I couldn’t bear it, and he laughed and told me I was being dramatic.

And then it happened.

Across the street from where I’d secreted myself away, the boy and his friend had been hiding behind a panel van. Unfortunately, they hadn’t seen the driver return and the van unceremoniously drove away from the spot where it had been parked, leaving the two boys huddling and exposed.

I thought I would die. They’d been spying on us! I convinced myself that I’d become this huge joke between him and his friends, and they’d been watching and laughing at me, knobbled knees jutting out from my awkward tartan school uniform. The weirdo who runs to the bus as it arrives.

“Oh my god, they’re coming over!”, my friend exclaimed. I wanted the ground to cave in and swallow me up whole. Even thinking about this whole scenario now is cringe inducing, like recalling a scene from a made-for-television movie. I froze.

“Hi”…I heard an uneven, stammering voice.

“So, I got your note.”

Again, I willed the earth to hear me and collapse beneath me. I looked up from my shoes – I had been staring at intently for some time – and came face to face with the object of my affections.

“Oh, yeah”. I bit the inside of my lip, which is something even more than 20 years later I still do when I’m nervous.

There was an exchange between our friends, both jovially encouraging us both to further discuss the situation in which we’d found ourselves in.

“So, I ah – I was wondering if you’d maybe, like, umm…” he managed to spit out. I could feel my face my face flushing a bright rouge, the heat working it’s way down my body like an all enveloping rash.

“Aren’t you going to give her your number?!,” my friend exclaimed, frustrated at the length of time we’d been standing in front of each other, both awkwardly pulling at our own clothes as some sort of refuge.

“Oh yeah, give her your number…”, his friend muttered, paper and pen at the ready.

He scribbled on the back of a textbook page, folded it over carefully and handed it to me dutifully.

“You can call me if you want to?”, he said as a half-statement, half-question. I remember saying thank you and watching them through lowered eyes walk away from the spot, where I still stood frozen, cemented to the sidewalk.

I remember the elation I felt at the fact that there was, or potentially would be some reciprocated feelings to my overbearing (and obsessive) teenage lust. He might not necessarily know me enough to like anything about me, but he knew enough that he was intrigued by me and wanted to know more. That feeling, even now as an adult and encountering other people who are interested to know me, even platonically, is incomparable.

And the rest? Well, it’s long buried. I did call him and we shared hours and hours on the phone, but for months at school we would observe each other across courtyards in quiet reverence. Talking on the telephone was easy, but fronting up to each other in person remained difficult for sometime. He eventually asked me to be his girlfriend and I accepted, ecstatically. He was everything I knew I wanted then.

But time is cruel, and so is high school. We experienced many firsts together; I can’t speak for him and say that I was his first love, but he was definitely mine. We wrote each other long love letters, that were never about anything in particular. I spent evenings in his home with his family long past my curfew, to the chagrin of my mother – I just so desperately wanted to occupy the same space as he.

But so did many other women, which would eventually be our downfall. My relationship with this boy played out like an incredibly far fetched episode of a tele-novella, which lead to some of the most painful, heartbreak I will ever know. The details aren’t important to understanding the story, but for years I held on to the memories of our initial courtship, hoping like hell we could one day get back there. We were both too young to fully comprehend so much of what we did and said, that the unfortunate part is that rekindling never happened.

Thankfully my story didn’t end with the death of my first love and neither did his.

I moved across an ocean at 18 to learn how to be a person without his name being uttered in the same breath as mine and to break the bonds that he had over me, for no other reason except I loved him with all of the naivety of a 13 year old girl.

I met other people who enjoyed my company, men and women. I shared many things with them that shaped my view of the world, and taught so much about who I was as a person – without him.

Most of the people that are in my life now? They don’t even know he exists. He is apart of a chapter of my life that I penned and shelved away in the depths of my archive many, many years ago.

He is now married happily to a stunningly beautiful woman and has had many children. I am now married with one son, refusing still to grow up to maintain some of the childlike joy that I had before I had my heart stomped into obliteration.

And for the most part? I’m happy. I’m fulfilled, blessed and loved. My heart is still a huge open wound, but as an empath I fear this will never change.

But even so? I’m not sure that I’d want it to.

Lazarus.

Artist Credit: David Flores

It’s been a long time since I’ve had the motivation to put figurative pen to paper, or even figured I had anything worthwhile to talk about.

I forgot that blogging had a therapeutic element to it for me, a place where I can express my thoughts and feelings about the world in which I’m moving through where people can be drawn to if interested, or repelled away from because the sentiments in my writings are either lost on them or just a singular point of view that they don’t share.

I worry often when I write that I expose too much of my own naivety, my own insecurities – because so many people I encounter assume that the representation of me as a person in my professional life is someone who moves through the world self-assuredly, unapologetically and confidently.

Ironically, the aforementioned adjectives are not descriptive words that I would ever attribute to myself, at least not in my current state of existence.

If I had to translate my own self-valuation into words, I would use ‘awkward’, ‘inconsistent’ and ‘hot-headed’. This is not to say that I’m not trying to become the perception that some people have of me, it’s simply that these are the things that speak the loudest to me when I traverse the ugly parts of my personality, unwittingly. My brain often goes to these places in moments of quiet, of which I have allowed myself tonnes of in the last six months. For the purposes of my own survival through debilitating anxiety and depression, getting to know myself intimately has become necessity.

I think these thoughts have hampered my ability to do this thing that I love so much; write. I haven’t written music in years, convincing myself that I had nothing of note to offer the world poetically. I’ve had the beginnings of a fictional novel becoming less and less topical and relevant on my desktop for about 4 years, fearing that by self-publishing what I think is a decent piece of writing will be slammed relentlessly by the rest of the far-more-talented world. I convince myself constantly that all of these creative ventures I have attempted aren’t good enough by any stretch of the imagination, so I move on to Netflix marathons and Pinterest boards, packed full of DIY projects that I know I will never have the motivation to attempt or talent to complete, leaving most projects unfinished.

But, I digress. This is current me, all wrapped up in ill-fitting clothes. These are all things that I want to change about myself. I don’t know what it is about 2018, but I feel…different. Like the winds of change have come through and swept me up on their laurels, to push me violently into uncomfortable experiences and out of the status quo that is me.

The beginning of this year began tragically for my family, with the loss of my paternal uncle to MND and the end of mourning for my cousins’ son. A week prior, my youngest brother got married to his long time girlfriend and we got to celebrate the beginnings of the newest chapter of their lives together. My sister announced her long-awaited pregnancy at Christmas, elating my parents and siblings with the addition and extension of our family. Two colleagues lost their lives unexpectedly. I reunited with my mother, after an uncomfortable and extended silence.

The juxtaposition of these happenings and experiences speaks so much to the uncertainties of life as it exists for all of us. During all of this, I felt like a passive observer, on the outskirts of everything happening around me – unhelpful, more than anything. Useless. I think this may have been behind my significant desire to change how I move through the world, less aggressively and with the type of kindness that I have lacked in the last 30 years on the planet. Watching how quickly things can go from celebratory to grief-stricken has been so transformative, and made me want to be more thoughtful about how I interact with other people.

I want to start reading voraciously, like I did when I was a precocious child; I want to tell my friends every time that I think kind thoughts about them and share them, even at the expense of us both being uncomfortable; I want to watch awful gaming walk-throughs with my son and listen intently as he describes what is happening on-screen and see the joy in his face that Mum is taking an interest in his passions.

I just want so desperately to be better than I am today – I know that’s probably what every person wants whose not a complete narcissist, but I really can’t articulate that any better. So I guess this new attempt at keeping record of my life, this new blog, will be a place where I can come and explain my rationale for my decisions.

All I can hope is that my words, regardless of what they are, are received with the positive intent and love that I mean them to be.

x C