FCT #29: letting go (part two)

I was wandering the neighbourhood tonight - scrunching through autumn leaves, inhaling the delicious smells of woodsmoke and other people's dinners, revelling in the super moon - when I realised that I was filled to the brim with sadness. Not a big loud sadness, but a quiet, contemplative sadness. A moving on kind of sadness I guess.

The good news is that I'm holding up okay in the face of that sadness. I thank my lucky stars for this week's blessings...

• Lulu, who sees me through it all and is coming to visit next weekend. Yippee!
• Miss B, my favourite teenager and movie partner. So far we've covered The Big Lebowski, Dirty Dancing and The Breakfast Club. We laughed, we cried, we sang, we danced, we compared Judd Nelson to Patrick Swayze, I got called a dork innumerable times, B admitted that today's teen movies are crap. How lucky am I to have my very own 15 year old?!
• Holl, who visited Canberra unexpectedly this week and took me out for tea. As always she was a breath of fresh air and sunshine. She reminded me just how much goodness is out there and helped me to feel like some of it is out there especially for me.
• An unexpected nachos party yesterday with M, P, M and friends. An actual social occasion. Chatting to interesting people. Peanut butter Lindt balls courtesy of P's Costco habit. Sooooooo nice.
• A new baby Calista for B and J. Callistemons are one of my favourite flowers and I'm sure she will be one of my favourite babies!
• Songs - happy and sad but perhaps leaning to the sad side. Too much Joni Mitchell. But after all, I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, looking for the key to set me free. Thanks Joni! Some rememberance grooving to old Beasties in honour of MCA. A great human being gone way too soon.
• Stitching - keeping me sane and holding me together when it all gets a bit too much.

Lots of lucky stars there. And only 107.3 days of letting go to go.

FCT #29: letting go

I've never been good at letting go. Holding on is more my style. I hold on to friends, experiences, emotions, song lyrics, old letters, ribbons, paper bags, ring-pulls, images from National Geographic, articles I'll never get around to reading, fabrics I'll never get around to using, random objects I'll never get around to incorporating into artworks. Given the choice I would probably amass all these things on an island somewhere and never let any of them go. (And good googly moogly, wouldn't it be nice to have all yer mates in one place!)

However... we all know that holding on isn't always healthy. Sometimes there's no choice but to let go. For instance, when the person you've been deeply in love with for more than a year says, point blank, "I'm letting you go." And via text message at that.

On Saturday - when that final text hit - my heart dissolved and spent the next six hours leaking out my eyeballs. It was my most spectacular crying effort yet... and I am a champion cryer. I can cry over artworks and trees and nappie ads, through entire children's movies and over any kind of speech. But this six-hour-stint impressed even me, particularly since I was at the Bathurst Show at the time. I cried in face-painting queues, over cake displays, in front of Norman the two tonne prize bull, watching the diving piglets, eating cinnamon donuts, talking to beribboned sheep, waving at dodgems. That night Mewi and I talked through my heart's dissolvement and I cried lots more. By this stage my face had puffed up like a big pink whoopie cushion and I wondered whether I might have actually developed an allergy to my own tears. Thankfully by Sunday I was down to a couple of cries. Yesterday there were none. Today my face looks vaguely normal.

Instead of crying I used yesterday's long drive back to the Can to workshop strategies for letting go...

1. Apply awesome maths skills
First I looked to lessons already learned and determined that it took me about 3 years to fully recover from the break-up of my 11 year relationship. This basic formula (and some quick roadside calculations) revealed that I should be feeling good as gold in approximately 3.81 months or 114.3 days. At least 61 of those days will be whisked away by intensive study and prac, leaving only 53.3 days to get through. The days get less severe as they go, so the last 53.3 should be easy peasy. Although I do have to simultaneously deal with Canberra's winter and I will be housesitting approximately five minutes walk away from his place. D'oh!

2. Address proximity factors
Proximity factors = the places that we went together or that in any way remind me of him. Yesterday I had to have a roadside wee rather than use the public toilet at Taralga because I remembered us stopping there together many moons ago. Seriously. Dude.

3. Address emotional factors
Emotional factors = the ludicrous emotional associations that I insist on pinning to the things that took on significance within our relationship. And we are talking pretty much everything from scrambled eggs to Little Golden Books to pine trees to the phrase "your mother".

I think both of these are best addressed in the same way: by not indulging in oversentimentality; by practicing exposure where it's practical (like with eggs and books and trees, which clearly I'm not giving up); and avoidance where it makes more sense (like altering my route to uni so that I'm not driving past his street twice a day).

4. Fill gaps
This is by far the trickiest strategy to implement. After stupidly throwing myself into one very intense relationship I now have not much of a life outside of study. Luckily I have two gorgeous uni mates and a couple of fledgling friendships outside of uni. I also have my creative practice which I suddenly have time for again! Yippee! I've actually been contributing to my writing group and dreaming up drawings and working on the world's slowest stitch series. And it seriously helps. As the beautiful Birdsworth said it would with the wonderful words "It does hurt like a mutha fucka - no use pretending - but channel that shit somewhere. Write, draw, create." Stay tuned for some new Flickr albums for a glimpse at the writing, drawing, creating.

That's by no means the end of the strategies but that's more than enough for now. It feels good to have shifted myself into a positive brainspace. All I have to do is keep it up for the next 111.3 days. Wish me luck!

FCT #28: hanging in there

I like to think that I approach life with an open mind and an open heart. That's certainly my aim. Not that I don't come with baggage, but hopefully it's a carry-on case rather than a convoy of lorries. I've had tough experiences, but no more than most other people I know and a lot less than the vast majority. I've had extraordinarily positive experiences too. I'm grateful for every opportunity that has opened up in front of me, and particularly for those that I've been brave enough to pry open further. The whole grab-bag of good and bad makes me who I am.

It was a big call to come back to Canberra - for a number of reasons - and I've had moments of regret along the way. Moments where I've felt like I might be running away from something rather than towards something. And that's in spite of the clear purpose I came here with. I'm fulfilling that purpose and will qualify as a primary school teacher by the end of this year. Beyond that lies a big unknown that will take me to my seventh home town.

Given that I won't be staying in Canberra beyond this year, I'm tempted to give up on it altogether, to put my head down and pretend that I'm living in a cave rather than a city that I've always struggled to connect with. But after weeks of thinking it over I've decided to invite the Berra back into my heart and to give it one last bash. It might be a cheap-n-nasty student-styley bash. It will definitely be raw and emotional at times. It might be silly + boring + sad + nonsensical + nostalgic + much more (or less). It might attract an audience of none. That's all okay. At the very least this blog gives me a way of recording and reflecting - of hanging in there - through these last seven months in the town I grew up in.

FCT #12: being open

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,

“Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise,

Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,

This great pull in us

To connect.

Why not become the one

Who lives with a full moon in each eye

That is always saying,

With that sweet moon

Language,

What every other eye in this world

Is dying to

Hear.

Hafiz

FCT #20: canberra autumn (magic mushrooms)

FCT #14: leaving (road-trippin)

 

FCT #27: creative moments

learning to write

I don’t know where to start and so I start with the desire to write.

It seems an ancient one: embedded back in those earliest memories of bedtime stories, birthday cards, roadside signs. A world of codes and symbols just outside my reach. I taught myself to read for the sake of those signs, convinced that one could never be bored with so much to decode. The highway markers proved disappointing whilst books brought the real revelation. A best friend to an often solitary child. Devoured voraciously.

I don’t remember learning to write, but once I did it formed a kind of holy trinity – reading and writing and me. When I wasn’t buried in a book I was an inexhaustible correspondent, barraging friends, family and faceless pen-pals with letters. Cataloguing birthday gifts. Capturing anything list-able in endless lists. A few years ago my Nana handed back an early example: an inventory of every food required for a summer visit to my grandparents’ sleepy coastal town, with each item carefully illustrated. Strawberries, floured fish fillets, dry ginger ale and extra-strong mints, clearly remembered in their giant jar atop the fridge. Oh, the audacity!

My first diary was a gift for my twelfth Christmas. A common brand of notebook still found in newsagents today, given to me by my brother and sister. Black-and-red-cover, hard-back. I made it my own with shining Easter egg foils – blue, gold, green, pink, a scene of frolicking bunnies and chicks – and set about documenting my summer, then my first year at high school and part of my second. Starting with sweetness and light, dear diary, and then descending into teen angst.

Many of the themes have remained the same in the subsequent notebooks. Identity, love, loss, friendship, family conflict, depression. The struggle to make sense of it all. For many years the notebooks were a struggle in themselves. I wanted them to be good. I wanted to create something that was beautiful, imaginative, insightful but more often than not I created a giant whinge. The same woes, repeated over and over, instilling a sense that nothing was changing. Finally I realised that the only unchanging element was my need to expel the rubbish, to exorcise it through writing it down.

I have never been without a notebook since age twelve-and-a-half, and I mostly use them when times are tough. There is little about the writing that is beautiful, imaginative, insightful. It doesn’t come anywhere close to capturing my experiences or thoughts as a whole. And yet the role that the notebooks play in my life is one of enormous importance. I would not be without them.