Suzi Sterel.

I didn’t want to fall in love. I wasn’t even looking for it. He was just another fuck. Sure, we shared common interests; a sarcastic sense of humour, a love of the Bombers and a general lethargic, weekend-procrastination that was perfect. Somehow I fell into this whilst recovering from one of the worst medical experiences of my life.

I don’t say that lightly. I’ve had spinal surgery and a bout of cancer. I survived. That’s all the detail I’ll go into (in this post anyway!) – my point is, I’ve seen some stuff. I’ve lived. I thought the cancer treatment was a doozy til my brain imploded. Two anuerysms in a week. I thought I’d never walk again. I was terrified of losing so many things. Reading. Writing. Talking. Fucking.

And throughout it all, there was Jake. He had somehow literally blown my mind. Falling in love with a fuck buddy was not on the 2022 wishlist – but somehow that’s what I got. He held me when I was tired. He called me to tell me he loved me, that he was going to work, that he missed me. So many things I hadn’t thought I wanted or needed. He’d stop by with a block of chocolate or a bottle of peach iced tea. He played games with me and taught me to love books and writing again. We watched movies and he made me cups of tea. I had to fight my inner demons and accept his help with love and grace, because even though I could do it myself, it was nice for once to have someone do things for me, do things for me that I didn’t even know I wanted.

He was the perfect antithesis to my inner sarcastic bitch that spent her whole life waiting for the other shoe to drop. To push and pull and fight and engorge on men only to spit them out later. To say I was confused was an understatement. Surely this man had an ulterior motive? Why was he being nice to me? It couldn’t possibly be real that he was in love with me as I was with him? That definitely made no sense, it did not compute.
I’d spent the last five years in remission inhaling fuckbuddies and embracing the so-called “walk of shame”. The “walk of shame” was a jump and a skip home. My body tingled and I felt powerful. It was not not shameful to me. Not one bit. I was an empowered woman. A feminist throwing a big fuck you to the patriarchy cos I don’t conform to your whore shaming. Yes I will arrive and leave in active gear, not your designer clothes, shoes. My hair is pulled back until it becomes sex hair. I am in complete comfort, not your stumbling Sex and The City mini-skirts.
I will kiss and fuck and leave in comfort. Ghosting is my speciality.
Your assumed shame and shock and judgement means nothing to me. I wear no shame as it is not mine.
All of this meant nothing when I met Jake.
He blew up my walls and my defences and every single boundary I had enshrouded around me.
The minute that we had a dirty weekend away, he was mine.
Whether he left me the following week or not, he was mine.

I thought I was being so grown up going to the Yarra Valley with a man. Turns out it’s just a lot of paddocks, parks and wine. I don’t even like any of those things. Wait. That’s not true… It is a stunning part of Victoria and I have nothing against a garden or a park, especially if it has a lake. Anyway, I digress.
A dirty weekend. In a winery district. Oooh-lala, indeed. We ate in the restaurant, had cocktails, played some nerdy boardgames, flirting like nobody’s business. It was delicious. Who even WAS I?? Spending two nights with a man, it beggered belief.
As the first night passed and we went to bed, my body tingled, ready and waiting to kiss him, to touch him.
I closed my eyes and felt my body being violently shook awake.
Jess. Jess! Can you hear me?
Mmm, I was tingling.
Squeeze my hand.
I tried but felt nothing. Why couldn’t I open my eyes?
My name is Amir.
Where’s Jake?
I’m here, I’m here sweets.
My eyes fluttered open.
Behind him was a stretcher. In front of me was Amir and Sally, two paramedics, judging by their uniforms. And name tags.
Confusion washed over me. Who even was I? Where was I? Why were there two paramedics pointing lights into my eyes, checking my pulse, giving me oxygen?
I shook my head but apparently it was still swimming underwater. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping that when I opened them again, it will all just be a dream. Or a nightmare.
The squeak of the wheel and the lift door opens. Pushing into the ambulance, we drove away. The sirens lulled me to sleep.

You shoulda been here yesterday. It was the name of the song that we had written and he took and ran with it. Ran all the way to Byron with it. Ran and shook and earned two new albums that changed our twenties and forever.

I never want to see him again. But now I see him everywhere. At the supermarket, in my office, driving, at the pub for after work drinks. There was no escaping him. I lived and breathed Marshall.

We never asked for this, we kinda just fell and once in, there was no out, just over. There was nothing more to be said.

But the further that I pulled away, the bigger his star grew. He belonged to everyone. Just not to me.

Change.

If anything is certain in a time of a global pandemic – it’s that CHANGE will happen. And life will spiral out of control, at a pace we are truly not prepared for. We need to be ready for the fact that the death toll will change astronomically, our friends, family, neighbours, colleagues will get sick, not be around for awhile and maybe even die. Daily, the case numbers change, people will change and I know without a shadow of doubt, I have changed. I don’t know what I’m feeling from day to day but out of control and lonely don’t seem to completely do it justice to describe what I am fully feeling.

I speak often as a disability and mental health advocate and one of the things I can be certain is that my life has changed. From the minute I had my spinal surgery as a teenager, taught myself to walk, self-medicated, taught myself to live as a sober, tee-totaller, all the way through to surviving chemo/cancer and on a daily basis, continued to show up in life, my life has done nothing but change.

I now face the uncertainty of being alive, living through a global pandemic and not getting infected; all whilst recovering from not one, but two brain anuerysms.

And with every moment of life change, I have been challenged and pushed and pulled and moved and moulded, stretched and strengthened like a long piece of taffy. Sometimes I wasn’t sure how I could make it from one day to the next, if I could continue to work, let alone eat or sleep.

Who am I anymore? Am I just a meat carriage of disaster and illness? Who am I? What makes me so loved? I’ve been pushed and pulled, yanked and grabbed, moved back and forward, sideways and backways, all the ways that I never knew existed.

I’ve been shoved up and down mentally in the last two years. Convincing myself of my gratitude – “I’m still employed, thank God” to catastrophising that “I am on the verge of a mental breakdown” and self-medicating with alcohol and self-pity, just to try and hold it all together.

All of it to prove my strength, my resilience.

I have lived with chronic illness and disability since I was 16 years old. And yet my strongest supporters, friends and family will vehemently cry ‘you’re not disabled’ or the question ‘you don’t look / act disabled’ – whatever the fuck that means! I am this distorted wonderful warrior woman who is all those things and so much more.

What we’re NOT seeing is change from Government – what we desperately need now is leadership, strength in business, commitment from employers, we’re all being told that the ‘back to normal’ statements will fix everything. But the ‘back to normal’ catchphrases of of eighteen months ago, when no one was prepared to even begin to acknowledge that the BIG global changes were sweeping through our country WILL happen. It will happen- with or without those who agree with it or not. People don’t want to return to normal. We are damaged or in a societal PTSD phase of anxiety and change. Return to normal – work five days a week, the commute, the hussle and bussle? No thank you. We will change and we will watch the broken institutionalised systems crumble

And that is one thing that we can be certain of, CHANGE happens – with or without our consent. What we can agree to is our perspective, our strength, our resilience. So life and a global pandemic might ruin my day, but it can’t ruin my life.

I am better than that. I am worthy of living this life and so much more.

It’s been just over a year since one of my oldest and dearest friends passed away. A facebook memory popped up and it broke me into pieces. She died 391 days ago, in the UK, just as Covid moved from a vague Chinese flu to a worldwide pandemic. By the time the coroner’s report was done, the borders were closing in, the opportunity to travel to London was taken from us and the Australian funeral was cancelled. The online funeral experience was horrifying. It left me cold. I felt adrift, unable to seek closure or grieve with friends and loved ones due to limitations on travel, government rule changes and lockdowns. We tried several times to schedule a memorial and each time another lockdown came in place. The 5km radius hit me the hardest, as a single woman, many of my friends lived outside the radius and social catch ups on Zoom are really just you and a bottle of wine day drinking.

Since the pandemic began, my mind has been in free-fall. For me, 2020 is best described as a kaleidescope of misplaced emotions, on a spectrum of extreme gratitude to the darkest of despair. In short, a total epic shit show. Without the ability to travel overseas and viewing a funeral via Zoom, I was at a loss as to how I would ever process the gamut of emotions that I’ve been experiencing.

Lockdown gave me plenty of time to consider what I feel, what I felt, how I feel now and especially: what I want my life to look like. Taking stock. Reassessing everything. The shadow of grief still chases me and everyday I wait for my friend to call, or a postcard to arrive. But there is only radio silence. Where is she now? Is she okay? I want to scream at her for not being here during Covid. But secretly knowing that travel restrictions would have been the death of her anyway.

My experience with grief is not a unique one. 2020 was a year of grieving. But for those who lost a family member or friend, the grief was both incidental and monumental. Incidental because as a Victorian, we shrugged and got on with our lives. Whilst secretly internalising and repressing the pain, increasing in size but refusing to feel anything.

Overall, I was angsty and frustrated; with no memorial or place to lay my grief down, I did what I always do in an emotional crisis. I threw myself in to research- as if educating myself on the concept of grieving could somehow alleviate my pain. There is such a wealth of knowledge out there and I absorbed much research and data out there about grief and loss. It’s a well known fact that death of a loved one is the number one stressor event that will impact every part of our lives- our relationships, our jobs, our emotions and it will trigger depression and anxiety across all walks of life in a myriad of different ways. Grief and loss may appear to be a solely emotional reaction but there is no doubt that unchecked and unprocessed, our emotional stressors manifest in physical illness and disease.

So, not only is there emotional pain and mental anguish to contend with, it comes with the daily torture of grief and loss of feeling lost and hopelessness. Never mind that on any given day, we are bombarded by mini-threats and routine changes that trigger emotional stress (Did I lock the door, Why am I texting and driving, how do I feel today? Did I drink too much last night? Is my job safe? How will I pay the mortgage if I lose my job? What if I can’t hold it together today?); but the fact is, because we don’t fight or run, we stay both passive, yet statically reactive; our cortisol and adrenaline in over-drive, we are flooded in stress hormones and often we have limited skills to absorb, process, manage and regulate our daily emotions. And on top of that, we have had a global pandemic to contend with. If you can somehow make it through the day in an uncertain world living through an ‘unprecedented pandemic’, without the shadow of death or grief foreshadowing you, then consider yourself lucky.

Knowing my own struggles, I can only imagine how others are doing, the Covid-19 sufferers and their families, never mind the elderly, disabled, mental health challenged, parents, singles, disadvantaged and those grieving time and distance and the death of loved ones. It’s been a hell of a year.

Whether you know of anyone struck down by Covid-19 or not, it’s safe to say that it has changed our lives forever. From mask wearing to lockdowns to the end of international and interstate travel, to global economies and across all business models; the impact of Covid-19 means that change is happening, whether we like it or not. There is no going back. There is no take-backsies, no snapback, bounce-back or comeback to pre-Corona world. There is only going forward. For some, going forward means going in to the unknown. The unknown of family safety, employment, mortgage and bill payments, health and food payments, on top of the uncertainty of health and travel. Life as we knew it will become a whole new world.

I know that my 2020 story is not unique. For every person who has passed away, or had a loved one who passed in the last twelve months, there have been significant changes as to how we live our life. Whilst huge sweeping changes generate this uncertainty and anxiety that infiltrates our lives in ways we cannot even anticipate and we turn on the news to visit the chaos of a dystopian-post-Trump-American-nightmare and a daily global death count, it takes all my inner strength to remind myself to breathe and accept that the sun will still rise tomorrow.

When I consider my pendulum of 2020 emotions and you take that and multiply by every single Australian during a global pandemic; it makes you wonder how will we move past our collective grief and what impact will it have on the collective consciousness?

And as we individually and collectively process our experiences throughout 2020, it comes at a time when we would normally be in the passionate throws of that monthly-long-glow of New Years Resolutions. Where hope and optimism grow. Where we think of weight loss and long-term projects, career goals and future fairytales, love stories and fantasies. 

And what is the new year glow, without the classic reflection and inward introspection? I think back to New Years Eve 2019, last summer, where half of the eastern coast of Australia was on fire. People were afraid. A friend of mine lost her house in the Mallacoota fires. Other friends complained about their summer holidays being put on hold and camping and boating adventures being waylaid. Road closures and regional interruptions meant plans had to change. We were basking in the glow of that early 2020 ‘first-world-white people’ problems.

‘Oh well’, my friend said, ‘Lakes Entrance is off, but Danny wants to go visit his sister in Queensland.’ And off they went. The casual travel plans of January 2020 seems like a lifetime ago. Normal life and how we navigate our daily routines have been turned on its head.

But there is an opportunity for hope. If we allowed ourselves to think differently, the pandemic presents an opportunity for diversification and a huge global re-set. It has the possibility to change and transform every country and every economy. It challenges us to reimagine capitalism and for big business to reimagine a better world, to recalibrate industry and to reassess the legacies that they want to leave behind. 2020 asked us to be brave enough to review our predispositions and assumptions around equality and equity for a variety of socio-economic groups, for women, minorities and LGBTQI people. To reassess and change the world. The opportunities for society to create a brave new world are endless.

IF we are brave.

And how do we do that? How can we be brave in a world fuelled by fear and narcissism. For me, the number one technique that has helped me is to take very clear moments to acknowledge truth and kindness, to remember to pat myself on the back and remind myself that 2020 has been a complex moment in our lives. So often we are focussed on the next thing, the next goal, the next achievement, that we don’t take the time to reflect on what’s happening in the moment. To appreciate our momentary successes and small wins.

On an individual level, the challenge that I offer both myself and others, is to give yourself permission to pause, reflect and then decide to act (or not), on any shade or colour on the spectrum of emotion. You are not lazy, wrong, weird, lost or selfish. You are simply having a human experience. I challenge you to recognise that it is important to take time in processing all that you have experienced. Because when you are authentic and connected with yourself and not on auto pilot, you may find that you want to do small things for yourself, for your home and for others. Light a candle and weep for those who are gone. Turn the music up loud and dance and sing like a joyful child. Take a long hot bath and turn the music down low and soothe your soul. Go out on a crisp morning and breathe in deeply and remind yourself of all the things you do have and the things in your that that your are grateful for.

Simplify your thoughts. Give yourself the gift of truth this year. Your own truth. And see how brightly your own inner light can shine. When you view your life through a spectrum of hope and success, you will see your mind opens up to the possibilities. Ask yourself: what do you want? What do you need to reimagine your daily life? How can you live more authentically?

It happened to me. The answers I sought came to me in the silence of lockdown, when the mind was quiet and I stopped to listen. I choose to believe that this way of thinking makes us stronger. Listening makes us stronger. Imagine the possibilities if we all stopped for a moment, talked about how we were feeling and chose to help one another by listening. The world is noisy. But if we choose to stop and listen to each other, it makes us strong and after all, we are stronger together.

Who’s with me?

When the holidays roll around, it can be very difficult to follow our hearts and minds as to how we want to be. How we want to live our lives when surrounded by painful family members. There is this really destructive and overwhelming feeling to join the Christmas bandwagon “just because…”

Just because…what exactly? 

Tradition?

Our upbringing? 

Expectation?

To follow the collective consciousness? 

Or just because ‘we should feel happy, we should feel like celebrating’?

Because after all, holidays, Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, all of the joviality are for celebrating and if you don’t celebrate, maybe, just maybe, there’s something wrong with you.

For many people who are grieving, experiencing loss or divorce, dealing with a depression, or perhaps, ill, exhausted, or just simply exhausted from a tough year… To actively want or choose a break from the demands of the holiday season can be downright challenging. And to speak the words aloud is somewhat taboo… “I don’t celebrate Christmas”…

Are you a Grinch? Or (sssh) just alone or lonely?

On many levels, Christmas and New Years has always been a difficult time for me. It also feels even more complicated now that I’m older. My brother has his own family and I’m living with my parents. It’s a strange feeling, this Christmas feeling. Traditionally, I can be very nostalgic and sentimental. The holiday season always tends to sneak up on me at the end of November and all it takes is that damn Mariah song or someone to mention Love Actually and my Grinch-mode auto-pilot setting is triggered.

I’m going to wax lyrical -and you, dear reader, can enter my own personal ‘Christmas Carol’ collection of Christmas Grinchy-hellsphere.

We enter through the door to Christmas Eve, 1997. My father collapsed on a chair, grey and clammy. Me calling the ambulance My mother returns from the supermarket, searching for my father in disbelief.

My Dad had a heart attack at the age of 52, just before the most family-oriented days of the year. It’s etched into my memory. We dined on hospital food and flat champagne by his bedside, as machines beeped, IV drips dripped and his (bleugh) catheter adjusted. A grim toast to still being alive. ‘Merry Christmas to us’ one of us muttered. My mum clung to him and adjusted his dressing gown and we smiled for the Kodak photo. Circumstances meant that I moved away four weeks later. A choice that feels very different now that I’m creeping closer to the age of 52.

We fast forward a few years to 2001. It’s four days before the dreaded day and I’ve arranged a very special present to myself – an abortion. It was so special that I told absolutely no one. I was grieving the breakdown of my relationship, as I had just discovered that our housemate was two months pregnant – and it was also my fiance’s. So for three days during those Christmas days, I pretended that I had period pains and spent the big day with a scowl written all over my face. I still don’t talk about what it meant to feel the life that was growing inside of me and what it meant to take that life away. As I grow older, living child-free- there is a lot of ‘what ifs’ surrounding that memory.

Time skip again to two years later. In 2003, I was sexually assaulted three days after Christmas, by a man that I considered to be a close friend. I pretended that it didn’t matter because he said that he respected me and I had every right to be angry at him but he was sorry, genuinely sorry, but he was ‘just a bit drunk’. He rang me on New Years day to tell me he had bought us expensive tickets to a concert. He told me he loved me and again that he was sorry but he just ‘couldn’t stop himself’ and ‘did I not realise how damn sexy I was’ and how he ‘needed it’…

‘It’ being rape. A word that has taken nearly twenty years to speak out loud and reclaim as my actual experience. And in reclaiming that word, do I really want to define myself as a ‘victim’ or a ‘survivor’? Do I wish to align myself with so many ‘survivors’ of the toxic masculinity experience of ‘taking’ a sexual experience when consent was so unequivocally removed? How many more times could I have said no? How many more times could I endure listening to him tell me he loved me? How long could I continue the silent scream in my head??

Every time the memory returned, I pretended and denied it and removed and deleted it. I did not speak about it to anyone. I told myself the narrative that what happened to me ‘didn’t matter’ and it was ‘no big deal’. All the whilst living with this supposed ‘it doesn’t matter’ experience. I managed my recovery by hiding in my house for weeks, smoking joints and drinking. To this day, I’ve never said the words sexual assault and rape because I unconsciously stockpiled excuses. You read the survivor stories and surely mine wasn’t so bad because my rapist was my friend? Surely I bore some of the responsibility? Was I too sexy (that seemed unlikely, but it was considered)? Did I cocktease him because I loved to dance with our friends? Did I want it?

And because he was rough and I do like rough sex – consensually, agreed upon pushing, pulling, yanking, clenching. Loving. And perhaps in raping me, I was asking for it that way. Did I somehow give him unspoken signals that I was allowing him to ‘take it’ from me? Did he think that I would like to be raped? Because perhaps he just thought that I wanted it that way? How many drunken nights had we spent talking about our sex stories, of coursee he knew that I liked it that way.

And then there was the timing. He said ‘he was drunk’ – but so was I. And because I was drunk and only semi-conscious, I didn’t say no – enough. And so he took it as a challenge. To convince me that I did want it, that he wanted me and in doing so ‘it was okay’ to ‘take it’.

And because my breathing got heavy and I pushed him away and because I drunkly laughed at him to hide my embarrassment, he grabbed and groped and touched and stroked and ripped at my clothing. To show me how much he wanted me. In his delusional mind, I had orgasmed. I had consented.

And after it was over, he smiled and said that he loved me. And we were okay. Because I didn’t tell him otherwise. I was too out of it and drunk and sore and frozen from shock and confusion to scream at him to fuck off and get off and get out.

And for several Christmases after that, I couldn’t celebrate. It was just endless reminders of ‘how things should be.’ Family members getting married, having children, grandparents, neices, – all those traditions, family, good times and being with the people you love. It’s the ultimatel holiday happiness feeling. Wasn’t it? It was just a never-ending reminder that I didn’t and I couldn’t date. I didn’t want to be touched. But mainly, I didn’t want to trust. I didn’t want to hurt anymore. I didn’t want to feel the things that I was in denial of. It was a conscious reminder of the repetitive pain and hurt and repression of “ugly” emotions. So I shut it off and shut it out. It was safer that way.

And we finally reach Christmas 2009. A glimmer of hope. I had met a beautiful and complex man at a wedding the month before. We spent a brief time together before he returned home to the UK. And instead of it being the summer fling that it was, I rolled the dice and moved overseas to live with him. I fell in love with his very British children. My life felt like an Aussie does London, Mary Poppins experience. He pretended that he wanted to play happy families. He wanted it all. He wanted to pick and choose when he wanted me and when he wanted to play happy families with his ex-wife. There were no boundaries and he was so broken. Ultimately it meant that he couldn’t quite fit me into his fantasy so I became obsolete to his real life.

This complex and complicated man-robot had grown up as a child of divorce. He didn’t want his seven and nine year old children to have a stepmother. He convinced me that he was right and wouldn’t budge because his ‘kids were his priority’ and I would always be third or fourth in his list of priorities.

What that really meant was that I was in a foreign country and on top of the micro-triggers of culture shocks, one of the realities was that it was somehow okay that I would spend Christmas Day alone.

Later, I found out later that his ex-wife had invited me to share their Christmas day with them. Many times. She had offered an olive branch because she knew what it meant to feel alone with your beloved man-slash- husband. She wanted me to be there with them and it meant that it was okay that her boyfriend would be there as well. It was easier for her to compartmentalise and make sure the new girlfriend (me) was included and we could move forward as mature human beings.

But he wasn’t. When you jump down the rabbit hole and realise that you are actually living with a reserved, emotionally-retarded British robot of a man, such as my ex, you know that the rose-coloured glasses have been removed.

My Christmases in the UK consisted of me taking time to travel (I know, I can feel your intense pity) or knowing that I would be home alone whilst my partner spent the day with his kids and his ex-wife. Christmas 2010 was spent by going in to Waitrose and spending $22 quid for the most expensive roast Chicken and a terrible Christmas pudding. And eating it alone.

The icing on that metaphorical shit-stained Christmas pudding was that he ‘forgot’ to buy me a present because his kids had to have new i-Pads. So I pretended that I didn’t care and said nothing. When Santa bought the seven and nine year old the i-Pads, all I said was ‘I guess it will replace the one you got them last year.’ and ‘you’re Father of the Year, babe – they’ll love it.’ I could barely contain my passive-aggressive sarcasm which is strangely biting in the Aussie accent.

Time skip to again – a week before Christmas 2017. I was left in a my oncologists waiting room for forty five minutes because there was a on-site medical emergency. It wasn’t a big deal, waiting to see a doctor seemed to be par for the course. A normal occurrance. I didn’t bat an eye-lid, I was just waiting for that month’s test results. And pretending like I didn’t care, like it was just another day. No biggie, no stress. I convinced myself that my biggest worry was which magazine to read in the waiting room. Heads up, I read both back to front. And then I pretended that my internal dialogue of ‘it’s back, it’s back, it’s back’ wasn’t a mantra, it wasn’t going to be my song. I worried that perhaps I should have told my parents, that I should ask my friend to come with me. Because no-one should have to be at this appointment alone. I should’ve asked my best friend to come with me. I should’ve have been more practical and logical and re-train my brain to stop disassociating. I thought, as I waited for the doctor that ifI just took an extra two or three painkillers then maybe all my worries would go away. The cramping and migraines would end.

Because anything would be better than the torture of waiting.

The receptionist smiled and surprisingly compassionately said ‘Not too much longer now.’

And for all that worry and anxiety and brain spiral, it turned out that the results were miraculous. They showed that I was now cancer-free and my oncologist wanted to give me the results directly herself. To celebrate in this day with me.

And then, like a dam bursting, the lifetime of pain and hurt and grief and loss and intense joy and intense sadness just burst through every fibre of my being. I had carried those feelings so far inside of me and below me and intensely repressed. I had pushed and I had pushed and pushed them down because the energy it took to process and think and explore and embracethe monumental feelings was too much. What good does it do to do the pity-party cha-cha dance? Why indulge the inner-demons to parade and tango in the shadows of the past to commit thought-genocide and invade my present life? The better solution was to just expel the shadows and work harder, focus hard, exercise harder and get more sleep. That’s what the experts tell me. Work-life balance. Hydrate. Eat some protein and greens. Go for a walk, get some fresh air, swim in the ocean. All of it so life-enhance and will fix all my ails.

So I pushed and I pushed and I pushed the shadows away.

This is my life, Suzi Sterel. I experienced all these things. So many of these experiences are intertwined with what happened at Christmas. They are so intrinsically linked and aligned with that holiday feeling of ‘I should feel happy right now’ and ‘I should be grateful’ and ‘why am so angry’ and ‘I’m so lucky that I don’t have to have chemo and my parents are alive and healthy and I have a roof over my head, I have a job, I’m no longer broke’ and the darkest of all ‘you haven’t killed yourself yet, so things are okay.’

Because all I want for Christmas is you, Suzi.

And after all of those damn things, I reminded myself at Christmas 2019 and at the beginning of 2020 that things were going to be okay. I got comfortable – as January rolled into February, into March, I was settling in to my job, my life, everything was okay.

I had my best friend’s wedding to look forward to, then my cousin’s wedding at Easter to look forward to, so much love and life happening around me, things were looking up. And as I drove home from a beautiful relaxed country wedding, I learned the news that a beautiful life-long friend had taken her own life.

By the time the coroner’s report was done, the global pandemic was announced and with it the borders were closing in and my friend’s family cancelled the funeral in Australia and the opportunity to travel to London was taken from us. I had no more answers. I was untethered, adrift, once again disassociated from all life’s moments, the brief moments of my best friend’s wedding long gone. I was in a place where I was unable to seek closure or grieve with friends and loved ones due to the Covid restrictions, the limitations on travel and the Melbourne lockdowns. How could I process this suicide, when in my own life all I could do was put one foot in front of the other and force myself to put on the mask of happiness and hope.

Dear reader, if you are still there and with me, I must admit that the Covid-19 lockdowns hit me hard. The many years and years of pushing complex traumas down and down and down started to seep through my life in a myriad of ways. All the traumas that I’d rejected and pushed and pushed so far into the depths of my psyche – they had nowhere else to go but – OUT.

The shadow demons were dancing once more and I was losing my mind. A mental breakdown experience in the silence of my bedroom during a global pandemic. My anxiety had reached a breaking point and the agoraphobia was setting in. Routine was out the window and nothing seemed important. Whilst the rest of the world experience the joys of walking their 5km radius and embraced day-drinking and a work-life balance (myself being one of the lucky ones to retain employment and work from home), I through myself into the extremes of becoming a workaholic to avoid dealing with all the traumas that were battling to unravel inside me.

And I have had to work hard since 2020 to seek a therapists support, in finding ways to connect to coping strategies. The main technique was reconnecting to my meditation practice, another was committing to a regular exercise routine, changing up my diet, developing a sleep routine and most importantly not drinking alcohol to self-medicate. This advice, whilst completely obvious, felt revolutionary.

I taught myself to run. I found stories of hope and health to inspire me. I taught myself to focus on self-care. And even when I broke my ankle in the 2021 lockdown, mentally I had developed strategies that made me feel stronger than before. And as I grew stronger, a strange melancholy struck in mid-November.

The agoraphobia was back, going to the supermarket become super-scary and anxiety enducing. I pretended Christmas wasn’t happening. It just did not exist for me. And it made me sad in some ways, because there’s a small part of me, the child within, who adores the sparkly lights, the pretty colours, the gifts, the wonderment, the parties, the connections, the heart expanding feeling in the air of the spirit of the season; kindness, thoughtfulness, merriment, and music. Friends. Family. Hope. Renewal. Rebirth. Love.

The thought of another impending Christmas holiday, with that all the decorating, hosting of friends, shopping, rushing around, co-ordinating schedules with friends to joyously reconnect in a safe, post-pandemic world, the nostalgic painful reminders put me in full regression mode. A mental breakdown of epic proportions.

Cue 2022 – a year of hope and renewal. A fresh start. So colour me embarrassed when Easter brought the onset of two brain anyeusysms. Weeks of isolation in ICU when my ward was struck down with a Covid outbreak. I had limited access to my friends and family. Another enforced lockdown, again, of epic proportions. And recovery. And despair. And thoughts of ending it all, because after everything, years of mental damage and trauma, upon trauma, what was the fucking point? Why did I keep on trying, keep on hoping?

I had to really dig deep and reconnect to my core essence, my spiritual beliefs and to my ancestors stories. I had to stop, breathe and embrace the unknown questions of what it means to be alive. And I began to pray. And asked that seemingly outrageous question directly to the Christmas spirit – that all important question of …

‘Who cares?’

When you start living your life through the lens of ‘who cares?’ it is a release of a mother of epic proportions.

It means, do what FEELS RIGHT FOR YOU!

Do whatever the FUCK YOU WANT. As Tina Fey says, ‘Do your thing and don’t care if they like it’ and ‘Some people say, “Never let them see you cry.” I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.”

It’s your party and you can cry if you want to. You can learn to feel again. You can learn to walk again. You can remember what it means to speak your words. To swear and sing and be cheeky, in whatever way and whatever silliness your life inspires. You can relearn to use your hands and feet when every fibre of your being tells you ‘I’m tired’ and ‘I can’t’.

You can. You can take those thoughts and slap them around and tell them to shut up. Because they are not real. They are just thoughts. And you sit there and watch them float away.

Do whatever it is that feels right. You can do anything if you just put your mind to it.

And to return to the spirit of Christmas, you can decorate your life or not. You can wear whatever feels good and embrace colour and the grey shadows and every shade on the rainbow spectrum. You can embrace the gifts of life that you have been given or not.

Because ‘who cares?’

Don’t play the victim of your own practicalities, it will not change anything about who you are and where you are. It just makes you tired and boring to others.

You are better than that.

You can make special plans in whatever way you like, you can prepare certain delicious foods that brings you joy, you can entertain and reconnect with your friends and family – OR DON’T.

Because ‘who cares’ – you are ALIVE.

Do, as one of my friends does at Christmas – eat cake and drink wine and smash out 10 episodes of Suits. Be fully authentic and aware of what feels real and true in your heart. Live that. Live each moment to the fullest loudest, joyest, loveliest moment of your life. Do whatever feels right in your body, in your heart, in your soul and in your energy levels. Do what feels right.

Don’t be the Debbie Downer that sucks the energy of the people around you and be the victim of your life. You are more than the sum of your sucky life experiences. You are everything. To quote the Doctor, you are important.

Make sure that you stop and reconnect with the though- ‘why am I doing this?’ Is it arrogant narcicism or focussed intent? Ask ‘why do I have to embrace all the traditions out of “obligation”

Embrace your PASSION.

Ask ‘Why do I feel I am SUPPOSED to do all these things in your traditional, with your family, at Christmas – and if you are doing it because you love it and you want to do it and it makes you happy, fantastice.

Live your bliss.

Don’t do something like follow the societal expectation of the December and January rules.The inane stupidity of the meaning behind the New Year and the re-set and ‘New Year, New Me’… Why? Why do we do this to ourselves? Just another set of torturous obligations and traditions? Or because it is a joyous experience to remind yourself of what it means to be alive?

Because conforming to the collective consciousness by giving the defensive rebuttal of ‘what we do’ and ‘other people are expecting and relying on me to follow societies rules’ is stupid.

What if I didn’t rush around trying to buy all the presents, all the booze, all the food? What do I want? What part do I play in all of this? What would it feel like to not decorate? Or perhaps just a whisper of decoration this time? What if I left the dishes unwashed overnight? What if I just allowed my brain to switch off? What if I didn’t answer my phone? What ifI left the house without makeup or without a bra? What if I just didn’t give a shit about whatever people thought? What if I turned off the white noise of the media? What do I think about my life? How do I actually feel about it? What do I believe? Why do I care so much about life? What is true, and authentic in my motivations this holiday season? What feels right to me in this moment?

All of this epic proportional rabbit hole rant is just chaos and a huge crisis of over-thinking. But it is mine and I make no apologies for it.

To be honest, my biggest lesson of the last twelve months is looking at my world and looking at my life in the most honest and authentic way. There is only one way to live my life. As Otis Redding said ‘I did it My Way’.

Bring on 2024!!

Merry Holidays, Happy New Year, Happy Whatever, God bless and Blessed be. May the Force be with you. Fortune favours the bold.

Go. Live. Now.

It feels like space mountain. Or a rollercoaster at Six Flags. Not just any old rollercoaster, one of those rickety old ones that goes clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety, click, click, click … click… until you reach the top. You know it’s coming. You can feel the anticipation. Your body tenses. You prepare your stomach for the fall. Your eyes dilate. Your throat tightens and you see the coming downward slide.

The fear and the… Exhilaration… It all crashes over you; the cortisol, the dopamine, the adrenaline, the fight or flight triggers, the nervous system reacts, your muscles clench, the eyeballs twitch and-

I stop. I remember that I have to breathe.

I tell myself that I’m one of the lucky ones. The mantra begins. I’m grateful. I’m healthy. I have a loving family. I have a home. And last, but not least, I am employed. My role has been deemed necessary. Words cannot express my gratitude for that, given that I am an immune-compromised human in an unprecedented pandemic. The thought of being unable to support myself financially, emotionally and medically (all of equal importance to me), all of those things terrify me. Recently, I have had to voice the words “immune compromised” to my employer, taking the risk that that knowledge won’t be be held against me, as it has done with previous employers, in the pre-Covid days. That was scary. But nevertheless, it’s a headspace that I navigate daily- who and what I tell. If and when I tell my friends and family of my pain. If I can drop the mask just a little bit a let them know the truth of my reality.

I live in a world of remission and chronic illness and I spend most of my daily working life hiding what I feel from people far better than what I give them credit for. What do I mean by that exactly? Well, if you’ve never had chronic illness or spent time in hospital, it’s unlikely that you’ll understand my experiences. If you’ve never lived with a disability or cared for someone with a disability, it’s unlikely that you’ll understand my experiences. There’s a percentage of people in this world who understand and there’s a percentage of people who’s life is far harder than mine. Maybe on reading this, you’ll tell yourself that I’m being a jerk. Maybe you have a ton of empathy or a touch of sympathy, but you can’t understand until you feel it, until you know. But here’s the crux of the matter- the world that I live in means navigating work and managing my disability in ways that only a small percentage of the population will understand. And that’s okay, I swing between adjusting and managing my situation to make sure those around me are comfortable.

Which brings us to my place in the global pandemic. Covid has bought the reality of being chronically ill to the forefront of my mind in ways that I had never anticipated. I have had to have honest conversations with colleagues and management whom I’m not even sure I trust them to have such honest conversations with. They are well aware of my position on returning to work and my unwillingness to return to work until they can ensure my safety. I have certain questions about those things and as an organisation they are still making their own high level decisions about what happens if and when the staff can return to work. The uncertainty and fluctuating changes means that I am in a situation of negotiating my position on the pandemic, day by day, moment by moment. I consider my moments of leaving the house very carefully. Normal events of five months ago, like a trip to the supermarket, a visit to a friends house, shopping, going for a coffee, all of these daily decisions involve hours of over-thinking and internal pep talks.

To recap, here we are – fifteen weeks into an unprecedented global pandemic. No one has a clue what normal is any more or how to react in a pandemic. The word alone brings up imagery of the bubonic plague, or more recently (one hundred odd years ago), the Spanish Flu. It has been just long enough for humans to forget. Long enough for humans to forget about world wars, martial laws and how we as individuals are here to support and serve the community. ‘For the good of humanity’ has been lost amongst the noise of capitalism and family priorities.

When I look back at when this started for me, I have to chuckle. The date was March 13, (Friday 13th, obviously) – the date when the grumblings had begun. Australia had slowly started to recognise that this wasn’t just a ‘Chinese problem’ or an ‘overseas problem.’ Immigration and airport decisions were made and memorably when our Prime Minister declared that he would go to the rugby on the Sunday, before locking down on Monday. It defined just how ill-prepared our Government was. The men were aflutter with their talk of the AFL and Formula One seasons about to kick off. Nothing in the world had changed beyond the Wuhan lockdown and it hadn’t reached our country yet.

On Friday, March 13, I flew to Sydney for the weekend, a situation I’ve since come to regret. I was monumentally sick with a cold and despite a fun weekend, I spent the whole flight home thinking I was dying and the people around me looking at me as if maybe I was. Australia was only in the midst of pandemic mumblings, the talk of ‘an overseas pandemic’ was being whispered and the news talked of ‘if you’ve travelled to China, make sure you get tested’. I returned to Melbourne on the 15th March, feeling as though I’d been hit by a truck, feverish and coughing. I became petrified of all the pandemic talk and I spent two days driving around trying to find somewhere that would allow me to get tested. The first two places turned me away because I hadn’t travelled overseas. Despite my medical history, it took me four different clinics and plenty of shouting to convince health professionals that I needed to be tested.

The mumblings and undercurrent filtered across all our conversations. Corona Virus became Covid 19. In April, the fear set in, people were panic buying toilet paper and the elderly and chronically ill were being tested. Easter came and went. The ability to work from home no longer involved union conversations and reams of paper – it was expected. People were still in denial. Community transmission was considered to be low – but we weren’t testing. That wouldn’t come for a few more weeks.

A month later came apathy and panic in rolling waves. May bought the certainty of no travel, no brunches, no sport, no Mother’s Day, no funerals, no weddings, no parties, no restaurant outings, all of which led to a collective confusion and community judgement of others escalated. Everyone had an opinion. Fingers were pointed and the NIMBY-brigade dug in to argue their world view. We watched the numbers on the nightly news, graves in New York, the British Prime Minister and the King in Waiting, got sick. We sat back smugly, our numbers in the teens and convinced ourselves were were safe. We discussed quarantine hotels and policies of cruise ships, watched as a handicapped season of the AFL begun and convinced ourselves that we were okay with this ‘new normal’.

We stumbled through June as job and economic panic escalated, doomsday naysayers, testing clinics open throughout the suburbs and the postcode lottery began. The whiny mumblings of six weeks ago became louder. June brought complacency and fear-based headlines. The hope of April felt like a lifetime ago. A fantasy. It felt like just as I was beginning to feel comfortable with ‘the new normal’, the Governmental lines were drawn and any certainty of travel in August and September felt like a foolish dream. I still hold out hope for a summer holiday, maybe a trip away at Christmas. The skeptic in me knows that it is unlikely. I am starting to lose hope in humanity. Hope in a time of quarantine feels unrealistic, like my dreams of travelling to America or see a live band play again. My heart breaks for my Pixies concert and my Tim Minchin tickets. My heart breaks for the music, film and theatre industries.

July brings a foreshadowing, a feeling of unsettled despair. Am I on top of ‘the new normal’? Am I supported? Am I okay? Sure, I consider myself eternally lucky that just six months earlier, I had moved back in with my parents (for a variety of financial and emotional reasons, including my care and theirs. It had become a matter of mental health and a need to cocoon myself for awhile but that’s a story for another day), but the beauty of it was I am able to be in isolation lockdown and still have family support. I no longer have a mortgage, rent, bills to add to the mental and emotional stress during the pandemic, so again, let me be clear – I cannot tell you how grateful I am.

My sanity feels like an ever-fluctuating state, moment by moment, day by day.

After all, my job is safe, the work continues and life rolls on. Onwards and upwards, in to the void I go – if it were a void that covers less than fifty square metres. I leave my bed to bathroom to the study (10 – 12 steps) and then to my kitchen (another 20 steps) for coffee and back to the study again. My day is complete. And back I go to the kitchen and make dinner and return to my bed to rinse and repeat.

I do leave the house; but when I do, I can’t wait to back at home. Safe and secure. On the rare occasion that I go to the supermarket – I feel the walls closing in and my chest tighten. I queue at the door of the Woolworths, adjusting my face mask and rubbing my hands with sanitiser, breathing in and out to centre myself. A Karen-type woman stares at me for a second too long. The pale blue mask is still unsettling to the Aussie sensibilities. In Australia, masks are not yet mandatory but I get the feeling that that decision may change. My brain tells me that if I don’t wear the mask, I’m essentially trapped at home and I don’t have anyone to talk to other than my parents. I don’t want to risk additional quarantine. The supermarket and local shops are my only solace.

In the supermarket, I walk past the teenager wiping down the baskets, his slight head nod tells me that it’s safe to enter. A gentleman behind me coughs in to his elbow, then picks up a potato. I reach for an avocado, as two small children graze past me, pushing and poking each other, as siblings do. Their mother just rolls her eyes at me and goes back to putting carrots in to a plastic bag. An elderly lady pushes past and asks me to pass her some tomatoes. I pass her them to her, using the plastic as a barrier. She stares at me a second, perhaps confused by my paranoia. I refuse to believe that I’m the weird one in this scenario. I complete my shopping in fifteen minutes, getting just the bare necessities. A group of teenagers stand too close behind me – just a tad too close… and I shuffle forward but they refuse to leave a gap. My hands tense. I clench my hands, digging my nails in to my palms; in each moment, my anxiety spikes. How do I navigate this space when I don’t trust that I’m safe? The danger isn’t agoraphobia anymore or road rage or supermarket rage or ignorance or apathy.

Right now, I do not trust the humans around me not to be infected and I cannot in any given moment guarantee that I’m not infected either.

I tap my card against the sanistised EFTPOS machine and make sure I give way to all oncoming pedestrians, careful to avoid eye contact. I scurry out, back to the safety of my car, ready to return to the sanctuary of my home. There is a message on my phone. My parents are out of milk. I sigh, making my way back inside. Whilst I wait in the queue, another message pops up, a reminder about my gym appointment, to be clean and on time. It’s funny that we now have to be reminded to clean and rinse and sanitise as if it’s a new concept. Fear does funny things to society.

As I drive home, I’m reminded that the traffic flows have changed mid-COVID; and a sense of unreality hits me. I no longer have any sense of time or distance. My friend Simone messages on our group chat, to check in about our weekly Friday night drinks on zoom. I don’t answer straight away. Enforced-Covid-Social-interactions leave me cold – I end up drunk and alone on my couch. I miss my friends but it just makes me feel sad, a reminder that I’m still living at home with my parents. And sure, it’s not that much different from pre-Covid times – but at least back then, I had a choice to go out or to stay at home.

We are doing the right thing, I tell myself. The lockdown is for community safety, we all have to do our bit. But my inner child is chucking a small tanty at my freedom and free will being taken from me. So the mantra begins again – for the good of the community, we stay inside. But my body will not allow it. The nausea rises and my hands twitch. Jittery, my days swing on the vine of free-flowing anxiety. Just don’t get me started on the other kind of needs – I don’t even know how to online date in Covid times.

For now, my only focus now is staying safe. Protection. The common good. I’ll worry about the agoraphobia later. I’ll stay inside, I’ll wear the mask, I’ll do the right thing. This is what we do now. We’ve seen the spike in numbers. We can see what happens when apathy settles in. The numbers grow. People here and overseas are dying – so we all have to do our bit.

And with every step I take from my car to the front door of my house, I know I’m still processing this Covid-Gravatron, this merry-go-round carousel of lockdown life. I feel like I’m almost getting in to the swing of things and we twist and turn, we go backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards and my head is screaming “I don’t want to snap back”. “I don’t want this to be the ‘new normal’”. My brain is still there, back on the 14th March, looking out of the Shangri-la hotel, looking at the Sydney Harbour Bridge and thinking about the bliss of a quick flight north for a weekend away. How simple it all was.

But remember, the lessons are there for all of us to see. This is an opportunity to look inward and outward, as within, so without. This is our time. A chance to reflect. The time is now.

2020 – 2.0. An evolution revolution. Can you feel it?

Tell me how you are processing the pandemic. How are you coping? Are you? What has changed for you? Are you okay?

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about Soul contracts and life choices. How much of who we are and what we do is pre-determined, or predestined? What is free-will and do we really have it?

And then of course, an article appeared in my newsfeed on facebook as if it was pre-destined [or, depending on your take on it- a possible Russian algorithm sent to spy on my click-bait choices 🙂 ]

How Souls Choose Their Families And Friends Before Birth

As the article states “According to Buddhism, your soul has been on this Earth before. It may have been here many times, actually. Our souls come to this world time and time again. This allows growth and change. As you grow old, your soul outgrows its contract and is ready for a new one. As your time in this body is over, your soul moves on too.”

There is no doubt my soul is an old one. I’ve always been impatient, the hurry to speed things up has been interpreted as rudeness on numerous occasions. But I’m ready for the next thing as soon as I’m done with the last. I’m not interested in your positive or negative feedback, I’m already on to the next thing.

But all of these things I feel, the clairsentient, the clairaudience and the empathy, I want to know more about how we choose.

“Your soul contract includes the time, date, and location of your birth, and the family you are being born into. It includes all the events of your life until death and how they may unfold. According to this theory, everything is how it is based on what your soul considered before choosing this life. You can’t remember this decision, yet there is a path for you and lessons to learn and grow from:
Even though there is a path your soul has chosen before being born into this body, you also have the free will to make changes as you wish. Though there may be an outline, it is not your destiny. You can get off the path, and choose differently. Your soul contract was meant to help you grow to a higher state of consciousness and awareness. Everyone you meet has their place and reason to be in your life. It may be confusing, but eventually, it will all be clear to your soul.”

And there it is – “Everyone has a reason to be in your life.”

And I wonder – what this even means in the context of a global pandemic, did we all make the choice to live in this time? What about those who have died, is there a reason for those who are infected and how some have immunity and some do not? Is it pre-destined, or is it just random? Science says there is no such thing as religion and the big bang theory started all of this. And by this way of thinking, nothing has meaning and we live and we die.

I’ve never been able to make my peace with this part of the soul contract. Forty years ago pre-birth, I made a contract with my father and mother to be their child to deliver the exact messages they need to hear / live wit

“Our lives are but a speck of dust falling through the fingers of time. Like sands of the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”‘

I refuse to believe that the connections in life are all just coincidence. I’m currently working on a post on coincidence and connection, so stay tuned but in considering my life choices, I want, no I need to know there is something more. Something bigger than random atoms bouncing around in the universe and that our choices and our life has meaning.

In the last fifteen weeks, the global pandemic has escalated and heightened my thinking on choice and free will. These global changes has filtered through every aspect of society (and my thoughts!) as it has made demands on defining who we are. Who we are as a person, as a family member, as an employee or employer but who we are as a community and as a human being. It has forced us to our choices, our life decisions, our hopes and dreams in ways that we haven’t had to before. It has placed demands on our perceptions and worldview – our beliefs and confidence in government and institutions, in the media and in our neighbours. Ultimately, we are being asked on a daily basis to commit to unseen acts of trust without even asking questions of the value of each decision, simply because the media and government tell us it is so. And I say to you – trust me, this is not a looney tunes, conspiracy theory post, I am not able to tell you stories of secret societies and back room deals but we need to start filtering our decisions and choices now. Critical thinking. Logical Thinking. How decisions are made. We need to orioritise if and what is working for us. Is it right to go out, who will we see, how will we interact with them, are we suspicious of them or are we lonely and do we “force interactions” on others and is it safe to do so. Are we safe? Are we sick? Have we taken the right precautions to keep our loved ones safe? Or are we feeding the fear? All of these new considerations are being foistered on us at an escalating pace that we expect the media and the government to tell us what to do and how to behave. But they don’t have the answers either.

So where do we turn? If we breathe through the pandemic and see that our choices, our words and our values are no longer working, what then? What can we do to make changes and how can we adapt when the circumstances of daily living is constantly changing? Who do we trust? The government? Our workplaces? Our friends? Our family? Who do we TRUST?

We are currently all going through a world-wide “call to action”.

A call to be your best and live your best life. To keep everyone safe and to focus on human kindness. To serve and offer assistance. This has to be our focus. But what do we do when those around us are apathetic about social distancing or want to hug or shake hands? When masks are no longer mandatory and a random person sneezes or coughs? What if that party of twelve that you went to on the weekend infects everyone?

This is not just a call to action for individuals. As individuals, we can all do our bit, we can direct our energy to small behavioural changes but there is a need for a society shift and indeed a global shift to raise the global consciousness. This is not something that will happen overnight. Over the next five years, we will see an escalation in destruction and fear, of humans actively fighting against the change. Lonliness, mental health struggles and fear is everywhere already in the Covid-world. Our refusal to willingly launch in to change (and our rejection of the call to action), will see us – as individuals, as a society, as a nation – stagnate. Our economies will crash, property use will change, our old ways of working, travelling, communicating and celebrating will need to evolve.

Right now, we are seeing many examples of anger and rage and ignorance and delusions, both in life and across social media. We see the damage that this causes. The people are afraid and that engenders anger and hate and despair.

There are lessons to bring about hope, lessons to bring about positive change, to reject the fear of negative change and to encourage us to refuse the need to cling to the old ways. If we are strong, if we believe in the common good and we focus our energy on doing what is best for all and commit to the discernment and filtering of all information, then there will be hope for humanity.

I WANT TO BELIEVE.

But how is this possible? Is it even possible? Of course it is. Look to history. At any point of change in society (the fall of Rome, the Renaissance, the Spanish flu, the French revolution, industrial revolution, Civil war, Vietnam War, Russia / Ukraine War etc), humans have fought against these moments, but ultimately, were swept along with the change.

All we can do is reflect on our role in this part of history. Look within. Consider your ‘why’ in life, consider your ‘why’ in every choice that you make. By doing this, it will allow us to consider how to heed the call to action and take the steps required to be your best self and serve others.

Make your choices through a prism of hope and kindness.

The time is now.

Feel free to share your thoughts on reincarnation, soul contracts or even your beliefs or rejection of anything in this article. Thanks, friends

My soul path is to communicate. To be an oracle, to be authentic, to speak my truth, to illuminate and to share my wisdom. If that sounds like arrogance, please know that this is not where I’m coming from. I truly believe in my soul’s journey towards creative enlightenment. My soul is too alive, too creative, it’s not quite squashed for the drones at Council. 

Lessons in life will be repeated until they are learned. 

I dream of being paid for my creativity. 

I’m a writer. I’m so much of a writer, it’s written on the walls of my soul. Ever since I was a small child, I’ve been a storyteller. My mother will certainly attest to my tall tales. But beyond that, I feel the world of stories and dreams more acutely than my waking life.

Recently, the fear and the nausea is rising. How long can I keep swallowing shit and tell people that it’s delicious? I’m absorbing so much negative energy that it’s making me sick and all I can do is keep plastering this smile on my face. It’s only a matter of time before I go full Michael Douglas or Jim Carrey and not in a funny way.

It’s not like I’m even any good at hiding my emotions, thoughts or feelings. They are literally written all over my face. I have three very different bosses tell me that I need to ‘watch my face’ or think about not ‘eye-rolling’ or ‘stop looking worried’. All these things? They’re just my face.

Chances are, if I think you’re an idiot, my face has already told you LONG before my words do. 

So what’s keeping me from this long drawn out entitled diatribe about my employment?

Fear. A lack of confidence. Why? Well, like I said earlier, we’re all brainwashed from childhood with the 9-5-er, the 40-year-mortgage-road-to- perdition… That’s what we do right? I’m a white middle class average, run of the mill, north-of-thirty woman, it’s time to settle right? I’ve been trained in this admin world for eight years, this is where I smoosh my bum into a wheely chair and settle in for the next twenty odd years.

Right?

I remember being told as a teenager that writing, performing, drawing are nice hobbies but now it’s time to grow up. Pencils down, textas back in the box, playtime’s over. No more colouring, no more fantasy writing. It’s over… But what if those things are your destiny?

What if that’s who you are, your dream, your life path?

Well… what happens is that you shove every ounce of screaming flesh and you push and you push every part of that writer, of that artist, down, down, way down. And then what happens, I hear you ask? Well dear reader, you end up where I am.

In a nine to fiver, doomed to repeat the lessons in life. Doomed to be surrounded by dream-swallowers, and mortgage-chasers. 

And then there are the Others. They are the “rest of us”= those people who just fell in to a job to pay for childcare or their next holiday or to keep the debt collectors at bay and got addicted to the slightly higher pay check. They were average at school, never really tried too hard at anything, but never really failed either. Chances are, that in any organisation, you’d expect a few of the Others. Dream Squashers. Passion killers. Monkeys, if you will. Apparently, with every job change, with every dashed hope, the monkeys are multiplying. I’m surrounded by them now.

I’m the ringmaster in this crazy circus life of mine.  I’m on the carousel the never stops spinning. I’m wrestling lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! And the animals do not want to let me sleep tonight.

Welcome to the jungle, my friends.

But the universe will not let me be. The wider world is calling and the universal energy is escalating. I feel it as strongly as my heart beat. The messages are constantly reminding me that I don’t have to choose this doomed-dream-swallower-life anymore. 

That it’s time to take the bull-by-the-horns and swing on the trapeze and –

JUMP.

I’ve hit a wall. This was the last thing that I thought would happen to me. After everything I’ve been through, the surgeries, the meds, the pain, all of it, I knew I had to hustle and regroup and somehow get my shit together.

My last job was a toxic mess. I’d been bought in because of the old statement ‘That’s not my job’. All of the things that were ‘not everyone else’s job…’ became mine. So I set about working my arse off (for years) to improve processes, procedures and information and how it was communicated to the wider world. I had that beast humming like a Voice contestant on Grand Final night…

…And I left with my dignity and sanity torn to shreds by unchecked arrogant and passive-aggressive behaviours. I realised boundaries I’d been putting in place were being trampled on and there was no two-way street – there was just their way, or the highway. So I took my bat and ball and resigned the fuck outta there.

The members of my team had destroyed my self-confidence and my ability to complete even the most mundane of admin tasks. I invested wasted hours in a toxic world of Mean Girls playing ‘Gaslighting Roulette’ (“Ladies and Gentlemen! Welcome to another episode where we play the guessing game of what mood will Sally be in today? Will she trap us all in a world of passive aggressive sarcasm? Will Catherine be a bitch today and remind us all of our tiny little lives? Will she spend forty five minutes telling the boss her tall tales about how she’ll fuck off and get another job – as the rest of us cross fingers and take bets that maybe today’s the day!? Will the twelve year old millenial tell me how I’m doing my job wrong and will I pretend to give a shit? Cos the mask is starting to slip and I don’t know how long I can last before I flick her in the eyeball just to get a human response from her. But the number one question of the day is will my Team Leader fall asleep at her desk, only to suddenly realise that the end of month has somehow snuck up on her and she has to complete the report and is unable to do anything else for the next three days. And can I re-adjust my face to the blank slate that I can once again pretend that I don’t care that everyone around me is on a higher pay grade but doing fuck all. And all the whilst saying, don’t worry guys, I’ll answer all the phone calls since no one else has time to pick up a goddamn phone. That’s it, ladies and gentlemen welcome to the glamorous world of Local Government!”)

Bleugh! It was exhausting!! The delights of manic office behaviour! How Fun!!

I swallowed shit everyday and did it with a smile on my face. Every day my soul was dying that little bit more. And I told myself –  “We do what we gotta do for a higher purpose: the almighty dollar.” Sometimes you gotta swallow your pride and a multitude of sins to pay the rent.

Right?

That’s what I was told. Climb the ladder, work your way up. Be good, go to school, get a job, meet someone who makes you happy, get married. The usual. And you’ll get rewarded with a pretty house and an adequate husband and excitable children. So I got on the gravy train.

Right?

Well. It was not exactly like that. I find myself drowning on this gravy train, hoping for some steak. Something with real substance. Because this gravy is starting to get gluggy…

(Ok. No more silly analogies… promise)

I spent a long time thinking about how I was done with the toxic world of Local Government that I was living in and walked away from it. But it turns out the Universe was playing a cosmic joke on me again.  Because here I am, employed again in Local Government. Council number 5. 

Remember Kathy, Robin and Sara? Well they’ve been replaced by doppleganger neurotic types at my new job. These dopplegangers are not quite replacements – these ones have souls. And a sense of humour. But the environment is the same, the toxicity is the same. Their energy is the same. It filters through every part of my job. ‘That’s not my job’ filters through our conversations on a weekly basis.

And still I come back to the quote that the “Lessons in life will be repeated until they are learned.“

I got sick at my last job. I swallowed so much shit that the toxicity of it literally gave me cancer. And when I took time off to heal and recouperate, the funniest joke of all was when I got a call from HR to explain my absences… even though my manager was aware and supportive of my treatment and all my absences were accounted for with a doctors certificate. All of them. And yet HR still wanted to mediate and discuss my ongoing absences. So I valiantly showed up, explained myself, thought ‘surely this will all blow over, if I just calmly speak up and act like an adult.’

But here’s the thing – IT DIDN’T WORK.

I could smile and wave, mumble sarcastically, act like a grown up, make some minor concessions and apologies but the three toxic cunts had decided to take me down. So mid-chemo, I decided ‘fuck this shit’ and quit at Christmas time. Because fuck them. Sure that’s when they all booked in leave, but I had hospital appointments and a life to live.

I’d like to say my life got better. I’m five years in remission but writing this from my teenage bedroom recovering from a brain anuerysm. Whoever decided that my life was going to contain challenges, wasn’t wrong. But if they thought it would fuck me up would be dead wrong. Because this shit wasn’t going to take me down.

I’ve got a life to live. Goddamnit. I have forty fucking years to take over the world. They will eat their goddamn words. I have a life to LIVE.

So where does that leave me? I’m forty years old. The cliche is alive and well in me. The mid-life crisis, a breakdown escalated in a global pandemic.. This cosmic joke that defines all that has happened in 2020 is here to remind me that life is short. I’m done. My current job is teaching me that. I have a job to do. And this is not it.

Thanks for stopping by.

Suzi Sterel. Writer Extraordinaire.

My friends joke about me walking in to walls, the mystery bruises, a broken toe from attempting high heels. Makeup lasts 2.5 seconds before it becomes panda eye. Tongues are burnt from cups of tea, fingers caught in doors, heads bumped, knees knocked. Hair is poky and mussy, no matter how much I brush it. I try really hard to be a grown up, but you know, it’s a work in progress.

We joke about the Sterel family trait of being un-co. My sister in law and neice have picked it up, possibly in sympathy to the rest of the family. I wonder if I pissed someone off in a past life to live this way.

It’s worse in a professional corporate setting. I’ve hidden cuts and bruises, because of how it might look. I have cuts from shaving my legs and bruises on my arms are so common, I’m still using the ‘walked in to a wall’ excuses. And trust me, I know how it sounds.

Yesterday, a colleague asked for help and I turned to indicate that I was on the phone, but in less than ten seconds, I knocked my knee, broke the arm off my chair, spilt my coffee all over my work notes and all over the carpet. My colleagues are brilliant in maintaining a straight face, but I’m sure they’re inwardly groaning. What next on Suzi’s top ten crazy klutz stories?

My friends are no longer surprised by my stories. The worst one was straightening my hair one Sunday night, whilst still wet. Every girl, woman probably most men understand – SCIENCE – that using intense metal heat on wet hair, is going to be a #epic fail. But all I could think was it was 10.30 at night, I was fuelled by Sunday-night-itis, the anxiety was flipping shit in my stomach and I had wet hair that had to be fixed. So I made an attempt to towel my hair, but let’s be honest, it was dripping. It was too much for my 10 year old GHD straightener. The heat and wet hair connected, causing the GHD to shut down, short circuiting the entire power into the house. So the power shuts off, at the same time that I realise my hair is on fire, I smack my hand on to it to put out the singeing hair and half my forehead hair falls off into my hand, burning my hands in the process. I’m still smacking my head to put out the fire, ripping off my plastic glasses so they don’t melt and rushing in to my ensuite in the dark. Power was restored, burned hand was wrapped and I looked at my face. A cool burn mark, worthy of a Harry-Potter lightening bolt and to make the situation more traumatic, a chunky tuft of singed hair that could not be moulded into a fringe. So it was a good six months of tuft-y fun, waiting for the re-growth.

But I laugh, what else can I do? Instagram the shit out of it? Trust me, I’m twenty years too old to post about all my ails.

POST Edited – I have edited this because it is now two weeks after two brain aneurysms. What does this mean? It just means that the room constantly spins and I am still walking into walls and am on lots of drugs. I don’t know if I am cured of being un-co, but I have a feeling it won’t be the end of me posting about me and my awesome skills

My friends are gracious when inviting me to birthdays, weddings, celebrations in stating, ‘formal attire – Suzi excepted (for everyone elses Safety, Suzi -heels are not required!). They know my love hate relationship with heels. I so want to have the desirable ankle and find the comfortable heel. It has certainly alluded my thus far. The last time I wore heels, I broke my big toe. It hasn’t recovered. It aches in winter. Most people think I must be drunk to fall, but I rarely drink these days.

Working at a new job has meant explaining the occasional need to wear runners in a very formal corporate setting, including hiding ugg boots under my desk. There has been several near misses, tripping on stairs, walking in to walls and slipping on tragically flat flooring. My colleagues don’t even pretend to be surprised anymore. Nope, we have moved straight into mocking territory.

One time I was out drinking and wearing a low – heel (2-3 inches, a definite old lady heel) and three times I fell on my own two feet, no drinking that time either! And then as I was walking back to my car, my heel got caught in a grate and the shoe was stuck but my body kept going. Needless to say, I drove home barefoot that night.

Speaking of ‘shoe incidences’, there are the winter boot stories. The need for warmth and the need to look awesome, don’t always collide. Especially in a pub in the winter. The floors are both slippery and sticky, which means a confusing time where I either fall or can’t walk.

I am constantly attracted to handbags and wallets that are shiny or sparkly, but have no real functionality or use. These stupid accessory usually show themselves off during my particularly clumsy moments. There was one time I was late for a flight to Sydney and I was running the length of Tullamarine Airport and in a surprising turn of events, I did not trip or fall – until I arrived at the gate and realised my ticket was no where to be found and as I reached to my handbag, the entire bottom of the bag ripped and the contents of my wallet and handbag fell to the floor, much to the chagrin of the Qantas staff. It did make it easier to find my ticket amongst all my crap. I did make some friends, including one particularly young attractive man who smiled at me throughout the flight. I suppose he felt sorry for me.

My un-co ness isn’t limited to just hurting me. I’m consistently ‘breaking phones, computers, printers, the safe, all the things at work. These things never happen to the other team members. It’s an unspoken ‘super-power’ that I have. I fried three computers in the space of six weeks. The IT department has said that that is the record, it’s nice to know that even at my age, I’m still reaching goals and breaking records.

I’m fascinated to see how the un-co gene will progress as I get older. I’m hopeful, that it will be like some weird Benjamin Button reverse-aging situation where I just get better with age. Let’s see how that works out!

 

 

Are you uncoordinated or know someone who is? I would love to hear your stories!