I accept the possibility that maybe I will never get well.
You will never be well enough to be a mother.
I accept the possibility that maybe I will never be well enough to be a mother.
You should have done something to save Rowena.
I accept that Rowena died, and there’s nothing I could have done about it.
You are too fragile to be a singer. It would kill you. You would be terrible at it.
I accept that I may never be well enough to be a singer/ songwriter, that the demands of performing, touring, self-promotion may be too much for me.
You are living at home with your parents, you loser.
I accept that I am living with my parents, and that’s fine for now, actually.
I accept that I don’t know how to prevent another holocaust happening.
I accept that I feel guilty for having lived at all, but that I can let that go.
I accept that I have no money, and no idea how to make money.
I accept that my stomach is churning and my heart is pounding.
I accept that I may not get to sleep tonight.
I accept that I will no doubt un-accept all these things a million more times in the years to come.
And so on.
This was well beyond my comfort zone. In learning to live with the voice in my head, I had to practise accepting lots of things that I wish had never happened, and lots of things that I didn’t want to happen. I had to stop fighting with the past, and the future. I had to come back again and again to the story that felt true, and hopeful:I was in recovery from a nervous breakdown. This would take some time. But I would get there. I was no longer going to live in the shadow of the bad feeling that had haunted me since childhood.
And then the sun would come up.
More often than not, I was now getting at least three or four hours of sleep a night, even if it was interrupted.
For a long time to come, my first feeling as I woke up, my go-to feeling, was still a shudder of dread and shame. I was getting better, however, and just carrying on with my day anyway. And slowly, slowly, week after week, my body remembered to sometimes forget itself. Bliss. Some days, I felt okay for only three minutes out of every three hours, but I practised accepting that too.
I still had a long way to go. It would be months, for example, before I felt able to catch an underground train, or be part of a crowd, or play my guitar and enjoy it. It would be months until I could watch television without feeling nauseous. I still, to this day, jump at the sound of a passing truck.
And it would be a year or more until I could sleep the way I used to. But, thanks to The Weekes, I just chalked all those sleepless nights down to training. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now: there is always something good waiting on the other side of fear.
Thanks to my local bookshop, I had now ordered and bought every book and audio cassette that The Weekes had ever made. I was, let’s say, a superfan. Turns out, The Weekes had one of the sweetest old-fashioned cultivated Australian accents you’ve ever heard in your life. Her tape began with: ‘This is Dr Weekes speaking. I am very happy to have this opportunity to talk to you personally.’ What a character! In every one of her works, she spoke of the need to nurture internal courage. She told me I’d need to do this regularly, and purposefully, until it was an established part of my schtick. (She would never use the word ‘schtick’, but I’d read her book so many times now, I was starting to take liberties.) She made it clear that if, at first, I needed to trick myself into little acts of courage, that was fine. My yearning would kick in at some point. That was the key, in fact. She said that in order to cultivate courage, we must want it.
And I was actually beginning to want it.
I had noticed that after I made the promise to one day write a book, and then jumped the fence at the cemetery—both things that terrified me—I felt happy, and alive.
So what else was I afraid of?
With pen and paper, I made a small list, discovering that, in fact, it was not so small after all. It was long. Very, very long. Looking at it made me feel sick.
And so, I decided to tackle it slowly. I decided I needed to just do one thing at a time, deal with one fear at a time. Okay, maybe two. Two fears at a time.
The two fears I decided to confront first were:
1. Swimming at the beach.
2. Applying to uni.
That creative arts course Libby was doing really did sound perfect for me, but there was no way I was going to get in; I hadn’t done the right subjects at school and, besides, I was a mature-aged student now. However, as Ron would remind me, there was no harm in trying, was there? I said to myself, if I didn’t try, there was every chance I’d still be living with my parents at fifty-seven. Is that what I wanted? (Although Ron said to watch my habit of ‘catastrophising’, I must say, I did sometimes find it rather motivating.)
I decided to start with the easier, more practically faceable fear: the one about swimming.
What exactly am I afraid of? I asked myself.
I am afraid of the cold water, because it hurts, and I am afraid of being in my bathers, because I will feel embarrassed.
I am also afraid of being eaten by a shark. (That was unlikely, of course but, nonetheless, I said it because it was there.)
So I decided that the next morning I would march down to the beach
