Your Own Kind of Girl

system settle. I took my time. I practised FAFLing every day with small challenges, like walking around the block. I walked, I ate well, I took deep deep breaths, I entered and exited bed at the same time every day whether I could sleep or not, I swam in the ocean, I went to therapy. As the months rolled on, I developed a new identity as a quiet person, a person who didn’t say that much, who didn’t do small talk. A mostly serious person. I listened more, and observed more, and I quite liked these qualities. It took so much less energy to be the quieter one in the room. I felt quite different to the person I had been. In fact, I began to judge that person rather harshly. Old Icarus—that’s how I now referred to the ‘pre-breakdown me’. Too much ego. Flew too close to the sun. I still thought that I’d failed—at travelling, at university, at relationships, and with my mind—and this breakdown was the playing-out of my failure. Aiming high still terrified me. The thought of ever travelling again was off the cards. I just wanted to keep things low-key from here on in.

My sister Lisa did not quite buy it. She knew me very well. She must have observed that if things kept going this way that I was probably going end up a rather bitter old lady. She didn’t believe me when I told her that I was too fragile to go out anymore, that I didn’t like being around people. She said that I just needed to start getting out again. I told her that I’d have another panic attack; that I couldn’t follow conversations properly anymore.

You know what Lisa said?

‘Tough titties! You’re coming out!’

She was not impressed by my little story. She said I was coming out with her and her friends that night. Nothing challenging, just Christmas carols in the park. Be ready by 6 pm.

That night she arrived at Mum and Dad’s with a fully packed picnic basket and told me to shush and just get in the car. We drove to a park in the middle of Malvern, which was hosting their annual Christmas carols concert.

In my pre-London life, I would rather have died than attend a Christmas carols concert—death by boredom. Now, curiously, the thought of attending said event filled me with terror! The voice in my head kept scouting all the potential disasters that could happen at any moment. My mind could not seem to help telling me wild stories that I, and all the people there, were not safe. But, as instructed, I practised my FAFL, applied a little rationale, a dash of humour even (‘Clare, it is highly unlikely a gunman is waiting in the bushes in the leafy suburbs of Malvern, just saying!’), and I was able to enter the park.

Lisa’s friends were waiting for us on a blanket, and when I sat down with them, they were all so kind to me that I started crying. Lisa didn’t skip a beat; she kept the mood up and even though I was too depressed to be able to make much conversation, it was good for me to challenge myself. They must have known what had been happening because none of Lisa’s friends asked me about Europe, or told me how well I was looking, or asked me how I’d lost the weight. Someone handed me a candle and a booklet and I heard my voice singing for the first time in months, which (surprise) also made me cry. I’d missed that feeling of singing with other people so much. It just calmed me in a way that nothing else seemed to.

It was a simple night out, but my spirits were lifted. My hermitage was broken. I went out, and I didn’t have a panic attack. This was good, I said to myself.

One day, a big white letter arrived in my letter box addressed to me. In it, I was remarkably surprised to find a letter confirming my, wait for it, acceptance into the Bachelor of Creative Arts at Melbourne University and the Victorian College of the Arts! I was so surprised, I screamed!

I was going to art school!

And … I was excited!

Or was that terror?

Either way, all good!

When I first came back from London, I thought my life was over. I thought I would never be well again. But in my recovery, in my work with The Weekes and Ron, I was learning to tell myself a different story: that every time I spoke the truth about what I knew, or thought I knew, I felt stronger. So, as long as I was willing to keep doing that, and keep fronting up to the things that scared me, there was nothing so wrong with me that couldn’t, in time, be set right.

And what I also learned was this: it might sound daggy, and you might have heard it a million times before, but Ron was correct when he told me that, sometimes, what starts at a breakdown really can become the moment you look back on as a breakthrough, as the moment in which you started to live your own kind of life.

8

God and Frank

I thought you were God

And I believed in you.

‘I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOD’

(What Was Left, 2005)

I’d always known my family were Catholic, but I don’t think I realised quite how Catholic we were until the first time my new best friend Defah came over after school for band practice. We were fifteen then, nearly sixteen. We met at Preshil, the school I went to after I left Star of the Sea. There were many interesting families at Preshil, and Defah’s was one of them. If I had to describe her family in a sentence, I’d say she was from good, solid, rational, liberal, entreprenurial, bohemian, artistic, Jewish stock. In short, Defah was pretty fricking cool. I suspect now that I may well have