I was so sick of them worrying about me, and they were no doubt so sick of needing to worry. It was probably time I got a place of my own.
Ron—my ticking clock in a thunderstorm—said this was a sign of good health, and progress.
Financially speaking, the timing could not have been better. My old call centre rang—they’d moved to South Melbourne, just around the corner from my uni—and they needed new staff.
Say what you like about people who work in call centres, that job was good to me. They gave me as much work as I wanted, the pay was three times what I would get as a waitress, and it was a job I could do with my eyes closed. Win, win, win!
I would need to buy a new suit, of course. Like those people in the weight-loss commercials, you could now have fit two of me inside my old one. But that was easy enough, because buying a new suit when you are thin is as simple as walking into Target and choosing from the available items. Life is just easier when you fit the clothes on the rack.
I worked up to twenty hours a week, fitting my shifts in between my uni classes. Some of my old mates still worked there, but many had moved on. The company was now about ten times its original size. It wasn’t like the old days. These days, before they let you on the phones, they made you sit through a week of corporate training. We did trust exercises, role-play, and spent an entire afternoon reflecting on a corporate metaphor about a man who threw washed up starfishes back into the ocean, one by one. The week was both rather boring, and rather fun. I suppose I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for ‘teamwork’.
Things had certainly changed since those early days at the start-up call centre in Footscray. As the company expanded, it also ‘professionalised’. We were now subject to far more rigorous KPIs. We were asked to swap leisurely chats with our customers for very short ones. Efficiency was king. That didn’t make sense to me. Wasn’t it more valuable to make sure your customers felt cared for?
The company had changed, and so had I. Now, at my cubicle, wearing my headset, I didn’t need to make up voices anymore. I was no longer spilling over the side, no longer tripping over all my unlived dreams. It didn’t look like much back then, but my amazing life had already begun.
My first share house after my ‘breakthrough’ was on a busy Fitzroy street, just on the lip of where the freeway began. Cheap rent, good location, bloody noisy. My housemates—dear friends, a couple called Jill and Dave—knew I was having trouble sleeping, and they set me up in the back bedroom: dank and dark with purple walls but far away from the traffic. Still, I stuck to my routine: early to bed wearing earplugs and an eye mask. Jill and Dave would laugh at me as I walked out from my bedroom in the morning, eye mask still in place. Their lightness and laughter were a balm. They were my age, but so grown up, so together. They slow-cooked legumes, baked polenta, fried haloumi and gardened. They had wonderful taste in world music, and didn’t ask questions when they knew I was tired. I was almost always tired. They let me be who I was, in that moment, and the routine of their lives, their stability, their generosity, gave me the freedom and space to start feeling my way into my new life as a uni student.
Over the next few years, I would move in and out of half a dozen share houses, all in or around the suburb I still call home, Fitzroy. Later, I would have the good fortune to settle with my teenage friend Ilka, who by now was a weaver, and invited me to live with her in a long-standing, urban permaculture-focused community in Thornbury which the founders—a bunch of free-thinking Methodists—called Compost (a joke that stuck). There were nine houses with no back fences and a shared garden. Our housemates were two of the original founders, Gil and Mem, who were educationalists, and then sustainable bush-food farmers, and, when I met them, nearly three times my age. For whatever reason it worked beautifully. I would live there for nine years, and raise my family there too. Of course, I could never have predicted that then. I was still busy trying to work out day-to-day things, like how to drive a car without having a panic attack.
I took my time at uni, finding my feet, practising telling Frank to fuck off. I was not in a rush, I told myself. I began, slowly, to rebuild my confidence. Every day, I recited the same things—there was no race to win, there was no way to do this wrong, there was no one else I needed to be, just me.
In the first six months at uni, all I really did was make sculptures of objects that symbolised hope. As the year went on, I also studied creative writing, theatre production, Butoh dance theatre, painting, film studies. Later I would study ethnomusicology and radio production. By audition, I was also allowed to take some additional classes in singing (improvisation) down at the Victorian College of the Arts, which was affiliated with my course. I took the tram there twice a week. It was next to the National Gallery of Victoria, where my mother used to take me sometimes after we visited Rowena.
My heart was raw with Rowena that year; raw with all the uncried tears of childhood, and all the guilt that—through my crying sessions with Ron—I was only just beginning to name and understand.
