Although I was making progress, I was still very thin-skinned. All it took was the sight of a newspaper headline, or the flare of fire and heat in a metalwork class, and my mind moved quickly to images of destruction, violence and emergency. Death, potential death, was still everywhere I looked. Sometimes it was too much, and I had to just hide in a toilet cubicle with earplugs in my ears and practise my breathing, coming back to the present moment, centring myself, asking for help, for the feelings to move. I may have been fragile but, fuck me, I was determined.
In class, I was quiet. Shy. I kept to myself that first year. Although I was practising challenging my fears, I still couldn’t think too far ahead. I wanted to keep my life as simple as I could. And, still, I was often overwhelmed, mainly by my own feelings. The students around me appeared confident and gung-ho. They wrote books, put on plays, made films. One made a plaster cast of her whole body, nude. I admired them all terribly. But I was not there yet—I was still too timid and prone to panic to claim my place in this coterie of creative people. I thought they were fearless. I thought they had something I didn’t.
Even though I was still scared, still jumping at shadows, still doubting myself, here is the point: I showed up anyway. My FAFL and my FOF (Fuck off, Frank) were enough to get me through those first days, then weeks, then months, and soon, I had started making things. I modelled tiny angels out of wax, melted silver with a blowtorch and cast the angels in metal using a centrifuge. I sewed tiny little pods of seaweed to sequins, to costumes, to stories. When my fellow students in film studies talked over intense storylines—youth suicide, murder, rape, terminal illness, even some Greek myths—and I felt too many feelings (these days you might call this triggered), I excused myself, found that toilet cubicle, and sat there until the feelings passed. I worried that my fellow students would think I had a bladder problem, but no one ever seemed to notice. Truth be told, we were all a bit odd.
Some days were more difficult than others. Some days, when I felt scared for no reason, I would just leave, go to Dad’s chambers, and sit in his office with him quietly as he prepared his cases. I still needed my parents, very much. Dad was such a comfort to me, always. He never asked me anything. Nothing. He just let me sit, and be; if he wasn’t busy be would buy me lunch, I’d feel better, and then back out into the world I’d go.
Around this time, in addition to my studies and my jobs, and therapy with Ron, I also started going to weekly group therapy at the Cairnmillar Institute in Melbourne. Dear God, it was awkward, sitting in that room in a circle with strangers who were much older than me, with much more complicated lives—kids, divorces, addictions, and so on—and I don’t remember much about what I added to the group. My main memories are of watching the facilitators, their skill, the way they used open questions and active listening to try to include all of our voices, all of our feelings. I had almost nothing in common with any of those people and, yet, we were all there for the same reason—we were looking for wisdom and purpose and peace. These groups were real and raw, and gave me an insight into adulthood that was truly formative. We didn’t have to be best friends. We didn’t even have to like each other. We just had to learn how to get along and, in general, that is exactly what we did.
Slowly, slowly, the thin membrane between myself and the outside world grew thicker. Slowly, slowly, my confidence returned.
As the months rolled on, I grew braver, more experimental with my clay work; they were still only small-scale pieces like boats and bowls and goblets and masks, but I started playing now with different materials and glazes and styles of firing. Raku firing was my favourite. It’s a Japanese style of low-heat firing where you add combustible items to the piece; you can’t predict how it will look when it comes out. I appreciated the symbolism of this. The way it allowed for artist and magic/fate/randomness to create something together, which allowed for the possibility of a happy (or, at the very least, rather interesting) ending. I also fired my pieces in wooden boxes stuffed with seaweed (saggar firing), just to see what would happen, and was so delighted with the result I did it again and again. I called these kinds of harmless experiments my Random Creative Adventures. I found the less attached I was to outcomes, to the future, the better I felt.
I was still very much inspired by the hope of a future further off—the one when I was forty, and a writer, and a musician, maybe a mum, with a lovely man—but any other timeframe (such as imagining what I would do next year or the year after) made me feel like I was choking.
So I kept things open. I explored. I allowed myself to do just one thing at a time. My only real hope for my time at uni was that I would survive (Fuck off, Frank) and that somewhere along the line, I could make something beautiful, hopeful, true—that I could take the straw of my life and somehow make gold of it, and that maybe, just maybe, I would one day remember what it really felt like to
