Erica Wheadon
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© 2021 Erica Wheadon. All rights reserved.

Writing in the dark

My bio states that I write about stigma, sex and shame. And that’s true.

At home. In the dark.

I have a thesis, a half-finished manuscript, and a bunch of essays in progress, all centred on the invisibility of women’s mental illness.

False bravado is easy. Publishing is vulnerable, and hard. And yet, this piece was accepted by the first magazine that I submitted it to. That alone tells me that these stories need to be told.

This story isn’t complete. Nor is it a redemption narrative. These are just the fragments I am currently able to lay bare right now.

Thank you Island magazine for giving me a space to share them.

Edit: Since we moved, the orchid sits on my desk and is about to bloom for the second time. Every day it reminds me that I’m still here. x

  • September 20, 2021

The last word

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate to have my lyric essay The High Road published in Issue 10 of Stylus Lit – written a year ago when we were in Cairns. My father had taken a turn for the worst, and became momentarily unresponsive, and we had begun to prepare for an end that seemingly would never come. For the first time, I began to reconcile our estrangement with my own self-acceptance and come to come to terms with my Scottish heritage – something I had routinely blocked out my whole life.

Last Tuesday he finally passed away. It’s not lost on me that my very first published essay was about waiting this for day (and yes I did drink the last of the scotch that I took from his apartment. I then bought another bottle). For the most part, I wrote everything that I needed to write in that piece. It was purposefully crafted, lyric and sparse. I didn’t (and won’t) going into the trauma and violence that we all experienced – I will only write about it when I am able. But I wrote this the day he died – it fills in (I hope) some of that sparseness.

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  • September 13, 2021

New ghosts in an old city

This week we were supposed to be in Sydney, but the latest outbreak meant that we had to cancel flights, accommodation and our Hamilton tickets – which we had been waiting almost a year for. We were fortunate to get our money back (not to mention fluke some amazing seats (in a sold out show) in two months time, so not all is lost.

Sydney and I have a bit of a fraught relationship – but yesterday I was looking through an old hard drive and found a few shots that I took on a photo walk around Paddington–a ghost in a city I could never make home.

How the world has changed since that time.

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  • June 21, 2021

Still here

There are about half a dozen blog drafts languishing on my hard drive. In my bid to put distance between first and last drafts (is there ever a last draft?), by the time I come back to edit them, the moment has passed. If I can be absolutely honest, I feel guilty about working on anything else right now that isn’t my manuscript. Even my personal diary has been relegated to a few dot points about dreams, or scraps of thoughts that occur to me throughout the day. Sometimes I diarise through playlists. Spotify informed me that I made my 400th the other day. Whoops.

On that note, here’s one of my new favourites. It’s not finished yet, but I suspect it never will be.

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  • June 20, 2021

The limit of allowable rage

I spent the summer inside, shunning the sunshine because I wasn’t spending it in paradise. And now I am here and the temperature isn’t even creeping, it’s dropping; every morning this week, I have felt it touch me before I am ready. My northern hemisphere friends are waiting for Spring, and I think, so am I. And yet it feels as if Spring was just here, within reach.

I miss writing, but for once I’m not sure what to write about. All of the prose in my book is being hammered, refined. Lately I have I wondered what I will write about once I have this book out of my system. Like, is that it? Am I always going to be writing in retrospect? I mean, I admire anyone who can write about the quotidian, but I’ve always had trouble writing the minutiae of my own life.

Today in a memoirists group, everyone is talking about the righteous rage in Gina Frangello’s book Blow Your House Down, and the scathing New York Times review that sent most of us scurrying to check our own work, comb through it for knots of our own ire. But the conversation has changed today. Many who had already published, wished that they too, had allowed themselves to be angry. I can’t stop thinking about it.

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  • April 15, 2021

Going home

I always knew that I’d intuit the right time to leave. I suppose that’s an inherent knack I have. A crawling wiggles in the back of my mind. It directs my eyes to the horizon, and I feel my skin, tight to bursting around my chest. Still, the reconciling between past and future decisions takes time. My imagination fires up. Where to next? Where do I need to be? What do I need to slough off in order to move forward without weight? Lists are drawn. Pros, cons, wildest dreams, realities (don’t realities always begin as wildest dreams?). There is the A list and the B list. A is what we want. B is something we could make work. Manifesting requires absolute faith. There is no plan B. And yet…plan B got us into the house we have called home since the end of 2018. We jumped, the A-list shifted and we free-fell (gratefully) into this place. In many ways I am grateful because if I hadn’t landed here, I might never have left. Then I would have been living on the west side of Brisbane, without a full breath to call my own.

This will be the third time I return to the Sunshine Coast, since I fell in love with it back in 2006. Each time, the same house spat me out. I kept landing back in Brisbane (do not pass go, do not collect $200) but it took my damned heart, and for every time that I have packed to leave, I have made a vow to return.

What’s next? I am asked. I am asked this a lot. I have no idea. The future, I have been told, will attend to itself.

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  • March 28, 2021

All we have

We’ve stopped saying goodbye. On some days he is so close to the veil that he can make out the shapes behind it. Other times lucidity flashes across his face like lightning – bright-eyed between micro sleeps – and he can remember the names of castles and his childhood best friend. I’ve lost count of the “you need to come in and see him now” phone calls. I’ve already walked through that door more times than I believed myself capable of. 

I don’t remember my parents ever holding each other’s hands out of love. They are long estranged and there will never be forgiveness or closure. But today there was a kind of love. Not out of pity, but compassion. Their collective trauma is encoded in my cells and it is now mine to transform, and transformation, as it turns out, begins with courage. I’ve been angry for so long. And dismissive. It burns energy that I can no longer spare. 

When he wakes up tomorrow, he won’t remember that we were even there. And we don’t owe him the fleeting moments of happiness we choose to give. But I’m beyond who owes who what now. Grief is a slow leak. Moments are all we have.

  • March 24, 2021
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