Erica Wheadon

forty-one

As a child, I would visit my grandmother and together we would pick blackberries off bushes in a nearby common, our hands and mouths stained with purple. I’m sure that the common was just a thicket of trees, but to me it was a forest, and it was magic. She was the first to teach me how to ground myself, to reconnect with the earth, and that walking, and trees, and dogs and birdsong was its own kind of healing. 

When she died, I was fourteen – having only seen her four times in my life. I had such little time with her on this earth, so blackberries are more than nostalgia to me, they’re a symbol of simplicity, and healing.

At the start of the year, I bought a blackberry plant of my very own. I had no illusion that it would bear an abundance of fruit, but it has been sitting on my back deck since January and I have been tending to it protectively, nonetheless. About a month ago, a tiny little red fruit sprouted and I felt a little pinprick of pride. Life goes on. I had proof.

41, and I’m still not sure how to measure a year.  In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee…(thanks Jonathan Larson) (#nerd). Probably more along the lines of… in whisky, in first drafts, in new books and medication. Doesn’t really have the same ring to it. 

I’m not sure how it’s been a year since 40. What the fuck, world. I’d demand a do-over, but it’s been a pretty good year, world-going-to-hell notwithstanding.  I won’t lie, my interpretation of ‘pretty good’ is a little different now to what it used to be. It’s been the first (relatively) drama-free year in a long time. I mean, unless you can count thesis writing and the slow-release-grief that comes with losing a parent inch by fading inch. 

So what’s changed. Perspective, I guess. Social, political, intellectual. I stopped for a moment and the world kept turning. And so I began to do it more often. Finetuning. Finding my feet.  It was also a Neptune Square year for me, one I had been dreading initially but it brought a welcome introspection. What did I want to take into my new world? What weight needed to be removed, adjusted?

‘Grateful’ is no longer a platitude.  My year has been uneventful compared to so many. I owe so much to my incredible husband and daughter. My family. Those who were wading through shit 10 inches deep, but still reached out to steady me.  To those who listened. You are a gift. My teachers and supervisors, who bore much of my mental weight in a year where they were facing funding cuts and potential job losses.

In the maelstrom that has been 2020, silence has been a protective measure. Normally when I go to ground, I am mired in self-destruction, but this year it was a sanctuary. And in it, I found a little discipline. Fasts, yoga, water, sunshine.  I found a great doctor, and a few chemicals that finally agreed with my brain. I learned to turn off the songs that would trigger me into regression (I can’t promise that this one is permanent, but it’s a small victory). I finally had my eyes re-tested. (hallelujah). When things seemed impossible, I returned to the forest. Feet on the earth. Wind on my face. Birdsong.

I found some astrological teachings that changed everything I thought I knew and weight turned to lightness. Karmic relationships took on new meaning. Up was now down. North became south. I was once asked whether I wanted to be right or whether I wanted to be free. Never has that been clearer than right now. I have learned to observe the tragedies and losses of this year privately. I no longer feel as if I need to justify my involvement, prove my allegiance, tear flesh from limbs.  

I should have been packing to go to Japan this weekend, and I’m trying not to be sad about that, because all things considered, if that is the worst thing to happen this year, then I am fortunate. Instead, I get to celebrate my daughter’s 21st next week with family and friends. How lucky I am. 

Finally, as of last night and after two and a half (long) years, I have finally satisfied all of the requirements for my Masters degree, finishing with an 85 (WAM) (approx. 6.8 GPA). I had been saving the bottle of Moët that my brother gave me on my 40th for the occasion, so it was remarkable that this came through exactly a year later. I’m not sure I’ll be able to cross the stage in 2021, but for now, this is enough.  

After a few weeks of slowly ripening, this morning my little blackberry finally came into its own. It hangs from its branch, proud and plump, the first of its kind.  

Cairns

There isn’t a year when I am not planning at least two international trips in advance. I’m still smarting over our fourth to Japan, my Scotland sabbatical. First world problems I know. This year has taught me about holding patterns, patience. Divine timing. And so, I have no choice but to be at peace with it.

I have always felt as if I don’t belong in this country (but then, the idea of belonging anywhere has always been foreign to me). Perhaps that is why I wander, one eye on the horizon, shrugging myself out of leases, or anything that grates against my desire for freedom. 2020 has tempered that impulse somewhat. It’s funny, for once I don’t feel tethered. This year has forced me to centre myself and find balance, at a time I think we all need it most. Also, it’s forced me to travel locally, something I’ve never held much interest in before (me: why would I do that when I could travel to Europe?).

And so, we decided to spend a week in Cairns. Sun and sand, with September on the horizon….literally what the doctor ordered. We took our time and explored the Atherton Tablelands, Green Island, Port Douglas and the Daintree. I marked Cape Tribulation on a map, proudly. The furthest north I have ever travelled.

I met a man in a purple tent, bent and frowning over a spread of cards.

‘Don’t be afraid of the two of swords’ he said. ‘You’re at an impasse.’

I asked him when I would be allowed to move on.

‘Soon’ he replied.

It’s been awhile since I’ve picked up a camera. I took four to Cairns – the Canon 5D3 and AE1, my old Fuji (now Stephen’s) and my father’s old Olympus. I don’t know why. Nostalgia perhaps. A connection to my childhood. Maybe taking a part of him to a place he will never see again. I don’t even know if the photos will turn out. Like him, I am still waiting for an outcome.

Lately I’ve become disheartened with digital renderings of black and white. The more I shoot film, the more I find digital disingenuous and trite. I did my best with these – I’m starting to resent taking a raw file and editing it (even with genuine film emulations), adding grain etc. Maybe that’s something I’m shrugging out of too.

I took all of the usual white sand landscapes with turquoise waters, and threw them on Instagram with the requisite selfies. These ones however were shot from the hip, out of car windows. Lines – jetties, roads, bridges. I both love and hate them. Potential once again ruined by perfection.

Perhaps I’ll upload the film images when they’re back.

Palimpsests

Music nerd that I am, I’ve been collating a list of every song I listen to for about 13 years now. A song can store a myriad of data – it can zap you back to a moment, or a feeling – so this isn’t just a catalogue of songs per se, it’s a storehouse. I decided to compile a Spotify playlist of every single song I have ‘loved’ on Last.FM. It’s a trip. There are 420 songs on this beast. And I’ve been listening to every. single. one. I’m trying to listen to them all consecutively – just to get a sense of the journey. Some of it is still too hard. (I mean, I have four different versions of “Survival Expert” by Something for Kate. Count them.) Right now I’m at the part of the narrative where my head was turned back to the light. Making the choice to try. Stay. It’s like my own personal hero’s journey.

Two nights ago, I dreamed of palimpsests. I received a letter – the kind you know you shouldn’t respond to – and I felt myself twinge and relent, feeling my resolve give way as I scrawled replies on torn scraps of paper, across walls, on the back of the letter itself, but my words were a jumbled mess. I even tried to disguise my words with fiction and parable but couldn’t do it justice. No matter how hard I scrubbed, faint traces of my story remained.

Defeated, I put the pencil down.

‘It would be easier if we could talk face to face’ I said at last.

I knew how fraught that would be. It would mean going back on a promise I had made to myself. A line I had severed with brutal intention. We walked for a while, before stumbling across people we knew behind a clear panel in a wall. In order to set them free, one of us would have to punch the glass.

‘Don’t do it’ I said. ‘You’ll only hurt yourself.’

The glass was already splintering from the impact where others had tried before. He attacked it anyway. Punching it over and over, until his skin shredded and his hands were covered in blood.

‘Why did you delete the playlist?’

He kept asking, punching, bleeding.

I was at a loss. I had tried to write this, over and over, and had destroyed every attempt.

You gave her my songs, I replied.

Transference of music is a cardinal sin. It is a broken vow. The worst kind of betrayal. It bastardises a moment in time, becomes its own palimpsest, where we overwrite one story with another.

It seems as if all we do is rewrite. Scribble. Erase. Paint it over and pretend it never existed. I’ve learned to stop fighting it and just surrender. Under the layers of paint and paper and glue, it exists. It will never not.

—

I’ve turned off the news. I don’t feel guilty about it. As I said to a friend last night – if I died, the world would still turn. If I check out, the world will still turn. It’s hard to create in a storm. This storm is our new collective reality. Every day is a choice.

My arms are aching from yesterday’s yoga session. It will be magnesium baths and writing for the rest of the day I think.

cavalier as fuck

I don’t know what to say anymore.

I knew what to say about ten minutes ago, when I was pegging damp clothing on the line at four in the afternoon. I carry no false illusion of any of it drying before tomorrow and yet that’s all I can think about now, rather than the flashes of insight, the debonaire prose that now eludes me. It’s almost cruel. Like a dream dematerialising as you awake. Like truth, I suppose, every time you recall it. I hold stubbornly onto a phrase, knowing that I lack the mental room for another. Before I flick the kettle on, I run to my desk and scrawl it on a notepad. The rest will return, I believe. Cavalier as fuck. What’s new.

It’s been six days since I handed in my thesis. The only thing that has mattered to me for two and a half years and now it’s over. The whole time all I could think about was the result – justifying my career choice with a grade, proving that I deserved it. I hit a wall in the final four weeks – creative artefact in pieces around me, questioning my decision to not only take three research subjects within the space of a trimester but changing my research question at the eleventh hour – essentially meaning that I had twelve weeks to research and write 20,000 words. The downside of being a big-picture thinker is that it is difficult to fine-tune the signal – especially with anxiety running interference. Somehow I found my second wind, and made it to the finish line, two days before my extension date. I don’t know if it’s any good. I bat away requests to read it from well-meaning friends with “Maybe” and “One day”. The truth is, I don’t want to even look at the damn thing again. Maybe ever.

What I didn’t account for was the freedom on the other side. Do you know what matters on the other side of your thesis? Fuck all. At first there is sweet relief, that you believe initially to be indulgent. Sleeping in past seven a.m. Late breakfasts. Taking pleasure in reading again. And then the questions begin. What’s next for you? Look, I know people mean well – but I can do without my reverie served with a side of existential crisis, if that’s okay.

So, I journal, I finish my current roll of film. I draw lazy circles with my feet and stare off into the sky. As if on cue, my latent creative energy rushes to fill the vacuum. I humour it. The revelations come, sometimes at speed, and I grab at them, let them hoist me towards their dizzying heavens where I exist for a time. I’m fortunate to have friends that know this process, and act as spotters, cautiously encouraging me, nodding that yes, it’s a good plan, an excellent plan. Groundbreaking, revolutionary. They are eyeing the ground, calculating whether they are any match for the inertia of my downfall. New post-it notes make their way onto the wall and I eye them critically, satisfied. No one is surprised when I can’t get out of bed the next day, equilibrium eluding me as it does. Hours later I feel the low-energy ebb. These smaller cycles don’t frighten me anymore. All I can do is try to navigate them with a modicum of self-awareness.

And so here I am, waiting for new paths to materialise, waiting for a grade that doesn’t even matter. I’ve spent the day creating work far more eloquent than anything I turned in. Sorry fear. Maybe expectation is the mindkiller after all.

kicking softly against the door

My words haven’t been flowing like I’d like them to. Deadlines will do that. When you’re writing to a brief, to a deadline, you can run the risk of completely bypassing the creative which is so paramount to the process, but it’s usurped by this…urgency.

It’s been so long since I’ve written just for myself.

The new journey is full of contradictions. Every day I feel like I know the lay of the land, and then something comes along which changes the shape of it.

This + this = this. But also, this.

I haven’t documented this lockdown. It’s missing from my journals, my photographs. In some small way, I’ve been in denial. I work through it. I send drafts to my supervisor. They are primordial and unsophisticated. I promise that I will find the right words. I make playlists. I try to make art in the downtime. I pretend the outside world is within reach and that I just choose not to exist in it.

I’ve begun a thesis playlist. It’s a work in progress. Some of it inspires the work, some of it informs it.

I’m coming to realise how much depression has shaped me. You don’t appreciate how much time you spend on that spectrum until it’s taken away from you. We all agreed that tamping my lows was the right move. Regulate its winter cycle.

But now I am kicking softly against the door in a quiet panic. I can’t even conjure a deep sadness. The best I can achieve is a kind of hollow melancholy. I keep testing it with hairline triggers. They smart and then fizzle out.


I am neck-deep in French psychoanalytic theory. Some of it is breathtaking and poignant. Some of it remains unevolved. The more I learn, the more I realise I don’t know. Today I am thinking about what has stopped me from posting this blog even though I started writing it two weeks ago. I am thinking about what silences women. I am thinking about how we are still held to account – even by each other. I am thinking about perfection and cancel culture and courage. I am thinking about the women who have come before me, the women who have been forbidden from writing, the women who have been institutionalised for wanting to, the trauma-memoirists who endured the backlash when they dared to challenge the canonised autobiographical form.

And I am thinking of how I have recoded my own writing. Of the overwhelm – the anxiety, the mediocrity, the who-the-fuck-am-I ness. I don’t know. Maybe I’m no-one. Maybe I’m one of the thousands of female post-grad students whose thesis will disappear into the void, whose work will not stay relevant. Maybe my work is not relevant. Maybe the days of glorifying the holy trinity – Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva – are over. Maybe I’m ten years too late.

But then I think about how we still glorify the men that came before them – the hallowed fathers of literature, the very hallmarks of greatness and genius that continue to permeate foundational lit. classes, conditioning them to serve the Symbolic Order.

“I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I’m desperate and I’m tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I’ve experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I’d only like to have what I would have been and never was.” 

Clarice Lispector The Hour of the Star

And then I think, fuck that shit.

x

Limbo

She pushes a box set into my hands. She is insistent. I came for photos, for my family history, I protest. For shreds of my childhood. I don’t own a DVD player. But I take it and place it in a box along with the rest of the scotch you’ll never drink. I don’t know why it’s on my desk. Scotland is too big right now. It looms large somewhere on a horizon I can’t bring myself to look at. You are in limbo, and so is everyone who has ever loved and hated you. ⁣

I shouldn’t have gone back yesterday. I had already said goodbye. I suppose it fits – you were the one who taught me to run back to men that had hurt me. I just need this to be over.