Erica Wheadon
© 2021 Erica Wheadon. All rights reserved.

Category: THOUGHTS

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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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.

Careful truths

This morning I woke up to an interview with Glennon Doyle about the genesis of her blog. She began writing, she said, because she was “dying for a place to tell the truth.”

Well, shit.

She talked about the long missives she would send her friends, the way her story was spilling out of her. I kept nodding, yes, yes. My friends are still on the receiving end of of similar rants, although perhaps not as long anymore. I’d like to say that this is because I am writing a book, but that’s not necessarily true either. Writing, as I have learned, isn’t about pouring your story onto the page. It’s as much about curation and craft as it is anything else. Finding connections. Truth, I have discovered, often lies between the lines.

I met someone recently for coffee (okay, bad juice in an empty cafe) who encouraged to me pour out my unabridged version; realities and feelings tumbling out in ways that I will never be able to put my name to. She then talked about her life and as I listened, a shared reality began to emerge. This isn’t just my story. This is hers too. And I know there are more out there like us – too-much women grappling with the stigma attached to our choices. She implored me to continue writing in the same way that I myself have crawled through essayistic writing and memoir, in order to find traces of myself. And yet, sometimes it’s that very work that halts my efforts. It is both a blessing and a curse to have a story and a desire to share it.

Glennon Doyle had legions of blog followers when her books came out. She had amassed an army of believers who moved swiftly to defend her against the tide of scorn, and sometimes I wonder what hope an introvert who is disenchanted with social media has against that.

My new friend called me brave. It’s not the first time. Truth be told, I am afraid of underestimating the courage that I will need to summon. What if I only summon a little and then come up short? What if there are consequences that I can’t see?

I told my new friend that I am more careful with my truths now, and that even these posts will sit in drafts, often weeks at a time.

What kind of world do we live in when it requires this much courage just to be yourself?

40 lessons from 2020

Yeah I know. A calendar is a construct and 31 is a number etc. etc. but since I like a bit of ritual and reflection, here’s a quick and dirty list of forty lessons I’ve taken away from this clusterfuck of a year.

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2020 – Songs that Shaped a Year

This year’s soundtrack didn’t take me long at all. Out of the thousands of songs I listened to in 2020, these were the ones that I obsessed over, etched into my psyche and wrote alongside the most.

In a bid to combat what could have been a treacherous year, depression-wise, I did my best to avoid anything that would potentially kill me (Woodkid, Nick Cave, Anaïs Mitchell etc) (progress), so these songs are stories of my highs, lows, ruminations, triumphs, vindications, decisions. Stories about family, forgiveness, addiction; the songs that would play on repeat in my head at 3am.

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Twenty-Two Exposures

I’ve started to dig out some of my older work – most of the time I don’t really know what to do with it, so it stays buried on my hard drive. Photography and I haven’t really been talking this year – we’ve been eyeing each other from opposite sides of the room, looking for an excuse to start a brawl.

I took these images in 2019, pre-pandemic. It felt disingenuous to glorify normalcy of any kind in 2020 so I didn’t look at them again, but now I feel a small ache creeping in my chest. Looks like we don’t have to come to blows after all.

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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. 

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