Erica Wheadon

Category: Uncategorized

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.

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.

Recently, I’ve been researching attachment theory and trauma and addiction (my usual light reading), as well as listening to lectures by trauma specialist Dr. Gabor Maté. Is it easier to call someone a drug addict, or crazy, than look at our own habits? We are all addicted to something, he claims. We all want to fill an emptiness within us. But addiction itself isn’t the problem, Maté says. It’s the solution to a personal battle that no one can see. Stephen asked me what I thought my addiction was. Music I replied quickly. That’s a given. Connection. As far as addictions go, that last one seems fairly harmless. It’s not.

I got addicted to a losing game sang Duncan Lawrence. Sounds about right.

I’m writing a chapter about what draws us to the edge of precipices, and why women (in particular) walk into the water to die. This morning I realised that l’appel du vide (the call of the void) exists in so many particles of my existence. Not just when I am faced with the enormity of a space, a mountain, a cliff or an ocean, but I have come to learn that music too is its own precipice. Even the liminal unspeakable spaces between a connection with another person can draw me into a place of inconsolability.

Ophelia who feels too much, doomed to drown in her feelings.

I read a poem by Meggie Royer the other day called The Morning After I Tried to Kill Myself, and then watched this beautiful interpretation which I won’t lie, completely broke me.

There are days when I wonder how I am still here. There are days when I wonder if I should be. I’ve been trying to connect to simpler tasks, small joys. Trail walking, local mountain honey, collecting firewood, snipping herbs and shallots for meals, watching zucchini flowers bloom in anticipation of a new harvest, feeding banana water to my magnolias. Embracing the simplicity of community, singing and joy, letting it heal and rewrite some of my broken code. Learning from failure, letting the earth teach me about seasons, the moon about tides. Every day I listen to a chorus of currawongs that I am told are descendants of the first currawongs I heard in this place 19 years ago. I’m yet to understand whether that hurts me or heals me, but I am a whore for symmetry and I never could let anything go.

I tried to unkill myself, Royer writes, but couldn’t finish what I started.

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.

In my thesis, I referenced an article about how women’s writing had been denigrated as merely memoir (predominantly in high profile reviews such as this). As someone pointed out this morning – yes, there may have been great rage in Gina’s book, but there was also great love, and we pondered where the limit of allowable rage was. ‘Searing’, suggested someone. I don’t know. My writing has been called ‘searing’ before and it wasn’t a compliment. Searing is intentional, but it is fast. Like searing a steak. Ripping off a bandaid. It stings, but otherwise it festers in its own dressing. But isn’t it that festering that encourages us to write to begin with?

I was taught to modify my rage in my M.A. To transform it into something useful. You don’t want to write something you will regret, they told me. True. I also don’t want to not write something and regret it, like so many women in this group were lamenting. My rage may have been medicated and therapised, but it was not exiled. Every time I show up to my manuscript, I walk a line that every woman knows well. Don’t write from the wound, they say. We know.

I haven’t taken a single photo since the nursing home (instagram photos notwithstanding). I’ve glued myself to my chair so I can finish off my client editing so I can unleash myself on Melbourne tomorrow. Four glorious days of wandering, in a place that hasn’t seen Spring for, well, awhile. 

I know, I know. Scottish blood, Queensland born. Gemini moon. I am both the chill and the bare feet that defy it.

I suppose I’d better pack.

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.