JC

A few months ago in an appointment with my psychologist he was showing me the graph results of K10s I’ve done over the past three years concerning depression, anxiety, and stress. K10s are an incredibly standard part of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, so standard that my results from them were graphed in seconds. If you’ve never delved into that world I just recommend doing one for fun, because I wholeheartedly believe we’re all a bit fucked up and clarification and validation are nice. K10 is short for the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale, it involves 10 questions about emotional states, each with a five-level response scale. Fun!

My psychologist always gets me to do a k10 when we’ve had what I so do not want to refer to as this but a ‘break through moment.’ Because the bones of therapy, at least for me, is simply: why are you like this, how do you function out there like this and how do you want to be. During the previously mentioned appointment I was discussing the evolution of my anxiety disorder this past year and post-trauma last year, because I’ve been an easily distressed little mate forever, but these days, the anxiety has grown to be at times so unbearable that there is ‘no way out’. In the moment, I’m just going to die like this, be it in three minutes or maybe 50 years, there just feels like relief will never be possible mid ‘attack’. So my psychologist does his psychologist thing and says, “what do you do in that situation?” and I say, “Well, I guess I just go FUCK IT, and keep going.” This makes my psychologist burst out laughing, he says he loves that. And it’s very true of how I function when my mental health it as it’s lowest, I would rather die than not keep going. I’ve been defeated plenty of times, but I’ve rarely openly admitted it. So we do a k10. He enters my results on the computer and it formulates a graph of all my previous k10s since 2015 and he spins the screen to me. Anxiety smiles at me, literally. From my pre-diagnosis to that evening, this perfect little hyperbola that starts up really high, gradually dips down to neuro-typical levels then shoots right back up. “Aw, it looks like a smile,” I said, because I was terribly sad but need to diffuse every moment with humour.

My psychologist is great because as much a he makes jokes too, which is why I get along with him so well, he diffuses these moments differently to me. Because he makes it clear that not being BETTER is not akin to failing. It’s a process, and I forget that. Further, he points out that in spite of every time my anxiety told me I’d not survive a situation, I did, I am sitting there talking about it. I also forget that. And the reason I thought about any of this is because I booked my next couple of appointments this morning and saved them in my calendar with the brain emoji, and that made me laugh a lot.

My brain. My fucking brain. This brain that without fail every November when I feel sad dwells on the ‘tears in rain/time to die’ monologue from Bladerunner. That houses my most favourite and hated aspects of myself; my intelligence and sense of humour live in my brain, along with my ‘heart’ (non-physical, emotional) that I really hope is good and worthy, but my mental illness lives there too. How I want to remove my brain so often, because sure it’s kind of the most integral organ aside from the heart (clearly organ/muscle), and jesus, if they got rid of it I would be literally nothing, but my brain so often wishes to be anything but like THIS, and sometimes that is being nothing. The brain that has made me think that everything in my life is something I pass or fail. So in effect I am failing at mental health, because I’m not better. This theory only exists because I have been better, I was doing so well and felt so good, so light and airy. Peak emotional soufflè. I mentioned to a friend last night about how I tend to feel like I have no instincts anymore, because everything before me is so intensely analysed, I don’t react, I just think, think, think. The bear has eaten me alive before I finished breaking down the flight or fight response.

At the beginning of this year I had one goal, to enjoy things. And I have, but it’s fucking November now. I have enjoyed a lot of things, and there is so much good amidst the bad of this world but why is it so hard to like myself, to relax? This year I have carried so much fear and anger that I might not ever be Soufflè Jessica again, and it terrifies me. I’m sure it drives my psychologist crazy everytime he asks what I want out of therapy and I say, “You can snap your fingers and make me how I was when I was really good, cheers.” I know it never worked like that, and I continue therapy and try to use every practise I’m taught to quell rampant anxiety. I TRY. I can never stop trying, trying to be better, to love the people I love and keep making people laugh so they can feel soufflè style happy. I know that ol Teddy Roosevelt said “comparison is the thief of joy” so I’m also going to try and be less angry about having the comparison. I guess it’s all work and remembering I am still sitting here, in spite of any number of things. 

So out I have to go, saying FUCK IT, working and trying to again feel like these:

Last night I was having a mini breakdown - it’s part of a depressive episode I call spiralling. When I feel like shit already and there’s something extra just tips me over the edge, and once over the edge everything else just rolls on over the edge too and piles on top of me. I spiral down. So I cried for over an hour last night and like most sensible people, while in this mood I decided to listen to my favourite sad songs. Which included Nicest Thing by Kate Nash. Which led me to Kate’s latest album Yesterday Was Forever. I had completely missed its release, but I have listened to it three times straight since finding it on apple music. I am fucking enthralled, and finding it last night was the most timely thing. Packaged up in gorgeous Kate Nash styling, is this perfect snippets explaining mental illness. And it’s SO bloody good, all the way through. It’s so good I can’t coherently explain why, which I think explains it.

I just need to document some of my personal favourite moments from Yesterday Was Forever:

“Well I wish that I could take you to another time when everything was cool and my mental health was fine but I'm trying” - Life In Pink

“What's wrong with me? Am I a person yet? What's wrong with me? Wish I could let my brain decide and stop the pain” - Life In Pink

“What doesn’t kill you, don’t kill ya” - Call Me

“I tell myself no matter what happens tonight that everything will be OK. Yeah, everything is gonna be alright, I'm not sure if I believe it but I hold onto it so much” - Musical Theatre

“Nothing ever sounds like it should, I keep holding on” - Musical Theatre 

“And you’ll never look back at the sun ‘cause it’s always shining // never take for granted, I’m always there if you want it” - Always Shining

You should just listen to To The Music I Belong because it’s so beautiful.

The repeated refrain of “I’m trying” rings true to all the tired hearts out here.

No doubt I’ll be looping Yesterday Was Forever all Sunday, and you can too if ya like, apple music & spotify.

Big ups and love to Kate Nash for being an angel.

Tonight I knew I could not attempt to sleep until the clock told me you were on your way out of this town.

For years I have written yearly retrospectives, not because I’m even slightly sold on the idea of a new year equaling a new slate, but rather because a year is a nice amount of time to measure, to look back on a slice of my life and ask: “well, what the fuck was all that about?”

2017 ended up being fucking bizarre, to try and find one word to capture it all. For the majority of it I have felt like I had no idea what or how to ‘be’ anymore. I have been more nihilistic, grateful, hopeless and, weirdly enough, funny than ever before. I do think I have the rare fortune of knowing why, which brings me to the story I have tried to tell consistently since April … the story about the time I almost died.

Throughout 2016 and into 2017 I was furiously combating the fact so much of my life I’d been too scared to do a lot of things. This, when referring to a medicated depressed n anxious person like me, is called flourishing. It was great, I bloody loved it. I did all manner of fun shit just because it was fun, I was well, and I could. So I went to a festival that was longer than one day, something I’d never done before because there was too many things that couldn’t be controlled. But I was into fun shit now! So I went. It was brilliant fun and I genuinely had the best time, but I also managed to contract meningococcal, which incubated for a few days before rearing its head as pneumonia, septic shock, and kidney failure. I almost died. I was in an induced coma for eight days, I was told that during the first 24 hours of my coma, the team treating me expected my heart to give out. It was never kept from me how incredibly dire my situation was, but I was never scared. So unlike me, I was overwhelmed with valium and gratitude I suppose. I never freaked out, but I also never wrote about it, and I write about everything.

I tried countless times to write about my near death experience, but everything I wrote was too sarcastic or too angry, and the only conclusion I was ever able to reach was that near death experiences lack context. I felt lucky, that was it to begin with. What a fucked up situation and what a lucky girl I was to be entirely okay. I feel that I reached a point of being fucking tired of being vulnerable. I had zero control while in a coma, my teeth were brushed for me, news of my situation was spread without my permission. As much as being vulnerable and real is important, more often than not it feels like shit. Not writing about my experience became my ‘fuck you’ to anyone who used my experience as gossip fodder when I couldn’t speak for myself. I felt it was better to present myself as not giving a damn. So I charged forward, doing my best to be cool and unaffected, but silence didn’t coax my trauma into vanishing. It made my calmness about the whole thing just become numbness. And then, because of the unpredictable nature of the universe, I was put in a situation where I was being discredited about my near death experience …. yeah. That’s a thing! I had to fine comb my experience juxtaposed with the notion I was reckless. Surprise, that fucks you up significantly. Being numb had me convinced I had been cauterised and was safe from the trauma I experienced, but I wasn’t. And it wrenched me from being numb into looking at this shit show through a lens of personal fault, which was awful and something I was exceptionally good at doing, see my history of shitty mental health. As a form of self preservation, I had brushed aside the terror that sat beside me in the hours before I was put in a coma to be intubated. I was oddly calm at the time, but I couldn’t breathe and I was in agony, and that memory is permanent. And I am completely okay, and astoundingly lucky, but that is a fucking scary thing to live through, but I lived.

All that being numb did for me was create heartache with no outlet - and that is not chill at all! It’s made me so angry and sad and stressed, it’s made me feel like the prozac that changed my whole life doesn’t work as well anymore. It’s made me feel like I don’t know how to be, but it’s not going to make me stop. I will likely make jokes about my near death experience for the rest of my life, because that’s what I do. I have to carve the good and funny out of every frightening and bizarre thing that might happen. 2017 cannot only be a year that was frightening and bizarre.

In 2017 I almost died, but then I totally stared death in the face and said ‘go fuck yaself’. And I saw Bruce Springsteen live. I read Springsteen’s memoir Born To Run which knew my sad and tired heart inside out. I read so much poetry. Music saved my sanity - as it always does. I cried in hospital listening to ‘Alright’ by The Attics on repeat because it was dreamy and I was alive, the opening mimics a heartbeat and I still had one. I listened to More Scared Of You Than You Are Of Me by The Smith Street Band everyday, I love it very much. I always said yes to cocktails. I saw Patti fucking Smith play her last ever Australian show. I saw Midnight Oil who I’ve loved since I was little with my beloved Smithies supporting. I danced. I made people I love laugh, and they made me laugh too. I tried to be what I thought I needed to be in response to my year, even though it didn’t always make sense. I went to galleries and a house of mirrors. I started getting an extra shot of espresso in my morning coffee. I went to Adele with the worst hangover of my life, and my Dad told me to ‘walk it off’ in the 32 degree heat. Which is SO funny - I’m glad that nothing in this world has ever stopped me noticing when things are funny. I felt like I ruined everything, multiple times. I continued to do fun shit. I dedicated afternoons solely to writing. I don’t end this year feeling particularly hopeful, but I don’t think you get that all the time. In fact I know you don’t, that wouldn’t be life.

Over and over this year I’ve thought about the Halsey lyric, “I hope hopeless changes over time” and I really do. Going forward I want to feel less sad about things that I cannot change or rectify. And I want to be calm in a way that is not a bullshit deception mechanism to awful things. But I’m trying to learn to not expect anything, given I could never have anticipated this past year. And, of course, I hope hopeless changes, I desperately, truly do. I want to notice when I am happy. And to love, always, and to be loved.

OH and no comas 2k18 would be fucking great, cheers.