Where to begin when there is no beginning. Context has already been well and truly ground into this blog. Old ground old ground old ground. Stuck in a groove as they say, the gramophone playing the same ring over and over and over and over.

What was I going to say.

None of these are questions. They are confessions of ignorance that do not expect or require an answer. Rhetoric. What am I saying. Do I have anything to say.

If I said I was not doing well would you just laugh. Captain Obvious much.

The pain is phenomenal. I would say this is the worst it has ever been, but, I have lived with pain so long now I can't be sure. It is always there. Like skin. It is always there. Don't think about it much unless it is acute. That's not true. I think about it all the time. I'm thinking about it now, how all the tension in my body makes my jaw clench and pulls on my scalp and squeezes my skull and I have a perpetual headache, and it feels like there is broken glass sliding between my bones and in my joints. There is no comfort. Anywhere. Not a moment of it. My body is out of sorts, its bones don't fit, the muscles don't fit, the skin doesn't fit, I'm all wrong, everything about me is wrong.

Too much nurofen plus. Ibuprofen makes you bleed, and there is blood coming out everywhere. I see the docctor tomorrow. I will tell him this. Maybe he will give me something else. What does it matter. I was never sure, could never be certain, that the nurofen actually made a difference. Never without pain. You do not understand a chronic condition until you have one. I can say this, because now I have one, and have had one long enough to understand, and when I look back I know I knew nothing.

I had a spell on Tuesday. One of those fainting in a public place spells. Thankfully I was not too public, and not too alone. Fortunately, I didn't faint. Unfortunately, I didn't faint. It's like vomit. You feel better if you just do it, instead of fighting it off. Or maybe it's all the ibuprofen. I didn't faint. The threat of it has been dogging me since. Nothing is solid. Gravity shifts about nervously. My hands shake. I must sit down. I must rest my head in my hands, hands on the table. I must stop. And wait.

Maybe it was because I had a little relapse, and purged.

Maybe it is because insomnia loves me too much. Three, four hours of sleep a night. I'm tired. I'm resigned. I give up. For the last month I've been having accidents with my alarm clock once or twice a week. If you consider I take one day off a week for physio and to rest my arms, that's not a great track record. Got myself into severe flex time debt, because I simply can't stay and make up the hours. It hurts. I'm falling behind at work. The piles of files on my desk are growing, and they're all urgent. All of them need to be done last month. I'm given at least one more a day, and I'm not clearing one a day. They tell me not to get stressed. How. Why. I'm practically part time, I can't do anything for myself in my private life, and I can't even take refuge in the assumption I'm doing my job well. I'm not. I'm falling behind. Clients call and ask for a status report and yell at me and say they will lose their children and it will be my fault.

People ask my how my writing is going.

7wishes has been returned to me. Knocked back by every publisher in the whole world in all history.

The psychiatrists ran me back and forth between intake and outpatient. I sent them the referral over a month ago. Back and forth back and forth. Despite my repeated requests for a female doctor, they kept referring me to a man. No. No. No. Listen to me, please, I can't fight for myself any more. Finally, an appointment on Monday. Every time they called I'd hang up, go to the bathroom and lock myself in a cubicle until the shaking stopped. This is wrong, this is all wrong, I'm all wrong.

There doesn't seem to be any climbing out progressing improvement getting better. In anything. This rabbit hole has no bottom like the sea has no bottom it's just cold black and crushing forever. No walls no nothing just you sinking forever.

There was a permanent position advertised in my office. The very role I'm performing. I'm only on loan from my old department. Of course I applied. I was doing the job, why wouldn't I get it? Everyone in the office assumed it was mine, and my offsider would then pick up my contract.

Instead, they gave it to an external applicant.

Not just the usual kick in t he gut from a job rejection. Humiliation. I'm humiliated in front of the whole office. I'm not good enough. An external applicant. I can't remember how many times I've gone for this job. It is doubtful anything more will be advertised before I leave.

That day I went to a travel agent and booked and paid for all my flights. Spite and bitterness, what fine motivators. My life is propelled by all that is sour. Melbourne to Sydney to LAX to San Diego. San Diego to New York. New York to NC. FL to New York. New York to Reykjavik. Reykjavik to Copenhagen to Berlin.

What is to anticipate. What excitement. I have none. Desperate only to stop this. This. Whatever this is. But I can't leave myself behind.

Does it matter.

I just want my hands back. I want my voice back. I want to write. That is the source of all that is broken. I could navigate every unknown sea the world saw fit to put in my path if only I had my voice my hands if only.

That seemingly self-destructive binge has continued. Meeting more and more stranger. Some people become less stranger due to prolonged exposure. Still. Strangers. You forget. When your people are people who know you and you've each trained each other and you don't have to explain any more. You forget. And then you introduce new people, and at first it's fun and then over a period of time they start giving you this look, as if they realise that it wasn't a one off, you really are like this all the time, and then they start dismissing whatever you just said with "you're weird" and similar. And yuou remember all over again that you're not normal. There's not hing noraml about you. You're all wrong.

What are all these people for anyone. What do you achieve with all these people. They're just distractions. All of them. You use them to fill your minutes so they pass quickly, and fill your head with noise so you can't hear yourself. Just using them. You could be good friends with any number of them, but you'll never know, because you are all wrong and your agenda and motives are all wrong and there is no honesty left with you.

And they. Who are they. What are they using you for. I turned down sex you know. There was a very long time I could not say no, because I believed that if I did the world would take my refusal in black and white and no one would ever want me again. I had to be grateful for any attention I got, because I wasn't worth attention. I turned down sex because I was tired of this charade of whatever it is people keep doing. This social dance. This pretending to be BFF and totally understand and get each other. This. Whatever this is. Do you know what I have to offer? Big tits and a pretty face. If anyone talks to me, initiates conversation or continues contact, that is why. There was a time I wanted to be pretty. Now that I am, I hate it. Nothing but surface. Only the surface. All this depth. With no bottom. No one wants that.

Nothing is getting better. Nothin.

Nothing is relief. Respite. Nothing else. Nothing helps.

I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to bee at work. I didn't want to go ut. I wanted. I don't knoww. Everything I 'm not. I yelled on twitter because, because, attention whoring, take pity on me even though i am not physically capable of responding. oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooopathetic and asked for a hug. asked for one. didn't go and get it, no. felt so fucking ashmed for asking. humiliated again. because i was asking of someone i had no right to ask from. and i though, twho else is there?

i walked to the ferris wheel by the yarra. it wasn't moving. operating, but no one was on it so it wasn't spinning. lost my nerve. no courage. sat by the river staring at it and all the dark globes as the sun set. i couldn't ask for the engine to turn just for me. i couldn't. i'm not worth that. i didn't know what else to do with my time. it was cold. so cold by the river. i found a plastic figure in the dirt. his paint was worn off.



he'd been dropped, abandoned, forgotten, so i picked him up and put him in my pocket. now he is on my desk. where i will forget him too. what has changed. nothing changes.

i had no where to go. no where to be. this is not home. this is not home. home is a state of mind and i am home sick. this is not home. this is not my space. i have no where to be. there was nowhere to be. just sat there in the cold and dark waiting for enough time to pass, because otherwise they would ask why i was 'home' early. and i couldn't be there. but i had nowhere to be. no where to go.

i stood out the front of thet house just standing because, because that meant more time had passed, putting off opening the front door and putting on a mask. jsut stood there on the sidewalk like a creep.

that is. all.

i'm going to purge now.

Undoing One of Many Mistakes; Triptych

"Well, this is the end. There isn't anymore. Now what do we do?"

"The only thing we can do: evolve."

"I think you mean 'devolve'."

"That is a matter of perspective. Anyway. Onward?"

"Onward."



"................Okay so the siphonophore thing didn't really work out."

"I won't say I told you so."

"Well if you're so clever why haven't I seen you in the sea? What did you devolve into?"



"A Golden Ray of course."

Travellers and Escapists

"We have to go, we have to get out," he said. "Everything is fucked."

She shook her head. "There is nowhere to go," she said. "'Everything is fucked'."

Then she smiled, opened the window and let the end in.

This Heart Howls, This Knee Jerks, This Voice Says

There isn't enough footpath in the world. No, that's not right. There is. More than enough. But I cannot walk- No, that's not right either.

At this point I choose to return to this address, or, I feel obliged and I heed that obligation. There is only so many loops of these suburbs I can make before I run out. A street can only be walked once a day. Maybe once at night, too, but it is summer, and the daylight never dies.

The office released us early, as with all other work places given the crowd on the train. Nothing called for my attention. I lingered at work after the others had left and stretched out my last tasks as far as I could, but they didn't have much elasticity to them.

When I left, I walked city blocks, aiming for this train station, and then when it arrived too soon, aiming for the next train station, and the next, and the next, until I didn't know how to walk to the next station, and Hoddle Street is a cunt of a street to drive on, let alone walk, so I caved and caught a train. For the duration of the ride my legs jittered.

The Twice-Only Dimensional Insect Empire spies upon us all. They have planted bugs in High Street.

They. Will. Get. In. Your. Ear.

The printout in the window of the Palace Cinema said 'last days!' Ominous. These days never end. The attendant said yes, this was the last showing of Monsters. Nothing called for my attention. The ticket was in my hand before I'd even thought about it, before I'd remembered the trailer looked a wee bit scary.

With two hours to kill I walked up High Street. I wandered into every new and used bookstore, ran my hands over clothes I couldn't afford, and blinked in the unfamiliar sun. The point was to walk. To move. The point was to stretch every minute mission as far as I could, but, time is always more elastic, always stretches further.

Lunch was at 4.30. A bag of Doritos.

The sun is set. The sky is not dark. The flying foxes are so much scattered pepper washing past my window.

There was an incident with the last post.

If an agent of the Twice-Only Dimensional Insect Empire gets in your ear, it will eat your third dimension, and then, eat your heart.

Monsters is not a flashy action-thriller. It was an unsubtle social commentary, beautiful and restrained, understated without being coy, and gentle, so gentle.

The monsters were beautiful. They were not monsters.

Monsters only exist in the unknown. To know something is to strip it of power. To understand it is to have empathy, and even if that empathy is without sympathy, possibly with judgment, it is no longer unknown, and the monster is gone.

I am not a monster, I am just a person. I know no monsters, only people.

Monsters may be easier to deal with. Monsters always of the possibility of being wondrous.

No, that's wrong, that's entirely wrong.

Monsters only exist when we fear them. In which case, I am a monster, I know many monsters, you're all monsters, there are no people anywhere. Also, I am afraid of the hair in the shower plughole.

B said to T, you'll be on your way out yelling get out of my way or I'll elbow you in the face! B demonstrated this action. I was behind B. Our heights are so perfectly balanced to have her elbow hit my face.

I whispered intensely to B, while she was talking to R, that there was an eyelash in her eye and she had to get it out because I couldn't stop staring at it and it was bothering me. She dug and dug and finally got it. And made a wish not to elbow me in the face next year. Then gasped in dismay because she'd revealed her wish, and thus, it will not come true.

I retreated to my cubicle.

B isn't a monster. She left sherbet bombs in our socks.

This blog. As with counselling, I'm weighing the balance between its benefits and its damage.

I know I am......not easy to know? But then, is anyone? Perhaps I should say, I know I am frustrating to know. I am confounding. My continued presence in a person's life seems to demand more patience than is fair. Perhaps? Maybe? I am only extrapolating, really. No one has turned and said, "Goddamn you're fucking exasperating to be friends with." Not yet.

It seems to be easy to misread me, and normal to get me entirely wrong. Maybe that too is normal. Maybe everyone regularly experiences that chasm of dislocation that comes when you realise someone has completely misunderstood you, and that difference between perceptions will never be reconciled.

This blog is prime for that. All personal blogs are fucking ripe for leap-frogging to incorrect conclusions, no matter how well meant. It's just what happens when your primary contact with a person is highly filtered. How many of you can read my facial expressions, or my tone of voice? There's a limited number of you for which I can claim that degree of familiarity.

There was an incident with the last post.

There is comfort in empty spaces.

Immediacy is in the nature of the internet. Now, now, now. It's drifted down through our subconscious and is so much sediment, now, now, now.

Personal blogs are, by there very nature, personal. Some come to serve their audiences, for better or worse. Some come to a compromise with their audiences, for better or worse. And some just...carry on. Guilty as charged.

When I write my massive long confrontational confessional soul-bearing heart-rending WOE THE FUCK IS ME posts, I'm aware of the effect they have. Comments are mostly closed because of that. People care, people are compassionate, people want to reach out.

And I'm just...not easy to know.

Those massive long confrontational confessional soul-bearing heart-rending WOE THE FUCK IS ME posts are my healing. If I can write them, then the worst of the crisis is past, or I am at least in a lull. To write is to define, to define is to control, and that small semblance of power and processing makes a world of difference. Oh it does. If I can then post that writing, make public, have my voice be heard, then my head is above water.

From your point of view, it doesn't look it. It looks like the Apocalypse.

You never see the Apocalypse. That happens in silence, behind closed doors.

These posts, they happen after the storm.

I do. I love it. People can't help but smile back.

And I am...not easy to know. I do not want sympathy, something that has (just for once) nothing to do with pride. It is a burden. I'm sorry, but to know I cause you concern weighs on me heavily and is a point in favour of keeping silent, and I must not. If I want advice or suggestions, then I will ask for it, and you will know it. That which is unsolicited is so heavy, I'm not prepared to receive it, yet feel obliged to do something about it, even though I may not have the resources or desire.

Most of you have loitered here long enough to simply reach out, let me know you're there and aware. This means more to me than you can imagine.

Others will continue to push help, and even though I struggle to accept it with grace, I appreciate the care I'm shown and haven't earned. Who am I kidding, there is no grace, only silence. I'm an arrogant ungrateful cunt at the best of times. I will push you away.

This runs contrary to your compassion, your caring, and your desire to reach out.

Look, if you leave me unattended in a room with a blank whiteboard, there will be sharks. That's all I'm saying.

Did you know I have trust issues? Of course I do. Especially concerning people who appear to be concerned with my well-being.

I mean, for starters, I have confused ideas about strength. That is, to be strong means you must be strong, which in turn means never being weak, which in turn, can be externalised by simply never displaying weakness. You must be fooled in order for me to fool myself. So my nearest and closest are constantly hurt and rejected that when I am vulnerable and wounded I will not go to them for help, I will not ask for it or hint that it may be required, I will not allow them to be the friend they are.

Conversely, I know what it means to support such a weight. It is immense, and the responsibility is equal, and crushing. I love my friends too much to want to be a burden to them, I love them too much to ever make myself a burden, I will not do that to them.

I am too heavy. Too many people have dropped me. Too much hard work for no guaranteed reward. I am not worth the price to be paid. Those with a White Knight Complex adore me. They're like flies on bullshit, they can't keep away from my distress and anguish and raw bleeding emotional chunder. The smell of pain intoxicates them, and they rush in to save me.

I make a shit damsel in distress. FYI.

When they realise I'm not an easy rescue and I'm hard work, harder work, fucking impossible work, when they realise that I won't enable them to feel good about themselves for having rescued someone from their misery, they drop me, fast as they can, and disappear.

Trust issues. You think?

Concerned for my well-being? Want to fix it? Get the fuck away from me. Fuck off. Just fuck off. Take all your "good intentions" and choke on them.

Be my friend. Make me laugh. Honour me with fun times and untarnished moments. Sit beside me and say nothing while we stare at nothing. Let me be a normal person. Pretend there is nothing wrong so I can pretend there is nothing wrong, for a while, with you.

Don't fix me. It isn't your place, privilege or right.

That task is mine.

The last line in Monsters was, "I don't want to go home."

This is my flat.

Home is a state of mind.

I am out of my mind.

So many times I have nearly deleted this blog. I haven't kept count. This was turning over and over in my head. Depression frightens me. When the counsellor asked me about it, I said there was nothing not to fear about it. By extension I fear all things that may lead to it, and if something I post here leads to something that knocks me flat and shakes my already unstable footing with doubt, and insecurity, and shame, and hurt, and confusion, and uncertainty, and shame, and shame, and shame, then I must exterminate it. In the balance of things the potential for trouble here is great, too great, it is inevitable.

But. But.

This is my voice. The last bastion of my voice. With Baggage and ASIM: Best of Horror 2 out this year, my writing is ended. There is no more "forthcoming" and no more being written. I do not write, I am not a writer. This is all that remains of my voice. To use a voice is to be heard. If I cease blogging, I have no voice. No voice. No voice.

This is my voice. Violently melodramatic and self-pitying, it is mine.

Perhaps it would help to add an ACHTUNG! to the side bar, notifying visitors that this is an advice, suggestion and sympathy free zone. We are demilitarised. This war is purely civil, and, uncivil. It is a spectator sport, and no, you may not join in.

Doubt and insecurity and the fact that I simply can't see anything because I am OUT OF MY FUCKING MIND shakes me. Is this a good idea? Does it offend and insult you? Would it? More than I already have?

Even if I didn't have a blog, people automatically try to fix things that appear broken, and I am stubborn and prideful and take independence to unhealthy extremes. Suggestions must be presented and then summarily ignored, so they may sit in the hinterbrain until they are familiar and unintimidating, and I may consider them objectively instead of hysterically.

I don't know, I just don't know.

Thus spoke the Sages of Public Sanitation, and they were not wrong.

I've had two bottles of cider, which is a lot for me. The last food I ate was that packet of Doritos. Seven hours have passed. The hurt has not worn off. I am upset and doubt myself, ashamed of myself, and shame draws up fury, and so this post is a knee-jerk reaction, exactly the sort of post I make an point of not making. It is a rule I live by: do nothing and decide nothing when you are upset.

I am upset, but I do not think I am wrong.

No. Really. There were three whiteboards. I can't even share the third photo as it happens to be over a potential confidential document.

This is not a post that I have dwelt upon for weeks and constructed carefully. It's word and thought vomit. Comments are on. Go for it. Vent frustration and hurt at me. Be offended and churlish. Be understanding and wonderful. Talk about geckos. Vote on the ACHTUNG! Judge me. Don't judge me. Use your voice.

This is the last of my voice, and I will fucking defend it. No one is worth the triumph of self-censorship. The war may only be in my head, but you will be the casualties.

The days are long. Summer is the invasion of light. There is only so much that sunglasses can hide.

I stopped walking. Halfway between there and here. I did not want to return to my flat. I wanted to go home, but home is a state of mind, and I am homesick. I stopped because I could not walk any more.

And then, when I had been stopped enough, I started walking again.

Once again my heart howls. I've had such high times that the strategies of handling a howling heart have fallen by the wayside and I am out of practice.

Once again I must learn to be heard beyond that howling. There is nothing to do but cry in harmony, and relearn how to discover wonder in the mundane world.

My mind; my dictatorship.

Wonder, significance, meaning, resonance; these things can be hard to see at first, but eventually, with enough time, you learn how to see and everything becomes clear.

Why are you worth knowing?

hush

it's cold. the wind is sneaking in and down my collar. it's raining. the street lights are split-personalities with the runnels down the window. there are layers of stress stretching themselves across my passage through time. thin, delicate layers, transparent layers, skeins that cannot stop me, and yet they grow, and keep growing, and the world is getting heavier. one day at a time.

I don't trust my unconscious, if it can even be called mine. It tried to kill me every night last year, and even succeeded twice. Maybe that's normal for those of us who are not lucid dreamers, but not for me. I control my dreams, I have always controlled my dreams, yet twice I lost, and my unconscious killed me.

I didn't wait for it to happen a third time.

I stopped paying attention, and without that waking attention they faded. Without my spending so much effort dredging them out of sleeping and teasing a half-remembered structure out of them, they were nothing. Pale little things. Sad little things. Dull little things.

Perhaps it was regrouping. My unconscious appears to have put a new battle plan into action. Suddenly my sleep is populated by people from my waking life, and that's not right, that's wrong. It's all sorts of unnatural, it's world-destroying, soul-crushing, and mind-meddling. Is that overly dramatic? I don't think so. With real people in my dreams, I am forced to be Tessa in my dreams, and I'm tired of Tessa, I have enough of Tessa when I'm awake, and she's a pale, sad, dull little thing. Tessa can't fly, leap, shoot, fire, pilot, command, rescue, wrestle, climb, dive. Tessa is not immune to gravity. Tessa cannot breathe in water. What of Tessa? She is nothing. And now, with you 'real' people in my sleep, I have no time away from her.

Now, when I wake, I must dredge my dreams out of sleep and pan events from them, and tell myself, this never happened.

I cannot resent this person. I cannot call this person. I never kissed this person. We are not okay. We are not destroyed. This never happened. I must remember. This never happened.

I don't trust my unconscious.

If I could pour it out into a bowl, I'd put that bowl outside, and let it evaporate in the sun.

Operation: GTFO

I have to go. I need to go. When I get up in the morning, I just move from the bed to the floor. Turn the stereo on. Stare at the ceiling for hours, till it’s time to go. No desire to do anything, and this doesn’t bother me. So, I think I have to go. I have a nightshift coming up, oh glory days of hell and horror. I have days off after nightshift coming up after that, and I have to go. I’m thinking of stealing a car and heading down the Great Ocean Road for a few days. Drive with all the windows down and the volume up. I want hot chips on a rocky beach, covered in enough salt to kill me. Maybe with gravy. Definitely with chocolate milk. I’ll take up cigarettes for the weekend, just to watch the ocean wind steal the smoke away. Lug my camera around and pretend I know what I’m doing, that I’m taking cliché photos on purpose. Walk on the sand till my ankles hurt. Throw rocks off cliffs. Watch the waves till the sun goes down and there’s nothing left to see. Eat more hot chips. Give chips to seagulls. Be in some other space, because I know all these spaces around me now and I have to go.

Thus commences Operation GET THE FUCK OUT (GTFO).

Phase 1: convince parental units to let me take a car for several days, ‘cause I can’t afford to hire one.