So nice to put pen to paper. I’ve tried the alternative forms of voice recording, typing on the laptop,  thinking it was the most expedient way to do it but there’s nothing like the physicality of writing.I like the link between the mind and creating the words before me. I enjoyed the quote that came across my desk the other day that in the future cursive writing will be seen as a form of code. Interesting how in recent years how important the actual act of writing cursive has become for me. So here I am in Daylesford at this workshop with Catherine Deveney and so enjoying it. Interesting how she runs it with introductions being such an opportunity to roll information along making individual suggestions to all participants having a whole range of different expectations.

But finally….. is it? How can I say finally? My life is a book without a defined ending perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe I need to die to be able to finalise the story? FFS! Why can’t I just have a finality to a chapter in my life? Originally I thought my story I would be linear, then I thought I could chop and change it dispersing different events along the linear story. Maybe my life is just made up in chapters? I’m not really sure. More introspection. This exercise with the prompts is good. Like the art class I took the other night I need to have more discipline and commitment to what I want to achieve. Prioritising. Appreciated Catherines advice on not taking on not getting feedback / other opinions whereas I’d been told in the past to seek out feedback throughout the process. That never really sat well with me. I guess what I need to take on board from this there is no right way. Just do it don’t worry about what other people think.
Don’t procrastinate.

Alice nearly did that, drown in her tears, when she had that shit day being too big then too small…she just couldn’t win. Sobbing in a Dr’s office was not the way I intended to spend my Thursday. Admittedly I am a little bit of a crier, late night B grade movies and shit sitcoms get me and happy stuff and other peoples hurt, but it had been a while since real physical pain had caused me to weep.

The pain in my tooth, head, jaw and face was excruciating, unmanageable and after 24 hours of ‘bearing’ with the worst of it, it got worser.  Alone on the coach I howled, like a wounded dog, I took a photo of myself on my phone to prove how bad I looked for myself and others for later, when I looked great again.

Walking to the local GP taking deep breaths through my nose and through the pain, scared that he wouldn’t believe me, a bit annoyed at myself, thoughts of ‘I have a high threshold for pain…I birthed two babies drug free for fucks sake’ then switched to fear that the drugs wouldn’t work quickly and also really really fucking annoyed that if it didn’t subside in two days I wouldn’t get to the Gunnas writing class and that would be some kind of irony, that it wasn’t me bailing out on ‘Gunnas’ a woulda shoulda coulda procrastination writers course or even me paying and not turning up and just generally procrastifucking my way through my 30’s, it would be my fucking tooth, the tooth that has needed to be out of my head for four months and I procrastinate and then go and get it out last week…for fucks sake. It was an intense 20 minute walk and conflicting inner monologue.

Dr immediately saw my distress and instead of the casual Australian way of greeting me with a ‘How are you today?’ and the casual polite auto-pilot Australian response ‘Good thanks how are you?’ we cut the bullshit and he said ‘So not feeling well?’ and I said ‘Noooo’ and sobbing ensued.

‘Iiiiitttt really hhhuurrtsss…I got my wisdom tooth out last Fffffriday and it was better… then it wasn’t and now ittss ssoooo bad and I have these drugs but they are not working’

Then as the qualified professional he is he kicked in and did his job… prescribed some heavy duty shit…

‘Take this slow release one on top of the codeine its blah bah blah and slow release anti-inflammatory on top of the antibiotics the Dentist gave you and it will get better.’

Me, grateful but also wanting a pretty immediate result childishly responded  ‘Buutt it hurts now…’ he then pat me, a little awkwardly on the shoulder like those memes you see of people that don’t like human contact…there there silly lady, or like a robot stimulating what human comfort is, but it did help.

Still a few hours off real relief I left the Dr with paper that I could give another professional person who would give me drugs…

The tears continued, they were there when husband, beautiful, dependable, stoic husband, picked me up at the chemist and against his usual wait in the car approach, sensing the gravity of the situation, came into the chemist, that made me happy and weepy, he didn’t hug me or pat me awkwardly like the Dr but he was there and he cared and I was grateful. Professional Pharmacist man told me some stuff about the drugs I didn’t listen to and said ‘you must be in a lot of pain’ I assume due to the heavy shit he was giving me and I told him ‘yeah and I had two drug free births and that was less painful’ like a wanker and like he cared, he nodded and pretended to, it was true though, at that point and even on reflection I’d choose the combined hours of childbirth pain over the week of pain and intensity I was in the middle of at that moment.

The tears continued as I ate the ham and cheese danish and boston bun from Bakers Delight, pulling off the crunchy bits (to avoid tooth agitation) and breaking it up into small pieces to put into the pocket of the left side of my mouth that wasn’t throbbing with …pain…pain…pain…you have to eat before the drugs…take with food ..or what? I dunno what happens might read the packet one day.

All the drugs out on the kitchen table trying to remember what both the Dr and the pharmacist said, ‘take this one with food, and this one every 12 hours and this one every 24 hours and this one every 8 hours and two of these every 6 hours’ only if needed…fuck me, I might accidently overdose here, how the fuck is a dizzy underfed, in dramatic pain, sobbing person meant to remember all of that. Stoic husband stands silently behind me like a body guardian angel making sure I don’t OD…good one mate.

May cause drowsiness…5 minutes later…fully clothed, dressing gown over clothes, on the coach 4:30…dozing off…pain subsiding a little… with some relief I snooze, not deep satisfying sleep, just that half awake half aware but hibernating like your computer,  one tap and you’re back on. It wasn’t until an extra codeine kicker later that night that the true relief came and after my children looked after me. My 8 year old daughter literally put me to bed after me weeping on the coach to her about how much I love her and my family and I’m so grateful to have everyone…high as a fucking kite… Morning brings sweet relief, after a week I was really on the mend and the realisation that I would make the Gunna’s Masterclass yay!

But…the tears continued. Still a bit fragile, still a day of work to go but I’ll get there, I will and I’ll eat and listen and talk and be inspired and write and be amazing. Saturday comes and Intros over with the Gunnas Masterclass Daylesford, coffee orders, nerves onto first exercise the ‘ice breaker’ I’m great at this shit 12 years in corporate easy peasy…enter Barbara to my right, five fucking minutes into the ‘get to know you’ and Barbara and I are letting little streams of tears trickle down our cheeks, we know why we are here…we just didn’t expect to be seated next to someone that ‘get’s it’ and that procrastifuckinates the same… that’s another story.  But so many things have started or triggered my tears over the years the good, bad, scary, beautiful and you know what, I’m going to start listening to the tears more and see what they are telling me. So what’s the moral of this story? Get your fucking wisdom teeth out and if the tears are there…maybe you’re ready to write…right?

Dedicated to Barbara, Dev and the Gorgeous Gunna’s… oh fuck it I’m teary again.

The first time I walked alone in the bush, I was small, perhaps about 8. I was at a family reunion of sorts at a place called Sherbrooke Forest. My mind kept flipping to Robin Hood all day. I was a quiet freckly tom boy. I was wearing identical clothes to my step sister who was 3 years older than me. We wore fake white sheepskin like jackets over red velour jumpers, punctuated by long lime green collars. She was the popular, beautiful, funny one. I felt generally privileged to be in her company and have her as my constant companion.

I can’t remember a lot about that day now looking back from the vantage point of 51 but there is a memory that comes back to me fairly regularly. It is of standing alone in the bush near our picnic site. Turning my body around in a full circle and looking to the horizon of trees, hearing the lyre birds’ strange calls, and being amazed that I could not decipher where I was in relation to our group and had no idea which direction to walk in to return to them.

When you are lost it makes you tune in to small details I think, a bit like looking for clues, paying closer attention to sounds, colours, shapes, objects, moving things. Next minute I was feeling a rising sense of panic. That feeling when you have been a bit stupid, pushed things too far, been so absorbed in something you have stopped paying attention to something else important. I had a sense of dread, but for me, and probably due to the accompanying adrenalin rush, it was also a little exciting. It was a problem to solve, a project, a mission, a challenge. So following the panic, there was a steeling of my resources, readying for the battle for survival of a sort.

And I do not remember the moment when I finally found the family party. I am sure it was under whelming. Who’s asking for me at the party, nobody. Had anyone noticed my disappearance, no. Probably I had been away for minutes, but of course it felt like time had stretched, and in that moment of being lost, time warped, place changed, and I changed. I remember sticks on the ground, the smell of that particular bush, the slightly threatening sound of the lyrebirds, not perhaps normally a threatening sound, and being left with myself as my own companion. I remember the internal dialogue and also the accusations of failure.

Sex in front of the fire was a very long way from my thoughts in that place, at age 8. So were other concerns of adulthood, love, loss and the grand beauty and challenge of life. My challenge was here and now.

I do consider myself a survivor. I do like to be tested. I do like a physical challenge. And now I find I still like getting lost. I don’t do it deliberately very often but I do sometimes. I definitely did it deliberately years later when visiting Venice. Getting lost in that city is like a magical dream. I luxuriated in those strange exciting lost moments until finally I found a familiar bridge that linked into my sense of place. And then I was walking with a kind of heady relief toward the old Nunnery where my then partner and I were staying in 2 separate rooms. Originally it was one, until we had a fight serious enough to for me to ‘move out’ into the room next door.  Sometimes I think this was a warning or precursor of things to come but that is another story.

I have been lost whilst driving or a passenger on many car trips. It usually seems to be when there is a timeline that is already compromised and stressed. How often do we really do things without a timeline? I confess that must be a hallmark of adulthood for me. Sad. But reliably when I get lost whilst in a car, particularly when a long way from home, I undoubtedly re-experience the strange joyful, timeless, freedom of being untethered that I experienced all those years ago in Sherbrooke forest. Infuriating often, for those that I am with.

I stopped shaving my armpits after I was physically assaulted at a Dixie Chicks concert. It was a year ago, but I remember the last time I shaved my pits as clearly as I remember the first time I shaved my legs. I was thirteen when someone pointed out I was the last girl in my class with hair on my legs. I spent a whole bus ride home dying of shame and then half an hour in the shower getting rid of the disgusting barely-there blonde fuzz. Cut forward twenty-two years to a hotel in Little Collins Street where I’m complaining to my friend about how much deodorant stings on freshly shaven skin. Three hours later a man in his sixties sprains my hand and threatens to throw me off a balcony.

We had been looking forward to that concert for so long. Years really. Three kids, a divorce, cancer, interstate moves, chronic illness diagnoses, several job changes, hundreds of haircuts, thousands of coffees, a constantly increasing collection of wrinkles, through all of these things in each others lives that we’d only seen glimpses of. Stupid geography, and love, and all the other small things that take curious people far away from each other. But now the Dixie Chicks were in Melbourne and we were together, sans kids, pumped out of our skins.

I shaved my pits specifically because I knew we’d be dancing. I knew it’d be hot. I knew my damn arms would be up in the air, because it was the Dixie Chicks, and I also knew that if you are going to get your skin up in anyone’s space, you scrape the hair off it first. Well, this is what I would have reasoned had I been over-analysing my shaving decisions at the time, which I wasn’t. I was just annoyed about the stinging and wondering if my outfit was up to scratch.

We both looked amazing. I even put on make-up, which makes me look a bit like a drag queen because I am tall and have a well-endowed jaw. But technically in every other way I was smokin’. We both were. Skirt, lips, boobs, hairless pits. My friend is incapable of looking anything other than the gorgeous ex-model she is, and I was the hottest female drag queen you’ve ever seen. We were golden. We knew all the words and ticked all the boxes and when Natalie Maines told all 30,000 of us to get up and dance, we bloody well got up and danced.

But none of it mattered in the end because we were taking up space. We were women taking up space. We were ‘fucking little bitches’ who were ‘ruining’ the night of two old white men who had paid ‘a fucking jackload for tickets’. And if we didn’t sit down for the rest of the concert they would ‘throw (us) over the fucking railing’. The man who grabbed me twisted my fingers as he screamed abuse. His buddy viciously dug his fingers into my friend’s collarbone. The railing was just in front of us and the drop was three metres onto concrete.

Good thing I’d shaved my armpits though, right?

A week later I picked up a razor – with the hand that wasn’t still swollen from the assault – out of habit. Then stopped. Who was I shaving for again? I realised with a feeling of utter revulsion that I had been shaving my underarms for him. For that old white man who physically assaulted me because I partially blocked his view for three and a half minutes. He and his fellows and their legacy of control and domination were who we were scraping the hair off our bodies for. Because of men like him, boys are recoiling at the sight of hairy female legs. Because of the standards set by old men making porn and getting rich selling shit we don’t need young women think they need to spend countless hours plucking, shaving, bleaching, waxing, tweaking and stressing about how much and where their own hair grows on their own bodies. And, in the end, it’s a losing game. Because play by the rules all you want, as soon as you take up space they assume is rightfully theirs, they’ll still try and kill you.

I didn’t want to please that guy! Fuck him! He had a whole fucking face full of hair! I was – belatedly – furious. I put down the razor.

I was still fuming about it all when I turned up at my life drawing session a few days later. The model was a girl I had an unrequited-and-almost-definitely-inappropriate-but-refusing-to-die crush on. The first time I ever saw her model I noticed she didn’t shave anything, and thought at the time it was a bit hot. Then, after many hours over several months, bodily specifics all blended into a general appreciation of how beautiful she was to draw. So that night I particularly noticed the hair again. Now this girl moves through the world with the confident joyfulness of someone who gives zero fucks about the opinions of idiots, and thinks Confest and camping are fun. She’s nearly as tall as me and she wears six-inch heels and glitter and she is utterly superb. Now she is someone worth pleasing, I thought, before giving myself the usual stern talking to and forcing my brain to reconfigure her into lines and shapes and shadows and definitely not thighs and sweeps of throat and the way her hands rest on the arm of a chair.

So next time I eyed off the razor in the shower I had both of them in my head. Him and her. Two ways of being, two versions of pleasing. I didn’t want to beeither of them. I’m clearly not interested in being an entitled violent arsehole, but I’m also not into camping or glitter. And I didn’t exactly want to please my crush anyway. I wanted, I finally realised, because I am slow, to be who I desire. To please myself and make my body happy. And at the most basic level my body had clearly demonstrated over many years, by way of ingrown hairs and pain and dryness, that it didn’t like me shaving the hairs off it.

So it’s not as useful as getting the police called, which is what my friend did at the concert. It doesn’t really make up for humiliation of crying in front of the entire Rod Laver Arena, which is what I did at the concert. And, sadly, it isn’t going to tempt someone unavailable and out of my league to want to jump my bones. But it’s something. My ongoing hairiness is my quiet middle finger, my apology to my thirteen-year-old self, and my way of reclaiming space. And next time Natalie Maines directs me to dance, you better believe I will be there with my arms way up, giving zero fucks.

The first time I met Peggy, she was wearing an orange dress. Now I’m not into dresses. Wearing them myself, that is. Female yes. Dress no. Jeans always, because they have good sized, secure pockets. Two on the front – one for the wallet and one for the smart phone. My choice of smart phone is dictated by the size of this pocket. If phone won’t fit, I no buy. Back pockets, one for keys and one for the omnipresent tissue to cope with the omnipresent hay fever. Then there is the bonus little pocket on the front, just big enough to hold the change from that vital morning coffee.

Now why are we talking about me and my aversion to wearing dresses and the accompanying necessity to carry a handbag for the above said items? Well Peggy is my antithesis. She loves the dress, handbag and the absolutely necessary, in her mind, matching shoes.

We were at a writing workshop. Me in my jeans with my usual hang back, introvert attitude and her with her, in your face, extrovert, ‘I must be the centre of attention’ attitude. I dropped my gaze, we were supposed to be mingling to select a partner to introduce to the group. The next minute Peggy was standing right in front of me, that very orange dress dazzling me with its brilliance.

Don’t make eye contact! Who else can I pair up with? Someone said ‘how about you and me?’ ‘Who’s asking’, I thought, trying to keep panic from overtaking me. I looked up and yes, wouldn’t you know it. It was the lady in orange, beaming at me.

In an instant I took in the matching handbag and shoes. No… that is all too much orange, all too much a sight from the past. Was it the ’60s or the ’70s when such a fashion disaster was commonplaces? Then it hit me. I know why I was avoiding this woman! It had been in the late ’60s. I was a student and was still under the influence of the current fashion. I’ve worn my own version of clothes styles for years now. It’s no longer out with the old and in with whatever is in this season.

I had an outfit somewhat similar to that which Peggy is now wearing accept that by comparison it had been minuscule. The skirt hardly covered my bum.

I was at a party and somehow, I’d ended up with this hippy guy and we were engaged in some hot sex in front of the blazing fire. We were mid orgasm when in walked a stranger. She stared and stared until finally she said ‘where have I seen that dress before’.

We were semi naked and the dress that had originally been my pride and joy. My means of getting a lay, was flung over the fire guard. How could this person be seeing it and not the state of chaos right before her eyes?

‘Myer’s window, on Tuesday! But it was gone when I went back with the cash on Wednesday. Bitch! How dare you beat me to it, and it was a bargain!’

My man sat bolt upright. Surely he would do something to ease my embarrassment

‘Oh hello Peg. I’m all done here. We’ve just got time to get home so the babysitter can leave.’