MichA

Writer and Editor

You can keep the spaceship

MichelleAinslieastronautWhen you are diagnosed with a mental illness, the definition of who you are and what you are capable of is often squashed into a stereotype-shaped box. Without asking about the unique ways your illness affects you, many job applications are immediately put onto the toss pile because you admitted you occasionally had anxiety or suffered from depression. If you throw in a word like bipolar or schizophrenia, then you can be sure that your chances of employment are minimised even further.

If you wish to travel internationally you need a letter from your doctor declaring that you are fit to do so and that the medication in your luggage is prescribed. I once wanted to teach English in Taiwan but couldn’t even make the first round because of my diagnosis. I understand that there are risks involved when you have a mental illness. Of course there are. Just like there are risks involved when you have diabetes or epilepsy. However, these illnesses don’t exclude you from the same opportunities, even though they pose just as much risk in certain working environments, such as a classroom.

Fortunately, I have never really given a shit about taboos and stereotypes. Even before I found out about my own diagnosis, I would (and still do) get to know people on an individual level, entirely separate from the identity slapped on their file by others. Just because someone is in prison, doesn’t mean he is “of bad blood,” he may simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. A highly successful CEO of a massive corporate (and a lovely family man) could be a far more dangerous sociopath. What you see isn’t always what you get. And that works both ways. I may be naïve to always give people the benefit of the doubt. But I guess it’s because I hope it’s what they will do for me.

Then again, this hasn’t always worked in my favour. My innocent faith in someone that others walked away from blew up in my face more than once. And allowing the ones I love to expect more from me than I could possibly give…well…that didn’t end fantastically either.

I’m a smart girl and those pesky IQ tests you do in school lifted my parents hopes far higher than my little feet would ever take me. With that level of intelligence, we were told, I could be anything I wanted. A doctor. An engineer. A fucking astronaut. [Read more…]

Writing Workshop Whore

Sometimes, when you have fallen off a very high cliff and are rescued, it’s rather easy to become awestruck with the one who saves you. It could be a sexy paramedic (if it’s an actual cliff), and it could (if it’s an emotional cliff) be a talk, a book, a magical person that enters your world at the right time.

My saviour was writing.

It always has been. From the earliest days when I only just learned how to spell and hold a pen, until now. I have filled hundreds of journals with the feelings I could never express beyond my invisibly sewn lips. There were days that writing literally saved my life. I have fallen off so many cliffs and it was always there to pick me up again, one piece at a time.

Last year I had two writing muses enter my life. [Read more…]

Me too

“Hollowness: that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.”

– Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

 

emilybluntYesterday I finally got my hands on a book that I should have read ages ago. There’s the movie coming out soon and I figured, I have to read the book first, I always do. Gosh.

The Girl on the Train made me forget that I had boiled the kettle and that I actually really wanted some tea. I didn’t notice my phone flashing next to me. I only got up to pee and feed the cats. I read it in one sitting – literally. I sat in the same place, just turning each page until I reached the end.

I think books mean different things to different people at different times. What I take from this one today may be quite different to what my future self feels in 10 years time reading the same thing. See, the thing is this: It’s obvious that Paula Hawkins is a brilliant writer. You don’t sell over 10 million copies of your book cause you’re average. But that isn’t the only reason I loved her book. It’s more because it made me feel something so familiar by living through her characters. On so many pages that was me. That was him.

[Read more…]

Getting my groove back

findyourgroove

Many of you know my sad story of how I had built up a little online business a few years ago – targetted at creative entrepreneurs – and how that mini-empire came crashing down when my domain name was mistakenly sold when I switched hosts.  That meant no more website – overnight – and no more emails.  I could no longer log in to Twitter, so my 1000 plus followers were lost in the big black void and all my clients who emailed me got a bounce-back.  But hey, that was then….and this is NOW!

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The way home

“Your little will can’t do anything. It takes Great Determination. Great Determination doesn’t mean just you making an effort. It means the whole universe is behind you and with you – the birds, trees, sky, moon, and ten directions.” – Katagiri Roshi

I haven’t written a blog post in quite a long time.

I also haven’t been out with friends much.

I kind of felt like a car with a leaking fuel tank. No matter how much I put in, I just kept running low on energy. I gave and gave and gave, pushing my body and mind to the limit. Although I knew it was important to follow the compass in my heart, my relentless refusal to fail made me say yes to more and more projects, even though North was pointing in a different direction.

My body was screaming at me. My hands and face were covered in red blotchy eczema and I had recurring nightmares. When I didn’t listen, my body dived into cupcakes and chocolate and those cute Sissy Boy jeans no longer pulled over my thighs. [Read more…]

You ruin your life by tolerating it

I recently read a post on www.thoughtcatalog.com that resonated incredibly deeply with me.  I have never read words that echoed quite so loudly through my bones.  I just had to do more than simply share the link on Facebook.  So here it is (republished with permission):

How To Ruin Your Life (Without Even Noticing That You Are)

By Bianca Sparacino

Understand that life is not a straight line. Life is not a set timeline of milestones. It is okay if you don’t finish school, get married, find a job that supports you, have a family, make money, and live comfortably all by this age, or that age. It’s okay if you do, as long as you understand that if you’re not married by 25, or a Vice President by 30 — or even happy, for that matter — the world isn’t going to condemn you. You are allowed to backtrack. You are allowed to figure out what inspires you. You are allowed time, and I think we often forget that. We choose a program right out of high school because the proper thing to do is to go straight to University. We choose a job right out of University, even if we didn’t love our program, because we just invested time into it. We go to that job every morning because we feel the need to support ourselves abundantly. We take the next step, and the next step, and the next step, thinking that we are fulfilling some checklist for life, and one day we wake up depressed. We wake up stressed out. We feel pressured and don’t know why. That is how you ruin your life.

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The wild and untamed beauty of my black wolf

“You are near again, your puppy breath hot in my face. You’re cute at first, small and cuddly, little needle teeth nipping but not really painful. I know though that you will grow.

I don’t know who feeds you, I certainly don’t, but sometimes I see you getting bigger and growing more frisky, puppy-legs and chest filling out and that playful silly grin becomes more sinister.

That time you grew and grew until I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, until I had to be taken to a safe place where they shone a torch in my face every hour on the hour through the night, to make sure you were not there sitting on my face suffocating me. In the daytime they kept me moving around from group sessions to craft sessions, to exercise sessions and meditation sessions, to trick you into staying away.

I know you as well as you know me. I tried to train you to heel! And sit! And lie down! Sometimes you obey and sometimes you don’t, and I swear you smirk at me then. Sometimes I know I have to give in and let you have your way for a day or two.

I love it most when you are sleeping, and I can watch you peacefully. A few moments of respite while the dreams flicker past the back of your eyelids, and your legs twitch as if you’re running. You’re probably dreaming of chasing me, closing the gap, almost upon me, ready to bring me down with a giant lomping leap.”

Above quote by Carol Riedt

(one of the incredible writers I had the privilege of meeting at the Stanford writing retreat in May)

the black dog [Read more…]

My piece of heaven

At the beginning of 2013 I had my first breakdown. Not a nervous one, where you feel burnt out and take time off work and need to sleep for weeks and weeks. Not a freak-out “I’m going to kill you all snap,” when life yokes you with stress too heavy to bear.

This was an all-out, lose-my-mind in a foreign country, kind of breakdown. Two days after my birthday, after driving back from Mozambique, I sat wringing tissues in my lap in Psychiatrist #1’s office. Fast forward a few weeks and you will see me driving in my little white Citi Golf away from my life and my home, towards a new beginning – one that I thought would be a slate wiped clean of my mistakes. [Read more…]

Soul Portraits

This past weekend I had the privilege of attending a writing workshop led by Rahla Xenopoulos and Maire Fisher, both of whom are authors who paint sentences into beautiful works of art that are framed in published books. It’s the dream of writers that have just begun to explore how it feels to have the liquid colour on our hands, taking tentative strokes with our hearts onto the page, to one day see our own work displayed in the gallery of a bookshop.

Rahla’s barn in Stanford would be the studio for 16 writers, some already published, others writing for the first time. I was kind of inbetween, searching for my voice among my piles and piles of unfinished books, scattered poems and abandoned ideas. I knew I would write my own story somehow, but I had no idea how to piece it together. Through a flood of heart mining exercises at the workshop, I managed to discover my buried sapphires.

writingbarn2

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True Colours

“Some time after I’d left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me, “You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you’re with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs?  I think maybe you always look like your men.”

– Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)

I like to blend.

I become on the outside what I think people want to see. It’s not something I’m proud of at all. My authenticity hangs by a thread and after a lifetime of being a chameleon I have tended to forget the real me. I have brushed so many metaphorical different colours onto my personality and appearance – bold, red lines for that one boyfriend, soft pastel hues for my mom. Sometimes I chip away at the dried paint, curious to see what originally lay beneath. It’s like facing a stranger.

chameleonpic [Read more…]