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chapter-19

grace

I think it was a Thursday.

And about seven or eight years ago, during that nebulous, drawn-out period in my mid-thirties. When I was melting down.

In the preceding twelve months I’d left my job in magazines, broken up with the destructive ex, been through the porn star saga, the Machu Picchu and diving with sharks misadventures and been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. I’d just been robbed and was contending with the communication breakdowns (phone, internet). I’d been housebound, on and off, between the misadventures, for almost nine months, my Hashimoto’s having rendered me unable to walk or work.

I was fat, sick, broke, unemployed, humiliated, isolated, alone, defeated and entirely stripped bare.

Anyway, on this late winter morning I’m kneeling in front of the mirrored wardrobe in my bedroom, silently howling.

I’m clinging to the floor like I’m going to fall through it and I’ve been scraping at my stomach. It’s red and bleeding from the nail tearing. I’ve been here for three days hyper-thinking and knotting my ball of wool, and I haven’t slept apart from a dopey hour or two before sunrise each day. The whole sorry story had finally come to a glorious head. I’m in a Category 5 anxious spiral.

I recall thinking that my behaviour was all so drama-ish. Did I learn this affectation (the silent howling and stomach scraping) in a movie? I’m a middle-class girl in orange Cookie Monster pyjamas having a breakdown on a Thursday when most people are cajoling their kids to eat breakfast or racing to bus stops.

My neighbours are starting their day. The security door slams next to my bedroom window and the kids from the top floor bicker as they clamber down the stairs on their way to school. Life is moving on without me. I’ve fallen off the conveyor belt. More hyper-thoughts.

Perhaps you’ve never silent howled before? Silent howling is a desperate, primitive scream out to The Gods reserved for when you’ve sunk as low as you can go. It’s that scream from the dank, primordial place I described previously, the pure, chundering-­forth expression of the pain at the core of the human experience. It says, Why? And No! And Wrong! It’s the outraged scream of a just-born baby after it’s ejected from the womb.

It’s a silent scream because when you’re a highly controlled, insanely well-behaved A-type with a too-tight grip on life, it’s beyond you to howl your pain at full throttle. I’m in the worst place I’ve been in my life. I no longer care about my own welfare. And yet I’m worried what the neighbours would think if I howled out loud. And the very fact that I’m micro-managing my own breakdown takes me down even further.

But then, on that Thursday morning, I look up. I look for myself in the mirror. I don’t recognise the reflection. I’m gone.

The silent howling stops.

I can only say, looking back, that something dissolved that afternoon. All the things that propped me up and defined ‘me’ had disappeared – my job, my athletic physique, my robust, healthy appearance, my energy, my ‘strong assertive female’ persona, my ability to conceive, my life savings. Gone.

It was a little like that sensation I remember as a kid when dad drove over a dip in the road and my stomach was left in the air. But I didn’t bounce back to solid ground again; I stayed suspended.

And this is what I thought in that moment: I’m ready to die.

This was not a violent or desperate thought. Nor was I thinking ‘I’m currently being suicidal’ or ‘I want to die’. It just felt like the inevitable dead-end of the descent I’d been on. I’ve since learned that this is what being suicidal can often entail – something of a dissociation from the true meaning of what you are contemplating. It feels like a calm, liberating solution. Dr David Horgan, from the Australian Suicide Prevention Foundation, says that once we see dying as an option, our minds will focus on finding proof that this is right, ignoring all the evidence that it’s a shockingly bad idea.

I’m still looking at my reflection. I have been here a few times before. I know this look. But this time, rather than fleeing from it, I sit with it.

Something wafts into view now. It’s an idea and it has words: If nothing matters, if I have no attachments, no commitments and nothing left in my life, I could just quietly disappear. I could self-annihilate. Why not? There was nothing to stop me, nothing I was responsible for. This felt light and liberating.

Or – and now the feeling gets even lighter – I could choose to exist, anew. From ground zero, I could opt back in. And I could do it freely, working from a blank slate without all my old stuff – no expectations as to how life ‘should’ be lived, no false and unhealthy ideas about my worth (that I have to achieve to be loved), no attachment to possessions or money,. I could be an interloper with no fixed address and just the clothes on my back. I could do life completely differently.

It becomes viscerally apparent that I have nothing to lose and no one to impress. This appeals and it swells as an idea, unhindered by the hyper-thinking of yore.

At this point I laugh. It’s the laugh I’ve laughed before when I went bungee jumping in New Zealand with my brother Ben. I fell and I fell, and when I finally experienced the tug at the end of the rope I just laughed and laughed.

And then that was it. I got up, peeled off the Cookie Monster pyjamas and stood at the fridge naked and ate peanut butter from the jar with a soup spoon.

124.

All of which would be a fairly thuddish anecdote if it weren’t for what came next.

The following day I’m at my Chinese doctor, Dr L, having needles – 12 centimetres long – tapped into my ovaries in an effort to inject life, or chi, back into the sad little things. My stomach resembles a mini slalom course and some of the needles are vibrating wildly, doing wide loops over my pelvis. ‘You are stuck.’ Dr L keeps telling me. I know, I know.

My phone rings. I answer it. It’s TV host Kerri-Anne Kennerley.

I don’t know ‘KAK’ as she’s known; I’d appeared on her show as a guest a few times.

Lying on the collapsible table and trying not to sound horizontal I realise she’s asking me to fill in as host for her show. On Tuesday. ‘I’m going on leave, something’s come up. You’ll be wonderful.’ I don’t tell her I’ve never hosted a TV show before. Or that I don’t know how to read an autocue. Or that the day before I was about to take leave on life.

I put on my best Sitting Upright at a Desk voice. ‘Wow, I’d love to.’ Because, that’s mostly my default position. Yes. Yes, of course. Of this, I’m very grateful. I have been often.

On the Tuesday after the Thursday, I played KAK for a day. The Channel 9 wardrobe department dressed me up in a hot pink Fendi dress and bright orange Gucci heels that render me a good foot taller than the infomercial guy who I crack go-nowhere gags with in the second segment. The hair and makeup girls tease out my limp hair and pencil in the gaps in my eyebrows.

Three minutes before going to air I’m shown how the autocue works and told to look to the camera with the red light on top. But I’m not questioning anything. I don’t expect anything. A part of me wonders if this is resignation. I’m certainly tired. But I’m also … what can I call it?

Loose.

I recall being made to jump on a trampoline that had been pulled into the studio, an advertorial for God-knows-what. And some Taiwanese food sculpture artists created a choco­late carving of my face and bust. They present it to me in the final segment. I’m topless and they’d fashioned me some engorged chocolate nipples.

A few weeks go by and I get a call from Henrie. Henrie was the station’s talent director and she’d chatted to me briefly after the show to say I’d done rather well. Shortly after, however, she left her job at the station and moved on to become a casting director. Her first gig was with a new show that was to be called MasterChef.

‘You used to be a restaurant critic, right?’ I had. ‘I want you to meet the producers of this new show. They might not like you.’ Henrie has a unique bluntness, one that keeps you from being disappointed by elevated expectations; she was perfect for this period in my life. ‘But who knows.’ I only just remember the audition; my head was incredibly foggy. I recall I didn’t know I was being auditioned. I had to taste and critique food sitting on a stool with a bunch of chefs.

I struggled to just get out of the house, my limbs swollen and wobbly from the autoimmune disease inflammation. And I had to borrow a friend’s dress because nothing in my wardrobe fitted. I was now a good two sizes bigger than when I left Cosmopolitan.

But let’s cut now to Christmas Eve. I’m playing Boggle and eating liquorice bullets with one of my brothers. Henrie rings. ‘Darling, you got it.’ I run outside onto the balcony and I punch the air. No. Frigging. Way. ‘And you’re host. You start in two weeks.’ I punch wildly. I have no words.

125.

This is grace. And this, my patient friends who are still with me 286 pages in, is where this anxious journey delivers us.

I’d rather leave aside the standard Christian notion that appears in the Gospels that regards grace as ‘the love and mercy given to us by God because God desires us to have it, not because of anything we have done to earn it’. Although if you reread the above and replace ‘God’ with ‘the flow of life’ then I guess it is in fact pretty much what I’m talking about.

Grace goes a little something like this, and apologies to the philosophers and theologians who’ve put far more detailed effort over the years into explaining it.

You descend. An anxiety spiral takes you here pretty effectively. In fact, an anxiety spiral is the descent towards grace. Can you see how I’m repositioning things here? Can you see what I’ve been working up to?

You go into pain. How? You sit in it. You stay. You simply be uncomfortable. You get raw. You don’t change hotel rooms.

Then you open. As you sit in the pain, you face what you’ve been fleeing. You see it and let it be. You create space for it to do that old ‘it is what it is’ thing. You let it unfurl and express. This is not easy. But it’s bold and brave and purposeful.

Next, you release your grip. You have to. You have to give in. You can see now that you are not the captain of your life. Goddamn, it’s hard. But it’s the inevitable truth. And with time you do experience it as sweet relief.

Then something shifts. It might be a simple coincidence that presents itself, but one that is so truly random that you have to take note. You know, a sliding door moment. It might be a stroke of luck that turns around your fortunes in one afternoon lying on an acupuncture table. It might be that the openness and humility you’ve created in this process of going down into your anxiety allows someone to step forward and give you the love you need. They hold you. This, too, is grace.

In all such instances, the sliding door moment or the stroke of luck is not the point. Mostly they’re ludicrously innocuous (I mean, a gig jumping on a trampoline in a Gucci dress?!). In fact, I think the stark innocuousness probably helps steer us to the real point – we see that we don’t have to do this thing on our own. Yep. That’s it. That’s grace. Grace is the ‘is-ness’ of life, presented to you on a cracker, ready to eat. It’s an openness that plants you into the flow of the river. Grace doesn’t bring a party to town. It’s not happiness. It’s not a fleeting high. It’s a delicate, yet whole, gift that whispers in our ear, ‘Life has this one covered’. It tells us that things fit. That you fit. You can’t try to get it, you can’t earn it or deserve it. It just is. Just as a flower doesn’t try to bloom. It just does.

126.

David Brooks feels deeply that the endpoint of the anxious journey is the acquiring of character. Writing about the world’s greatest thinkers and leaders who pass through suffering before arriving at their significant position in history in the New York Times, he suggests, ‘Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.’ I rather love this line. It suggests a subtle transformation or perspective shift, but one that’s perfectly pitched for showing you the truth of life. For me I didn’t come out healed, I emerged from that touch-and-go Thursday with a calm knowing. A connection. A full, deep sense of the Something Else. A weather vane at my core for what mattered. I also emerged knowing this was enough. It was perfect.

127.

In psychological circles it’s called post-traumatic growth. I love research that produces a percentage that I can roll out at a party. Like this one: According to the results of more than 300 studies over the past twenty years or so, up to 70 per cent of people who went through the anxious ringer report positive psychological growth at the other end. We’re talking a greater appreciation for life, a richer spiritual life and a connection to something greater than oneself, and a sense of personal strength. You could call it character.

The way it’s described in the literature I’ve been reading is that certain trauma can shatter our worldviews, beliefs, and identities completely. All the stuff we busied ourselves with – rigidly sticking to a grain-free breakfast for a month, worrying about what our workmates think of our new haircut, resenting that our parents don’t respect what we do for a living, getting annoyed that our boyfriends have cooked us dinner once in two months – is obliterated and we’re left to start afresh from our real values. The more we are shaken, the more our former selves and assumptions are blown apart and the fresher the growth.

Harvard researchers found this kind of seismic implosion often leads to creativity. The space created by stepping into the ‘is-ness’ of life invites innovative thought and exploration. The examples of this kind of life disaster–first trigger for creative greatness are well known. The research goes as far as showing that people who felt more isolated after a traumatic event reported even greater creativity.

128.

After that Thursday morning in front of the mirrored wardrobe, grace paid a few more visits. Not due to any trying on my part. Quite the opposite. It’s because I’d given up. I’d gone as far as I could. My life conditions (my grasping, my control freaking, my indecision, my hyper-thinking and hyper-­toggling) had become so intolerable that sitting in the pain, getting raw and open were my only options and so grace just had to flow in. Just as that proverbial ‘river of life’ does when you stop building detours to try and steer it your own way.

I don’t think I mentioned that when the porn star got cold feet that time in New York I was already three months into researching and writing the book and had spent my small publisher’s advance holing up in Manhattan and LA. When I got home to Australia the publisher told me I had to repay them the $10,000 advance. It was $9025.00, to be precise, after a few fees were subtracted. I put up a fight, pointing out it was their talent who’d pulled out of the deal, not me. But I was too exhausted to fire all cannons.

The same week I got a letter from the tax department. I owed a ridiculous sum on some undeclared interest. Well, it turns out the interest was on earnings from a credit union account I hadn’t accessed since I was eighteen (I’d assumed it was shut down).

Long. Tedious. Story. Short. I finally get hold of the obscure credit union in Canberra, from a pay phone at the end of the street (bearing in mind this occurred smack-bang in the middle of that fortnight when I had no phone, internet or car). I’m surprised they’re still in operation (both the credit union and the pay phone). They confirm there’s an account in my name, but they won’t let me access it, nor tell me how much is in it. Not without an account number. Which I guess is fair enough.

Now, I don’t remember numbers as a rule. My brain doesn’t hold on to them because they don’t have a story or a shape. I remember words by picturing their rough form. Which is why I always get Gary and Greg mixed up. But from some dusty recess at the back of my brain I pluck out seven numbers. They tumble out in order, seven numbers I’d used perhaps two or three times more than half my life ago.

They sing-song out like a skipping rhyme. Lachlan the erstwhile humour-free credit union ‘member services official’ whoops down the phone line. ‘Bingo!’ He then pauses like he’s Larry Emdur with an unopened envelope. ‘Oh, yes, there’s quite a lot of money in here.’ How much? I need to know how much. I’m broke. With a tax bill. And a porn star book advance debt.

Lachlan can’t tell me.

I have to supply a signature. Again, fair enough. We tried my signature, which I faxed to them from the post office down the road. It took three failed attempts to actually physically get there (remember, my car had just been stolen). But the signature didn’t match. I vaguely recall redesigning my signature in my late teens.

Carless, cashless and terribly weak I go back and forth between various agencies until Lachlan and I are able to finally reunite (again, via the pay phone) and he can finally tell me how much bloody cash I have sitting in this mystery account, that’s been ticking over year after year, growing exponentially and accruing tax debt at the same rate.

‘You ready for it?’ Lachlan pauses dramatically again. ‘Miss Wilson, it’s $9,025.’

This was a very fine moment in grace.

129.

There’s a very particular thing about grace. You can’t go out and get it, or buy it. Just as you can’t earn it. I read somewhere that it’s like life wants to give us a gift, but we want to buy it.

Remember Sky? The spiritual counsellor charged with making sure I didn’t get too caught up in the magazine world I found myself in? Well, in our final session I called on her to help me quit my job. I fretted back and forth with her over many sessions. Should I dump everything and enter the unknown? Or should I wait for a better job first? Or should I just persevere? Because what if I had this wrong? What if life really was about getting a secure footing on the conveyor belt and neatly passing from school to job to partner to holidays in Fiji for two weeks every year to bridge nights? And so on and so forth.

I’ve asked this question so many times in my life. I asked it when both my previous long-term relationships came to an end. I fretted whether I’d ever find anyone better. I went through it when I deferred university to travel for a year. What if I was wasting a year in which I could be getting ahead? Our default position is safety. A desire to buck it gets messy.

Sky let me fret and squirm for a bit before sharing this profound wisdom that I’ve referred to many times since.

‘The thing about life, sweetheart, is this, when we leap into the unknown, we always land safely. We just do.’ ‘We freefall for a bit.’ She does a zooming thing with her hands. ‘But then, as we’re falling, we grow angel wings that carry us to our destination.’ I can’t quite believe she’s introduced angels without apology, but I nod.

‘Life supports us; it always does.

‘The problem is, we all want to go out and buy ourselves a set of angel wings first. Before we jump.’ She nods at me to check I’m getting her drift. I am.

‘But, sweetheart, there’s no such thing as an angel wing shop.’

There most certainly isn’t. You have to jump first.

And, you see, that’s the other thing about grace. You have to let go first.

In our culture, we want guarantees. When we can learn to make leaps without them, then, well, things really do start to look different.

I go home. I put Gillian Welch on my stereo and type out my resignation letter. It’s a cracking email. There’s no room for equivocation, no suspended clauses that allow for my own back-pedalling. I write, ‘It is with clear and irrevocable intent …’ 2_bit.psd

GET OLD

I chatted to Mitch Albom, he of the mega-selling Tuesdays with Morrie, during one of my New York trips. He shared with me this idea. ‘When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, “The whole world is mine”. But when an old person dies [it’s] with his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson.’ I wonder if sheer years on the planet is the ultimate balm for anxiety. In those letters to one’s younger self that magazines and chat forums like to do with famous or well-lived people, the advice handed down is always that ‘it gets better. It just does.’ I raised this in the forums I held while writing the book. Participants aged in their teens and twenties arced up about the idea. They didn’t like being told that working on their anxiety would help and bristled around the idea of sitting in anxiety, accepting it, seeing the beauty in it. In one session we talked about a radio program some of us had heard on the way to the session. It discussed resilience. A listener shared her extremely traumatic childhood and was asked what stopped her from living with the ‘it’s unfair that I got lumped with this’ noose around her neck. Her simple answer – hindsight. She was now thirty-five and, she said, she’d simply had enough rough patches from which she emerged okay. These eventually stack up and create a picture. That life will turn out okay. One 24-year-old partici­pant in the forum blurted, ‘It makes me really angry … it’s bullshit and it makes me more anxious. So does your talk of “gratefulness”.’ The participants over thirty-five or so had a different response.

I’ve arrived at an age where accepting this is ‘just my life’ brings peace and, going through the motions of anxiety when it arises, strangely it helps. This too will pass. You fight it still, but it lessens over time. — Anthea I followed the ‘right path’, doing all the ‘right things’ to keep anxiety at bay. But it didn’t work. After 20 years you let go. Having toddlers are good [sic] – they do the opposite. You have to let go and give in or you will be one of those people whose bodies collapse. — Tim As Steve Jobs shared in his Stanton commencement speech, life and its hardships only make sense when you get old enough and you’re able to look back and join the dots. You have to have dots in your experience for the picture to take form. When you look back on your life you can see that pulling out of college from nervousness (as he did, instead sitting in on typography lectures), is what led you to run a graphically orientated tech empire. But only once you have enough dots.

130.

Jump first. A bit of an ask, hey. Does life realise what it’s asking of us? I think it does.

If we’re serious about joining life – like really joining it and not sitting at odds with its flow and existing constantly in a state of dis-ease – we gotta have faith. (I’m aware some of what I’m saying here is starting to sound religious. Please don’t leave me if this presses buttons for you. Before their scriptures turned into dangerous, numb doctrine, most of the spiritualists asked the same true questions and used the same language. That’s all.) Life is mysterious. Life is uncertain. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Along with taxes and death, the only certainty in life is that we just don’t know. So we might as well join this inevitability. In my chat with Brené Brown we discussed that this is the ultimate way to life a wholehearted life – to get cool with uncertainty (for the record, we also discussed how very little frightens us more). Sartre described it as a necessary experience that allows us to ‘become free in relation to our nothingness’.

Many psychs today discuss managing anxiety in terms of having ‘negative capability’. Which is to say, having an ability to be okay with the uncertainty of life. The term emerged from a disagreement John Keats had on the way home from the Christmas pantomime with a bunch of contemporaries who were on a professional quest for definitive, reductionist answers. Irked by the notion, Keats writes: Several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

What an aim. To sit comfortably in mystery without grasping outwards. To sit. To stay. And see what happens. It’s freedom, right? But how do we do it? Dare I say it, I think it takes patience and sheer years on the planet. Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet: I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

3_bit.psd

GO STRAIGHT TO COOL

It can be a scary chore to set out and ‘trust life’. So I take a slightly different tack.

I go straight to being the person who is open and cool with not knowing. I practised this heavily while coping with the vagaries of my disease and my diagnosed infertility and (somewhat resulting) singledom that lasted eight years. I kept saying to myself and others who asked what the future held, ‘I don’t know’. But I wouldn’t say it despondently; I’d be deliberate about being cool with it. In doing so, I found a strength that is quite defining and satisfying.

It meant my vulnerability was about being raw and exposed, but ultimately was something I steered and owned. Over many, many years of building this muscle, I now feel emboldened when I say, ‘I don’t know’.

131.

American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron (who cites her two marriage breakdowns in her twenties as the catalysts to her own spiritual and anxious journey) defines anxiety as resisting joining the unknown. I came across one of her books wandering around a bookshop where I wrote a lot of this Beautiful Beast. Like Ray Bradbury who wrote Fahrenheit 451 in a library in twenty-minute spurts broken up by flicking through random books that (gracefully?) provided perfect inspiration for his seminal book, I flicked randomly, loosely, finding the sport of seeing what cropped up very helpful. Turns out, as I grappled with this very bit you’re reading, I realised the book I’d picked up was called Comfortable with Uncertainty. What are the chances? Better still, the subtitle: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion.

Yep, 108 again. It’s an auspicious number in several Eastern traditions and is a mathematically pure and abundant number. Plus, the diameter of the sun is 108 times the diameter of the Earth. I like all these factlets. And that the number pops up in my life daily.

Chodron argues that the journey we all need to do is the experiment with sitting in uncertainty. Ha! The ultimate endpoint, she writes, is growing up. The journey ‘offers no promise of happy endings’. Rather, the part of ourselves that keeps seeking security (when there isn’t any) and something to hold on to (when such a thing doesn’t exist) finally grows up. She says anyone who faces these truths is a true warrior.