فصل سوم

chapter-3

the something else

This is the bit in the book where I go back to my childhood briefly, mostly because my publisher asked me to include it. I’ve got to say, I do so reluctantly. From years of doing it for counsellors and psychiatrists And what’s your relationship with your mother like? I find it kind of boring and indulgent. But I relent … I wasn’t a morose kid. Although I did scowl in a lot of family photos. I went about normal kid things – collecting smelly rubbers, BMX racing, catching yabbies in our drought-sucked dams.

I grew up in the bush outside Canberra on what my dad described as a semi-self-sufficient property. Not because Mum and Dad were hippies. It wasn’t that idyllic, I promise. They were just broke. We bred goats for milk and meat. We lived minimally in gumboots and thongs, depending on the weather, and third-hand clothes. My grandfather worked in a factory tearing up clothing that couldn’t be sold in the op-shops into rags for car mechanics. He’d set some of it aside for us. He’d arrive at our place with big plastic bags of worn-out rugby league sloppy joes, hyper-colour tees and drop-waisted dresses and we’d pick out our wardrobes.

Mum would buy day-old bread from the Tip Top bakery for 10 cents a loaf. The bread was reserved for pig farmers. We didn’t have pigs, but Mum felt justified in the deceit. ‘I’m not lying. You lot are pigs,’ she would say.

I hung out with my five younger brothers and sister. We were each other’s best mates, in part because there was no one else.

But gravel churned in my brain. Try doing kid things and smiling for photos and being simple and innocent with those little rocks grinding relentlessly. It’s distracting.

When I was twelve, two things happened. First, I became obsessed with spirituality. I took to reading the Bible folded over the end of the bed, blood rushing to my head, running a ruler down the lines. Then I started tapping and counting things over and over and stopped sleeping. I was diagnosed with anxiety for the first time shortly after.

I don’t think this was a coincidence.

Church left me deeply distressed. It wasn’t fear of God or damnation. It was the deep, deep loneliness that it triggered. At Sunday Mass I would turn around to look at the people behind me. Their calm Sunday morning faces said to me they ‘got it’. This is what terrified me – the fact I didn’t get it. What was I missing? Mum would tap me on the knee and tell me to stop staring. The despair crept over my shoulders. I associated church with the too-tight-around-the-neck prickly Fair Isle jumper I wore at this age.

When I was about thirteen, I declared I’d renounced God, having looked into the matter at length. I subjected my parents to explosive rants arguing that church was really rather detrimental to my wellbeing. I quoted the Bible, mostly the Old Testament (I never did read as far as the new one in my research), to make my point.

Somehow I convinced Mum and Dad that I had to try other religions, to see if they ‘fitted’. Exhaustion and bewilderment saw my parents give in. Which was unusual. Normally my anxiety and panic was something they felt they had to quash. It had to be contained, toned down. It was too much. I was too much. I appreciate the burden they must have endured now. But back then I was all raw exposed nerves with those damn gravelly thoughts rolling around in my brain and nowhere to place them. No one to steer me or hold me.

And so each Sunday we’d drive the hour or so into town and they’d drop me off at different temples and conference rooms that I directed them to, while they all went to the Catholic church with the post-Vatican II beer-bottle windows and utilitarian wood veneer pews.

I don’t have clear recollections of this early teen spiritual search. I don’t know how I found these alternate places of worship, pre-internet. I asked Mum. She doesn’t know either. I can only assume I researched using the Yellow Pages. I know I loved to read the Yellow Pages, and junk mail. It was incredibly soothing to compare prices. To compare anything. And count things. In sets of threes and multiples thereof.

I have glimpses of sitting in a room above a Chinese restaurant with a scientologist who held a clipboard and wore a khaki shirt tucked into beige pants. I recall soon after sitting in a plastic stackable chair at the back of a Hare Krishna meeting next to a fold-out card table holding pamphlets. The people in front – men and women – chanted and clapped, which made me awkward and overwhelmed. When Mum and Dad picked me up two hours later I was sitting on the nature strip out front crying, in an anxious panic. I still didn’t get it.

I also don’t have much memory of going to the counsellor who told me I was anxious. Actually, this is a common theme across all of my anxious episodes – very hazy recollections of everyday details, like dates and locations, but sharp-as-tack memories of the theories and ruminations that accompanied the episodes. Anyone else experience the same?

I remember walking in through glass sliding doors and down an asymmetrical corridor with craft projects hanging from the ceiling beams – paper mobiles and finger-painted things attached to string. I know I was seeing a counsellor to address the fact that I wasn’t sleeping. But also because of the tapping and counting. There was an ankle-grabbing beast under my bed that I knew would grab me if I had to get up to go to the loo (which I always had to). The combination of fears left me paralysed. I’d have to lean over and check to see if it was there, for hours on end and to a count of three. Or four. Depending.

Mum and Dad thought I was bored. ‘Oh-oh, Sarah’s bored again,’ they’d say if I got myself wound up. It was one of those things that was said in our family. I wasn’t bored, though. I was frantically trying to get answers and flee the fluttery-ness in my guts.

I was running around with a hot potato with nowhere to drop it off. I got even more anxious when I became aware that no one else seemed to be feeling the same things. I’d lie awake all night at sleepovers hyper-aware of everything about my friend’s existence and not knowing where to place all the thoughts and analysis. Wow, Penny’s mum doesn’t wear a bra, what does that mean? Apricot chicken from a can … is that allowed? What do other people think about when they’re falling asleep?

I also set up a business about this time. And this, too, was about fleeing the fluttery-ness. That’s how I interpret it now. When I say ‘my business’, let’s be frank, I was twelve. Or thirteen. I was a lacklustre artist but I would spend weekends making library bags from a roll of calico that I then painted with dinky pictures of sunbaking elephants and galahs in aprons. I also did a range of Australiana brooches, and hand-painted gift cards sold in packs of five. I negotiated with Mum to drop me off in town once a fortnight or so while she picked up supplies on one of her weekly trips in from the bush (they could only afford petrol for one trip a week) and I’d front up to boutique toyshops and galleries with my wares. I’d like to say I was a passionate craftsperson. But really it was more that making stuff and having an enterprising meta-purpose ­distracted me while I tried to grapple with the meta-issue of my existence.

Georgia, one of my editors, has made a note asking if the business was successful. I guess you’d have to say it was, G. I know I made $7 a bag. Dad used to call me ‘the little capitalist’ and I was the family loan facility.

I point out this nexus – between my spiritual yearning and anxiety – because it’s helped me understand my restlessness ever since. Anxiety and existential curiosity are connected. Yes, absolutely, it can become medical when it spirals out too far. But its origins are far more fundamental.

In my early thirties I went on a yoga retreat. It was before what I shall refer to as my Mid-thirties Meltdown. I was in the middle of a messy, very protracted breakup. I was editing the Australian edition of Cosmopolitan magazine at the time and I’d started to lose my focused, bird’s-eye grip on my staff, on my ideas, on my principles. I was looking for something, even just a break in the rut in my head.

I’ve done this since my early teens – revisited my spiritu­ality on and off. And it’s always occurred in tandem with my anxiety. Indeed, I enlisted the help of a spiritual counsellor during this time. I saw Sky, a tall and magnificently elegant woman in her late fifties who’d lived a very full life, on Tuesday afternoons and charged her with ‘keeping me real’ amid all the handbags and free eye creams and client cocktail dinners.

I arrived late for the three-day vinyasa intensive at the collection of wooden huts tucked into dense bushland a few hours south of Sydney. I do these retreats, but I tell you, every single time I arrive fidgety and cynical and worried about sharing bunk beds with strangers and doing partner-up-with-someone exercises.

And constipated. I always, always get constipated at these things. I’ve since asked around – lots of other A-types do, too. I pass through the gates of the retreat centre and everything just jams right up. Sure, I come across all divulge-y and confessional to most people around me. But I’m like the kid who’s told to share his bag of lollies and dutifully holds out his stash, gripping it from below so that only one or two he doesn’t mind giving away can be picked out.

You don’t have to be Louise Hay to see what this is about. I hold on to my crap when truly confronted. Funnily, always, without fail, on the last day as we do our final class or meditation, I finally let go.

I poo.

Then I cry.

Then I drive home.

On day three of this particular retreat, we were sitting in an old scout hall, the doors flung open to bushland. It was late afternoon and we had to meditate for a full hour. I’d never sat still so long, nor properly meditated. I gripped. I wanted to run. To climb a tree. Couldn’t we just talk about meditating in expansive ways over rooibos tea from the urn in the common room? But I sat and followed the instructor’s directives. It went a little like this: 1_bit.psd

SIT ON A SMALL BENCH

WITH YOURSELF

Sit. Quietly. Turn your awareness to your heart space.

Now imagine you’re sitting on a small wooden bench with yourself. Imagine you’re doing so in that space in the centre of your chest. There you are, sitting to your right, the little nattering humanoid that you are, berating yourself for eating too much at lunch and debating whether to hang the washing out or not. This little nattering self is your little ‘i’. You (the big ‘I’) can watch it all. Yep, there you are, sitting quietly, looking out at a view, over treetops down to an ocean. On your little bench. Together. You’re just hanging, nowhere to go, nothing to do. The two of you.

You will probably pull back from the heart space into the head to analyse and commentate. And to grasp outwards. Because that’s what we do. What will I eat for dinner? Are everyone else’s legs falling asleep? But when this happens you gently swing your internal, closed-eyed gaze back to the situa­tion on the bench. Yep, there she is, your little mate – your little ‘i’– to your right.

And you hang out a bit more, calmly and patiently.

And then it might occur to you that your little mate ‘i’ is just that – a little mate sitting next to you. And that this Big ‘I’ is who you really are. It feels deep and close and yet so vast.

I find this realisation funny when it strikes. Here ‘I’ am. And, yet, for so long I thought I was merely my little nattering mate sitting next to me. It’s funny in the way that a kid finds it softly, self-consciously funny when they realise their dad has played a trick on them. A dawning funny. I realise in this moment that I have been here all along.

I sit in this. It feels like when I climb into my own bed after being away travelling for a week. The smells and the warm hug at my being. It’s also spacious and expansive, open-chested to the world. I feel spacious. I feel the world is spacious. It’s magnificent and elevated.

I don’t want to run from it like I normally do, back to my scheduling and thinking about the load of washing I’ll need to put on when I get home. Or, worse, to my inner self-berating. Sarah, everyone else is doing this just fine; find a way! Sarah, you should be doing more productive things. QUICK, you’re wasting time.

16.

I hear the birds outside doing their late afternoon restless thing, furtively dashing about like it’s department store closing time. This fluttery, end-of-the-day sound can often get me fluttery, too. But something’s different this afternoon. There’s a sense of resignation, and I go along with it.

The birds descend into the tree outside, one by one, quietening. A few swoop up and about, causing a cluster to loudly bustle up in fright. I know that unsettledness. It’s what ‘i’ do. But I hold the feeling and come in closer, on that bench, to my deep, vast self. And gently, gently, with a little more holding, we all settle. We land.

Then I poo.

Then I drive home.

I’d never been able to meditate previously. Or at least not comfortably. I’d always been too anxious. I’d sought out meditation many times. I had dropped into community classes and went on one of Sky’s retreats. I tried to grasp that spiritual connect I was looking for, but it never fully clicked. When I was eighteen I organised a meditation course for anxious women on my university campus. I brought in an instructor to lead things. I sat in the group and joined in. For thirty minutes I effectively sat cross-legged and trash-talked myself. It was brutal. At the end, everyone walked out peacefully, gently sharing their relaxing experiences. Me, I fled to the toilets in the student politics common room and bit into a roll of toilet paper to hold back a long, guttural scream. It was too much of a gear change back then and the half an hour of desperately trying to put the brakes on my frantic over-thinking only made things worse. So did the acute awareness that everyone else seemed to be able to do something that I couldn’t.

But in that moment in the scout hall with the sun streaming in, I touched a still, settled, vast, spacious, magnificent knowing at my core. It was only for a few delicate moments, but there was no going back. The scab was removed and the rawness – the ‘Something Else’ I’d been looking for – was finally exposed. I call it the Something Else because there’s no other way of describing this yearning – this indescrib­able thing or place or energy I’d been looking for – that came before words.

But now I’d touched it.

And goddamn I wanted to touch it again.

17.

Have you read Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle? Bookish friends tell me they read it as kids. Reading it now in my forties I don’t see it as a kids’ book. I’ve drawn from it all kinds of grown-up spiritual themes. The protagonist, Cassandra, a sharp-minded teen seeking the Something Else, asks the local priest, ‘And do religious people find out what it’s all about? Do they really get the answer to the riddle?’ The priest replies, ‘They just get a whiff of an answer sometimes … If one ever has any luck, one will know with all one’s senses – and none of them. Probably as good a way as any of describing it is that we shall “come over all queer”.’ ‘But haven’t you?’ asks Cassandra (which reminded me of the same question I asked the Dalai Lama in relation to quietening the mind).

The priest sighs and says the whiffs are few and far between. ‘But the memory of them everlasting.’

18.

I’m hoping you know what I’m talking about when I talk of yearnings and ephemeral Something Elses and whiffs and things. Maybe this will help: You know how dogs do that thing where they circle and circle, unable to find the spot where they feel comfortable enough to settle? That’s us. Most of the time. We wander about, filling up our weekends, creating never-ending to-do lists.

It’s like we’re searching for a Something Else that makes us feel … what? Like we’ve landed, I suppose. And that things are all good on this patch. Know what I mean?

And so here is my (possibly) contentious theory, the one that has guided me for some time now and that I took to my publisher when she asked me if I’d write about my anxiety: Anxiety is a disconnection with this Something Else. As I say, the doctors and scientists can call it all kinds of things, but I believe it all comes down to this disconnect.

As German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers wrote, anxiety is a feeling that you’ve ‘not finished something … that one has to look for something or … come into the clear about something’. To put it bluntly, as Jean Paul Sartre did at some point, unlike a table or garlic crusher or whatever, which has a comfortingly obvious purpose, we don’t know why we exist.

This, dear friends, is what I am talking about. Yes, yes, yes. This is anxiety.

It’s this lack of connection and clarity that leaves us fretting and checking and spinning around in our heads and needing to compensate with irrational, painful behaviours, whether it be OCD, phobias or panic attacks. It’s this sense of missing … something … that leaves us feeling lonely and incomplete and fluttery. Something is not right. We haven’t landed.

When I fret that someone hasn’t rung me when they say they will, for example, sure, I’m fretting about feeling abandoned and lonely in life. But let’s pare this back another layer. I’m really fretting that I’m not able to exist calmly, happily on my own, on my own bench.

When I check that a tap is turned off, perhaps thirty-two times, in repeated patterns of 16 x 4 sets, between 2am and 5am, sure it signals trust issues. But drilled down, I’m really fretting that something is missing that should be making me feel supported, comforted and assured that everything’s going to be okay. That I’m not connected with this Something Else is my anxiety.

I checked in, once again, with a number of psychiatrists on this rather contentious idea, too. Was I on a dangerous (possibly manic) tangent? SANE’s Dr Cross tells me I’m not when we meet for coffee at my local café-slash-office. ‘Anxiety is all about a lack of connection and a need for spiritual answers,’ he says. He even directs some of his patients to a ‘spiritualist church’ in Sydney’s western suburbs where existentialist topics are discussed. After we finish chatting, a couple at the neighbouring table lean over and explain that they are psychologists and are about to publish a neuro­science paper looking at how the chemical imbalance model was failing anxious patients and that they couldn’t help but interrupt to say they agreed. Margot and Dale are research partners and it turns out that I know of Dale’s previous establishment-­stirring work (he published the bestselling Don’t Diet in the late ’80s). Margot says, ‘For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors have asked the same quest­ions: “Who are we? Why are we here? Is there any point?” Why do we think we should suddenly block ourselves from asking such questions now … which is what the current medical model does.’ She apologises for interrupting. No, no! It’s perfect, I tell her.

So let me be really firm on this – I believe the yearning for this Something Else buzzes at our cores. It’s the soundtrack to our lives as we go through the motions of doing our tax returns and walking to the chemist to buy aspirin. I talk more about this later, but for now let’s hand it to Buddhist monk and author of The Miracle of Mindfulness Thich Nhat Hanh for the final word: You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day.

19.

Although, granted, some of us are able to put on noise­cancelling headphones. And, about three times in any given week, I envy such people this most sweet aptitude.

I call these people life naturals. In fact new research shows that 20 per cent of us (well, not me personally) were born this way – biologically immune to anxiety. Turns out they have a very fortunate gene mutation that sees them produce higher levels of anandamide – the so-called bliss molecule, similar in effect to marijuana. Which might explain some people’s inability to arrive anywhere on time.

I’ve always dated life naturals. Life naturals can be a salve for neurotics.

My mum is a life natural. She sleeps soundly at night and can tune out of the chaotic, competitive conversations at the dinner table at Christmas when it’s the best thing for her wellbeing. She’ll sit there with a quiet smile as we all bait each other, referencing gags from thirty years ago, bagging out Dad for listening to the extended version of ‘The Only Way is Up’ by Yazz while he does the vacuuming. Dad, on the other hand, experiences the buzz at full throttle. ‘Well, with your father I didn’t sign up for the merry-go-round,’ she said to me one winter morning sitting in their kitchen as Dad got himself worked up about how he’d fit in a two-hour run between the dozen or so other tasks he’d assigned himself for the day; ‘I signed up for the roller­coaster.’ I guess rollercoasters can be entertaining.

This is what else life naturals do: they see a flower. And find it beautiful. That’s it.

They don’t wonder if they’re liking it enough, or if the whole experience is a waste because today they’re too stressed to appreciate lovely things like flowers. Nor do they fear that the flower won’t last. And they don’t try to draw on that Zen proverb about how a flower doesn’t try to bloom, it just blooms on its own. And then despair that they’re failing to do the same. They simply grasp the is-ness as a matter of course.

This is another thing life naturals do: they can see straight to the positive. Here’s an example. I was with the guy I dated while writing this book, reading the paper after a very fresh ocean swim. We’d met on Tinder. He’s an electrician and fisher­man and has lived on the Northern Beaches of Sydney all his life. He’s a caricature of laidback, even for the Northern Beaches, an area renowned for its she’ll-be-right-while-ever-the-surf’s-up culture among blokes. He’s a Life Natural.

I watch as four Maseratis pulled up outside a café at Sydney’s Palm Beach, revving obnoxiously for no reason. A bunch of middle-aged blokes climb out of the cars. One of them actually has a lemon sweater knotted casually around his shoulders. It’s a lot of things all at once. My cynical head rears like a dog to a cat and I grapple for the most cutting summation of all the vulnerable, totally human stuff going on in this scene. ‘Do they truly think that we’re thinking anything but “terrible cliché”?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know,’ says the Life Natural. ‘I just reckon they’re happy they can afford the car they’ve always dreamed of owning.’ Yeah, alright. Fair and generous point, I told him.

Anyway, this book is not for life naturals. Unless they want to read it to better understand the rollercoaster ride they’ve chosen to be on. Which is actually not a bad idea.