Poppy and I are having wonderful adventures together again. Every week we hang out together for a day, just us two, and do something fun. It’s brilliant. I’ve been working on my garden and backyard, bit by bit, clearing up weeds and junk and setting up more interesting play areas for her. Clearing away the mess of half done projects that were simply out of reach, and simplifying everything. This gorgeous photo is of her laughing in a paddle pool under the peach tree when planted when Tamlorn died. She brings so much joy and life into my world. I love her so much and I don’t want to miss out on her.

My grad cert in public health is in full swing and very interesting. I’m juggling it alongside a few gigs and projects on the side, which would probably drive most folks mad but feels so balanced to me it’s a breath of fresh air. My ideal week is a sample pack, a pick and mix of favourite things: Poppy adventures, a date with Rose, cooking, study, speaking/training, friends, time in the studio, writing, reading, and projects. Enough housework and admin that everything keeps ticking along and my schedules nest all these different activities in well. I was watching a great interview with a favourite artist, Del Kathryn Barton, recently. She spoke about how lucky she was to spend 5 days a week in her at studio and how few artists get to do that. I felt a chill and realised I would hate that. I’d feel so lonely and disconnected in my studio for that much of my life. It was a strange realisation at first – most artists crave more studio time. But it’s not my marker of success. Which is helpful to know before blindly pursuing it.

I’ve been reading a few interesting books lately and getting a lot out of them. One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer has been fascinating and invaluable over the past month. Like many folks with a trauma history I tend towards trying to make huge changes, innovative, life changing shifts in how I do things that serve to destabilise and overwhelm me. This book discusses the power of making changes so tiny our brain barely notices them and doesn’t feel threatened. It’s change by stealth, laying down new neural pathways subtly without shifting so fast we kick off a panicked flight/fight response. It’s working very well for me.

Another is I Could Do Anything, if I Only Knew What it Was by Barbara Sher. Last night I was reading in bed while Poppy slept next to me, weeping through a chapter about understanding why you need to be rescued to validate old childhood wounds. A powerfully fresh memory of being stranded and trapped in school suddenly overwhelmed me. I was not just unhappy, I was distraught. I was first suicidal at 10. I cannot express strongly enough the anguish of feeling so different, so alone, and so unvalued. A gifted, traumatised, creative, multiple, queer young person, an outsider everywhere.

I mentioned cautiously to friends recently that I have started talking with a psychologist who specialises in gifted people. I told them that I’ve been so careful not to discuss it most of my life because people are so threatened and uncomfortable with people who are gifted. My friend looked baffled and said she loves taking to smart people, why would I be worried and hide that? It’s finally occurred to me that I am trying to hide things about myself to appease the insecurity of people who never liked me anyway.

Unlike the other case studies Barbara mentioned, I blamed myself rather than others for my misery, loneliness, and humiliation. I was isolated and bullied because I was a freak who deserved it. In some ways I am still waiting to be rescued from school, to feel wanted and loved and deserving and important enough to care for. So my tangled career reflects this too, a fear of being trapped, ambivalence and confusion, a vague hope someone will ‘discover’ me and fix things for me. Not expressed with blazing narcissism, but a kind of confused helplessness. If I make it because of my own work, that need to be saved goes unmet. As of course, it must. No grand deliverance now could ever take the pain of those years away. But I can live differently with the scars.

Fascinating book. Since the first chapter a curious change has happened in my miserable inner voice ‘I hate myself’. I still have bad days where it loops, but most of the time if I remember, I can say ‘I don’t understand myself’. And it concurs, and leaves me in peace. A strange inner quiet to contemplate just what that means.

Life is a strange and wonderful adventure. That’s a good thing for a life like mine to be, because adventures give pain shape and meaning and context. It’s not called an adventure if everything is comfortable and all goes to plan. Threads of sorrow, anguish, and darkness all belong in adventures, they can be part of rich and deeply lived lives. I am untangling and learning and find myself feeling very alive lately. I step in and out of poetry, of Narnia, looking at the world sideways to see how it changes. To see what I want and where I could fit. Standing in the hallway of Torrens University, a new student, lost in all possible ways, and feeling the thrill of belonging, being part of something. Is it not the work of our lives to understand the deepest desires of our hearts and seek them? To grieve the dreams lost and turn fresh earth to grow new ones? We are strangers to ourselves until we can bear to look, and look again.

One of the questions in Barbara’s book, designed to help us better understand ourselves, was ‘If you could spend a day with anyone in the world, living or dead, who would it be?’ Names of brilliant artists starting flicking through one part of my mind. Quite unbidden an answer welled up from my deeps: Rose and Poppy.

Already here, and blazing so brightly in my life.