Wazzapedia.

I’ve got a whole bunch of half-written blog posts in the drafts folder on my blog.

I often get ideas for posts just before I go to sleep, or while I’m at work, so I take a few notes and leave the post “until I get home”. Often when I get home, I’m tired, or I’ve lost the impetus; sometimes I’ve just forgotten completely.

I think the biggest problem though, may be the location of my computer.

In our home, all the computers are together in one location in our living room. It was a choice we made for accountability. With the kids computers there, nothing could be hidden, and we could keep an eye on what the kids were seeing online. I’m also setting an example that they can see that I’m not looking at things that they shouldn’t see.

The flipside of this is that the kids are constantly around, or the TV is going in the background. I can very quickly slip into a game and block out what’s going on around me, but for me, writing or designing requires a different brain-space, and the background distractions make it nearly impossible.

I’m not quite sure how to resolve this situation at the moment.

Where and when do you blog? Can you blog/write/design in a noisy environment?

My family deserve better than this. They deserve better than this dessicated husk of a person I’ve become.

There’s a deep bitterness to being diagnosed with something that can’t be tested for with a blood test or a brain scan; something that sucks all of the colour and joy out of life, but is quite literally “all in my head”. There’s a deep burning anger at myself knowing that I live in one of the most privileged societies on the planet, and have a life that people long for, and yet have to fight myself to just keep going.

Maybe it is “just” depression again. They doctor tried to convince me to go on different anti-depressants. They have worse side-effects than the last ones I was on. People report that they’re harder to get off as well. Another doctor once described anti-depressants as a crutch to use to get well. But after the prescription is filled and the tablets are taken, there’s no process of getting well beyond that. Not that I can afford, anyway.

Besides, call it cynical, but it’s not in the best interests of the pharmaceutical companies for someone on anti-depressants TO get well; then they’ll stop buying the product.

So I’m resistant to the ideas of the meds. Even moreso than the last time I was convinced to take them.

What’s my alternative? I refuse to give in to the darkest impulses. I won’t do that to the people who love me.

I’m not living right now, I’m just existing. Anxieties piled on top of anxieties. A literal headache that I’ve been unable to shake for five weeks.

I’m not supposed to think like this; to write like this. I, who call myself a follower of Jesus? I’m supposed to speak of joy and peace… of hope. But… this is also the truth of who I am right now. Should I only speak the truth when it’s nice and friendly and happy?

I’ve lost hope that things will get better. The good people are taken away too soon. The wicked prosper, destroying people’s lives for the sake of profit or power. The voices of the idealogues grow increasingly strident demanding that they get their way, and damn the rest of you.

Perhaps I should abandon my faith and try to find meaning in dogmatically tearing apart and ridiculing those who disagree with me. Somehow, I don’t think that will work for me any better than my teenage fundamentalism.

My current reality is that I can’t trust my own brain. Maybe I’m seeing the world as it truly is, or maybe the chemical soup in my head is missing some vital ingedients. I don’t want to be like this. Who would choose this over the alternative of actually living? It drives away the people who care for me, and earns the kind of attention people pay to chewing gum stuck to their shoe.

Whatever the answer is, it’s beyond me to find out right now, and beyond my ability to hope for an answer to come.

Tomorrow I’ll do the same as I do every day. I’ll drag myself out of bed and take weary step after weary step across the parched desert of my current existence until darkness falls once again, and another night of dreamless sleep returns me to the start of the cycle.

Maybe, for me, this is as good as it gets.

As with most things I’ve done in life, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I thought I did. I thought I understood the magnitude of what I was about to do, but really?

Twenty-one years old. I’d lived a sheltered life, working in the family business from the age of thirteen, and full-time from fifteen. I’d continue to work there for another five years.

Eight months before. The second of July, 1995. I was volunteering at a Christian campsite during the winter season. There were four of us arrived that day. The odd blonde girl wearing a Cookie Monster T-shirt and singing Sesame Street songs at the Lodge for her first winter season. A guy and a girl from the 1994 winter staff team. I’d had a crush on her since the previous winter season.

We all went out for dinner that evening. My crush made it very clear that evening that she wasn’t interested.

I ended up working shifts in the kitchen with the odd blonde girl. A week later we started dating.

Three weeks after we met, I asked her to marry me. It wasn’t a terribly romantic proposal (or relationship). Heading back to Cooma after spending the weekend visiting her parents; I asked her as we drove past Pheasant’s Nest on the F5. She later told me she thought I was joking, so she said yes.

I wasn’t joking. Suddenly we were caught up in the whirlwind.

Eight months to the day from when we met, on the second of March 1996, I stood next to my brothers in a sweltering church. It was the day John Howard was elected; he’d go on to govern the country for twelve years. I voted for him. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

We stood in a sweltering church Anglican church in Castle Hill, and exchanged vows in front of a church full of people, most of whom I barely knew. Hell, I barely knew the nineteen year old I was exchanging wedding vows with. I barely knew myself. And we didn’t know each other. How quaint, in this day and age. Virgins on our wedding day.

I made promises in front of God and a group of people I barely knew, that I was convinced I would keep. I was twenty-one years old. There were a lot of things I was convinced I knew; I was wrong about most of them. No-one knew what the future would bring, but we believed we’d make it; we promised we would.

There were whispers at the wedding reception. “They’re too young”. “It won’t last”. Not to said to us, but to those closest to us.

Perhaps we were too young. We were both broken people. We each had a load of hurt we were carrying around, and it didn’t take long before we unleashed it on each other. How could we have really understood what we were saying when we promised “for better or for worse; for richer or poorer; in sickness and in health…”

My poor financial skills were already visible, if you knew where to look. Who could predict my mental health issues? Her physical health issues? Neither of us realised that we had no clue about conflict resolution, and conflicts would go unresolved. For better or worse indeed. There were some good times, but a lot of “worse”. No point in pointing fingers; we both shared the blame.

And yet…

Perhaps it was sheer stubbornness, that neither of us were willing to be the first one to throw in the towel. Love can grow in the rockiest of soils. That shared experiences, even shared pain, can become part of something greater; this is something that seems difficult to grasp these days.

Some couples start out great, attuned to each other, sharing everything. But they grow apart. Maybe they chose to put themselves first, their happiness first. Maybe something happened that changed everything. One day they’re two strangers sharing a house, maybe a bed.

Some couples start out badly. Everything falls apart, and it seems the more you try and stick it back together, the worse it breaks. But you both keep going; trying again and again, in spite of your mistakes. Over time, you find that things are starting to stick. Sure, it might not look great from the outside, and maybe even worse from the inside, but you keep patching the broken things up, and you just keep moving forward.

One day, you look back and realise that years have passed. That each of those days – good, bad and fair-to-middling – have added up to something greater than the sum of its parts. Through the brokenness, you’ve built something… beautiful.

It was never very Hollywood. Television and movies tell stories about love. If you just feel that spark, you just look into each others eyes, you’ll just know. That warm feeling will carry you through the hardest of times.

Hollywood lies. Love can start with romance, but romance isn’t love. Neither is sex. Sex can be the glue that can hold a marriage together or without love it can tear a marriage apart. The warm romantic fuzzies go away; romance is a paper boat in a perfect storm. Romance isn’t built for sickness or mental illness; car accidents or broken dreams; miscarriages and difficult pregnancies; temptation or financial strife.

Love is when you keep going in spite of everything inside you screaming “GIVE UP NOW! IT’S NOT WORTH IT ANY MORE”. Persevering for the sake of the other, and maybe in that moment, you find yourself. Love grows in and through those experiences, if you let it.

Real love gets knocked down by life and gets right back up and screams “IS THAT ALL YOU’VE GOT?!?”

Fourteen years ago I stood in front of a group of people, most of whom I didn’t know, and a nineteen year-old woman I barely knew and was asked by an old family friend “Do you take this woman, to be your wife, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, for as long as you both shall live?”

I still do.

I love you, Tan. Happy anniversary.

Tomorrow I return to work. This holiday doesn’t feel like it was long enough; these days they never do.

It’s not like summer holidays when I was a kid. My strongest memories of summer holidays are of lying on our old lounge, in a lounge room tinged green from the sun reflecting on the underside of the pull-down canvas blinds. The TV is on in the background with never-ending cricket matches (which I hated) competing with the rumble from the wall-mounted air conditioner vainly struggling to bring the fibro-clad tin-roofed house to a reasonable temperature. The cicadas are the endless background barely audible above the TV & aircon.

I was bored out of my skull in this little country town; too much of a goody-two-shoes to go and make mischief, too nerdy and uncoordinated to go and play with the other kids.

It seemed like those summers, like my boredom, would never end.

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