Meltdown

I have reached peak overload.

I realised this about 30 minutes ago when the two base cakes I had been cooking all morning, for my Dad's birthday cake, fell apart coming out of the pan.

I completely lost it. I screamed at the cakes. Berated the oven. Jabbered incoherent nonsense at my 13yo. Hyperventilated. Felt like (but have not yet) bursting into hysterical tears.

If you are thinking that this sounds a wee bit like a toddler meltdown, well, you're right - it's exactly like that. And, like a toddler, my meltdown was triggered by stress, frustration, exhaustion, and a sensory overload burden that I can no longer process rationally.

I am, however, not two and a half, so it is less acceptable for me to break down and throw my toys over what is undoubtedly annoying but not life threatening mini crises. My extreme anxiety at the failed cake sitting on my kitchen bench and my sense of utter catastrophe arising from it is disproportionate and exaggerated. So why am I in this state? How do I dig up?

Well, it doesn't take a psychiatrist to spot that this really isn't about a disintegrating cake at all. Cake is the trigger but not the cause of this emotional tsunami.

I have been operating at 150% for months now, between working long hours, parenting and householding, and making some big changes to how we structure our house that will be much better in the long term but are very stressful to actually implement. I am also becoming steadily less well as my underlying conditions move out of alignment and my anxiety ramps up. (Stress is a big factor in both of these too). I am feeling utterly overwhelmed and it has caught up with me and kicked my arse HARD.

Dragging out of the meltdown I am still fighting (my chest is tight, my throat closed, my eyes awash with tears, and I have told the kids to please not speak to me unless it's urgent) is going to be damn hard. If I was two and a half I could relieve myself somewhat with a screaming jag and throwing a few blocks - but I am not and adulting carries some responsibility to handle yourself differently. (Damn adulting).

Right now I can't think of anything I want to do less than go out to friends for dinner tonight or to my parents for birthday lunch tomorrow, but I know that opting out of these things will be sad for my kids, so I need to put my big girl pants on and do it anyway.

But oh boy. I sure don't want to. And I have started crying now at the thought of making another cake.

Found Poem: Poets in the Sky

This is a found poem dedicated to David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Umberto Eco and Elie Wiesel. 2016 has been hard on us, here on planet earth. I feel like the words of these lost ones have something important to say to that. (Most phrases from the writings / lyrics of the five, with some linking phrases from me).

All collective judgments are wrong.

Oh yes:

It's too early for the rainbow, too early for the dove

These are the final days, this is the darkness, this the flood

And there is no man or woman who can't be touched

the sun that pins the branches to the sky

bleeding all over the future as it daily dies

Battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise

this world dominated by disorder and decay

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich 

That's how it goes 

Aristocrats on a mountain climb

Making money, losing time

I wish there was a treaty we could sign

It's over now, the water and the wine

We were broken then but now we're borderline

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth

Is it true you betrayed us? The answer is Yes.

And yet:

even though it all went wrong.

little scraps of wisdom spark the heart

tiny shadows gesturing at a new start

times are changing

It's time we all reach out for something new

Hope is like peace -

we want it so much we will it here

A dream is a scripture.

Sometimes, the truest one.

I have tried in my way to be free:

To show not what has been done, but what can be

There are victories of the soul and spirit

to be prised from hands of ice

This is the faith from which we start:

Men shall know commonwealth again

From bitter searching of the heart.

The sun, the moon and stars

Don't seem as far as they did yesterday -

- Kathy, 16/11/16

A November without a writing challenge

I am feeling a bit flat.

It's November, and every November for as many years as I can recall, I've done a writing challenge. I've done NaNaWriMo three times; I've done a Month of Poetry a few times; I've done NaBloPoMo (blog every day) at least four times. I've even done a Month of Non-Fiction twice when working on long academic pieces coming out of my thesis.

This year I am not doing anything, and it's for good reasons - I'm up to my eyeballs in paid work, I have a heavy month with family commitments, I am quite fatigued - but I still fell a bit disjointed. I'm so used to November being The Month of All the Words ... it feels strange, a bit wrong, to be not trying to make something this year. Especially after enjoying NaNoWriMo, and the production of my verse novella Theory of Mind, last year so much; this year does feel like a letdown in a lot of ways.

I do have plans to catch up creatively - I'll be doing Month of Poetry with my poetry group in January again, and I am hoping to sign up to do Camp NaNo in April. But I won't lie: a November without a driving creative goal feels peculiar, and I really wish things were different for me this year.

Spring (Poem)

the arctic cup flowers hold a native bee apiece
a fragrant tenement, open to the sun

upside-down honeyeaters excavate the stiff bottlebrush
their neon-splashed wings fanning out to brush the seedpods

near the doorway, a white and green speckled spider spins quietly in the lavender
building a shimmering net to catch mosquitoes by the dozen

the cat that doesn't live here, and the dog that does, loll on their backs
a little breeze lifting the soft vulnerability of their belly fur

the fruit trees are ferocious with buds, while the wattle paints the sky canary-bright
white butterflies investigate the weeds by the compost pile

the rose trees, thorniest of all the weeds, are glorious in triumph -
sunset-gilded, ivory and deep pink, red as the reddest love

the wind stirs the branches and flaps the sheets on the line, and says:
Life.

The road not taken

When I was 23, I was working part-time (initially 0.6, later 0.8) at a small education industry support association while completing my Master of Arts by thesis part-time. My job at the association was primarily around sourcing, editing, publishing and marketing a range of teacher-support booklets and student resource books. I found teachers who were willing to write them, commissioned the work, hand-held it through to delivery, copy-edited the product, sourced images and handled the permissions, arranged printing, marketed and sold the publications at conferences and events, and even packed and posted the mail-ordered products. About the only thing I had no touch on was the money bit (I didn't invoice or bank or pay bills).

I'm not sure whether it was just because this was my first professional job, or because I still had it in my mind that I wanted a "writerly" career and I didn't have the bredth of experience or imagination to think about other possibilities, but I assumed that my career path was one of two options from there: an academic career (which was already losing shine as an option as I watched the convulsions in the academy) or a career in publishing.

By the time I got engaged to be married in the December of that year, I had pretty much ruled out an academic path; in my discipline (American History), a PhD in the US would've been essential, and my life was taking me down a different road, with a partner who was committed to remaining in Australia. So I thought I had it worked out. I'd finish my MA, get married, and move into a job with a more mainstream publishing house. I'd work my way up through editorial roles. I'd build skills so that when the time came to have a family, I might be in a position to freelance those editorial skills from home for a while.

In the year following, I applied for six jobs in publishing, and was interviewed for four of them. In two cases I didn't make it past first-round interviews, but I was one of two final candidates for a job with Oxford University Press, and I was actually offered a job with Pearson Education.

With the Oxford job, I missed out to a person with just a touch more experience - that job I absolutely would've taken had it been offered. The Pearson job was a key decision point for me, though. It was an entry-level position, and the salary they were offering was lower than the fulltime equivalent of my 0.8 job; not massively lower, but when you are earning less than $30,000, $2,000 less is a significant chunk of change. And so, after agonising over the issue for three days, I reluctantly turned down the offer, even though it was likely to be a great path into the industry I thought I was decided upon.

After turning down the Pearson offer, I got so busy with wedding and honeymoon planning that I didn't apply for anything else, and when I got back from my overseas honeymoon, a postgraduate friend asked me to do some freelance publications work in the government agency she herself worked in. I took that option, left the industry association, and spent eighteen months doing publications and event work there while finishing my Masters. From there I went to another government agency to manage in-house publications, then to an online news aggregator service. It looked like I was sticking with publications-related stuff, if not traditional publishing per se.

My next job, though, turned that on its head. I went back to the government agency I'd first worked for to take a job developing policy and training systems / programs. This felt like a weird step - after all, although I had some training skills, I had never actually worked on policy before. I honestly thought it was a transitional job, that I'd do for 12 months to get back on my feet after the horrors of the night-shift news job, before going back towards publishing.

I was there for almost 10 years, and when I left, I was established as a policy development professional.

I don't regret any of my professional decisions to any great extent, although, with hindsight being 20/20, I can observe a tendency to stay longer in poor situations than I really should have. I do wonder sometimes, though. How different would my life / career be now if I had accepted that Pearson job? How would it look if I hadn't been just slightly edged out for the Oxford role? Would I, now, be a senior publisher at a big trade house? Or would I have abandoned the field and moved into something else?

The work I do is still "writerly" - of a sort - but it isn't what I imagined my future looking like, back when I was 23.