How things are
Question.
What’s the most candid answer you can give to the question “how are things?”, without disturbing the social peace.
Anything overtly glum like “miserable” or “shit” is of course off limits. “Tired” is borderline, but abuts, ever so slightly, bummer territory.
Safer ground, the absolute sweet spot if you ask me, is “busy”. It divulges the exact right amount, leaving just enough unsaid. You stop short of noting whether things have been good or bad, while still stressing the appreciably large quality of said things. It keeps open the possibility of further inquiry (“oh, what’s on your plate?”), while also leaving plenty of room for a turning circle (“yeah, busy time of year. Anyway!”). It is, as far as non-committal small talk responses go, a total slam dunk.
Anyway! It’s been a few months since my last weekly newsletter. Why the hiatus?
Truthfully, I’ve been quite busy.
Writing and performing a comedy festival show, for one. If you’re reading this and came to see it, thank you so much! If you’re reading this and you didn’t come, thank you also! Your apathy and indifference is fuel for me.
How did I fare this festival? Certainly better than Arj Barker, in that I haven’t had to appear on breakfast TV to tearfully clarify that I don’t have an agenda against Mums.
Still, 3 weeks before opening night, with 10 consecutive shows on the horizon, virtually 0 minutes of material written, and 3 other jobs to balance, I feared, half-expected, that I was careering towards a breakdown. Not necessarily a screaming-early-morning-rebuttals-at-Karl-Stefanovic breakdown (although I couldn’t definitively rule it out). But a more familiar, collapsing-with-exhaustion kind. The kind I’ve had probably a dozen times before.
I’ve been seeing psychologists and psychiatrists for the best part of 7 years now, and even though I’ve made massive progress with depression and anxiety, collapsing with exhaustion is still something of a constant. Even when I’m happy (most of the time now, thankfully) I tend to think and work and live at a fairly frenetic pace.
I don’t really think that is the product of an illness or condition or anything you could plausibly pathologize, more just a feature of my personality. I’m very bad at resting. There are so many things I love doing - reading, writing, thinking, plotting, scheming - and so long as I have even the tiniest bit of gas in the tank, I’ll go days and weeks, whole months even if circumstances allow, at full throttle.
Until, invariably, the engine starts to splutter, my front tires rub on the road, and there’s one big, sobering halt. Phone calls are made, panic sets in, the RACV guy texts his ETA. I take a moment to remind myself that cars aren’t made to run this way. But this resolve towards gentleness only ever lasts until the next stretch of open road.
At risk of venturing too far into bummer territory, I’ll tell you that the last few months have felt like one massive stretch of open road. One that’s left me feeling not just busy, but more than a little tired.
Luckily, it hasn’t been anything so dramatic as a breakdown. I’ve managed, better than other points in my life, to pull over when needed, and to otherwise keep my wheels on the road. (And to keep my anti-Mum agenda tight lipped).
But I’m still very tired. And praying that I might finally have learnt my lesson. Namely, the lesson of patience. To find moments, even when the world is so full of love and excitement and possibility, to slow down. Stop. Be still for a while. Withdraw, and withhold, and wait.
My number one priority right now is learning how to wait. Be patient. Delay gratification. I’m reminded here of a comment from the American author and activist D.L Mayfield. “I don’t want to be radical anymore. Instead, I long to be sustainable.”
Mayfield’s work - living within refugee communities to write about their plight - is, by most measures, fairly radical. But even the most radical vocations require the odd period of detachment and delay. Even the doers of the most radically good deeds need time for rest and renewal.
In the coming years I hope to start high school teaching, and to keep writing (perhaps performing too) things that resonate with people. Not necessarily an earth-shatteringly radical vocation, but one that, hopefully, will feel like the right fit.
In the meantime, I want to work out, better than I have before, how to be sustainable. How, in the name of future work, I can excel at rest.
Anyway…
How are things?