letter #17
we're all making our own sense of things
I don't know how to begin, knowing that we are all in this together, but that there are so many different outcomes, each of you having different challenges, and that each day something changes.
Most--okay all--of my work for the next six months has been cancelled or postponed. As far as funeral work, well maybe I'll write about that in another tinyletter because I think it's really important. All of my performance work has gone for the foreseeable future, which is devastating because I had some great invitations to take my shows on tour. And all of my workshops and readings and so on are postponed ... but I've reworked one of my projects a bit and instead of doing it as a series of readings, I'm launching a new newsletter: Weird Adelaide. A series of snippets and short stories and bits and pieces which I assume will be posted as sporadically as everything else I do. Follow the link to sign up if you're interested.
I have to stay away from facebook. It's not so much the constant news, it's the constant scrolling...it's no good for my jittery brain. I want to know what's going in my friends' worlds, but I can't really tell from facebook because my feed is such a jumbled mess of posts I've seen ten times already and sponsored messages from life coaches and real estate agents. I'm missing blogging more than ever before ... it was a much richer connection to my friends and far less frazzling. I’m guessing I’m not the only one who feels this way, so if you’re writing or blogging somewhere will you let me know? I think I'll probably be sending more tinyletters which is the closest thing I've got to blogging now. Don't worry, you won't be inundated. It's taken me three weeks just to write this one. It's about what's going at the shops.
On shopping
Did I tell you the story of how I ended up buying nearly 200 drinking glasses when we moved into our new apartment in Abu Dhabi? It was quite the thing, sitting in a small hotel room with two small boys in Spain, and The Mister, texting me from Abu Dhabi asking, 'Um, what are they all for?' and me, slowly understanding exactly what it was I had done.
Where it began
It all started because in 2008 I helped to pack up my grandfather's home after he moved into aged accommodation, then a few months later packed up my childhood home after my dad died, and then a few weeks after that we decided to move to Abu Dhabi so I had to pack up that house too. Friends, it fucked with my head. It was the grief of course. Sifting through the memories and saying goodbye to the past and to an imagined future was difficult. I had to process the sense of dislocation and question my identity. But on a much more practical level, what did me in was the billion decisions I had to make. Each thing I touched became a question and each question required an answer: to keep or not to keep; if not to keep to bin or giveaway; if to bin to skip or to recycle ... on and on and on it went.
Fast forward a few months
Because I was in a period of deep grief, the implications of this decision overload were masked for a while. In January 2009, we moved to Abu Dhabi and for the first six months, we were renting a serviced apartment, so we freighted just six small cartons—Lego and toys, my sewing machine and embroidery hoops, my stereo and CDs. I hardly even took any books. That apartment was tiny and my boys, although tiny too, needed more space. But I loved that apartment for its simplicity. (And its view of the sunset.)
The conditioner doesn’t match the shampoo
I had a thought that I would record everything I bought, an experiment in not buying things. It was no big deal to me, not buying things. I've never 'gone shopping' as a form of recreation. But it didn't last long this non-acquisition of things. We needed sheets and towels, there weren't enough saucepans, we needed somewhere to keep our CDs. I ventured into the shops. I can't find the list now, but I do remember the first things we bought: packs of Lego. Two small boys to keep entertained, remember?
I could tell from a few of our shopping experiences that things weren’t quite right with my brain, and it all became clear when I had my first panic attack. In the Khalidiya Lulu's hypermarket. I'd made it all around that enormous shop, choosing from brands that were all new to me, filling my trolley with things we needed: saucepans, notebooks, yoghurt. But then I got to the shampoo which really should have been the easiest because there it was, the shampoo I've used forever (Garnier for normal hair if you're interested, I'm sure you're not), only there was no conditioner to match the shampoo. I picked up other combinations of shampoo and conditioner, put them in the trolley, took them out and put them back on the shelf again...I have no idea how long I did this for, but I started to shake, I couldn't breathe, and in the end I had enough sense of mind to ring the mister.
‘The conditioner doesn’t match the shampoo,’ I said.
‘Sorry?’
‘The conditioner doesn’t match the shampoo.’ I couldn’t explain it any better than that.
The mister had no idea what was going on, but convinced me to leave the trolley and stayed on the phone with me until I was back at the car.
I got a bit better … but not really
This inability to go into the shops lasted for several months, but I survived by spending most of my time in our apartment, punctuated with trips to the gym and afternoon walks back and forth from school to collect the boys. I got sort of better, gradually bit by bit, and then it was time to leave our beautiful, simple apartment.
We found a new place to move into and by this time the school summer break was approaching. I had planned a trip to Spain, the boys and I leaving first and the mister meeting us there.
A few days before we left, I thought I'd go and do a bit of shopping for our new apartment, get myself in the mood for a new stage of life. So off I went to the Home Co. Like my dad, I have always had a thing for nice drinking glasses, so I went straight to the glasses where I had whatever is the opposite of a panic attack. ‘They look nice,’ I thought and took a six-pack of glasses off the shelf. With my ability to make a decision seemingly restored, I celebrated by making dozens of them. ‘I’ll have these, and these, and these and these …’ Smoothies, wine, water, beer … every possibility catered for in packs of two or three as I imagined some future where I was suddenly a socialite inviting everyone I knew for dinner (bearing in mind I still knew more or less no one because I was spending most of my time in my apartment). I took them home, then got on a plane and went to Spain while the mister, back in Abu Dhabi slowly discovered the full extent of what I’d done.
The story goes on for a long time
Although my mental health never got quite that bad again, nor have I ever fully recovered and there are stashes of things that still show themselves from time to time. The tubes and tubes of sunblock I would buy on every trip back to Australia, for example, the only person to be buying litres of it in July. About six months after we moved back to Australia, my youngest son ended up making a list he titled ‘Things NOT to buy at the supermarket’ and sticking it on the fridge. It’s still there.
Shopping from my phone at 3am
In this respect, the last few months have been challenging for me. For the most part, I’ve managed to reign in my hoarding or stockpiling or panic buying or whatever you want to call it. I did order a one kilogram block of fresh yeast, and accidentally bought two dartboards instead of one…these being purchases I made on consecutive mornings at 3am when I was tossing and turning.
Last night, when I said I wasn’t finishing my dinner because I wasn’t hungry because earlier in the afternoon I’d been overcome by a strange desire to try cream cheese on a hot cross bun, the mister and my youngest boy made me go to bed without my phone. I was asleep by nine and woke a few times in the night but went back to sleep without buying anything.
Any conclusions?
Not really. I mean on the one hand, I do kind of get why people are buying more than they usually do. But I hate the waste that I know there will be, and having worked on a checkout I can make a guess at how awful that job is right now. Capitalism is not our friend in all sorts of ways, and the prime minister’s patronising, ‘Just stop it,’ for me symbolises everything I don’t want in a prime minister. Maybe it's slowed down a bit now?
Well, if you don't unsubscribe after this strange and inconclusive letter, I'll talk to you again next time. Take good care of yourself and the people around you. And don't forget to let me know if you've got a blog or a tinyletter going. Talk soon, and in the meantime, I’m looking forward to my Easter bread…I’ve got just enough flour left and goodness knows I’ve got enough yeast.
Sending you much love
Tracy xx
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