letter #20
we're all making our own sense of things
One
I have a serious case of inertia. At first, I didn't recognise it for what it was, because it has some of the same symptoms of one of my baseline characteristics--that characteristic being procrastination exacerbated by a tendency towards laziness. Those shared symptoms include (but are by no means limited to): turning the computer on, opening every programme that might be useful, then every browser tab, then sitting in front of the computer for hours but without opening a single document or answering a single email; making mental lists of things to do and be done, knowing that tomorrow you will not remember a single thing on that list and make a whole new list but nonetheless convincing yourself you believe in the list anyway; getting up from your desk, going back to your desk, getting up from your desk again.
**
So I went back to my micro-steps system, which is tedious and seem a ridiculously immature thing for a mature person to need to do, but it means writing a single, simple task up on my whiteboard then working only on that until I cross it off, then find a new task to focus on.
**
Only the system isn't working because I'm not working in the place where the whiteboard is. The whiteboard is in our unused garage my office which has no insulation and is whatever temperature is outside. And although is generally mild in its winter, the outside temperature is nonetheless too cold for a person to sit at her desk and be able to concentrate on anything other than how cold she it. So, instead of working in our unused garage my office, I've been working in the seat in the window in my eldest boy's bedroom, which is the bedroom where I'm living while my bedroom is having a wall put in and being painted. This window gets the sun nearly all day, and the seat in the window is a circular twirly one, so I can have the sun on my back at anytime of the day.
**
if there is a more gentle place to spend an ungentle time than this circular twirly chair in the window, turning it slowly to catch the sun on my back I could not imagine it.
**
I don't want to give this room back to him.
**
He is twentyish and will move out of home one day not too far away. I will be sad, but this window will be my consolation.
Two
I went into town because I wanted to buy something that I didn't want to buy online. I went on Thursday afternoon, then again on Saturday morning. There were people about, but there were a lot of signs that said, 'For Lease'. Even the Cibo on the corner of Rundle and Pulteney Streets has closed. On my Thursday afternoon trip I got to the shop at 4.32 and from behind the closed door the woman pointed to the sign headed 'Hours.' They close at 4.30 now. Four thirty? That's very early.
**
I don't love shopping, I don't even like it. When I'm forced to make too many decisions, my anxiety begins to soar and I start to walk back and forth between shops until the only way to end my paralysis by analysis is to go home carrying nothing except the emptiness of time lost to futility. As the bushfires raged then calmed, I found it jarring that so much recovery was supposed to come from us spending money, from buying things and things and even more things. It seemed to me that consumerism was so much of the problem, how could it be the answer too?
**
But I like the life of a city and one of a city's foundations is its shops.
**
I went to a department store.
**
They have never been as glitzy as they were when I was a child and I went into town with my mother and we wore our second-best clothes and we bought fabric and patterns and you knew that David Jones was close because you could smell The Cookie Man.
**
But it's June 2020 (it was when I went) and when I went to the changing room there was grit on the floor, tangled in hair and sprinkled with dust. And when I came out, there was no one at the cash register where I went to pay. And I waited a while, but then I left.
**
They have never been as glitzy, but they have never been this grim.
Three
I went to a cafe.
**
(For takeaway, I'm still wary of eating in.)
**
They were playing ABBA on the stereo and had macrame on the walls and I thought, 'This is how young people see me,' but I did not feel seen.
Four
Sometimes I am filled with hope that change is here.
**
Then I read an article about cuts to the ABC.
**
I understand that I have privilege, but I feel my lack of political power more deeply every day.
Five
I have finished one piece of writing and even had it published here in The Adelaide Review which made me feel quite grown up, like a grown up writer.
**
The reason I was at Writer's Week in 1988 (the year I describe in that piece) was to see Sally Morgan whose book My Place had just been published. That was one of those books that when I read in one gulp from beginning to end and when I looked up again the world had changed.
**
I had a similar, but not the same, experience years later when I read The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke. That was a book that drew me in as the experiences she described felt so familiar, then suddenly!
**
I'm not active on twitter, but I go there occasionally to scroll through Maxine Beneba Clarke's amazing twitter feed.
Six
I don't like the cliche of unusual times, but what else is there to say?
If you are reading this because someone forwarded it to you, and you would like to subscribe to this irregular and infrequent tinyletter here is the link.
I have not replied to all your lovely emails from the last tinyletter. See above regarding inertia. I read them all though, many times (and have just now read them all again) and thank you. It means a lot to see you in my inbox, and I am back on top of things now and replying to emails again.
Wherever you are, I send you my love, and I hope that there are moments of peace in your life.
Tracy xx
I acknowledge and pay my respects to the Kaurna people, the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land where I live, and as a writer acknowledge in particular the continuing importance of storytelling to Kaurna people. I pay respects to Elders, past, present and emerging.