The corona virus has slowed down so many things…the mail, my ability to buy the correct pasta sauce for the correct pasta, the good coffee shop closing up. It’s left me locked up with two defective felines of various levels of intelligence and has allowed me to indulge in not a single book of the ante-library, as I work out time zones for Zoom meetings and work out which emails I never have to answer and can procrastinate further than eternity on.
In short, I’ve become more introverted and less exhausted than I have been in years. The pandemic has stripped layers off me from therapy and recovery movements, the *correct* opinions to have to fit in with certain crowds and then what I actually think and limited my ability to take up new and more demanding positions.
For years, I was defined by my sheer audacity of will to graduate with an honours degree in anything and then a PhD. Now I’m mocking my own discipline’s media portrayal in conferences about sexy space archaeologists and can finally let the vampires back into my vocabulary just a little now I’m not terrifying psychologists with my descriptions of why I admire random ambush predators. My favourite still is the domestic cat, breed: ragdoll.
In the pause of society, the slow life of elsewhere in Glenelg, I’ve paused a lot. I always thought I knew myself well because I was so candid about my flaws and owning my deviant behaviour. I’m not sure how many of those were mine to start with though I’ll own “strangely literal and newly human” from Anyanka Christina Emanuella Jenkins as fitting me too.
But how much was “I find your energy too busy,” was a person not brave enough to find another room of people and instead to criticise me? How much of that busyness was mine to start with? I remember intensely disliking being compared to Bjork’s It’s Oh So Quiet. But long before that I’d really been letting a battle with the diagnostic establishment with what eventually was bipolar disorder and fibromyalgia go on. This is before I’d been painted in lived experience layers by mental illness, disability and lessons in compassion. That song still irritates me, along with Memories.
When I was 17, I had a friend called M. M was destined for great things and he knew, we knew it, the entire small city we lived knew it. He was a big deal. Order of Australia big deal, a talented actor who just didn’t fit the Home And Away mode of Australian drama and we hadn’t really produced anything adventurous since A Country Practice. He was big for a skinny geeky kid who played Michael Jackson in the rock eistefodde. But life isn’t fair and while he was over burdened with life, I was nihilism in muted colours. So it was terribly unfair when M was suddenly taken by an asthma attack before university; university drama was supposed to be his time, he would have thrived and travel overseas would have been the making of him.
Yet there I was, stabbing my feet with sewing needles so no one could tell I couldn’t face existence and here was M gone. I was pretty angry at the universe and the gods I held sacred at the time —it varied in the same day between new age polytheistic young lady destined for a minor in women’s studies to that time I joined a really obscure cult that taught me excellent Bible scholarship I still carry with me to this day and were a soft, kind place in a world that didn’t have too many compassionate safe places for a victim of the kind of bullying abuse I’d suffered. The universe had it very, very wrong, I went through bargaining and asked to the universe to trade our places like so many people have asked the universe. And like the cosmic balance, I was not able to swap out my place that I didn’t want and didn’t ask for, to that of acceptance.
I had accepted M was gone from where I could reach him or trade places, that I would have to fill his place. Suicide was no longer an option for me in ordinary circumstances and I would have to start speaking up. That was easy as I started at a senior college on a university and I made friends outside the high school click. I would have to be more daring, more clever, try all the things I could and let this adversity that his destiny and become mine but one thing I’d almost always admired about him is that he was brutally honest and I would too. I’ve been wearing a dead boy’s red shoes for a long time. But they no longer fit and the layers of paint peeling, away and home, is Adelaide.
I am an introvert with cats who enjoys the quiet and filling my mind with as much knowledge as possible as I was when I was a child and encyclopaedias and then libraries became my places of solace. Cats have always been the forbidden animal due to my father’s allergies and the best non-judgemental company I had needed to survive my teens and later twenties, though I’m pretty sure the neighbours think I’m weird when I ask them what they think on current affairs. Dee will voice an opinion and Issy will quietly study with me as I try something else new.
There are still the sharp hard edges of me that were honed in adversity, both a pen and sword, but a thing that drives me to seek the opportunity in a challenge. The negotiation in the answer no, but it makes me a difficult to like person. So my own wyrd took hold several years ago when with the desperation of nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying to be a better person, inspired by a FUSA campaign no less, than I decided to try and be someone I liked. The problem is the trying is negotiation and to use that terrible analogy you can be a little bit pregnant or not at all. There is really no middle ground for negotiation how much you like yourself, you do or you don’t.
Self narrative influences so much and without a commitment to liking myself and that liminal zone of “trying”, I took on vulgar values and habits that weren’t mine to begin with. Most of my faux pas and fuck-ups were due to the fact I was negotiating by doing what I thought would make other people like me. I had strange notions of friendship from school and having to be better than someone else to appease the hole in my heart was something I gained from toxic teenage boy masculinity dictating my likes and dislikes. (The distinction is that was not M’s glitter at all. He was ahead of his time).
The eclecticism of my music was actually a place of resistance that later served me well in the arts. I remember telling my mother recently about I had heard the word eclectic at 16 and thought “I should do that, it would upset my ex-boyfriend!” I’m not a neurotypical person and I’ve had some odd notions of revenge in the past and so much of the cultivated yuck was based around things I thought would offend yet the audience would never even know. All of it hideously manipulative and egotistical, traits I share with my niece that has taught me a lot about leadership and who I am underneath the weaponised words and obsession with evening the odds. I need more therapy on this one and more time studying the kind of person I want to be as I fail forward into leadership.
There is one thing I had gain from the fact that glitter rubs off on those that wear M’s shiny red shoes, I had gained a bravery to be someone else, somewhere else. University was the making of me. I had to the courage to finally admit I am a geek from before when geeks ruled the world and knowledge is my elixir of choice, that I liked literary books and obscure theory. I wrote a “Buffy thesis” in honours English in the kind of small country town I swore off as a teen before I’d been slippered red and put myself out there in a time that wasn’t terribly kind to the the survivors of mental illness and faced multiple disabilities with relief because I was alive. I have had the candidness to face my own misdeeds and try to learn from it all. I have a story to tell. It probably won’t make a lot of sense to start with but I think of it a lot like Sansa Stark’s hair in Game of Thrones, you can tell who is influencing her from the way she styles it and that last scene of the final episode as she is crowned Queen in the North, unadorned and out, says a lot about her identity. I’m learning to lead and be me in my entirety, but at the right size for me.
I’m finding my style now but only because I’m prepared to dislike my behaviour in the past and still love myself in the moment, the way Malcolm Gladwell does when investigating the both interesting and dreadful sides of human behaviour. I found me in a genuine curiosity to see how it all turned out and then found myself baked, like cookies, from wearing that dead boy’s shoes. I hope that when I die, I can hand them back, apologise for wearing them out and then thank him.
C.Santilli, The Lonely Archaeologist, 22/04/2020
Catfabulous Pawductions Presents: The Lonely Archaeologist. 