As I woke up this morning I could feel the cool, sticky dampness of my hair. The result of a feverish sleep induced by too many alcoholic drinks the night before. Then the storm troopers came stomping through, wielding their weapons through my head. Battering my memory cells into submission. Until the images of the night before began to run through my mind, like a movie I’d been dragged along to watch. I’d told everyone I was going to a writers workshop today, this year was the end of the goner I thought I’d become. I wasn’t even going to be a gunna, I was going to be a doer. The trouble was, after two red wines I’d convinced myself that I could handle anything. And the Hemmingway’s cocktails had been made especially for me.

I got up, still panicking about how I was going to find the time to sort out my straw like mop, whilst scolding myself for not going home earlier. I needed to look like a writer, whatever that was. Terrified that even if I rolled around in Barbara Cartland’s powder puff the seediness from the night before would still be leering through the pink clouds. I dragged myself into the shower, praying the lavender shower gel would cleanse my mind as well as my grubby enclosures. A good scrub of my cave parts would surely make me feel like the respectable human I am, worthy of sitting amongst other gunnas, or at least help me to fake it through the day.

The remnants of late night poker were scattered all over the lounge room. The closed blinds with a small chink of light leaving a musty impression over the room. I reached into the cupboard for my organic muesli and green vanilla tea. Transfusing the good girl intellectual thinker back into myself. I traipsed back to the bathroom to brush my teeth. My mouth felt like it had been on suction with a vacuum cleaner so powerful, it could suck up gum trodden in the carpet ten years ago. Teeth so gritty when my tongue rolled over them it received a free exfoliation. Teeth like ancient ruins. The toothpaste felt glorious, like a fluoride Taser gun.

I finally made my way to the workshop on the tram, leaving just enough time to make it. Reading The Age newspaper on the way, the last step in my cleansing ritual. With a shake of each page the aura of seediness became dimmer and dimmer.   Getting closer to the venue the nerves started to take hold, questioning my belonging. I passed a sex worker standing in an eerie looking alley. It would be ok, I didn’t have to have sex with strangers.

On the journey home I reflected on the messages from the workshop. The fascinating and supportive participants, authentic and curious about each other. Not being perfect was the order of the day. And it was ok, I didn’t want to kill anyone…just entertain people. To be a doer might mean that I would have to ‘fail by daring greatly’ (Theodore Roosevelt). And, if I don’t get my arse out of this seat, I might just die before I make it. Metabolism grinding to a full stop. Found at my desk in my secret Dolly Parton ensemble, I’d be a goner, not a gunna.

Once upon a time there was a struggling art director… he was writing the story in his head as he wandered the housing commission looking for the kid he needed. A poor kid, a really povo kid, he needed to look like Billy Elliott at the start of the film. Malnourished for a start, dirty would be perfect and threadbare shoes were a necessity. The visibly poorer the better.

Where the fuck was he? There didn’t seem to be a single child without brand new fucking trainers and smacky trackies on. He blamed China and their obnoxiously cheap stupid sneakers under 10 bucks. And the culture of buying new instead of fixing the old. And sneakers, for fuck’s sake. How was he going to get the shot he needed, the one that would win him awards, with a kid truly grateful for a new pair? They probably nick them anyway. No one wants a new pair of leather shoes when they’re a kid, he could remember deliberately scuffing up his new school shoes as soon as he got them to his mother’s outrage. He certainly didn’t revere them, or know that they were his last new pair til he was an adult. Not that he’d grown up poor. Sure they had a Nimbus but not because his parents were thrifty, his dad just always got bad advice. Like buying a Betamax.

Every day for a week he’d lurked around the housing commission staking out potential subjects. There had to be a recipient worthy enough, poor enough, someone who would show him some genuine heartfelt gratitude because their shoes had died in the arse weeks or months before and been repaired so many times they may as well have been walking barefoot. Honestly, there had to be someone in that state in this country. Preferably in this particular block of flats.

One day he found him. His perfect ragamuffin. Dirty, disheveled, looking forlornly over the concrete of the estate, he was fucking perfect. He was wearing what might have been trainers once but they were unrecognizable. You couldn’t really have fucked them up more in the studio. He could practically taste the champagne at the awards, he swallowed at the thought of the coke at the after party. He started writing the acceptance speech in his head as he approached the boy, who promptly ran off screaming.

Fucking stranger danger bullshit brainwashing. Every child programmed to believe a man they don’t know is probably trying to rape them, every man by themselves in a place with children is suspect.

Because of that utter bullshit, his target was lost. He briefly considered following him home and approaching the parents, parent? Who knew in this sort of hole? And why would he want to have sex with a child? The only children he’d met were fucking annoying little shits, the idea that that would somehow turn into lust was alien to him.

He was going to have to hire someone. Some annoying little snot whose parents were so obsessed with their child’s looks they couldn’t help but share them with the world. Putting all the money into little Crispin’s uni fund even though Crispin would probably get a scholarship and inherit all his parents money after failing to look after them in their old age and wouldn’t even need the money after landing a plum job in a firm and retiring early after a brief but illustrious career.

Seething with the injustice of Crispin’s perfect fucking life, he wandered back to the car. Still carrying the brand news shoes he’d planned to present to his subject, he started art directing the shot in his head. Wanted: Billy fucking Elliot at the start of the film. Willing to get dirty. He could see the finished shot. He could taste the champagne already.

Our family has a bad track record with cars. My maternal grandfather died in a car accident on the way to visit my mum and me in hospital when I was born. He never looked in the rear vision mirror. A truck took him out. The cops said it was the worst smash they had ever witnessed.

Mum took valium to deal with the grief. She remarked to her friends that I was a calm baby and a wonderful sleeper. She was breastfeeding.

The phone call came in the middle of the night. It was just past midnight, which made it my birthday. It was my father’s ex. She said there has been a car accident. Head-on with a tree. Your father is dead. I had trouble finding your number. I didn’t believe her. My father was very well organised.

Later that day I got a birthday card from my father, posted just before the accident.

I delivered his eulogy holding my 18 month-old son, who my father only met once. We had been estranged for over 10 years. I said you might want to meet your grandson. Two weeks after my father died, I fell pregnant with my second son.

I had a nasty legal battle with my father’s ex over his meagre estate. In the end, she got the house and I got the superannuation. A few years later she sent me a friend request on Facebook. I didn’t accept.

I’m sitting in a room high above Rathdowne St, facing my creative demons. It’s a writer’s class. Not the insufferable kind where we talk about characters and narrative arcs and what publishers look for in a novel these days. We’re all here to face something inside us that stops us from doing what’s in us to do.

I’m surrounded by a long table of women and one man and their coffees and their stories. We take turns. Some of us have a novel in our heads.  All of us have ideas and social injustices we struggle with.  As each person speaks their creative vision, Catherine stops and says,

“Wow. Who wants to read that book?”  Almost everyone puts up their hand.

There’s a lot of nodding and mmming. It’s not because that person has a wild, creative idea like nothing we’ve ever heard.  It’s because something about that story resonates with us.  It resonates in strange ways, personal ways, creative and unexpected ways. Their stories are all so interesting.

I understand what stops me writing. It’s a shadowy monster who sits in my throat. Whenever I have something to say, it curls its long fingers around my windpipe and whispers,

“Hush, no-one cares.”

The monster has been my friend for a long time. It inspires the brevity of blog posts, which come out as neat philosophical packages. It helps me distil other people’s cloudy, unformed ideas at the office into value-added work. To sit quietly without presence or personal agenda is essential. I let it all wash over me. I catch the important bits in my net, just the bits people care about. My monster is good at that.

It also means I’m terrified to let out my own unformed ideas and feelings.  I always pull myself in. Stop it short. Keep it quick. Get to the point. Hush.

No-one cares.

The challenge I face is to let go. Who cares if no-one wants to read my trite, preachy nonsense, or whatever it is people think?  Maybe if I speak up, people will nod and say mmm just as I’m doing to these other women now.  They’ll see something that applies to their life in unexpected ways.

Hell, the challenge isn’t even that someone else cares; it’s that I care. I care to meet, know and befriend the idea I’m writing about.  I care about characters that have been knocking about in my brain for nearly 20 years. They’ve been patiently hanging out in there like tiny, trapped prisoners. They just want my pen so they can live their lives.  I want to spend time with them and hear what they have to say.

My challenge is that when the monster comes curling, squeezing, suffocating and saying ‘hush’, I respond with all the matter-of-factness I can muster and say,

“Fuck off.  I care.”

livingwithmuchness.com – photography by Urban Edge, used with permission