My Most Recent Breakdown in 2018
What?! I am actually going to blog about my latest mental breakdown, make it public to those who read this blog. Well yes, and for a very good reason, people need to talk about and understand mental health issues. A person who recently turned sixty-five cannot expect to survive a life like mine and not have had such a problem. After all, I was born into it. My mother was schizophrenic with paranoid delusions, and my father most likely passed on Asperger’s syndrome to me. The problems associated with this destroyed filial contact and made my life so difficult. Always the outsider, always too odd, always to blame, and always described as mad, bad, and dangerous to know. People can be very unkind, and sometimes those who are kind do not know how to help. Sometimes you get abused by those who see you coming. I am sure there are several song lines in all those statements because mental health is an everyday issue; people just do not want to know.
I have had a litany of abusive situations throughout the decades of my life. As a child growing up with cold and distant parents who left me alone for long periods or were demanding the impossible; I knew they were next to useless and best left early. However, how that happened marred my life evermore. My mother would leave us in 1971 to have an affair, in revenge my father frightened me and my siblings with severe beatings and then drank himself into an early grave. I left home, mother returned, but would taunt me with visits and accusations until after being a victim of random bashings and the flood of 1972 in Brisbane, I left for Sydney. There I would be robbed and stabbed after returning from an Opera House concert one too-dark night; I was twenty-three. Sort of sets the scene.
But, my reactions were never quite what was expected. I knew I was missing the plot, and others took that to mean I was resilient, when I was in real need of attention and care. Instead, I got the horrible mental health care of the 1970s where people were lobotomised for being gay or given shock treatments for depression. It was very scary, and I did all the right things not to be part of that system. The history of the times in that respect is easily researched. Fortunately, I would find Art, or more to the point it was always there—just dominated by my overbearing mother. I knew how to finish her. I ignored her, became unavailable, she was not my problem, too much nagging, abuse, gaslighting, and redirection of blame onto me from her own serious mental state.
Instead, I went to art college, the Queensland College of Arts, Seven Hills, the best years of my life. My craziness, and I was crazy, was matched by others whom I became to understood found the arts as therapy. Good. I had found my niche, and being crazy from grief, from an undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder, and the beginning of my lifelong skin cancer battle with Melanoma was matched by some of the most self-absorbed human beings who would initiate me into accepting mental illness as a natural life event. Mind you, the 1980s were not known for their kindness, this was the decade of greed and can-do without limitations and I had a ball. After graduating, I dropped my mother in her madness, and ran away to the regions of Northern Queensland which cultivated my cancer well, and also would grow two mental breakdowns.
Between was the 1990s which were my best professional years, and my detachment due to Asperger’s was seen as artistic licence because no one was bothered enough to ask; they had their own problems. This was the decade of AIDS, Neoliberalism, and new everyday digital technology. So, the first breakdown was in 2005 when I was manipulated by minds who destroyed things for no one’s benefit, which is real madness and the details are best left behind in the decade of horrors which included 9/11 and the global financial crisis of 2007-8. Enough to make you mad on their own, destroying businesses, lives, and hopes. Included in that was some very unprofessional counselling which misdirected me into a dead end.
Regardless, I kept working until the new world order was just too much for me to understand. It was too emotional; it was full of talk and self-promotion. Talent was not the hands-on type or intellectual insights of the artisan, artist, or scholar; they were well and truly demonised by then. Instead, it belonged to people a person with Asperger’s syndrome could not relate to. My dead end became a slow plummet into despair; I had many dark years where I dreamt of being buried alive in scarified land. The sort of ground my father made on the farm where he chased me as a four-year-old with a giant caterpillar tractor while ripping the ground asunder, his idea of a joke.
Baby boomers are dealt a rough hand today, our generation is to blame for everything. No, we are not. Because to say so means you are trapping yourself into believing a group, ethnicity, religion, anything is the total sum of all things wrong. The stuff of Hitler, caliphates, Pol Pot, you know what I mean. So, what did I have to survive with? I had no supportive family, a sustainable regional art practice, my own home, money, good friends, all the stuff my generation was supposed to have. Just this empty feeling, I had lost something certainly, but it was more than material goods. My sense of self was gone; I had identified too much with what I did, my artwork, rather than seeing that was not me.
I went to James Cook University where I did well. People with Asperger’s are very concentrated types; we immerse fully. Awards, this time intellectual, became mine; but, still no friends or at least the dependable type are always out of reach, still something was wrong. I go into post-graduate and find a teaching post. People with high-functioning autism or Asperger’s are capable of teaching, as long as they know, and as long as they are supported; I neither knew what I had or was good at asking for help. The crash came hard this time. My symptoms were complicated with physical health issues which continue, and a trip into total despair was inevitable. I considered suicide; I worked out how to do it. Instead, I did have a good old-fashioned doctor, who now retired, realised all was not well in my world. He found the assistance I needed. Then, I was faced with my longtime mental illness and my diagnosis of autism confirmed. A psychiatrist recognised my past abuse. A clinical psychologist made me see I was not just my work, and explained why I did not attract friends or relate to siblings. I am seen as aloof, too blunt, too self-absorbed and attract bullies, or those that want me to fulfil something missing in themselves; they are always disappointed and are often hostile.
My mother right up till 2004 interfered in my life, laying tales of woe and deceit into my path. Others would follow her, and I never understood; I just knew I was very uncomfortable. Then people I had relied on locally began to fall away or were pushed because they were demanding something I could not provide. It felt as though they were tearing flesh from my body, and I never understood. Now, I do understand, and that expression never too late to learn is a cruel mockery of my life. I am no lucky baby boomer, instead I am rebuilding what I lost. Then early this year, we had a major flood event in North Queensland and what sense that makes does not come easily to me.
I have no faith, I do not believe in magic, the stars, or cards. My focus is on returning to a time when I could enjoy making a piece of pottery, of helping someone else do it, paint a picture for no other reason than Nature called, or make something out of found objects. I will add a post on furniture I have made or decorated, gardens I have built, and cats I have cared for. These are the things that make me whole, not just bashing away in my studio for days, and weeks, and into years on until I went crazy. But, returning to teaching others, not English and history, rather the skills to make an object, an animal, or a pot out of clay. To make paintings again, for the sheer thrill and nothingness of it.
This is hard. My hand baulks from a paintbrush, my kilns were salvaged and are in crates waiting rebuilding, my studio was inundated and is useless to use now because it had a compacted crusher-dust floor which is unsafe to use anymore as floodwaters carry dangerous long-lived diseases. Especially dangerous for me as I have a compromised immune system due to my autism and the chemotherapy for my skin cancer. Townsville and other towns are still rebuilding nine months later; it will take years to recover. My mind is still fragile, I jump at noises, I sleep fitfully, I am socially isolated and in any case have never warmed easily to others. I once told a hardened returned soldier my life story and he never spoke to me again! There are many gaps in this post.
Therefore, I will try a Pozible Crowdfunding Project to raise some funds and work myself into another life, and this time I will plan a few others like me into the plan to help and for me to help, quid pro quo. My life has been challenging, it is a saga of wrong turns, wrong places and times, things just plain gone wrong. Sometimes, it was other people too, there are some seriously crazy people out there, and they will eat you if they can. These crazymakers make no gains for themselves or others, and cannot see the damage that ripples out. Now, I am hypervigilant and expect the worst, but deep inside, in the darkest parts of my guts is a glow. Sometimes, early in another sleepless early morning, after midnight, I see a form lift out of me and hover, it is an earlier version of me from another more hopeful time and it says, ‘time to move, put things in order, and the rest will follow’. So, I will, because the absurdity of life suggests it. I want to do what gives me personal meaning.
