The Long (and Shitty) Road to Feeling Okay

By now, most of you should realise that there are precious few things in my life I won't freely talk about. Although I update this blog sporadically, I have cheerfully thrown the intimate details of my messy personal life at you like a plate of hot spaghetti, hoping that it will one day bond us in a dripping tomato-flavoured camaraderie (and second degree burns). Rather than pretend I'm some sort of otherworldly creature that has no use for embarrassing bodily functions and is always photogenic, I admit that I'm human and I fuck up. There's no shame in that, because there's not one human being that doesn't.

Except this man. This man is perfect.

So everyone knows that I do dumb things more than occasionally. In fact, if you're one of my nearest and dearest, you've probably seen it in person. You know that I drink too much, I don't understand most basic social cues and can't sing to save my life. You've heard my numerous stories about vomiting every colour of the rainbow, and that time everyone saw me naked at my birthday party. If you went to school with me, you've probably seen me cry in class more than once over something as insignificant as a fucking 16 out of 20 for creative writing.

Seriously, fuck you, 15 year old me. Grow some goddamn balls.

I'm establishing all this because despite my proclaimed love of honesty and being genuine, there are still things in my life that make my gut churn when I consider bringing them up. I know it's hard to believe, but behind this huge, hulking testosterone-fueled exterior... I am just as scared of rejection and criticism as I was at age thirteen. I am a human being with stupid, useless emotions and unfortunately, said stupid, useless emotions make it really hard to not care about whether people like me. Sure, I'm not too much of a wimp about it. One of the benefits of getting older is realising that there's no way to please every single person at the same time (unless you're at an orgy and have vibrating dildos strapped all over your body, like some sort of magical super sexual hedgehog. And no, I can't find a gif for that metaphor). However, you also realise that sometimes, it's best to try and limit the damage you may accidentally inflict on your personal relationships by keeping your goddamn mouth shut.

For example, there are certain topics a well-meaning person can bring up in a conversation that will quickly devolve into everyone flinging shit in each other's faces, no matter how innocent the original intention was. Topics like "feminism", "abortion", "refugees", "the environment", "veganism", "politics" and the granddaddy of all argument-starters, "religion" very rarely can be discussed without someone getting offended. Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, they stink sometimes and no one wants someone else's shoved up in their face (unless they're extremely close and like butt stuff). This is why that unless I'm with people who know me well enough to accept that I have some controversial views on things, I won't discuss these topics. After years of needless conflict, I've learned my lesson- that voicing your personal opinions very rarely enlightens others, it just gives them more reason to think you're a complete douche.

One such topic that I rarely discuss, despite its huge presence in my life, is mental illness. And to be honest, can you blame me? Despite living in a world where there are so many facilities that cater specifically to understanding and spreading awareness about psychological issues, there is still a massive taboo surrounding the mentally ill. Be honest. When I use that phrase, do you think of an average, everyday person or do you think of a urine-stained homeless guy ranting and raving to himself at a bus stop? Or better yet, does your mind immediately go to white padded rooms, grim-faced orderlies and hypodermics filled with opiates? To be honest, I'm guess I'm just making a huge generalisation here, but it astounds me how many people simply do not understand that for a lot of people, mental illness is just another part of their lives. They get up, they go about their daily routine  and the only difference between them and everyone else is a little voice in the back of their head telling them how pathetic they are and convincing them the world would be better off if they just crawled under the house and died.

I'm talking specifically about depression here, because I don't really have enough personal experience with other illnesses to address it in any way other than making some sweeping generalisations. Oh boy. Depression. One in seven Australians experiences depression in their lifetime and yet so many young people haven't the faintest clue about how and why it happens. To be honest, I can kind of see why it's so hard to understand. You're sad, right? Well, then... do something that makes you feel better! Look at you! You're just sitting there, moping. Why don't you get up and do something? Everyone else can do it. Why can't you? It's your own fault you're depressed. You're not even trying to do anything about it.

Thing is... sometimes, you just can't.

Depression has been a presence in my life for as long as I can remember, even before I experienced it myself. To be honest, with a background like mine, it was probably inevitable that it would eventually happen to me. One of my earliest memories of my mother is of her in bed, ashen-faced and tired because one day, everything just got far too hard and she had to stop. And although eventually she got back up again, she never was quite the same. Depression is like that. Whether it makes you weaker or stronger, ultimately something changes within you. 

Just typing this is making me feel a little sick in my stomach. I have a fundamental fear of divulging any information that makes me look weaker, and if there's anything that stops me dead in my tracks, it's realising that my own brain often betrays me. But, to be honest, it shouldn't be a source of stigma. So many people are walking around with the knowledge that something inside them is making them unhappy. So many people find it hard just to place their feet on the floor every morning to get out of bed. Sometimes, it can be damn hard to find a reason to keep being part of the world. It happens.

The first time I ever experienced serious, clinical depression, I was thirteen years old. At this age, most doctors won't even consider diagnosing you with a mental illness unless you do something absolutely batshit insane, because there's always the possibility that you're just whacked out on hormones. I couldn't tell you the countless times I was hauled into a doctor's office from thirteen to fifteen only to be told that all my feelings could be attributed to simply being a teenage girl. To be fair, I see their point. Crying a lot and being moody is pretty much part of the territory for going through puberty. However, waking up every morning and feeling so stressed because I didn't feel like I had the energy to get through a whole day was not, and no amount of prescriptions for various types of hormone-adjusting birth control could change that.

It happened gradually.I remember that all I wanted to do was sleep. The funny thing was, I just couldn't. I'd go to bed utterly exhausted and drained, usually crying over something or other, and my brain just wouldn't shut off. I'd lie there in my bed, completely paralyzed as I replayed every single personal failure I ever had over and over again.  Everything I obsessed over, everything that I saw as so fundamentally bad and wrong about myself I now recognise as meaningless, trivial bullshit, but at the time, it seemed so much bigger. I was slowly convincing myself that not only was I a bad person, I was so awful, pathetic and lowly that the world would be so much better if I just plain didn't exist any more.

And to be honest, not existing sounded like a fucking pleasure cruise compared to what I had to live with every single day. It was like all my senses were gradually fading and all I was left with was this odorless, palette-numbing experience of the world occasionally punctuated by the metallic taste of fear One of the main signs of depression is losing interest and enjoyment in the things that used to give you pleasure. For me, the concepts of "interest" and "enjoyment" ceased to have any meaning.

Oh, I tried. I still blundered around, hoping that if I forced myself through enough activities I used to find enjoyable, I might just be able to trick myself into having some fun. Of course, this didn't work. As soon as I tried to do something remotely distracting, my brain would pipe up with a definite "no, fuck that, you're not getting away that easy" and would proceed to systematically ruin any hope I had of escaping the immense farty cloud of boredom that was slowly enveloping my life.

Reading a book? Fuck you, you'll never be able to write like that. Watch a movie? Fuck you, all those girls are beautiful, thin and perfect, and you will never look like that because you're too fucking lazy. Hanging around with my friends? Fuck you. They only hang around because they feel sorry for you. All you do is hurt people. They'd be so much happier if you just curled up into a ball and died.

Just fuck you, Phoebe. You are shit. You will never be anything other than shit.

Of course, now that I'm a lot older and have self-esteem shooting out of my ass, I can laugh off all the horrible things I used to say to myself. Writing well takes a shitload of practice, not even the girls in movies look that good in real life and if my friends didn't like me, they would have given up on me long ago. I made a huge mistake by being narcissistic enough to think that all my flaws were of utmost significance to the happiness of those around me. Turns out, they aren't. Much like how I don't really give two shits about what other people are doing most of the time, people also don't really give two shits about what's going on in my life. In a way, it's strangely liberating. Sure, I'm probably doomed to live my life in obscurity, but at the same time, no one will be reading about me centuries from now and hear all about how I deliberately put off shaving my legs and armpits until I have to go out.

Oh come on, like any of you shave when that part of your body isn't on show.

That's the really shitty part of depression, the part where you become so self-centred that you forget that people exist outside of their relationships with you. You're so focused on your own inability to feel happiness or pleasure or yearning or fucking ANYTHING that other people become expendable. I found I couldn't listen to anyone's problems any more, or respond to their requests for help, because how on earth could I be any use when I couldn't even help myself? Ultimately, this was a pretty selfish thing for me to do and I let a lot of people down. I expected them to be there for me when I needed them and then refused to offer the same back, because not only did I not have the energy, I was also so scared of being a disappointment. It basically broke down into me being incredibly parasitic in my personal relationships, which would sadly recur numerous times during my teens. And here was the worst part about finally recovering... I had to face up to just how badly I'd treated everyone around me.

It's pretty ridiculous- here I was, finally feeling things other than abject disgust about myself for the first time in years, and I had to come to the realisation that yes, I was a completely selfish, shitty douche. It took a long time to make up for, but luckily I happen to be surrounded by people who somehow overlook my assholish behavior because for whatever reason, they love me. And I'll always be grateful for that, because honestly, I don't know what I'd do if they weren't around.

Here is where I'd tell you guys I love you... but that would be so fucking sappy, I think I'd puke. 

So instead, here is a dog with a duck on their head. 

So basically, the story sort of has a happy ending. I got better. I learned how to be a functioning human being again... mostly. I experienced true love's kiss, rode off into the sunset on my trusty steed with a fair wench and never experienced such dark and dreary misery ever again.

Of course, that's total fucking bullshit. The story never ended. Turns out, depression has this habit of recurring and while I've not experienced anything as intense as that first incident, I know that it still happens to me. It's kind of like watching a horror movie. I saw the monster die, and for a moment, I am so certain in my knowledge that it'll never bother me again. Then, I feel something cold and dead grasp my ankle, and the pit of my stomach drops, because oh fuck, it's happening again. 

I don't really know how this is going to affect the rest of my life. Maybe in a decade, I'll wake up one morning and realise that I can't recall feeling any form of soulless ennui for a good many years. Maybe when I'm dying, I'll look back at my life and wearily note that all along, parts of it withered away into a grey blur. But it is something I have to acknowledge about myself to even have the slightest hope of dealing with it.

I am Phoebe Montgomery. Some mornings, I don't physically feel capable of getting out of bed, but that's okay. I beat myself up over the smallest of failures, but that's okay. I may feel like there's no way forward a lot of the time, but that's okay. Even if it's only in the smallest possible measure, it's okay and one day, I'm going to feel okay again.

My name is Phoebe Montgomery and I'm mostly okay.

I hope you're okay too.

BeyondBlue (the facts)

A Big "Fuck You" To Romance

Honestly, most of the time, the thought of romance gives me the shits. As a perfectly modern woman who's all for things like gender equality and splitting the bill, some of the absolutely ridiculous gender stereotypes that arise from dating seem so illogical that at times, I wonder if all these decades of love songs, poetry, Disney films and saccharine Nicholas Sparks novels have made our race borderline retarded. Now, I'm not saying we're like this all of the time. When human beings are capable of being objective, rational and calm, we can make some fairly decent decisions. However, throw in some fevered glances and the strong desire to touch each others' genitals and we devolve back into the sex-crazed primates from whence we came. Love, lust, desire, infatuation, ill-timed erections or whatever you care to call it, makes us incredibly stupid. I wouldn't really mind this, but often it's a stupidity most of us could really live without. Maybe I'm just bitter because my love life runs about as smoothly as a giraffe with four fractured ankles. Maybe love and sex just turn people into stupid, inconsiderate assholes. All I know is that when I play word association games with my therapist, whenever she says "love", I say "the pain of being fucked in the ass by a massive freshly cut diamond."

I may need a quick drink or five before we continue. 

Consider briefly the whole male-female dichotomy. The way I see it, the reason why we are so divided is purely based on sexual tension. Case in point, when I was a young, slightly overweight lass with acne, braces and no sense of style, I could easily be "just one of the bros" (a phrase I hate, by the way- what, you can't just be friends with someone just because they have a vagina you have the slightest possibility of entering some day?). However, then something happened. I became marginally more attractive and suddenly everyone realized that YES, I am a GIRL with BOOBS and a VAGINA. Funnily enough, this directly coincided with my forays into the world of underage alcohol consumption, and so for years now I have been becoming wearily accustomed to this simple equation:

 Male friends and acquaintances + alcohol  = I'm going to be felt up... a lot.

Every dude I know after a few drinks.

Don't get me wrong, it's not strictly a male thing. In fact, it's a rather human thing. Bring alcohol into the picture and suddenly everyone's a possible conquest. Any magical liquid that makes everyone slightly more attractive and silences that little voice in the back of your head that stops you doing stupid things is going to cause a lot of sexual misadventures. However, from a strictly personal level, sometimes it can be a little disheartening that so few of your friends stick to their boundaries when they drink. It's even more disheartening when the same shit happens when you're sober. Again, I know I'm picking on men, and I apologise- I'm sure that every possible gender and sexual orientation (because fuck, there's so many these days) does it. But I'm speaking from personal experience... and from personal experience, I'm starting to kind of hate it.

Okay. Time for a little personal anecdote of mine, which is kind of hard to share, because honestly, I'm still embarrassed over it. It was kind of a game changer for me, in the sense that it took my massive ego and chiseled it back down into something that would let me function in everyday life, but without being a massive tool. Honestly, that probably needed to happen. Let me try and put it into perspective for you readers who probably have no idea what I'm rambling on about.

From the age of about nine until I turned fourteen, I considered myself to be extremely ugly. Not just plain, not just unattractive, but mirror-shattering, eye-melting, brain-exploding ugly. I realize already that this is probably going to be taken as a way for me to blatantly fish for compliments, but honestly, I can assure you it's not. One, I no longer think of that- while I have my ups and downs, I managed to somehow stitch together some sort of borderline healthy self-image that keeps me well-adjusted most days. Two, I probably wouldn't accept them anyway, because compliments on my looks make me sort of uncomfortable. Actually, any sort of comment on my looks generally makes me uncomfortable. This is probably because I used to have people repeatedly come up to me when I was little and tell me how ugly I was. I'm not really sure why this is, it's just one of those many things from childhood I couldn't explain.

Anyway, predictably enough, this resulted in me having extremely low confidence when it came to attracting dudes. Luckily, it was in the sense that I was actually too scared to approach them least I get rejected, rather than surrendering my vagina to the first semi-interested party and getting knocked up.

This could have been me.

And BOY, did I get rejected a lot. Still do, actually, so I'm hoping it's just one of those facts of life and not because I have some weird birth defect no one thought to tell me about (seriously, guys, if the reason you keep disappearing on me after we hook up is because I have some tiny deformed baby face on the back of my head, I'd like to know). While everyone around me was reveling in their two week long relationships and school social hook ups, I was getting used to hearing the same line over and over again: "I think we're better off as friends". Which, of course, is the polite way of saying "it's really awkward that you like me because I find you less attractive than a small pile of  nutty squirrel poo, so please take your misguided romantic interest elsewhere". I'll admit it, the first few times it hurt quite a lot. I've lost count of the many times I had a big, typical teenage girl melt-down where I lay on my bed and cried my eyes out to bad indie folk songs because I was so certain that no one would ever love me back.

But of course, then something explicitly strange happened. I managed to get myself a boyfriend. I know, I was surprised too. However, it happened, it lasted for a good two years or more and without going into majorly upsetting details, ended. And then my reign of romantic terror finally began. You see, suddenly, for whatever reason, I wasn't being rejected any more. I managed to date a bunch of dudes that I regarded as basically unattainable (and then, while dating them, realised they weren't actually that fantastic after all. Whoops). This had the unfortunate side effect of turning me into a egotistical, overly confident monster. Basically, if I saw a dude I liked, I went after him without fully thinking it through. Trust me, it sounds like an okay way to deal with things, but at the end of the day, you are leaving yourself with a whole airport carousel of emotional baggage. 

All this is just background information. The real story still needs to be told. In truth, part of the reason I'm dawdling so much over this contextual bullshit is probably because this is a story I'd rather not share. Few things in life can make me feel so utterly shamed for me to completely avoid talking about them, but I think this comes close. It's not even just that it makes me feel pretty embarrassed. It also makes me feel pretty sad, because I think the one big consequence of this whole shitty debacle is that I lost the chance of making a good friend. While I won't accept complete responsibility for what happened, because it takes two people to occur anyway, I still regret blowing that friendship because of some hormone-driven drunken fumbling. Who knows, maybe if I'd been smart and held off, everything would be okay.

Okay, Mr Sloth Therapist.

I'm going to be as vague as possible with details because, well, in a nutshell, I think it'd be a lot less awkward for the person I'm talking about and myself if no one has any idea what the fuck I'm talking about. In fact, most of what you're about to read is heavily fictionalized, apart from the very real emotions and the general gist of what was going on. Understood? Okay.

So I was standing in a first class lounge in Abu Dubai, my elegant, slender fingers wrapped around a crystal champagne flute as I pondered my next French undeerwear modelling campaign, when Nicholas Holt shot me a sultry glance from across the bar- too unrealistic? Really? There's not the slightest chance I could somehow get into modelling and end up making love to Nicholas Hoult in an underwater hotel suite? Fine. If you insist, I'll try to aim for a touch more realism.

Sorry Nick, my darling, the story of our love affair will have to wait.

There was this guy. I guess he could really be like any other guy, except for some reason, I happened to get this weird anxious, slightly bubbly feeling from being in the same room as him. Not that it happened very often. Except, then it started to get more frequent, particularly after I moved. We'd be at the same things, and usually pretty drunk, and I'd find it harder and harder to ignore that for some reason, I really wanted to impressed this particular person. The carefully cultivated "fuck everyone, I'll do what I want" attitude that had been my sole achievement of the last few crazed months was suddenly abandoned as I found myself carefully watching what I'd say and do in front of this one person. Why this was, I'm not really sure. Maybe after spending so much time being controlled and repressed, I couldn't help but fall for the first guy who acted like a complete gentlemen towards me. Maybe after all the loneliness experienced from first starting university, I couldn't stop myself from reaching out to a person who I saw as someone very similar. Either way, my emotions got the better of me, and it wasn't smart or logical, and it didn't make sense. When I realized I actually had some weird, complicated feelings for the poor dude, it was like getting hit in the face with an exercise ball.

Okay, honestly, that metaphor wasn't a coincidence, I just really wanted to post this gif.

This is the point where I wish I could have just been content with how things were. There was a person in my life who was actually pretty interesting to talk to, who I could occasionally flirt with and that was the way things should have stayed. But of course, my massive ego wouldn't let that happen. Because I was so caught up in feeling desirable for the first time in my life, I had to push it. So I got drunk (he was drunker), we kissed  (to my credit, he started it), shit happened (but not what you think) and now on the rare occasion that we're in the same room, there's a horrible awkward barrier between us. A barrier that can only be defined as the knowledge that two people did something laughably stupid together and only one of them was dumb enough to wonder if it meant anything later. 

To my credit, my ultimate desire isn't for this person to suddenly turn around, confess their undying love to me and drive us off into the sunset. For one, that's corny as fuck. For another, I know better than to pine after uninterested parties (having spent most of my adolescence doing so). What I want, more than anything else, is to be able to interact normally with this person again. No more stilted attempts at conversation. No more avoiding eye contact. No wondering if it's okay to turn up to the same venues... It'd simply be nice to be able to share a laugh or smile again.

The amount of gay that last statement was.

Anyway, basically, the point of that awkward semi-confessional anecdote was to demonstrate why I'm so bitter about dating, romance, sexual tension and all the rest. I'm sick of it because I'm honestly tired of missing out on good friendships because of it. Sure, dating someone, or even trying to date them, seems like a good idea at the time. You find someone you find cute that you get to potentially snuggle up with, and that feels pretty good. But these things always come to an end somehow, and then you're not only without a person to cuddle, but there's one less person in your life you can connect with. Ditto having sex with them, unless you come up with a really good arrangement. I've said it before, and I'll say it again- sex and love makes us all into gibbering, genital-obsessed idiots.

So, at least for awhile, I quit. I give up. If a nice guy wants to come sweep me off my feet at some stage, he's welcome to try, but I'm not actively looking for anything. After years of having to deal with the shitty complications that come with love, sex, liking someone, not being liked in return, I think it's about time I enjoy being on my own. There are far too many good books to read for me to fritter away time and energy worrying about romantic entanglements. And if worst comes to worst... there's always lesbianism.