They say that we are more likely to meet our demise on the month of our birthday than any other month of the year. It is as if the full circle has been drawn and our maker chooses not to bother with another year.
My birth month is June and this idea does not surprise me as historically this month has plagued my family with tragedy.
In June my grandparents were murdered.
I believe in Fate but I also believe in random which usually blacks out the other and keeps me grounded, nailed to the floor. I like to see, hear and feel what’s real yet I have no doubt that spirits exist. I’m such a realist that it breaks my daydreaming heart. I’m half empty, half full, everything and nothing yet even I can draw a line through the month of June.
In June my brother’s life fell apart and he went to jail for the first time.
June is cold even in Brisbane the first chilly wind whips around your ears but June also has the most incredible blue skies like paint that is thick, and chunky to touch. I look forward to June because it’s my and my mum’s birthday which means cocktails, long lunches and spoiling but I also grieve sometimes for things I don’t understand.
In June I lost my dear friend Paul to suicide and I had no idea he was sick.
I cry a lot in June. For things I have lost by adding another year to my life. Things that is now further away from me.
In June we discovered my brother’s addiction to heroin.
I move very quickly in June and often rush what shouldn’t be rushed. I make huge bounds in a matter of a month. I usually cut my hair short, leave my partner, and start looking for a new job, new friends, anything new. I shed my skin in June.
In June I left my de facto, changed jobs and moved twice and then turned 30.
I won’t write in here what happened last June as it still breaks my heart and it’s simply not ready to live within words of a page.
In 2009 June has once again been a rollercoaster. Lately I can’t help but ponder if the theme of the month is sealed like a self fulfilling prophecy. Have I created June? Have I invited it in like a houseguest and welcomed it so warmly that it continues to reappear each year?
One part of me believes this while the other part, the one without the ego, just believes in bad luck. Just believes that something bigger is at play, something magnetically drawing in disaster on this month of my birth. Either way June is foggy, tiring, and overwhelming. Either way each June I become a year older, I complete a circle and start on a new one. I shed my skin and I grieve for all that June have taken before.
23 June 2009
20 June 2009
A Thousand Words
Yesterday I saw the World Press 09 exhibition at the Powerhouse museum. Although it wasn’t as impressive as past years some of the images still burn my eyes.
True Photo Journalist can bring the world into your heart in one devastating shutter. There are still images that I saw in the world press 2003 exhibition in Japan that are tattooed in my brain. Images of sorrow, terror, despair and hope are still with me to this day. If you are thinking of taking in this year’s exhibition it may not touch you as deeply as past years but there are guaranteed images that will overwhelm you with gratitude that we live in Australia.
The news never covers all of human heartache. For some reason, perhaps lack of time or maybe censorship, what really happens out there rarely enters our living rooms or newspapers. After walking around the walls of the Powerhouse and absorbing the photographs on the wall you soon realise that fodder like swine flu and petrol increases mock what is really happening out there and sometimes in regions you have probably never heard of.
It has been said many times that the human spirit can adapt to anything. If your life is filled with torture, murder and poverty you adapt your expectations in order to survive. Images that display this human adaptability always scar me deeper. Seeing children play around dead bodies, people cooking amongst rumble, and woman accepting their fate of slavery wound me. These images are the ones that stay with me the longest.
I believe the biggest heartbreaks are the silent ones. Not so much the natural disasters, the diseases and the deaths that make sure a big noise in our lives but the slowly changing landscapes that change us, mould us and slowly harden us.
On the smaller scale, and lets be honest most of us live within the smaller scale of things, we too accepts fates beneath us, fates that crept in slowly and moved in piece by piece over many years of apathy. Whether it is a 40 year old woman who wakes up with a husband she never really loved and 3 children she never really wanted and wonders whose life she is living or a man about to retire after 45 years of doing something he hated. These things happen every day. Hearts break every day for these same reasons. We live with crimpling pain because we know no better, we ride the train to a tedious job everyday because we don’t know what else is out there, and we kiss a husband every morning while secretly scheming excuses on how not to be intimate with him tonight. We live everyday the same as before even if it is broken.
I wonder how we would show that sort of heartache in a photograph.
True Photo Journalist can bring the world into your heart in one devastating shutter. There are still images that I saw in the world press 2003 exhibition in Japan that are tattooed in my brain. Images of sorrow, terror, despair and hope are still with me to this day. If you are thinking of taking in this year’s exhibition it may not touch you as deeply as past years but there are guaranteed images that will overwhelm you with gratitude that we live in Australia.
The news never covers all of human heartache. For some reason, perhaps lack of time or maybe censorship, what really happens out there rarely enters our living rooms or newspapers. After walking around the walls of the Powerhouse and absorbing the photographs on the wall you soon realise that fodder like swine flu and petrol increases mock what is really happening out there and sometimes in regions you have probably never heard of.
It has been said many times that the human spirit can adapt to anything. If your life is filled with torture, murder and poverty you adapt your expectations in order to survive. Images that display this human adaptability always scar me deeper. Seeing children play around dead bodies, people cooking amongst rumble, and woman accepting their fate of slavery wound me. These images are the ones that stay with me the longest.
I believe the biggest heartbreaks are the silent ones. Not so much the natural disasters, the diseases and the deaths that make sure a big noise in our lives but the slowly changing landscapes that change us, mould us and slowly harden us.
On the smaller scale, and lets be honest most of us live within the smaller scale of things, we too accepts fates beneath us, fates that crept in slowly and moved in piece by piece over many years of apathy. Whether it is a 40 year old woman who wakes up with a husband she never really loved and 3 children she never really wanted and wonders whose life she is living or a man about to retire after 45 years of doing something he hated. These things happen every day. Hearts break every day for these same reasons. We live with crimpling pain because we know no better, we ride the train to a tedious job everyday because we don’t know what else is out there, and we kiss a husband every morning while secretly scheming excuses on how not to be intimate with him tonight. We live everyday the same as before even if it is broken.
I wonder how we would show that sort of heartache in a photograph.
10 June 2009
The Race
Today I’m 32 years old. I programmed this into my CrossTrainer at 7am this morning and it seemed to give me an easier ride as if to say the extra year I was now carrying around was some sort of burden.
Birthdays lose their shine after about 10 years old. Years mount up, sometimes unnoticed in a rapid fashion from about 28 years old. After 30 it all seems a little ho hum.
I barely remember the last 2 years of my life as it was such a blur of sickness. It was a day, a month, and before I knew it 2 years. Knowing this it is a strange sensation to turn 32 when I don’t remember blowing out 30 candles let alone 31. But here I am today cold and full of sugar (as you should be on all winter birthday) and 32 years old.
I have a feeling that age in this middle before middle age years feels exactly the same. Same amount of pain or lack there of, same amount of fitness, same needs, same amount of aging to the skin – things are frozen for awhile at least. I could be 30 or 39 and still wake up feeling the same. Or maybe that was spinning complete bullshit and a sad case of denial.
Do I care that I’m 32 – not really but then my concept of time has always been warped. I still look the same as I did when I was 30 – in fact in some little ways I may even look a bit better.
Some women race against time all their lives. I’m not really sure why I need to run or what I’m meant to be running towards. What exactly is the end game here?
Should I be married with kids by this age?
Should I own things…. Cars, houses, a couch?
What if I don’t even want those things? If I’m running a different marathon then what are the damn rules? Where is the finish line?
It’s very difficult to measure time and space when what you want is so unconventional.
Birthdays lose their shine after about 10 years old. Years mount up, sometimes unnoticed in a rapid fashion from about 28 years old. After 30 it all seems a little ho hum.
I barely remember the last 2 years of my life as it was such a blur of sickness. It was a day, a month, and before I knew it 2 years. Knowing this it is a strange sensation to turn 32 when I don’t remember blowing out 30 candles let alone 31. But here I am today cold and full of sugar (as you should be on all winter birthday) and 32 years old.
I have a feeling that age in this middle before middle age years feels exactly the same. Same amount of pain or lack there of, same amount of fitness, same needs, same amount of aging to the skin – things are frozen for awhile at least. I could be 30 or 39 and still wake up feeling the same. Or maybe that was spinning complete bullshit and a sad case of denial.
Do I care that I’m 32 – not really but then my concept of time has always been warped. I still look the same as I did when I was 30 – in fact in some little ways I may even look a bit better.
Some women race against time all their lives. I’m not really sure why I need to run or what I’m meant to be running towards. What exactly is the end game here?
Should I be married with kids by this age?
Should I own things…. Cars, houses, a couch?
What if I don’t even want those things? If I’m running a different marathon then what are the damn rules? Where is the finish line?
It’s very difficult to measure time and space when what you want is so unconventional.
05 June 2009
The Bride's Nightie
Indecision really shits me; it grates all the way from my back teeth to my bones. It’s funny that I used to avoid Librans as it was deemed their nature but I now take the crown.
Being in two minds is a sure sign that I’m never sure of anything these days. I chop and change as much as the Pacific and it drives people crazy. They are not alone in that thought.
I was stubborn, and I say “was” as it is becoming increasingly obvious that I will never quite be what I was before. I was determined, single minded perhaps even a little closed minded if I had to be perfectly honest. I was black and white, open and shut a book that could be easily read but generally shut too quickly in your face so you only gathered the gist of who I was but never the whole story.
Now I’m, well not really sure who I am, hence the indecision. Yes, no hang on, No, definitely not! No hang on maybe I will, maybe I can, fuck it cancel the whole thing.
Sorry.
I want so much I can’t possibly find it, I want so little I can’t find the energy to grasp it. I want everything and nothing all at once so it’s understandable that I will change my mind.
My birthday is on Thursday. It will be the 3rd birthday in a row spent confused, scared, sick, on the edge, anxious, a mess. The last two I didn’t even acknowledge but this one I attempted to mark it I even tempted fate but suggesting a celebration.
I want to cancel it, I want to hide away, ignore it, pretend it never happened and pretend that I don’t feel as confused, scared, sick, on the edge, and anxious as the last two.
BUT HOLD ON! What ever possessed me to want to celebrate in the first place? Why did I even put myself through planning it and inviting people? Maybe I felt that this year there was maybe something different, brighter, more hopefully; maybe I even (I can barely write this) found something worth celebrating with people that helped me find that something.
Anne saved my life with sweet blues, unrelenting support and stability.
Susan saved my life by lending me her courage, making me laugh and getting me drunk.
Carly saved my life with her stunning gift with words and her frightening audacity.
Another was there as well, in a faraway place called Denmark but in the last year she was as close to my skin as possible. I can’t celebrate with her, as much as I want to, need to, but the others are here on my doorstep wanted to share the day with me. Wanting to celebrate the mere fact that I actually want to celebrate.
And that is the reason why this birthday is different.
Being in two minds is a sure sign that I’m never sure of anything these days. I chop and change as much as the Pacific and it drives people crazy. They are not alone in that thought.
I was stubborn, and I say “was” as it is becoming increasingly obvious that I will never quite be what I was before. I was determined, single minded perhaps even a little closed minded if I had to be perfectly honest. I was black and white, open and shut a book that could be easily read but generally shut too quickly in your face so you only gathered the gist of who I was but never the whole story.
Now I’m, well not really sure who I am, hence the indecision. Yes, no hang on, No, definitely not! No hang on maybe I will, maybe I can, fuck it cancel the whole thing.
Sorry.
I want so much I can’t possibly find it, I want so little I can’t find the energy to grasp it. I want everything and nothing all at once so it’s understandable that I will change my mind.
My birthday is on Thursday. It will be the 3rd birthday in a row spent confused, scared, sick, on the edge, anxious, a mess. The last two I didn’t even acknowledge but this one I attempted to mark it I even tempted fate but suggesting a celebration.
I want to cancel it, I want to hide away, ignore it, pretend it never happened and pretend that I don’t feel as confused, scared, sick, on the edge, and anxious as the last two.
BUT HOLD ON! What ever possessed me to want to celebrate in the first place? Why did I even put myself through planning it and inviting people? Maybe I felt that this year there was maybe something different, brighter, more hopefully; maybe I even (I can barely write this) found something worth celebrating with people that helped me find that something.
Anne saved my life with sweet blues, unrelenting support and stability.
Susan saved my life by lending me her courage, making me laugh and getting me drunk.
Carly saved my life with her stunning gift with words and her frightening audacity.
Another was there as well, in a faraway place called Denmark but in the last year she was as close to my skin as possible. I can’t celebrate with her, as much as I want to, need to, but the others are here on my doorstep wanted to share the day with me. Wanting to celebrate the mere fact that I actually want to celebrate.
And that is the reason why this birthday is different.
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